You were just waiting for a picture of ugali, weren't you?

I fully admit that picture posts are lazy because they don’t require me to think too much about what I want to write, but I thought it might be fun to illustrate more of the things I’ve been talking about! Plus I have a few more MBs to burn off before I leave Kenya tomorrow.

A fairly typical landscape in South Nyanza province:

A very upset chameleon the kids found one day:

My bed in the volunteer room:

After we acquired a chair for our room (very exciting):

Fetching water from the borehole during the dry season:

Mercy doing her laundry:

Doing homework with the girls one evening:

Faith and I:

Loading up a piki-piki for the December holidays:

Lastly, the staple of our diet, ugali and sukuma. (Appetizing, eh?):

My flight really does leave tomorrow, which is hard to believe. I've been thinking a lot about reverse culture shock. I never thought that I would have a hard time adjusting back to a culture, or--at the very least--living conditions that I grew up with, but the first few days out of the orphanage were rocky. I'll see if I can articulate that in a future post, but I make no promises.

I'll see many of you soon. Can't wait!

Happy Faces

Today was my last day at the orphanage. I started and stopped writing several drafts of this entry, trying to sum up my experience somehow, but I think this is a case of pictures being worth more than words. I’m going to introduce you to some of the faces and personalities that I have fallen in love with. In no particular order, these are a few of my kids:

Sheilla has one of the brightest smiles in Nyanza. She’s the youngest girl at the orphanage, but it doesn’t stop her from playing the mom to the babies and younger kids from school who visit. She’s also famous for crawling onto the bench in the girls’ study room during homework time and falling asleep. (What kid wants to go to bed alone?) I carried her to her own bed more times than I can remember.

Meet Ascah. This is one of the few pictures I got of anyone that wasn’t posed. Anne thought Ascah looked too serious while she was walking, so she decided to sneak up and tickle her. We were at a regional schools sports day, so Ascah is in her school uniform. She’s in fifth grade, but she started school late, so she’s one of the older girls. The older girls are often given a lot of responsibility for the younger children, and Ascah takes on more than her fair share without being asked—washing her younger brother’s clothes by hand every night, refereeing disputes between kids, standing up for anyone she thinks is being unfairly accused, and being entrusted by the other children with their valuables.

Only the very youngest kids get out of carrying water back from the well during the dry season. Rose is a fifth grader, so she’s considered capable of making several water runs while the well is unlocked. The bucket she’s carrying is about six gallons, so it weighs around 50 lbs. The kids Rose’s size usually ask for help getting the bucket set on their heads, but after that they can carry them without spilling a drop.

This is Peter wearing a pair of cutoff shorts that I had hemmed for him that afternoon. He has a sixth sense to tell him whenever there is a camera about, so I have many, many pictures of him. He’s also one of the few kids who can take reliably good pictures if given a camera, so I designated him photographer a few times for a more “child’s eye” view.

Evans usually takes his role as one of the two oldest boys quite seriously, but when you pull out the camera, he becomes a jokester. That’s a mango pit he’s pretending to eat off Night’s head. Night, having just eaten a mango herself, doesn’t appear too concerned.

What's a people picture post without a group picture? This is Levis, Susan, Evans, and I. (Evans is actually much taller than I am.) I have hundreds more pictures and stories, so I'll try to get a few of them in print now that I have a decent internet connection.

Next time ask Auntie Anne

As volunteers, we’re not supposed to have favorite children. We’re “neutral”--like parents and Switzerland. But…we’re humans. There are some kids that we naturally get along with better than others, just like the kids sometimes prefer one of their aunties to the others. Peter is one of those kids for me. On the fourth or fifth day I was here, he asked me a question—just because he was curious—and I spent ten minutes and drew several diagrams in the dirt to explain why it’s warmer in Kenya than it is in Germany or the United States. He hasn’t stopped asking me questions since, and I love it. I love that he’s curious, engaged, and willing to ask. As many of you know, though, the problem with smart kids who ask questions is that sometimes there’s no good answer. This was one of those conversations:

Peter walked up to me with his fifth grade social studies book open in his hands, “Auntie, it says that flowers are a cash crop in Kenya. Why?”

“Because…because they…” Oh crap.

“I mean, you can’t eat them; they are just growing, and you can’t make anything with them.”

These are all very good points. “Well, but people in other parts of the world buy them because they’re pretty.” Because they’re pretty?! Oh no. “The flowers grow well in Kenya, so they grow them and cut them here, and then they fly them to Europe where they’re sold at the market to make money.” Well, that sounds like quite the luxury.

He nodded, but then…”No, Auntie, you can’t cut flowers because if you cut them, they just die very fast.”

Oh, Peter. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. “Usually that’s true, but after they cut them here, they keep them very cold when they fly them so that the flowers are still fresh when they get to the market, yeah?”

Unconvinced, but clearly too polite to say that he’s just decided that people in Europe are crazy, he answered, “Yes,” and walked away, leaving me to wonder why in the world cut flowers are a cash crop. (Notice I had cleverly avoided answering why—mostly—and instead answered how.)

The reality is that the cut-flower industry, mostly roses, in Kenya is a multi-billion dollar industry right up there with tea and coffee. (This article--http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/20/kenya-flowers-iceland-volcano--gives you an idea of just how much money is involved.) During my wildlife management studies, we drove by row upon row of greenhouses lined up along Lake Naivasha while our professors told us about the low-wage jobs and prodigious amounts of chemical pesticides that the industry was providing to the area. Lake Naivasha, the center of floriculture in Kenya, was dedicated as a Ramsar site (Google it) in 1995. The water-dependent habitats of Naivasha—specifically papyrus wetlands and yellow fever acacia forests—are especially conducive to birds, with an estimated 495 migratory or resident species passing through each year. It’s also unusual because it’s freshwater. Most of the Eastern Rift Valley lakes, including Naivasha’s famous neighbor Lake Nakuru, are saltwater. According to an IUCN document published in 2005, floriculture and horticulture farms cover approximately 50 km² of area surrounding the lake (the native papyrus shoreline is currently at 12 km²). They are virtually all irrigated from the lake and comprise an immense 50% of the approximately 63.7 million m³ of water that is drawn annually from Naivasha. Much of the rest of the water abstraction (and water pollution) is from the population boom that followed the estimated 30,000 jobs the floriculture industry is directly responsible for. Rumor has it that the demand by European markets for fair-trade and pesticide-free flowers is starting to trickle down, but fair-trade flowers still use water and land, and imagine trying to scale down or change a functioning operation that makes that much money in a country with a 2010 estimated per capita GDP of $1600. (CIA)

Of course that brief paragraph doesn’t cover a fraction of the ecological considerations, or even touch on the economics. Interestingly enough, the studies that maintain that the floriculture industry around Naivasha does not significantly affect the water table or pollute the lake are written, researched, and funded by Dutch scientists and universities. The wholesale flower markets in Amsterdam being one of the largest buyers of Kenyan-grown flowers.

One of the main focuses of our wildlife management semester at SFS was on human-wildlife conflicts. Most ten year olds in the United States would tell you that it’s wrong to kill an elephant, but if that elephant just destroyed your family’s entire subsistence farm for the growing season, it’s easy to see how that wouldn’t be a black and white issue. Floriculture strikes me the same way. Directly employing 30,000 people in a country with a 40% unemployment rate is no small feat. (CIA) On the other hand, using approximately 30 million m³ of freshwater to water flowers for export in a country that has recently and persistently been plagued by drought and famine (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/world/africa/08kenya.html) seems irresponsible.

I hope someday Peter will be able to work on a resolution.

CIA. The World Factbook. 1 March 2011. 9 March 2011. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ke.html.

IUCN/LNRA. Lake Naivasha: Local Management of a Kenyan Ramsar Site. Management review. Naivasha: IUCN Eastern African Regional Programme, Nairobi and Lake Naivasha Riparian Association, 2005.

"Russian parts..American parts...all made in Taiwan!"

We had heard good things about the Nairobi National Museum, so when we were in Nairobi in December, Anne and I decided to pay it a visit. The museum sits right off the Uhuru Highway; a main thoroughfare that is currently under construction. All of our trips to Nairobi have involved an impressive amount of time spent sitting in traffic on the Uhuru highway collecting dust from the construction site(s). On that day, we hopped out of the matatu early to avoid sitting in just such a jam. The highway is largely shade-free, so even an extra five-minute walk left us sweating and dusty when we walked in to the museum. Amid all of the traffic and dust, the Nairobi National Museum is an oasis. It’s surrounded by a botanical garden that buffers the noise and the exhaust, and shades the grounds. It’s nowhere near the scale of Central Park, but the relief of suddenly being in “nature” instead of the city is similar.

The layout of the museum reminded me a bit of the American Museum of Natural History, as one of the first exhibits is a Hall of African Mammals with a large bull elephant as the centerpiece. Actually, in this trip to Kenya that’s the closest I’ve gotten to an African elephant so far. They also have an impressive exhibit of skeletons of early humans since many of them were excavated by Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. It was amazing to stand in front of the 1.5 million year old skeleton of Turkana boy, but it wasn’t that exhibit that stuck in my head. That would have been the exhibit on toys.

In the hall dedicated to showcasing the 42 different ethnic groups in Kenya, including their traditional children’s toys, there was a single tiny display case dedicated to “modern” toys. I don’t even remember what the toy itself was, but the caption struck me. It was a simple statement that the children of Kenya had a long tradition of fashioning their own toys out of whatever was handy. The traditional toys for each tribe were often made out of wood or bone or hide, but the modern toys are commonly made out of trash. Soccer balls, for instance, are made out of many plastic bags that have been mashed into a ball and secured with a woven string net. They are remarkably durable (i.e. they don’t deflate when faced with thorns) and, as the kids often play barefoot, sting much less when kicked (or when you catch one to the face). The caption went on to say that this was a tradition that should be continued. The writer was worried that pre-fab toys were starting to rob Kenyan children of the experience of making their own. I think that’s a more pressing concern in Nairobi than it is in Stella, but the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated the writer’s point.

The toys that the kids make here ARE ingenious. They have pull cars made with plastic jugs as the bodies (turned on their sides and with one side cut off to allow for passengers), peeled sticks as the axels, and plastic lids as the wheels. They tie a string to the jug handle in front and the cars roll around just as well as anything you can buy for $9.95 at Wal-Mart. They make toy guns with sticks and rubber bands that can shoot a pen cap thirty feet. One of the boys makes tiny drum sets with tin can lids, sticks, and metal soda cap rattles. Making their own toys from scratch has all kinds of implications at the orphanage. Any given child has thirty-one brothers and sisters, so things are inevitably broken or “borrowed.” It’s a real boon for them to be able to simply make new ones with free materials. This part of Kenya also has nothing in the way of official trash collection (there’s just a designated pile on the property that the chickens pick through and then is periodically burned), so making toys out of it is an informal recycling program. It’s a lot more pleasant to have the plastic bottles used in toy cars than it is to smell them burning all day.

Materialism is a stereotypically American, or “Western” phenomenon, but it’s one thing to know it and another thing to experience the opposite of it. I brought a suitcase and a backpack full of stuff for six months. The other volunteers were surprised when I got off the plane at how little stuff I had, but over the last few years of bouncing around between the Netherlands, Kenya, New York, and Idaho, I’ve downsized to a couple of suitcases full of “essentials” that are always with me. This is the first place I’ve lived where that looks like a ridiculous amount of stuff. Even the last time I was in Kenya, I lived with thirty-three other American students, so we were surrounded by laptops, water bottles, books, sunglasses, shampoo, iPods, and many other possessions that we take for granted. When the kids here went home in December (for a month), they took everything they owned with them, and three siblings shared a duffel bag. Keep in mind that for kids in an orphanage in Kenya, they are very well off.

I’m not advocating that everyone run out and dump their things and move into a studio apartment. I like my stuff. I’m sure I’ll acquire plenty more of it in my life. I imagine, though, that I’ll spend a lot more time considering if I can make something instead of buy it, or repair something instead of replace it.

(Bonus points for the name of the movie the title comes from.)

Southpaw in the Southern Hemisphere

As many of you know, I am left-handed and I like being left-handed. This isn’t usually noticed with much more than a passing remark in the United States (unless you get me started on finding a decent pair of left-handed scissors, then I can go on about it for a while), but there’s a stronger stigma against it in Kenya, so there aren’t very many of us running around.

One of the first things that the kids noticed about me is that I eat with my left hand AND I write with my left hand. When I claimed that I couldn’t write with my right hand, they pushed a pencil into my right hand and told me that I had to try. I slowly scrawled a wobbling signature across a scrap of paper, and then switched hands and quickly signed the other side with a flourish. This was met by a chorus of “ehawas!” (one of their favorite exclamation words), and several kids picked up pencils and tried to write with their left hands too.

It’s been several months now, but the excitement has yet to go away. The kids still comment every time I pick up a pencil when I’m doing their homework with them, and just two nights ago, three of them went to the blackboard with a piece of chalk to show me how they have been practicing writing with their left hands. I’ve tried to explain that it’s not a choice, some people are just born this way, but that hasn’t stopped them from telling me that they are going learn how to write with their left hand. (Something I’ve actually tried to discourage because I’m afraid they’re going to get in trouble for it.) It’s hard for me to get a read on how strong the stigma against it is because, as respectful as we volunteers try to be, we probably make cultural faux pas fairly regularly, but they are almost never pointed out to us, and, when they are, it’s with an eye towards helping us learn the culture and do better next time. I’ve had several adults notice that I’m left-handed, but only one told me, very politely, that it was “not advisable” to use my left hand for anything.

At the immigration office in Kisumu last week, one of the clerks turned around while I was filling out my visa application and asked, “Why are all Americans left-handed?” I started laughing and said that of course we weren’t and he said, “You are! Barack Obama is left-handed and you are left-handed. You are all left-handed!” (He was saying all of this with a huge smile on his face, so I’m pretty sure he was only a little bit serious.) I pointed out that there seemed to be a correlation between good presidents and left-handedness because President Obama and President Clinton are left-handed and President Bush is right-handed. This got a huge laugh from all eight people standing around in the immigration office at 9AM on a Tuesday morning. Turns out President Bush jokes are almost universal outside of Idaho (or if you’re the Dixie Chicks).

Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post, and left-handedness vs. right-handedness has always been fascinating to me. If you’re interested in reading a good book about Lefties, I always recommend Left-Hand Turn Around the World by David Wolman.

(For the record, I’ve run in to stigmas against left-handedness in the States too.)

If anyone wants a few book recommendations...

I feel like expanding on an email I wrote to my dad a few weeks ago.

I was “warned” before I came to the orphanage that one of the biggest problems that previous volunteers have had was boredom. Specifically, boredom during the ten (yes, ten) hours of the day that the children are in school. No problem, I thought, I’ll just do what I’ve always done—read. In order to solve the problem of fitting six months worth of books in under the international baggage allowance, I purchased a NOOK—Barnes and Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle. I’m a bit of a hypocritical eReader owner. I scoffed, I continue to scoff, at the existence of such a product (and not just because I’m living somewhere with no running water).

I grew up with a PhD in English rhetoric and a librarian for parents. Our house is stuffed with books, real books, and most of them have even been read. We are a family of Readers, surrounded by a community of Readers, with an understood etiquette and culture that comes along with that. One shouldn’t dog-ear pages, but it can be forgiven if it’s a paperback and it belongs to you. If you borrow a book from someone else, it should be returned in approximately the same condition. If some disaster happens to befall the book while you’re reading it, then it is your responsibility to purchase a new copy. “Let me just finish this chapter,” is an acceptable excuse in almost any situation. Reading at meals is fine as long as you don’t spill something on your book. Reading for the entire day is not doing nothing. It’s reading. A good book is always an excellent gift option. Talking about books is always a good conversation option. A pile of books on the floor is not a mess, it’s a (much anticipated) to-do list. Spending money on books is an investment, not a waste. Growing up this way instilled a reverence in me for a well-told story, for the thrill of turning the page, for the smell of old books, for a well-made bookcase, for people who know all kinds of information, for knowing that information myself.

Keeping a collection of books on an eReader isn’t the same. That being said, it is one of the top three best items I brought to Kenya. Kenya is not a haven for book lovers. The country’s bookstores are few and far between. A person has to go to Nairobi to find a bookstore that sells more than school textbooks and the Bible. That is not even the slightest bit of an exaggeration. Even in Nairobi, most of the bookstores merely stock a collection of bestsellers from the last two or three years, a smattering of classics, and a handful of East African travel guides for good measure—a Wal-Mart style nod to literacy. The day I found a bookstore in the Yaya center in Nairobi that was run Book People-style, with books of all types stacked to the ceiling and an owner who had the entire catalog in his head, was one of my proudest moments. I even found a book that the current president of Barnard wrote that was published by Harvard University Press. It was out of my price range, but still, talk about a small world. I was so excited by my find that I promptly bought two real books, despite the metaphorical pile that exists on my NOOK. I spent the next few days pouring over Race of a Lifetime (American title: Game Change) about the 2008 presidential election. It was in the shrine-like section of the bookstore dedicated to all things Obama. When I was reading it back in Stella a couple of days later, I had the following conversation with the nurse and “head Mama” of the orphanage, who is currently studying every night for the business classes she takes at the local branch of the University of Nairobi.

Mamdogo: “Can you finish that book?”

Me: “Sure, see I’m already halfway done. It’s about how Obama won the election in the United States.”

Mamdogo: Flipping through the pages of the book, “It’s like the Bible. Me, I am afraid of such a book. If you finish this, you must tell me, in very short, how he did that.”

This is an educated woman in a very well-off Kenyan family. Her husband is a co-founder of the orphanage and is considering a run for an MP seat. It says something about the general lack of reading culture that even at the highest level of society in this area, the only substantial book that most people know is the Bible. Novels in Stella are truly, well, a novel idea. When I was reading the Diary of Anne Frank one afternoon downstairs, one of the fourth graders asked me if Anne (one of the other volunteers) had written it because that is the only Anne she knows of. When I explained what the book was about she said incredulously, “A girl?! Wrote that whole book?!”

I have never been so grateful for my education, for my books, in my life.

I spend several hours every evening with kids clamoring for my help with their homework. They have officially discovered that, unlike the non-native English speaking volunteers they’ve had before, I can read everything in their books. I can explain any English word they don’t recognize and describe how it relates to words they do know. I can do other things. I can read maps. I can look things up in my English-Swahili dictionary. I can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in my head. I understand AM and PM. I can write with my left hand. (It’s like black magic!) They don’t have any reference books outside of their textbooks, but I have a computer—with internet access—and I know how to use it. I refuse to do any part of their homework for them, but I have endless patience for explaining why and how because watching their faces when they finally understand the problem they’re trying to solve is the best part of every day.

I realized when I was helping several students with their long division last night that I have some thank-you letters to write. I was privileged enough to have many teachers in my life who were willing to sit next to me explaining, with endless patience, how a problem worked until I had my Eureka! moment. I am privileged with a family that values education so much that they were willing to make sacrifices to ensure that I received an excellent one. And they’re still always willing to send me a good book.