Karibuni!

I did this post for SFS, so I’ll do it for Happy Home too. The goal is to give you a sense of what our living quarters are like. Anne, Tabea, and I all live on the second floor of the orphanage. We have our own bathroom, living room, and bedroom. We have electricity, but no running water. We have two plastic buckets, four blue several-gallon water jugs, and two five-liter jugs that are essential to our existence. (I’m overstating that, but you get the idea.) We have a rainwater catchment system that involves several underground tanks and two above ground tanks. The above ground tanks are where we get water that needs to be relatively clean—mostly drinking water and hand-washing water. The underground tanks are where we get water that doesn’t need to be super clean for bathing, laundry, and toilet flushing. It’s not muddy or anything, but sometimes we have to use a strainer to get the stray sticks, plants, or bugs out of it.

Getting water from the clean, above ground tanks involves a simple turning of the spigot and filling of the five-liter jugs. I use hauling in the most literal sense to describe retrieving water from the underground tanks. We remove the iron manhole cover and lower a five gallon yellow bucket on a rope. I haven’t mastered the art of getting the bucket to drop into the water correctly, so I spend a decent amount of time hanging over the hole swinging the bucket around in the dark and hoping to plop it in such a way that the lip of the bucket actually goes under the water. Most of the time, I fail miserably at this and I end up with only a gallon or two of water to haul the fifteen feet out of the hole. Occasionally, though, I am extremely successful, and I end up staggering around trying to tug a forty pound swinging bucket to the surface using the hand-over-hand-on-a-skinny-slimy-rope technique. Depending on how much water I get in the bucket, I repeat this process three to six times to fill our toilet-flushing several-gallon jugs. The orphanage was nice enough to build us Westerners a sit-down toilet, but with no running water, the price is the daily hauling of flushing water. We use the water in the yellow five-liter jug and our red and green plastic buckets to wash our hands, our dishes, our clothes, and ourselves (showers are bucket style unless you’re the fancy American who brought a camping shower bag). The last bit of water in the clear five-liter jug is treated and reserved for drinking.

Our living room has a picnic table, a few clothes lines, and a bookshelf in it. We are the official keepers of the games here, so the kids check things out during the day and return them before dinner. We keep a list and try to make sure that most of the pieces come back, so that the few games that they do have last a little longer. We also have a tiny paraffin hot plate that we use every once and a while to cook our own food. My favorite cooking item is an electric water boiler that I use for heating water for tea a couple of times a day. The electricity is reliable enough that we’ve only had it go out for an entire evening once. (I wrote this a few days ago, and now it’s twice.) Usually, if it goes out, it flickers right back on a few minutes later. Nifty!

Our bedroom has three beds, three people, and three people’s stuff in it. That doesn’t leave much room for anything else. I picked up the habit of leaving my mosquito net tucked under my bed at all times while I was in Kenya before, and it’s a habit that has served me well. At SFS, we were worried about snakes and mosquitoes. Here, it keeps the mice out. We didn’t have food anywhere near our sleeping quarters at SFS, but we do here, so mice are a reality. I leave my stuff zipped up or tucked inside my mosquito net, though, and we co-exist just fine.

I would write more and make it a little more interesting, but I’m currently in Nairobi and about to pack to leave for Mombasa. The children went “home” for their end of school break, and they aren’t coming back until December 28^th, so the volunteers are free to travel around. Anne, Tabea, and I are headed to the coast this week and then we’ll part ways so, hopefully, I can head down to Kimana while they hike Mt. Kenya with their volunteer group. This means that my internet use/blog posts may be a bit erratic until I’m back at Happy Home. It'll be very different to be in "tourist Kenya." We left Stella yesterday morning and we've already eaten at three restaurants. I was even able to buy Oreos and a Snickers bar at the grocery store. No ugali for me for a few weeks! :-)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and safe travels home.

Getting to Migori for mangoes

Transportation

I had a friend in third grade who lived on a farm. She had a pig named Roy B. Bacon, chickens, a cockatiel, and a lot of land. Most of what I remember about being at her house is that she and I would pack a picnic and make a “nest” somewhere in the wheat fields (not actually great for the wheat, now that I think about it) to eat our lunches and play. Every once and a while, though, Roy would escape, and her dad would toss us in the back of the pick-up truck to track his potbelly down. Sara would be sobbing and calling for Roy and I would be thinking, “I’m not wearing a seatbelt.” This led to a conversation between my mother and I about Sara coming over to our house to play until Sara’s parents could locate enough buckled seats for the eight year olds to sit in.

Mom, I think we need to invite Kenya over to our house to play.

I’ve been in/on five forms of vehicle transport now—a taxi, a bus, a matatu, a truck, and a piki-piki (motorcycle). The taxi, bus, and matatu are all relatively boring. You usually get a seat and the option of a seatbelt. Tabea warned me to check that the seatbelt opens and closes properly before putting it on (some of them refuse to let go once they’ve got you), but, hey, it’s there if you want to try! The trucks and the piki-piki’s, however, are the main form of local transportation. The matatus are fairly regular, but you get the piki-piki all to yourself and it costs the same amount. I actually like the piki-pikis a lot. They only go so fast and the drivers have their own personal safety in mind, so it’s usually a peaceful zip down to Migori. Below: On the back of a piki-piki.

I can’t say the same about the truck drivers. They’re nestled in the cab with their roof, their seatbelts, and their windshield. I, as a girl used to such accommodations, approach these rides much like I approach Space Mountain at Disneyland. Avoid at all costs. If that is somehow not possible, then I anchor myself with as many limbs as I can, squeeze my eyes past shut, and countdown until it’s over. Below: Loading the girls up into the truck (bonus overhead rack for safety!).

(An exciting aside: There was a piki-piki driver strike in the district this morning! It appeared to involve a piki-piki swarm, a lot of yelling, and each driver attaching a large tree branch to their motorcycles. It may have turned into something else somewhere else, but that was what was happening on the main road in front of the orphanage. I believe we had the stand of source trees. Irene (the social worker here) said that they haven’t been on strike since the election violence in 2007-2008. Today they were striking because the police inspection/roadblock that prevented us from getting our bus to Migori for less than 1000 shillings is still in place. The police are extorting 1000 shilling a piece out of every driver in order to be “allowed” to use the road to Migori. The drivers are used to paying the police bribes, but considering that most of them charge 30 shilling for a ride from Stella to Migori, this particular cost is just greedy. God speed piki-piki drivers.)

Food

One of the most useful lessons I’ve learned from living in other countries is that spending a lot of time thinking about the things that I don’t have here that I would have at home takes away from my enjoyment of the place I am. That being said...

I looooooooove food. I probably spent around fifty percent of my budget every semester in New York on food. A lot of that was at the grocery store, but a sizeable amount was at Italian restaurants, Indian restaurants, Thai restaurants, chocolate restaurants, organic restaurants, vegetarian restaurants, Cuban restaurants, Mexican restaurants, Greek restaurants, and even one Ghanaian restaurant. Manhattan is restaurant Mecca and if there was ever a religion I would be happy to adopt…

I’m used to spices. I’m used to variety. I’m used to dessert.

The rule in Kenya for sensitive Western tummies is boil it, peel it, or forget it. I would have to work a lot harder to follow that if the orphanage didn’t already adhere to it. The regular fare here is ugali. The closest thing I can think of that I’ve eaten in the U.S. is polenta. It’s maize flour that’s been boiled until it’s a solid hunk of white…calories. Everyone gets a piece about the size of my head accompanied with a spoonful of its favorite meal partner—sukuma-wiki, boiled kale with a lot of salt. I eat about fourteen meals a week in the “dining hall” and about seven of them are ugali and sukuma-wiki. (I eat breakfast with Anne and Tabea upstairs. We cheat and have bread, fruit, and tea instead of maize porridge.) Four more are ugali with some other boiled vegetable—cabbage or spinach usually. The last three are rice with cabbage, beans with maize (maize in the fed-to-cattle-in-the-U.S. sense, not in the sweet-corn sense), and chapati with lentils.

Thursday night is chapati night. Chapati dough is flour mixed with a little bit of salt, a lot of water, and a few cups of margarine. The dough is kneaded, rolled out, cut into even strips, rolled back into balls, rolled out into tortilla-sized pancakes, and then fried within an inch of its life on a jiko. Anne, Tabea, and I spend all of Thursday afternoons sculpting our arms with the traditional Kenyan chapati workout. Thursday night is culinary heaven.

To the untrained ear, this post may sound like a complaint about the food. The first week it would have been. After a week of nibbling around the edges of every meal, however, one gets hungry enough to appreciate how the salty and bitter sukuma-wiki complements the unassuming flavor of the ugali and, with her eyes closed, one can almost taste the soy sauce on the cabbage and rice. They probably won’t be opening a hit restaurant in New York anytime soon, but everyone here can go to bed with a full stomach, which is more than many can say.

Also, I haven’t given up spending a sizeable amount of my budget on food. Kenya has four things that I have no realistic expectation of acquiring in my daily life in the U.S.: Stoney’s, masala fries, digestive cookies, and tropical fruits right off the tree. Stoney’s is the strongest and most refreshing ginger soft drink in existence. Masala fries are tiny strips of potato that have been covered with masala (which I think might just be chili powder) and fried until they’re the consistency of a chip. Digestive cookies are some wheat and butter biscuit British holdover (evidenced by the brand name, Britainia) that is almost worth the price of colonization. Tropical fruits available here include bananas, pineapple, avocado, and mango. Four bananas cost about eight cents, a large pineapple about 40 cents, avocadoes four cents apiece, and mangoes two for 15 cents. Anyone who has ever tasted fruit that fresh for that cheap senses that it’s the counterweight on the cosmic balance that landed the tropics with the oppressive humidity and diseases that plague them.

What if you spoke English and German at home, Spanish to your friends, and then all of your textbooks were in Kiswahili?

I have a sponsor for my internet time, so now I have to be reliable about these posts!

Happy Home houses 32 children from seven to sixteen. I’m still trying to connect names with faces, but the children don’t seem to mind when I ask for their names repeatedly. During a normal week, the kids are in school most of the day. However, the Kenyan school system is on an all-year schedule that starts in January and ends in November. The children, therefore, are currently studying for their final exams. Their last day of classes was Friday, but this week was a sort of “reading week” between classes and exams, which start this Friday. This has a number of consequences for us—the volunteers: the children have been home all day instead of at school (excellent for learning faces and playing games), we’re preparing practice exams (I’m in charge of nine of them, so not so excellent for actually having time to spend with the kids), and we have revision (review) every evening after dinner.

Review time has turned in to my favorite time of the day. We divide the kids up approximately into their grades and work out of their textbooks. So far I’ve ended up with the fourth and fifth graders. The first night we did English as a group, and the second night I worked on math problems at the chalkboard with three of the girls. They’ve been doing long division, fractions, word problems, simple geometry, and budgeting money. I had a blast trying to dredge up the tricks I used to remember my multiplication tables, and making up word problems about shillings. For example:

You go to the market with 163 shillings to buy pineapple and paraffin. You take a matatu which costs 15 shillings. A pineapple is 50 KSh and you buy two. You fill your bottle with paraffin for 34 shillings. Do you have enough money left to take a matatu home?

Fun, right? It’s actually been the best way to learn names because I’ve ended up helping different kids each night. The amazing thing about schools in Kenya is that they learn in English. Every class except Kiswahili is taught and studied in English. I asked one of the girls how many languages she knew. She answered, “Four—English, Kiswahili, Luo, and Luhya.” She’s nine. And going to school in her fourth language.

How to mess up the drive and still enjoy the journey

Well, after three weeks of travelling, I finally arrived at Happy Home! It’s definitely Kenya with the training wheels off. The taxi driver met me at the airport without incidence. The two other volunteers happened to be in Nairobi for a few things, so Joseph drove me to the house they were staying at. I took advantage of the opportunity to brush up on my (extremely rusty) Kiswahili. Coming straight from the Netherlands meant that every foreign language sounded like Dutch the first couple of days. Imagine my surprise when the owners of the house turned out to be a Flemish Belgian couple! The two other volunteers are named Tabea and Anne, and they’re both nineteen year old girls from Germany. They both had a mild case of food poisoning, so we delayed our departure to Happy Home for a day to hang around the posh Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. Tabea and I went on an errand to get my cell phone up and running at the Westgate mall, which has more fancy stores than all of Moscow. Not quite the Kenya I remember with SFS.

We were finally able to get started the next morning, which involved hailing my first matatu. Matatus are how resident Kenyans move around--dilapidated, uniformly white, 14-seater vans, staffed by a driver and a guy whose job it is to exceed the seat capacity by at least five people—let's call him the stuffer. SFS took a look and do not touch approach with their students and matatus. After some minor haggling at an unofficial matatu stop, someone will direct you to a matatu that will take you virtually anywhere in Kenya for PENNIES. My first ride from the house in Westlands to the country bus station halfway across Nairobi cost thirty shillings. That’s approximately 35 cents. SOLD!

Our next transportation adventure was the country bus station. Tabea and Anne assured me that they had never travelled to Migori (near the orphanage) from Nairobi for more than five hundred shillings. Of course, Thursday had to be the exception. There was a police crackdown on public transportation (read an inspection station where bus/matatu drivers would have to bribe their way out of non-compliance with “official” standards) on the road that we needed to drive on, which meant that the number of buses traveling to Migori was severely limited and there was no room for negotiation below 1000 shillings. My still-Western pricing sensibilities were not bothered by this cost (a little under $12 for a six hour ride), but Anne and Tabea were enraged by the 200% inflation. We futilely attempted our negotiations for a half-hour or so before someone finally offered us a ride to Kisumu for 600 shilling. They told us we could get off at a junction town before we got to Kisumu and take a matatu for 300 shilling to Migori from there. Not great, but it was the best offer we had gotten, so we hopped on the bus. Unfortunately, the bus arrived in the “junction” town three hours later than they said it would, and there were no actual matatus there. It was about half an hour before sunset anyway, which would have made it unsafe to travel the rest of the way by matatu. So we stayed on the bus to Kisumu.

It’s a relatively large town on the shores of Lake Victoria that just happens to have the best mid-range hotel three wandering wazungu women could hope for. Five hundred shilling a piece got us a triple with our own bathroom, beds, mosquito nets, towels, fan, and (bad Swahili soaps) TV. The rooftop terrace with a view of Lake Victoria and the vegetarian Indian food restaurant called the Laughing Buddha around the corner were included free of charge! A cup of chai and a plate of samosas with masala fries later and I was reveling in our six-hour driving detour.

We made it to Happy Home by matatu without incidence the next morning. The crackdown made our trip particularly pleasant because the stuffer was afraid to clown car our matatu, so we remained within a person or two of capacity the entire way. The quality of the roads is also remarkably better between Nairobi and Migori than it was between Nairobi and Loitokitok. They’re actually paved. The entire way. I assume it’s because of the higher population density, which is good for the roads, but bad for the wildlife sightings. So far I’ve only seen a few Thomson’s gazelles, a warthog, and an African crowned crane. A world of difference from my wildlife-packed Maasai group ranch experience. Western Kenya is all villages and shambas (Kiswahili for farms). They have tea plantations that stretch for MILES, along with a booming sugar cane empire (Sony Sugar), and the requisite fields of maize, beans, bananas, and tobacco. As the crops indicate, it’s a much more tropical climate than the semi-arid rangelands I was on before. The temperature hovers between eighty and ninety degrees most of the day with a two-hour dip in the afternoon when it thunders and pours and all that displaced topsoil goes running down the hills in great red rivers. I found the equator!

More on actually being here later...