FAQ: Are there other Peace Corps Volunteers in your community?

No. I'm the only mzungu in my village except for the Chinese road crew. The
nearest PCV is about an hour away. Yesterday my associate Peace Corps
director, a Kenyan and second to head honcho in Peace Corps Kenya, came to
visit my site. He had with him a guest from Peace Corps Washington and boy
did I ever unleash a barrage of pent-up American small talk on him. I didn't
realize how long it has been since I've talked to an American who lives in
America. And how different it is from talking to an American who has been in
Kenya for four months. Lookout Kroll, you'll be the first in a few weeks,
unless I cross paths with some unfortunate tourists soon.

Hope

Mungu akipenda - God Willing - runs far deeper in Kenyan culture than just a
casual tack-on to a farewell. "See you tommorrow, mungu akipenda." The way
Kenyans cling to hope and faith in God or fate can strike an impatient
American as being naive and foolish.

When I talk to Kenyan friends about how deeply corruption is entrenched int
he community, the response I get is, "God's way will prevail eventually," or
"Leave it to God to decide." I keep pushing people to act - to speak out
against corruption, to hold leaders accountable for their actions and to
question things that appear shady or that are just non-transparent - but
this is a non-confrontational culture and showing respect is often more
important than asserting yourself.

So instead my colleagues nod enthusiastically and then say, "Justina, you're
the best person to confront them. You do it." And they are both right and
wrong. Somewhat right, because as a foreigner I can get away with being
direct and conforming to social norms, and pretend that I don't know better.
But wrong, because the mzungu being the spokesperson for the Crackdown on
Corruption isn't sustainable (who will speak out when I leave?), and already
the people with things to hide are hiding harder, gathering secretly and
whispering, "Don't tell Justina because she'll ask questions." It goes
against most of my instincts at this point, but I wonder if there is a more
culturally acceptable way to approach this - meaning less direct, less
confrontational and less vocal. The corrupt take notice when I speak out,
but they don't take action. Well, only to do a better job of hiding from the
mzungu watchdog.

I feel like part of the reason various leaders continue to steal, lie, bribe
and cheat is because they know their community won't confront them. It's
that simple. So when Kenyans tell me that God will decide and that He'll
reward the righteous or whatever it is, my first reaction is to get
impatient. I want to say, in a loud, un-Kenyan voice, "Not if you don't get
off your ass and do something about it, you fool."

But there's a part of me that sees virtue in their hope and seeming blind
faith that some cosmic justice will eventually be served, that the karma pot
will evenutally dole out what each person deserves and reclaim its dues from
those who owe. Maybe the virtue is in what it reveals about how Kenyans have
survived hardship. Hope and faith in a better tommorrow, mungu akipenda, is
a coping mechanism, one that is comparatively underdeveloped in Americans,
because most of us have never had to coexist as intimately with loss,
disappointment, delayed gratification or no gratification at all as Africans
have for centuries. Hope is perhaps the only thing many Africans have, and
at least no one can tell them it doesn't exist. How can you disprove the
existence of hope? It's the only thing someone can't take away from you.

Yes, the apparent powerlessness to effect change that many Kenyans feel is
frustrating and at times baffling - why don't they just SAY something? But I
know the answer is more complex than I can understand after being here only
four months. It's ignorance, illiteracy, culture, poverty and much more, but
arranged in a psychological algorithm different from anything I'd ever
expect. At least I've learned this much so far - reality is not the equation
you were taught in school or the Africa you pictures after perusing the
guidebook. Hopefully over time I'll come to understand what it really is a
bit better. Mungu akipenda.

Nothing Much Has Happened Since Yesterday...

Dry season is here. It hasn't rained in four days, and the roads that used
to be brown ankle-deep swamps are light yellow and hard as bricks. And
dusty. The lush valleys filled with tea and bananas are now lush valleys
filled with dust, tea, and bananas. A week ago I was wishing for dry season
so I could stop scraping mud off everything I own. Now I'm wishing for rainy
season so I can stop staggering through town blind with dust in my eyes. And
so I can stop arriving home from work a lighter, dustier shade of brown. But
at least my clothes have started drying and mold has stopped growing on my
bookshelf.

I got back from Kisumu yesterday afternoon and realized that my cooking gas
was gone. I had borrowed the cylinder from the hospital and had to give it
back on Saturday, but since I took off out of town I forgot all about
arranging for Sunday dinner upon my return. So I had no way to cook or take
a (warm) bath, which are my two primary activities these days. I ended up
borrowing a jiko (ceramic-lined charcoal stove) from my neighbors and
entertained the kids by stir frying green beans - apparently an exotic
vegetable only found in large cities like Kisumu. One of the boys kept
telling me that I forgot to "take the cover off the beans." And I chatted
with my neighbor, a history teacher at the school, about AIDS and
"immorality" in Africa. And of course he hit me up for a visa to the U.S.
All in all, losing my cooking gas wasn't such a bad thing except for the big
black burnt spot it left on the grass. And my co-workers and I spent half
the morning hunting around town for a replacement, so if all goes well I'll
be cooking tonight, and if all doesn't go well I'll be eating raw tomatoes
for dinner.

Useful Kiswahili

First, a shout out to my peeps in Houston. Hope you are still afloat. I just came out of an Indian restaurant where they had CNN on, which I think may be a minor miracle in itself. Footage from Hurricane Rita looks bad but not as bad as Katrina. But we'll see how things unfold. Am praying for the best. (Praying? Has Kenya turned me into a prayer?)

So I continue to be a bit obsessive about foreign languages, so here is another rambling about Kiswahili. Most Peace Corps volunteers have a collection of useful Kiswahili phrases that they bust out on a regular basis. There's the standard "sawa sawa" (fine, okay) because it just rolls off the tongue, or "pole sana" (very sorry) because it's useful in a variety of situations.

"Bwana" (mister, a polite form of address for men) is a handy way to politen even the most obnoxious demands. "That's a total ripoff, bwana. I'm not paying." This is also true of "tafadhali" (please), which no self-respecting Kenyan ever uses. Someone even told me that tafadhali and asante (thank you) are associated with begging. But Kiswahili sounds really blunt and demanding when translated directly into English, so tacking on a tafadhali, even though it marks you as a hopeless mzungu, lets you get away with a lot more. "Get lost, tafadhali," makes you feel less like an insensitive boar when you're running away from street kids lunging for your chocolate eclair.

"Kwa sababu..." (because...) and "inategemea" (it depends...) should be in every educator's repertoire both for their meaning and for their pleasant rhythmic quality, while being able to distinguish between "baada ya" (after) and "badala ya" (instead of) can earn you a few laughs at the bar: Tusker beer's slogan is "Tusker baada ya kazi" - Tusker after work. A Peace Corps volunteer's slogan after a crap week at site: "Tusker badala ya kazi" - Tusker instead of work.

"Ngoja" (wait) and "bado" (not yet) are useful for those bus rides when the driver starts pulling out of the parking lot and your friend is still in the pit latrine.

My personal favorite: "hakuna nafasi" (no room) because it has two very specific uses: to tell someone you really, honestly can't eat anymore ugali (hakuna nafasi kwa tumbo - no room in stomach) and to protest the 40th person trying to get onto your 15-person matatu. It can also mean no opportunity or no spare time, which is a good way to get out of doing something you don't want to do. Speaking of matatus, I used to confuse "funga" (to close) and "fungua" (to open)...until I started taking matatus in rural areas where the 15-person maximum capacity is rarely enforced. Forty people packed eyeball to eyeball in a matatu, emitting that charming Kenyan body odor, taught me real fast how to say, "Fungua dirisha! Fungua dirisha!" Open the window! Open the window!

Translation of New Blog Caption

"Ukijenga moto kwa kumpa mtu, yeye atahisi joto kwa usiku mmoja. Ukimwasha mtu kama moto, yeye atahisi joto mpaka maisha ya mwisho."

This is my attempt to translate a slogan that has recently become dear to my heart, especially after a rough week at site. You've seen it before: Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

[Close with evil laugh.]

Bananaless in Kisumu

Mailbag: Asante sana Elise, Eric and Amy! Who says letter-writing is a lost art? Just want y'all to know that Nigel puking all over Amy's floor made my co-worker laugh like I've never seen him laugh, which just goes to show that dogs make the best cross-cultural ambassadors. That same co-worker's face lights up everytime he sees Christian messages on my mail - especially Elise's dead Christ on the cross. I have to stop bursting his bubble by explaining that my friends are just being sacriligious. Also asante sana to Patrick for a THIRD bag of peanut M&Ms, teabags
(Earl Grey is paradise in English breakfast tea country) and sample shampoos.


So it's another weekend escape to the big city for email, cold beer and fried chicken. Also I'm looking forward to washing my hair, a chore that I've started putting off for places where water comes out of the wall above your head. And I've been instructed not to eat bananas while I'm here in Kisumu unless I want to be stoned by an angry crowd. Why? Because the whole country is fiercely divided on the upcoming consitutional referendum, which Kenyans will get to vote on on November 21. Hm, sounds a little like...Iraq?

Anyway, NARC, the ruling party led by President Kibaki, has drafted a new constitution that supposedly contains a multitude of reforms designed to crack down on corruption. In reality the new constitution is just as disappointing as the old one, containing hundred of new and controversial propositions that make it impossible for a reasonable voter to agree with the entire document. Yet voters only have two choices: Yes, adopt the new constitution, or No, reject it and keep the existing one whose contents suck so much that it was the reason people demanded the constitutional redraft in the first place. Like in Iraq, there was a big uproar about a month ago because it looked like the government wasn't going to make the draft publicly available and people would end up voting for something they had never even read. But Kenya came through eventually, distributing copies to even remote rural constituencies like mine, and they are even offering "civic education" classes to educate the masses about what's in the draft.

Oh, yeah, bananas. So the various members of Parliament and other politicians have already begun campaigning across the country to gain support for their side. Those that want to vote Yes have adopted the banana as their symbol, while the Nos have adopted the orange. At campaing rallies people wave the fruit corresponding to the side they support. My friend Mugah said, "Look at how silly we Africans are. Bananas and oranges of all things." I didn't tell him that AMericans use elephants and donkeys. Anyway, Kisumu is a heavily No camp (oranges) and rumors abound that people here have already been stoned for eating bananas in public, and that banana vendors are being driven out of town by No supporters. The matatu that I took into town this morning had an orange skewered to the windshield wiper, and we got held up by a bunch of MPs (members of Parliament) holding a No rally in Chavakali (about 30 minutes outside of Kisumu). I've been advised not to eat either bananas or oranges while I'm here, and I'm expecting that tensions will only rise as the referendum date nears. Fortunately I live in the bush, where it's easy to hide out from mad crowds and quietly farm chickens instead. Hex! Hex!

A Woman's Creed

One of the speakers who came during our pre-service training passed this out as part of her presentation. At the time it only resonated distantly with me but being here for a few months "in the trenches" with women in the developing world has made this hit close to home for me. It's not just lyrical imagery, it's reality for women all over Kenya, Africa and the world.

Written by Robin Morgan, in collaboration with Perdita Huston, Sunetra Puri, Mahnaz Afkhami, Diane Faulkner, Corringe Kumar, Simla Wali and Paola Melchiori at the 1994 WEDO Global Strategies Meeting.

We are female human beings poised on the edge of the new millennium. We are the majority of our species, yet we have dwelt in the shadows. We are the invisible, the illiterate, the laborers, the refugees, the poor.

And we vow: NO MORE

We are the women who hunger - for rice, home, freedom, each other, ourselves.

We are the women who thirst - for clean water and laughter, literacy, love.

We have existed at all times, in every society. We have survived femicide. We have rebelled - and left clues.

We are continuity, weaving future from past, logic with lyric.

We are women who stand in our sense and shout YES.

We are women who wear broken bones, voices, minds, hearts - but we are women who dare whisper NO.

We are women whose souls no fundamentalist cage can contain.

We are women who refuse to permit the sowing of death in our gardens, air, rivers, seas.

We are each precious, unique, necessary. We are strengthened and blessed and relieved at not having to be all the same. We are the daughters of longing. We are the mothers in labor to birth the politics of the 21st century.

We are the women men warned us about.

We are the women who know that all issues are ours, who will reclaim our wisdom, reinvent our tomorrow, question and redefine everything, including power.

We have worked now for decades to name the details of our need, rage, hope,vision. We have broken our silence, exhausted our patience. we are weary of listing on our suffering - to entertain or be simply ignored. We are done with vague words and real waiting; famishing for action, dignity, joy. We intend to do more than merely endure and survive.

They have tried to deny us, define us, denounce us; to jail, enslave, exile, gas, rape, beat, burn, bury - and bore us. Yet nothing, not even the offer to save their failed system, can grasp us.

For thousands of years, women have had responsibility without power - while men have had power without responsibility. We offer those men who risk being brothers a balance, a future, a hand. But with or without them, we will go on.

For we are the Old Ones, The New Breed, the Natives who came first but lasted, indigenous to an utterly different dimension. We are the girlchild in Zambia, the grandmother in Burma, the woman in El Salvador and Afghanistan, Finland and Fiji. We are whale-song and rainforest; the depth-wave rising huge to shatter the glass power on the shore; the lost and despised who, weeping, stagger into the light.

All this we are. We are intensity, energy, the people speaking - who no longer will wait and who cannot be stopped.

We are poised on the edge of the millennium - ruin behind us, no map before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues.

Yet we will leap.

The exercise of imagining is an act of creation.

The act of creation is an exercise of will.

All this is political. And possible.

Bread. A Clean Sky. Active peace. A woman's voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cookfires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body's integrity honored, the lover returned. The magical skill that reads marks into meaning. The labor equal, fair, and valued. Delight in the challenge for consensus to solve problems. No hand raised in any gesture but greeting. Secure interiors - of heart, home, land, - so firm as to make secure borders irrelevant at last. And everywhere laughter, care, celebration, dancing, contentment. A humble, early paradise, in the now.

We will make it real, make it our own, make policy, history, peace, make it available, make mischief, a difference, love, the connection, the miracle, ready.

Believe it.

We are the women who will transform the world.

Brand New Day

Well yesterday was a weird day, is all I can say. Six months ago, wondering why my calves were suddenly stinging and then discovering a prickly 3-inch caterpillar stuck to the inside of my skirt would have been the low point of any day. But somehow going to bed feeling like there is MAYBE one person in your
community who is trustworthy and everyone else is a corrupt liar takes the cake - and makes for weird dreams and even weirder mental health in the morning. I have decided to keep listening and asking questions, and to try to convince myself that a corrupt man is not necessarily a bad man (or woman). I don't know if I will ever actually believe that, but I think it will be an exercise in mind expansion that will hopefully help me understand why things work the way they do in Kenya - why people choose to give and take bribes and steal from their own communities and lie to my face about it - even if I don't agree with it. I am learning not to believe everything I hear right away, because rumors run rampant in small villages like mine, and narrow minds run even more rampant. I am also learning that what an American considers a selfish lie may be what a Kenyan considers a way to avoid hurting someone's feelings. And also that while it's a bit naive to assume that most institutions in America function as meritocracies, it's downright retarded to assume that meritocracy even exists in Kenya. The U.S. isn't the only country where money
talks big, and the rich get richer, and the poor have more children.

Well, on a happier note, we successfully redesigned and printed out our new letterhead for the VCT, and I think I managed to convince my co-worker that homosexuality does exist in Kenya, even here in this community.

And yes, today is a brand new day, and the weather is beautiful, and my co-worker is trying to convince a woman dying of AIDS in the hospital to go with her to the VCT in Mosoriot (outside Eldoret) to get ARVs - antiretroviral drugs to help her feel a bit better and extend her life. The hospital in my village doesn't have any capacity to care for someone with AIDS - no ARVs, not even HIV tests except for pregnant mothers. The patient is an AIDS widow but is in denial about her own status, although I don't know how the endless vomiting and diarrhea doesn't give it away. Oh yeah, because it looks like cholera. Or malaria. Or an amoeba or typhoid or...

Build a Man a Fire and He'll Be Warm For a Night...

...set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Kisumu is notorious for having the highest AIDS prevalence in the country - 48%. People attribute this to a lot of different factors, including polygamy, wife cleansing rituals and the fishing industry of Lake Victoria. It's common for Kisumu fishermen to ask poor customers, usually housewives and orphans, for sex in exchange for fish. Forty-eight percent makes for a morbid sense of humor, so I basically tipped over laughing when a Kenyan said, "Kisumu has the highest AIDS rate in the country because fish are the sexiest animals."

Mail call etc: The backlog is finally starting to trickle in. The P.O. box that we share with the hospital was apparently not paid for, so the posta was holding my mail hostage until the bill was cleared. So a huge thank you to Mom and Dad (seaweed heaven, plus I never knew I could appreciate tampons with applicators so much), Felix (what is a pecker in British English?), Dan (I don't know what you sent but it tasted good), Amy (I bet you didn't know that the strawberry-beetle foamboard would become a coaster), Anne and Cynthia (y'all are incredible - just goes to show guailos know how to shop for Asian food too...and expect a letter soon). I know there are still others on their way so I'll keep you posted as they arrive. And also, congratulations Mika and Guillaume! Elise Keiko will be very lucky once her new parents wake up from their deep sleep.

So I had two solid days of mobile outreach this past weekend. Friday we visited a women's group made up of old mamas who are launching a program where they go into the community to speak about AIDS...a popular thing to do here apparently. The problem is that none of them know the first thing about AIDS - what it is, how it's spread or how to prevent it. And they were too busy being stunned at the Swahili coming out of my mouth to acually concentrate on what I was saying. On Saturday we visited a group that links individual donors in Western countries to vulnerable Kenyan kids whom they support financially and send fan mail to, like in the movie About Schmidt. There was an orphan named Kitale in my village in Kitui, who belonged to a similar organization. She showed me the letters her American sponsor had sent her over the years. They are a blond, churchgoing couple from Tennessee with blond kids, and despite obviously having no clue how their adopted Kenyan orphan lived (through no fault of their own or course), it was really nice to see this end of a setup that I'd only read about or seen in movies. I remember Kitale's sponsors had sent her pages from a coloring book not realizing that not only does Kitale not own anything to color with, but that she didn't even know that the pages were meant to be colored in the first place.

Anyway, outreach is outreach, and I'm slowly incorporating more Swahili into my lessons, but for the most part we say the same things: What is AIDS? How is it transmitted? How do you prevent it? What services do we offer at the VCT? And then we show a rotating collection of videos, including the notorious "Silent Epidemic" which is basically a slide show of how your genitalia will look if you have gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, chlamydia, yeast infections or warts.

Well I had a different entry all drafted and ready to type up but then I arrived at work this morning to a four hour tutorial on corruption in my community. So I'm exhausted, and frustrated, and a bit discouraged right now. The thing is that corruption in Kenya is everywhere, at all levels of government and in the community. Otherwise honest people give and take bribes because it's more efficient than speaking out for change. And otherwise dishonest people run rampant in the community. We were briefed on this in pre-service training, but I never thought it would be this bad.

Anyway, I hope to post more later but right now I need to wrap this up so I can run down the street to print some letterhead before the rain comes. Argh! It has come...

Anonymous Comments Clarification

A real spammer would never even read my last post because they spam using automated programs, but nevertheless I felt compelled to vent. Anyway, sorry if anyone thought I was addressing them specifically; I know none of you on my email list are spammers (what a hypocrite, I am complaining about spam and talking about my own mass email list in the same sentence), and I welcome anonymous comments from everyone including random blog surfers I don't know...unless it's spam of course. Thanks for reading!

Double Double

Peace Corps volunteers have a lot of free time to become fascinated by inane and banal things, like what I call double double words in Swahili. These are single words formed by repeating the same two syllables twice, and I even spent an evening trying to string together a sentence using only double-double words. It didn't quite work, nor did the Swahili haiku. My next hobby: teaching myself shadow hand puppetry to pass the time when the electricity goes out.

polepole - slowly
hivihivi - so-so, fifty-fifty
korogakoroga - to stir repeatedly
pondaponda - to pound repeatedly
barabara - street, road
pikipiki - motorcycle
pilipili - chili pepper
tingatinga - tractor
katakata - to cut
bodaboda - a bicycle taxi with a bright vinyl upholstered cushion for the passenger
wasiwasi - nervous
katikati (ya) - in the middle of, between
takataka - odds and ends, rubbish
rupurupu - incentive
mbalimbali - different
chemshachemsha - to boil repeatedly
pigapiga - to hit repeatedly
patipati - flip flops
buibui - spider
konokono - snail
sawasawa - okay
juzijuzi - the other day
rogaroga - to bewitch
rasharasha - drizzle
chemichemi - a spring (water)

I'm Going to Freeze to Death. In Africa.

(Subject line courtesy of Jen Lee, the funniest Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya.)

Hello from Kisumu! First order of business is an open message to you pathetic spam whores who are using anonymous comments on Blogger to advertise. CUT IT THE FUCK OUT!! If you're not willing to pay for marketing lists or spend time actually researching and identifying a target market, why the hell would I shell out a single Kenyan shilling for your crap-ass product that's not even appropriate for my demographic group?

Mail update: The only thing I've received is Michelle's package of spices raided from McDonald's. Am wondering if the local post office is doing some raiding of its own, of mail addressed to the village mzungu. Will keep everyone posted.

Went for my usual fried tilapia lunch on Lake Victoria today. One of the tour boat operators sat down at my table, without asking or introducing himself first, and tried to sell me a boat ride to see the hippos. I ended up making him teach me some greetings in the local Dholuo language and then complaining about all the corruption in Kenya. I also explained, after he said, "I heard most of the people killed in New Orleans were niggers," why he shouldn't use that word to refer to black Americans.

"So it is a somehow abusive word?" he asked.
"Yes, people have been killed for saying that word to someone."

Apparently this was hilarious to my new boat tour operator friend (Ibraham), because he laughed until he cried. Then my fish came, and I sat there and ate it while he sat there and stared off into space, not talking to me, not asking me to share my food with him, not even watching me. Just sitting there. It was one of those very Kenyan oddities that I'll probably never understand, nor will I ever figure out the appropriate way to respond. Like the time I was sitting in a matatu reading the newspaper, and the guy on my left quietly peeled the corner of the paper out of my left hand and started reading over my shoulder. Eventually, the paper had migrated so that he was holding the left half of it in front of him and I was still holding the right half in front of me. All this happened without a single word exchanged, nor did he even make eye contact with me.

So yes, I live at less than one degree north latitude from the equator, and I think I'm going to freeze to death. It's about as cold here as July in San Francisco. Brrr!!! I carry a fleece to the office everyday, wear a scarf when I'm outside washing the dishes, and sleep under three blankets while wearing two shirts, a pair of pants and a sarong. My co-workers were even arguing about which kind of jiko (charcoal stove) I should buy to keep myself warm at night, but the only concensus they were able to arrive at was that since my room is so small, any charcoal stove would turn me black. "Like Hillary," they said.

I'm Eating Cheese in Kakamega!

First, a huge thanks to Cory for a spectacular political and economic analysis of Hurricane Katrina. I've really been in the dark for the most part about the storm but my heart goes out to everyone affected. Also thanks Lynn for the article about the first Intro to Gay and Lesbian Studies in China. Unfortunately Kenya has not made it that far in its attitudes towards homosexuality; basically it "doesn't exist," just like underwear. Am visiting friends in Kakamega
and Webuye this weekend, then spending Monday in Kisumu doing research for work.

Kenyans English is a bit hard to adjust to sometimes. Last week my neighbor Winnie came to my door and said, "I have your hex." I started getting nervous even though Kalenjins swear up and down that they no longer practice witchcraft. "Sorry?" I said, thinking she was smiling pretty big for someone who was telling me she just put a curse on me. "Hex! Hex!" she said. "You know hex?" I was starting to get really worried, until she pointed to my hens. "I have your hex," she said, meaning my hens had started laying eggs inside the carpenter's shed. "Ah, you mean mayai - eggs," I said. Also, the other day when the rooster came into my room
and for some reason had a field day with my comfortor, my neighbor told me, "Haha! You have a cock in your bed!" And whenever their cat sneaks into my house and the neighbors come looking for him, their 5-year-old boy asks, "Pussy is where?"

A few weeks ago my supervisor and I were traveling to Serem in a barely running, rickety old pickup. As we approached the town, we jolted to a stop. Everyone sat completely emotionless and still, reading their papers or staring out the window, the typical Kenyan reaction to vehicle breakdowns. After about five minutes, the driver turned the vehicle around, put it into reverse, and we drove the rest of the way into town - BACKWARDS. Later my supervisor explained that the truck had run out of gas, and since the way into town was slightly uphill, by going in reverse the driver was able to use gravity to tip the last of the gas into the engine and make it to Serem. Karibu clever Kenyans!

Better run, Rich and I are expected in Webuye for a fajita dinner tonight. I get to eat cheese!

You're the Only Bean in My Githeri

I have some groupies from the girls' school where I live. They come over on Friday and Saturday nights to talk about boys and teach me slang. Soon I will be speaking Swahili like a 16-year-old and scoffing at pickup lines like, "You're the only fish in Lake Victoria." P.S. Githeri is a local dish made of beans and maize.

Thanks to everyone who has said they sent mail: Mom and Dad, Frances, Lynn, Felix, Michelle, Anne Roberts...I know I've forgotten others. I haven't received it yet, but I've put a call into Nairobi to find out what's wrong (the answer: I live in Kenya) and will let you know when I receive anything. I trust that *something* will arrive by 2006. Hope you did not
send live animals. Also congrats to John and Nancy on getting married. And finally, apologies for not posting more frequently to the blog; it's not for lack of anything to write, but rather that I only get access to email about once every week or so and most of my time is spent reading and replying (really, I do reply...eventually) to emails. Couple that with power outages at the post office (the only place in town
with an internet connection) and sick postal employees and you get Big Tummy not updated so often in Kenya.

One of the weirdest things I'm still getting used to is the unconditional trust many Kenyans place in anything that I say because I'm a mzungu. One day I told my workmates that I wanted to tag along with the hospital's mobile clinic (watching health workers give vaccinations and pass out mosquito nets) instead of going with them on a school visit to teach about AIDS. They both paused uncomfortably and then said, "We really feel that if you're there, that the students will listen to us more." I get told repeatedly that Africans have been educating people about AIDS for years, but it was only when a mzungu (a VSO volunteer, the British version of Peace Corps) showed up and started teaching the exact same things that people started listening. "We don't know why, but black Africans will listen to a mzungu before their own people."

Last weekend I was summoned to the home of a woman who I've seen around town. She approached my workmate Hillary and requested that we visit her over the weekend. She showed us around her boma (homestead) and told us that she had contracted HIV from her (lyin cheatin drunken) husband, who died five years ago. She
said we were the only people she has ever told about her status; not even her kids know. Until then AIDS had always been a disease that conjured up this generalized compassion and deep anger about The World's Inequality and Lack of Access to Opportunities and Resources, anger about Government Corruption and Culturally-Reinforced Ignorance and Gender Roles that Disempower Women. The New York Times reports Whole Villages Wiped Out by AIDS, It's So Sad, So Devastating. That sort of thing.

This woman talked to us for hours and even though her story sounded like it came straight out of an NGO case study - her husband worked away from home for awhile, passed HIV to her, which she then passed to one of her kids who died at 6 months, she gave birth to another son who is now five and HIV negative, her late husband's family rejects her, she fears stigma and ostracization from her employers, her kids are teased for not having a father - it transformed the disease from this distantly dramatic scourge sweeping through muddy villages in poverty-stricken African countries 15,000 miles away, into this thing that is a living, breathing part of this woman's life...this woman who is 36, only five years older than me, who is telling me her story in fluent English, whose cement house is airy and bright and clean, who cracks angry jokes about how good-for-nothing men are ("We're not all the same," said soft-spoken Hillary, the nicest person in the world), whose kids race around the boma until they're tired enough to come inside and sit next to the mzungu and blow quietly on her arm hairs. She's a strong woman, honest about her fears and her bitterness, but not devastated by the path her life
has taken. She takes care of herself, protects and provides for her kids who are known throughout their village to be the brightest kids in their schools, and takes each day as it comes. Her life continues, with a new life partner called HIV.

On Friday I went to visit some orphans in a village outside Ndurio, about 5 km from my town. We walked into the mountains, over green ridges and lush valleys dotted with fuzzy sheep, tea, millet and coffee plantations. At one point Hillary told me to look up at what appeared to be thousands of dandelion seeds
floating on the wind. "Termites," he said. "They're very sweet when you fry them." Ah. As we approached a boma where some of the orphans live, we saw a bunch of kids huddled over a mound of grass picking at it. "They're eating them straight from the ground," he explained. I asked if he would eat one for me. "No, I prefer them fried," he said. "You'll have to try them one day." I agreed.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my neighbors, both young men in their 20s, about the US. One of them said, "We hear there are a lot of niggers in America."

"Um, we don't say that word," I said. "You mean
African Americans?"

"Yes, that's what I mean," he said. "They're black like us. But we hear them saying, 'What's up nigger?'
in music videos."

Well it's not easy to explain the concept of reclaiming racial slurs as a form of cultural solidarity, I learned. They continued, "How come all your athletes and movie stars and musicians are all
niggers?"

"Could you stop saying that?" I said. "We don't use that word in America."

"Sure," he said. "When you take us back to America with you, we'll remember not to say it."
***
Like a lot of young educated people in Kenya, the doctor at the hospital in my town is very opinionated and outspoken about corruption and the need for reform in Kenya. He even showed me scars on his leg that he got from being shot at by rubber bullets when he was a student protester at university. He said that one way local religious leaders exploit public opinion and cheat people out of money is by taking advantage of their ignorance about mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Many babies don't contract HIV through childbirth, but through breastfeeding. However, since babies will retain antibodies from an HIV+ mother right after birth, newborns will often test positive for HIV antibodies even though they don't actually have the virus. Eventually the baby's antibodies die off and the baby tests negative for HIV. But all this time the pastor will be praying for the newborn to be cured of HIV, and when the baby finally tests negative, the pastor will declare that he has performed a miracle through prayer, and the offering plate gets passed around. (A week later the pastor buys another cow...)