"Sluts"

 

“Sluts,”  Jackson would mumble under his breath as he and his two brothers walk past Mary and her friends. The women do not bother looking up; they keep their focus on their hands as they bead their colorful bracelets and necklaces.  Mary and Josephine did not bother explaining that they had gotten AIDS from their husbands who had died years ago, and Sarah was too embarrassed to tell her story of being brutally raped in the slums when she was 18. The women keep their hands busy, glancing periodic smiles to one another.  The women are isolated and the violation of names and stigmas rival the violations their bodies have experienced, so the women draw closer to one another.  They are too busy trying to live to bother retaliating to those who’s hearts have already died.

       Four months pass, and Mary’s grows curious at the disappearance of Jackson. She saw his two brothers leave the slum, but never saw Jackson leave.  She slows down in front of his door and slowly removes the bucket from her head as she leans into the doorway.  There is Jackson, half naked and lying on the mud floor in a daze.  He had come down with tuberculosis and his brothers had abandoned him and left him to die alone. Forgetting her title as “Slut,” Mary runs and gathers the other women to help pick Jackson from the mud. The women use the money they had made from selling their beads to go and buy Jackson a bed. They lift him up onto the bed and spend the next four days tending to his medical needs.  When he is well enough to walk, they purchase him a bus ticket and send him to his home village to be cared for by his parents.

        Today Mary and her friends continue to gather daily to make beaded necklaces and bracelets to finance the next need that may arise in the slum in Nairobi, Kenya.