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UNREPORTED WORLD: KENYA
The second in the new series of Unreported World comes from Kenya, where the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the world.
Friday 28 April 2006 7.35pm & Thursday 4 May 2006 4.50am
The second in the new series of Unreported World comes from Kenya, where the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the world.
Friday 28 April 2006 7.35pm & Thursday 4 May 2006 4.50am
Reporter Aiden Hartley begins his journey in the Dandora slum. Only a couple of kilometers from the centre of Nairobi, Dandora holds the biggest rubbish dump in Sub-Saharan Africa with 1,500 tons of rubbish dumped daily.
With chemical reactions taking place in the rubbish, fires break out continuously and a pall of smoke drifts across the city. Father Daniel Moscetti, who runs a school on the edge of the dump, tells Unreported World that 700,000 people are affected by the poisonous mound of rubbish, suffering cancers and respiration and eye problems.
Amongst the rubbish, thousands of slum dwellers fight with animals in the filth for scraps of food. Hartley finds a group of young children with a bag of rancid decaying food which they've collected from a rubbish dump, which is all the food that they're going to get today and which is all they’ll eat that day.
Their despair leads to drastic action. At a local Barnado's Home, Hartley finds day-old baby Rose, who had been stuffed in a plastic bag and thrown in the gutter. She's alive only because passers-by noticed a cloud of flies buzzing around her.
The slums are awash with guns, smuggled in from Africa's civil wars. Now the authorities fear the rise of organised crime and an outlawed sect called Mungiki. The founder of the sect tells Unreported World that 500,000 youths were members and that 30 out of every 100 people in the slums are armed. He says that they only require one person to bring them together and there will be a fight which will destroy Kenya.
However, the state official in charge of the area tells Hartley that people like to come to Dandora to live and enjoy their wealth. With three and a half million people starving to death in Kenya, the president has convened a group to enhance the government’s performance and delivery of services to the people of Kenya. But the only performance the slum dwellers see is from the swish Mercedes and BMWs – part of a $12m government fleet– as the ministers drive back to their expensive homes in the posh part of town. sect.
With chemical reactions taking place in the rubbish, fires break out continuously and a pall of smoke drifts across the city. Father Daniel Moscetti, who runs a school on the edge of the dump, tells Unreported World that 700,000 people are affected by the poisonous mound of rubbish, suffering cancers and respiration and eye problems.
Amongst the rubbish, thousands of slum dwellers fight with animals in the filth for scraps of food. Hartley finds a group of young children with a bag of rancid decaying food which they've collected from a rubbish dump, which is all the food that they're going to get today and which is all they’ll eat that day.
Their despair leads to drastic action. At a local Barnado's Home, Hartley finds day-old baby Rose, who had been stuffed in a plastic bag and thrown in the gutter. She's alive only because passers-by noticed a cloud of flies buzzing around her.
The slums are awash with guns, smuggled in from Africa's civil wars. Now the authorities fear the rise of organised crime and an outlawed sect called Mungiki. The founder of the sect tells Unreported World that 500,000 youths were members and that 30 out of every 100 people in the slums are armed. He says that they only require one person to bring them together and there will be a fight which will destroy Kenya.
However, the state official in charge of the area tells Hartley that people like to come to Dandora to live and enjoy their wealth. With three and a half million people starving to death in Kenya, the president has convened a group to enhance the government’s performance and delivery of services to the people of Kenya. But the only performance the slum dwellers see is from the swish Mercedes and BMWs – part of a $12m government fleet– as the ministers drive back to their expensive homes in the posh part of town. sect.
