'Running a day-care in a slum awakens me to
The gleeful babies chuckling as Rose Weche, 41,
The babies are seated on tattered rags in the room they spend most of their days in Korogocho slums. Their gazes are fixed on Ms Weche, oblivious of their congested surrounding.
“When their mothers drop them every morning, they become mine. I care for them, wipe them, check if they are sick, feed them, and they fall asleep on my laps,” she says while holding an eight-month-old baby.
The woman has provided daycare services to families in the slum for close to a decade. She says right from when she offered to care for babies of a few women who were casual workers, it became an explosion.
“Mothers would beg, some even shed tears because they had nothing to pay. I was charging Sh5 then, and some could not afford it. I wrote off debts,” she says.
Running
“When you watch how mothers struggle just to put something on the table for their children here in the slums, you appreciate motherhood more,” she says.
She currently charges Sh20 per day for each child.
In the bloodshot eyes of a first time teenage mother crying because she has nowhere to take her baby, she has seen vulnerability. From the stagger of an alcoholic mother returning home with nothing but the reek of alcohol and arms stretched to receive her baby, she has seen what hopelessness can do to a mother. And in those who return home after labouring for hours as cleaners,
“Motherhood is different for every woman. There cannot be a single definition of what motherhood is. Having this
It is the little things such as watching a child taking their first steps in her small space, or how they cling on her when she feeds them that gives her joy.
“Some of the children are now older and no longer come to day-care, but when they see me, they run to
Her greatest happiness, she says, is when she meets
“They respect me,
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because they know that for someone to dedicate their time and help you with your children, sometimes at no pay at all, is the greatest gift they can get,” she says.