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Three weeks into a four week voluntary work project in Kenya, I found myself where the Foreign Office had said not to be. 1 I stepped out of the taxi into a jungle-the urban jungle of Kibera.
Featured in the film The Constant Gardener , Kibera (jungle) is in the shadow of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and is Africa's largest slum. This impoverished and unsanitary labyrinth is riddled with corruption and disease. No one really knows how many people live in Kibera, but population estimates range from 500000 to 700000. 2 Locals claim up to a million people live there-a quarter of Nairobi's population.
The average home for a family of five is 3 metres by 3 metres so overcrowding and infectious diseases are rife. This problem is compounded because the main sanitation system is a series of open sewers that flow through the streets leaving cholera, typhoid, and other diseases in its wake. 3 Most people live on less than $1 (£0.62p; [euro]0.72) a day. 4 Life expectancy is 46, around 12 years lower than the Kenyan average of 59, 5 and again many locals claim it's even lower than official figures suggest. More than 100000 orphaned children have to grow up alone in this dangerous and festering environment. 6
My three friends and I were being guided by Ali, a presenter from the community radio station Pamoja FM. Ali was known on the streets and assured us we would be relatively safe. I still felt uneasy as we got deeper into Kibera. Turning down an alley Ali stopped us saying; "Not even the police go past here. You can get shot any time, stabbed any time, raped any time." Seeing our faces he then cheerfully added, "But hey. Don't worry, you are with me."
I was on edge for the next few minutes, thinking how vulnerable we looked, then climbing up a bank, I saw an astonishing view. Sprawled out in front of me were thousands of dwellings, each different, each made of mud and corrugated iron, each a home. These buildings are so close together it is said that you can walk from one side of Kibera to the other on the corrugated roofs. I was standing on the main thoroughfare through...