Opportunity Knocks, No One Answers

My six-year old niece and three-year old nephew moved to Nairobi from the States in July. They were both here once before with their parents. I was one during my first trip to Kenya. The bar scene has really changed since then. I digress. Anyway, they were just like me. They were born in the States, spoke English like an American, and had lived their entire, although short, lives stateside.

Two days ago, I got a chance to see my nephew approximately six months post-move. I wondered how he was transitioning. I wondered if his Swahili would already put mine to shame, which admittedly wouldn’t be difficult. I wondered if he misses the States. My re-introduction to my nephew was beyond anything I could have imagined.

Six months ago, I was playing with a boy who sounded like me, who spoke English like me. Two days ago, I met a little Kenyan boy who was fluent in English, who is apparently that same child. That’s right, my nephew speaks English now like he’s Kenyan. He speaks English with a Kenyan accent. By speaking to him, you would never guess that he was born and lived his entire three years in the States. In fact, you might just think that this three-year old Kenyan boy is über-intelligent and has an amazing command of English as a second language and just might be one of those special kids who enrolls in college at the age of seven, or starts a company at the age of eleven. But you would be mistaken, at least on the language front. He doesn’t speak any local languages (although he can count to ten in Swahili). He just speaks English like he’s Kenyan. I know it makes sense that he would, but I was baffled. I still am.

Children absorb information like a sponge and can experience astounding mental growth when presented with the right opportunities. Which brings me to yesterday’s experience. I spent yesterday with my cousin in a slum called Kiambiu outside of Nairobi. My cousin works with Rapha Transformation Center (RTC), a new NGO that is working to provide support to people facing extreme hardships in Kiambiu. Kiambiu has approximately two hundred-fifty thousand residents crammed into an area that you could drive through in less than two minutes -- that is, if the roads were paved and the narrow streets were not crowded with chickens and little kids playing.

RTC has only two full time employees. They spend most of their time trying to find those in extreme need. The families and children we visited obviously have had few opportunities to absorb anything meaningful. Their lives are a constant struggle largely because of the circumstances into which they were born. Re-meeting my nephew within twenty-four hours of visiting Kiambiu really put this into perspective for me. Opportunity is everything.

The first person we visited was a young man in a wheel chair. He was caught in the middle of a gang fight in Kiambiu and was hit by a stray bullet in the side. He was one of those innocent bystanders who ended up very unlucky. He ended up paralyzed from the waist down. He has a wife, a thirteen year old boy, and a ten year old girl. The wife is now the sole bread winner in the family. If she gets sick, there is no one to pay school fees or buy food. She tries to make a living by offering services to other people throughout Kiambiu. She does anything from washing people’s clothes to painting people’s houses -- whatever she can to make some money. Their family has gone from having very little to having even less.

The husband has feeling every now and then in his legs, which means that there is some hope that he may regain use of his legs. The doctors initially gave him a choice. He could have surgery, or get pain medicine. He chose pain medicine because he didn’t have enough money to pay for surgery. Eventually, he ran out of money for the pain medicine too. He now goes without any treatment.

On top of all this, the family has to come up with rent money for a room in the picture below.



The room is only one room and the walls are made of mud and cow dung. It’s the same type of one room dwelling that my father and mother lived in with their families growing up in rural Kenya. My dad has eight brothers and sisters, and my mom has six. But that was in rural Kenya in the 1940s and 50s. These conditions are in 2008 in what could be considered the Nairobi metropolitan area. These conditions exist throughout the country and throughout the continent. Given these circumstances, the odds are stacked against a child wanting to escape this cycle of poverty.


Hope (pictured above with one of the women from RTC) is the daughter of a young woman in Kiambiu. Hope's mom was diagnosed with TB and HIV a few months ago. Hope is two, and she has a fifteen year old older sister. We asked her mom about her greatest challenges in life. She said one word. Food. Her older daughter lives with her sister. Her sister pays her daughter twenty Kenyan Shillings per day for her chores. That’s enough to maybe buy half a loaf of bread in a slum.

In between Hope's mom's tears, she told us about her dreams to start a business just so that she could provide for her daughters. She is unsure whether her two year old is HIV positive yet. She often has to choose between buying kerosene for her room, or buying food. She is desperate while her child is clueless. What is her solution? If she dies, what becomes of Hope? Does she have to die? Does Hope have a chance?

How can we value technological advancement so much, yet ignore the millions of Hopes, and million of people like Hope's mother, who are struggling just to continue living and to keep their children alive? I think the answer is pretty simple -- we can ignore these people because they are invisible to professionals who go from home to work and back every day. Because it’s easy to ignore the invisible.

So what’s the solution? Perhaps a first step is a pretty simple one. To make the invisible visible. Below are some pictures from Kiambiu.






I apologize if I sound like a late night commercial with Sally Struthers today, but I’m just explaining what I saw. My nephew has a shot. I had a shot. But so many of these kids, quite frankly, don’t. As long as people ignore these events, birth will continue to dictate who gets opportunities to move forward and who dies without a chance at life. Imagining a world where everyone has the same opportunities is unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make more opportunity available to those who so desperately need it.