Navy chaplain travels to Kenya for volunteer work

[unhappycamper]

Navy chaplain travels to Kenya for volunteer work
By Tim Wightman, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Monday, February 23, 2009

Nothing Navy Lt. David Masterson heard beforehand could do justice to the squalor that awaited him upon his arrival in Kenya.

Masterson, Camp Fuji’s command chaplain, spent all of January in the Dandora district of Nairobi, home to about one-third of the capital city’s more than 3 million people. He was there as a volunteer with Kinyaho-Dandora School, founded in 1987 by Kenya Children’s Fund, an American group.

What he saw outside the school gates were people living in slum apartments or shacks made of sticks and mud, many with no electricity or running water. Some homes have as many as 10 people living in a single room. AIDS and crime are rampant.

A river filled with garbage and waste runs through the area and is the community’s lone option for cooking, bathing or cleaning. People frequently forage through a nearby garbage dump, searching for food and anything else of use.

Masterson said he was awestruck by the scene.


Rest of Africom article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=60898