Larium Is No Good

Peace Corps Medical switched my malaria meds to Doxycycline a couple weeks ago. It wasn’t just that the other medication, Larium (mefloquin), was making me depressed and irritable. I was in a constant state of seething anger, convinced I hated all Kenyans, and yet I was paranoid all the time that I had unknowingly offended someone and they would want to seek revenge on me some dark night as I was walking to the choo, or that I had expressed an opinion that violated some Peace Corps policy and I would be administratively separated from my service. I felt insecure, hypersensitive, and socially inept in a way I haven’t felt since seventh grade. I would wake up feeling inexplicably stressed out every morning, even though I had slept soundly. I had no firm grasp on reality, and no perspective. I believed I was perfectly capable of homicide.

And yet, the side effects were subtle enough that it didn’t occur to me that it was the Larium. The longer I’m off Larium the more I realize how profoundly it was affecting me. Living in Kenya is stressful with or without Larium, but after awhile I seemed to be devoid of any coping mechanisms, including a sense of humor. Instead of going outside or writing or finding some other outlet when I was stressed out, I just laid in bed staring at my mosquito net. Larium also seemed to exacerbate every emotion I experienced, so for months I thought I had discovered a new mental illness, called Peace Corps bipolar disorder (PCBD). Tiny things would send me into a flying rage or a deep, immobile depression, or make me maniacally happy, but there was never anything in between. In the moments when I felt good, it was giddy and precarious, like it could disappear suddenly. And afterwards I would feel exhausted. Emotional stability eluded me.

Over New Year’s I met a bunch of PCVs who had switched off Larium and reported amazing improvement. One PCV stopped hallucinating that her cat was a giant saw-toothed monster who was trying to eat her. Another PCV stopped bursting into tears for no reason. I am no longer paranoid all the time, and my sense of humor has returned.

Someone told me that Peace Corps is one of the few organizations that still prescribes Larium as the malaria prophylaxis of choice. The U.S. military stopped prescribing it because too many soldiers, uh, went crazy, or suffered long-term emotional problems, even after they returned home. Everyone reacts to Larium in different ways, but I can see how Larium would be particularly bad for people who are thrust into extremely stressful or traumatic situations, like soldiers and Peace Corps volunteers. It exacerbates emotional responses and strips you of your normal ability to deal with adversity. Some people have really bad nightmares, depression or anger, while the lucky ones get trippy dreams that they say keep them sane. I used Larium when I went to China for three weeks, and didn’t have any problems. I used it in Kenya for over seven months, and in retrospect I was probably starting to experience side effects after two months.

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Fellow PCV Eric gave an interesting analogy about Kenyans and HIV. He told a fable about a storm that came and flooded a man’s house. The water rose so high that he had to stand on a table to keep from getting wet. A neighbor came by and said, “Come with me. I have a car and we can escape together.” The man said, “No, I’ll be fine because the Lord will protect me from any harm.” The water kept rising until the man had to climb onto his roof to avoid being swept away and drowning. A neighbor came rowing by in a boat and said, “Come with me. I have this boat that will save us from drowning.” The man said, “No, I’ll be fine because the Lord will protect me from harm.” Well the water kept rising and swept the man to his death. When he saw God in heaven he said, “God, you said you’d always protect me from harm, yet you let me die in the flood. Where were you?” And God said, “I sent your neighbor with a car and another neighbor with a boat to help you, and both times you turned them down.”

In his community people know about HIV. They know how it’s spread and how to prevent it. But yet they have multiple partners and they don’t use condoms. They assume that the Lord will protect them, but they don’t see the information and free condoms that are available to them as God’s way of offering them help in fighting AIDS. Eric’s organization provides support to people living with AIDS (PLWAs), and 80 percent of the clients are women who got AIDS from their husbands. He asked one of the counselors at his organization why Kenyan men refuse to use condoms.

The counselor said, “They think they can’t feel any pleasure when they use a condom.”

“Maybe it’s more pleasurable for them to die of AIDS,” Eric said. God bless New York honesty.

My village is not as far along as Eric’s community, which is close to Kisumu. Today a kid around 20 years old came into the VCT for an HIV test. Afterwards he told me he wants to mobilize the high school and college-aged youths at his church to educate each other about AIDS. He said most youths are either getting false information or no information at all about HIV—what it is, how it’s transmitted and how to prevent it.

Before I came here I would have thought that was ludicrous. Everyone in the U.S. knows the basics about HIV and AIDS. But we have clients coming into the VCT freaking out because they’ve just attended a session about HIV conducted by Catholic priests. They have a wild, nervous look in their eyes and after hemming and hawing for a few minutes they say they want an HIV test because they just learned that condoms have holes in them. I never thought I’d see the day when the phrase “condoms have holes in them” would send me into a blind rage. Religious leaders – the people who are supposed to be role models in their communities – are willing to risk – no, not just risk – they are willing to be the cause of people’s deaths – by lying to further a political agenda of behavior control based on some arbitrary perversion of God’s message about sexuality.

The fight against AIDS is complex in Africa. There’s so much money pouring in from foreign governments, NGOs and private donors (think Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) with noble intentions, and plenty of beneficiaries with genuine needs. But there are also opportunists who know that getting involved in the “noble fight” can be a very lucrative business. These opportunists are high-ranking politicians, 50-year-old village widows with an 8th grade education, and everyone in between. Many of them use the money and the cause to further their own agendas of keeping women disempowered, keeping congregations fearful of divine repercussions for “immoral” behavior define by themselves, keeping the rural poor dependent on leaders who are their only source of information about HIV, about resources, about money. Plenty of people lie about being HIV positive because they can get free food and they can secure microloans to start small income-generating projects, except that many people use the money to pay for school fees or medicine and then default on their loans. Anywhere there’s money in Kenya, there’s corruption at the expense of those who are already the most vulnerable populations. The corruption is in government, in churches, and now, in the fight against AIDS.

A Mzungu Is Not: A Miracle Worker

Met with a community group today that wants help getting electricity and a water system in their village. I tested out my flip charts on What a PCV Is and Is Not, feeling a bit anxious that everyone would be bored out of their minds. But this is Kenya, where every meeting, workshop, social event and church service is one big exercise in boredom, where half the audience is always asleep, and yet people are too polite to walk out to save themselves from dying of ennui.

Despite this, I somehow held a classroom full of old men and women at rapt attention while I droned on about the importance of sustainability and community involvement. Maybe it was just the mzungu novelty factor. Anyway, I was nervous that people would scoff when I said that I’m here to help with capacity-building—training people on proposal writing, computer skills, income-generating projects, and raising awareness about health issues—and that I’m not a donor myself. But I think most people walked away understanding of what I can and can’t do for them, and no bitterness. It was another lesson in giving Kenyans credit for being able to understand and accept who I am instead of who they think I am.

There’s always this weird specter of anxiety over whether any development work I do is crossing the line of imperialism. The difference, I think, between development work and George W. Bush invading Iraq is that development is about listening to the locals and helping them find their own solutions to their problems, rather than storming in and imposing the American way on the downtrodden masses who will tell you they’re grateful for anything you can offer, then six months down the line will realize you’ve just given them a fleet of fishing boats and they live in a landlocked country. I think it’s more of that liberal guilt coming out, but it was strange to be addressing forty people whose combined expertise and resources and knowledge about their own community far outweighs mine, and being told that they wanted me to tell them how to implement these projects. I’m just some yahoo from halfway around the world who (you can’t tell anyone I told you this) couldn’t identify Kenya on a map a year ago, and certainly had no idea there are millions if not billions of people in the world who don’t have clean water or electricity.

Hillary confirmed that I had been completely honest and set the community’s expectations appropriately in terms of how much I’d be able to do for their projects, but after the meeting so many people came up and said they suddenly had so much hope that they’d never had before, simply because I had come to speak to them today. It felt like a lot of pressure and made me wonder if I had said something to give them false hope.

Many Kenyans will chalk it up to a legacy of distrust left by former President Moi’s regime, where people no longer believe in their leaders, from the village chief and local religious figures all the way up to the president, because they were so corrupt and showed no interest in developing their own country. In the meantime NGOs and foreign governments were assisting Kenyans and getting some results. The assumption that a lot of people now have is that anyone who is foreign can be trusted, and anyone who is Kenyan cannot. And that is why, according to many Kenyans, a community like the one I met today was so eager to hear what I had to say.

This group's situation is not uncommon. In 1999 they had applied for electricity through Kenya Power and Lighting. KP&L replied with an estimate, and said they would be happy to wire the community with electricity if the beneficiaries could contribute one million shillings, which was only ten percent of the total cost of the project. It sounded like an outrageous amount, and the community got discouraged and abandoned the project. In reality, 1.3 million divided by 100 beneficiary families divided again by seven years is a rather manageable amount of money to raise, but at the time no one pointed that out. It's a common problem that a community gets discouraged rather than exploring all their options, and for some reason it takes a completely incompetent and unqualified "advisor" like me to be the catalyst for action. It remains to be seen whether I can deliver.

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The BBC interviewed some Nairobi youths about the effectiveness of abstinence-based programs used to teach people about AIDS. There were the usual answers about the importance of girls (mind you) remaining virgins until marriage, but one guy’s response caught my ear.

“It’s unrealistic to tell people that virginity is important,” he said. “First of all, where are you going to find a girl who’s a virgin? And second of all, what are you going to do with a virgin once you’ve found one?”

Big Bad Wolf Meets Big Bad Fundis

January 25, 2006, Wednesday. 11:38am.

The wind blew the aluminum sheet roofing off the VCT last night. Well, not completely off. One side was still attached to the top beam and the rest was flapping up and down like a huge Japanese fan beckoning to someone in the tea fields behind the building. We rounded up a couple guys in the trading center to help us tie it back down. As I speak they are standing around the building like Liliputians holding down the giant while they wait for someone to go fetch nails to secure the ropes.

A couple days ago a building collapsed in Nairobi, killing more than ten people and injuring hundreds. I saw white people on the Kenyan news for the first time in a long time, American and Israeli soldiers who had flown in to join the rescue efforts. It was a multi-story building that had been constructed using metal beams that weren’t designed to support the weight of a multi-story building. People speculate that the construction company was bribed to use low-quality materials that could be quickly and easily assembled into a sub-standard building, maybe under political pressure to complete the structure in a short amount of time. There are other buildings in Nairobi constructed of the same materials, including a large estate that is home to hundreds of families. (An estate in Kenya is like a gated community, I think.)

People in my village are muttering about the shoddy construction job that went into building the VCT. (You can see and hear the roof flapping from the trading center.) There is a fundi (carpenter) who did most of the work, who people say got paid a lot of money to build our VCT in a hurry. My co-workers at the VCT have been complaining that a suspiciously hefty sum of money went into constructing the building, and 13 months later we’re starting to see exactly what we got (or didn’t get) for that price.

Post script: Saga to be continued...

Fetching Water, Bird Narcissism, and Paneer

Oh my God I fetched water today and I never want to do it again. I don’t mean I walked 25 yards to the tap at the headmaster’s house, where I usually get water for cooking and washing.

I had paid the village Water Guy, an old man who fetches water from a spring and hauls it around to various shops in the trading center for 10 shillings per jerry can, to bring some water to my shamba. (Apparently if you are a man who hauls water for a living, or sews clothes for a living, or cooks food at a hoteli for a living, you are not doing woman’s work, you are just earning a respectable living.)

My neighbor Ben made endless fun of me that evening when he heard I had hired someone to fetch water instead of doing it myself.

“There’s a spring right next to your shamba,” he said. “Why don’t you just fetch the water yourself and save 40 shillings? It’s the African way.”

Today I asked one of the shamba boys on the school compound to show me where this spring was. He took me through the forest, past the pineapple fields, and down a steep hill into another rainforest. There was a little spring at the bottom of the valley, and he helped me fill three 20-liter buckets with water. The spring was only about 200 yards away but it took me 15 minutes to haul one bucket back up the hill, past the pineapple fields, through the other forest, and back to my shamba. At first I tried to put the bucket on my head but it was too heavy to lift. It was only after I’d spilled half of it on myself that it was light enough to lift as high as my head. The shamba boy waited patiently for me each time I stopped to rest, which was every 25 yards. And he was carrying TWO buckets, but not on his head because he’s a man and men don’t carry things on their heads.

I don’t know how Kenyan women do it. Most people in my village still get their water straight from the source, a natural spring or a river, instead of from a tap or a tank where water is piped to. This means they have to descend into a valley, and then scramble back up with all that water, no easy feat during rainy season when hillsides are muddy, or during dry season when hillsides are sandy and loose. These women are fetching water for an entire family – a conservative estimate is five people per family, but ten is more accurate. They must be doing what I did today, but ten times daily.

When I got back to my house I told Ben that I had taken his advice and fetched water from the spring.

“And how did you see it?” he asked.

“I can’t believe women do this all the time, everyday,” I said, back on my crusade for gender equality. “It’s such a burden. You need to start helping your wives and sisters.”

“No, men can’t fetch water,” he said, laughing. “It’s for women.”

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There are two brown finches that have been visiting me each morning on my window sill. Or at least that’s what I thought they were doing, because everything revolves around me. I discovered that they’re just enamored with their own reflections in the window, and if they see my big looming figure moving around inside my house, they fly away. But love – and self-love – transcends all barriers, including fear and the self-preservation instinct, and 30 seconds later they are back, chirping and twittering and tapping at the window.

Suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

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My formerly cheeseless life is now filled with paneer! It’s so easy to make, and delicious sauteed in oil and salt. It even squeaks like cheese curds! The only problem is you only get a small chunk of cheese from a lot of milk. I used two cups of whole milk and got a little ball half the size of my fist.

Here’s how: Bring whole milk to a boil. I don’t know if this step is for Peace Corps volunteers who get milk straight from a cow, or if you need to do this in the States, too. Remove from heat. Add a few tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice. The milk will separate into chunks of white solid and a yellowish liquid. Stir gently. Put a bandana or other thin cloth into a colander. Sieve the milk through the cloth. The white chunks are your cheese. Wrap the cheese by gathering up the sides of the cloth around it. Squeeze out the excess water from the cheese. Put the cheese, still wrapped in the cloth, back into the colander and set a heavy weight on top. This will help squeeze out more water. Leave for 15 minutes to 12 hours depending on how hard you want the cheese to be.

More BBC News, Recounted as Accurately as Possible…

1. Botswana has just eliminated free secondary education, joining the ranks of most African countries that only provide free schooling through eighth grade. One high school student interviewed for the story said that the new policy would encourage him to work even harder because he knew that it was now a great privilege that his parents can afford to send him to school. When I see the kinds of problems the lack of free secondary education has created in Kenya, I can’t understand what possible social or macroeconomic benefits there are to this policy change in Botswana. The missionaries may have brought an annoying brand of Christianity to Kenya, but at least they also set up schools. If only the governments of Africa would now invest in their schools to the fullest potential.

2. South Africa encourages (or requires?) virginity testing for girls as a way to curb the spread of AIDS. It is part of a larger ritual celebration of virginity, a rite of passage, for unmarried girls. A traditional health practitioner, usually an older mama, manually inspects the girl’s hymen, as well as checking for a series of other medically-unproven signs of purity, including the look of innocence in a girl’s eyes and the looseness of the muscles behind her knees. Once a girl is pronounced a virgin, a huge celebration ensues.

If South Africa is anything like Kenya, most women (and girls) have no say about when they have sex, especially in rural villages. A woman’s duty is to provide pleasure for a man. She doesn’t have the right to say no or to ask a man to use a condom. If she does, she is often beaten. A woman came to the VCT one day wanting an HIV test. She was probably in her early twenties and pregnant. The father of the baby had kidnapped this woman when she was 14, took her to his hut, and raped her. This “relationship” continued, and she eventually gave birth to his first child, but they never got married. Now she is pregnant with his second child, and wanted an HIV test because she knows he sleeps around with other women.

On more than one occasion a Peace Corps volunteer has encouraged a Kenyan woman to say no to a man she doesn’t want to have sex with, with disastrous results. The woman was beaten to a pulp, and the Peace Corps volunteer was threatened, or even chased out of the village, for daring to challenge the will of a man.

Peace Corps policy now strongly discourages (prohibits?) volunteers from getting involved with issues of gender violence in their community because it has put more than one volunteer at risk of getting hurt.

Coming from a culture that values gender equality, I feel this arrogant, George W Bush-esque moral duty to intervene and convince Kenyans that my point of view is more humane. The problem is that there’s no easy way to go about being a moral imperialist, probably because moral imperialism is morally questionable from an objective standpoint. Even when I have casual conversations with Kenyans about equalizing gender roles, or when I attempt to lead by example, everyone just laughs and writes me off as a foreigner with funny ways who will never understand their culture.

Maybe the key is accepting that it’s not my role to sweep through the country preaching gender equality. I may plant a few seeds in some fertile minds, but maybe as more people, especially girls, attain higher levels of education, traditional attitudes and gender roles will begin to loosen on their own, at the grassroots and at the policy-making level.

3. Uganda offers university scholarships for virgin girls. Truly dizzying logic: encouraging girls to conform to one oppressive double-standard in order to empower them to rise above all the other cultural and institutional oppression that has kept them down for generations.

4. The BBC reads letters from listeners who write in about “Why I Love Africa” (accompanied by a catchy jingle). They say things like, “I love Africa for its rich cultural heritage and music that go back for centuries.” Many of these listeners are African ex-pats living in Europe or the U.S. One of my friends once commented that the subtext to most of the letters is, “I love Africa because I no longer have to live there.”

More Mob Justice and News Briefs

There have been a lot of robberies lately in Uasin Gishu, just outside Eldoret. Locals suspected that the police were committing the crimes because everytime someone would call the police after being robbed, they would arrive six hours later, when the perpetrators were long gone. People decided to take the law into their own hands. At night they would block the roads so no getaway vehicles could pass. They couldn’t track down the actual criminals, who they suspected were Kikuyus, so they beat up a couple of Kikuyu vendors instead.

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News briefs of note, collected while making French toast and listening to BBC in the mornings:

1. Germany has begun using a series of questions to determine if an immigrant is fit to be naturalized based on whether their value system agrees with what Germany considers to be correct. Lots of people are upset because they feel it discriminates against African Muslims in particular, who will most likely give the “wrong” answer to questions like:

Are men and women equally capable of doing the same job?
If your son told you he is homosexual and wants to live with another man, what you would say?
Is it okay for a man to beat his wife in order to discipline her?

My thought is that it’s not just Muslims who will give the “wrong” answer, it’s most of the people I meet on a daily basis. In my village, men and women alike believe in a strict division of labor based on gender, in the idea that a woman’s ideas and thoughts are not valuable, that a wife must obey her husband unconditionally, including embracing whatever opinion he tells her to embrace, and that a man must beat his wife in order to discipline her. And of course, that homosexuality doesn’t exist in Kenya because it is a scourge only found in the west.

The question of whether it’s right to use these kinds of interviews as a way to filter out “undesireables” is another matter altogether. If I were President of the USE (United States of Earth, as my fellow PCV Jenly calls it), I wouldn’t want people immigrating to my country who had unenlightened views about women, gays, people of other races or any other populations having traits that people use as an excuse to discriminate against them. In fact I’d want to round them up and flog them all.

But if I were the open-minded, accepting person I idealize myself to be – and Kenya has taught me that I’m not – I wouldn’t fault someone for the cultural values they were brought up with even if they offend me wildly. It’s a conflict I have constantly. Many of the same people who believe in these wrong answers are my friends (lets not kid ourselves, their answers are wrong in my opinion, so I’m going to stop putting “wrong” in quotes). It’s cultural, just as my values are cultural, and a purely objective anthropologist would say that neither value system is superior to the other. But the truth is that I think the idea of gender equality is superior to the idea that women should be subservient to men. I think the idea that no one should be discriminated or favored based on their race, culture, sexual orientation, age, religion, or whatever, is superior. And I so desperately want to shake people and say, “What’s wrong with you up there?” and change their minds and make them see it my way, but I know it’s unrealistic moral imperialism. (But for a good cause: my value system.)

I still haven’t figured out an effective way to share my views with people. I still get written off as the foreigner who doesn’t understand, like yesterday when I joked that my Kenyan husband will be fetching water. It’s especially hard because the matter-of-factness with which I’m told some things infuriates me even more. I went to a chief’s baraza (a town hall meeting) where the attendees were mostly men. We were sitting around chatting before the meeting and some of the older men started talking about how women aren’t allowed to own land under the laws of Kenya because women themselves are considered property. I knew he was just telling it like it is, not trying to demean me, so somehow I managed not to grab Grandpa by the neck and scream at him. Instead I said in a normal tone of voice, “You can own cows and chickens but women aren’t farm animals; you can’t own them.” And everyone just laughed and said, “But that’s what we believe in our culture.”

With people I know well, I like to test their boundaries. Today as I was gathering all the stray tree branches and plywood in my shamba into piles, Hillary said, “I wish my wife would come here so she could collect this firewood.” Because gathering firewood is the woman’s duty, which is why you see women walking along the road carrying huge stacks of firewood on their heads (only women carry things on their heads; men carry things on their backs).

And I said, “I think you should strap a pile of firewood to your head and carry it home for your wife.”

As I expected, he said, “Oh, that would be an abomination. She wouldn’t even appreciate it. She’d say why am I making the whole village to talk about how there’s something not normal with her husband?”

“But you’re not normal,” I said. “You believe in gender equality.”

“Yes, but I’m still normal,” he said. “I can’t carry firewood.”

The Vomit Clinic

My friend Julia runs the village vomit clinic. She calls it an herbal medicine practice, but when sick people come over to your house and barf into a basin so you can analyze it, I call it a vomit clinic. She has been running it for about four years, and people come from as far as Kapsabet and beyond seeking the healing powers of puke. The vomit potion is a family secret handed down through the ages, made by boiling the dried bark of a certain tree from the forest. Within ten minutes of drinking the potion, the patient inevitably vomits. This is when Julia works her magic. By poking at the contents of the patient’s vomit and observing its color, taste and the presence of mucus or blood, she can tell you what illness you have. Yellow vomit and a bitter taste (determined by asking the patient, not by tasting it herself) indicates malaria, while a small spot of blood suggests worms. Sometimes just vomiting seems to cure the patient, while other times she’ll tell them to go to the dispensary or pharmacy to get medication. The clinic is only open on Saturdays from 7am to noon, but its reputation has spread through word of mouth and now she does big business, especially during harvest time when people have relatively lots of money. I invited myself to see her vomit clinic one of these Saturdays, but just to watch. Will give a full report when I do.
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Today was a marathon of visiting water projects which, on Kenyan time, means two. My village gets so much rain most of the year that water is not a problem in and of itself. The main problem is accessing the water sources, which are often overflowing. The topography here is hilly, which makes it difficult and more expensive to pipe water long distances. About ten years ago the Ministry of Water laid some pipes and tried to offer a metered water service. Since there are so many water sources around here, people preferred to fetch water for free, even if it meant extra time and labor, so the Ministry was losing money. But then some thugs stole the generator that was pumping water from the river up to our village, so that headache was solved.

So it’s 2006 and most people still have to walk up and down steep hills to fetch water. When you’re fetching water for five kids, livestock and a few acres of farmland, that’s a lot of time spent Jack and Jilling it up the hill, tripping, slipping on mud, and falling on your arse with 20-liter jerricans full of water tumbling off your head and rolling into the valley.

One group I met with today asked me if I had heard about the problem that women have in their community.

“Which one?” I said. Being beaten by their husbands? Having no social status? Being stuck doing 90% of the work?

“Women spend all their time fetching water and don’t have time for their other chores,” he said.

“If you’re concerned about this, maybe you can help your wife fetch water.” I was being a smartypants because I knew what the response would be.

The room erupted with laughter. “That’s women’s work,” he said. “Men don’t fetch water. It’s a taboo.”

“If I marry a Kenyan man, he’s fetching water,” I said, because it’s always about me.

The room erupted with laughter again. “Maybe you can marry someone from another tribe then,” he said. “A Nandi man won’t fetch water.”

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I found my third chameleon today. This guy was army green and didn’t seem to have much of a talent for changing colors. His repertoire seemed to consist of army green and gray-green. He was also shedding his skin so it looked like someone had used his body to skewer a tiny piece of plastic grocery bag, much the way you’d pierce a Capri-Sun juice drink with a straw. The more chameleons I meet the more I like them. I’m always tempted to bring one home as a pet, but the neighbor’s cat would surely eat it, and after placing it on every item in my house to watch it change colors to match, it would probably lose its entertainment value. Or maybe not. They do have those cool eyes that rotate independently of each other.

Mob Justice

9:03 am, Kisumu.

Woke up before 7am to the sound of arguing and pounding in the hotel room next door. Should I bang on the wall and tell them to keep it down at this ungodly hour? Should I go out and get the manager? Should I stay safely locked in my room? After a few minutes debating in a half-conscious stupor whether I was in danger or not, I realized that the commotion was actually coming through my window from the street below. I had to stand on the headboard of my bed to see down to the street, and spied a crowd of people watching two men get beaten. Should I get the hotel manager? Should I call the police? Should I yell out the window to leave the guys alone?

Mob justice is unpredictable and volatile and I didn't want to further incite a crowd of angry men armed with blunt objects. The yelling and dull thumping of wood against human flesh was making me ill so I went out to the lobby hoping to escape the noise. Two old men carrying walking canes and suitcases were leaving.

"They're beating someone right outside," I said.

"Oh, are they?" one man said. "Well I hope we don't get beaten too." They both giggled and staggered downstairs with their luggage.

I turned to go back to my room and saw one of the hotel managers sitting in the reception area.

"Do you know what's going on outside?" I asked.

"They caught some theives who stole from a bank," he said. "Now they are being punished." He took a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled with satisfaction.

I didn't know where to go or what to do. There was no point calling the police (does 911 exist in Kisumu?); they are notoriously corrupt and would either ask for a bribe or continue beating the thieves.

The crowd was growing larger. Newspaper vendors milled about selling the Sunday Nation and bodaboda boys trolled for customers among the gawking spectators. It was business as usual, except that two men were lying face down in the gutter with their hands tied behind their backs, having the crap beat out of them. How do people just stand by and watch cruelty happen?

Not that the American justice system is so much better. Maybe Americans embrace justice like we embrace eating meat. We like the end product but we don't really care to see how it gets there. Most of us would rather not think about how animals are farmed and slaughtered, but boy do I love a nice thick slice of steak, medium-rare, with little cloves of garlic poked into the tender flesh, sprinkled with cracked peppercorns and good old Lawry's seasoning. And Popeye's fried chicken, mm, mm. And rack of lamb dusted with rosemary. And grilled salmon steak. And bacon-wrapped scallops...

Ahem. Most law-abiding citizens would rather not think about what happens inside American prisons and jails. Our legal system may be set up not to be cruel and unusual, but the reality is often grim, though I hear cable TV in your cell is nice. Stories of mob justice really upset me, but I wonder if it's any better in the U.S. Last week two men in my village got into an argument over 50 shillings (less than a dollar). One man went to the other's house with a machete and threatened him. Neighbors came out and tried to reason with the armed man, but he wouldn't listen. He started attacking the other man, lacerating the unarmed man in the forearm. The neighbors responded by beating Machete Man nearly to death. Ugh.

Well on that happy note I have to catch a matatu back to my village soon. Also my flash disk is acting up and so is my floppy drive. There is a conspiracy to make sure I can never store information and transport it from one computer to another again. Kenya and technology don't go together and it may just make me insane.

Computers In the Bush

The first year social work students at the Social Development Institute, a school that offers college-level classes in my village, have been running amok in the community, gathering information for an assignment that’s due on Monday. Each student was assigned a different topic and is expected to tap local resources to conduct their research and compile it into a visual presentation.

We had various groups of students trickling into the VCT asking for information on contraceptives, abortion, and nutrition for special populations (people living with AIDS, the elderly, etc.) One student’s topic was “the role of social policy in Kenya.” Her friend’s topic was “stress and how to manage it.” Social Policy lady was sitting slumped in her chair looking defeated while Stress lady was looking decidedly unstressed out. I asked Social Policy how her teacher expected her to find information on such a complex topic. She said she had flipped through the newspaper and visited the school library.

“Our library is empty,” she sighed. “There are a few books but they’re really old and outdated. I don’t know where to turn now.”

We suggested that she visit the District Office of Social Services in Nandi Hills, about an hour away. “Oh,” she scoffed. “It’s too far. I don’t have time.”

I did not scream, “This is your education we’re talking about!” Instead I asked if she had tried searching on the internet.

“I don’t know how to operate computers,” she said.

“Isn’t Computer Proficiency a required course?” Hillary asked. He is a graduate of the Institute himself.

“Only the students pursuing a computer science diploma are allowed to use the school’s computers,” she said. “Social work students aren’t allowed in the computer lab unless you pay an extra 15,000 Ksh each term.”

So let’s review. College students here don’t have basic computer skills. The college they’re attending won’t let them go near a computer unless they can cough up 15,000 Ksh, or about $200, a fortune in a village where half the population lives on less than a dollar a day. There is no internet connection in my village except at the post office, so even if students know how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet, they’re graduating with no knowledge of how to access the single most valuable source of information in the world. How can anyone navigate in a society increasingly connected and powered by the internet with no exposure to the internet? How can a country develop and compete in a high-tech world when its educated populace doesn’t have skills to access the relevant technology?

For the last few months Hillary and I have had an ongoing discussion about how to start a small computer lab that offers classes on basic software packages, resume writing and other computer skills. I’ve also talked to locals who have tried to set up an internet connection here, but it was a cost-prohibitive logistical nightmare. I was also worried that we might be duplicating the resources at the Social Institute because I’d heard that they have a computer lab and classes. Instead it sounds like there’s a huge need for something like that. Stay tuned to this space as the idea percolates.

Back In The Saddle

Yesterday was our Annual General Meeting at the VCT, the first meeting we’ve had since October, even though we’re supposed to have meetings once a month. I still don’t know what happened to my supervisor and his little crew of allies at my organization. Maybe some little green man in a flat spaceship came and took them in the middle of the night, gave them a demo on how to make crop circles, and showed them a PowerPoint presentation about proper management skills.

There’s still traces of shadiness – knee-jerk defensiveness and stuttering excuses are still common – but they seem to have a renewed commitment. They say they’ll do something and the next day they’re doing it. They agreed to stop making decisions and spending money without the input of other members. My supervisor came to the meeting with an itemized list of everything he had bought with the VCT’s money, how much he had paid for it, and how much money was left. He agreed that from now on any donor funds would be deposited directly into the VCT’s bank account and not his. He agreed to prioritize income-generating projects instead of landscaping the front lawn.

And I’m being more patient, exercising restraint, listening more and interrogating less, giving the benefit of the doubt. It’s true that despite being here for almost six months I still don’t really get how Kenya works. Politics and tribalism run deep and can go back for years or decades, and outsiders are never fully trusted, although always fully solicited for money at every opportunity. My own cultural biases make it difficult for me to understand what is really happening sometimes. Kenyans do a lot of saving face. They’ll lie, keep secrets, tell you what you want to hear, all in the name of either protecting their reputation or not offending you. To an American, it all smacks of corruption. Why would you need to keep secrets if you don’t have anything to hide? We believe that if you have a problem, you should ask for help to resolve it. Kenyans believe that if you have a problem you should keep quiet and try to resolve it on your own, otherwise people will think you’re incompetent and untrustworthy. Getting people to be open, to work together, and think of each other as teammates united in a common cause can be hard, especially in this group.

I still have a little hope cupped between my hands that people in my organization can build it into an efficient, productive, well-run VCT providing valuable services to a community that desperately needs it. It will be a slow, non-linear process, and I’m still pursuing projects with other groups so that I don’t spend all my time working with an organization that could collapse at any time (in my cynical opinion).

I have made a teaching aid that I should have made the first month I was here. It’s just a page from a large flip chart on which I’ve scrawled:

What a Peace Corps Volunteer is NOT

Someone who donates or raises money for your organization
Someone who writes proposals for your organization
Someone who is solely responsible for inspiring and mobilizing your members

I also made a companion page that lists what a Peace Corps Volunteer is. I find that as soon as people meet a mzungu their instinct is to sit back and wait because they think she will get busy fundraising and writing proposals for them. And I am always tempted to just take the budget they’ve scribbled for me and bang out a proposal, because it’s much faster than teaching proposal writing to people who can barely identify a grammatically correct sentence. I still have to remind myself that everything I do has to be something that involves all group members and gives them the tools and knowledge to do it by themselves the next time. In development lingo, I’m a facilitator.

These two old men came to see me today asking for money for a water project and a rural electrification project.

“We want to write a proposal to CDF for funding,” one of them said. “And also you can assist us with some money.”

“I don’t have money,” I said, flipping on the anger switch.

“Of course you do,” he said. “You’re a white.”

“I don’t have money and I didn’t come here to pass out money,” I blurted out. I am still working on the patience and tact thing. “But I can help you write a proposal.”

“You can write the proposal for us,” he said. No one in their group has ever written one before, which is something I have in common with them.

“I’ll teach you all to write a proposal,” I said. “When I work with a group, I like to involve all the members so that when you finish the project you’ll say, ‘This is our project,’ instead of, ‘This is the mzungu’s project.’”

Both men laughed. I’m not sure what that meant, but they are expecting me to give a workshop on proposal writing next week, and they didn’t mention anything about coming with a check made out to their group.

Bums and Bombs

You know you’re beginning to develop a circle of friends when you can sit around with someone and gossip about how you think a mutual friend is ruining his own life.

My friend stopped into the village for a visit today. He ran off to join the Kenyan Army and just settled into his new post on the beach in Mombasa. When he left for boot camp in September he was this idealistic young doctor with big dreams of going to England or America to pursue additional degrees, who could talk for hours about how deeply personal social injustice, corruption and human rights violations were to him, who wanted to change Kenyan history by overthrowing the current administration and replacing it with a reformed, progressive government. He was #1 in his class for all twelve years of primary and secondary school, and got his degree from Nairobi University, Kenya’s best. He’s brilliant, dedicated, hard-working and passionate. He joined the army with plans to pursue further medical studies, paid for by the military.

Today he says boot camp has made him forget most of what he knows about medicine, but now he wants to study to become a bomb expert so he can work with gadgets, avoid dealing with people, and spend his career sitting on the beach waiting for police to find a live bomb so he can be called in to defuse it, while collecting a fat military paycheck, taking advantage of the military discount on beer (20 shillings a bottle instead of 65 shillings or more), and commanding the status and power of being a card-carrying commissioned army officer.

Why bombs? Because people appreciate your work. Who isn’t going to show gratitude if you’ve just stopped a bomb from blowing their face off? Also there are so few bombs in Kenya that most days he can just do nothing.

“You’re so smart, and you could do so much for Kenya,” I said. “But you want to sit on the beach and drink beer?”

“Yah,” he said with a huge grin. “I just want to relax.”

It just seems like such a waste of valuable talent for Kenya. Somehow in a country where so few people have access to upward mobility, it seems like people like my friend should feel a civic duty to do something for their less fortunate countrymen. I suppose it’s not fair for me to expect him to shoulder this kind of burden. But Hillary and I had a private gossip session later about why our friend would choose to become, in our opinion, a bum.

“You know he’s a Luo and Luos like money.”
“When people get money they just forget about everything they thought they stood for.”
“He’s still young and malleable. Maybe he’ll realize after a few years that he needs more than money and sitting on the beach to be happy.”
“He doesn’t know yet what he really wants. Give it time.”
“He’s a lost cause.”

---------
Something smells like shrimp cocktail and its driving me crazy. I miss seafood!!

Here Come The Rains

I noticed two nights ago that everything was strangely still. I went to the choo and didn’t get creeped out by the trees swaying between the stars and the sound of crispy twigs and leaves crashing into sheet metal roofs. Dust no longer swirls through town like a Tazmanian Devil. The electric blue sky that loitered day after day for the last month is now thick with white and pink clouds. Just last week I felt overwhelmed by all the vivid colors of the dry season – I almost took a picture of the sky, the brilliant tea fields and the purple and pink bougainvilleas that grow along the wall of the school compound, but decided that I’d have plenty of time to capture this scene that I walk past every day. I’d make a bad professional photographer, and a wildly successful missed opportunist. You folks back home may have to wait until next dry season to see a photo. I know the rains are almost here because I’ve busted out my long underwear and turtleneck sweater again, the ones I packed thinking I’d only use them if I climbed Mt Kenya.

Holeyness is Unholy

January 6, 2006, Friday, 9:45pm.

Kenyan women are amazing, and not just because they put up with Kenyan men.
Peninnah, the headmaster's neice, offered to help me wash my clothes today.
I guess she had a little gap in her busy schedule of washing, cooking,
cleaning, going to the market, fetching water, chopping firewood and
polishign shoes for twelve people, and took pity on my because I had been
sitting there scrubbing my socks for an hour. In twenty minutes she had
washed a stack of clothes that usually takes me four hours. And all the
stains were gone!

She starts her senior year of high school on Monday. If she does well on her
KCSE, a standardized exam that determines whether seniors will qualify to go
on to university, she wants to study to be a doctor. I can't imagine any of
the girls at my school stuck on their husband's farm taking care of seven
kids and a drunk. They are all so bright, so ambitious and talented, but
sometimes when I look at them I wonder how many of them will end up getting
pregnant, getting and STD, or just getting married after graduation because
their test scores weren't high enough for them to continue their education.

The KCSE is the main determinant of whether a high school graduate can go on
to college or university. As students get more competitive, and more
students score at or above the cutoff (it used to be a B+, now I think it's
an A-) the universitities keep raising their minimum requirements. I keep
wondering why the government, or someone int he private sector, doesn't just
open more universities. The demand is there. Kenya is full of smart,
educated students. As more of them graduate with high test scores, more of
them start applying to universities outside Kenya. This country will soon
become brain drain city.

And student loans in Kenya are a joke. The government loans out money that
covers only a fraction of the cost of university. The public universities
get the top students because these institutions are the cheapest and best
funded. The lucky few who can afford private universities will attend, but
private universities are also considered second tier. Students who don't
qualify for university can attend a college, or enroll in a diploma or
certificate program (in decreasing order of academic rigor). After all this
time and expense, most students can't find a decent job, because the
unemployment rate in Kenya is, uh, I don't know...60 percent? Seventy
percent? Eighty percent? Depends who you ask.

Once again the government could create tons of opportunities for its
citizens in the form of student loans and more universities, which would
employ more people and create a more educated masses. Why don't they? Oh
yeah, corruption. Only primary education is free in Kenya. A huge number of
students drop out of school after the eighth grade because they just don't
have money to attend high school. Or girls who want to continue their
education prostitute themselves so they can pay for school fees.

I was telling someone in my village that right now while his kids are still
young is a good time to start planning ways to generate income and start
saving for high school fees. He just looked at me like I was crazy. Kenyans
barely think as far as next week, much less next year or next decade. I
guess when putting ugali on the table is a daily challenge, you're not
thinking much about the long term. It makes for frustrating work here,
because everyone is like, "Give me money now," and can't understand why
you're wasting their time talking about planning and skills and
sustainability.

-----

I noticed the other day that a Kenyan friend had a huge hole in the crotch
of his pants, so I pointed it out to him. "You might want to ment that," I
said.

"Thanks for telling me," he said. "A Kenyan woman would never tell a man
that kind of thing. She would have just looked at the hole in my pants, and
then gone to tell all the other women in the village so they could laugh
about it."

Whereas an American woman would tell you about the hole in your pants, then
go and tell all her friends and family about it by writing about it on a
publicly-available website.

Odds and Ends From the Brain Side

It looks like the rains are starting soon. The clouds moved in about an hour ago and the air feels light and cool, instead of heavy and dry. Locals say in another week we may get some rain, which means I need to finish putting poop in my shamba soon.

I went over to the headmaster’s house for tea this morning. His nephew Ben, who is visiting from Nairobi, invited me to church. When I told him I don’t go to church, he said, “Oh I never used to go, either. I just started going last year.”

I asked him what made him decide to start going. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I have nothing better to do.” This was different.

“If you need something to do, you can clean my house,” I said.

“HAHAHAHAHA!” he said, then lowered his voice. “If we were in Nairobi I’d help you clean your house, but I can’t do that here. People would think, why is a man doing housework?”

-----------------------
The World’s Nastiest Choo

I’m not sure if it beats out some of the “toilets” I used in China, but the ladies’ choo at the Nakuru matatu stage is the worst I’ve seen in Kenya. The floor is a slippery pee-poo-and-mud soup, and I discovered that if you only need to do a short call, you don’t need to bother going into a stall as I had just done; you can just find yourself a nice spot among all the other peeing women in the corridor and pee into the gutter that runs around the whole restroom. The stalls are for long calls, which would explain why there was a giant pile of poo in the middle of each one. Apparently the logic is that if you have to poo bad enough or your matatu is about to leave without you, you don’t care that there’s no door on the stall so you can watch women peeing outside while you add your contribution to the pile o’ crap that you’re hovering over. Roll up your trousers, ladies!

-------
Kenyan Listening Skills

Kumiko and I were buying vegetables from the stands outside her house. One particular vendor, Mama Joyce, wanted Kumiko’s Nalgene water bottle.

“You give me your bottle,” she told Kumiko.

“This is my only one,” Kumiko said. “I don’t have another to give you.”

“But you gave one to the other girl,” Mama Joyce said, referring to a young woman who had been going around the neighborhood flaunting a water bottle that Kumiko gave her. “Give me your bottle.”

“I don’t have another,” Kumiko said. “This is mine.”

“Give me your bottle,” said Mama Joyce. “You get from America and you give me.”

“Listen!” Kumiko said. “I don’t have a bottle to give you.”

Mama Joyce looked at me, then looked at the Nalgene bottle I had in my backpack. “You give me your bottle,” she said to me. We walked away as quickly as possible clutching our Nalgene bottles, apparently coveted possessions in Kenya.

Chicken Soup for the Chicken-Brained

Am being a total bum today, but mostly because I think I have a mild fever. Must have been something I ate because I’ve been getting to know the choo a lot today. So I’m just taking it easy, flipping through old travel journals from Asia and Kenya, and browsing the notebook that Joyce gave me as a going away gift, reading some of the quotes she put in there from Anais Nin and Nelson Mandela.

This one reminds me of why I’m here, and how sometimes I get bogged down worrying about inadvertently offending people with some type of cultural or moral imperialism by just being here or telling people in the wrong tone of voice what I think. Nelson says to stop that.

“We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us…And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 Inaugural Speech, attributed to Dag Hammerskjold and Maryann Williamson.

This one reminds me of how morning looks and feels from my pillow every day, or at least on days when Larium isn’t giving me stress dreams.

“A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.” – Anais Nin

One of my windows faces east, but the trees from the forest filter the morning sun into lively dances of elves, and it reminds me of the winter sun in Texas, when I was a kid and would wake up and go sit in the warm column pouring through the den window until my Mom would yell at me to go wash up and get ready for the day.


10:13pm. I Really Need a Life.

Seven things you would never hear during a job interview in the U.S:

1. Are you a Christian?
2. What church do you go to?
3. Do you believe in the Bible?
4. How often do you read the Bible?
5. Can you recite six Bible verses for me – three from the Old Testament and three from the New Testament?
6. We want to hire a Baptist for this position.
7. We don’t want any Catholics or Seventh-Day Adventists in this position.

Hillary interviewed for a social worker position today and these were some of the questions he was asked. In their defense, the organization is funded by the Baptist church and provides support and counseling for orphans. But it made me realize the degree to which anti-discrimination policies have been institutionalized in the U.S., a reflection of the American obsession with not offending anyone for any reason. I could show up for an interview at the Jewish Community Center and no one would dare ask about my religious beliefs, much less my marital status, whether I have kids, how old I am or if I’m gay. And frankly they probably wouldn’t care. In a way it’s understandable that an organization under the Baptist church would prefer to hire a Baptist, but my in my secularly-biased American opinion, a person’s religious beliefs and knowledge of the Bible aren’t going to affect his or her ability to provide quality counseling and case management to kids. But that’s not the way Kenyans see it. In Kenya, if you are a saved Christian, you are automatically a morally upstanding person with the highest integrity and respect for the law and for others. You would never beat your wife, rape a woman or a child, have pre-marital or extra-marital relations, steal money, lie, exchange money for sex, or commit corrupt acts. And as I learned yesterday from my neighbor, people who don’t go to church drink a lot of beer and get drunk all the time. I mean, what else are you going to do on Sunday mornings? I need to find out what Kenyan Christians assume about the moral character of Kenyan Muslims and Hindus, besides that they’re stingy businessmen that horde their profits and send them back to India.

Around 6pm I decided I needed to get out of the house because I was getting lethargic and homesick from composing moody journal entries on my laptop and listening to Lynn’s Chriskwanukah mix. (Tied for favorite tracks: Adam Sandler’s Chanuka Song and Shirley Q.Liquor’s 12 Days of Kwanzaa. No Kenyan I’ve talked to has any idea what Kwanzaa is, even though it’s a Kiswahili word.) I was walking through the forest when I noticed six of the neighbors’ kids running after me. “We want to run with you!” they said. I had only planned to go for a short stroll, but now I had fans to please. I taught them some basic warm up stretches, and then the yoga stretch where you stand on one leg while holding the other high above your head behind you like a figure skater. That one keeps them amused for hours. It was getting dark so we only ran about half a kilometer up the road that leads into the rainforest, then turned around. On the way back to the school compound we came upon a guy walking his Chinese fixed-gear clunker of a bike up the hill, so I told the kids to help him push. They sped his bike to the top of the hill and still had tons of energy, so I challenged them to a race to the football field. Now I know that the headmaster’s nine-year-old son runs faster than me. When we got to the goal line, I had to be the human chairlift and hoist each of the kids up so that they could grab the top bar of the goal and swing back and forth until their arms got too tired to grip. Some of them wanted to go for a second ride but I was the party pooper with no energy left. But I came home in a much better mood. Maybe I don’t hate kids after all.

Summer Time on the Equator

January 5, 2006. Thursday, 9:73am.

Note to self: chai masala does not go well with Earl Grey. I think it was
invented to liven up low-grade tea like the kind Kenya sells domestically.
Kenya is the third largest exporter of tea worldwide; did anyone else know
that? Most of what we get in the U.S. is sent to England from Kenya and
repackaged as �English� tea. Twinings, for example.

Sugar cane is the perfect summer treat. I went for a walk in search of the
lady who manages the spinach farm at Father Mair Girl�s School. It was time
for another armload of spinach. This time I asked for only five shillings
worth, which is enough spinach for at least four meals. Oh yeah, sugar cane.
On the way back from the lady�s house I saw some farmers with fresh-cut
stalks of sugar cane. I bought a four-foot stalk for five shillings. FIVE
SHILLINGS! There�s nothing like breaking off a piece of sugar cane with your
teeth and sucking out the cool juice, then letting the dry fibers dribble
out of your mouth onto the road. Something about it seemed so Huck Finn, so
barefoot summer afternoons frolicking by the Mississippi River wearing a
straw hat and overalls with rolled-up pants cuffs. The breeze picked up,
trees swayed, dried leaves rustled, and half the dust from the road ended up
in my eye. Ah, summertime in the American south. Ah, Africa in January.
Daytimes are hot, with swirling winds that stir up dusty funnel clouds in
the trading center and across the volleyball field. Nighttimes are cool,
with howling winds that whistle through the aluminum roofing on my house.
It�s kind of creepy, especially if I step outside to use the choo. The dark
shadows of swinging trees loom over me, blocking and unblocking the moon and
stars. Lights that appear and disappear in the night sky freak me out.
There�s something evil and menacing about it, and if it�s after sunset
you�ll find me sprinting to and from the choo so the night sky monster
doesn�t try to zap me with falling stars.

I went to see Sugut this morning, the guy who was taken hostage while
building water projects in southern Sudan a few years ago, to get a list of
all the registered community groups in my district. It�s time to start
meeting people and planning some �capacity-building� activities, i.e.
trainings and classes. He said someone accidentally erased his entire hard
drive so he would have to track down a hard copy. I started telling him
about the issues I�ve been having working with my organization, thinking it
was a bit risky to be spilling such rotten beans, but he only nodded and
said he had heard about it already through one of our members, who happens
to be his drinking buddy. Nothing is a secret in an African village!

Who Are You and What Did You Do To My Supervisor?

January 4, 2006, Tuesday, 12:18am.

Something is different these days. Is it the New Year? Is it the realization
that my malaria pills were making me a little crazy? Is there a rare cosmic
alignment? Curiously, my supervisor was at the VCT yesterday, and even more
curiously, he was not avoiding me like a madman. I wandered into his office
on a whim, not sure what I was planning to say to him, feeling irritated at
his elusiveness for the last four months. I sat down and didn�t say
anything. He seemed to think it was strange, since on the rare occasions
that he and I cross paths, I usually burst into his office and start
quizzing him about his latest sketchy exploit at the organization.

Today I wasn�t sure how to begin. Confrontation never worked. Innocent
questions never worked. I didn�t have to figure it out, because he started
talking about how the new year would bring lots of �revisions� � revised
relationships with the community, the village hospital, the Ministry of
Health, the district public health and other government offices, a revised
commitment to the organization and to all his responsibilities as a civil
servant and community organizer.

It was weird. I was thinking of what Lynette, the English volunteer who was
here before me, likes to say about Kenya: All Speech and No Action. Kenyans
love to make speeches, but even more so they love to never follow up on
their plans. I started to feel suspicious. This man never lifted a finger
for the VCT since I arrived, and here he was vowing to be a changed man. On
top of that, all these ideas he was proposing were ideas that the other
members have been pushing for all along, but without his involvement and
signoff on funds no one bothered to show up for meetings and get organized
(Red Flag #1: he is the only person in the organization that has access to
the piddling sum of money we have.)

I decided to take a risk and be direct. �I need your support as my
supervisor in the next year. When I arrived you were supposed to take me to
meet public health stakeholders and community groups so I could get to know
them. You were supposed to meet with me and develop a workplan. But you were
never around. I feel like I�m starting from scratch in the community. I need
you to help me if I�m going to do productive and successful work here.�

I thought he was going to raise his voice into the usual defensive whine:
Why doesn�t anyone appreciate all the work I�ve done in the past? Don�t you
care about benefiting the community?

Instead he said, �I know I�ve been focused on other responsibilities and
have been neglecting my responsibilities to you and to the VCT. But things
will change. I will have more time to dedicate to the VCT this year. We�ll
do lots of good work together.�

I looked over at Hillary, who had a slack-jawed look of disbelief on his
face. Who was this man sitting in front of us? We left his office shaking
our heads. My supervisor was definitely acting differently. Before when he
promised to do something he said it in that J.R. Ewing voice that said, �I�m
telling you what you want to hear because I want you to leave me alone.�
Today he sounded like he had a clear grasp on his past mistakes and future
aspirations. Visions, ideas, commitment.

It remains to be seen if he really is All Speech or more than that. I am a
cynic at heart, and he is a Kenyan, but stay tuned to this space.

Mail Update

Thanks to:

Lynn
Patrick McD
Antti
Grace L
Felix
Frances

for your wonderful Christmas care packages and cards! Will keep everyone
posted as the rest of the holiday mail trickles in. Am running out of time
on my surf card talk again soon bye

The Little Bucket

My friend and fellow PCV Sean sent me a Christmas card with this poem. I
think Peace Corps makes people crazy, and hilarious, and hyper-focused on
their GI tract.

The Little Bucket
by Sean Rubens

There once was a little bucket used to store fat.
But in one meal the family made sure to cook with all that.
The little bucket was sad since now it had no purpose.
Hoping that it would be used as storage, perhaps a thermos.
The little bucket ended up as a visitor's choo.
However, the visitor was afraid that the little bucket would overflow.
The little bucket hoped in time that the visitor and it would be friends
with some luck,
And one night the visitor couldn't hold it and said, "What the f***".
The little bucket and the visitor became best of mates.
Now they get together for vomiting and short call dates.

Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink

I read this op/ed column in the Nation yesterday (see post below) about how
Kenya is underdeveloped because Kenyans lack the inspiration to build the
infrastructure to solve their water problems. This was in light of the
current dry season that creates famine for millions of Kenyans every year.
Kibaki is now appealing for national and international relief in the
billions of shillings to rescue people suffering from famine, especially in
the northeast.

Before I would have written off the column as narrow-minded Republican
vitriol complaining that Kenyans are just lazy and need to get off their
asses, but in the context of my experience in the village, despite some of
the language choice (�we must enslave nature�), I really see where the
columnist is coming from. I don�t know why leaders of this country have
known for their entire lives that every year in December and January there
is a drought and famine because it stops raining, and yet no one has
succeeded in developing water infrastructure to prevent people from
starving. And then Kibaki asks foreign countries to send food and money, as
if this were an unavoidable crisis that no one saw coming, instead of a
seasonal occurrence that could be addressed with some planning and
organization. The corruption and greed here is infuriating, but even more
than that it makes me sad. A reader wrote into the Nation (one of the papers
here) that it�s a shame that it takes photos of starving children for
leaders to take action. It�s more of a shame that the actions that leaders
take are unsustainable, temporary solutions. Next year the same communities
will once again face drought and famine, and everyone knows it. But the
people who can do something lasting about it won�t. Instead of planning a
public water infrastructure to serve the country for generations, at the end
of next December they�ll once again appeal for aid and pat themselves on the
back for being �so responsive� to the crisis at hand. And year after year
80% of the population � those who live in rural areas � will continue to
have to fetch water miles from their home, wonder if it�s clean, hope the
rains keep coming, and dread the dry season. In the mean time their leaders
are too busy looking for ways to funnel money into their own pockets to
think about how to lay pipes and irrigation systems so their constituents
have access to a basic human right � clean water and food.

From the Daily Nation, January 1, 2006.

http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?premiumid=0&category_id=39&newsid=64410

Kenya has lots of resources, but we lack the inspiration

Story by X.N. IRAKI /Opinion
Publication Date: 01/01/2006

Water in California is brought from the north to the thirsty south through
aqueducts, one of which runs for 444 miles. The water irrigates the orchards
and vegetable farms which break the desert's monotony.

More water is brought from the Colorado river before it empties into the
Pacific Ocean, already "tamed into total submission'' as suggested by some
poets.

A drive through California leaves no doubt in one's mind that man can tame
nature, subdue it and enslave it � if only inspired. Farms are generating
power from the wind in California.

In Kenya, we have failed to tame nature; she has enslaved us, and we are
paying the price through hunger. The deserts in California are no less
forbidding than Kenya's. But after gold ran out, Californians did not start
whining; they were inspired to tame nature.

Water shortage is not a problem in Kenya; it is only its distribution. We
let too much of it flow into the oceans where no one needs it. Some areas
have too much rain, while others have too little.

But some dry areas are endowed with fertile soil, like the Laikipia plains.
What is lacking is the will, the inspiration to bring water to such areas.
Technology is there, so is labour. An uninspired nation cannot solve its
problems � even the most basic such as feeding itself.

Why are we uninspired to tame our rivers, subdue nature and enslave it? Why
is agriculture one of the least popular choices for Form Four graduates
aspiring to go to university?

We even joke about agriculture. In one public university renowned for its
science and technology orientation, students who major in horticulture are
considered as not "tough enough'' and are subjects of silly jokes.

Why have agricultural extension services been neglected? Why are we railing
against genetically modified crops?

Yet in other countries, most agricultural extension work is centred at
universities. The new methods, ideas and discoveries in agriculture find
their way to farmers as soon as possible, the way new potato varieties used
to reach farmers from the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.

We still look down upon agriculture, yet in other countries, governments
give farmers subsidies even when other countries complain. They know that a
country that cannot feed itself has little respect.

An uninspired country will not aspire to achieving high goals like feeding
itself. We spend a lot of time talking about abstract issues like the
Constitution at the expense of real issues like food and water. In Kenya, we
know our problems, but no one wants to solve them; no-one is inspired to
solve them. It is not the first time the country is starving. But we seem to
learn nothing. We appeal for food aid and receive it, and as soon as the
rain comes, life goes on.

We expect other people to solve our problems, yet they have theirs to think
about. Must we have hunger and images of dying children to act? Yet signs of
our lack of inspiration to confront imminent problems are everywhere �
always with us. What can we do about hunger? Why should we fail in one of
mankind's greatest discoveries � agriculture?

Let us have inspirational leaders who do more and talk less. The Government,
through extension officers, should introduce new and modern farming
practices that leave the river banks intact. The policy makers must make it
clear that water is a strategic natural resource and feeding ourselves is a
national priority.

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The writer, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi's faculty of commerce,
is currently a Fulbright scholar in Mississippi, USA.