Mathare Valley

They aren’t supposed to be easy. They are supposed to be hard.

Heartbreaking.

And utterly unbelievable.

For that is what it was like for our team today. Hard. Heartbreaking. Utterly unbelievable.

This is the Mathare Valley, a giant slum in Kenya.

We visited here today. In the hours since we’ve been back at our modest hotel, a literal mansion compared to the living conditions we witnessed earlier, I have been having an extremely difficult time processing what we experienced.

That children, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them, live here, spending each day amidst a desolation you cannot comprehend unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes, makes my soul ache.

I want to try to describe it for you, though. I think you need to know about it. You don’t want to know about it. Trust me. But I think you need to.

I needed to.

This place, you guys. You can’t imagine it. You just can’t. Imagine a place as desperate and awful as you can conceive of. Imagine children living in squalor not fit for wild animals. Imagine filth and slime and rotten garbage. Imagine this place of desolation.

Did you imagine it?

Well, what we experienced today, nay what these hundreds of thousands of people live each day, is worse than that. It’s worse than what you can you even imagine.

Unless you’ve been here, all the photographs and videos and descriptions can give you an idea, but you can’t really grasp just how awful it is in the slums of Kenya. You can try to imagine it, but it’s very uncomfortable.

Imagine streams of raw sewage flowing everywhere. Imagine pornography being shown to men and children alike in little huts. Imagine fathers who work at the makeshift distillery by the sewage infested river, who then spend their money getting drunk on the beer they make instead of bringing it home to their families. Imagine children who eat rotten fruit they salvage from the heaps of waste that are piled everywhere. Imagine homes made of tin or cardboard or mud. Imagine the child led homes, where the parents have died and the children are living alone, fending for themselves.

Imagine the stench.

In an area just a couple square miles big, there are 800,000 people spending their days and nights.

There is dirt and mud everywhere. Nothing is paved. As we walked through the slum today, on our way to the Compassion project situated squarely in the center, I focused on the ground, trying hard not to slip. At one point, my eyes scanning the garbage that lay on the dirt, I came to a realization, especially when I saw a cross section of the ground.

There was not garbage on the ground. The ground was garbage.

The slum is built on garbage. Years and years of decayed garbage, piled up in layers, decomposed into black dirt, creates the ground upon which these people live and have their homes.

Can you imagine?

I didn’t cry today. That was a first for me on this trip to Kenya.

At first, I wasn’t sure why. Why I didn’t cry.

But then it hit me.

I think I didn’t cry because,

if I cried,

that would mean I had accepted that these awful, impoverished, beyond belief conditions are real.

And so far, my mind refuses to believe that they are.

But I will come to terms with it. I don’t want to, but I will.

I haven’t yet. Seeing the children today was the most difficult. It was what I didn’t want to accept as real. Seeing these children living like this.

Children who need sponsors. Children who might be able to attend school and eat at least one meal a week (Yes, a week.) if they were sponsored.

Sponsors’ $38 a month can help buy new clothing for children in Kenya,

and help them pay the monthly rent on the homes they live in.

It was an unbelievable experience today.

Thank you for letting me begin to sort my thoughts out here. Thoughts about how incredibly overcome I was when I saw the people in this slum walking on the garbage/ground with bare feet.

Thank you for looking at these photographs and not turning away.

It is my hope that your heart will be softened,

and that you will be willing to head over to Compassion’s Sponsor a Child page and pick out a child to help.

I pray that I will be able to discern what God wants me to do with the broken heart I have after visiting the Mathare Valley slum today.

Right now, I do know that He wants me to share with you about it.

About the stories of the people there.

And, oh boy, do I have stories.

Stories of hope and promise, coming right out of this slum. You will be encouraged. I think you’ll want to help.

Because, you see, these dire conditions are awful, but they are not completely hopeless.

I’ll show you more about that beautiful hope tomorrow.