Life for a Street Child

                  This beautiful girl is one of the many nameless children roaming the gutters and alleys of Kibera. Some children have been orphaned by AIDS, some have been abandoned by caregivers who can no longer care for themselves, nevertheless a child.

                  Children on the streets of Kibera are subject to many kinds of assaults. Flying toilets, plastic bags filled with human waste, are hurled from shacks and add to the pile of waste that makes up the ground in Kibera.  One of the reasons construction is difficult in the slum is there is no land available for a foundation, the streets are landfills of waste.  Crimes against children, especially girls, are a normal part of everyday life. Since 25%of the population of Kibera is HIV positive, children who are molested are often infected with the AIDS virus. 

                  In this environment, this child’s smile is unexpected and contagious. Her eyes shine with mischief, and maybe even hope. Hope is a luxury of the very young in Kibera, a precious resource that is all too quickly taken by realities of living in the forgotten slum.

 

The Facts of Kibera

               The Kibera slum of Nairobi is the largest slum (in terms of population) in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Alioune Badiane, the director of the UN Human Settlements Program: “It has 3,000 persons per hectare; I do not see any other place in the world that has such a density”. Kibera has more than 1.2 million people in an area about the size of Manhattan’s Central Park (~ 2.5 square kilometers = ~ 600 acres). More than 25% of the population of Kibera has been diagnosed with AIDS, and most of the residents live in an atmosphere of despair and severe deprivation. Many of the children are orphans at an early age due to AIDS and other diseases. More than 50% of the population is under the age of 15, and approximately 80% of all youth are unemployed

 

A Second Chance at St. Lazarus

 

The school is called St. Lazarus and appropriately so.  Lazarus called forth by Jesus, closed off and sealed away from the world, his friends and family reluctant to smell him, fearing the stench of death.

 

                  In the tomb that is the slum of Kibera, St. Lazarus School is reviving lives that have been sealed off and forgotten, without a soul to mourn their passing.  These children, abandoned and orphaned, live in the largest slum in Africa. On a patch of land smaller than Central Park,  over 1 million Kenyans live in squalor and disease.  25% of the slum population is HIV positive, with no sewer system, rare cases of running water, and rampant violent crime. Children of Kibera are often orphaned or abandoned and left to fend for themselves in the sewers they call streets. .  In this land of a million forgotten people, St. Lazarus school is offering these children a chance at life. Through education, meals, and shelter from street life, this school is resurrecting young lives and offering them hope of a better future.