June 5, 2004

Dear Friends,

I am writing from the Amsterdam airport, as I wait for my connecting flight back to New York. As is usually the case, it has been a long difficult week for the people at the Good Samaritan Home.

When I wrote last, we had some very good news that Mary, the 11-year old who had been raped on the street, had been found. Last Thursday, Good Samaritan took her to the doctor to be re-tested for HIV infection -- fortunately she was negative. Auntie bought her a uniform for school,and was ready to take Mary to school on Monday. But Monday morning, when we went to pick her up from the family with whom she was living, Mary had disappeared. Again, she had run back to the street. At this point Auntie doesn't know what to do. She only hopes that Mary returns and she can try again to bring her to school.

I spent much of Thursday evening and Friday with Boss, who seems to be doing very well. He told me that he was glad to be living outside of Good Samaritan and that he felt he was beginning to make a life for himself. He is doing well at work and is able to support his younger sister Njambi, who decided to move out of Good Samaritan and live with him. Boss even told me that Auntie was right to try to get him to leave in December, and he wished he had listened to her earlier. He still spends a good amount of time at the Home -- he lives very close to it --and he often helps with the younger children.

Monday morning, after failing to take Mary to school, Auntie, Freddy (the social worker and teacher) and I traveled to Laikipia, several hundred kilometers north of Nairobi. A year ago, a pastor from the region came to Nairobi looking for help. There were many orphans near his home, and there were no resources in the region to help them. He found Good Samaritan, and Auntie agreed to help however she could. She took in a few children from the area, and provides extra clothes and food, when she has it.

Laikipia is a part of Kenya that has been, in many ways, abandoned. In 1997, tribal conflicts broke out in the region, supported in part by key figures in the national government. Many people were forced to move, and even though the violence ended in 1998, people did not start to return to the area until very recently, when the new government came to power at the end of 2002. Because of the isolation of the area, HIV infection rates were relatively low -- 6 or 7%. But as people who have been living in towns move back to the area, the infection rate is rising and the one local medical official predicts it will be at 10% very soon. Because of the poor medical and educational resources, he feels it could get higher very quickly.

Compounding the problem, the area is very dry. Some years there is enough rain for food. Some years there is not. Last year there was food, but already this year the land is beginning to dry out (the recent rainy season was shorter than usual), and people are afraid this will be another bad year. I asked the pastor why people continue to move back to an area where the land is bad, where there is a good chance of going hungry. The pastor responded that the people who move back to Laikipia are landless, and that any land, even bad land, is better than no land.

We visited a number of children, most living with over-burdened grandparents or relatives. The pastor helps them with food, tries to get the children bursary fees for secondary school, and assists with AIDS awareness in the region. We also visited Elizabeth's grandmother, who is going to come to Nairobi in the coming months to try to find the girl and bring her home. We all worry, though, that it may already be too late.

On Wednesday, we traveled from Laikipia to Karatina to visit Njeri, the HIV-positive mother of Kennedy and Tony. The previous Friday, Auntie had sent the boys to Karatina ahead of us. When we arrived, we learned, though, that Njeri had died on Thursday.

When, at the funeral yesterday, relatives opened the coffin so the boys could see their mother one last time, I could see how thin Njeri had become in her last days. She was buried in her parents' fields, amidst banana trees and coffee plants.

Kennedy and Tony were in tears much of the day, and Auntie's concern yesterday was with them. Their grandmother is sick -- she had the bed next to Njeri in the hospital -- and the grandfather is very old. The uncles are hawkers in the small town of Karatina, and cannot afford school uniforms. Auntie has agreed to pay for the uniforms, and care for Tony and Kennedy at Good Samaritan until the uncles are prepared to take them in. They think that will happen within the next few months.

Without Auntie's efforts in getting Njeri's family to accept her, she probably would have died alone in Nairobi. Without the Good Samaritan Home, the children probably would have ended up on the street, sniffing glue and eating food out of trash bins. They now are getting an education, and will eventually inherit the land that is rightfully theirs. I asked Auntie how she keeps going when there is so much against her and these children, and she responded that it is the ability to help, even a little bit, families like these that get her through the day.

I'm nearing the end of the first year of this project, and I've spent nearly three of the past eleven months with people from the Good Samaritan Home. I've seen changes in both the institution and the lives of the children who live there (some of whom have now moved away). And the level of trust the Mathare community has in me continues to grow. Last Saturday, two older, respected men in the community asked the Home if I would like to see, and videotape, how chang'aa, the illegal drink that blinds and kills many each year, is made. They brought me to parts of the slum that I had never seen before, that I could not see without their assistance. The chang'aa is made at a bend in the Mathare River which is blocked from view from above by the houses in the slum. Fires and old steel drums line the banks, and men and children work on and in the river, using the heavily polluted water (the open sewars flow directly into the river) to make the drink.

On my previous trip to Mathare earlier this spring, I was allowed to see where the chang'aa is sold, in little shacks where the bar maids are also often prostitutes.

Over the coming years I hope to continue to see, and document, new aspects of life in Mathare. I'll be back in Kenya at the end of August. Until then, thank you for your continued interest and support.

best,
Randy