In Kenya, reason for hope

Rose is 17 months old. She weighs 15 pounds and looks the size of an American 5-month-old. She cannot sit up, walk or speak. She has the toothpick limbs and saucer eyes of the malnourished and the dull skin of dehydration.

In another corner is Caroline, a waifish 9-year-old who sleeps in a crib. She is a whispering, otherworldly child, pretty and fragile. Her parents are dead, and she is severely malnourished. I have just given her a teddy bear and accessories from a bag of toys we brought from the U.S. When I gave her the bear, she looked at me in disbelief. This, I realize, is probably the first time she has had a toy all her own. Now she sits in her crib slowly undressing and dressing the bear, over and over again.

Then there’s Benedict, a 2-year-old boy dressed in pink. He cannot walk by himself or talk, although he’s trying. A child his age should be running after a ball, but Benedict struggles to stay upright.

I look at my 11-year-old daughter, Indigo, and wonder whether this is just all too much for her. But she smiles back at me, happily playing with Claudia. Claudia is 18 months old. She arrived three weeks ago weighing 13 pounds, the size of the average American 2-month-old. Now she is 26 pounds, still not talking or walking, but a beautiful, happy child.

These children have HIV/AIDS and are orphans, or their parents are simply too poor to feed them sufficiently. But they are fortunate. Rose, who was staring death in the face, now has a feeding tube and a nurse to watch her 24 hours a day. Unlike 12% of Kenya’s children under age 5, she will live.

We are in the “respite wing” at Nyumbani, a home for abandoned, HIV-infected children located in a leafy suburb of Nairobi. After eight glorious days on safari, we are spending the next two days helping out in Nyumbani and New Life -- both homes for HIV-positive babies, then visiting the Harambee Community Center in the Mukuru slum.

Before we left the U.S., Indigo collected school supplies, clothing and soccer balls. People gave generously, and we had brought four extra bags with us. And now, at Nyumbani, I am wishing that we had many more bags so the boys would not have to wear pink and every one of the 110 children would get their own toy. Later, Indigo, my wise child, chided me. “Wearing pink is the least of their problems, Mama, and we did our best.”

The previous day, Indigo and I spent a peaceful afternoon playing with, feeding and holding the babies at New Life, a sunny, whitewashed home for HIV-positive babies who were abandoned. Parents are often unaware that with good nutrition, 75% of infants born who test HIV-positive will test negative by the time they are 18 months old. They panic, abandoning their children. Unlike Nyumbani, which takes chronic cases of all ages, New Life fosters only babies. Those who eventually test negative are adopted out to families from Kenya and abroad.

We had come to Kenya for a mother-daughter trip, something I try to do annually with each of my daughters. I also try to do one philanthropic project a year with them, large or small. Indigo’s contribution to this trip was to gather the items the homes needed.

Micato Safaris, a Nairobi- and New York-based company, organized our trip. When I told Micato I wanted to tack on a few days to make these visits, they told me they could assist with that as well. The family-owned company, which has a class-act reputation as a travel operation, has poured millions of dollars back into the community and wildlife programs through its philanthropic arm, AmericaShare.

Most Micato guests don’t spend two days doing what we did, but most do spend a couple of hours at AmericaShare’s Harambee Center in the Mukuru slum. Some are so shocked or moved by what they see that they leave having sponsored a child’s education or even having paid for a new building. And some are just too afraid to step foot near a slum, so they don’t go.

The Nyumbani Children’s Home is in Karen, the posh neighborhood named after author Karen Blixen, and the Harambee Community Center is in the heart of the slum. The Mukuru slum -- or “informal settlement,” the ridiculous new politically correct term for slum -- is one of the worst. About 700,000 people crowd into a five-mile stretch of littered, polluted river. There is no running water, no sewage system, no electricity and no garbage collection. Dwellings are 10-by-10 shacks cobbled together from rusted corrugated iron. By day, people go about their business, and it is safe to enter; but by night, even residents stay off the streets.

As we entered the slum, I watched Indigo observing the scene from our van. She has seen poverty all over the world, but this was the worst. Garbage was piled everywhere, sewage seeped in open channels, and stalls selling tomatoes, goat’s heads and soap stood between the two. Throngs of women with plastic containers waited patiently to buy water.

Running among all this were armies of children: playing soccer with balls made of wadded up plastic bags; tots carrying kerosene on their heads; and clusters of boys sitting atop garbage piles and doing nothing. When they saw us bumping up their streets in the Micato van, they dropped what they were doing to run alongside, waving and shouting, “Muzungu! (white person) Howareyou, howareyou,” a phrase they apparently took for a one-word greeting.

“Can we get out of the van?” Indigo asked Patrick Nyaleta, our patient safari director who had been with us throughout.

“No,” Patrick replied firmly. “It is just too unpredictable.”

“But the children don’t look dangerous,” Indigo responded.

“It is the gangs,” Patrick said. “They can come from anywhere, even in the daytime.”

Then, deep in the slum, gates opened and closed behind us, and we were inside an oasis with a tidy, green lawn and neat, cinder block buildings -- the Harambee Center. Built by AmericaShare and partly funded by previous Micato travelers, the center educates young people about HIV/AIDS. (Warner Bros. created a Sims-style computer game to teach teens what to do if they are mugged, raped or threatened, and how to avoid the virus.) Harambee is also a source of clean water, a skills training center and a gathering place for the 300 Mukuru children whom AmericaShare sponsors in private schools.

Some of the sponsored girls were at the center, and I asked whether any would tell me their story. “I never had a father,” a bright-faced teen told me. “And my mother died of AIDS. I lived with my uncle, who abused and beat me. Then AmericaShare found me when I was 10 years old. I had only been to school for about two years, on and off, so I had a lot of catching up to do. But I didn’t care that they put me in with the little children. I was so happy to go to school.”

She is now 15. I asked what she wanted to do. “I want to be a surgeon,” she said.

Besides the children’s homes and the community center, Micato suggested we visit a different kind of orphanage -- one for elephants and rhinos. The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, in Nairobi National Park, is a sanctuary for animals whose mothers were killed by poachers or were separated from their herd by trauma. There are about 25 elephants and three rhinos in the shelter at a time.

An elephant is about 250 pounds when it is born. The average adult weighs 8,000 pounds. To survive, rescued babies need to be bottle-fed every three hours for more than two years. They crave physical contact and are with a human keeper, their surrogate mother, round the clock. As the elephants grow, they are taught how to forage and then reintroduced into the wild at Tsavo National Park.

Sheldrick funds the operation by allowing people to foster an elephant. For $50 a year, you choose a baby and receive monthly e-mail updates and photos on its progress. I was not getting out of there without fostering one for Indigo and, in the name of fairness, one for her little sister. Indigo chose Tano, a tiny creature. Knowing my other daughter is a softy for the underdog, I chose Kilaguni, who had been attacked by hyenas and was missing a tail and chunks of ear.

In a similar vein, we were spending the night at Giraffe Manor, also an animal sanctuary. An elegant stone house built in the 1930s, it is today one of Nairobi’s loveliest places to stay. And for any animal lover, there’s a priceless bonus. You get to be kissed by a giraffe.

At 6 that morning, Indigo woke me shouting, “There’s a giraffe outside! She’s hungry!” In our room was a brass bucket of giraffe kibble, and although we were on the second floor, the animal’s face loomed against the window. It stuck out its rough, blue tongue as Indigo gleefully hand-fed it the whole bucket, then ran downstairs in her pajamas to greet it at the front door for her morning kiss.

These animals are not pets. In the 1970s, the owners recognized that the Rothschild giraffe was endangered (there are still only about 300 in the world) and brought a pair to the estate. The breeding program continues with many giraffes released into the wild.

The elegant animals wander between the manor house and the adjacent Giraffe Center, an educational facility that teaches Kenyan children and tourists about conservation. And they stroll by every morning to be fed kibble over the breakfast table, snaking their necks through the arched windows.

Because this is the season meant for delight, permit me to wrap up this story by planting a thought: Think of giving someone the gift of a check you’ll send to Nyumbani to buy a child a toy. Or a virtual baby elephant and watch it grow. Or help educate a Mukuru slum child through AmericaShare.

There’s real joy in this, I promise.

travel@latimes.com