Where bin men are kings....

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New visitors= a new chance to go to the dump site and it was a lot worse today. With the start of the Long Rains the smoke and burning plastic were gone and the stench of rubbish and abundance of flies were so prominent. This is the comic relief style Africa where small children are so unphased by the swarms of flies on them and their clothes, hands and feet are so grubby that most British parents would have a fit and begin attacking them with Ariel and Dettol.

This is the place where even the bin men drive around like kings, transporting rubbish in garbage trucks but knowing that what they carry is literally a life line for the people that live there. All it is is the waste of Nakuru, but it is worth so much to so many people.

The mood was different there today, a girl had been raped, in suffering there is no sense of community as today showed me. Her mother was beaten for allowing this to happen, we weren't around to see this but gossip spreads fast. We met a woman who has suffered from arthritis since 1984, she stopped being able to walk in 1987 and has had 14 children. Her youngest daughter was recently in hospital, when she was with her, her house was robbed.

She went on to tell us that this is a regular thing, people rob her and her 14 children of food, water, anything, she doubted if the corn we gave today would still be hers before she could use it. So hard to be around.

The children there are so lovely, a chance to practice Swahili and play games, sing the hokey kokey.... as you do! Its so hard to put them down, in a rubbish dump and leave. Seeing the houses- and these are just small rooms, most not even made of stone or something with longevity, which are stiflingly hot and unbearable, it is hard to decide whether it is better to stand outside with the Marabou Stalks and the pigs or inside with the spiders and clutter.

Leaving there and looking at how dirty I was the thought is I need a shower, but as I sit writing I know all those people are in their rooms with their families, they don't leave. I wonder if Elizabeth still has the corn... this is serious poverty. The first time it was hard, but this time meeting people and being welcomed into their homes, people asking you to take their babies as they are sick it really was just so hard... and even that doesn't do justice to how you feel at that place.

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