Life is anything but easy in Nairobi’s sprawling Kibera slum, which has been labelled one of the biggest and worst on the African continent, with HIV/Aids and unemployment hitting dwellers hard and indiscriminately.
But when walking through the muddy, slippery dirt tracks of the slum a little before Christmas, hardly anyone encountered mentions the lack of money, work or the toll of Aids on them; instead many talk about God.
”It is important to celebrate, to know about the birth of Jesus Christ. When we are together at Christmas, we recite poems about Jesus to each other,” said 19-year-old Jacinta, who lives with her younger sister and her mother in the slum.
Jacinta’s mother has a job, so the small family can eat and even give each other a gift at Christmas.
”Last year, my mother got me a Bible. I got her a dress, a nice fitted dress,” she says proudly.
In a simple hairdressing salon, where the only furniture on the earthen floor are two wooden stools, stands Asha, a Muslim woman, with her two-year-old daughter Maimuna clinging to her skirt.
Asha does not celebrate Christmas, but says business is always a bit better in December because people want to look good for the festive season.
Edina (18) sits on one of the stools nearby, having her hair braided. With a big, shy smile, she says she is going home for Christmas to the Kisii district in south-western Kenya, near Lake Victoria, where her mother and siblings live.
”We will eat mandazis [a sort of doughnut] and drink sodas. On the morning of Christmas Day we will go to church. Its important to remind each other about God. We read from the Bible and teach each other about Jesus,” she says.
In a one-room mud house off a narrow alley nearby lives 23-year-old Caroline with her two children, her sister and her mother.
”We go to the church in the morning, and we enjoy the birth of Jesus,” she says, adding that this year, she will have a special gift. Her husband, Moses, is coming from coastal Mombasa to visit.
But not everyone is looking forward to Christmas.
Yasin (27) leans against a wobbly wooden railing on the track side with some friends.
”I was born here in Kibera. I don’t have a job. I live with my five sisters and four brothers and two of my sisters have children. Life is hard,” he says sharply.
Asked if he intends celebrating Christmas, he exclaims, with bloodshot eyes: ”If I celebrate Christmas? I always celebrate!”
Then he asks us for a 50-shilling note (about R3,50), and shoots off down the alleyway.
”He is going to buy changaa [locally brewed beer],” says an elderly bystander with a melancholy smile.
At the local Anglican Church a few hundred metres away, lay-preacher Lilian is preparing her sermon for Christmas Day.
”I will need to talk about how people have diverted from the Christian path. Here in the slums, the main problems are HIV/Aids and unemployment. People do anything for money, that’s the root of the insecurity,” she says.
She says there will be no service late on Christmas Eve, ”because of the insecurity, we don’t like to involve people in the evening”.
But, ”On the night of the 24th, most people keep vigil, and at midnight you will hear people all over the slums, shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other and cheering,” she says.
Although she thinks some aspects of Christmas are being commercialised, Lilian says people in Kibera still value it.
”As we see it, it’s the only day that we, all Christians, come together.”
Kibera, one of Africa’s oldest and largest slums, was originally inhabited by Muslim Nubians from Sudan, whom the British allowed to settle on the land in the 1920s, after fighting for the colonial power in World War I as part of the King’s African Rifles.
Today, the forest of the 1920s has given way to a muddy maze covering about 235ha. An estimated population of between 500 000 and one million people goes without water, electricity and sanitation. — Sapa-DPA