Conversations With Kenyans

What Did You Bring Me? This morning Godi came into the office to greet me. We hadn’t seen each other in awhile because either he’d been in the field with the mobile VCT unit or I’d been out of town.

“Nairobi ilikuwaje?” he asked, testing my Swahili. How was Nairobi?

“Ilikuwa nzuri,” I said. It was fine.

“Umenileta nini?” he asked. What did you bring me?

I instantly switched into English crankypants mode. “Why do you expect me to bring you something everytime I go somewhere? Even people who don’t even know my name ask me this, like they’re entitled to a gift.”

Godi just laughed. “Oh, your Swahili is so good. I didn’t expect you to understand me.” No matter how long I’m here I’ll never get used to Kenyans laughing at times that I consider completely inappropriate, mostly when I’m already annoyed. I think my greatest contribution to this country has been my prodigious ability to amuse Kenyans with my irritation over cultural misunderstandings.

“Nevermind my Swahili,” I said. “Why did you ask me what I brought you? It’s rude to ask for gifts.”

“It’s just a greeting,” he said, still grinning and patient as ever, true evidence of the superiority of the Kenyan temperament. “It’s what we say when we see people. Like when a man returns to his house at night, all the kids come running and ask, what did you bring us?”

“But it’s like begging. If you want something from Nairobi, give me the money and ask me to buy it for you while I’m there,” I said.

“We don’t actually mean it when we ask what you’ve brought. We can go into someone’s house and say, what can you cook for me, because it’s just a way to greet and talk. But if we’re actually hungry we won’t ask,” he explained.

“Ah,” I said. “That makes sense. It’s like when my parents greet their Taiwanese friends by asking, have you eaten yet? All my life I’ve always wondered, what’s this infatuation with whether people have eaten or not? And if you say you haven’t eaten, are they supposed to take you to lunch? But really, it’s not about food at all. It’s just greetings.”

“Yes, that is it,” he said.

Perhaps It Can Maybe Not Be Possible. Americans are legendary for being direct and literal communicators, for better or for worse. So it’s a constant source of frustration for me when people can’t tell me No, and will lie and say Yes, then assume I knew they meant No. But most of the time when someone is being indirect, I don’t even realize it.

“Justina, you’ve forgotten about the HIV workshop you promised to teach for the boda-bodas,” my co-worker said to me today.

I bristled. “What do you mean? We’ve been working on it all week. We just finished the proposal today and we’re mailing it tomorrow.”

And on top of that, where have YOU been this whole time? I haven’t exactly seen your face around the office all week, eager to offer ideas and help out with proposal writing. What kind of obnoxious assertion is that, that I’ve somehow dropped the ball when you’re the one who’s been MIA while everyone else around you has had their noses to the grindstone on this project?

I didn’t say any of that. I just said, “But I don’t understand what you mean when you say I’ve forgotten. Why do you think that?”

“So you are now looking for funds,” she replied, dodging my question. “That is good.”

“We talked about this in last week’s meeting,” I said, my irritation growing more thinly disguised by the minute. “I said that we were going to write a proposal this week. Remember?”

“Yes, I was at the meeting,” she replied. Then why are we having this conversation??

Instead I said, “Okay, then I still don’t understand why you thought I had forgotten about this project.”

I never got an answer. I was still irritated when I ran into Hillary later, so I recounted the story to him. I rarely see him anymore; months can go by without crossing paths with him, but when I do I’m always reminded how well he knows me.

“Justina,” he sighed. It was one of his you-impatient-Americans-need-to-be-more-understanding sighs. “All I know is that Africans use very indirect ways of communicating. They don’t say exactly what they mean. They like to beat around the bush.”

I didn’t see how this was relevant to my story, so he continued. “When she said you had forgotten, she was translating directly from the Nandi language. It’s just a way to ask how things are faring on. She wanted to know if the project was continuing on well. And she probably got shy when you started getting annoyed.”

It was starting to make a little sense, and I was starting to feel like a jerk. I still don’t know why she felt she had to be indirect about it, but I do know that with most things I don’t understand about Kenya, if I try to make sense of it, I’ll only start passing judgment, and it will drive me crazy. All I need to know is that this is how things are, whether I like it or not.

And at least now I know that she wasn’t accusing me of being a slacker.

On the other hand… Sometimes Kenyans can be so direct as to be intrusive. The minute I came back from the States in January, people were already counting down the days until I would give them my things.

“When are you returning to America?”

“In August.”

“When you leave, you will give me your laptop.”

Her audacity was too infuriating for words. I somehow managed to respond with a fake plastic smile, “No, I will not. Ni yangu.” It’s mine.

As much as I know that the true meaning of these “requests” is mostly lost in translation, that they’re probably not the presumptuous imperatives that I take them to be, and that I’ll never understand them for what they really mean, it doesn’t make it any less easier to tolerate when I’m asked over and over, “You are going home to America in August?”

“Don’t worry, it’s still a long time,” I’d say, anticipating their sadness to see me go. “I’m still around.”

“I am booking your mattress and all your furniture when you leave.”

“Um, I don’t know. It’s still far away.”

“Your shoes are very smart.”

“Thank you.”

“I am booking them. When you leave, you will give them to me.”

So much for forging meaningful friendships that last a lifetime.


It'll Behoove Ya, To Care For Your Uvula. I’ve been meeting with my Swahili tutor, Nicholas, twice a week. Some sessions are more productive than others. Last week he came over with a bad sore throat. He’s been working as a day laborer at a gas station in town, and the dust and diesel fumes finally got to him.

“I have something in my throat that I need to remove,” he said. “I want to look for someone to cut it for me.”

“Uh. What?” I said.

“It is this thing in my throat. You know it? It is giving me a bad problem.”

“Tonsils?”

“No, it is hanging down in my throat and I’m choking,” he said. “It is very long. People like to remove it.”

“The uvula?” I said.

“Yes, in Swahili we call it the small tongue,” he said. “Some people cut it off when they are very young. It avoids these problems of the throat.”

I’m always skeptical but fascinated by Kenyan interpretations of common maladies and their home remedies, so I egged him on.

“But you say it’s choking you?”

“Yes, when I swallow. It chokes me at the back of my tongue.”

“Come on,” I said. “The uvula doesn’t hang down that low. I think you should take some medicine and wait a few days. Don’t cut off your uvula.”

“Do you have one?” he asked.

“Everyone has a uvula,” I said. “You want to see mine?”

I let him peer into my mouth and then realized that it felt like an encroachment on my personal space.

“Yours is very short,” he observed. “Did you cut it?”

“We don’t cut uvulas,” I sighed. “It’s not normal to do that.”

“Mine is very long,” he said again. Then he opened his mouth and pointed.

He was right. It was very long. I couldn’t see the tip of it because it hung down into his throat. But somehow I doubted that it was the source of the infection, nor did I think it was exacerbating the problem.

“So what happens when you cut it?” I asked. “Does it bleed? Do you have to swallow the part you just cut?”

“There is no blood in that part of the body,” he said. “And people used to say that if you swallow it, you’ll die, but I don’t believe it.”

“I have a pair of scissors. You could cut it yourself and see if it’s true.”

“Oh, no, I fear it so much. I want to look for someone else to cut it.”

“Well, good luck with that.”

The Nairobi-Nakuru Spinal Cord Injury

This is what makes the 8-hour bus ride from my site to Nairobi not merely miserable, but seething, writhing, tortuous pain: The hours-long stretches of chewed up "road" where there's really nothing to do but ponder the hard questions about the human condition, mainly, why is the only thoroughfare between Nairobi and Western Kenya such a shameless mess?

Kenyan passengers next to me are always apologizing to me for their roads, as if I'll return to the West and reassure everyone that ordinary Kenyans don't approve. Actually there's another road connecting Nairobi to the western parts of the country, through Narok, and it's arguably even worse than this one. Worse than Nairobi-Nakuru, which I'm churning along right now, a road audacious in its assumption that it in any way resembles a singular noun, what with being 5 bazillion distinct chunks of eroded asphalt pockmarked as if someone drove by 50 years ago and fired an automatic weapon at it, starting at the Ugandan border and not letting go of the trigger until Mombasa. Except for the smooth stretches right before and after some large cities like Nairobi and Eldoret, where the gunmen were distracted by thoughts of stopping for cold beer and beautiful ladies of easy virtue.

Some stretches make no pretenses about trying to fit the "road" definition. Between Nakuru and Naivasha there's not a pebble of tarmac to be found, just a white ribbon of dust, which becomes the land of 1,000 matatu-swallowing lakes during rainy season, lined with sighing acacis trees resigned to being ghostly, dust-covered white from trucks rumbling by.

The trip is 8 hours of vibrating, neck-snapping monotony, because for 2 to 3 hour stretches it's too bumpy to read, too bumpy to sleep (from a chiropractor's perspective), and too noisy, due to bumpiness, to listen to music unless you care to drown out the deafening explosions of bus hitting pothole after pothole with deafening strains of Radiohead. I kid you not, at one point I thought someone had fired a gun from the back row, while at the same time someone else had whacked me on the head with a book.

It's also too bumpy to drink water, which is always a problem because of my unfortunate bladder-bus schedule relationship. The only rest stop is in Nakuru, which isn't for 3 or 4 hours from any point of departure, and even though I've perfected the art of emptying my bladder right before I board the bus, postponing taking my daily anti-malarial meds (makes me pee), and not drinking anything before Nakuru, inevitably, one bumpy hour into the trip, the jolting road conditions have drained everything into my apparently very small bladder, and it becomes a dilemma between enduring several more hours of turgid discomfort or announcing to the whole amused bus in Swahili that I need to go for a short call in that stand of whitethorn bushes and blackjack.

Anyway, because of this, I'm usually parched (albeit empty-bladdered) by the time we descend from Nakuru into the semi-arid Rift Valley floor towards Nairobi. But by this time the road has become a post-earthquake zone again, so I can only stare longingly at my light blue bottle of cool, clean water while I roast inside a bus whose windows have been snapped tight to keep out the clouds, thick as morning fog over San Francisco Bay, being kicked up by the other 40 vehicles bobbling over each pothole like they're cruising along the ridge of a dragon's spine, while the equatorial sun beats down on the lovely savannah landscape of zebras and baboons indifferent to my suffering. One baboon holds a discarded blue water bottle in his hand. In my self-pity I assume he drank the water himself.

Observe the Sensation of Rabid Mosquitos Injecting Malaria Larvae Into Your Bloodstream

I had a moment of clarity a few days ago where I decided I could benefit from incorporating a ritual of relaxing and unwinding into each day. At first my idea was to meditate, but meditation is always one part relaxation and fifty parts frustration for me. I’m told it gets easier and more beneficial the more I practice it, but observing the rants in my head and the hysteria around me and then letting them go doesn’t really create much closure for most of the inane stressors around me. Primal screaming would be much more satisfying, and less time-consuming.

Anyway, I finally decided to take a tea break at the end of the day as a way to just put stuff on hold, and create distance, chronologically and emotionally, between me and the rest of the world trying to invade my sanity. So I everyday come home, fix myself a hot drink, munch on a snack, and imagine that I’m English.

Basically I’m trying to be a little more grounded, a lot less tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-KABOOM! Being in Kenya for 19 straight months made me forget how much I have back home. Everything had kind of faded into a distant reality that seemed like the past, without a present and future. Going home last month, and then coming back to Kenya having been reminded of what makes my home home, makes everything here seem less isolated from the people and places that are familiar and comforting and important, and the old habits and haunts that reassure me that I’m the person I think I am.

We haven’t had running water in ages on my compound. I’ve been fetching from my organization’s storage tank, which will soon run dry. Today a neighbor told me she had gone to see everyone who might be in charge of water, and was told that we all have to pay a bribe so that they can restore our water. I launched into a loud rant about selfish, opportunistic and corrupt officials to no one in particular. It’s a good thing I was on my way to my new tea break, although I’d prefer it if primal screaming were culturally acceptable here.

My language teacher, Nicholas, came over for a session and excused the fact that I was so irate I could only speak Swahili in simple present tense. I finally gave up and told him the story in English.

“We’ve been living this way for all this time,” he said. “Justina, I tell you Kenya is so bad. If I could go away from this place I would.”

He told me about an old boss who told him to pay 500 Ksh out of his 900 Ksh monthly salary as “thanks” for being given the job. If Nicholas didn’t pay this each month, the boss told him, he would be fired. “I have a wife and kids,” Nicholas told him. “How am I supposed to support them on 400 shillings a month?” So the boss fired him.

400 shillings is about $5.50.

The poverty line is defined as less than a dollar a day.

I’ve heard Nicholas’s story a hundred times. It’s everyone’s story. Unemployment is ubiquitous. Jobs are hard to come by unless you know someone. There’s never enough money for anything. And yet those who have the power to help their poorer neighbors or their community instead add to their hardship by asking for bribes.

I think it's easy for me to forget exactly how poor some of my friends are, especially if I've never been to their house, only to find out it's made of mud and dung. I hired another friend's wife to wash my clothes for me, which used to go against my principle of doing things myself simply because I can. But over time I realized that it provides income for someone in the community who needs it more than I need the validation of being able to say I can wash clothes almost as well as a Kenyan woman. Anyway, this woman came over with her baby tied to her back, and I offered to let her put him down on my bed while she worked (often Kenyan women do housework, dig in the shamba, or fetch water and firewood with their babies tied to their backs). She asked if I had a large plastic bag. All sorts of disturbing images came to my mind, but she explained that the baby was still young and it would be prudent to put something under him to protect my bedding. It still seemed weird, but I obliged. She put the baby down, and suddenly my room was filled with the odor of ripe diapers. I was extremely grateful for the plastic bag. Later I noticed the woman had the same odor about her. I've always known that her husband struggles to earn enough money to support their family of three young kids, but it upset me that for whatever reason they couldn't practice basic hygiene, especially for the baby.

I stopped feeling obligated to save anyone a long time ago. It’s unrealistic. And I’ve stopped feeling sorry when I hear the 5,000th stranger telling me the same sob story, which I know will be followed by a request for money. But when it’s a friend’s story, I want to do something. Americans always think there’s a neat solution to every problem. But the only thing I seem to be able to do is get angry every time I hear about people knowingly perpetrating injustices against each other without remorse. That’s why I’m so tired, and have taken up tea-guzzling and biscuit-dipping.

In the end, the only remotely meaningful thing I’ve gained is a much more profound understanding of how lucky I am. I stand here and call a place outside these borders home. (DELETE FLAG-WAVING ANIMATED GIF.) I can, and am expected to, leave Kenya one day. There is a story that New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof tells in his book, China Wakes, that I now relate to more than ever. Kristof is commiserating with a Chinese friend about how deeply saddened they are by the political and social ills of modern China, a country that Kristof has lived and worked in for awhile and feels a connection to despite its flaws.

This friend observes, “There are two brands of bicycles in China, Flying Pigeon and Forever. You foreigners, you are like Flying Pigeons. But we Chinese, we are Forever.”

Maybe it’s no coincidence that the bicycles here are copies of Chinese brands.

Back At It On the Equator

Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor…Oh, Wait. The Kenyan Postal Corporation just broke their own worst record. I just received a package that was mailed to me last March. Ten months! As they love to say here, better late than never. It was a large package with five boxes of Girl Scout cookies from Nandita, and we were both convinced that it had been intercepted and devoured by mailroom workers. I guess this explains why Kenyans sometimes seem to hold onto hope beyond all hope…because occasionally it’s not totally naïve to do so. Nandita tells me it’s already Girl Scout cookie time again back in the States, but I think I’m good for now.

My Own World Map Project. The World Map Project is a tool that some PCVs have used in their schools to teach students geography. Basically you help kids paint a mural of the world on the side of a school building, and they learn where different countries are.

I’ve started my own World Map Project, with a less altruistic purpose. Basically I’ve been amusing myself by gluing a map of the world, postcards and stamps to the top of my coffee table, then shellacking it. Fumes are fun. But I decided that it might be interesting to get readers of my blog involved. If you want, please mail me postcards or stamps (which might mean that you have to write me a letter), and I will try to add them to my coffee table mural.

The Kenyan postal service seems to handle letters and postcards more reliably than packages, so anything you send should theoretically arrive before my close of service in August. Just don’t enclose any cookies.

P.O. Box 30518
Village Market, Nairobi
KENYA

Unrelated side note: If you want to send a package, use the address that goes directly to my town. Drop me an email if you need it again. And use padded envelopes rather than boxes as they tend to arrive within a month, as opposed to ten.

Disputes Over Snoring Chickens. Well, I’ve been back in Kenya for a week now, and in case anyone was wondering, everything in Kenya is still intact. Miraculously, the screaming baby Idi Amins next door moved away over the holidays, but now another neighbor is trying to manipulate me into giving her one of my chickens, or money, or both. The saga never ends, but how many of you out there can say you’ve ever argued over live chickens? Chicken salad sandwiches, yes.

Wanna hear something that’s fascinating only to me? My chicken passed a worm today. About two inches long, white, with a triangular head. Eeewww. I’ve also decided to re-evaluate my chicken-farming strategy. I have four roosters who now spend all their time fighting over two hens, plus they’re ridiculous in the morning. COCKLE-DOODLE-DOO x 4 x (5:00am until 9:00am). So I’m downsizing my rooster department. I’ve already given one to a co-worker, on the condition that he cannot eat it until I leave Kenya. Another rooster has a chest cold right now (not bird flu), which makes him snore at night, but as soon as he gets better, he’s also getting a new home.

Cleaning Up After the US Army. One of the first things I did when I got in was I had my whole house cleaned. Normally I’d clean my own house, but what needed cleaning was all the poo. The Ubiquitous Slug Army (US Army) has been going to town on my walls, window sills, ceilings and doors for the last seven months, but it took a few weeks in a poo-free country to lower my tolerance enough to do anything about it. Now my house is 99 percent poo free.

So the minutiae of life in Kenya plods on, sometimes driving me to absurd rants in my head, other times lulling me into a mid-afternoon nap. I arrived at work last week expecting, for some reason, to be greeted with a pile of work to do. Old mentalities die hard. Instead I came into the office and sat around for two hours reading Newsweek. It was only after I had asked, “What’s new?” five times, and been told, “Nothing,” five times, that someone happened to mention a complex misunderstanding that my organization has been having with other groups in our district. Which has been going on for a month. Which I was never told about. “We were waiting for you to come back from America so we could ask for your input on what to do.” Apparently this was what they meant by, “Nothing.” I’m glad I clarified.

Winding Down My Visit to Heaven

Well, it's not exactly heaven here in the U.S., but it's not exactly Kenya, either. I've spent an alarming amount of time using wi-fi all over Northern California, which led me to an upsetting discovery on the Blogger Buzz page: There is a link to another Peace Corps volunteer's blog on there. Excuse me? Why doesn't that link point to my blog? The guy gets like 149 comments on a single post. Does he really need more traffic? On a good day I get 3 comments and 2 of them are nasty bitter bile about some inadvertently insensitive cultural comment I've made about my lovely host country. Sorry about that, Kenya. You really are a wonderful place, really.

Anyway, the problem with having unlimited access to everything in the world here in America is that you can easily find out how people have outdone you in ways that never crossed your mind. Like getting a link on Blogger Buzz. I am NOT jealous.

Well I've been on a whirlwind tour of friends and family in Texas and California, which will come to a sad end in a few days. People keep asking if it feels surreal to be back in a place that's so different from the world I've known the last 20 months, and if the abundance and waste depress me.

Surprisingly, it feels really normal to be back, and more importantly, really good. When I think about Kenya, about the way I live there, and especially the way most Kenyans live, it strikes me as absurd, and slightly heartbreaking. It doesn't make sense why anything is the way it is there, and as many PCVs will tell their friends and family back home, if you try to figure out the answer, it will only drive you crazy.

I don't regret everything I've seen and done, and what I still have to do, but it's Kenya that feels surreal, not the U.S. America is my home, and I've missed it in ways that I never thought possible. In weird ways. I've missed the things that were essentially invisible to me before, because I took them for granted. MapQuest, for example. The overabundance, especially around Christmas, has always disturbed me, and this year was no different. And I couldn't stop staring at that woman in the restroom at the Frankfurt airport, who let perfectly clean, drinkable tap water run on full blast while she scrubbed her face with soap.

But all my time here has been spent appreciating what we have in the U.S. It was easy before I went to Kenya to focus on everything I hated about our culture - the mindless consumerism, my shame and embarrassment over the current administration, the irreconciliable conflict between some elusive notion of spiritual happiness and the realities of bill paying, oversimplified mainstream answers to existential questions, and people who have too much useless crap in their houses, including me.

But despite all it's flaws, the predictability of living in a culture I know is immensely comforting.

You know if you go to a restaurant and ask them to replace pita bread with toast, they'll do it. They won't insist it's not possible, without being able to give a reason.

"It's not possible."
"Why not?"
"It's not possible."
"What's the reason?"
"It's not possible."

You know that if you ask someone for directions, they will use distinct landmarks and street names.

"How do I get to Nakumatt Lifestyle?"
"It's just there."
"Where?"
"Up there."
"Up where?"
"You see that tree? The green one?"

You know that the electricity won't go out. Ever. Unless there's a hurricane, or an earthquake, and then there'll be hell to pay at PG&E, and their stock price will go down. You know that all your friends have flushing toilets that you don't have to wait for 15 minutes to refill between half-hearted flushes. You know that if someone wants to say No, they'll say it to your face, and life goes on. You know that if you ask someone their name, they'll say it in an audible voice. You know that if you ask someone the price of something, they'll tell you the real price, and there's no bargaining allowed (except on cars and mattresses). You know that no one cares whether or not you're in church on Sunday, or whether or not you're really sleeping with your male "roommate." You know that gay people exist, and so does underwear, and it's okay to talk about both, but it's not okay to talk about your diarrhea. You know that someone who gets caught stealing money from their organization will be fired and have a hell of a time getting another job. You know that no one will end an assertion with "God willing."

I know what I'm feeling is different from what I'll be feeling after my close of service in August. Right now I know I'm going back to Kenya soon. I know I'll see all my friends there again. I'll go back to all the things that infuriate me, and all the beautiful invisible things I take for granted that will make me realize, someday, how much Kenya has become another home for me, for better or for worse. Or at least that's my prediction. Returned volunteers tell me they miss Kenya in ways they never imagined. They say the U.S. becomes this empty, unreal place that doesn't understand them or care what they've been through, and they long for their life in Kenya that seems so normal compared to America.

I have no idea what the hell they're talking about. Maybe one day I will.