My name is Liz Muthoni. I live in Nairobi in a slum called Kibera. I am 18 years old. I moved to Kibera in January from Nakuru where I was born. Am trying to advice young peoples who have lose hope in their lives.
I used to live with my mother in Nakuru until I had to drop out of school in form 2 because we did not have enough money to pay the school fees. That is when I moved to Kibera to live with my sister, Alice. My sister is 35 and has been living in Kibera for many years. She sells vegetables in a cabana. I live with my sister, her husband, and their three children in their three room house.
I wake up every morning at 6:30 and help my sister’s children get ready for school. I cook them tea and bread for breakfast. Then I start doing my duties in the house like washing utensils and sweeping the house. After that, I take a shower. At 10am I go to my family’s workplace where I clean and get it ready for the day. At 3pm I go get my five year old nephew from school. Once I am home again, I start preparing supper.
When I think about my community, I think about orphans, people with HIV/AIDS, widows, and street children. I live in a ghetto. A ghetto is a dirty. We have garbage everywhere. We have diseases because they dump garbage everywhere. We have a sewage problem. We don’t have plumbing so after cooking people throw their dirty water and garbage into the drains in the street. These get filled with garbage and stink. When there is too much garbage the water doesn’t move.
Our houses are built with metal, wood, and mud. But most of them are built with mud. When it rains, like it did last night, the drains fill up and overflow. Then, everything that was in the drains comes in to peoples’ houses. Not everybody has electricity some of them steal from their neighbors or they use lumper life in ghetto is hard.
This is a good first post, Liz!