Kibera

Where to begin, Kibera is one of the largest slums/shanty towns in the world. It has over a million people living in tin shacks, some as small as a few feet square and all with dirt floors. Imagine over a million people living in a fairly small area with no electricity, running water, sewage system, basically everything that you and i would consider the basics of life. If you want to see it in a movie The Constant Gardener is filmed there. It is like nothing you can imagine untill you see it, it was so foreign to me in every possible way, i have never been anywhere that can compare to it in any of my travels.
We walked the 30 mins or so in along the train tracks and all of a sudden you are just in kibera there is no fence or entrace it is just there and you go from lush greenery to mud and tin, like that! I was overwhelmed by everything, thank god catherine knew where she was going as it is a maze of allys, dirt roads and shantys. We walked about 20 mins into Kibera itself, you get the feeling that it could go on miles, and at one point when we were on a hill of sorts you could look out and all you could see were tins roofs for forever, all i could say was wow, i was lost for words.

finally we reached this big pile of rubbish and Cathrine said that was where the kids go to the toilet just in the middle of the road and the school was just behind it. The school is communtiy run and this lady Mary runs it if she wasn't there i don't know if these kids would be in school at all. it is a big tin Shack about 15ft by 40ft and there are about 40 students all under 7. Threre are four classes but it is all one room so it is very noisey with 4 teachers trying to keep control of their students. The kids were soooo cute when we arrived they all were saying hi hi ow r u, very cute. Everything is very basic, chalk and a blackboard, Mary had taken old sacks and sewn the alphabet/colours/numbers into them with wool and used them to decorate the walls. I can't really describe it very well so you will just have to wait till i can upload pics to da any of it justice. Anywho i went in the next day aswell to teach and it was amazing the kids are so happy to see you and at playtime they are all over you, as soon as you spin one of them around they all start shouting teacher, teacher, me, me after 10 mins i was exausted but i couldn't stop as you just can't say no. In that moment when i was playing with the kids i was so happy to be there and realized i had absolutly done the right thing in coming here, it was so amzing and bear in mind i was playing in a garbage pile covered with flys and rats!! so that is saying somthing. I am already falling in love with africa.