Nairobi is a Cloud of Poison But Still

Nairobi. My relationship with this town is like my relationship with LA. Everytime I visit I appreciate it a little more, and hate it a little less, even though getting here involves sitting in a solid cloud of noxious gases from Eldoret all the way to city center. I can feel the years of my life being cut short with every breath of eye-watering gray smoke I inhale, especially when we've been at a standstill in downtown Nairobi for 20 minutes waiting to enter a traffic circle simply to make the equivalent of a U.S. u-turn to go in the opposite direction. By the time I arrived in the city Friday night I had an Excedrin-sized headache and couldn't walk in a straight line, and I hadn't even been drinking.

But, I was meeting a guy from my village who is now studying to be a Catholic priest in Nairobi. He and his friend picked me up in town and whisked me away, as much as you can whisk away during Friday night Nairobi traffic, to their priest-studying place (I kept asking people all night exactly what kind of place this was. It wasn't a college. It wasn't a church. It was some type of Franciscan community under the Diocese, and it was an all-male congregation of students and other people in various stages of Franciscan brotherhood and priesthood) to meet all their fellow brothers and priests.

Side note for all the Catholics out there: I don't know anything about Catholicism so bear with the lousy terminology here.

We went to the Mother House for dinner, where there was a celebration in progress. One of the brothers had just graduated so they had prepared a big meal and thumping party music. I walked into a large hall throbbing with a hip hop beat as two priests, in full-on priestly collars and large Franciscan crosses hanging around their necks, got funky on the dance floor. It was the first time since I've been in Kenya that the music blaring through the speakers wasn't Christian reggae or gospel going in an endless mind-numbing loop, which is ironic considering that I was at a Catholic event with Catholic brothers at a Catholic parish. In fact there was NO Christian music whatsoever the entire night, only a huge lineup of remixed Kikuyu oldies from the 60s and 70s, with the occasional Kenyan hip hop interlude led by a young brother who would announce his presence throughout the night using the "n" word. I was the only person, of course, that seemed to find these moments awkward.

Over dinner three priests took turns regaling me with their stories about traveling and living in the U.S. As soon as I finished eating, all the brothers bustled me onto the dance floor and turned up the Kikuyu folk music. We bobbed and shuffled and congo-lined to crooning Kikuyu love songs for a few hours, including one song that apparently inspired everyone to start playing synchronized air guitar, and a ballroom dance number involving the mzungu visitor and the head priest's youngest sister.

Franscican brothers know how to party. The shower in my room at the parish was malfunctioning and ended up flooding my bedroom floor at 2 in the morning, but otherwise it was a fun night, fueled only by a proliferation of Orange Fanta sodas and a huge vat of mokimo, a traditional Kikuyu dish made of mashed bananas, pumpkin leaves and green maize.

In the morning I had to go back into town for a Peace Corps event, but everyone kept insisting that I stay for a few more days. Kenyans are really the most welcoming people I've ever met. The brothers and priests each offered to take me to their respective homes the next time I visit. I now have local guides should I ever want to visit Lake Baringo, Turkana, Nakuru, Naivasha, Tanzania, Kampala or Western Uganda ("Be careful when you go to Uganda. They eat people." "Don't be joking. If we ate people, Justina would have been eaten when she went rafting on the Nile.")

My Nairobi friends rock, man.

Girls Leading Our World

I need to play a bit of catch-up on my blog posts since I’ve been away so much lately. It’s hard to even pick a place to begin, from my colorful trip to Homa Bay to speak to a church group about AIDS to the momentum and interest building in my community for gender development issues.

The last few days has been a whirlwind of interviews with high school girls in my village to nominate some candidates to attend Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), a Peace Corps-sponsored experiential learning camp for girls that empowers them with skills and knowledge to be leaders in their community. Wow that was a boring sentence, but the underlying meaning is really exciting to me. I’ve been in my village almost nine months and I’m only just beginning to get a sense of the people and institutions that will be valuable resources to me on gender development projects, always a touchy issue.

Today I was talking with a woman who teaches at one of the girls’ high schools here, and with very little prodding from me she began lamenting all the discrimination and injustice that girls face in Kenyan culture. It was the same story I’ve heard over and over – girls are valued less than boys, so they are not encouraged to excel or even attend school, as a result they often end up in early marriages or pregnant without a partner supporting them, they are socialized to believe their role is to bear children (A woman attending one of my AIDS talks said, “If I were HIV positive and my husband were negative, I would just go back to live with my parents, and leave him and our kids in peace rather than be a burden to him, because I’ve already given him children so what more use does he have for me?”), they are socialized to defer to men and never question them, they are told they are not as smart or capable as boys, etc, etc. And as a result, girls grow up to be women who just accept their situation, unjust as they may feel it is, because they don’t feel empowered to change anything.

I’m excited after this week because I think by merely going around and talking to people about Camp GLOW I’ve revived a bit of discussion about girls’ issues. It’s something people in my community have always talked about, but now there is a hint of hope in their voices that with Camp GLOW girls now have a resource immediately available to them for empowering themselves. Like most perceptions of what I do and what the Peace Corps can do, it’s a bit overblown, as there won’t be any sudden equalization of gender relations even if all three girls I’ve nominated are invited to attend the camp, but at least I am starting to get a feel for the level of interest – and opposition – to gender development activities, and I’ll be able to work with people here to tailor programs to the specific interests and needs of this community.

-----

Story from Homa Bay:

After living with the shy Nandis for so long it was slightly jolting to travel through Luo country, where people are seemingly more outspoken and not afraid of a little confrontation. I was waiting for a matatu in one town, glowing like Kryptonite as the only mzungu in sight for miles, when a woman approached me and started asking about me. What’s your name? Where are you from? What do you do here? That sort of thing.

“My home is just there,” she said, pointing to somewhere between 50 yards and 15 km away. “Come over for tea.”

“Oh, thanks but I can’t,” I said. “I’m late and I need to catch the next vehicle that comes along.”

“Come to my home for tea,” she said. “It’s just there.”

“I’d love to, but I can’t,” I said, wondering if it was normal to go over to a complete stranger’s house for tea.

“Don’t refuse,” she said, getting visibly upset.

“Sorry, I really can’t. I need to be at a meeting,” I said.

The women looked me up and down with a frown on her face, then said, “Okay. I’d ask you for your mobile number, but you’re not very friendly.” Then she stalked off, ostensibly to take tea by herself.

In My Tribe

March 12, 2006, 11:13pm. Sunday.

Back from a little hiatus known as safari time in the Maasai Mara. Patrick
is visiting from the States and as I speak he is making his way up Mt.
Kenya. Why do people always climb mountains after visiting me? Anyway, just
a little plug for my safari guides, Paul and Joseph, who are fun and great
cooks all in one. And big points for Paul who wasted no time correcting the,
uh, missing vodka incident, which saved me the trouble of going around to
all the Maasai warriors who were guarding our camp and smelling their breath
to identify the guilty party. Paul and Joseph are also Kikuyus, which means
they have a little problem with their r�s and l�s. So for the first two days
we thought our driver�s name was Roland. It was actually Lawrence. Also I
kept wondering why Joseph kept talking about going back to the roach. The
itinerary didn�t say anything about roaches being part of the wildlife tour,
and I was upset that no one told me there was a roach problem. It turns out
we were going back to our lodge.

We visited a Maasai village as part of our tour, which we knew would be a
total sterilized tourist trap, but curiosity got the best of us and we
coughed up the ten bucks entrance fee. Yeah, like we were entering an
amusement park. It turned out to be not exactly sterile, and more disturbing
than amusing. The Maasai are one of the few tribes in Kenya who have
preserved nearly all of their traditions, from their dress to their diet,
although most of them are now Christian and most communities are not as
nomadic as they once were. But practices like female genital mutilation and
polygamy are still very common. The Maasai, unlike nearly all other tribes
in Kenya, are not farmers; they are pastoralists. A family can have hundreds
of cows, sheep and goats, which are their main source of food. The Maasai
diet, I am told, consists of meat, milk (often mixed with cow blood) and
ugali. Because they don�t farm, the Maasai traditionally don�t eat
vegetables.

The stereotype of the Maasai is that their cows are everything. A Maasai may
be wearing rags and have no shoes, but as soon as he gets some money, he
will buy a cow. I asked a guy how many wives he had and he said, �Just one.
I will get more wives when I get enough cows.� The going rate seems to vary
� some people told me five cows for a wife, some people told me ten. Other
tribes joke that the Maasai love their cows so much that even if a cow is
dying the owner won�t get rid of it.

Anyway, this village is a single family � a man, his wives and all their
children, in-law children and grandchildren. The mud houses are built by
women so they tend to be just too short for a Maasai man to stand fully
upright inside. Each house has a room where the goats and sheep stay, which
makes for a pretty vigorous case of methane poisoning. Also, the village is
wall-to-wall carpeted with cow poo, and the kids, most of whom run around
completely commando, seem to enjoy snacking on it. Choos are non-existent;
why dig a deep hole to prevent potentially toxic human waste from
contaminating your scarce water supplies, the bottoms of your feet, and your
kids� fingers when you can choose any spot in the bush where you feel
comfortable? Aren�t we all one with nature anyway? These villagers certainly
were; every one of them smelled just like pee. Everytime we drove past a
village the smell of cow poo and human pee wafted into our vehicle.

My interaction with village Maasai has been extremely limited so I really
don�t know what to make of all this. Anita, a British woman on my tour,
asked me what kinds of projects I would try to initiate if that Maasai
village were my assigned village. I said, �I�d dig them a bunch of choos.�
It struck me that the lack of choos was probably just another of the many
ways that this village had chosen to preserve their traditional way of life.
And in a purely objective sense, that�s fine, just as it�s fine to
circumcise girls if they truly want it, and it�s fine to have a polygamist
culture if its consensual. The problem is that the line between what someone
really wants and what someone thinks they want because their culture tells
them they�re supposed to want it is completely unclear and easily
manipulated for political or social purposes.

Aside from the poo and pee factor, the Maasai are beautiful people -
statuesque, dignified, adorned in intricate beaded jewelry, often carrying
spears and clubs for fighting off lions and other hungry animals who wander
into their village at night (�To protect your family?� I asked. �To protect
our cows,� they said.) I spent way too much money on the beaded handicrafts
that are ubiquitous in all the Maasai curio shops. I�m just as intrigued as
any other tourist by the sight of Maasai wrapped in their signature red
blankets, grazing enormous herds on the savannah. They are more than
slightly intimidating in their stature and rather hard but handsome facial
structure � high cheekbones, narrow nose and jaw, and piercing eyes. It�s
unfortunate that the name for their warriors � young, good-looking and brave
men in the tribe � is moran. As Margaret Cho says, that�s like naming your
kid Asshill. You�re just asking for him to be tortured on the playground.

As part of the village tour, our Maasai guide took us to visit the village
primary school, which he said was built from proceeds from local tourism.
One of the teachers, Beatrice, took us to meet her second graders, who
obediently jumped to their feet and recited, �Good morning, we are happy to
see you.� Then the teacher hit us up for money to build more desks. I asked
her if she had tried writing a proposal to CDF, government money that is set
aside for every constituency in the country, which is supposed to be
distributed to community groups requesting funds for whatever grassroots
projects they have started. CDF is notoriously corrupt because the funds are
distributed (or more commonly, not distributed) by the area MP (member of
Parliament) who often selects projects based on favoritism and political
motivations (or just pockets the money). However, schools tend to receive
CDF funds more frequently than other types of projects (such as boring water
projects), because they are high profile, glamorous projects that make the
MP look good. I told the teacher all this and to my surprise she said she
had never heard of CDF. If this was true, it was just another example of how
unaware people at the grassroots are about what resources are available to
them locally, and therefore how easily these communities can feel
disempowered and hopeless. This particular village was relying on tourism
revenues, which is not such a bad thing since the tourists won�t be
disappearing from the area anytime soon. But they are the lucky ones; there
are hundreds of communities out there who don�t have the benefit of tourism
and may not know about CDF and other government money set aside JUST FOR
THEM, should they be so inclined to ask for it.