Survival in the dumps

Leaving the bustling arrivals gate, a dump truck joins a fleet of airport taxis full of deep-pocketed safarigoers, business travellers and missionaries departing from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the largest hub in east and central Africa and a proud symbol of Nairobi's growing economy and global presence. Carrying food waste from the day's flights, the truck eventually turns towards the city slums, while the taxis continue to the capital's business district.

Their routes expose two very different, yet interwoven, narratives to the rise of east Africa's most populous city. At roughly the same time every day, the unfinished salads, sandwiches, bread, yoghurt cups and refuse from Nairobi's incoming flights are transported to the Dandora Municipal Dump Site — the capital city's only dumping location. Far from the expressways and skyscrapers of downtown, the truck meets a landscape of smoke-filled horizons and metallic, waste-born mountains.

Smoke from burning piles of trash scratches the inside of the throat and obscures the bent backs of human and animal scavengers scattered across the smouldering lot. When the Sun is overhead, the smell of four decades of waste is overwhelming. As the truck arrives, children — who have skipped out of school for the occasion — meet it on a rutted dirt road just outside the dump site's entrance.

The older ones clamber up the truck's sides as it waits to enter the dump, pulling directly from the pile — a half-eaten brownie, an unopened, liquefied yoghurt cup — while the youngest sort through waste tossed on the ground. Once the scraps have entered Dandora, they hardly make it out of the truck bed before dozens of men fight over the haul. Baked by the heat of the Kenyan sun and reeking of spoilt milk, the congealed food waste is thrown into mouths or placed in strewn Kenya Airways bags for later. Avoiding the frenzy, women wait for both the children and the competitive pack of men to disperse before picking through what remains.

One woman pockets a handful of wrapped candies. "Schoolwork rewards," said Rahab Ruguru, 42, a mother of six. "Working here is how I am able to feed my children."

Ruguru and the other rummagers sort and place into large sacks the materials that cannot be eaten but can be sold for recycling — metals, rubber, milk bags, plastics, meat bones and electronics tend to be among the most sought-after.

This informal chain of middlemen and women — an estimated 6,000 people — has long done the dirty work for recycling companies. Hundreds of self-employed pickers scavenge the sprawling 12-hectare dump site from 5am to sundown. Community buyers purchase their day's work at nearby weigh stations, eventually selling a larger aggregate stock to informal truck drivers who are ultimately paid upon delivery by the recycling companies.

This largely invisible survival ritual — essential to the upkeep of the dump site but not officially condoned by the city — has continued since the first trash started arriving at Dandora nearly 37 years ago — 22 years longer than international environmental law allows and 11 years after the site was declared full by the Nairobi city council. Over the next five years, the city hopes to finally decommission the crude dumping site, raising a fraught debate between the haves and have-nots of this east African boomtown.

Dandora is a symbol of a larger problem: Even as Kenya touts continued economic growth and cultural influence — including proudly hosting the Nairobi Securities Exchange, the financial hub of east and central Africa, and regional headquarters for the likes of General Electric, Google, Coca-Cola, the United Nations Environmental Programme, and UN-Habitat — its poorest citizens have been left behind by their country's rise.

A new constitution, accelerated advances in information and communications technology, East African Community integration and the discovery of oil have many feeling optimistic that Kenya will continue to be the regional powerhouse economy.

Nearly two-thirds of Nairobi's population, though, will continue to live in the city's slums. International organisations have long been working to bring attention to these neglected voices — including Amnesty International's Kenya: The Unseen Majority: Nairobi's Two Million Slum-Dwellers report and the World Bank Institute's Putting Nairobi's Slums On the Map project — yet this attention has often focused primarily on Kibera, the city's largest slum.

On the opposite side of the city, however, more than 1 million people live in informal settlements around Dandora. "If you look at economic-growth statistics, you might think things are getting better, but this wealth is clearly not trickling down to the poor," says Aggrey Otieno, a human rights activist born in Korogocho, one of the slums bordering Dandora. "We have a lot of people investing in Nairobi. Malls, KFCs, Apple stores, factories — they are being built citywide. But without a solid waste-management plan, without a focused desire to truly improve the living standards of all Kenyans, we will be dealing with these problems for a long time."

This isn't just a debate about trash — it is a debate that captures how Nairobi and other fast-rising African cities treat their most disadvantaged citizens, Otieno says. And that is why a seemingly mundane municipal issue such as the fate of a trash dump can turn into a political flashpoint.

"[Trash pickers] are squarely situated in the informal sector, which cities have consistently demonstrated an inability to govern," says Rosalind Fredericks, an assistant professor at New York University who specialises in the political economy of development. "Many African cities just cannot keep up with the population growth they are seeing, and urban upgrading in sub-Saharan Africa cannot be done by simply erasing informal settlements; they have to be somehow absorbed into the economy and operations of the city."

City council members of Nairobi recognise the problems but blame the megapolis's rapid population growth — the city has grown from 827,775 in 1979 to 3.2 million today — and the city's overwhelmed bureaucracy for their slowness to act on Dandora.

"Population growth has superseded our facilities, and it is because of the inadequate capacity of the city council that we are here," says Mutabari Inanga, an environmental and public health officer in Nairobi's city council. "The infrastructure of waste management in Nairobi is not well structured at all. There has also been very poor cooperation between the city council and the residents, and as a result, [Dandora] has become an environmental and health crisis for which we have no one to take responsibility."

Inanga says the city is prepared to decommission and relocate the site, but that it is waiting for the final go-ahead from the new dump site's projected neighbour, the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Airport officials fear the new site will attract birds that will interfere with air traffic. So the plan remains on hold. The endlessly pending relocation has led a variety of voices, from across Nairobi's fractured class system, to weigh in.

On one side are Nairobi's political reformers and slum advocates. Health studies in hand, human rights organisations and Dandora community leaders claim that the decommission process is long overdue. A 2007 study by the United Nations Environmental Programme is among the most comprehensive analyses of Dandora's impact on the surrounding communities. The report revealed that Dandora soil samples contained fatally high levels of lead, and found that 154 of the 328 children observed living near the dump site suffered from respiratory problems and had concentrations of lead in their blood that exceeded internationally accepted levels.

A well-known reformer and the country's newest chief justice, Willy Munyoki Mutunga, says he believes Nairobi's urban reformers should take a stand on the removal of Dandora in the country's coming county elections. "It is time the pro-poor leadership seize political power in Nairobi. The dump site reflects Kenya's unacceptable status quo. That dump site is a violation of the constitution and I hope my compatriots in Korogocho will task the Legal Advice Centre to move to ... remove this site of death, poverty, ill health and the present unacceptable distribution of national resources."

But on the other side, the trash pickers worry that their needs and livelihoods aren't being fully considered. They are fully aware that Dandora is not good for their health, but a slow death is better than no life at all.

Julius Macharia was born in one of Dandora's bordering slums. He grew up eating leftovers from Nairobi's airline passengers and is now one of the dump's gatekeepers. The dump site is controlled by an unofficial cartel of local residents who claim to provide security to the pickers, though they mostly use intimidation to control who is permitted to pick where, often to the detriment of the women.

They charge city dump trucks — and even journalists — a small fee every time they enter. Macharia, who prefers the name Tiger, is one of the cartel leaders.

While Nairobi's business district dithers and shirks responsibility for the fate of Dandora, Tiger worries about what will happen to those who depend on it should the government ever really take an interest in their affairs. "If they come, what will happen to us? We are like these birds and animals to this city," he says. "They don't recognise us as people. They don't care what happens to us, and if they relocate this place, we will have nothing."

City officials have long-term plans to turn the dump site into a park, but the pickers hardly see how they will achieve such a goal, nor what use they would have for a park. Inanga says the city has also "earmarked money to sustain the livelihood" of the pickers who lose their jobs. "We envision some of them fitting in at recycling points [at the new dump site] ... others will be given something to help sustain their livelihoods."

Ruguru rolls her eyes at the prospect. "I know working here is bad, but I am here because of hunger."

Asthma makes life harder for Ruguru. Toxic smoke from small fires of burning waste spreads to every corner of Dandora and across the surrounding communities. As a mother, she worries daily about the toll that the site will take on her children's health and spirit. Save her 4-year-old, the entire Ruguru family scavenges Dandora on weekends and after classes.

No matter what regulations the bureaucrats in Nairobi may issue, Ruguru doesn't see a time they will stop picking through the leftovers of her country's success story. "If this site moves, I will move with it — or we will not survive."

David Conrad is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. This article was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting.