Heart of the Streets

Written by Jessie Yates, July '07, after visiting a Street Kid Program in Nairobi

Each Wednesday and Friday they come, in the smog of the city dawn. Traveling down dark streets they bring the money they need to buy the bread, milk and sausages for the morning, and in the back seat of one of the cars is always a grocery bag filled with a bottle of water, cold medicine, neosporin and bandaids. Sometimes the trunk is filled with old and abandoned shoes or clothing. They wait on the side of the darkened alley, watching for the emerging shadows of the men, women and children that have come to depend on these visits of hope and love.
He started to come with the volunteers less than a year ago. He travels every week from his home in the slums across town to feed those that have become his friends, and to give them the occasional smile that shows them the little love that they will ever be witness to. He watches closely and everyonce in a while steps forward to where they are seated against the wall and reaching out his hand, beseeches them with his eyes and soft voice. His patience with them persuades them to hand over that false lifeline that they find in a glue bottle into his waiting hand. He never fails to kneel down beside them and to talk to them in a whispering voice, asking them how they are doing, slowly unraveling their sad and heart wrenching stories.
He stays there, in the cold of the streets as the sun rises, for two hours. Sometimes he makes a breakthrough and gets the usually silent man to talk to him, other times he has to break up a fight. All the time his heart wrenches for the children that appear shoeless and shivering and for the young girl that is pregnant, but still high on glue. His heart breaks throughout the week when he thinks of his friends out on the streets, and his prayers for them are said with an immense amount of love. He stays with them as they one by one disappear around the street corner with what little food the volunteers were able to give them that day. And then, as the last figure disappears, he turns down the street and hails a matatu, for he can't be late to his classes at the university.