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.

Still on the road, back in Stella tomorrow...

I’m back (almost)! I finally brought myself to leave Shela a couple of weeks ago. I was motivated by the end of the SFS semester deadline. KBC/Kimana aren’t directly accessible from Mombasa, so I needed to get back to Nairobi before I ventured down to the group ranches. We hadn’t done much besides visit the beach in Mombasa when we were there on our way to Lamu, so I spent a couple of days there on my way back. I kept to the well-worn tourist paths in Mombasa itself such as a giant former Portuguese outpost called Fort Jesus and a cement quarry that has been rehabilitated into an excellent wildlife habitat called Haller Park. I resisted the pull of Diani Beach (Mombasa’s most famous tourist/resort beach just south of the city), so I “redeemed” myself for the week I had just spent on Lamu with some more educational activities.

The Kenyan coast has a lot more cultural mixing than the rest of Kenya because of several hundred years of trading, most notably with Arabs and Indians. In contrast with most other parts of Kenya, the predominant religion is Islam. For better or worse, this means that many of the guidebooks include a warning to American tourists that their presence may not be appreciated, especially if the United States is "escalating" or "engaging" in conflicts in the Middle East (read: bombing Muslim countries). I didn’t run in to any of this personally, nor did I feel anything but welcome on Lamu, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about what being American means in the rest of the world.

I always think it’s interesting to hear what impressions people from other countries have of the United States or Americans. The most common response (from a Kenyan) to my answer that I come from the United States is, “OBAMA!” but sometimes the answers are more colorful than that. For instance, the aeronautics engineer from India has traveled all over the world and been in the States several times. When I told him what country I was from, he said, “I don’t believe you. You’re too quiet to be an American.” I laughed, and Anne and Tabea asked him what exactly he meant by that. He said he meant just that, “That I’ve never met an American who needs a microphone. They’re loud.” When he found out I went to school in New York City, he said, “Now I know you’re lying.” It has been said that it is bad to perpetuate stereotypes, but sometimes they’re just so darn funny. Which is my way of excusing myself for telling a few more stories…

I was chatting with Chief, the manager/chef/magic man of my guest house in Shela when another man came up and sat down with us. He said that his name was Abib, but he also goes by F.B.I.—“flamboyant brain implosion.” Your guess is as good as mine. He said that he had been working in the tourism industry in Kenya for over twenty years. I had been discussing what Chief could make me for dinner and how much I was going to pay for it. He proposed 400 shillings (about 5 dollars) for banana pancakes, chai, and fruit. That was less than I would have paid at a restaurant and seemed like a perfectly reasonable price to me. I handed Chief the money, and Abib, who had been watching, laughed and said, “I love Americans. If you give them a fair price, they never argue; they just pay. Europeans fight over every shilling. I think there’s something humanitarian about [the Americans’ willingness to spend money].” I still can’t quite decide if he was calling us gullible, but I don’t think so. I think he was calling us generous.

One of my favorite moments was with a guy at the bus ticket counter in Lamu. I had been sitting in a British ex-pat café across the street reading the newspaper and the “latest” European magazines (i.e. less than a year old). The newspaper headlines were all about the leaked diplomatic cables from the United States. The articles were not particularly favorable towards the U.S., specifically certain members of the State Department. There is a wall in Lamu town near the market that has a whole bunch of anti-American/pro al-Qaeda graffiti and posters on it. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t make me nervous unless I just read a headline article in a Kenyan newspaper trashing the U.S. government. I walked out of the café feeling conspicuous and a bit upset about Julian Assange’s cavalier attitude towards leaking potentially damaging or destabilizing information regarding international relations, but I had to buy a bus ticket, so off I went. The bus company I rode to Lamu with is called TSA and all of their signs in the Lamu office are in Arabic. I walked in and asked to reserve a seat for the next day. The guy across the counter was Muslim and he pulled out a sheet of paper and a pencil and asked what country I was from. I sighed and said, “I’m from the United States.” He asked if I was from Chicago. I said, “No. I’m from a state called Idaho, but my dad is from Chicago.” He nodded rapidly and said, “Idaho! Idaho! I think I’ve heard of that. There is this show called American Idol. I think one of the singers was from Idaho. There are a lot of very good singers on that show, and they come from all over the United States! Do you know the show American Idol?” His name was Amir and he gave me 100 shillings off of the price of my ticket and asked for my phone number.

Guidebooks are useful. A guidebook recommended Shela, which was the best vacation decision I made. But blanket statements about a place or a culture don’t get anyone very far. If I had just the newspaper or the guidebook to tell me about Lamu and Kenya, I wouldn’t recognize it as the country I’m in. It’s the Amirs and the Nihals and the Abibs who can make the whole world feel like home.

Journey to Lamu

We started in Nairobi last Friday and took the night train to Mombasa. We all agreed that “Night Train to Mombasa” sounded like an old Hollywood romance starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand. Well, Anne and Tabea don’t know who either of those people are, so they agreed that it sounded like a romance and I supplied the rest. I’m pretty sure that the Kenyans haven’t done anything to the train station since the British pulled out. The map of Kenya in the ticket office/waiting room was from 1961. The train takes eleven hours or so and included breakfast. There were lots of other tourists around, and I hit the trifecta when I sat down in the waiting room next to two Dutch girls and an American travelling around together. I talked to the American for a while, and then turned to the Dutch girls and started talking to them in Dutch. This got several raised eyebrows, a snort of laughter from Anne and Tabea, and one, “I guess we’ll have to be careful about what we say.” If only I could do that more often in Swahili…

Anyway, the night train was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in Kenya. Anne, Tabea, and I got a sleeping berth all to ourselves with four beds in it. An attendant brings bedding a couple of hours after the train leaves the station, so after socializing for a while with an aeronautics engineer from India, we turned in early. We woke up while the train was passing through Tsavo National Park. We didn’t see any animals, but we had a lovely breakfast with a couple of older British ladies before heading back to our car and discovering that we could open our windows all the way. We spent the rest of the train ride standing on our seats and sticking our heads out the window. We tried to gauge the distance to our destination by the prevalence of palm trees and the strength of ocean smell in the air. I would almost recommend the train to Mombasa more than the city itself, but that might just be my dislike of the climate there. Below: Morning on the night train.

Saying that Mombasa is hot is like saying that William Hung can’t sing or that Andrea Yates was a bad mother. All technically true, but poorly descriptive. Mombasa feels like everything I’ve heard about living in Phoenix or central Florida in the summer, but without air conditioning. We tried going to the beach, but the reef causes the ocean floor to slope down at about one foot every half mile. We were there at low tide which meant that walking out to the water took ten minutes. It took another fifteen minutes of wading to get to water that came up to our knees, but it was water that had been sitting in equatorial sun for the entire morning—probably around 100°F. It was our first trip to the Indian Ocean, though, so we splashed around and then found a restaurant with cool drinks and some shade.

Anne and I went out to dinner that night at a cafeteria-style restaurant with wireless internet (!) that served American, Indian, and Kenyan foods. I was shoveling my way through a giant piece of triple chocolate cake a la mode, when our Indian friend from the train the night before came in to say hi. I had had great fun the night before asking him questions about how planes worked and which airline companies had good or bad reputations in the industry. He said that he got stopped for questioning every time he flew into the United States because his last name is Mohammed and he works in the airline industry. Sample question from TSA, “How much do you know about planes?” Sample answer from Nihal, “A lot. It’s my job.” Hahaha. Oh, TSA, I feel safer already. Needless to say, it was fun to run into him again.

We left Mombasa early the next morning on the bus bound for Mokowe, where we got a boat transfer to Lamu. The bus ride was cheap, but long. I sat next to the window, so the first half of the ride I got baked, and then it started raining, and it turned out the roof leaked above my seat. Fortunately, Shela and her ocean views and rooftop terraces have been making up for it ever since. Below: Camels on the beach and an ocean view with a dhow.

Alternatives to winter

There is no way to tell this story without making everyone living above 45°N very angry, so I’m just going to do it—like ripping off a really sticky band-aid. I am in a tropical beach paradise. At some point in my life I decided that spending my vacation money to go to tropical beaches would be frivolous, possibly even wasteful. I should go to Places With Activities. A trip should be about restaurants, museums, things to learn, people I know, etc.

Stuuuuuuupid!

I invite anyone who comes to the same conclusion that I have to join me on Lamu. Specifically Shela village on Lamu Island. The cost is airfare to Nairobi, train fare to Mombasa, bus fare to Mokowe, boat fare to Lamu, several itchy mosquito bites on the walk to Shela, and the knowledge that you will resent living anywhere else on the planet for the rest of your life. (Seriously. The first thing you see when you get off the boat—which just hops a channel from the mainland, no border crossing necessary—is the Lamu immigration office. The only other two I know of are in major population and international traffic centers like Nairobi and Kisumu.)

Anne, Tabea, and I got here four nights ago and decided to hike to Shela rather than stay in Lamu town proper. Our Lonely Planet guide recommended it, and after the crush of humanity in Nairobi and Mombasa, we were feeling like a little seclusion and quiet relaxation. We had also picked out a recommended guest house (hotel here means restaurant), and Tabea negotiated the price down to 1200 shillings per night for the three of us. That means that for four nights in an Arabic-Swahili style suite with two bedrooms, three beds, one balcony, one bathroom, one kitchen, electricity, running water, a fan in each bedroom, and a rooftop terrace, I paid $20. You’re thinking about joining me now, aren’t you? What if I told you there is not a single motorized vehicle to be found in Shela? All transportation is done by donkey or dhow (traditional Swahili sailboat). Okay, there are a few motor boats, but they’re on the water, so they don’t count.

It’s about 85°F here every day and the clouds burn off around 10AM. The public beach on the island starts just south of Shela and goes on for miles. There are no towns after Shela, so there are dunes and palm trees on one side and the clear blue Indian Ocean on the other. Late November/early December is still low (tourist) season in Lamu, so it takes about five minutes to find at least a half mile of beach to yourself. The equatorial sun limits the amount of swimming time for all but the most leather-skinned wazungu, but it doesn’t matter when all of the restaurants offer half liters of fresh mango juice for $1, fresh banana PANCAKES, and vegetable samosas that are to die for. I have basically not stopped eating since I got here. I think the Germans are starting to worry that they won’t be able to fit me on the boat back.

If those of you currently experiencing winter in the north are still speaking to me, I’ll post more about Lamu (and the night train to Mombasa!) in a couple of days. I’m coming back here in April when I travel again, so let me know if you want to be in on that trip. J

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...

Last night

So for the last month and a half or so we've been working on presents for the staff. That might not mean much to anyone but us, but the entire student group donated money and LOTS of time to make/buy presents for all 26 staff members. We embroidered names and nicknames on hats, shirts, aprons, and lab coats. We bought new cleats for Sipaya (the ones he has don't fit so he can't wear socks or lace them--picture playing soccer with that). We made Sarah a video and got her a gift certificate to the closest thing to a Starbucks Kenya has to offer. We decorated mugs and filled Okello's with candy and beef jerky (two of the food vices he picked up while he was in grad school at the U of I). My friend Haley drew AMAZING birds all over Kiringe's lab coat (he loves birds). The list goes on. We did all of this work on top of finishing DR and wrapping up the semester. I can't tell you how much I was looking forward to tonight. Megan and I ran all over campus last night posting formal invitations all over office, garage, generator, kitchen, and bathroom doors. I even posted one on the door of the TV room where they were having a staff meeting without them noticing. We rearranged the chumba and practically held them in their chairs (most of them, especially the ones who don't speak English don't usually stay for RAP after dinner) until we started the presentations. It was two hours of cheering and gift-giving (and lots of girls crying). Apparently no other group of students has ever done this for the staff--gotten individual presents for every one of them. I can't imagine why because these guys bend over BACKWARDS for us all semester and could not have taken better care of us. Not only that, but I have had irreplaceable conversations with many of them about the U.S. and Kenya and conservation and life. Megan and I spearheaded a lot of this and at the beginning we were afraid other students weren't going to pitch in enough money or want to contribute their artistic talents but literally everyone did something. I was so proud of this group and so happy watching the smiles on the staff's faces as everyone got something. It was the perfect, perfect, perfect end to the semester.

We're leaving tomorrow morning and I already have plans to see SAM Sarah and Manuel in the Netherlands. Nicole's boyfriend goes to school at the U of I, so I will see her during winter break and Haley is COMING TO THE FLEETWOOD MAC CONCERT with me in March at Madison Square Garden.