Mathare Introduction
No one can prepare you for the sight, and pictures cannot tell the entire story. Thousands of tin shacks, children in tattered clothing with bleeding ulcers on their lips, goats and chickens feeding on the house-high rubbish heaps and the smell of urine and faeces overwhelm even the heartiest traveller.
Try to imagine one toilet for every 10,000 people and the contents pouring onto the paths between homes and into the small river where people wash.
From a Christian Mission Aid worker who went to help in a school in Mathare
It is a place like no other I have visited. It is the largest and worst slum in Africa. They come to Nairobi from rural areas to look for work. There is no work. Mathare was ‘built’ over many years on top of a rubbish dump, as more and more people settled there. It is a long strip of tin and wooden shacks and earthen walls built on both sides of a small stream. The stream runs through a small valley with steep sides, and the slum is at first difficult to see.
We descended to the slum from the edge of the valley on narrow paths, which were slippery from the previous night’s rain. The effect of walking through the narrow dirt pathways between the dirt and tin and sticks and old boards is like entering a series of trenches. At times I felt we were almost underground. But beneath its tin and tarpaper cover, Mathare teems with the daily life of poor, idle people. They work and wait and watch, and suffer almost silently. Small children are everywhere, and many pregnant women. There is no one my age. They died, without even knowing what it means to be HIV positive. The older boys and young men stand, brooding, watching the visitors intently, watching for things to steal.
A volunteer staff of teachers has organised a school for the children. The classrooms looked and felt like stables. It is a school with dirt floors, earth walls, no sanitation, and no ventilation. Open sewers run through the centre of these ‘hallways’; sometimes the sewer, the stream, is the hallway, the path. The kids are dressed in clothes they have been given, passed down time and time again. The clothes are rags on some, and their bare feet are muddy. They are dirty and diseased.
From an Afro-American tourist
This is a city of paraffin lamps. Thousands of people are milling about. Narrow paths zig-zag between shacks. In front of every shack something is being sold. Meat is grilling, chapattis are doing triple somersaults off flat pans and mandazes (like fried burgers) are spitting with fury. The energy of the place is unbelievable.
There are piles and piles of neatly arranged tomatoes, red onions, mangoes and kale. Red, yellow and green bananas hang from ceilings. Maize is being grilled. There are acrobats, charismatic preachers with mobile PA (Public Address) systems, butchers, bars and every sort of clothing imaginable for sale.
There is not a blade of grass, no trees or bushes.