Hadithi za Legacy

Heart of the Streets

2007-10-18T11:03:00.000+03:00

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.

Night of Tears

2007-10-18T10:43:00.000+03:00

Written by Jessie Yates after visiting the Spring Valley Children's School, July 2007)

It wasn't the first time that their mother had come home drunk. They had had no food for several days, and had been huddling together for warmth against the cold of the dead fireplace. They had waited in the dark, alone and more hungry then they had ever been, waiting for her to come home. Maybe if they could just get through the night, tomorrow they would go to the community school and they would be fed.

She came home late that night; they had all fallen to sleep underneath their threadbare blankets, piled amongst each other for warmth. She had been drinking a lot, more than usual, and something had made her mad. Whether it was the realization that her children were still there against her wishes, or an argument gone bad with her boyfriend, her wrath was at the highest extreme as she tore through the huddled bodies. In the dark night, childish screams erupted and a mother's angry voice could be heard throughout the slum area.

The screams slowly diminished after she threw the children out into the cold and dark night. Although they cried and banged on the door she would not let them in. Her youngest daughter was so famished with hunger that the older children became afraid for her life. They waited, tears in their eyes and throats throughout the night, stooping together next to the cracking mud wall of their house, trying to warm each other and forget their hunger.

In the morning, the children woke up with the weak sunlight of predawn in their faces. The youngest saw to her greatest delight a scrap of food nearby. Nothing near to what she needed to quench her hunger, but none the less, it was food. She reached for it thinking about nothing except for the immense emptiness in her stomach. By the time she heard the growling of the dog and the warning shouts from her brothers and sisters it was too late.

I saw her just this past week. She has grown taller and older, yet underneath her ragged clothes I could see that she is just as skinny as she ever was. She is a pupil at the community school now, and is part of a family made from good will and love. When I first saw her, she had just washed her hands in the faucet in preparation for lunch. She ran up to me extending her small arm, calling to me "baridi, baridi". She wished to rest her small fingers against my cheek to show me how cold they were.

Her scars were painfully noticeable, stretching from across her forehead, over her eye and down to her ear and cheek. Her eye was lifeless and pale, she could no longer see. Her cold hand gripped mine for several moments as she pulled on it, peering at the nails and at the strange pinkish color of my mzungu skin. She giggled with the sound of purity and childishness as she ran away after her friends and family. The memories of that night in her past seem so fresh in her mind, at such a young age she alone knows what pure and brutal pain feels like. She has the scars to prove it, both on her skin and in her soul.

The Heart of a Man

2007-10-16T19:01:00.000+03:00

Written by Jessie Yates after a visit to the Congolese Refugee Orphanage and School in Nairobi. She and Amy Buchannan, a classmate from Wake Forest University, worked in Kenya during the summer '07 school break with BARA (Baptist AIDS Response Agency).

On the day that he set out on his journey, he had only one thought on his mind, to get to safety and away from terror. He was still young, had a life to live, a wife to find and to love, a happiness to create in his future. He was joined by others, other young men his age as he trekked across the blood ridden countryside. He had pride in his nationality and his language, but he was much more terrified of those men following behind him, raping his sisters and murdering his brothers. He knew only one thing, he had to get out of the Congo and into a life that could never be as hard as the one that he was leaving.

He and his companions had not gone far when they saw the small and huddled figure. The child was crying out in a mixture of her mother tongue and French, crying for her mother. Behind the child's tears, they saw raised cheek bones and hungry eyes, her small feet were unclad, her clothes ripped and muddy. He stooped down and picked her up under his arm, and with the look in his eyes, his companions understood. They could not abandon her, she was so small, maybe they would find her family in Nairobi.

Every child that they saw along that long and neverending journey of fright they called over to them. When the children were unable to walk, they were carried. What little food had been brought was shared amongst them. The tears never ended, but neither did the hope that their families would be found.

He took all the children to a shanty town just outside of Nairobi where he knew others of his country had sought refuge. There he sought for the families of his young friends. God, only God, could have been powerful enough to send him those that he sought. For surely in the midst of those poverty ridden, but safe homes, he found family after family. For those that he did not find, he found others that were willing to adopt in memory of their own lost children. But still, in the end, fifteen children remained. Fifteen orphans, who under the tears and the muddied clothes he had come to love and call his own. Fifteen orphans who became his children and his students.

The years that followed were strengthened in faith, as he found a wife that loved the children just as much as he did. Faith saw him through as he looked through the community and saw so many children, some Rwandan, Sudanese, Congolese and still others that were Kenyan. In all of them he saw the need to create a school, to create a community of children, the need for someone to feed them, and above all, for someone to love them. In the years to come, he would run out of food and money, he would be threatened by his landlord, and he would see the needs of more and more children. But through it all, he would keep his faith and for every step that he took, he would show love in a world that had too long been robbed of that all important emotion.