Debrah Matei Mwololo was not at home when armed policemen accompanied a fleet of bulldozers at 2am in October 2011 and flattened the house she had come to love.
Her father, Joseph, had heard reports that the authorities planned to evict the 80,000 residents (pdf) who they said had encroached on airport land in the Kyang’ombe settlement, a 20-minute drive away from Nairobi city centre.
Unlike many residents who were caught up in the raid, Joseph decided to move his family to his ancestral village in a neighbouring county before the bulldozers arrived.
Debrah is not unused to change. In 2008, the family relocated to Kyang’ombe after Kibera, the area where they had lived up until then, became the setting for some of the worst violence seen in Kenya.
The unrest occurred following a disputed presidential election that spawned weeks of killings. Although their house was not attacked, Debrah’s parents decided they needed to bring her up in a safer environment.
Moving to the village of Mitaaboni in Machakos County meant Debrah would see her grandmother more often.
But the public school she was enrolled in was not to her liking. Teachers were perennially absent, a phenomenon the bright-eyed, confident 10-year-old accounts for, with fetching innocence, by saying “they would stay in [their] meetings for too long”.
Teacher absenteeism is a recurring issue in Kenyan schools. In 2014, a study in two counties found that teachers skipped up to a quarter of their classes.
In a country with few natural resources, education is seen as the most important ticket to a better future for many families. Even parents earning modest amounts of money make huge sacrifices to send their children to private schools, which are often better managed than public schools. So the issue of teachers failing to report for work is a major one.
Debrah’s mum, Christine, said they noticed their daughter’s spoken English was no longer as good as it was and decided to bring her back to Nairobi.
The new home she shares with her sister, Dorcas, six, and young brother Caleb, two, is in the Mukuru Kwa Njenga settlement, not far from their old home in Kyang’ombe.
The main road to the house is unpaved and ringed by rows of stores that serve the slum economy, with pedlars selling pan-fried groundnuts and women cooking sun-dried sardines, a popular dish among local construction workers.
Conditions are basic. Although Kenya is the wealthiest country by GDP terms in east Africa, and is now rated by the World Bank as a lower-middle income economy, inequality levels are strikingly high.
Kenya’s low-income urban settlements are among the world’s roughest. A UN-Habitat report noted that these settlements, which are home to half of the Kenyan capital’s population but occupy only about 5% of the city’s land mass, are “some of the most dense, unsanitary and insecure slums in the world”.
A river of black, raw sewage flows outside the two-floor row of iron sheet houses in which the Mwololo family lives.
But Debrah likes their tidy, one-room house. The electricity connection means that she can do her homework at night.
All the children sleep under a mosquito net . Each of them has suffered from malaria in the past two years and recovered after receiving medication at home.
An aggressive mosquito net distribution programme has helped Kenya to reduce infant mortality at a rate among the fastest in the world.
Apart from the malaria bout, Debrah has not had a serious health problem in recent years. What truly excites her about her new home, though, is the school she now attends, St James junior academy.
She loves it because the teachers never miss class. She has one particular favourite.
“I love teacher Cecilia because she teaches me maths and if there’s a part where I do not understand or remember, she reminds me and shows me what to do until I get it.”
She particularly enjoys the Christian religious education class and has made plenty of new friends. “My closest friend is Rena Kerubo, and I love her because she passes by my place every day and we go to school together, read and do everything that our teachers tell us,” she says.
When she is not at school, Debrah likes to play hide and seek or read her favourite story book, Grandmother Visits.
Debrah’s father, Joseph, continues to be a baker but he has found a new job at a company called Bake‘n’Bite, which is only a 15-minute walk from where he lives. Conditions are better than at the previous station, where he earned 9,000 Kenyan shillings (£59) a month. He now makes about 17,000 shillings and works eight-hour shifts. His wife, Christine, would love to start a small business such as a hair salon, but doesn’t have the capital.
Debrah hopes one day to travel to see her aunt in Tanzania. And she is determined to achieve her dream of becoming a doctor, an ambition that might rest on how long her parents can afford to keep her in private schools.
“I want to be a doctor because I will be able to treat many sick people, and so that those who are very sick can get well,” she says.
Factfile: Kenya
Under-fives mortality rate (per 1,000 live births): 71
Population living on less than $2 a day: 67% (2005)
Gross domestic product: $60.9bn; gross government debt 49% of GDP
Percentage of children enrolled in primary education, female/male: 85/84 (2008-12)
(Data two years old or less unless indicated)
