Nairobi - Social Forum, Slum

18-28 Jan, 2007 - from Nairobi, an airplane home, and the Kigali airport

I recognize it has been quite some time since my last posting, and certainly there is a lot to process, but I’ll start first outside Rwanda, in Nairobi, Kenya, where I have been attending the World Social Forum. With an estimated 50,000 participants, nearly every country was represented in one of the largest gathering of social movements worldwide.

Over the last few days I have been attending a subset of sessions with The People’s Health Movement called the World Social Forum on Health. Along with panels on various health issues, this micro arena served as an open platform from which individuals could speak on health concerns from their countries. In attendance was a mixture of students, physicians, the suffering poor, radical liberals, and a combination of the bunch. But saying the conference was a smash success is constructing a façade. Some positives came as a result, but in general the organization was shoddy, transportation sketchy, and outcome questionable.

At one point mid-week a number of Nairobi City Council members sat in attendance. Kenyan participants did not take long to press their guests on the city’s garbage collection in slums and elsewhere. As it stands, any street functions as waste disposal. Council members argued it was the citizens’ responsibility to bring trash to dumping sites (ten by twenty foot designated plots of land). But that is a flimsy response. To begin with, sites are often front and back yards of homes - surely a health hazard. Economic factors and poor living conditions also make the problem much worse than heaps of coke bottles and rotten food. Have you ever wondered how people go to the bathroom without running water? The simple answer is plastic bags. These toilets are then dropped in dumping sites on the people’s way to work. To the council members’ comments, my co-attendees argued their compliance, saying only when the sites overflow do they set garbage in the streets. And in their support, in spite of tax dollars paid, it seemed that dumping sites were rarely picked up.

But we also discussed issues at a larger level, such as the effect of globalization on health. This is, for me, a new and fascinating topic, as I am starting to understand the interconnectedness of health, economy, and the environment. Allow me to give an example. Cocoa is a cash crop in Ghana, which the European Union only charges a 0.5% tariff to export raw beans into their countries. However, the tariff jumps to 31% if Ghanians wish to export a processed product. So Ghana sells its resources at a low cost in order to have them processed in the developed countries, then buys its food back at an elevated cost. Essentially the people get screwed. Unfair trade results in economic suppression, which means at a family-level less money is available to spend on health care, food, education, et cetera. At a larger level, the situation is not much better. Said one speaker, during the thirty years between 1960 and 1990, African countries borrowed approximately 540 billion dollars. They have since paid back $550B, but still owe $295B because of interest. He went on to point out Africa spends more on paying debt interest than it does on health and education. His point was that although bringing poor countries into the global market was supposed to be helpful, it has actually destroyed domestic economies and worsened people’s health. The blame seemed to be placed on the developed countries for exploiting the poor nations. But surely much of it ought to be shouldered by the governments of the poor nations as well. Adding to the existing problem of unfathomable corruption, they have not organized themselves to get production plants up and running in their respective countries, which is within their power to do.

On the last day, participants drafted health proposals for their respective continents. Those from Asia were concerned with drug companies exploiting their people as guinea pigs. Issues of sexual and reproductive health made their way to the South American recommendation. I helped a young Kikuyu draft the African document, which included issues of sanitation, affordable health care, availability drugs (anti-retroviral and other – which although are readily prescribed, are quite difficult to find, so I am told), and female genital mutilation.

As I fly back to Rwanda and reflect on the week, however, it all seems a big dance. Of course I hope I’m wrong. I hope my pessimism is misplaced and that the political power of the People’s Health Movement (www.phmovement.org), a global health body of local, regional, national, and international health organizations, is stronger than my perception. But without international governmental officials present, I wonder if any of these proposals will be read or taken seriously.

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As much as I enjoyed working with an international body on international health concerns, by weeks’ end it seems that I have learned much more from those outside the conference than those from within.

It only took two matatus to reach the sports complex where the conference was held from the house I was staying. Sometimes it took more if drivers decided more business was available on other routes. Usually, though, the 15 km (9 miles) stretch could be made in two hours’ time.

Once completing the first leg, there are a number of routes that lead to the WSF. 45 always goes there, and 46 does as well, except the other day when 46 went to a slum. At first this was frustrating; a kilometer walk to the next stage, from which a taxi could be taken back to the main road, where one finds matatus that lead to the WSF. But then I looked around: a grid of blue and gray corrugated tin sheets nailed together like a third-grade science project. Barefoot children and trash heaps. Trash everywhere. Circling around the affordable housing was a trench - a moat of urine, shit and water run-off. A cesspool of filth. Picture a car, stripped of its wheels, thrown in the moat, serving as a bridge to some while housing others. Downstream a woman stooped over and used her hands to fill a bucket with the juice, trickling through all that trash. She poured out the yellowish-brown juice – not tinted, but a thick, dirty color, similar to what snot looks like at mid-day on a construction site. She poured it on some plants, but it was all over her hands, and where will she wash it off? She won’t. So now there is probably E-coli everywhere, and on the vegetables, and people will get sick.

The next matatu drove a short distance, then stopped to let someone out. We waited, as we always do, until it filled up again. We were still in the slum. And I noticed something else. Body odor in Rwanda smells like sweaty-armpit, like a teenage boys locker room – sick, but familiar if you’ve ever missed a day of deoderant. The smell on the bodies we picked up from the slum was of rotten fruit, and feces, and Lord knows whatever other odors their skin soaked up the previous night.

That morning it took 3 hours to go 15 kilometers, but now I understand the World Social Forum. In the opening days it frustrated me to no end, sitting for hours in meetings where the only development seemed to be a roomful of sore cheeks. But now I do not mind all the talking. Obviously I hope steps are taken as a result to bring change, but at least there was an arena for people to share their stories, a place to de-tox from the hell they live in. Meanwhile, each night I go home to a hot shower and eat until I am satisfied. In years past this made me feel guilty – but not anymore. The discrepancy does not bring fault but rather responsibility to use privilege appropriately in order to reduce hatred, increase respect and, for me, preach love through Christ Jesus.
And while I am here, I’ll share another story. On the ride last week I sat next to a rather pleasant, older mother. She looked like she was about 45, so I suspect she was actually in her mid to late thirties. We traded cell phone numbers and the next day she invited me over. Her family lived about two miles further down Ngong Road, past Nakumat Junction for those of you who were with me last summer. We got out and started walking when she warned me she about the slum. Not to scare me, but just so I was mentally and emotionally prepared. “Ben,” she said, “I want you to be here, in the slum, to see how we live so you don’t attend the Forum and discuss issues of health, return home, and never understand what this is”. We meandered down the dirt walkways, through the strip of market space, took a right where the clotheslines crossed, and turned into her tin home. One room for her, her husband and their two kids. It looked like maybe the seat-high table gets pushed forward at night, with the arm-rest width of their chairs designating sleeping spaces. There was a bed that was walled off by a sheet. But that was pretty much it – one room to sit, sleep, do homework and cook – one room to pass time. I took dinner with them – a glass of Sprite, although I think they were going to cook Ugali when I left (boiled flour and water). It was pretty miserable, and yet they did not complain. In fact, most of the people walking around seemed surprisingly happy. Most admirably, although my host told me of the struggles to make rent each month, it was not a sad-story-turned-sales-pitch. She never asked for money – or even implied that I should be sympathetic and give. She simply wanted me to see truth. I think that in coming here, I was hoping to be Jesus to people, to love and to share. But more often than not, they’ve been Jesus to me.