Five-Year-Old Orphan Buried his Dead Baby Brother
George Ocholla used to be one of the street kids in Kenya. They hang around the corners begging, sniffing glue or just staring blank-eyed like zombies.
George’s parents died of AIDS when he was about five and they were poor to begin with. So did his uncle and aunt. Together, George and his siblings and many cousins were too much for his poor old grandmother to pay for. So George and his baby brother, one-years-old at the time, moved into the dump. Plumes of gas rise from this dump and gigantic apocalyptic storks circle above the children picking through trash for something to eat. George ate from the dump, but eventually he ate something poisonous and had to get his stomach pumped. His baby brother wasn’t so lucky. After a meal of garbage one day, George noticed his brother, who was strapped to his back, wasn’t moving or making a sound. He was dead.
I learned all of this in the basement of an orphanage where George, now 10, lives with 30 other kids with similar tragedies. When he was telling me this, he was sitting with his elbows resting on his thighs and holding the microphone himself, talking into it like someone at an AA meeting, for an hour. His face was not sad. He actually looked and sounded like a 50 year old man who remembers his days as a peasant now that he’s made it big in fish processing or home-building. It was pretty impressive. It also made me feel like buying George a beer. He is a total badass.
ABOUT THE ARTICLE: You can hear George and his classmates sing and talk in this story I did for NPR.