A Little Prince in the Kibera Slums

Yesterday I had an experience that was both disturbing and encouraging, and from which I have not yet fully recovered. In the morning I went to visit and speak with the 7th and 8th graders at Little Prince School in a poor area of Nairobi. The school is a project of AVSI, the Italian NGO that grew out of Communion and Liberation. It’s a beautiful school with a welcoming and positive environment. I first visited the preschoolers who were reciting rhymes and singing songs that I remember from my childhood like Humpty Dumpty and the Hokey Pokey. It’s part of the way they begin to learn English. I went to speak specifically to the 7th and 8th graders since they had recently studied a little about St. Francis. They 8th graders were very interactive, while those in 7th were attentive but more reserved.

When we finished visiting the classrooms, Porzia – the teacher who had invited me to come, asked whether I would like to accompany a social worker on a home visit to the nearby slum. I eagerly took her up on the offer. I thought I was prepared for what I would see since I had encountered the extreme poverty of the developing world in Honduras and elsewhere. What I was unprepared for, though, was the immensity and density of squalor that spread out before my eyes almost as far as I could see.


The Kibera slums of Nairobi are reportedly the second largest on the continent after Soweto, South Africa, and are home to perhaps more than 1,000,000 people (see the Wikipedia article). Thousands and thousands of tiny hovels made of mud, scrap wood, cardboard and rusted sheet metal are almost stacked on top of each other, covering a huge expanse of land. Some the size of a large closet in the US house entire families. We entered through one of the main “streets” of the settlement, about the size of a single car lane. Open sewers ran down both sides past countless cramped “shack-front” shops selling the basic necessities of life. Off this main street shoot innumerable alleyways, from which shoot off even more innumerable narrower pathways barely wide enough to walk along. The huts that the residents call home open onto these. I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the misery: small children squatting in the dirt, garbage strewn everywhere, mangy half-live animals scavenging for food, and family upon family struggling under the cloud of unemployment, sickness and domestic difficulties. I can’t begin to fathom how the settlement continues to survive. And it’s from here that many of the students at Little Prince come. No wonder that some arrive at school an hour and a half early in the morning and don’t want to leave in the afternoon.


When I returned to Little Prince a couple of hours later, it really appeared luminous to me. It is a little island of light and promise in a sea of desperation, a haven of hope holding out a helping hand to children whose futures might be otherwise totally bleak. Thank God it exists, though Kibera and places like it could use many thousands more.