This article is from page 27 of the 2010-02-23 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 27 JPG
KELVIN Wairimu is 18 years old and has excellent school grades. Ask him what he wants to be and he says “I want to be a doctor.”
Kelvin is a lovely, grave, respon- sible young man who has taken on the role of father-figure to his three brothers and his baby sister. His fa- ther has gone and left the family to fend as best they can.
He shares a 10 foot by 12 foot room with his family and mum, Ruth. He achieves his excellent grades study-
ing by the light of a tiny flame from an oil-burner whenever his mother takes in enough washing to pay for oil. When she doesn’t, the family have to go to bed before it gets dark in the tiny room furnished with an old bed, a side table and one broken chair.
There are five other families sharing this tiny house, one family to a room, almost 20 people in one house.
As well as taking in washing at 100 Kenyan shillings — about €1 — per bag, Ruth babysits a tiny baby and is paid the quivalent of 30 cents per day
for the service.
Ruth would like to be able to send her eldest son to seondary school but that’s impossible.
She speaks only a little English but explains that she wants to give the other children some basic education and that has to be paid for. Keep- ing her son in secondary school for a year would cost €250 a year, an ambition way out of reach for woman who earns less than than €10 per week and has to find €17 a month to pay rent for her one room.
Money is so short that the family
buy salt-water from the street hawk- ers to drink because it’s cheaper.
If Kelvin ever gets to be a doctor, he will understand what damage the family’s poverty striken lifestyle has done to their health but in a house where it’s all that Ruth can do to feed her children, health considerations take a back seat.