The Eleventh Post

I really like reading the comments that people leave on this thing. For those who aren’t looking at them, I highly recommend Cameron Murray’s piece in response to The Fifth Post. It’s about doing things to sacred cows. Trust me, you’ll love it.

On the subject of comments from the punters, my darling sister wrote the following in response to The Eleventh Post:

“Benny, aside from various wacky adventures, what are you actually doing??”

Naturally, I gave her a gobful for being so impertinent. But after I’d put Lozzie firmly back in her place, it did get me to thinking that I haven’t really said much about the work I’m doing over here. That’s not really going to change much in this post, so bad news for anyone who’s hanging to hear about that. I am intending to write a post specifically about work, just not right now. Right now, the reason I bring up work is because I want to talk about health issues. Read on – you’ll see the connection.

For those who don’t have the slightest idea what I’m doing here, primarily I’m working on a couple of microfinance programs being run out of two community centres near where I’m living. As they’re both quite small programs, I decided it would be good to spend some time at a larger microfinance organisation as well so I could get a broader picture of the field. Microfinance is a big deal over here (and I assume in plenty of other developing countries now as well) and there are some pretty largeish organisations running around with hundreds of branches and millions of clients. So I worked a few contacts and managed to line up a couple of days at a bank called K-Rep.

K-Rep’s big thing at the moment is a project called FAHIDA which targets financial services at victims of HIV/AIDS, their families and carers. I spent much of my time with them visiting borrowing groups who were part of this project. The first time I’ve ever knowingly met an HIV sufferer actually. It looked like a pretty impressive operation, with people clearly benefiting from the loans being extended to them. The one thing I couldn’t figure out was, why do HIV/AIDS sufferers need specific financial services? Why can’t they just use mainstream services as regular (albeit micro-) borrowers?

I asked the incredibly helpful K-Rep Regional Manager this when I got a chance. I think it really showed my ignorance of the situation. The reason, he said, is because infected people experience so much discrimination in day-to-day life in Kenya. Apart from the stigma attached to the disease, lending institutions don’t want to know them because they’re marked for death. That sounds blunt but that seems to be the way it’s seen here. Why would you lend money to someone if you were worried they’d die before they paid it back? This just exacerbates the social isolation that sufferers can face in every aspect of their lives.

The same day, we visited a group that was running a sort of refuge for AIDS orphans from their local area. The manager told me that there were 3400 orphans involved in their programs – all orphaned by AIDS, and all within an area maybe the size of Bankstown. The prevalence of HIV in Kenya is around 7%, compared to nought point something in Australia.

The very idea of an orphanage seems Dickensian to us. Here there are orphanages all over the place. People are always going to funerals – sometimes several in a week. Of course it’s not all due to AIDS – there are plenty of other things in Kenya that can lead to untimely death – but every time you’re talking to someone and they tell you “yes, my parents both died” or “my sister died earlier this year” that’s always the first question in your mind.

There are some things you can just never know about the struggles of living in a developing country until you actually spend some time in one. The devastating effect of HIV certainly becomes much more real when you see it up close, but at least we do hear about it and talk about it (a bit) in the West. Not so jiggers. Have you heard of jiggers? No, I thought not.

Jiggers are little fleas that live in dusty soil and like to burrow into human flesh and lay eggs. People living in dusty rural areas who don’t wear shoes are at high risk of being visited by them. That means a significant minority of the population of rural Kenya (in a crowd of children walking home from school, it’s not unusual that half of them will have no shoes). When you get lots of jiggers, your feet look like this:











… and you literally can’t walk anymore. This is an old guy that one of the other volunteers has been treating, but the worst affected are often kids. Kids who are crippled because of jiggers take to crawling around – until they get them in their hands and knees and can’t do that anymore either. In extreme cases, the sores can turn septic and you can die from them. Removing jiggers is a slow and painful process involving a scalpel and an agricultural chemical called Lysol. In some areas of Kenya the problem is so bad it’s considered a national crisis, with TV fundraising appeals and celebrity spokespeople and everything. All because of little critter you’d probably never even heard of before you read this.

In a country with an HIV/AIDS prevalence of 7% and 40-something percent of people below the poverty line, why do there also have to be little bugs that crawl under your skin and lay eggs there, and keep doing it until you’re crippled or dead? That’s life here.