Notes of Marginal Interest

My Cat Is Not A Vegetarian. I just watched Fatso hunt down, torture and eat a gecko. Part of me felt like I should have done something to rescue it, but two years in rural Kenya does something to a person’s sense of Darwinian intervention. The cycle of life is the cycle of life. Cats hunt, geckos run. Plus, it was kind of like watching a train wreck. I really wanted to see every gory detail, from start to finish.

Fatso’s quite the hunter. My house is more free of creepy crawlies than it has ever been. My spider problem is now my former spider problem. Mice don’t bother coming inside. A line of ants is to Fatso what cereal dust is to a little kid. You know, tongues dabbing at stuff.

This gecko was…crunchy. I watched her bat it around for a few minutes, the gecko flopped on its back playing dead hoping she would go away. It looked miserable, and you could see the life slowing seeping out of its beady black eyes. Fatso kept batting it against my mattress and pushing it under my sheets, trying to get it to twitch so she could bat it around some more. I made a note to myself to remember where she left the body so I wouldn’t have any surprise gifts in the morning. But I didn’t have to. Fatso batted the gecko under my desk and ate it. And it sounded like this:

Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Then she went over to where she had left the tail (which had broken off early in the hunt) and polished that off, too.

Crunch crunch crunch.

I Have Internet At Home! I’ve finally joined the modern world in Kenya. The newest group of volunteers, who arrived in September, all bought internet-enabled phones. It was something that I’d only vaguely heard about through the Peace Corps grapevine and one of my blog readers, and just recently I realized it would be a great thing to have. I mean, internet access in my very own house! So I spent three months thinking about it, and talking myself out of it, and then finally bought the phone last week. The best part is that the phone works in the States, too, so it’s 7,000 shillings unwasted.

The phone accesses the internet through the cell network, so I can theoretically get internet anywhere there’s cell phone coverage. It’s really cheap, something like 1 shilling per 70K of data downloaded. I usually spend about half a shilling to check my email. As if that weren’t enough, Opera makes software for mobile phones (Opera Mini, go to http://mini.opera.com) that basically compresses web pages into a few basic elements (mostly text) so a 50K page might end up being only 3K or so. I’m now working on getting software for my laptop so I can browse from my computer, instead of from the tiny screen on my phone.

I’m usually the last to discover new technology, so I won’t be surprised if I get a bunch of comments on this post telling me that this has been around for a couple of years now.

Global Warming Is Real Warm

I heard on the BBC last week that temperatures around the world have been 2-3 degrees higher this year than ever before. Apparently this is a very significant rise, and has caused a lot of countries’ dry seasons to be longer and dryer than usual. That would explain why it’s almost the end of March and the rains just started today. Hopefully they’ve started for good. My washcloth is a disturbing color of brown.

We’ve been getting one day of rain every 7-10 days for the last couple of months, but today feels like rainy season rain. Long, cold and really wet. I finally planted a few seeds in my tiny little plot that vaguely resembles a shamba. I’ve planted eight rows of vegetables, because that’s as much room as I have. And I had to buy KukuNet (chicken wire) to fence it off from my chickens. The maize that I’ve been throwing in the yard for them has sprouted into, surprise, maize plants! I got a tomato plant after I tossed them a rotten tomato, too. Nature is pretty amazing.

Godi Strikes Again. I don’t see him much because he is often in the field for weeks at a time conducting mobile VCTs. But he always has something culturally significant (to me) and blog-worthy (to you) to say, so when he’s in the office I try to chat him up a bit.

Recently I’ve been campaigning for my organization to provide more support for career development of its counselors. I got the idea after one of our counselors told me she discourages clients from using condoms.

“Uhhhhh…you do whuhhhht?” I said.

“Well, condoms can sometimes be unreliable so I tell them not to use them,” she said.

“They’re unreliable 1 percent of the time, usually because people use them incorrectly,” I said. “As a VCT counselor, shouldn’t you be telling people how to avoid getting AIDS? How are people supposed to protect themselves if you’re telling them not to use condoms?”

“I tell them to abstain,” she said.

“If a client comes for an HIV test, you can safely assume they’re not abstaining,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, starting to backpeddle. “I only tell them to abstain if they’re not married. Youth should not be having sex.”

“Do you really think a 19-year-old boy who is already having sex is going to start abstaining because you told him to?” I said.

“Oh,” she said again. Peddle peddle peddle. “I tell them about condoms. And I tell them about abstaining and being faithful. I give them all the information, and let them choose.”

The conversation bugged me. In order to become a VCT counselor, you’re supposed to attend a month-long training that includes how to give accurate and unbiased information. Once they start practicing, the counselors are supposed to be supervised so that this type of thing doesn’t happen.

“We have a problem with some counselors imposing their own morals on clients,” Godi said.

Great.

The PCV who was here before me had put together a small library of books on HIV, ARVs, STIs, health and other relevant topics for anyone on staff to access. The problem is that the management team all nodded enthusiastically and told the PCV that she’d done a great job, then promptly did nothing. Oh, except that they put all the materials in a locked cabinet and gave the only key to one of the counselors, who is rarely in the office because she goes out for mobile VCTs.

I suggested to Godi that counselors be encouraged to review the materials in this library, especially in their copious free time. Or that they simply be reminded at staff meetings that whenever they get a question from clients that they can’t answer, that the library is there to help them find answers. Godi told me he didn’t even know the resource center existed.

“Also you just can’t tell people,” he said, switching into embarrassed vague mode, which drives me crazy.

“You can’t tell people what?” I said.

“You can’t tell people things,” he said.

“I know, you just said that,” I said impatiently. “What can’t you tell them and why not?”

He just stared at me, his grin and his embarrassment growing. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

“Yes, you do!” I said. “You know. Why do you say you can’t tell people things?”

He paused for a long time, and I could tell the cogs were turning in his head trying to figure out how to explain something to a mzungu that a mzungu can’t understand.

“You sometimes want to tell someone some things, but it’s not good, so you just keep quiet,” he said.

AAAARGGHHH!!! I just stared at him across the table, slack-jawed, my cheekbone cupped in my hand.

“We don’t have a learning culture,” he said finally. “If you tell someone to improve, maybe they can never talk to you again. People don’t want to admit they don’t know something. They don’t want to admit they’ve made a mistake. So to tell people to use the resource center is very hard.”

“Ah,” I said. “So asking someone to research a question that they couldn’t answer during a counseling session wouldn’t work.”

“No, they can even give the client any answer, even a wrong one, just so they don’t look as if they don’t know the answer,” he said. “So it is very hard to have a learning culture.”

Great.

Well, I’m still waiting for the lady with the key to get back, so I can rummage around the library and see what we can do to encourage a learning culture among our staff. The good news is that there are people in my organization who are always eager to add to their technical knowledge, who ask for advice when they don’t know the answers, and who believe that there’s always an opportunity to improve their skills. Is it possible to spread this mentality to other staff members? We’ll see.

OWLS=Old Growth Forest in the U.S., Death in Kenya. I’m designing this year’s t-shirt for Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), the annual leadership camp that Peace Corps hosts for secondary school girls in Kenya. I racked my brain for design ideas that fit the following criteria:

Meaningful to Kenyan girls
Not offensive to Kenyan girls
Not offensive to any other Kenyan
Attractive and fun to Kenyan girls

I was worried because my knowledge of Kenyan symbols is limited. I didn’t want to inadvertently use something that is widely regarded in Kenya as bad luck or just unappealing (chameleons, slugs, snakes, rats), and I didn’t want to create something that I thought was profoundly clever, but that the girls wouldn’t get.

For example, one of my favorite lines from the poem A Woman’s Creed is, “We are the women men warned us about.” Well, Kenyan girls don’t find it especially amusing, even after I explain it.

Earlier that day Nick had told me that owls are regarded as bad luck. If you see an owl land in a tree, he said, it means someone will die. He says it has happened several times to people he knows. There is even a special way to chase the owl away to break the curse (light a tree branch on fire and throw it at the owl).

So, no owls, no snakes, no chameleons, no slugs. I finally decided on sunflowers in various stages of growth. The girls who attend Camp GLOW grow so much in the course of the week, and what girl doesn’t like sunflowers? Even I like sunflowers, and I hate clothes with flowers on them. As far as I know there are no negative associations with sunflowers here. I mean, they have farms for them up near Kitale.

P.S. OWLS is the mnemonic that kids in California learn for identifying an old growth forest. You know a forest is old growth because it:

is Old
has Woody debris
has a Layered canopy
has Snags

Neat, huh?

Food Is the Most Important Meal of the Day. I’ve never been much of a Thai chef, because there’s always a good Thai restaurant around the corner…in San Francisco. So I’d pretty much written off the possibility of Thai food in Kenya, until Brady introduced me to lemongrass and fish sauce, which are both available at Nakumatt. I can now make a stripped-down tom yum soup base! It’s ginger, lemongrass, fish sauce, chili paste (the Thai stuff that uses shrimp), coconut milk, vinegar and lemon juice. For the food part I add beef, shitake mushrooms, green onions and (gasp!) Ramen noodles. Hey, you gotta improvise. Kaffir lime is also a key ingredient, and one that’s not so easily found in Kenya. I don’t even know what it is. Is it a fruit? Is it an herb?

Dr. Patti, the Peace Corps doctor, came by my town today for a site visit. The visit was for basic assessments – what’s my water situation, what’s my safety and security situation, do I have electricity, are my pets clean and immunized, do I have a hole-free mosquito net, any potential health hazards at my site, how’s my mental condition, am I diarrhea free, etc.

She saw a list on my wall called “USA, So Far Away,” listing things I miss from home, and saw that one of the items was asparagus.

“You know, we get lovely asparagus in Nairobi,” she said. “You should look for it at Sarit Center next time you’re in town.”

Suddenly she seemed to change her mind, and picked up her phone. “Honey,” she said to her husband on the other end. “Could you add asparagus to the shopping list? I’m with a volunteer who wrote it on a list of things she misses from home. She’ll pick it up when she comes to Nairobi.”

Eeeeeeeeee!!! It’s small acts of kindness like this that makes her so amazing, in addition to her competence as a doctor. She also brought me a jar of Nutella, not easily found in Kenya. There are a few people on the medical staff who have similar hearts of kindness. One of the nurses sent a large plate of cheese and crackers to our in-service training in Kitui, knowing that a lot of PCVs miss this staple hors d’oeuvre in cheese-deficient Kenya. Another nurse gave me the leftovers from her lunch, the exact contents of which I now forget, but it was something American, had meat, and included a salad. And most importantly, she let me heat it up in the microwave. The microwave!!! I’d forgotten those things exist.

SMS I received today: “I <3 dr.patti! shes so kind&she duznt giv me a breast exam wen I hav diarrhea. cuz ima boy!”

A Plug For Kakamega Rainforest, the Great Weekend Getaway

I can’t believe I’ve lived an hour’s bike ride away from the forest for almost two years, and haven’t really spent a lot of time there. It’s a minor tourist destination for people who actually make it out to Western Kenya, or who are working their way towards Kisumu or Uganda, but it takes a few days and some exploring to find its best-kept secrets. There are scores of trails winding through the forest, but only one is helpfully marked with a destination and estimated hiking time (River Yala, 3 Hours). Even that one has a confusing hairpin turn with a few side trails branching off in different directions, all of which I’m sure end up at the foot of a mass grave full of decomposing tourists still clutching their Nalgene bottles.

A few weeks ago we saw a troupe of blue monkeys migrating past one of the campsites. A research assistant was jotting down notes and watching them through binoculars. She explained that this troupe was invading another troupe’s territory, and if the other troupe came along and discovered this, a massive fight would ensue. This particular troupe had about 40 members, including youth, and like all blue monkey troupes it was dominated by a single alpha male. The rest were all females, and they each had a particular ranking in the group. The research assistant was trying to establish which females were dominant over others based on their behavior during inter-group fights. At one point the monkeys dropped down from the trees one by one, crossed the lawn, and ran under the stilted guesthouse, where they began eating dirt. “Calcium,” the research assistant explained.

They’ve also renovated the bandas at the KEEP (Kakamega Environmental Education Program) center, which is a nice place to crash for the night. Each banda has beds and mosquito nets, and is constructed like traditional Luo (or Luhya?) homes with thatched roofs and a covered veranda with simple furniture to lounge in. There’s running water, solar electricity, newly constructed choos and bafus, a party banda, and friendly staff who will heat your bath water to scalding temperatures and cook local meals upon request. You want chicken? They’ll find you a chicken. All this under the forest canopy, for 500/= a night (extra for the cook). Fall asleep to the 24/7 tooting bird, strange insect noises, monkey calls and that creepy clicking jungle sound that you hear on Lost. Wake up to the 24/7 tooting bird, the Christmas bird (whose song sounds like the beginning of Silver Bells), and all sorts of other songbirds, including roosters.

Alternatively there is what I like to call the Rooms-On-Stilts. KEEP calls it their guesthouse, an aqua blue wooden structure raised one and a half stories up on stilts as if the area were prone to flooding. There are only four rooms available here, but each one has two beds with nets, a flushing toilet, and a bathtub with running water. An added bonus is that you can see the ground below through the floorboards, which sometimes bend under your weight. The Rooms-On-Stilts has a balcony that is eye-level with the forest canopy, and we were able to wake up one morning and watch blue monkeys and black-and-white colobuses over breakfast. And the best part is that each room, which sleeps two people, is only 770/=, or 385/= per person.

The only problem with the forest, especially if you’re exploring the areas around KEEP and Rondo Retreat, is that its business model involves KEEP members, who are from the local community, trained to constantly hit up tourists for guiding fees. You’ll be offered walking tours to the river, to the lookout, to the bat cave, night walks, bird-watching tours, monkey-watching tours, and lectures on local butterflies and snakes that include peeks at their meager collection of both. All of these tours are expensive (for the Peace Corps budget), starting from 400/= per person per hour. The first time I went to the forest I was tricked into a couple of these tours, which add up when you’re talking three or four hours of guided instruction on how to walk through the forest. It was informative as long as we kept asking questions. To our guide’s credit, she was knowledgeable. To her discredit, she wasn’t too keen on talking.

The forest is a great place to escape Kenyan village life. There are, of course, plenty of villages surrounding it, but once you get into the protected areas, it’s just you, monkeys, butterflies in every color imaginable, and crazy tooting birds. (Here’s a question: Is it true that someone came up with a mathematical formula for the flight pattern of a butterfly? Or did I just imagine it?) There’s almost nowhere else in Kenya so peaceful and relatively undamaged by people. I thought that with so many parks and reserves it would be easy for me to find wilderness in Kenya, but ironically those kinds of spaces are much more accessible in the U.S. Any unprotected land of any value in Kenya has been claimed for some purpose already – farming, firewood, grazing.

The Kakamega Forest is only a fraction of what it was just a few decades ago. Apparently it used to extend all the way down to Kisii. And before that, I’m told, it was part of the equatorial rainforest that stretched all the way to West Africa.

When I talk to locals living around the forest I realize that they place no value on conservation of forest lands. To them it’s firewood. Life is about survival, not lifestyle. When I stop to watch monkeys, they shake their heads and laugh.

“Don’t you think monkeys are neat?” I ask.

“No,” they say. “They are monkeys.”

“The trees and flowers in the forest are beautiful,” I say.

“No,” they reply. “It’s just trees.”

KEEP has done a lot to educate people from the surrounding villages about the importance of conserving the forest and its ecosystem, and it sounds like they’ve made some progress. Women are only allowed to gather firewood from certain areas of the forest where cypress farms have been planted, and they are being taught how to plant eucalyptus and other fast-growing trees on their own property for firewood. There are even community-based organizations that breed butterflies to sell to museums and zoos around the world as income-generating activities.

You visit me, I’ll take you to the forest. You can even pick your own chicken.

This Is My Cat, Fatso

Isn't she cute?? Goo goo ga ga ga goo goo yes you are you are so cute yes you are awww who's a good girl who's a good kitty want some omena and ugali drool drool slobber

International Women's Day Wrap-Up And More

More Fun With High Context Speech. The mama who comes to wash my clothes said to me this morning, “Wewe ni huko.” You are over there. I was thinking, well, no, I’m right here. But I let her make her seemingly irrelevant and inaccurate observation undisturbed.

She repeated herself several times, until I started to suspect that she was asking me a question. “Wewe ni huko?” You are over there?

What a strange question, I thought. Can’t she see that I’m standing right here giving her blank looks because I don’t know what she’s talking about? And even if I weren’t right here, exactly where is this “over there” place that she thinks I am?

“Wewe huko?” she said, as if this clarified. You over there? “Wewe ni kazi?” You are work?

At this point, any Kenyan would have figured out what she was asking. I was only getting more confused by the minute. This lady has maybe an 8th grade education, but she’s not crazy. “Kazini,” she said. At work. “Wewe kazini.” You at work.

“Yes!” I said excitedly, finally getting her. “Yes! I’m going to work today!”

Whew. I will never master this language.

Fun With SMS. Yes, this is how many volunteers spend a significant portion of their living allowances. I stopped writing down brilliant smses after about three months, but I wish I had kept a log. Some good ones:

“Hmmm… Jst saw a barefoot guy in a parka preachn 2 a flaming garbage pile. I <3 kenya”

“Thr’s jst sumthn about seein a billbrd th@ sez “imagine, freedm frm unpleasant odors.” While ridin in a matatu th@s jst 2 ironic 4 wrds.”

“A bunch of baby spiders hatched in my shoe last night so I killed them all. And such is the cycle of life.”

“Help, is the red spot on a black widow spider on the back or on the belly? Would be good to know rite now…”

[Editors note: Someone has a spider problem.]

Everyday Is Women’s Day. But International Women’s Day only comes once a year. And Kenya definitely teaches you to redefine what you think you know about what constitutes a successful International Women’s Day. I’m just happy because:

1. My purple ribbons were a huge hit all over town, and enabled the ladies on the IWD committee to more than cover the expenses of running the event. (They bought fewer sodas for attendees than they had originally agreed to do, and took themselves out to lunch instead. So they now also have an opportunity to develop financial responsibility.)

2. The ladies are so enthusiastic about having a designated day each year to make a lot of noise about being ladies that they’ve decided to continue celebrating International Women’s Day every year. They’ve already started brainstorming ideas for next year. Three hundred and sixty-four days in advance is unheard of in Kenya, and everywhere else. I’m so proud of them.

This is one of the only projects I’ve worked on here that sounds like it will sustain itself after I’m gone. So in the development world where sustainability is the whole point, I’ve done good.

I noticed that the whole time I was thinking of ways to infuse the day’s activities with thought-provoking message that go beyond the clichés that already pervade women’s empowerment dialogs in Kenya. I started to wonder if I was just imposing my own expectations of what a day like this would look like in the U.S. Kenya is in a different place than the U.S. in terms of women’s rights. That goes without saying. But also, the path they clear for themselves to achieving equality will probably end up being very different from ours. These ideas are brought to the developing world from the West, but ultimately it’s up to countries like Kenya to hold the torch the way that works for them.

It always surprises me, though, to turn on the BBC and hear about women in Afghanistan and Iran demonstrating or filing lawsuits for their rights. That brand of loud, visible protest and seeking legal recourse are options that women in my town aren’t even aware of. I think there’s such a profusion of confusing messages about women’s rights, and so many different communities of women in various stages of self-awareness and empowerment in Kenya that I don’t see a neat, unified movement happening at once. Women in Nairobi are so different from women in my town, and even more different from women in the villages.

The fact that 100 women made it a point to leave their chores to attend three hours of speeches yesterday shows that there is significant interest in learning more about their rights as well as being mobilized to do something about it. Yesterday was only a tiny step, and a different me would have written it off as insignificant, but I like to think that Kenya has trained me, in some ways, to be an optimist. Giving women a forum to speak about and listen to each other talk about things they like, things they hate, and things they want to change about their lives and their own culture is something that rarely happens in this community.

Listening to the guest speakers, some of whom were men, I realized that most people are well aware that the injustices that women face are wrong, or at least they’re aware that they’re supposed to say they’re wrong. Walking around town talking to people, I tend to forget this, because I think that in a non-confrontational culture like Kenya’s, people hesitate to speak out against a random injustice they see perpetrated against someone else on the street. Instead, things like wife-beating, unequal divisions of labor and power, and the sublimation of women’s and girl’s needs are considered part of everyday life. It’s just the way things are, just as packing matatus beyond the legal limit and overcharging customers are just the way things are, and most people have never bothered to challenge the status quo.

Women Rule

Preparations for International Womens Day, which is this Thursday, are in full swing. After watching community leaders and boda-boda operators running around like chickens with their heads cut off (I’ve seen plenty of chickens doing it, and it looks ridiculous) in an attempt to “prepare” for World AIDS Day last December, Adrienne and I both vowed never to facilitate a community-wide event like that in my town again, especially one involving district officials.

Carren and I have been teaching an empowerment workshop at a girls’ high school outside of town, and I was perfectly content to restrict my IWD activities to this one project. I also distributed a few copies of an IWD flyer to some of my co-workers and encouraged them to talk to people about women’s rights and contributions, but beyond that I planned to be laissez-faire.

Well, somehow within 24 hours the flyer landed on the desk of the District Social Services office, which is in charge of events like this. The officer in charge quickly assembled an IWD committee that includes women from a local gender development NGO, and me. We have a week to mobilize people – to tell them about International Women’s Day, to get them interested in its themes, and to sell purple ribbons to raise money for the event.

Trying to talk to people about International Women’s Day has been interesting. Men always shrug it off as a day “for women only.” They don’t take it seriously for that exact reason. When I asked my supervisor if he wanted to buy a purple ribbon to show his support, he said, “I’ll ask my wife if she’s interested.”

I said, “March 8th is not just for women. It’s for everyone who supports equality and empowerment for women.”

“Women are already empowered,” he said.

“Oh, come on, they are not,” I laughed, fully expecting to see a big, sarcastic grin on his face. There wasn’t one. He was completely serious.

“Yes,” he said. “Women are empowered already. They do not need to be empowered again.”

I had no idea what he meant. I couldn’t put aside everything I’ve seen and heard in Kenya to the contrary, and simply ask why he thought that. Instead I said, “If women are so empowered, how come they’re the ones getting HIV? How come they’re having fifteen kids when they only want four?”

“Children are a blessing that God provides,” he said, as if I’d never heard that argument against family planning. “You get kids if it is God’s will.”

“Children are not a blessing when you can’t feed them all,” I said.

“You can feed them if you pray,” he said. “God will provide if you pray.”

“If prayer is the answer, why are there so many kids starving?” I asked, alluding to the fact that there is no shortage of prayer in Kenya.

“They are starving because their parents don’t pray,” he said.

Ah. Silly me.

This conversation was all the more frustrating because my supervisor is an educated man. He has lived all over Kenya. He runs a VCT, knows all the statistics about women and HIV, understands the social factors, including gender inequalities, that help spread HIV. He knows his community. He sees women and girls lose their futures, or their lives, to teen pregnancy, early marriages, lack of school fees, STDs, HIV, and the inability to decide what’s best for themselves.

It was disheartening because I know that my supervisor’s attitude represents the majority of men in my community. I kept emphasizing to the women on the IWD committee that when they go into their villages to talk about empowering women, they need to involve men, too. Women can only be empowered with the support of their brothers, fathers, pastors, neighbors and other men who care about them. As long as gender development activities are seen as “for women only,” a polarizing rather than uniting force, it will remain a struggle against the tide.

Later this afternoon I was at the chemist, wearing a purple ribbon. One of the pharmacists said, “This International Women’s Day, what will women buy for men on that day? You will buy us sodas.”

This prompted a female customer to begin ranting, “Women don’t have any rights. We ask for a Women’s Right Office at the district, and there is none. We are asking for rights, but there is no office to support us. So what can we do? We just have to go home to the same old husband.”

[Laughter all around.]

It’s still a long road ahead, but at least we’re stimulating discussion. I also discovered today that at first no one on the IWD committee was even clear about what the day is about. They all complained that when they went to talk to people about it, they didn’t know what to say. I was really glad and encouraged that these women had the self-awareness and initiative to ask for help.

When they saw the box of purple ribbons and quotes about women that I’d made, they wanted to help me make more. “They are so nice, it is not enough. People will want to buy many,” they insisted.

The most pleasant surprise of all, though, has been the support that we’ve received from the Social Services office. They are the ones that took the initiative to organize local women to plan the day’s activities. They began organizing a week in advance, which is extremely competent planning by Kenyan standards. The officer in charge even lectured the women for being three hours late to the first meeting. “We Africans cannot develop because we cannot keep time,” he said.

That morning I was in my house, debating whether it would be naïve to show up for the 9:00 meeting at 9:00. There was a series on the BBC about the significance of rice in Asian cultures, which I’d been looking forward to for a week (because the teaser sound bite featured a Chinese woman saying that her mom used to tell her that if she didn’t eat all her rice she’d marry a man with spots on his face, and I thought, hey, my mom told me the same thing!) The BBC report started at 9, and I knew the meeting wouldn’t start at exactly 9, but I decided to play it safe just in case government offices kept time better than regular Kenyans. I caught five minutes of the BBC series, and showed up at 9:20. The receptionist stared at me as if she wasn’t expecting any visitors for another few hours. I went to see the officer in charge, who told me to come back at 10:30.

“The others will probably be here by then,” he said. “We are poor here in Africa because we cannot keep time.”

I was upset that I had missed the BBC report for nothing, so in retaliation I didn’t go back to the office until 11. And I was still the only person who had shown up so far. The officer in charge began making phone calls. “If everyone is not here by 11:15 I will call off the meeting. It is you people who called for the meeting in the first place,” he barked into his cell phone.

Yeah. The meeting finally started at noon. Three hours late.

Another Dry Season, Another Rant

The Miracle of Washcloths. Dry season has finally arrived, two months late. (Even the weather is on Kenyan time.) But dry season means dust, and dust means I have to work harder to stay clean. The bath I used to take every three or four days now happens almost daily. And involves a washcloth. The standard splashing just doesn’t get things clean anymore. African dust clings fast. Washcloths are essential for people like me who are disturbed when their own face turns their pillowcase brown after three days. Ew.

Other essential hygiene habits for dry season: Daily hair brushing (to remove dust), daily q-tipping of ears (to remove dust), weekly cleaning and polishing of shoes (to remove dust), and weekly laundry (to remove dust).

Actually I don’t know why they’re called wet season and dry season. They should be called cold season and dusty season.

I Got A Cat! I wasn’t planning to. My friend mentioned that he had two kittens that he couldn’t keep, and he was planning to drown them in the river that weekend. I told him that if that was going to be their fate, then I would take them. I’d recently seen a mouse running around my house anyway.

Well, two weeks later, I still didn’t have any kittens, so I assumed that they had been taken for an impromptu swimming lesson and failed. It turns out, of course, that my friend and the kittens were just on Kenyan time. The next day he brought one over. I was afraid to ask what happened to the other one. (I later found out he had given it to his brother...whew!)

So I named her Fatso. She has a fat tummy, probably from worms. I’m still trying to think of another name because I’m not entirely happy with Fatso. It’s fitting, but not perfectly fitting. Amber suggested naming her AIDS. To reduce stigma, she said. What better way to show my friends and neighbors that AIDS is not a death sentence?

“Yes, I just got AIDS last month. And I’m very happy. In fact, I think I can live a long time with AIDS.”

International Women’s Day Is March 8. My co-worker Carren and I are doing a workshop at a local girls’ high school to get the students interested and involved in girls’ empowerment activities. Today was the first day, and it was relatively successful, considering that I haven’t taught high school kids in almost a year, and we were addressing 600 girls at once, most of whom couldn’t understand an American accent. It’s interesting to realize that sometimes English still needs to be translated into English, and humbling to realize that I really should learn to teach in Kiswahili.

This year’s IWD theme is “Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls.” I think it should also include ending impunity for violence against people who advocate ending violence against women and girls. Empowering women and girls to speak out for respect and equal rights is still not very popular in some crowds.

As much as I would love to see high school girls engaged in loud, outspoken protests and high-profile activism, the reality of getting these girls involved in a culturally-appropriate IWD is a lot more practical, and a lot less dramatic. Every community plans its own events for IWD; we will probably have the usual suspects: guest speakers who talk way too long, skits and poetry readings. Our workshop teaches basic skills like communication, self-esteem and assertiveness through interactive games and exercises. Today they played Fox Across the River, drew pictures of themselves in the career they want to have in ten years, and pondered the possibility of being sidelined by pregnancy. And they loved the fact that it didn’t resemble trigonometry class in any way.

Note to self: Six hundred high school girls is a lot. Bring more crayons.

http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/iwd/index.html

Hee Hee Hee Anus Hee Hee Hee. I asked Nicholas to start teaching me more Kiswahili proverbs. I think they are an extremely powerful form of communication in Kenya, and they usually make more sense to me than regular conversation. After almost two years here, I still don’t understand what people are talking about, even when I understand what they’re saying. Here’s an example:

I was checking out of a hotel and asked one of the staff where I should leave the key. I was coming out of my room, and he was mopping the hallway floor.

“Is it okay if I leave the key in the door?” I asked.

“Ingia ndani,” he said.

This literally means “enter inside.” The problem is that, with my not-so-finely-tuned interpretation skills, I decided that it could have three possible meanings: 1. Go back into the room, 2. Put the key inside the room, or 3. Leave the key in the door.

I learned, after much gesturing and pointing, that he was saying it was okay to leave the key in the door. It seemed to me that he should have said, “Wacha kifungu kwa kifuli.” Leave the key in the lock. Or, less specifically, but still clear, “Weka kwa mlango.” Put it in the door. But I think Kenyans have a much keener ability to infer from context than I do.

Anyway, I learned what is quite possibly the most useful proverb to date, which I’m told politicians regularly recite at political rallies:

Nyani haoni kundule, huliona la mwenzake.

A monkey cannot see his own anus, only that of others. In other words, people are hypocrites. The fact that politicians recite this proverb is absurdly and hilariously ironic.

Of course my favorite part of the whole thing is the word anus. Hee hee hee. I’m 12 years old again and I know the word for anus in Kiswahili.

More fun with proverbs:

Fahali wawili hawakai zizi moja. Two bulls cannot stay in the same yard.

Wapandapo ngazi watu wawili hawashikani mikono. When two people climb a ladder they do not hold hands.

Wapiganapo fahali wawili nyazi huumia. When two bulls are fighting, it is the grass that gets hurt.

Pilipili usioila iyakuwashia nini? How does chili burn you if you have not eaten any? (In other words, mind your own business.)