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.