Slums: The Breeding and Killing Grounds of the Orphan

I’ve been in dozens of slums in as many different countries. Whether it is flimsy shanties perched precariously on stilts over the Mekong in Phnom Penh, staggered shacks built on broken sewer pipes in Manila, sprawling abodes of plastic sheeting on the saturated waste banks of Mumbai, or the smoky roadside labyrinths in Dhaka, they all share common traits: extreme poverty, desperation, disease, death, and...orphans.

Famine, unemployment and refugee influxes are just a few of the many factors contributing to the drift towards major cities in the developing world. People in search of survival and opportunity make the trek from smaller towns and villages. Once they arrive at the city, however, they find that millions of other people have made the same journey. No jobs. No income. No medical facilities. No hope.

Having expended all their resources, they settle into the slum areas that form bands around these major cities or create strips within them on garbage-embedded, sewage-drenched land.

(Image: Sewer stream in Mathare Valley slum, Nairobi)

Others have been in the slums for generations, held in bondage there by religion, social immobility or lack of financial advancement prospects.

Here is where the precursors of orphaning are the most prevalent. Paucity and destitution feed all manner of criminal activity and moral iniquity. Drugs and prostitution help people to claw out a living but, in a place of such hopelessness, also provide them with base thrills to take their minds off of their realities. Exploitation often takes the form of sexual slavery or “sugar daddy” serial relationships where a young girl or boy is essentially owned by an abusive provider. Open sewer lines bleed poison into water supplies. Typhoid, Cholera and other water-borne diseases claim victims by the thousands daily. Cesspools propagate malaria-carrying mosquitoes that bring fever and death with painful regularity.

(Image: A homeless child sits by trash and sewage in Mathare)

All these things combine to rip parents away from children. It is often the children who become the victims of the sinful choices of their parents or the corruption and neglect of their societies. It is the children who are left to suffer the heartbreaking and traumatic consequences. It is the children who find themselves orphaned and abandoned.

My film crew and I climbed a rickety water tower that swayed in the wind. We wanted a better vantage point overlooking the Chambiu slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Rolling hills of green grass and wildflowers opened to a stretch of tin-roofed shanties abutting one another. It looked peaceful from above. Not seen were the forlorn lives of thousands struggling to survive below. That reality became clearer as we later entered another slum community in Mathare Valley.

(Image: On a water tower, overlooking Chambui slum in Nairobi)

We ventured into Mathare from the top crest and then descended down into its depths, through the jaws of squalor and suffering. Putrid streamlets flowed down with us and carried decaying litter, raw sewage, and infirmity through the community. Ducks, chickens and turkeys drink this water and are often seen with half of their feathers missing. This infected poultry is, of course, eaten by the slum inhabitants during rare meals of meat.

(Image: Duck drinking raw sewage)

The Mathare Valley slum is a half-square-mile mass of shacks that holds the lives of over a half million impoverished men, women and children. There are many Muslim families within it, including those of countless Somali refugees hardened by challenge and conflict. The spiritual depravity is as evident as the physical.

(Image: Mathare Valley as viewed from a garbage-laded hill)

Children are everywhere and throng to us in hoards. Their parents can’t afford to send them to school and others have no parents to tell of. These children come to us dressed in smiles and tattered rags…nothing more than holes threaded together by fraying strands of fiber. Most are barefoot, but some boast worn out sandals or sneakers. Battered souls and battered soles.

(Image: Children in the 'nicer' section of Mathare)

Bare feet are often accompanied by bare heads, as malnutrition and disease cause thick black hair to turn orange, thin, and fall out. The feet of the street child and orphan navigate through garbage piles filled with little plastic bags of human feces. These bags are often pecked open by birds or torn into by goats and pigs. And, yes, those are eaten also.

(Image: Goats eat human waste in a cruel 'cirlcle of life')

For the orphan on the “streets” of the slums, each day brings new struggles and skirmishes with death. Pestilence brings uncontrollable diarrhea that eventually kills through dehydration and the shutting down of vital bodily functions. Starvation claims in its own right, but it also brings severe hunger pangs that are “controlled” by huffing glue; glue that stunts development and lays waste to brain cells. The stealing of food can bring a swift and harsh beating, amputation, acid drenching, solvent fire bath…or execution.

And at night the real terror begins.

The predators come for their little victims. Girls and boys as young as toddlers are snatched up to meet the sexual desires of marauding men. Some of these men are pedophiles by nature. Others believe the myth that having sex with a virgin can cure AIDS. As millions of HIV positive men hunt for maidens, they have to keep aiming lower in age in order to be assured of virginity. Thirteen year-old targets have now been traded for much younger prey – eight year-olds, six year-olds, three year-olds. A downward spiral of use and abuse. As the children are forced into intercourse, they are themselves infected with the sickness. The rape becomes a death sentence. Orphaned by AIDS and dying with AIDS.

Such is the environment and degradation of the orphan. Such is the hopelessness and horror of the abandoned child.

We began to visit and pray...

Comments

[Sarah]

What a horrible way to live. I can't even imagine it as a reality. My heart breaks for these children.

[Cheri]

Unimaginable horror. I have to believe that God sees, knows, cares...