Katy Payne's talk weekend 24/25 October 1998
At first sight Nairobi seems quite similar to Croydon. There is a downtown area with smart office buildings; there is a McDonalds; there is even something like the Purley Way, lined with familiar buildings: Japanese car show rooms, IBM etc.
If, however , you go down the alleys between the buildings, then you realise that you are indeed in a different world: the world of MUKURU. A vast densely packed urban slum sprawls down a shallow hill to a fetid stream. None of the roads are paved. Al of them have a channel in the middle down which human and animal waste escapes to the river. The best houses are the shacks built of packing cases and corrugated iron. Most of them have black plastic bin liners stretched between bamboo sticks for walls.
Emaciated children their faces betraying their recent bout of glue sniffing, squat by the roadside. Their fathers hang about on the street corners. The women, as ever, struggle for their families in a constant fight against disease and hunger. The life expectancy of their sons is 25; they may dies of AIDS or violence before then. Over this quagmire of misery the pervading smell is of human and animal excreta.
Almost the only hope for a child born in MUKURU is education. A handful of Sisters from Japan, the USA, Britain and Kenya provide a lifeline of hope. These and a small group of other workers are trying to stem the tide of illness, ignorance and despair that threatens to engulf the township.
The mission statement of one of the Orders providing Sisters in Mukuru "Is to help the poor in the abandoned places of the world". It is hard to think of people who are poorer or more abandoned.
Here in South Croydon we have so much. Please give something of our abundance to help those who have so little. There is a display at the back of the Church of the schools, clinics, orphanage and child rescue centre of the MUKURU project. Please give generously, thank you very very much.