Inured

Inure (verb): to make somebody used to something unpleasant over a period of time, so that he or she no longer is bothered or upset by it.

In attempting to set up a visit to drought-stricken areas around Nairobi, the World Food Program suggested I visit their school feeding program, which aims to feed school-aged children who would otherwise not eat. (SEE STORY BELOW)

Literally. Some would faint in class, others would be too weak to play during the break. Most would spend their lunch hour scavenging like goats for scraps of food tossed away by their neighbours. Some would return in the afternoon. Most would not.

In Kenya alone, the WFP feeds some 1.1 million school-aged children in 3,800 schools across the country. Although they run similar programs in schools around the world, what makes the one I visited a little different is that it’s in an urban area. Traditionally, extreme poverty is thought to exist in the remote, rural areas, where the people are nomadic, without property except their cattle and their goats. But Nairobi has the largest concentration of slums anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa and the poverty defies description: it’s not just crippling, it’s not just abject. It’s unbelievable.

In 2004, WFP secured a huge grant from the International Paper organization – something I’ve never heard of and will have to Google – and they expanded the program in Kenya from two to six slums. Now, slum is an interesting word. In the Kenyan sense, it basically means high density housing without basic amenities, like running water, electricity or sanitation facilities. In practical terms, that means people living on top of one another in ramshackle buildings constructed from whatever is cheap and handy. Some “bathrooms” are plastic bags, tossed from the window or thrown on the pile in an alleyway when they’re full. At one point, near the railroad tracks that featured so prominently in “The Constant Gardener,” there was a little girl just pooping in the open.

The school we visited is the poorest of the 107 schools in the program. It is on the very edge of Kibera’s poorest district. Kibera itself is the largest slum in East Central Africa, home to more than a million people. Usually the WFP likes to have the schools that are part of the program equipped with a kitchen and pots and some basics that will help them run the program. St. Philips has none of these things.

The kitchen is merely a bunch of sticks nailed together. There are no walls and no roof. A giant pot provided by the WFP – large enough for a kindergarten student to bathe in – sits on top of three stones, which keep the pot up off firewood collected by parents or students. This is where, each day, a parent comes to cook maize and beans in oil. It’s hot work and there’s little praise for the menu. The mid-morning snack is corn-soya blend, a “high nutritious” supplement containing 43 vitamins. That is often all some kids have to eat: a mid morning snack and a margarine tub of maize and white beans. Some of them even snap a lid on their ration and take it home to share with their parents and siblings.

This school is being primed for a visit by the executive director of the World Food Program, Jim Morris. To get to the school, he will cross a river of sewage on a bridge that’s made of 16 sticks. Arrangements have been made so that he will be able to simply walk into the school, as opposed to walking around a partition made of junk that’s been fashioned for some unknown reason. Walking around the partition means jumping over the sewage river and then jumping back. The sewage actually smells quite nasty and is thick and black in colour, full of rotting vegetables, plastic bags, dirt and poop, both human and otherwise.

That smell wafts all through the school. (Lorna, the program assistant who is guiding this trip, tells me she has another school that is much worse off: it’s called Holy Unity but they’ve christened it “Holy Shit” because a river of human waste surrounds the school like a moat.)

Now, I’ve been around Africa, I’ve seen some pretty interesting schools, most memorable being the straw hut in the Dogon country in Mali. But St. Philips was a new and disturbing experience. A teacher gave me a tour, starting up a small hill where the kids and teachers gather for assemblies on Mondays and Fridays. It’s just a rocky piece of dry ground, with a tree off to one side. There’s a large, square, mud structure with gaping holes that’s now used for the nursery class. When I visited, the little tiny kids – nursery and pre-school aged – sat on a blanket in the middle of the bumpy floor. One of the older kids had a plastic red pointer and banged against the chalkboard, where there were five pictures hand-drawn with chalk. “What is theeeees?” she would scream. “Theeees is a cah-t,” the kids would answer. “Theeees is a geeraffe.” “Theeeees is a cow.” “Theeeees is a lie-on.” There were 31 children, most under the age of five.

The teacher, a born again Christian aptly named Hope, told me the kids were doing so well “through the blood of Jesus,” which is pretty gross. She had them stand up. (“We are standing up.”) Show me your head! “Theees is my head.” What are you doing? “I’m touching my head!”

This square of crumbling mud is where the entire school was once located. All nine classes were shoved into this one room, all the teachers talking on top of one another, all trying to hold onto the attention of their children.

In January, they moved into a new building, made of mud and sticks, a corrugated roof and, in some places, plaster. There’s no electricity. No water. No bathroom. The kids are called to school by a bell, rung by head boy or head girl. There are nine teachers and nine classes. Kids pay 100 shillings per month to attend, or 1,200 shillings per year, which is $20.

The floor of the school was a minefield chipped rock; I had to clutch the mud walls just to maintain my balance. There were only enough desks and thin benches for seven of the classrooms, so form one and the nursery sit on the floor. The chalk boards are actually just smooth plywood that the teachers write on. That’s it for ambiance.

At one thirty, when lunch was finally served, kids came from all over, some in uniforms for other schools, some not in uniform at all. The head teacher, Jacinta, is a thin and nervous woman, a mother who cannot bear the thought of turning hungry children away from free food. So things have slid. But the executive director of the WFP is coming, so Lorna wants things ship shape for his visit. She wants grateful parents, smiling children. And no strays. No kids who only show up for food. She’ll put the fear of God into them herself if she has to.

We are expecting the culprits to be street boys who hustle or work, but stop in at the school for the free meal. But while I was taking pictures, a tiny girl with a baby on her back showed up with a black plate and a chipped black cup. Her name is Wambui. She is 10 and has five siblings, including the baby, who is smacking her lips at the sight of food. Wambui is registered at the school, in the nursery class, but she lives alone with her HIV-positive mother and has to rush home to feed the other kids and look after her sick mother. She has sticks for arms, knobby knees and elbows and a little line of snot drizzling from her nose.

I sometimes wonder whether I will continue to be surprised, shocked and saddened by Africa’s conditions or if I’ll just grow cynical and jaded and become inured to the misery around me.

WORLD
AIDS orphans struggle to survive ; Charity groups rush to supply children with proper care, food
Karen Palmer, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
1080 words
23 March 2006
The Washington Times
A15

Kilema, TANZANIA -- Poking out of Patrice Mavia's purple plastic sandals are toes dark and swollen with blood, ragged and infected as if chewed by jagged teeth.

His fingers seem to be in a similarly painful state.

Adella Kessy, a nurse at the Catholic hospital in the foothills of Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro, said tiny sand fleas are to blame. Left unchecked, the insects form painful pustules and lesions, destroy fingers and toes, and eventually leave a victim crippled.

They come from walking barefoot on ground infested with sand fleas, drying clothes on the ground or poor hygiene. They are a clear sign of neglect, said Ms. Kessy.

Patrice probably doesn't bathe with any regularity, nor is he likely to hand wash his thin clothes, or know that he has to destroy bugs and parasites with a heavy, charcoal-powered iron. He is, after all, only 8 years old.

Patrice was orphaned by AIDS maybe five years ago - he thinks he lost his parents in 2001 and 2003 - and he is the only one around to remind himself to wash behind his ears and scrub between his toes.

"No one is helping him care for himself," said Ms. Kessy, shaking her head.

As communities across Africa struggle to cope with the growing number of children left parentless by AIDS - a number expected to reach 18 million by 2010 - the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said recently that less than 10 percent of AIDS orphans receive any form of support.

"Most are in poor, poor, poor environments. They're in poor houses, poor environments and have poor food," said Anna Anselm, a clinical officer at the hospital's patient resource center.

"They can't afford everything that's needed for the essentials of life. They're so limited."

Once a month, Ms. Kessy and her colleagues at the hospital's HIV/ AIDS counseling center invite orphans like Patrice to the hospital for "tea" - giving health workers a chance to know who the children are, where they live and who takes care of them.

More important, it gives them a chance to see the children. Are they skinny? Scraggly? Sickly?

Worrisome cases are followed up with a home visit, where volunteers will also drop donated food staples like beans, oil or flour.

Problem spans Africa

The problem of starving, orphaned children is not limited to isolated pockets of Africa. In the decades since the spread of AIDS, more than 100,000 children at 107 schools in six of Nairobi's sprawling slums get their only meal - lunch - through the World Food Program.

At St. Philips School on the edge of Kibera slum, Wambui, 10, materializes at the clang of the lunch bell carrying a baby tied to her back with a brilliant pink scarf.

Skinny and stunted, with bony elbows and knees, Wambui carries a metal cup and a chipped black plate as she waits for her share of the mixture of corn and beans fried every day for the school's 345 hungry children.

The baby on her back smacks her lips waiting for food as school officials confront Wambui.

They want to know why she's not wearing her uniform, and whether she's showing up for classes or simply arriving for the free food and then disappearing back into Kibera's crowded, dirty alleys.

The feeding program is not simply about a free meal, they say. It's a way to keep children healthy and in school so they can break the cycle of poverty.

"Words cannot explain how much this food has done," said Louise Masese-Mwirigi, a monitoring officer from Feed the Children, which runs the program.

Before the program was in place, children were scavenging like goats, she said - looking for scraps in the garbage thrown out by their neighbors.

Adults could exploit them by luring some children with the promise of a piece of chicken or a plate of greasy chips.

"This is protecting them in a way you really can't quantify on paper," said Mrs. Masese-Mwirigi.

In soft Swahili, Wambui explains that she lives with her mother and helps care for five other children. Her father is dead, and her mother is dying of AIDS.

She was in class, she insisted. Teachers were simply looking for her in the wrong place: though she is 10 years old, she is still in the nursery class.

Taking food home

About 20 percent of St. Philip's students are orphans. Some come from single-parent families. Almost all are destitute.

A few children snap a lid on their ration - a scoop and a half - and take it home to share with desperate parents and siblings.

"They cannot even have a meal. They will feed here today and they will come tomorrow and feed again. There won't be anything to eat at home," said Joseph Ndungu, a representative of the city education department.

A report issued last year by Human Rights Watch found that AIDS orphans are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to fall behind in their studies and less likely to see meager family earnings go to their education.

Dropping out means children are more likely to become trapped in poverty, exposing them to greater risk of abuse, sexual exploitation and AIDS.

Teachers at St. Philips say the offer of free food has turned that trend around.

Before the feeding program began two years ago, there were 212 students enrolled in the school. Now there are 346, about a 50 percent increase.

"It's important for their academic work, and health-wise," said the school's head teacher, Jacinta Katheu. "The feeding program is helping their families very much. They are jobless - their guardians are often jobless - and at the end of the day, they won't even eat a meal. There's no food at home."

Caption: Every day in Nairobi, Kenya, students line up to receive a free lunch of a fried corn and beans mixture. Often, it is the only meal the children eat, and many take the food home to feed their families. [2 Photos by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]; Nurse Adella Kessy gives donated used clothing to children orphaned by AIDS at a hospital in Kilema, Tanzania, located in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. [Photo by Karen Palmer/The Washington Times]