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Cecelia here. Brigid and Aidan like to be tucked into their mosquito nets every night -- I think I freaked them out at first when I found out that nets are provided in every room and recommended by the guest-house staff, even though Nairobi is at an elevation of 5500 ft (and we haven't really seen any mosquitos yet -- knock on wood!). And every morning we go down to the eating area breakfast buffet (the walls painted with lively foliage scenes, the tin roof only partially covering it, with a big tree growing in the middle of one end of the room) and I distribute malarone, an anti-malarial drug, to each member of the family (while Aidan sings "mallll-- arone" over and over and Brigid says she's going to start calling me Mary Louise Parker). I've done a number of interviews yesterday and today, with mainline Christian, evangelical Christian, Muslim, non-denominational, and umbrella groups, while the family plays. Today we all went to Kibera, known as the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa, and Tom, Brigid, and Aidan toured some of the programs run by an NGO and visited one of the participants' homes while I did an interview. Kibera has (depending on who is counting and when) between 600,000 and 1 million people living in it. It has 13 villages (although it is very difficult for a non-resident to tell what the lines of demarcation between villages might be, since it is so crowded) and, I was told, over 500 NGOs working there. It is extremely religiously pluralist, but after 2001 the USG apparently pressured the Kenyan govt to make the Islamic NGOs leave. Lots of life. Lots of little stalls everywhere. Lots of hardship, too, of course. One person said she thought that, in contrast to one of the other big slums, there is hope in Kibera.
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