Nothing Really Matters, Anyone Can See

I'll admit I use the word "squalor" quite loosely since I began living in East Africa. It just seems to be a handy catch-all descriptor for some of the things you encounter in a developing country.

That probably sounds really elitist and snotty, so let me step back for a minute and try to regroup. You see, I spent part of this morning in Kibera, a place I've successfully found hundreds of reasons to avoid visiting over the past year or so. If I'd been of sounder mind and stronger resolve, I might have spent more time exploring one of the largest, most mind bogglingly poor slums on the African continent, looking for health-related stories or even ways that I could help personally.

But my first trip there, in August of 2008, disturbed me so profoundly, I've only been back one other time since this morning. And I've seen American slums, and Mexican slums, and Caribbean slums, and slums in 5 other African countries besides Kenya. But so far, nothing has gutted me like walking through Kibera. Or should I say tip-toeing through Kibera, praying with all your might that you won't trip over what scant broken pavement exists and fall face down into the mud mixed with sewage that lines every passageway.

A friend on Facebook just asked me to expand on my latest update, which described how sobered this morning's visit left me. I'll just repeat what I wrote to her:

"It's just so overwhelming, and heartbreaking. Imagine a scene from Mad Max's Thunderdome, and then add about a thousand rusted tin roofed shacks. Throw in several tons of garbage, and streams of raw sewage flowing through the unpaved, narrow pathways. Add many precious babies stumbling through those fetid streets, and fill the air with a stench that would bring you too your knees. Then before you go, toss in just a bucket full of abject hopelessness, neglect and despair. THAT'S Kibera, and even that doesn't quite capture it."

I can't recall the exact moment I started losing my nerve about these sorts of things, but I'm thinking it must have happened before that first Kibera visit. Probably in Gulu, which had its share of hard-core poverty and...well, squalor. I'll always remember picking through the piles of steaming garbage to get to the market, where slabs of freshly hacked cow and goat hung from stalls, covered with flies and dripping rank blood. And the filth, and the smell.....

I fought my way through 8 months of life in Gulu, even wound up appreciating the lesson it taught about what real poverty looked like. So I guess that's why I am just so utterly devastated by Kibera. Because a life-long liberal bunny-hugger like me has to believe that within every impossible social injustice, there's a lesson to be learned, a way to move forward, the slimmest chance at a solution, even if it's a long shot.

But Kibera just cuts you off at the knees. You can't explain it. You can't learn anything from it. You just want to get away, and if possible, never, ever return.