Faith Amidst Adversity: The Tale of Korogocho

Faith Amidst Adversity: The Tale of Korogocho

By Sister Gillian Horsfield

In 1984 I was asked by my community to come to Nairobi to work in the slums and to introduce Community Based Health Care there.

The nearest slum to where we lived was Korogocho, the poorest slum in Nairobi, home to at least 60,000 people. It was alongside the city dump, where most of the people earned their living, scavenging for items to sell and children looked for food.

Korogocho was in Kariobangi Parish where Small Christian communities had been very effectively introduced. All the members were expected to join a Huduma, which meant rendering some voluntary service to their community.

At the parish council meeting I offered to train some of their members to care for the sick, and to prevent a lot of children’s sickness, and so the Huduma ya Afya (Service for Health) was started.

The first year I was there we trained the first group of health workers, visiting the people living in the slum, and teaching them basic care. The group met once a month to discuss things and improve their knowledge.

AIDS in Korogocho

It was the early stage of the AIDS epidemic, I found a few patients that I thought had AIDS, but I wasn’t sure, and hadn’t any way of testing them. At that time no one knew how to treat it, the only information being spread around was that AIDS kills, so I collected all the information I could from hospitals in other parts of Africa about what they were doing and what drugs were effective.

Within a year we began to see more patients. We talked with the health workers about the desperate poverty in the slum. Mothers without food for their children, would go to the bar to find a man. Food in exchange for sex. Many men came from rural areas to find work to pay school fees for their children. Unable to afford Nairobi rents, they got informal lodging in the slums. It was all too easy for them to get HIV.

With such high levels of fear everywhere, when even doctors and nurses were too scared to do their work, it was difficult for patients to get care. Patients at the government health centre, were told to wait outside, where they might (or might not) be helped. Seriously ill patients at the big government hospital were admitted, but then isolated and ignored. We talked with our health workers for a long time about all this, wondering how we were going to cope. Eventually the Health Workers said:

“We are Christians, it is our job. We will take care of them. If you will bring in the medicines and things they need, we will look after them”. They have done it ever since.

We brought in the medicines, and bought food locally, and wrote project bids for the funds we were going to need.

As AIDS spread in the slums, the need for the programme increased. Almost all the developments in the programme came from the initiative of the health workers. Here are some examples:

• Hospice: When visiting a very sick mother lying on a muddy floor in a hut that was falling down, the health workers said: “We can’t look after her here, there is an empty room near here, if you can rent that room we will look after her”. That was the beginning of our hospice, which eventually had 10 rooms.

• Food: Sick people need food. The health workers found a very poor mother who couldn’t go out to work because she had young children. They said that if we could give her food she would cook for as many patients as we needed. That was the beginning of our food programme.

• Child Crisis: Many children were becoming orphans, we looked for relatives, but that took time. The health workers told me about one health worker, Beth who was very good with children, and had a room next to her house that was empty, if I could rent it, she would look after children there. That was the beginning of our child crisis centre.

• Training: There is no extended family in the slums. The children of the sick patients were usually their only carers. We trained them as young community health workers to make their job easier. That was the beginning of our training programme.

Within two to three years, we had several hundred patients. With a few people dying each week, pastoral care became an increasing need. A Maryknoll sister helped us for a while, and later a Little Sister of Jesus… Then one of the Comboni Fathers came to live in the slum, which was very good for our patients, but as the numbers increased, we needed more help.

I started training pastoral workers from among the health workers. Listening skills was part of the basic health worker training, and those who were good at it, I invited to become pastoral workers. To prepare them to care for dying patients, I taught De Mello’s Centring prayer. This helped accustom them to sitting in silent prayer while they held the hand of a dying patient. Our classes started with 10 min of silent prayer and the emphasis was always on reassurance of being loved by God, of forgiveness.

But it was not just the patients that needed pastoral care. The health workers asked for a day retreat every 4 months, which we provided and was always very well attended.

In Korogocho, a place where despair often overshadows hope, my work alongside people living with HIV became an avenue for profound personal growth and understanding. Here's what I took away from my time there:

• Trust in God: In the heart of Korogocho I found a true trust in God. I felt that I was where I was meant to be and that He would help me. During my quiet moments of contemplation, I often felt God’s guiding hand, and it was during these introspective moments that I would come up with my best ideas.

• A Purpose: Praying one day, when preparing to start work in Korogocho I felt the Lord was saying to me: “Take care of My people”. The people of Korogocho were definitely His people, as indeed were all our patients.

• Lessons in Pastoral Care: My patients taught me pastoral care, through them I understood what was needed. Twenty years in Korogocho taught me tremendous respect for the people there, especially the sick and the health workers, but also respect for the wisdom of the children.

Korogocho reshaped my beliefs, reaffirmed my faith, and renewed my purpose. My message to the Church? Listen to the people, especially the young people and trust them. A priest comes to a parish not to instruct and lead a lot of ignorant parishioners, but to listen and join with them to go forward together. Find the wisdom in the parish and in the children. It’s there in abundance.