Kibarani project

The Kibarani Dump Site Children and Nursery School
Kibarani, Mombasa, Kenya

Three thousand people are living on the brink – at and around stinking mountains of garbage. On the brink of life and human dignity. They are the inhabitants of Kibarani on the outskirts of Mombasa. When visiting the site, it is hard to imagine that people can survive there. The heavy, slightly sweet odour of tonnes of garbage rotting in the hot Kenyan sun is horrible and seems to permeate one’s skin, clothes and hair.

Kibarani’s garbage dump is the final destination for most of the city’s garbage. Even though the garbage dump has no official sorting system, the garbage is still sorted piece by piece. Every time a garbage truck delivers a load, the residents congregate at the garbage dump to look for food to eat, clothes to wear or plastic and metal to sell. This is their only means of survival. And they a struggle for food – every day people race to be the first to reach the new piles to see who will find the best food or the most plastic and metal. About three hundred people live at the garbage dump itself in small lean-tos made of plastic and cardboard found in the garbage. The rest live across the road but they all share the same fate: being dependent on the garbage dump to survive. Mothers with infants on their backs go through pile after pile of garbage, while the older children help them. The children live in the garbage, play in the garbage, eat the garbage and fall ill from the garbage.

At the same time, Kibarani is known as the most dangerous part of Mombasa, and it is even dangerous to walk around there during the day. Rape, violence and assaults are part of the daily lives of the many adults and children living in the area.

The School and Our Children
Kibarani Nursery School is situated across the road leading to the garbage dump. As the school was founded by the residents themselves, it is tangible proof of their wish to provide a different, better future to their children. Today about 150 pupils attend the school, and the children are eager to play, learn, sing and dance. But many find it difficult to concentrate when they start at the school. Rumbling malnourished stomachs mean a lack of energy and cause many of the children to be underdeveloped. Many of them are sick from the food they eat and the toxic fumes they inhale at the garbage dump. They have a distended stomach, ringworm, scabies and fungal infections, and many have open sores that don’t heal because they have cut themselves at the garbage dump. Diarrhoea and infections are everyday afflictions, and many of the children are often absent from school because they are too ill or because they have to stay home to take care of their younger siblings.

Often the older children carry their youngest siblings on their back when they come to school. And teachers often have to pick up a baby lying on the ground outside the school when the six-year-old sister becomes too tired to carry her little sister or brother any further. At the same time, it is difficult for many of the children to interact socially with the other children. Even if most of the children are not orphans, their daily lives are infused with violence and despair. This makes it difficult for them to develop normal social skills. Most of the children have an enormous need for affection and care. When visitors come to the school, they are quickly surrounded by children begging to be picked up, held and played with.

What We Do
100% to the Children aims to help as many children as possible, in the best way possible and for as long as possible. For this reason, ever since we took over the school’s operating costs in June 2008, we have been providing support in the form of nutrition, health and education.

Food
100% to the Children makes sure that all of the children receive two healthy meals a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. For breakfast, they are fed a nutritious porridge which gives the children enough to eat and the energy to start the day. After the porridge has been served and classes started, the school’s two cooks start to make the school’s lunch. Fresh vegetables are delivered to the school every day. The cooks use the vegetables to make a variety of satisfying, varied traditional Kenyan dishes. The children are fed meat, fish (omena), rice, beans, maize porridge (ugali), fruit and vegetables. Being fed every day has made an enormous difference to the children. Now they have enough energy to play and learn. Many of the children were cross-eyed due to malnutrition when they started to attend the school, but today most of the children who had this condition have improved. Also, when the area was afflicted by an outbreak of cholera in July 2009, these healthy daily meals made an obvious difference. All the schoolchildren afflicted during the outbreak survived, while three other children from the area who were not yet part of the food programme unfortunately died from the disease.

Health
100% to the Children has a health team who visit the school every other week. At present, the team is made up of a voluntary Danish medical student and a Kenyan clinical officer (a cross between a doctor and a nurse). Twice a month, they visit the school to offer treatment to all the children in the area. The treatments have been a huge success and the team often treats up to thirty children a day. The children are afflicted with a wide range of ailments ranging from infections, open sores, and malaria to malnutrition and diarrhoea – illnesses which unfortunately were often fatal before we started up the health programme. At the same time we bring great focus to bear on helping the families to help themselves. Accordingly the health team established a collaborative effort with Kenya Red Cross (link) in September 2009 concerning a basic first-aid course offered to parents. The families living in Kibarani are poorly educated and many do not know how to treat even basic ailments or injuries. Burns are treated with toothpaste and feverish children are not given enough liquid. This is why it is important to teach parents how to provide the best care for their children.

Special Needs Children
100% to the Children also provides help to any children who need more treatment than we can offer when the team shows up at the school. At present, we are sending three children with cerebral paralysis to be treated at a nearby hospital twice a week. The children and their parents are picked up and taken to the hospital, and one of the effects of the treatment is that the children are now able to eat sitting up and have more control over their bodies. A great many children in Kibarani suffer from exomphalos (umbilical hernia). As the families cannot afford to go the hospital to give birth, local midwives cut the umbilical cord using dirty scissors or knives. This results in serious infections that develop into exomphalos, often the size of a softball. 100% to the Children offers the children and their parents surgery to remove the hernia. We also have one epileptic child who is also undergoing treatment and regularly goes to the hospital to keep the illness at bay. There are undoubtedly more epileptic children in the area and once we have identified them, we can also include them in our SNC programme. Education and Training At the moment, 100% to the Children is supporting three teachers and one teacher’s assistant at the school. They are teaching the children English, Kiswahili, geography and mathematics. Often, however, the teachers also serve as surrogate parents who can give the children the extra attention and love they are panting for.

Read more about our support to children with special needs >>

Our Aims

• Health Clinic: At the moment our health team is treating the children in one of the classrooms. But before the end of 2009, we will also be able to open our own health clinic in the area. The clinic will enable us to treat the children in better, calmer, more private and sterile surroundings. The health clinic will also improve our options for getting more and better equipment and thus for giving all the children in the area better treatment. When the clinic is finished, we also hope to be able to find the means for treating the children once a week instead of every two weeks.
• The School: The school in Kibarani is very run down and was unfortunately built on an eroding embankment, so it is only a question of time before it will no longer be possible to use the school for classes. For this reason, we want to be able to build a new school on more solid ground in Kibarani at one point. We also want to include childcare facilities for the youngest children in this new school building. Many of the children are sent to school already at the age of three. In so doing, the parents make sure their children are fed and do not have to worry about minding them during the day. But the smallest children often sit sleeping in the classroom because they are simply too exhausted to stay awake. We want to make it possible for children to get out of the classrooms and into a childcare scheme where they can sleep and play as they wish.
• Bigger kitchen: We also want to be able to build a bigger kitchen. Today, it is only possible for us to offer food to the 150 pupils who attend the school. But many children in the area still go to bed hungry every night without having received one sound meal. 100% to the Children aims to help as many children as possible, and for this reason we also want to be able to build a kitchen that delivers food to children who don’t attend school. Far too many children in Kibarani die from malnutrition or basic illnesses which they cannot survive without a proper diet. Eventually, we also want to be able to offer schoolchildren a packed meal which they can take home with them when they leave school. In order to be able to help the children in the best possible way for the longest time possible, we also have to help the families.
• Special needs: We are continuously finding new children in Kibarani in need of special treatment. Some cannot sit or stand because they are malnourished and their physical and mental development has stopped. These children need high-protein diets. Other children have an urgent need to enter a regular therapeutic process at hospital (physical therapy, etc.) so they can lead as normal a life as possible. Often, a treatment process – which can change the life of a child – costs as little as DKK 500 a month, but this amount is far beyond what families can afford. Accordingly, we are continuously trying to raise additional funds for children with special needs. This will also enable us to help them in the same way as the other children.