I’ve visited some projects financed by World Friends and managed together with the local organizations.
One of these, Acref, made up of a group of young people who were born and grown-up in the slums, has founded a sort of school of music, dance and theatre for the young people from the Babadogo slum.
I’ve seen a reharsal of a show that they’re preparing for a performance in December: pure energy. They’re very skilled. Expressionists, I would say, for their bare, plain and raw way of expressing.
Obviously, the sound of the African drums comes into your stomach. You can feel that it arrives from afar and it really belongs to the primitive mankind. It’s so beautiful. And these sounds go with the effort of the boy to grow up in a very hard reality. Really hard.
 
Then there are the disabled children, who stand at the bottom of the social ladder in the slums, because they are victims of stigmatization and emargination from their neighbours, so that their parents are afraid of letting them go out.

World Friends and Acref have organized here many initiatives to support the disabled children and their mums, who are usually alone: for example, the women get the microcredit to finance their small activities. The children instead are looked after from the physiotherapists, who every week treat their malformations appropriately.
When I went and visited the Centre, there was a three years old child, with mental and physical disabilities, who hardly  came nearer, by limping, without a word, sat on my knees and has been looking and smiling at me. So touching.
At their eyes, whites are weird.
The majority of the children, as they see us, laugh and call us msungu (white), sometimes they mock us, sometimes they take our hands and then run away.

Nicoletta Rolla
World Friends' supporter



To help disabled children from the Nairobi slums, World Friends started the construnction of the Physioterapy Department of the Neema Hospital.

There are two children in Babadogo, Felicita and Nicole. They’re sisters, the tailor’s two daughters. Felicita is deaf- mute, she speaks by her gestures and her eyes. She’s seven or eight and she works hard. She helps her mum to clean, cook and shop. Since she’s deaf-mute, her mum writes on the back of her hand the things that she needs to buy, and she goes and buys them by showing the list to the seller.
Nicole can speak and hear instead. She’s younger than Felicita. She’s smart and lacking of two incisors as all the children at her age. For this reason, her smile is very funny.
Their hair is twisted in small braids attached to their nape. They’re very beautiful.
The other day we went to the world day of the disabled. We’ve marched through pouring rain, singing in the mud.
The date with the other disabled children coming from the slums in the eastern area of the town was at the Babadogo’s primary school. We sat down under three broken tents, installed in the middle of the courtyard, waiting for the local politician who had to make a speech and bring flour.
We have been waiting for him for three hours at least. Nicole and I kept close to each other because we were cold. I gave her my sweatshirt and then she sat on my knees, and in this way we warmed each other up. We got asleep for a while. And then we chatted a little. I think we became friends, because the day after she said hello with an expression of anticipation in her look.
In the meantime, Felicita has been cooking together with some women. Sitting on a coal sack in the rain, she has peeled potatoes, prepared the fireplace, cut the vegetables. She’s a tireless worker, as many other children.

Nicoletta Rolla
World Friends' Supporter

Felicita, Nicole and their mother take part in the World Friends’ AFEMA Project, that takes care of the mothers with disabled children from Nairobi slums.