Debra Pickett

March 11, 2004
Orphan Porn
by Debra Pickett

About 80 [in 2006, it's now about 120] children live at the Good Samaritan Home in Nairobi's Mathare slum, and the thing I think about most when I look at them is how many I could take home.

This, I have to admit, is probably not the most productive, developmentally correct approach to meeting the needs of Africa's AIDS orphans, the generation of kids who have lost their parents to the AIDS pandemic that is still raging across the continent. There are 10 million to 15 million of these children in Africa. About half a million of them live in Kenya and Tanzania, where I traveled last month.

I figure I've got room for at least four of them in my one-bedroom apartment.

That would be something, I suppose, some tiny difference I could make. I've spent so many years thinking I need more money and more space -- and, OK, probably either a husband or a really great nanny -- before I start a family, but I look at these kids and I realize how ridiculous all of that is. I have enough. I have too much. I could support a few of these kids. And then the logic starts to fall apart.

Which ones do you choose?

There is the tiny boy, about 3 (most of these children don't know how old they are or when their birthdays are) who everyone calls John-O. He sits on the ground to eat his lunch because he doesn't like the way his legs dangle from the too-high benches and his favorite toy is an improvised version of hoop and stick, made from old wire, that he can only play with when the other, bigger kids are distracted by something else. It takes me half a minute to fall in love with his big, bright eyes. Yes, I could easily take him home.

But what does that do? What does that do for the other children here, who love him as their brother? What does it do for Mathare, with its open sewers and its air of anger and desperation? What does it do for Good Samaritan -- just picking out the cute ones and taking them away?

The beauty of pigs

I've traveled here with supporters and representatives of Global Alliance for Africa, a Chicago not-for-profit organization devoted to caring for the AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children of this region. The group's founder and executive director, Tom Derdak, has an approach that manages to be both thoughtful and tough-minded. They are not in the business, he frequently says, of delivering emergency relief or pulling kids out of their communities.

Instead, Global Alliance focuses on building on the strengths -- and there are strengths to be found here -- of existing local programs. At Good Samaritan, they've provided tools to help the kids and their caretakers grow vegetables, plus goats, chickens and pigs that will be a low-cost source of both nutrition and income. They also paid the start-up costs for vocational training programs, in tailoring and carpentry, for some of the older kids. The idea is that, with a pretty small initial investment from Global Alliance, the orphanage can become self-supporting, selling goat milk, eggs and pork, along with clothing and small pieces of furniture, while the kids gain some practical skills.

The ideas are simple but also stunningly original. In this crowded slum, teeming with garbage, there is plenty of free food for the goats. And no one complains about the smell of the pigs. Yet, before Good Samaritan, no one had thought of animal husbandry as a way to make a living in this urban slum.

Etiquette for aliens

Standing in the middle of Good Samaritan's ramshackle compound, where the only level floors are made of dirt and there is not a single, perfectly straight wall or finished ceiling to be found, it is easy to feel discouraged, even despairing, about the state of things in Africa's slums. Children wear secondhand clothes in varying degrees of shabbiness and seasonal appropriateness. Classrooms double as sleeping quarters and seem adequate as neither. Lesson books are dated and falling apart.

But it's also easy to see why Derdak and his organization chose Good Samaritan as a partner -- they never say "recipient" or "beneficiary." There is a vibrancy here, a spirit of optimism, that is almost palpable. The kids, many of whom speak English in addition to Swahili, are not afraid of adults. When they play games in the safety of the compound's courtyard, there is true joy written on their faces. The adults who work here love to talk about what they're doing and what's coming next and how well things have been going. Somehow, the place even smells better than the rest of the slum.

Still, it is hard to be here, hard to know what to do.

When we walked in -- 12 white Americans emerging from two white vans, parked on a narrow street where almost no one ever drives -- we were immediately conscious of our difference, our alien-ness. Adults and children gathered outside Good Samaritan to stare at us. We barely looked at them, busy as we were, trying not to appear squeamish as we carefully stepped over the streams of raw sewage running through the middle of the unpaved road. The engineers and developers among us were sizing up the building, which makes a joke of the concept of "up to code," and thinking they should avoid stepping inside its walls, just on general principle. We were all making mental lists of how to "fix" the place.

The children already had gathered in the open courtyard, seated in U-shaped rows of benches, waiting for us -- and the nyama choma (roasted goat dinner) we'd supplied. We were invited to sit on benches, too, except ours were in the shade of a corrugated-tin awning and directly faced the children. It was hard to tell who was more on display. For a while, we all just stared.

The adults had cooked three goats, plus a massive pot of pilau. They proudly showed us how they were frugally saving the goats' heads for soup. We smiled and tried to make appreciative noises.

They served us first -- hospitality -- even though we would have gladly skipped the meal to save more meat for the children. But Mama Mercy, the incredibly charismatic woman who runs the place, and her assistant, Rose, wouldn't hear of it, insisting we eat -- and heartily. They had saved big, fat slices of goat liver, the best part, for us. Despite the discomfort of feeling the kids watch us eat, we could not refuse. We shoveled the food into our mouths as fast as we could, hoping to get to the kids' turn a little faster.

We felt like we were walking a fine line, wanting to politely accept our role as honored guests but also itching to get out of our assigned seats and end our staring contest with the kids.

Finally, one of us -- 22-year-old Steve Frederick, a Northwestern University senior who'll become a teacher when he graduates -- did. Almost all of us quickly followed suit.

Why I didn't take their pictures

And now we're sitting here, in a hot, dusty courtyard, making fools of ourselves. Many of the kids understand English, but most are too shy to speak it, and so we resort to the funny faces and broad gestures that form the lingua franca of too-enthusiastic adults meeting too-reticent children. The kids indulge us, laughing when they know they are supposed to and nodding excitedly at the big plates of food finally being served to them.

They eat happily, and without reservation, swapping food from plate to plate in the grand tradition of school lunches everywhere.

Then, the adults tell them it is time to perform for us. Small groups of them get up to sing and dance and put on a skit about the importance of learning English. We clap and cheer, musing on what it is OK to notice -- the jovial sexiness of even the youngest girls' dance moves? -- and what we should try to ignore.

I keep wondering if there is a right way to act. Are the sun hats and glasses a bit much, making us look more like space aliens than we already do? And what about the way many of us take breaks from sitting in the direct sun light, with the kids, to retreat to the shade for a cold drink of bottled water or to put on sunscreen and lip balm?

And I think, too, about what I am supposed to be doing here, what the proper etiquette is for a journalist in an orphanage. A hundred times, I reach for my tape recorder and camera. And a hundred times I decided to let them sit, unused, in my bag. I know I should be clicking away, taking snapshots of the most appealingly shabby children, but I can't make myself do it.

What would be the point? To make you feel bad? Convince you to send a check? Show you what a saint I am for spending a few hours of my life here?

While I am here, sitting on the ground, talking and laughing and fooling around, the kids of Good Samaritan are not AIDS orphans, not symbols of the dozens of desperate crises in Africa. They are just kids.

And I know the minute I take my camera out, they won't be. Somewhere between the lens and this page, they'll go back to being abstractions, participants in what is, essentially, orphan porn.

So, if you want to know what they look like, you have to imagine it for yourself. Just picture the children you know, the way they giggle and wrinkle their noses and stare when they think no one is looking.

Picture those kids. And then subtract everything they have.

If not morality, national security

There probably is, in some ultimate way, a moral reason for helping Africa's most vulnerable children. We have so much and they have so little. It would be so easy for us to give resources that would mean the world to them. It cannot be right to let them go hungry while we keep getting fatter.

But there is also a pragmatic, self-interested reason for doing it and, this, Derdak knows, is probably his best hope for bringing in big donations for his cause.

"The future political and social stability of Africa depends on these children," he says.

This is an entire generation of children who've grown up without parents and, in many cases, without any adult guidance at all. They have grown up without hope. They have plenty of reason to hate the "developed world." They could easily become the terrorists and guerrilla fighters of tomorrow. They could easily come after us.

Reason for hope?

At Good Samaritan, no one says the word AIDS. You think of the kids just as children, rather than as orphans, and it is so easy to lose yourself in their songs and laughter.

There are 80 children here, flourishing in Mama Mercy's care, but there are hundreds of thousands more across other parts of Kenya and Tanzania. And there is only one Mercy.

You think of it that way, and it is just as easy to lose yourself in despair.

Can it really make a difference? Can it ever be enough?

Global Alliance looks for partners with a demonstrated commitment to helping orphans in a specific community, trying to find way to keep children with relatives or foster families, rather than in big, expensive orphanages. In Meru, in northern Kenya, they've sponsored a chicken-farming program for families who take in children from the Rural Vision Orphanage. Selling eggs provides the families with enough income to support and educate the kids they take in.

In a similar program in Arusha, Tanzania, they're working with the Tanzania Capital Boosting Association to provide small "microcredit" loans to families whose primary breadwinner has died of AIDS so they can start their own businesses, like selling corn or frying fish.

Each of these programs helps a few dozen children.

It takes an enormous amount of research to find programs like these -- run by local people, rather than big, international organizations and emphasizing self-sufficiency rather than charity. There's no easy way to "scale" them, mass-producing a single solution for all the challenges faced by communities in Africa. It takes a stubborn kind of faith to see this as worth doing, to get yourself out of the American "expert" role and replace your instinct to rescue children with a goal that is both deeper and more modest: to cheer on the good work that other people are doing, while resisting the urge to do it yourself.

All in all, there are about 1,000 children who benefit directly from the work Global Alliance does. By the end of next year, Derdak projects, it will be 5,000.

I don't know if it's enough. But it is more than I can fit in my apartment.