Mary and Siko are waking up in their 12 foot square home in Dagoretti. A family of three sleeps together on a double bed. Mary is an orphan. Her parents died when she was a child. She and her sister were forced to fend for themselves on the streets of the slum. To grow up fast. To battle against the odds. And simply survive.

A child waits outside of Mary's home in Dagoretti. The path is her front yard and a child's playground.

Mary starts the day collecting water. Slewing a piece of cloth around her head to which she attaches an empty 20 liter drum. She makes her way through the trash dump to the water vendor. After filling the can she carries it home. In Nairobi, a slum dweller pays five to seven times more for a liter of water than an average North American citizen.

Mary passes a child on the way to collect water.

Kibera is dusty during the dry season with flowing paths almost impassable during the rainy season. The irony of too much water and too little safe water to drink.

Water shapes everyday life in Nairobi's slums because there is insufficient water and sanitation infrastructure. It is not unusual for residents to travel up to 20 minutes to a shower, toilet, and clean water outlets.

Alice collects water several times a day. She walks out her plot, past the drug addicts, thru the side alley, to the water vendor. Like Mary, she does not have easy access to a public water pipe. And like Mary, she too pays between 5 and 10 Kenyan shillings per 20 liter jerry-can of water.

Alice moved to Dagoretti 17 years ago. Like many who moved to Nairobi from the countryside, she came to earn a living. She has no other family in Dagoretti.

Alice, a single mom like Mary, has six children, one of whom looks in the window of her two-room home.

Florence lives with her eight children and three grandchildren in Dagoretti. Their home consists of two 12ft X 12ft structures. She has made a makeshift doorway between the two dwellings by removing a sheet of corrugated sheet metal from the wall. Florence's husband has taken a younger wife and no longer lives with the family. He rarely provides financial help. Day after day, Florence juggles the need for water against paying rent, food, education, and clothes. Medical expenses would throw the household into crisis.

Insufficient water and sanitation infrastructure in Kibera results in open sewers littered with plastic bags filled with human waste.

The plot where Caroline lives in Kibera used to be a small piece of paradise in the slums, with a common area filled with sunlight and the sounds of neighbors chatting and laughing. That is until the landlord "upgraded" the plot by building a large brick building in the middle of it and feeding electricity into the older structures. Now, the sound of the neighbors socializing has vanished. In its place is the mechanical tick of the electric meter. The new building has dramatically decreased natural lighting into all the shacks and extra water runs off the roof making the area darker and damper.

Kibera, present and future.