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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Caroline Kimeu in Mathare

‘I’ve only the clothes on my back’: lives swept away by floods in Kenya

A woman stands ankle deep in murky water in a slum alleyway.
Jane Kalekye stands outside her home in the Mathare slum in Nairobi, which has been flooded almost every night as El Niño rains devastate Kenya. Photograph: Edwin Ndeke/The Guardian

Jane Kalekye trudges through the narrow muddy alley to her tin-roof house in Mathare, one of Kenya’s largest slums. Ever since the devastating floods that forced her out of her home last month, she and other residents who live by the rubbish-choked Mathare River, which runs through their area of Nairobi, have begun an anxious countdown.

It is only a matter of time before their homes are brought down, they say, either by another bout of flooding, or by the government’s ongoing demolition of houses along riverbanks prone to flooding.

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