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.