"Silent Food Crisis Crippling Kenya Slum"

This article published yesterday by Voice of America points out the toll that skyrocketing food prices have taken on the residents of Kibera. The need for aid and opportunities to help are greater now than ever.

As international headlines draw attention to the political bickering among Kenya's leaders, a crisis almost entirely hidden from view is ravaging Nairobi's Kibera slum. A window into the lives of Kibera's schoolchildren reveals how the silent food crisis in Africa's largest slum is threatening an impoverished generation's future.

On the edge of Nairobi sits the sprawling tin-shack Kibera slum, which with its roughly one million inhabitants is large enough to be a city in itself.

Food prices have more than doubled in the past year, making the always-difficult survival of Kibera's population more challenging.

Plight of children

For a generation of Kibera children growing up with extreme urban poverty, disease, and ethnic violence, the unmanageable price of food is causing much wider and more sinister ripples than simply whether or not they will go to bed hungry. When families cannot afford meals here, it is often the children whose lives change most drastically.

"I am going to go home," said Gideon. "Then if there is no food, then I am going to rubbish."

Gideon dropped out of school last year so he could help support his family by scrounging for scraps in the heaping junk piles of Kibera. If he is lucky, he might make 20 cents a day. Gideon is 13-years old.

The school Gideon used to attend is supported by the World Food Program. Usually the lunch meal the school offers is enough to keep kids attending, as it is likely to be their only meal of the day. But in Gideon's case a fatherless home with younger siblings that need feeding and a mother in the late stages of AIDS has all proven too heavy a burden.

Gideon's mother, who is too sick to work and has been unable to persuade her son to return to school, says she makes her other children continue going to school, even though she can not pay the school fees - otherwise her children would not eat. When the kids are kicked out for being unable to pay, she is nevertheless forced to send them back to the school.

Miriam Wawira is the headmistress at a pre-primary school in Kibera. She says those children whose situations are unfortunate enough to qualify them for admittance into the small school are the fortunate ones in their families. While those young kids receive at least two meals a day during the school week, their siblings are unlikely to be as lucky.

"There are those parents who bring their children here simply because they know in as much as there is no food at home, at least this child can come to school, have porridge at 10 o'clock, have lunch at 1 pm," said Wawira. "And then after that, when they go home, even if there is some little food at home, these children who have been to this school, they will always be the last to be served in their family because there are other children who have been in the house and maybe they have not had lunch or did not have breakfast."

Prices skyrocketed

Food prices in Kenya have shot up, in part due to a severe drought that has left the year's harvest well below the nation's basic demand. Maize flour, the basic staple, has more than doubled in the past year, a trend that holds true for about all other simple grocery items.

For families already engaged in a daily struggle to make ends meet, the unbearable food strain could hardly have come at a more inopportune time.

According to a joint report from humanitarian groups Concern Worldwide, Care International, and Oxfam International, the cost of cooking fuel is up by as much as 50 percent from last year, while the price of water has doubled. Meanwhile, the global economic downturn has helped shrink incomes in Kibera by 20 percent.

Steven Okello, a project officer based in Kibera for CARE-Kenya, explains the crisis has remained largely under the radar because the problem is not that there is no food, rather, the prices are simply too steep.

"The food is available, that is the paradox," he said. "The food is available, but the prices are unaffordable for people living in Kibera. Right now if you look at maize flour for instance, one packet goes for 100 shillings. Yet a majority of people living in Kibera live on less than 70 shillings per day."

Read the rest of the article here.

Handbag and Jewelry Sale!

Where: Vincentown United Methodist Church, 97 Main Street, Southampton, New Jersey
When: Saturday August 1, 2009 from 9 am to 12 pm


All the proceeds will provide financial compensation, medicine, hospital care and income opportunities for HIV positive men and women in Kibera.

See the flyer for the event here.

If you are not able to attend but would like to hold a support group sale event in your town, please contact us!

Report from Counselors

The counselors that we have hired to work with the kids at Tunza have written a report for us about what type of issues they have been working on, the progress they have made with the kids and what still needs to be done.

See the full report here.