April 6, 2005

Dear Friends,

I’m writing from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Between shoots in Bulgaria and Ethiopia for the World Wide Orphans Foundation (for more information on the great work WWO is doing, please visit www.orphandoctor.com/wwo/), I spent four days in Nairobi as part of my ongoing project documenting the lives of children growing up at the Good Samaritan Children’s Home in Nairobi’s Mathare slum.

I spent a good amount of my time in Mathare with Boss’s 17-year old sister, Njambi, and her new baby Melissa Wambui, who was less than two weeks old when I met her. Both Njambi and the new baby seem healthy and happy.

Boss, Njambi, their older brother Malonza, and now Melissa, live in an extremely small, one-room house in Mathare several hundred yards away from the Good Samaritan Home. Boss, who is twenty years old and pays for the house and supports his brother, sister, and now niece through his job at a Nairobi printing press, seems to have mixed feelings about the new addition to the household. While he says that the baby is a blessing, because the house is so crowded and because Njambi yells at him when he turns the music up too loud, he now spends much more time at Good Samaritan. The baby clearly cuts into his freedom, and Auntie tells me that Boss sometimes considers moving out and letting his brother and sister fend for themselves.

I mentioned in my last letter that Auntie was having difficulty dealing with Njambi’s pregnancy because Njambi had to drop out of school, wasting a year of school fees, and because Auntie took it as a personal affront. Now that the baby is born, Auntie won’t talk to Njambi. Though she often helps single mothers in trouble, in the case of Njambi Auntie told me she “didn’t want to reward my girls for getting pregnant.”

Because Njambi’s pregnancy was the second at Good Samaritan last year, Auntie decided to try to send many of the girls to boarding schools, away from the difficulties of Mathare and Nairobi. Lucy, who had been living at Good Samaritan, but a few months ago moved back in with her HIV-infected mother when she started getting too sick to work, was one of the girls who was sent away. Leaving her mother was very tough for Lucy, but Auntie refused to let her most talented girl stay in the slums, and in January she went to a new school several hours from Nairobi.

The schools are currently on break between terms, and Lucy had returned home to visit her mother, and I briefly visited the two of them. Every time I see Lucy’s mother she looks a bit sicker, and I wonder how much longer she will live.

Lucy was happy to be at home with her mother. She told me she liked the school, but she had missed her mother a lot. And because of this she had had some difficulty adjusting to the new school, and her grades weren’t as good as Caroline's, the other girl who had gone to the new school from Good Samaritan, who Lucy had easily outperformed at the old school.

I’ll make a longer trip to Kenya in June, and I will have time to visit Lucy’s school and see if she is doing any better. I’ll also have a chance to check in with Chalo and Ochieng as they continue to prepare for their final high school exams which they take in October and November.

And I’ll continue to follow Boss, Njambi, and Melissa. On my last night in Nairobi, I received word from Boss’s employer that Boss was trying to sell mobile phones at work. Some of the foremen confronted him about it, and he claimed that all the phones had their instruction manual and so they couldn’t be stolen, and that he was just given the phones by a friend to sell. Though he may not actually be stealing the phones, we’re afraid Boss might have gotten in with a stolen phone ring, and his job might now be in jeopardy. If he continues to try to sell the phones at work, he’ll get fired.

If Boss loses his job, it makes Melissa’s future prospects, which are already bleak by circumstance of being born in the slums of Nairobi to an unemployed, young, single-mother with an 8th grade education, much more dire. I hope that Boss puts his act together, or if he doesn’t, Auntie steps in for the sake of the baby.

Until next time, thank you for your continued interest and support.

Best,
Randy