Magunga Williams writes:
via the Homeless of Nairobi Project by Shamit Patel
In the Westlands suburbs of Nairobi, across the road from rejuvenated Sarit Centre mall is a messy road intersection. Matatus routinely tie up traffic to a knot, honk loudly and cough thick exhaust fumes from engines that have seen better days. In the midst of the commotion around the commuter terminal, a woman stands with a bucket at her feet selling boiled maize. Clifford Chianga Oluoch, a Mathematics teacher at Oshwal Academy in Parklands stops to buy some boiled maize. He is soon joined by two street urchins. They want to buy a cob of boiled maize too, but they don’t not have enough money for more than one and an argument ensues over who gets to eat it.
A common Nairobian would have minded his own business. Street children are a nuisance on our streets as it is. They yank side mirrors from motorists in standstill traffic, snatch handbags and cell phones from city yuppies, prowl the streets relentlessly begging for alms (if you meet the polite ones) or using hostile extortion, threatening to smear your body with faeces if you do not show cash. It was in late November 2014 when this incident took place. Clifford reacted to the two street kids as any father would to his own boys and settled the score by buying each of them a cob of maize. What followed is that one of the boys went away and returned with twenty other street kids, all pleading for a cob. He ended up buying boiled maize for all twenty of them.
“I do not quite remember why I even did it,” says Clifford, “but then after they were finished eating, one of them asked me ‘utarudi kesho (will you be back tomorrow)?’” He said yes and made a promise to come back the following day with more food...[continue reading]
