Gioto kids: A childhood buried in garbage, rescued by education

People move through the heaps, bending, picking and sorting what others have thrown away.

A flock of Marabou storks drops onto the waste, pigs push their snouts through the piles, and goats wander between them as trucks arrive, carrying more rubbish.

For some families, the dumpsite is more than a place where the city disposes of its waste. It is a source of survival. Families have for years picked through the waste for food and anything they can sell, while children grow up amid the smoke, dirt and uncertainty.

It was here, in 2001, that Pastor Alex Maina first confronted a question that would shape the next 25 years of his life.

He had gone to the dumpsite and seen families, including children, scavenging for a living. What struck him was how early poverty seemed to be taking hold of their lives.

“I remember the first time I saw the families there and the Children. It really touched my heart. I did not have much to give at that time, but I started a relationship with them. I would visit them once a week, having some juice and some bread,” Maina recalls.

The children would see him return each week, and the visits gradually became something they counted on.

Four years later, Maina decided to do more than a visit. In 2005, he rented a small place in London estate, a few kilometres from the dumpsite, where children could come in the morning, sing and take part in activities.

“It was an alternative to the dumping site where they would have stayed the whole day in the dirt and pollution. That small step developed into a school as we have today,” he said.

Forty-five children came on the first day. When feeding was introduced, the numbers rose to 75. Maina says more than 1,000 children have passed through the programme.

His concern was not simply that children were out of school. He was looking at what happened when children remained in the same environment year after year, watching adults around them struggle until those circumstances became the only life they knew.

“A family lives out of the dumping site, scavenging there. They don’t have money to take the kids to school, so the children are raised in that environment without education,” he said.

Maina saw a pattern: parents living off the dumpsite, children growing up without education and another generation facing the same struggle.

In his account, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies and other social problems are also part of the environment surrounding some families.

“The kid just becomes like the parent, and the cycle continues. My initial thought was, what can we do to cut the cycle?,” he said.

For Maina, education became one way of interrupting that pattern. But he says taking a child to school is only one part of it.

“You may not be able to help the parent, but you can take the kid out of the cycle and give this kid an alternative view of life, empower them with education and other skills,” he says.

John Maina knows what the cycle looks like from inside.

He grew up around Gioto, where his family lived in small makeshift structures made from cardboard and other discarded materials.

“We used to look for food in the rubbish. We could find discarded ugali, pick it up, clean it and eat it. Life was hard. We did not know where our future was going,” he recalls.

John joined The Walk in 2013. He later attended Crater View Secondary School before joining African Institute College, where he studied Community Health and Community Development.

Maina continued to support him after school, and John eventually established a music recording business.

But there was a time when John did not even understand what the future was. Maina once asked what he wanted to make of his future.

“At that time I didn’t even know what the future meant; all I knew was life in Gioto,” he said.

For Lillian Diki, the cycle began with a different kind of loss. She was seven when her mother died. The family lived in Hilton slums.

She recalls seeing her mother die when a man she was living with set fire to their house after accusing her of having an affair.

“One Saturday morning in 2004, my mother and my younger brother were brutally burnt. The man my mother was living with was not our father. He claimed that my mother was having an affair with another man, and because of that, he set the house on fire while my mother and my younger brother were inside”, she recalled.

After the loss, survival became the immediate concern. The death of her mother left her and her twin sister orphaned and homeless.

Lilian says she slept outside, lived on the streets and went to the dumpsite to scavenge for food.

“They used to call me the child of a prostitute, the prostitute who was burned. It was painful,” she said.

Maina and his wife began taking care of Lillian and other children, providing food and school fees.

Lilian says Maina repeatedly reminded her that what happened to her mother did not have to determine her own life.

“You can become a better woman. You can become a powerful woman in society,” she recalls him telling her.

Lilian completed Form Four, trained as a nurse at Kenya Medical Training College and later received a scholarship to study Business Information Technology at Maseno University. Her twin sister did not complete school.

She eventually became an author, writing about poverty, stigma, pain and recovery that shaped her childhood. Her first book, It Ends with Me, speaks directly to the life she wanted to leave behind.

“I did not want that cycle to continue with my generation. I wanted my life to be better. That is why I wrote “It Ends with Me,” she said.

Other books she had authored include Leaving the Rags Behind, Becoming the Evidence of God’s Voice, and Don’t Waste Your Pain.

Standing before children at The Walk centre, Lilian says she still thinks about the girl she once was, the orphan who went to the dumpsite to look for food, whose future seemed already decided.

“Can anything come out of this child? Who was nothing? Whom the mother left in the dumpsite where she used to go and look for food, meeting with dead bodies, and yet today I am here; my story didn’t end in the dumpsite,” she said.

Maureen Nashikanda was only three years old when she came to The Walk Centre. Born near the Gioto dumpsite, she is now studying Education Art, specialising in English and literature at Laikipia University.

“Twenty years ago, I was here, seated the same way these kids are sitting, and I received the same education and the same mentorship from the same teachers who are standing there,” Maureen said.

She plans to pursue a master’s degree and become a lecturer.

“I am graduating this November, and after that I am planning to pursue my master’s and become a lecturer so that I can give back to society, maybe help one kid at The Walk centre as a sign of giving back to society,” she said.

Twenty-five years after Maina walked into Gioto, he does not claim the problem has been solved.

The dumpsite is still there; families are still trying to make a living from the waste and still grow up around it.

But for some of the children Maina met along the way, life did not end where it began.

“We have not solved the whole problem, and we also have other schools that partner with the community to help the same people, but we have seen a lot of positive change,” Maina said.