Extract from If I Was A Child Again

But I almost didn’t make it at all - when my mother was just three months’ pregnant with me, the doctor told her that there was a strong possibility that I wouldn’t make it. But she was having none of it – determined I would survive, Mum took to the bed and rested up for the month while my father and grandmother looked after my older brother and the house. And I obviously enjoyed being closely minded – so much so, that I didn’t want to come out at all in the end... Eventually, several weeks late, but in the fullness of health, and by all accounts a pudgy thing with a shock of dark hair, I took my first breaths. I was born at home with a midwife as was the popular trend in England at the time, so my father was right there to witness my birth. Apparently, I had excellent timing arriving quite quickly in the end on Saturday morning at ten o’clock, leaving plenty of time for Dad to go on to cook a roast dinner for my visiting grandparents and our little family. But in all the excitement of the new arrival, Dad forgot to defrost the chicken before roasting it, and until the day she died my grandmother enjoyed teasing him about that iced roast chicken meal on my every birthday.

So, once my Mum was left in charge of the cooking, my childhood was always safe, secure and happy. But there are times I wonder how much of my good fortune was down to nothing more than a twist of fate, a small accident of birth? What if I hadn’t arrived into that terraced house in Croydon to Maureen and John? I was late after all, and according to some, not even expected to make it at all. So what if I’d arrived somewhere else entirely? If I were a child again, and born somewhere else, to different parents - how different might my childhood, my life, have been?

Not long ago my work took me to a small project run by Australian missionary Brothers in the Kibera Slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Kibera has some of the harshest living conditions I have ever witnessed. Almost one million people live there in an area roughly the same size as Central Park in New York. It is an extremely poor area and most of its inhabitants lack access basic facilities such as electricity or fresh water supply. Small children play on large mounds of rubbish, sewage and scrap; broken down cars drive along mud-tracks lined by small tin-shack shops, the many gaps in roofs and windows patched up with cardboard boxes and plastic sacks. The houses are built in winding mazes, spiralling up and down the mud hills. As you walk through the narrow lanes, you need to dodge low under protruding, corrugated iron structures. I dread to think what conditions are like in the rainy season when the ground underneath must be slippy and dangerous. 

Certainly no place for a child to grow up..

- you would think… 

Yet it was here that I visited the Mary Rice Centre – a small special needs school and centre. It is a tiny, but vibrant centre offering these often forgotten children physical therapy and a chance at education. The ultimate goal being to help them transition into state schools. 

As the school was closed for holidays, we visited some of the children and their families in their homes. Isaac, a child with cerebral palsy was living in a newly built multi-storey building on the outskirts of the slum. Arriving at the complex, I was dismayed to see a pile of rubbish and sewage out front almost half as high as the building itself. There were no lifts inside, and I wondered how this family managed to carry their severely disabled child up the ten flights of stairs to their fifth storey flat each day. I marvelled at what genius could have decided to give this family this flat, and not one on the ground floor that Isaac could access with greater ease in his wheelchair. I felt dismayed for this poor young boy and his family, and uneasy about my own comparably privileged situation. How could it be right that I could have so much, could be given such a good start in life, while here on the other side of the world a young boy must contend with poverty and physical challenge on a scale that I could barely begin to comprehend.