The Slums

It's not easy to see so much disparity in wealth and income
every day between the fortunate, and the less so. Not in Canada. And definitely not here, where the gap strides so much further. The best I can really do as a journalist, I think, is to take the time to travel to those areas and at least try to bring some of those stories to life. Minor, but maybe a contribution in some small way.
I pitched a story to my editor about a group of international doctors who were offering free dental, eye and medical exams to families in three of Nairobi's slum areas over the course of two weeks.
"It's not much," said one of the dentists that had traveled from Canada to Makuru. "But it's better than doing nothing at all."
I thought it would make a pretty terrific story to find some families who would otherwise not have had the medical attention at all.
Not because it shows how the "rich countries" are helping the "poor countries", but because there's something so wonderfully human about people helping other people for no reason at all. Giving up their medical practices at home, their pay, sacrificing time away from their own families to do something just because it's the right thing to do.
It's always beyond eye-opening to visit a slum area because you can see it in one of two ways: a despondent and dingy cluster of poorly assembled houses and rickety businesses, or as one of the highest forms of human survival where people have learned to be innovative in spite of their great financial constraints.
And still, it's not hard to find the same values in them that you'd find in others with more money, or even yourself.
A father who had brought his little 5-year-old daughter to the free clinic because her toothache was so bad she couldn't eat anything, said he felt so bad for her pain that he and his wife could not eat if their daughter didn't.
A mother who barely had enough money to take her nine year old for a standard tooth extraction, but did it anyway because her daughter was in so much pain. She spent her savings, about Ksh400 (less than $10) only to find out the local dentist had made things worse by not pulling out the entire tooth, leaving a piece behind to become infected. The free clinic, luckily was able to fix the problem.
I returned a second time to see how the clinic had fared at the end. Thousands of children had lined up to be seen by doctors. Hundreds of kids fitted with new glasses so they could see the chalkboard at school. If only it was a more sustainable program. Even the stern-faced nurse from Georgia who was helping run the clinic and had been on other medical missions before, couldn't help but get choked up when she said how worried she was about what would happen to the children once she leaves. "In the States, you know when you go off duty, another nurse will come to replace you. But not here," she said.