Slumdog Millionaire

Lyndsay here:

Had a great night sleep after our chaotic 13 hour adventure across the border, only to wake up at 6:30 Saturday morning to make it to 6:45am mass. We hit the ground running after that. Enjoyed a breakfast of chicken sausage, toast, and milk tea (our recent Ugandan obsession, two words for you- whole milk). We set out mid morning with Father David and his brother Raphael to go see an orphanage, the slums of Nairobi, an animal orphanage, and to top it off had pizza & Kenyan beer for dinner (three happy campers here).

First, the orphanage. We had all been expecting an orphanage simply full of orphaned children, very similar to the other orphanages we have been to in Uganda. Father David had told is it was run by Sister's of Charity, that was it. We walk in, and it is an orphanage for special needs children, with physical or mental disabilities, in some cases both. These are all children that have been essentially left to die by their parents. They have been thrown in the garbage (literally), left in slums, left on the side of the road, or found abandoned by policeman and brought to the sisters. The breath literally escaped my body when we walked into the main room. There was nursery music playing in the background, orphans all wheelchair or bedbound, several unable to communicate, only moaning and making undecipherable sounds, some were unable even to hold their heads up in attempts to look around the room. Children with microcephaly, cerebral palsy, and more, totaling 63 orphans. 63, and only a few sisters to care for them. If there is someone who is in need of volunteer help, it is these women. These sisters, this is their life, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. They have completely surrendered themselves and offered their lives up to the Lord to merely do good for these forgotten children. These children were all clean, well fed, and most importantly, for those who could, they were smiling. These sister's are the saving grace to each and every child here. 

We then left the orphanage and proceeded to the slums, which we would come to learn is the largest slum in all of Africa, with 3 million people living within its confined quarters. We had a group of 7 or 8 kids following and playing with us, two of whom accompanied us on our walks to the slums because they live there. We did not actually go into the slums, Father David was worried for our safety, that someone might try to rob us. We walked up to the edge and I swear we were in the midst of a scene from Slumdog Millionaire. Row after row of shacks with tin roofing, dirt is literally everywhere, scattering moreso each and every time the wind blew, piles of garbage are strew about everywhere, clothing hanging out on the line, children laughing and playing. Father David used to do a lot of work in this slum before another parish took over. He told us HIV is rampant, the majority of the population is infected. It is horribly filthy, families of 7 or 8 will live in a one room "shack" with one bed, during the rainy season such as now, rainwater mixes with sewage and simply runs freely throughout all the homes. This is poverty unlike I have ever seen it. These people have nothing, even less than nothing. They live in shacks, are constantly covered in and surrounded by filfth, and despite all of this, Father David says they are some of the most faith filled people he has ever met, that when they sing, they sound like angels.

We are so lucky, we are so unbelievably lucky to live the life we have. Our poorest of the poor in the United Sates would be considered rich men and women here. I kept asking myself "What have I done God to be blessed with this life? Why did you choose for me to be born into my life and for all of these people to be born into theirs?" I have yet to figure out the answer. Here I thought we were living this life of scarifies, living in rural Uganda for two months, with no fridge, no air conditioning, minimal or no electricity, pooping in a hole in the ground, limited diet, cold showers, hand washing clotting… I could not have been more wrong. This life we are living now, is a life suited for kings compared to the people living in these slums. No words will ever begin to do justice or paint a vivid enough picture of what we saw today.

We then headed for the animal orphanage, enjoying a quick lunch of fish, salad, and chicken sandwiches with fruit salad. (Michelle and I ate fish eyes for the first time, that one was for you mom!) After lunch, we spent time in the animal orphanage, which is in all honesty a zoo, despite Father David's attempts to tell us otherwise. Granted the animals were all injured or abandoned animals rescued from the wild, which were then rehabilitated and nursed back to health, but now live in captivity, loose terms in Kenya, given that monkeys were crawling in and out of their cages to stare at us or eat people food that had been thrown on the ground. We saw the lions during feeding time (clever Disney naming Simba as they did, we learned the Swahili word for lion is "Simba" oh so clever..) They were literally feeding the lions raw slabs of meat, bar-b-que rib style, complete with raw meat scent, and the sound of crunching bones. 

We spent our night sitting outside Pizza Inn, located within a gas station, drinking a Tusker beer and eating what we were convinced was the best pizza ever (mind you it's a Pizza Hut equivalent at best, 2 months of rice and beans will do that) to you. We talked, laughed, relishing the fact that we were sitting at a table, outside a gas station, in the middle of Kenya, eating hot pizza, drinking a Kenyan beer, with a Kenyan priest, and Kevin Diamond, after all these years.