Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 16, 2004
Plastic bags, knotted and sagging, soar across the slum late at night.
They bounce off tin roofs, splatter against mud walls patched with tin cans and
tumble down the steep hillside, where they sprout every few feet like plastic
weeds. In the morning, they are trampled into the ground.
After 33
years in this shantytown known as Deep Sea, Cecilia Wahu barely notices the bags
anymore. They are called "flying toilets," and because no one here has a
bathroom, everyone has thrown a few.
"My dream, before I die, is to
live in a permanent house, not a shack," says Wahu, 66, who has rheumy eyes and
is missing teeth. "It could be small, but it must have a nice kitchen, a real
bed and its own toilet."
That is her dream. Her reality is an
8-by-8-foot mud hut.
Survival in Deep Sea is a matter of staying above
an endless tide of mud and waste. All that separates Wahu from the filth is a
dirt floor, thin plank doors and a stubborn sense that even this place is a
neighborhood.
About 1,500 people are crammed into this treacherously
steep four-acre warren. They live on less than a dollar a day, and this is the
best shelter they can afford.
There is one water faucet, one toilet
and no electricity. The homes are jumbles of tin, red-baked mud and sticks that
barely keep from tumbling into the fetid Gitathuru River below.
Tropical rains eat away at the walls. Roving bands of thugs threaten to break
down homes unless they are paid protection money. Wealthy neighbors across the
river lobby the government to clear the hillside.
The future of Africa
is bound up in such places.
Rural people seeking jobs,
medicine and a better future are overrunning the cities of sub-Saharan Africa.
They are among the fastest-growing cities in the world. The United Nations
estimates that by 2020, these urban areas will be home to 550 million people.
Nairobi's slums, where more than half of the city's 3 million people
live on 5% of the land, ar e the first stop for the new arrivals. Despite the
wretched conditions, most people must pay to live here. As the slums grow more
crowded and destitute, the land becomes more precious. A network of tribal
leaders, government officials and other slumlords profits handsomely.
According to a U.N. survey, 57% of the dwellings in one Nairobi slum are owned
by politicians and civil servants, and the shacks are the most profitable
housing in the city. A slumlord who pays $160 for a 100-square-foot shack can
recoup the entire investment in months.
"People will fight, they will
kill, for this place," Wahu says. "It's a roof over your head. And everybody
wants that."
Through the smoke of Deep Sea's hundreds of coal-fired
cooking pots, the Kenyan capital's most exclusive neighborhood shimmers on the
other side of the river. It is called Muthaiga, and it is home to ambassadors,
entrepreneurs and Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.
Loud Congolese Lingala
music blares from Deep Sea's shacks and wa fts over the river to intrude on the
splendor and solitude of the rich.
"They only make noise and cause
trouble," says one longtime Muthaiga homeowner. "We will get them out … at
any cost."
But much as they complain, Muthaiga residents need Deep Sea
for the cheap labor it provides.
From the kitchens and gardens of
Muthaiga where they work, the slum dwellers see rolling coffee plantations, lush
forest and monkeys swinging over fences into backyards.
It is a stark
contrast to Deep Sea, which is barren of vegetation and dotted with
litter.
Wahu and her family arrived in Nairobi in 1970 and settled here
on land that no one else wanted. A relative had evicted them from a plot in a
coffee-growing district about 35 miles away. One morning, Wahu's husband left
to look for work and never returned, leaving her to raise five children. She
found a job cooking three meals a day for an Indian couple, caring for their
four children and cleaning their house. The pay was $5 a mont h.
Wahu
and her neighbors named their collection of shacks Muchathaini, or "bitter
thing" in Kikuyu, after a wild plant they pulled from the ground and ate.
Several years later, after a young boy tumbled down the hill and drowned in the
river, they re-christened the slum Deep Sea.
The slum has since grown to
about 550 structures so closely packed together they appear to be one. Wahu,
now too old to work as a maid or nanny, earns about 20 cents a day washing
potatoes or shelling beans at a nearby market.
Wahu has seen many
families come and go over the years. A few earn enough to move up and out.
Some others, defeated by rent and crime, go back to the countryside. Like her,
most just hang on.
A few doors from Wahu's hut, Joseph Mutua laces up
his shoes, getting ready to patrol the neighborhood. A local church pays him
about $35 a month to keep thugs from harassing residents.
Mutua, 49,
pays $10 a month for a 100-square-foot shack, a typical size in Deep Sea. He
lives th ere with his wife, Stella, and their seven children. The place is
wretched, but when he gets his salary, Mutua immediately pays the rent. He has
seen how a partial or late payment can lead to swift and violent
eviction.
"The landlords throw you out in no time because so many others
want the house," Mutua says.
At night, Mutua, his wife and their
toddler, Benson, sleep on a piece of castoff foam in a corner of the room. The
other children sleep shoulder to shoulder on cardboard boxes. Pictures of rap
star Eminem, Brazilian soccer player Ronaldo and Jesus are plastered on the mud
walls. When it rains, water flows through the room.
Compared with their
neighbors, the Mutuas are comfortable. Joseph, who earns more than the average
resident, sometimes tells his children to skip school and look for odd jobs. As
a result, in some months they are able to set aside a dollar for access to the
single water faucet that a Catholic church recently installed near the entrance
to Deep Sea.
Ma ny of his neighbors, unable to afford access to the
faucet, pay peddlers the equivalent of 8 cents for a 5-gallon container of
water. That's about 20 times what the city charges for tap water in better
neighborhoods, according to a recent United Nations study.
To use the
toilet, Mutua pays the church another dollar a month.
The faucet and
toilet are in a small wooden structure at the top of the hill. The building,
with a concrete floor and walls painted lime green, is the sturdiest piece of
Deep Sea.
But when the Mutuas can't afford it, or when it's dark and
they're afraid to walk up the hill, Mutua says, he too resorts to the flying
toilet.
The practice has become so rampant that several nonprofit groups
have launched a "Stop Flying Toilets" campaign. They have adopted a winged logo
and are sponsoring races with well-known Kenyan marathon runners to spread the
message.
"We have to stop the epidemic of diseases when you have sewage
in your frontyard, on the footpath and even on your house," says Risper Radula,
an official with the African Medical & Research Foundation, which treats
slum dwellers for cholera and respiratory illnesses.
Disease is just one of the dangers in Deep Sea. Thugs prowl the alleyways.
They prey on young women at night and, like the landlords and government
officials, they extort whatever they can.
Wahu keeps some Kenyan
shillings in an empty condensed milk can under her bed to pay her 15 cents a
week in protection money. She also saves to pay wazee wa viriji, Swahili
for "agents of the chief." They come on behalf of the local administrator, who
assesses fees when residents make repairs or improve their homes.
Wahu
says the chief's men take away her front door or beat her when she doesn't pay.
When they see her Bible, they mock her, as if to say her God is weak: "If you
are a Christian, why are you living like a dog?"
Even so, life is better
than it used to be.
When Wahu arrived here, her roof was made of
plastic bags. Today, it is tin. In the old days, she had to carry water from a
pipe a mile away. Now, the church's faucet is a short walk.
Just up the
hill, a rickety sign hangs on the Deep Sea Hotel, proudly proclaiming: "Under
new management." It's a mud hut like all the rest, but it's called a hotel, in
keeping with the colonial tradition of using that title for a place where
refreshments are served.
The proprietor, Margaret Wambugu, stocks a few
sodas, loaves of bread and a small clump of wilting vegetables, discards from
the nearby wholesale market.
"Karibu!" she calls out to
customers. Welcome.
Across the mud alley, an establishment with no name
sells changaa, a harsh brew made from corn and often spiked with battery
acid. A couple slow dances to a Percy Sledge tune oozing out of a small
boombox. Peter Wanjohi, the bartender, greets each new customer by holding
aloft a green bottle.
"Kumi-kumi?" Wanjohi beckons, usi ng the
Swahili slang for the drink. It means "10-10," because a generous shot costs 10
shillings. "One shot, and you're good for the day."
Down the hill is a
clinic that treats children for lice, scabies and respiratory diseases, common
here because everyone breathes in the fecal dust. The Consolata Church in
Nairobi, which installed the faucet and toilet in 2002, has built a nursery
school and a workshop where a few residents make shoes and clothes to
sell.
"They're here to stay," says Peter Ndungu, one of the church's
social workers. "We have to work to make their lives better."
Residents
have begun to defend their turf. Two years ago, the local administrator gave
landlords permission to start building more shacks on a small patch of land at
the top of Deep Sea that for years has been a playground.
Wahu, Mutua
and others joined together to fight the proposal and some evictions. About 150
residents raised $500 and approached a charity that provides legal help to slum
dwellers. They fought the landlords for months. They petitioned the government
and staged rallies. They demonstrated at the local administrator's
office.
In the end, they stopped the landlords from building and saved
the playground.
The narrow plot is just large enough for a children's
soccer field. Rocks stick out of the reddish earth there. In the dry season,
the winds whip the dust into little twisters that make the children cough and
rub their eyes. And when it rains, the water pours downhill into Deep Sea,
pushing mud and debris against the huts below.
*
About this
series
The number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living in dire poverty
has nearly doubled in the last two decades. Times staff writer Davan Maharaj
and photographer Francine Orr traveled the continent over nearly two years to
chronicle the continual struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day. The
six articles in the series:
PART 1: Sunday -- Eking out an income.
PART 2: Monday -- Staving off hunger.
PART 3: Wednesday --
Settling for castoff clothes.
PART 4: Today -- Living in 100 square
feet.
*
Coming later:
PART 5: Locked out of
school.
PART 6: Surviving AIDS.
*
On the Web:
More photos, narrated reports by the reporter and photographer,
previous articles in the series and information on how to help can be found on
the Times website at: latimes.com/pennies.