Wanjiru Macharia
21 August 2008
Nairobi — Children have turned to scavenging, while girls and women are trading sex for food.
That is what is left of the Nakuru Showground camp for the displaced, after Kenya Red Cross Society withdrew from where it had been feeding more than 14,000 uprooted people.
The council, it would seem, took the cue and stopped collecting garbage.
Scenes of children aged between six and 10 years looking for food remains and organic waste greet you at the two main gates of the camp where more than 9,000 people are still camping.
They are dirty, barefoot and hungry. They use their little bare hands to rummage through the dirt, oblivious to the risk of contracting diseases.
They carry the filth home in small bags and give it to their parents who spread it outside the torn, faded tents to dry.
Their parents use them to collect organic waste which they dry and sell to pig farmers from the neighbouring London, Kiamunyi and Hilton estates at meagre amounts. A kilogramme sells for Sh5, with the most expensive seller giving it out for Sh10.
A survey by the Nation revealed that some parents have no choice after donors vanished more than a month ago. A volunteer who was working in the Children's Department when the Red Cross was still offering services at the camp said hunger and poverty among the internally displaced was the main reason children were collecting garbage. The garbage brings a meal a day.
The volunteer said other children were being sent to Menengai Forest to collect firewood for parents to sell within the camp and in estates. "Menengai Forest is a dangerous place to send children because of the crater," he said.
A victim of eviction from Kamuyu Farm home in Burnt Forest, Ms Leah Njeri, said it was true children were collecting waste while girls had become prostitutes, if only to buy sanitary towels.
"When a situation is as grave as it is here at the camp, the most vulnerable people are women and children; that is why you find many bad things happening to them," she said.
Ms Njeri said men within the camp and from outside were preying on girls and exploiting them since the men knew the girls were vulnerable.
She told of her fear that there would be new cases of HIV and other venereal diseases, since the girls were engaging in unprotected sex.
Ms Njeri added that the camp was congested and most parents lived in small tents with their children. "You might want to engage in sex for the sake of your children. But what do you do when only a thin piece of canvas separates your side of the tent from your neighbour's?" she asked.
Most families can only afford a cup of light porridge a day.
And Mrs Esther Njeri Thairu, a mother of 12, said her children often went to bed on empty stomachs since the food she and her husband could afford was never enough. "With the meagre wages I get from working at a farm in Kiamunyi and Engachura, I can only afford to buy one-and-half kilogrammes of maize flour and several bunches of sukuma wiki," she said.
On several occasions, she fails to get the causal jobs, so the family sleeps hungry.
Mrs Thairu, who has children aged between one and 18, all living in the same tent, said the last time she got food rations from the Government through the Kenya Red Cross was more than one month ago.
Asked why she was still living at the camp yet the Government was issuing money to refugees to return to their former homes, Mrs Thairu said she would never go back to Uasin Gishu District. She said she did not feel secure enough to return to the area, especially now that her would-be host had also been evicted.
She noted that the Sh10,000 the Government was giving families to leave the camp was way too little, and was not even enough to rent a house and feed her large family for a month.
"Look at the kind of a family I have. What can I do with Sh10, 000? How long will it last us before we become hopeless beggars?" she asked, and appealed to the Government to rethink its decision and fully compensate those who were still remaining at the camp so that they could restart their lives.
Every five years
She appealed to the Government to consider settling them elsewhere where they felt safe. "Some of the people here are tired of being attacked after every five years and their property is destroyed and their relatives killed. They do not want to return," she said.
Another victim, Ms Sofia Kerubo, said she was on her way to the town centre to beg food at the market since her family was on the verge of starvation.
She said people were living in unhygienic conditions since even Nakuru council, which used to collect garbage, did not do so any more.
Overflowing toilets
Ms Kerubo spoke of overflowing toilets, adding, there was danger of contracting diseases at the camp.
Camp chairman Peter Kariuki Githinji said life was becoming unbearable, and that people had started dying due to water borne diseases. A man had died of diarrhoea last Saturday, he said, adding, most drainage tunnels had blocked as the council no longer offered services.
But provincial children's officer Abdi Mohamed said children from the camps had not drifted into the streets. The children roaming the streets, he said, were from destitute families and broken homes.
The department had Sh2 million from CDF to renovate a children's home on Nakuru-Eldoret highway, he said.
Additional reporting by Josephine Njoki
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