How are you?

Walk with us through Kibera...
The dirt is deep orange, almost red. It's the kind of soil that sticks to your feet and when it rains, walking on it is like walking on a slip and slide. The road on the outskirts of Kibera gives us an introductory view. In a hilly, sloping area about the size of Central Park, over one million people have settled in tin, wood and mud shacks. It's almost startling when we see green here in Nairobi. The overpopulation and lack of a supportive, sustainable infrastructure have lead to almost every last inch of this city to be settled on, built on, or used up. But along the road, there are a few crops haphazardly trying to grow up to be food.

I asked Lilian, our guide, why she came to Nairobi from the lush, open beauty of western Kenya. She said it was to look for work. Hers is a common story. Well-educated men and women come to Nairobi hoping that their hard work and success in school will mean something here in the big city so they can help their families improve their lot in life. What they find is fierce competition for even the most modest of jobs and an impossibly expensive housing market. When your family has sacrificed so much for your school fees, for you to be the chosen one, and this is what you find in the promised land, how can you return home? You can't. You don't.

As we approach St. Monica's Early Childhood Development Center and the Women's Self-Help Group, about a dozen children greet us in song. I do not feel worthy of the honor I am so often shown in this country. We spend some time in the three room shack that serves as the school and the women's meeting/business space. In conversation, I discover that we are the first visitors from the West to come to them since the post-election violence in January 2008. They depend on visitors to buy their crafts, but they understand the fear. Lilian tells me that in those weeks, even if people had food, they couldn't eat it. They were afraid of their own neighbors in that embarrassing and deeply disappointing time.

Lilian and Pauline, an elderly mama, lead us through Kibera in search of the Hot Sun Foundation. We are hiking those hills on that red dirt. As I stumble over sewage streams and rocky, uneven hills, I just keep thinking how grateful I am that it is not raining. Then I am sad, because there is often water shortages in Kibera and the rain helps.

Everywhere we walk, there is a chorus of children calling out "How are you? How are you?" It is the most basic of English phrases. Every "Muzungu" presents an exciting opportunity to use it. I am fine, Children of Kibera, how are you?