Kenya (Kitale) – Polythene

“You must be strong,” Pasteur John encouraged me. With his nice dress shoes, he casually treaded sewage soaked mud from a topped-off set of latrines past an adjoining shamba (vegetable garden). The fecal mix caked to my hiking boots like wet clay. I dragged my feet on the dry earth, but a sliver of plastic wrapping had wedged itself between my right boot’s indents, carrying with it a thick mass of sludge. I sighed and followed the only suit in the village Kipsongo to a woman washing rotted tomatoes and potatoes in a metal bowl of intense brown water.
“See here. This is from town. They went to town to collect this from garbages,” Pasteur John explained picking up a perished head of cabbage from an assortment of low-grade produce. The holy momma continued with her task uninterrupted by our presence. “They use as a food. They wash with this dirty water. But because of poverty, there is no other way to get food.” He held up a tomato and with gentle pressure flattened it. “You use this as a food to kill hungry for a day.”
Kipsongo is a small slum of roughly 300 families not far from Kitale, but hidden from the roads by a wall of flowered trees and shrubs. During the early 1960s, members of the Picot tribe pillaged the Trukana people forcing their relocation. Forty years later, tribal segregation has kept these people from creating income, and the same government land policy that affected the Sabot and the resulting SLDF has isolated these people into a compact area of polythene huts—plastic wrappings over a wooden dome frame.
“Come, let’s move on.” With a brisk stride Pasteur John weaved his way between corridors of tarnished plastic and few mud-brick homes. “See the girls sleeping—no job. Hungry,” he elaborated like a real-estate agent showing off the corners of a mansion. One girl flapped her arm in the air shooing us off.
Born in 1967 Kipsongo, Pasteur John, through the Christian church and the goodwill of westerners, has brought meager portions of food, housing, education and money to the community, but many in that same community accuse him of abusing his position for self-gratification. This is a common criticism shared by all those providing good to a community, even by those of a similar mission.
“Okay, you can see this house,” he pointed to a polythene hut standing beside the narrow curtained entrance. “The owner has died and he is sleeping inside. You canna go inside.”
“Inside?”
Pasteur John was already halfway through the tight arch signaling for me to follow. I squatted down and waddled up a slick slope leading to the entrance. My right foot gave way and I fell to my knee. I quickly picked myself up and crawled inside.
The translucent plastic coverings lit the space with a deep orange hue. A myriad of shirts and trousers hung from a curved branch-frame wallpapering the enclosure like a closet wardrobe gallery. At the hut’s center, resting over rain soaked cardboard tile, a red and green-checkered wool blanket and a pair of chigger gnawed feet exposed from underneath the cover.
Pasteur John bent over the opposite end and unfurled the blanket’s end. I sidestepped to my left.
The man’s right fingers pressed ever so softly to his forehead as if in despaired thought. A fly scurried across his sunken cheek and into the hollow of his shriveled and bluing left eye before dropping through the stubble of his graying beard and parted frown. Through his frozen expression and empty stare, I could feel his sorrow and pain. He was like a statue chiseled from marble into a symbol of Kipsongo.
“We have been giving him a treatment, but now he’s lost his life. He’s dead. Do you see this house? His polythene house?” Gaps in the plastic allow for rain to drip through and soak the floor. “This is hard for me as a Pasteur here.”
I better get used to this, I thought.
Pasteur John continued, “Now I have to look for money for a coffin, and for a cemetery.”
I zoned out of what he was saying and interrupted, “Can we say a prayer for him?”
“A prayer?” He seemed surprised. “Yeah, but I can say it Swahili.”
The man’s son joined us following Pasteur John’s plea. The twenty-something year-old sat across from his father, his eyes wide and tearing. He wiped the dry and bloody mucous from his nose with the palm of his hand and spoke helplessly with his arms, barely forming words.
“He says he has no money to bury his father. He has beaten his knees because he has lost his father. So he needs only help.”
The man’s son turned to his father then to the Pasteur and then to me. I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes so wide and vulnerable.
Pasteur John stood. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I dreamt of our visit to Kipsongo that night, but through a skewed reality. I imagined what Havasuapi Falls must have looked following this summer’s scenery altering floods. Instead of the clear blue-green water, mud now spilled over Havasu Falls into a chocolate river also rich in sewage. At the waterfall’s base, the same polythene huts and Trukana people of Kipsongo.
An old woman plainly washed her clothes in the torrent stream, while soiled children picnicked at its shore, tinged avocado creaming their fingers. The sky began to rain and I ducked for cover under a polythene hut, slipping again on the same slick slope. Rainwater poured through seems in the plastic and pooled at my boots; the hut’s owner resting as he did when I saw him that day. I hugged my knees and leaned against the thin wood frame. Several other children and adults sat as I did, or slept cuddled beside the old man*. We waited for the storm to end.

*The week before our visit to Kipsongo, we were told, a mother had passed away in her plastic tent and left there for five days. Her children slept beside their mother until the necessary funds were gathered for a proper burial.