If you look up the meaning of the phrase ‘living in squalor’ in the dictionary its synonyms would include filth and misery and those are the conditions Andrew and his tenants are living in.
“Sewage flows down here from Magiwa,” Andrew says pointing at stone houses just beyond the slum, “until it gets blocked here and enters our houses,” Andrew continues turning back to point at a stone wall behind him.
The stone wall separates what is from what is meant to be. On one side are shacks made from what looks like rusty corrugated iron sheets, open on the side that faces the stone wall and on the other side are flats made from stone and cement coming up.
The Kibera residents are intended to move out of the slum into the flats but until then they live with sewage flooding their homes.
The flats are part of the Kenya Slum Upgrading Project (KENSUP). A decanting site for Kibera residents has already been put up in Lang’ata. It consists of 600 units and with three families in each unit it houses 1,800 households.
This is a drop in the ocean considering over 200,000 people live in Kibera. The decanting site has also been riddled with controversy. Some of the residents have failed to pay the Sh1,000 monthly rents since 2009 when they moved in.
Others have been accused of renting out the houses and moving back to the slum.
Oundo Vincent, one of Andrew’s tenants, has lived in Kibera for the last 23 years. He invites me to his home to show me the damage the sewage has caused.
It looks more like a shed than a home. There isn’t much other than a dirty mattress on corrugated iron sheets. There is no need to remove my shoes because there is nothing covering the ground. A sheet hang on pegs separates his home from his neighbours.
He had more, he tells me, until a fire gutted down everything within a kilometre of where we stand a month ago. “The fire brigade tried their best but there was simply no way for them to reach us,” Andrew tells me.
“I was unable to salvage anything because it happened around eight in the morning and I was at work,” Oundo, a construction worker, contributes.
As we speak his five children hang on the wooden poles that support the iron sheets looking out at the stone wall and construction beyond; they range from thirteen to eight years of age.
Maureen who lives next to Oundo also has children, two girls; Ruth is six months old and Rachel four years old.
They had to sleep out in the open when their house burnt down. Andrew rebuilt his tenants’ houses from the iron sheets the fire didn’t consume.”
There wasn’t enough left though and that’s why one side of the shacks stands open.
“What the fire didn’t take the thieves did,” Andrew laments.
Maureen has had to take both her daughters to hospital because of the cold draught it lets in. With the rent money he collects, Andrew has been able to buy a few more iron sheets and now they provide the roofing on Oundo’s shack. Their shine doesn’t fit in with the drab surroundings.
Maureen has no roof yet. Canvas covers her home but she’s done the best with what she has. New cooking pots glimmer in one corner. A green sofa sits against one wall. On its left are buckets and soap where they take baths and at the centre of the room a mattress.
I haven’t seen a toilet or pit latrine on my way in or on my tour of the shacks. “We pay five shillings to go to the bathroom,” Maureen explains.
There’s a gap in the wall where the buckets are and beyond them I see sewage flowing.
“It gets worse, much worse,” she says following my gaze, “Sometimes it’s like a tap just opens and it floods our homes. Everything it touches you have to throw.” It got so bad one night she climbed the stone wall with her children to seek shelter in the unfinished flats beyond but they were turned away.
“We tried creating a hole in the stone wall so the sewage could flow out but they closed it back up,” Andrew says.
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