KILIFI, KENYA – The sun slowly peeps through the clearing clouds in the bold, blue sky. The enveloping humidity generously gives out bear hugs to residents here, leaving brows doused in sweat. A salty breeze flaps the branches of the palm trees lightly, teasing the sweaty multitude in the coastal town of Kilifi.
Kilifi is just one of the many towns in southern Kenya that lie on the coast of the Indian Ocean. It’s a paradox of beauty, relaxation and rich, sandy beach resorts amidst a populace plagued by illiteracy, poverty and high fertility rates.
Racheal Kirangazi, 59, is a single mother in a village within Kilifi town. She and her son are the primary breadwinners for the 24 people – her other five adult children, their spouses, her 10 grandchildren and her mother – who live in houses within her homestead.
But she says that she is used to taking care of others, as she’s been doing so since she was a teenager. Kirangazi dropped out of school when she was in fifth grade, when she was 14, to get married.
“I wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing,” she says. “I just knew I needed to get married.”
But she says that there’s nothing unusual about this. Her mother, Fatuma Mramba, calmly agrees. Kirangazi says she has no regrets about starting a family so young, and neither does her mother.
Kirangazi became a widow in 1993 when her husband, who worked as a police officer, was killed in the line of duty. She now works as a charcoal vendor in the area to provide for her family.
Her six children all dropped out of school. They now earn low wages at menial jobs, except one son who is a mechanic. Together, she and this son support their other 22 relatives.
Kirangazi, one of her sons and Mramba are also HIV-positive. She and her son believe they contracted it from taking care of Mramba.
They receive health evaluations every four months, courtesy of Food for Prescription, a community outreach program that provides care for people living with HIV. It was initiated by the World Food Program and Pathfinder International and is implemented locally by the Ministry of Health and a local nonprofit organization, Strengthening Community Partnerships and Empowerment, SCOPE.
Through the program, the family also receives food rations. They have been receiving cornmeal, lentils and cooking oil for the past nine months.
Kirangazi is also part of a women’s group that runs “sack farms.” They grow vegetables in sacks filled with manure, other nutrients and soil.
Between the sack farms and the community outreach program, she says that feeding her family has been manageable. She says she sees taking care of her family more as a cultural obligation than a burden.
Local hospital officials in Kenya’s coastal towns say that promoting reproductive health care is difficult because of cultural opposition, illiteracy and poverty. The tendency in these areas is for girls to drop out of school, marry young and have large families. Local hospitals, the government, nonprofit organizations and international partners have implemented various initiatives to erode cultural resistance to family planning. Although they cite some success, they acknowledge that it’s an uphill battle.
Nearly 70 percent of Kenyans in coastal areas lived in poverty in recent years, according to the 2005-2006 World Bank Survey on cases of rural poverty in Kenya. At the same time, the population growth rate for Kilifi has exceeded Kenya’s annual population growth rate of 2.6 percent, according to 2010 World Bank statistics and the Kilifi District Strategic Plan 2005-2010.
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