Home visit

From the main road the track lay between maize and sunflowers and the ground beneath was soft and sandy. Matthew stopped by a man and asked the way. The man pointed down the road, and indicated to turn right. He walked with us alongside the car. The right turn was a lane of soft sand. The 4x4 just fitted between the sunflowers and the mud brick buildings. We stopped and the man, who had walked with us, pointed down a path between tall stalks of maize, bright green after the rain. We walked down the path, and came to a small group of mud buildings arranged in an open square. The building on the left was small, the choo, toilet. The first building had no roof and the floor inside was slicked with dried mud. In the next room was fire wood, stacked against the back wall. The building on the other side had a door that showed where hands had pushed it to open it, and a lock. The building had no roof. The back of the building had collapsed and the mud bricks lay disordered where they had fallen. The rains had washed this wall away, broken the roof. The tops of the remaining wall brushed away under my hand. Round the back was a pig sty with a sow and a piglet, brown with the dirt of the floor of the sty. There was access for the pigs to a shelter.

The three buildings bounded an open living area. At the back of the living area there were some sheets of corrugated iron, a few mud bricks forming a barrier, and sleeping arrangements on the earth sheltered by the corrugated iron, arranged as a roof.

Three or four chickens wandered around, one with three guinea fowl chicks following her.

The shamba, garden, is a space two metres wide by about five metres long.

The mother is forty seven years old. She is HIV. She lives under the corrugated iron with her sister and her mother, some cloth curtains hung from the beam, made of a tree branch, to keep out the light.

The son is waiting to hear if this Trust will sponsor him. At this home there is no place to work, to store, to dream: the love of his mother wants him to be a boarder at this school and to escape this life.