The name Kenya suggests images of Indian Ocean beaches or vast stretches of savannah. But just outside the capital, Nairobi, beyond the gated villas surrounded by parks and swimming pools, there is another world, the world of the poor.
The most recent statistics count 199 tent cities around Nairobi, with two and a half million inhabitants. The shanty town of Korogocho measures one by one-and-a-half kilometers, with a population of 120,000. According to the stories, it is the most violent of all. Another, named Kibera, stretches out like an immense, endless snake with its jaws attached to cthe city. The most populous slum and one of the largest in the world, it counts perhaps one million inhabitants.

Confusion
After twenty-five years of ex-president Daniel Arap Moi’s regime, the new government that took power in 2003 quickly disappointed the hopes of those who dreamt of a piece of land to live on. Instead, it raised fees for the matatu, the bus service for the poor, and accelerated demolition of the shacks. Large red crosses are scattered everywhere, in Korogocho as elsewhere. They mark structures scheduled for demolition, and mean the inhabitants must evacuate immediately. According to the bureaucrats, many shacks are dangerous because located beneath high tension wires. Others, such as those in Kibera, are deemed too close to the railway; still others are said to be blocking a planned beltway around Nairobi.  A man struggles to cultivate a strip of earth that will soon be covered by cement. 500 hundred thousand people have been ordered to evacuate. But where?
In Korogocho (which in the Kiswahili language means “confusion”),  where everyone has problems, too many to make sense of them,  reality is very difficult to absorb. Stories like those of the children in Saint John’s Primary School are the order of the day. Mostly orphans, they are cared for by older brothers or relatives, but often there is no money for food, clothing, or medicine. One of them is Sophia, twelve, who says, “My life is a nightmare, I lost both my parents. My grandmother is sick but takes care of me and my brothers. I can’t lose her; without her I have no future.” Every evening in  Korogocho for three years now, Father Daniele Moschetti celebrates mass among the sick in the shanties.

Insecurity
There is a total sense of insecurity. The coming of night brings the curfew. The streets,  animated and chaotic a few minutes ago, suddenly become deserted and dark, illuminated only by the glow of the sky and a few feeble streetlamps.
Problems such as alcoholism, drugs, Aids, violence, prostitution, and corruption are the daily life of these people,  snaking through the shacks and the open sewers. Walking here means encountering children who sniff glue to forget their hunger and drunks high on chang,aa, an illegal liquor produced with the consent of the police. People drink it in the morning before going into the huge garbage dump or in the evening when they come out, to forget a day spent buried in refuse. Life has little value here, the poor steal from the poor, people thieve or kill to survive and try not to get caught, because slum law is pitiless.
Father Daniele Moschetti has come here, assisted by lay volunteers, to carry on the work begun by Father Alex Zanotelli, who spent twelve years in Korogocho. His challenge is to reconstruct human dignity, to give hope and a chance for life to redeem itself.

Hopes
Moses paints murals on sheets of tin, His skillful touch makes the immense agglomeration of Koroocho seem a little less gray. A huge painting at the entrance to the slum shows the Nairobi that everyone wishes for. Its color comes from within everyone and is the fruit of the rehabilitation of those who have managed to bring it forth through art, work, or sport. There are small organizations like the Mukuru Recycling Center, where paper refuse is transformed into burnable fuel. The Bega Bega Center is devoted to craft production, and Boma Rescu is a rescue center for street children. The newest trend is sport centers: boxing, weightlifting, athletics, karate, and soccer.
Saint John’s Church and its school are a reference point for the Catholic community of Korogocho. It has the merit of not having isolated itself, instead maintaining good relations in the neighborhood with other religious orders, including Muslims, Protestants, Seventh-Day Adventists, and followers of the Religion of Maria. Sunday morning is bright with confusion: children dressed in pastel  party clothes mix with eccentric personalities come from  who knows where. The inhabitants here say there are more churches than toilets. School offers the only  hope for change, the children know this and mark it down in big letters. The opportunity to go to school allows them to dream of a different kind of future. Education is the way to train people capable of constructing a better civil society. It’s just a shame that here, in contrast to so many other schools, the view out the window is of the largest garbage dump in Nairobi.