Korongocho

In the week leading up to our departure from Nairobi to Europe, we have had the opportunity to do a lot of things that we have been hearing about and wanting to do all summer. This included learning about Kenyan sign language and deaf education, eating at our favorite restaurants, visiting some friends for the last time, and seeing Korongocho.

Korongocho, literal translation from Swahili to English is trash. Korongocho is a slum area very close to where we have been working all summer. Some of our students even live in this slum that neighbors Dandora and Methare Valley. Korongocho isn’t as old as some of the slums that neighbor it. It began when Nairobi started a landfill in that area. When people came to Nairobi in seek of work and didn’t find any they saw the dump as a viable option for sustaining their family.

Today, 5,000 people live within the dump. They don’t have homes, the families simply burrow a hole in the trash and surround themselves with used plastic sacks for protection at night. During the day they spend the day scavenging for food and used plastics sacks without holes. Once they collect as many bags as they can hold they take them to the open sewage river and wash them. Then they dry them in the sun. They take these “recycled” bags to the fruit and vegetable market in the Korongocho slums and sell 10 bags to the vendors for 1 Kenyan Shilling. That is approximately $0.02 USD. Keep in mind the bare minimum to feed a family in the slums in Kenya for a day is 50 Shillings.

There is a man by the name of Pastor Joseph Kariuki who has made it his dream to educate the children of these families and give them an opportunity to leave the slums. He started a school named The Refuge. He raised money in his church to buy a small piece of land and is in the process of building a few classrooms, small dormitories, and a kitchen. He wants to be capable of housing 36 orphans and have at least 150 primary students. He has big hopes and dreams for the place, but we know that he is completeing the Lords will, and we ask for continued prayer towards his cause.

While we visited Korongocho we received a tour of the facilities and got to give some small toys away to the children. We played with balloons, beach balls, and noise makers. The light that those children bring into your life is something that I will never forget, and those smiles make it so much more difficult to travel home.