Wale wali wa Liwala wala wali wa Liwala wao

(A Kenyan tongue twister)
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I hate kids. I didn't really like kids when I came to Kenya, and now I hate them. In all fairness, I think I'm just a little bitter and frustrated and weary of being a mzungu in a place where mzungus can hold an entire village at rapt attention for half an hour by simply sitting in a chair. And kids bear the brunt of that frustration, because they're small, dusty, snot-dribbled, boil-pocked, and make these high-pitched, nasal oinking noises that go like, "HOWAH YOO?" After ten weeks it's every Peace Corps trainee's least favorite greeting from the locals. Although arguably, the matatu touts hissing
TSSTTTSSSTTTSSSTTTZZZ to get your attention may rank higher by virtue of really having no cultural equivalent in America in rudeness factor.

If regular-sized locals are irritating in their ability to stare without shame, form a veritable gauntlet of greetings along every road I walk in town so that I've responded "Jambo" literally a hundred times by the time I get home, and talk about you in the local dialect right in front of you, somehow the kids are a hundred times worse. All they want is your attention, and if it's negative attention, even better. They don't care what their words mean, because you're just their toy to manipulate in any way they can. So to respond to them only feeds their taunting, and to ignore them makes you bitter.

Kids here are fast learners, which is how every one of the 300 kids at my host brother's primay school knows my name, and I am met with a swarm of green and pink school uniforms spilling out of the classrooms towards me, oinking, "Jahs-tee-nah! Jahs-tee-nah! Jahs-tee-nah! Jahs-tee-nah! Jahs-tee-nah!" everytime I walk past the school grounds. This has always been fine with me since having my name oinked at me is preferable to having "mzungu" oinked at me. Last week I made the mistake of yelling at a kid who oinked,
"Japanese!" at me as I was coming out of the post office. I turned around and said, "Don't be rude." So naturally, being a 6-year-old brat, he said it again. "I said don't be rude," I said, walking threateningly towards him. "I'm not Japanese and you're being rude." He and his friends made some oinking sounds that resembled laughter and ran away.

A few days later a different kid, wearing a uniform from the same school as the first kid, oinked, "Japanese!" when he saw me at the post office. I pedalled slowly towards him on my bike and said, "Do you want to get your ass kicked?" He and his sister ran away, but it was too late. Five minutes later a pickup truck piled with kids - all wearing the same school uniform as the first two kids - drove by. One of them oinked, "Japanese!"

I fucking hate kids, especially the ones wearing those red school uniforms with the red-and-white checked shirts. They're just the right size and shape so that I can pedal up behind them, stick my foot out and smack them in their tiny dusty little butts. But frankly, I know I'm never going to do it because in Kenyan culture kids are considered a blessing, so some bitter mzungu going around kicking kids on her bike is only going to rouse a lynch mob of angry parents. Instead, in a few days there will be 300 kids from the primary school with the red uniforms screaming "Japanese!" at any mzungu who looks like they're from East Asia.

I am leaving Kitui next week and moving to my permanent site in Western Kenya, but I have to offer my sincerest apologies to all Asian American Peace Corps trainees who arrive in Kitui going forward, because they are the ones who will suffer the consequences of my stupidity with kids. I wonder how many shillings it is to get one's tubes tied?

At Least I'm Not Sniffing Glue in Nairobi

(Subject line courtesy of Rich's twin brother.)
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Journal entry July 17, 2005, Sunday. 9:51pm.

Back in Kitui. Was nice to be in Nairobi as an independent traveller rather than a ward of the Peace Corps. It is different living in a country in the villages and communities rather than traveling through
and seeing all the attractions that the government wants foeigners to see and barely interacting with the realities of the people who actually live there. I think experiencing Kenya from both sides really makes me aware now of how much I didn't see as a traveller on holiday in Malaysia and China and especially Thailand. It makes me laugh everytime I read my Kenya Lonely Planet and compare how it's represented in the guidebook to how the real Kenya is that I've seen so far. Even the difference between hearing from our Kenyan trainers and actually talking to people in the communities - Erin's mama's womens group, my supervisor at my future site, the girls at the secondary school who have the AIDS club - or seeing the glue-sniffing kids and homeless people with gaping open wounds passed out in cenral Nairboi is really a step closer and more real and tragic.

I'm now beginning to understand how photojournalists in war zones or other places rife with death and destruction can just shoot pictures and seem not to do anything to help the people suffering before their eyes. The tragedy is overwhelming and I really fight against all urges not to try to do something and just walk away. I am realizing that it's not my role to save all these people, and the reality is that I can't. I could have given that street kid money today in Nairobi but five more would have run up to us, and giving just reinforces the idea that foreigners all have money and they are the answer to the kids' problems. Ugh. I feel like i'm just trying to justify my heartlessness now. I can't believe how desperate that girl's grip was today. When I tried to pry her hand away from Sean's, she just latched onto mine instead, with a death grip. I don't doubt she is suffering and desperate in ways most American will never know. Homeless people in the U.S. don't look at you with the terror and hopelessness that that girl had in her eyes. When we passed the guy with the giant open wound ("I'm guessing the white part is bone," Sean said.) I started imagining myself being the bleeding heart hero - kneeling down next to him, speaking in a comforting voice, dressing the wound - and then realized that even if I had my first aid kit handy and was willing to break all Peace Corps rules about using our med kit to treat others - really, would that one dressing healing a six-inch chunk of missing flesh? And then wouldn't the mob that would then descend upon me begging for meds for their own ailments end up trampling me deep into the cracks of the sidewalks of Nairobi? It's not my role to rescue random people here, but isn't there some good Samaritan philosophy that says that if I can then I should try?

I walk past so much everyday without batting an eye, most of the time barely feeling any guilt anymore, because I've resigned myself - maybe since the day I arrived - to the idea that I can't save the world. Ugh. Justifying my passivity and inaction again. I still think about the woman who stopped me on Mombasa Rd and asked for money to feed her kids. Saying no here is so different from saying no in America. It feels so much more heartless.

On a lighter note, during my future site visit last week I saw: flamingos, zebras, some type of antelope or gazelle, that iridescent blue bird, some crazy crested cranes, werid gray storks, snowy cranes, and black monkey, a bunch of baboons and a giant cow at the girls' school. At one point it looked at me and said, "Yum, that mzungu looks tasty. I want to eat her." That cow didn't get to be that big from eating just grass and maize. There were some mzungus in that belly and I heard them knocking to get out. "Hodi! Hodi!" they said. (Hodi="knock, knock")

Ukimwi ni ukosefu wa kinga mwilini = AIDS is a lack of

Hello everyone,

I was going to post this to my blog but the geniuses at Google seem only to be able to design websites that work when you have a good internet connection. So hopefully one day in the next two years I'll be able to post to my blog again, but for now I'll have to spam your inboxes with 45K text messages.

I am in the gleaming metropolis of Kisumu now, wrapping up a week visiting my future site, meeting my supervisor and colleagues, and familiarizing myself with people and resources in the community. I will be posted to a rural town in the Rift Valley of western Kenya, working at a VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) center. The VCT provides counseling and HIV testing, but I will mostly be doing community outreach
and education on AIDS, malaria, and how to avoid eating poop. The area is lush and cool, with rolling hills carpeted with velvety tea plantations. It looks a lot like the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, for those of you who received postcards from me while I was there. For those who have asked about visiting me, January is the driest and hottest month, which means about 85 degrees with a light sprinkling of rain
everyday. Oct-Nov are rainy, as are Apr-May. In the Rift Valley, rainy season means lots of mud, and currently my town is only accessible via a dirt road. Right now it's winter so the weather is really pleasant, and at night I sometimes even bust out the fleece. I am near the Kakamega Rainforest (seven different kinds of monkeys, rare birds) and not too far from Lake Victoria, Kisumu, and Mt. Elgon.

I know I told some people I'd be disappointed if I went to the Peace Corps and had hot water and electricity, but you know what? I HAVE HOT WATER AND ELECTRICITY (except on Mondays)!!! Who needs to feel like a ruff-n-tumble granola girl when instead I can buy a fridge and laptop to watch DVDs and store MP3s and digital pix? It is in the same compound as the town hospital so it is gated, guarded and my neighbors are nurses. I have a shamba (garden) that I'm hoping to grow spinach, tomatoes and pineapples in, and I'm thinking about getting chickens for eggs, a cat to chase down mice and cucarachas, and maybe a dog. I even saw some Chinese people paving the main road leading into town. So, in summary, all are welcome to stay with me at my bucolic pastoral home. I have a spare room, flush toilet, a choo for those who prefer to squat, and a yoga mat. Karibu nyumbani yangu! (Welcome to my home).

Before I came here I told everyone that I was going to come back to the U.S. with a Kenyan runner in tow, and guess what? My site is in the land of the Nandi, the tribe that a lot of Kenyan runners come from. I've already seen a couple people jogging around town and yes, they are fast.

I wonder if learning Swahili has actually improved my Chinese because everytime I try to think of how to say something in Swahili, I end up thinking of how to say
it in Chinese. It doesn't help that "ni" means "I" in Swahili and "you" in Chinese. "Si" is a negation in Swahili and means "yes" in Spanish. "Tu" means "we" in
Swahili and "you" in French. "Tosha" means "enough" in Swahili and "thank you" in Taiwanese. In Swahili, "dada" means sister, not father, and "kaka" means brother, not poop. Fortunately the Spanish "mesa" and Swahili "meza" both mean the same thing, table. "Yeye" means he or she in Swahili and grandfather in Chinese. You form the past tense with "li" in Swahili, with "le" in Chinese. The Kambas (the tribe in Kitui) confuse their "r"s and "l"s just like the Chinese, which is how I ended up thinking for the longest time that there was a lock near Kitui marking some
historical event.

My supervisor and co-workers took me to see some of the public health organizations in my community, including the public health office, dispensary and an AIDS Club at one of the girl's secondary schools (which, incidentally, could really use a less
stigmatizing name). I was also accosted by a local pastor two days in a row, who kept asking if I had decided to be saved. This is a conversation that I've already had with other pastors in Kenya, and it's always some variation of this:

"Have you decided to be saved?"

"No, not since you asked me yesterday."

"Why?"

"I don't go to church. I don't practice Christianity."

"You don't pray?"

"No."

"Is it because you have everything you want in life? Isn't it? Because you are American so you have everything. Money..."

"I don't have money." (You idiot.)

"Just let me ask you, let me ask you this. You have money, you have food, you have clothes so you don't have to pray to God because you think you don't need anything else, isn't it?"

I said, "You don't pray to God because you want something," (you idiot), "you pray because you are grateful for what you have."

"Ah, so you are grateful because you have everything you want."

"I'm grateful for everything I have, and I don't think prayer is for asking God for more things."

"Ah, so you do pray!"

"I don't practice a religion. I will not decide to be saved today or ever in the next two years."

"Ah, well, we shall see each other, then. My home is over there. Come over for tea sometime."

Christianity in Kenya is at once aggressive, threatening, and manipulative, and yet amicably forgetful ("What religion are you?" "I told you yesterday..." "Sure, karibu kwa chai - come over for tea.") But one thing is for sure, people can't grasp the concept of not practicing a formal, organized religion. Damn those British colonial missionaries.

Off to buy a bus ticket back to Nairobi. Plan to stay at one of the backpacker hostels in Nairobi tommorrow night, to check out how my traveling brothers and
sisters live, instead of staying at one of the overpriced Peace Corps-endorsed hotels in the mzungu ghetto. Will take notes for those of you who plan to stop in Nairobi on your way to visit me. Heheheh.

Tutaonana badaye!

Swahili, toilet water and supangett

This morning it suddenly struck me as a modern day miracle that the water we use to flush our shit down the toilet in the U.S. is drinkable. In the last six weeks all my ideas about water have been seriously realigned. Yesterday we visited a village that is building a well with a water pump. Before the well, people would have to walk 2-3 hours one way to fetch water during the dry season, and one hour when there's water in the river. If the family didn't have a donkey, they could only bring back one jerrycan (20 liters) of water in one trip; with a donkey they could carry 80 liters. For the first couple of weeks it bothered me that some nights I go to bed smelling like rice or ugali (a pasty dough made with maize flour and water) because my host mama prepares my bathwater with the same water she uses to wash the sufuriya (coooking pot) after dinner. But these days, as long as I know the water has been boiled and treated with purification chemicals, it doesn't matter what color it is or what's floating in it.

Today we took a mock ACTFL, which is the language proficiency test we have to pass in order to continue as a volunteer after pre-service training. My Swahili is improving, and I think in the last week I've made huge leaps in vocabulary and grammar competencies. I can now tell all the language teachers that I drink like a fish (Ninakunywa pombe kama samaki), that they bore the hell out of me (Unaniboo), and that ten shillings for an avocado is a ripoff (Ovakado ni shilingi kumi? Ghali sana!).

Swahili is a strange language. Basically you conjugate verbs, adjectives and adverbs to agree with whatever class of noun you are modifying. You create meaning by adding prefixes, infixes and suffixes to verb roots. If you remove all prefixes and suffixes from certain verbs, you realize that the root word is a single letter. So, the verb "to be" is "w," "to have" is "n," "to eat" is "l," and "to give" is "p." In reality you'd never use any of these words in their root form, but it's funny to think of it that way.

Tommorrow our trainers announce our site placements. This is where we will be posted for the next two years digging wells, shoveling chicken and goat shit, talking about condoms and encouraging people wash their hands after using the choo. We are just over halfway through our pre-service training, but I already know I'm going to miss my homestay a lot, despite the fact that all the kids smell like pee and are covered in dust and snot. Once we get to our sites, we are pretty much the only mzungu for miles, and for the first three months we have been specifically instructed to "do nothing." This is the Peace Corps' way of forcing us to get to know how our communities operate and what their public health needs are instead of crashing through the village trying to convert everyone to clean and healthy mzungu ways on day one.

Well tonight I am making spaghetti for my host family. I took a big risk and asked my host mama to buy ground beef for the meat sauce. I am curious and mad nervous to see what the Kenyan version of ground beef is. When I told my host parents I was making spaghetti, they said in their Kenyan hick accents, "Oh, supangett? Somebody tell me mzungu like supangett but I never try. So I am happy for supangett." I saw a menu at one of the local restaurants and discovered that indeed, the Kenyan word for spaghetti is "spangetti."

Will let you know how the supangett turns out.

Translation of Blog Description

The Swahili blurb below my blog title says, "I am a public health advisor for HIV/AIDS and water sanitation in Kenya. But I can't make chapati or hand wash clothes or pound maize because I'm a total mzungu. Oh well."

Post Office Secrets

Hey everyone,

Well I don't know how I can express how much it means to a Peace Corps volunteer to get mail (thanks Mom & Dad, Alyssa, Pat McDaniel and Sarah!!! You're heroes!! Nandita and Nick, I have not received your letters yet, will keep you posted when I do), so I wanted to include more info on sending mail to Kenya, from a briefing session we had yesterday.

1. The 1-2 items per envelope is a rule of thumb I suggest so I don't get charged high customs, but I've been told that for the first three months I'm here, I'm not charged customs for packages I receive. Which means you can send LOTS of stuff to me between now and August 15 and I don't get charged the crazy $20-$75 or more just to retrieve it from the post office.

2. Other ways to avoid high customs charges:
* When you declare what you're sending, write "educational materials" instead of whatever it really is. Also don't declare a high value for it as the charges are higher for stuff that is worth more. They tend not to put high charges on "educational materials", but they like to tax food (especially if they've never seen it before) and electronic-related items like batteries.
* Write "Jesus is watching you," "Jesus loves the honest and righteous" or some other ominous Christian message on the outside to deter mail employees from
stealing the contents.

I am in Nairobi for the weekend, celebrating July 4th at the U.S. Embassy and looking forward to eating an actual hot dog with actual ketchup instead of the weird Peptang stuff they have here. Hope everyone is well!