The Brain Twitches in Kiswahili

Binge Posting

2007-08-13T10:47:00.000+03:00

I'm catching up on the last three months of blog posts that I have stored on my computer. If you're still checking this space, you're quite the hopeless optimist, but it finally paid off! Keep checking back for updates and thanks for reading. I'm slowly posting my way to July...

A Farewell to Monsoons

2007-05-02T22:47:00.000+03:00

It’s my last day in Stonetown, and on Zanzibar. It’s been raining for the last 13 hours straight, which makes me think we got lucky for most of the trip, where we’d get the standard 2 hours of monsoon rains each day, usually in the afternoon. Today, though, it’s pouring buckets. I know this to be a fact because last night the ceiling in my hotel room was leaking, so I set out a bucket and went to sleep. In the morning the bucket was full and my room was flooded.

Today was supposed to be a curio-shopping day, but now it’s a test-out-the-cool-Arabic-style-cushions-in-the-hotel-lobby day. More notes on Zanzibar:

Coffee. Excellent Kenyan coffee is world famous and impossible to get in Kenya. Coffee in general is not very popular in Kenya except among wazungu, and most of the coffee sold in supermarkets is of the instant Nescafe variety. On Zanzibar, coffee is sold on the street in small teacups, for a few cents. Locals drink it black, unlike in Kenya where every hot caffeinated drink is drowning in milk and sugar. (My tribe, the Nandis, like to brew tea leaves in whole milk, and skip the water altogether.) Tanzanian coffee is thick and robust, without that thin taste of tree branches, and every morning you’ll see coffee vendors shuffling kettles and teacups around as fast as they can to keep up with the crowds of thirsty men gathered around their stand. Coffee drinking is apparently not a very womanly thing to do on Zanzibar.

Mosquitoes on Zanzibar are the worst in the world. I have a mosquito scale that goes like this:

Houston, TX – rabid, responsive to Deep Woods Off (30% DEET).
California Sierras – very rabid, move in black clouds, responsive to Jungle Juice (100% DEET).
Malaysia – very rabid, responsive to Jungle Juice.
Kisumu and Lake Victoria – extremely rabid, will find a way into your net, responsive to Jungle Juice.
Zanzibar – extremely rabid, cross-eyed and drooling; will find a way into your net even if you tuck it into your mattress; especially fond of knuckles, toes, bottoms of the feet, and bum; unresponsive to Jungle Juice.

Seafood. Zanzibar has the best seafood in East Africa!! We stayed in a guesthouse* next to the big fish market in Stonetown. Being in the same neighborhood as the fish market was interesting, to say the least. In the mornings, from the rooftop café of our hotel, we could watch fishing boats unload their catch, but afternoons were more interesting. Loud arguments would break out in the street over fish, and a crowd would gather that sometimes included someone waving a fish around.

There’s a seemingly endless variety of sea creatures to whet your non-vegetarian appetite, most of which would make up-country Kenyans shiver and gag: octopus, squid, barracuda, red and white snappers, kingfish, lobster, crab, mussels, clams, tuna, shark, rays.

You can try many of these (grilled on a stick) at Forodhani Gardens, a grassy plaza along the waterfront with no actual gardens, where a modest row of food stands – and their annoying vendors – pop up each night at sunset.

The fresh-off-the-boat seafood, fresh-pressed sugar cane juice (served ice cold with a generous hint of lemon and ginger), Zanzibari pizzas, local dishes like urojo (potatoes, bajias and fried cassava in a cold coconut-lemon-chili soup), and relatively cheap prices make this popular eating destination worth a trip – or several.

But it’s not exactly “a good place to soak up the local atmosphere,” as Lonely Planet inexplicably describes it, unless your idea of soaking up the local atmosphere means being constantly harassed by drunks whose English vocabulary consists of, “Why didn’t you buy me the beer you promised?” and, “Fuck you!”; “artists” hawking ugly paintings that they didn’t paint; vendors trying to sell you the exact same stuff on a stick that the guy at the next table just sold you; and lots of tourists just like you being harassed for stuff because they’re tourists.

We also made friends with one of the cooks at our guesthouse, Salma. We bought a large snapper and squid at the fish market, some oil and lemons, and asked her to prepare a Swahili-style meal for us. For a 5,000 Tsh tip, she deep-fried the fish, and served it with a simple lemon-coconut-chili sauce, which is found in a lot of the local food here. It was one of the best meals we’ve had on Zanzibar.

Today I’ve commissioned Salma to teach me how to make urojo. It’s usually eaten for breakfast or dinner, the light meals of the day.

Vegetables. Leafy green vegetables aren’t very common on Zanzibar, but it seems like the Zanzibari equivalent of Kenya’s sukumawiki (a type of kale not so dear to my heart) is closer to spinach, which is quite palatable.

Swahili. Our guide for the spice tour, Abdul, told me this joke about the prevalence of Swahili in East Africa:

The Swahili language was born in Zanzibar, lived in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, died in Uganda, and was buried in the Congo.

So I told him a joke that Kenyans love to tell:

In order for East Africa to develop, Ugandans need to learn Swahili, Tanzanians need to learn English, and Kenyans need to learn manners.

Supposedly Zanzibar Swahili is the most proper Swahili. I definitely had to clean up all the village Swahili I’ve been using (which I apparently contaminated Brady with). So instead of speaking like a caveman: “Chakula iko?” – Food, it’s there?

I have to say, “Kuna chakula?’ – Is there food?

And instead of using the imperative Swahili that makes Kenyans so famously rude:

“Nipe chai” – Give me tea

Or, “Letee chai” – Bring tea

I’ve learned to say,

“Nisaidia na chai” – Help me with some tea

Or, “Naomba chai” – I request tea

As much as Swahili is widely and properly spoken in Tanzania and especially Zanzibar, English by contrast is almost non-existent. Which has been great for me, as my Swahili has improved by leaps and bounds in the last ten days. Unfortunately, being a nerd and knowing I’d be traveling in Swahili-land for over a week, I brought all my language notes from my lessons with Nick, and promptly left them in a tour van that I was never able to track down again.

Okay, Fish Market. I just went down to the beach where they sell fish straight off the boats. I was looking for a nice white fish for Salma to fry up for my last meal here. It was raining so I wrapped up my head with a scarf like a local woman, which didn’t fool anyone, judging from everyone’s eagerness to repeatedly announce to each other that I am from “Cheena, Cheena.”

There were all kinds of crazy fish whose names I’ll never know because the vendors only knew the Swahili names for them. Cats of every size, shape, and disease prowled for fish parts and licked at puddles of fish juices. I came up on two men enthusiastically hacking away at large white rays the size of endtables. I stared for awhile, watching them make fillets, until another guy slapped a three-foot shark onto the table in front of me. I left the market with two fillets - a shark and a ray.

Yard Sale On Zanzibar! It’s like becoming a human snowball on the slopes of Tahoe, then face planting several hundred meters downhill. Or maybe it’s more like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of crumbs so that I can find my way back here one day. Either way, this was a vacation of losing stuff all over the island. I lost my Swahili notes, a bandana, a pair of sunglasses, my leftover kachori from lunch, and a $100 bill.

Well, I didn’t lose the $100 in the sense that I left it somewhere and forgot where. It was actually stolen from me by one of the staff at the guesthouse where we stayed. First I feel compelled to explain why I was even carrying a hundred dollar note. Before this trip I went to get USD at my bank in Nairobi, but they were reluctant to give me anything smaller than a hundred. In the States, a hundred dollar note is pretty obscene. I don't think I've ever carried one before. In Africa, it's unthinkably obscene, which is why it seems like people (or at least bank tellers) can't comprehend exactly what it means to be carrying that much money in a single bill. So the teller grudgingly changed one of the hundred dollar notes she gave me, and I was stuck walking around Nairobi with three one hundred dollar notes, quite a security concern in Africa's most crime-ridden city.

Anyway, before the money was stolen, I had really wanted to write a glowing review of the guesthouse, because it was a great place to stay. But after this betrayal, which really felt like a betrayal after I thought I’d made friends with all the staff, I now really want to use this forum to trash that guesthouse into the deep blue Indian Ocean. I will, however, do neither.

8:49pm. After seething about it all the way back to Nairobi, I came to the conclusion that this is East Africa. Duh. Even if I were staying at a five-star hotel, there would be people working there who would happily and without hesitation steal my money, even if I was exceedingly kind and generous to them. That’s how things work much of the time.

I'd let my guard down. I was tired of being cynical of people’s motivations all the time, and knowing that it’s the only prudent way to be. I was being naïve and I knew it, in wanting to trust people who were so friendly to me, and wanting to prove wrong all the assumptions about Africans that wazungu and Africans both embrace. I’ve stored up two years of negative perceptions about East Africans, but it’s exhausting to constantly see the world around me this way. At some point I just wanted to assume that people are essentially honest, good and caring. But in Africa, things don’t work according to a mzungu’s assumptions.

(Photos by Brady Zieman)

I Succumb To The Spice Tour

2007-05-01T23:28:00.000+03:00

Zanzibar was one of the major spice islands back in the day. A lot of spices arrived here from India, South America and Indonesia, and many of them are still used in local foods, especially in pilau and curries, which explains why Zanzibari food is so much more flavorful than up-country cuisine.

Scores of tour operators on the island offer tours of spice plantations for the low, low price of $10. Tours are generally very similar, and usually include not only the plantation, but a pilau lunch, a poke around an old slave cave, a tour of crumbling sultan baths, and a dip in the ocean.

There was a French couple and a German family – an MSF volunteer working in Chad and his visiting parents – in my tour group, who all, by nature of being European, made me envious of their multilingual skills. How often do you meet someone from Europe who only speaks one language, except Brits? It always makes me want to dedicate the rest of my life to learning as many languages as possible, starting with a few months in Provence…or Tuscany…or Nepal.

Anyway, today’s tour was probably the only tour I’ve taken in Africa where our guide actually guided without constant prompting. Not only did Abdul know what he was talking about, he actually pointed things out to us as we went along.

We went to a spice plantation owned by the Tanzanian government that’s now used mainly for research rather than income generation. Abdul walked us around to different plants and explained what parts are used for spices and how they’re harvested.

Here’s some interesting information if you’ve ever wondered what’s in your Indian food (and for future reference for those of you who will receive Zanzibari spices as gifts when I get home):

pilau masala = cinnamon, cumin and whole cardamoms.
tandoori masala = cumin, cinnamon and annatto (gives it the red color)

Other fascinating spice facts, according to Abdul:

Nutmeg is taken from the seed of the fruit of the, uh, nutmeg tree. To get nutmeg spice, remove the seed and dry it (if the seed rattles when shaken, it’s dry), then remove the mace (a waxy outer covering that looks like wilted flower petals), crack it open and grind the stuff inside. This is the only part that’s used; the fruit itself isn’t used for anything.

Nutmeg has a lot of cultural significance among the Swahili people. In large quantities, it can be quite intoxicating, so women drink nutmeg tea during special ceremonies, which “puts a welcoming look in their eyes,” as Abdul describes it. “All women on the coast of Tanzania and Kenya know how to use nutmeg.”

Cloves are considered THE Zanzibari spice, even though it’s not a native plant. It was brought to the island by traders and flourished in the warm, rainy climate. Cloves are not quite the big export they used to be on Zanzibar, but locals are still very proud of “their” cash crop.

Turmeric is used only for its deep yellow coloring, not for its flavor, which is bland. You harvest the root of the plant and grind them up. Turmeric is used mainly in curries and stews, and sometimes as a substitute for saffron to color rice.

Annatto is the red coloring used in tandoori masala. It is made by crushing the seeds of the annatto fruit, which looks like a larger, flatter version of rambutan, with its long, fuzzy red hairs. Like turmeric it doesn’t have a flavor. Annatto is also used by women as makeup.

Durian is ready to be harvested when it falls off the tree. Since durian is rather sizeable and spiky, people have to wear helmets and stand under the tree ten hours a day retrieving fallen fruit like tennis ball boys.

Durian (or, according to my eavesdropping on the Germans, “schtinke frute”) are forbidden on boats, buses and trains in Tanzania (and in most other countries where they’re grown.) Illegal smuggling of durian has never really taken off; somehow the contraband is always discovered.

Jackfruit is the biggest fruit in the world. Fortunately it doesn’t fall when it’s ripe; you have to pick it off the tree. Therefore, no helmets required.

On the same spice plantation there were some dilapidated bath houses used by various sultans of Zanzibar, but mainly by the first and most powerful sultan from Oman. Despite the cobwebs and mildew of today, you could imagine that it was quite the luxurious spa treatment centuries ago. There were massage tables, a sauna room, and the bathtub itself (now home to leaves and algae.)

The slave trade was also big business for centuries on Zanzibar, where slaves fetched the highest prices in East Africa. Men from the Congo were especially valued for their strength, and women from Ethiopia for their beauty. Today women from some tribes in Tanzania still practice facial mutilation – piercing their upper lip and threading a bone through – which arose out of the slave trade, when women would do this to make themselves “ugly” and therefore be useless as slaves. Slave masters were not only Europeans and Arabs, but also Indians and Africans – basically anyone with a lot of money.

We saw a cave that was used as a holding cell during the sultanate, where slaves were kept until they were ready to be sold. Today the cave has a steep stairway that allows tourists to descend the 50 meters or so to the bottom, but the slaves were lowered down using ropes. There’s a natural spring inside, and an underground tunnel leading to the ocean through which slaves were smuggled to awaiting boats. Only a third of slaves survived the journey across the ocean.

Kids are everywhere in Africa, and the spice plantation was no exception. What was different, however, was that some of these kids spoke German, which quickly endeared them to the German family, and was much cuter than any English- or Swahili-speaking kids I’ve ever come across in East Africa, for the mere fact that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

Unfortunately some types of communication are universal, and since Brady’s gone and I’m no longer accompanied by a man, I’m apparently required to be treated as a prostitute in this Muslim culture. When I got back to Stonetown this afternoon, 14-year-old boys decided that the proper way to address me was to follow me around making kissy sounds and pretending to swoon at the daring impossibility of a respectable woman walking around alone. I pictured each of them purple, cross-eyed and strangled in my bare hands, and that had to suffice. This may be vacation, but not every day ends as a carefree paradise.

We Tried To Open A Can Of Whoop-Ass And Failed

2007-04-30T22:13:00.000+03:00

Brady flew back to Nairobi early this morning, so I’m on my own for the rest of the trip. I was sad to send my partner in laziness back to the fast-paced rat race of his dust-covered village in Ukambani, where a tall pile of work awaited him. Uh…wait. I was sad to send my partner in laziness back to a land where, like Zanzibar, nothing is ever an emergency. Ever.

A van came to pick me up this morning to go to Kizimkazi, on the southern tip of Zanzibar, where we would take a boat out to try to see some dolphins. The “dolphin tour” has been talked down in several travel guides and magazines including the Lonely Planet for being rather unfriendly towards the dolphins themselves. Apparently a lot of boats aggressively chase down dolphins and generally disturb them in their natural habitat just so tourists can get a glimpse of them. Despite all the shortcomings of the boat we took, I have to say that at least our operator wasn’t of the “hunt and chase” variety.

The British couple turned up on the same tour (the male half of whom, incidentally, resembled Gael Garcia Bernal), as well as a Swedish expat living in Zambia, her 4-year-old granddaughter, and an Indian couple from Dar es Salaam. The van dumped us at a beach, where we were greeted by two different vendors renting out the exact same snorkeling gear. The rental fee was included in the cost of the tour, so we didn’t really care whose snorkeling gear we used, but obviously the two vendors did, because they raced each other to our van as we pulled up so that they could abduct as many of us as possible and lead us to their shop.

After we selected our snorkels, a third guy came up and said he was renting life jackets. The couple from Dar had already paid for theirs, but the rest of us nearly started a riot.

“We’re not paying for life jackets. They’re required in the boats and they should be provided for free,” British Gael said.

“I’m certainly not paying for a life jacket for her,” the Swedish woman said, pointing to her granddaughter. “She’s four years old and they’ve got to give her a life jacket. She can’t go out there without a life jacket.”

“Where’s our captain? We demand to talk to him.”

“It’s illegal in this country to operate a passenger boat without life jackets,” we said, not actually sure if it was true. “If anything they should be included in the cost of the tour, but we’re certainly not paying extra for them.”

In typical fashion, the life jacket scam man refused to acknowledge what we were saying, and presented a bunch of lame excuses instead, hoping we would get confused about the real issue and just shell out the money.

“This is my shop,” he said. “I sell life jackets. You must pay for them. Only 2000 shillings, I give you good price.”

The boat captain came over and tried to further explain the incompetence we were currently witnessing. “I have life jackets on my boat,” he said. “But they are broken. So you must pay this man.”

“Can’t you swim?” the captain asked us, as an afterthought.

“Yes, we can all swim, but it doesn’t matter. If the boat capsizes we’ll need life jackets,” we all said in various impatient tones. “And the girl can’t swim.”

“So you pay for a life jacket for her.”

“Do you understand that without providing life jackets you’re running an illegal operation?” British Gael said. “Are you even licensed? Show us your license.”

“Ah, my friend,” the captain said. “I have left it at home.”

“So what you’re saying is, you’re not even licensed to operate a motorized boat, and you want us to pay for life jackets because you’re breaking the law.”

“This is my shop,” the life jacket man said again. “If you want life jackets you must pay.”

“That’s wrong and illegal, and if you don’t provide life jackets for free we will all get back into the van and go home,” British Gael said, looking at the rest of us to make sure we’d back him up.

We all nodded, looking back at the van to make sure it was still there. It suddenly dawned on us that we hadn’t been given receipts for the tour. The van could have driven away and if we ever found them they could have denied that we ever paid for anything.

The captain finally offered to let us try the broken life jackets in his boat. If we could get them to work, we could use them for free. So, um, how exactly do you break a life jacket? And even if you manage to break one, how do you end up breaking several, all in the same boat?

All of us, except for the couple from Dar, were ex-pats living in Africa. We were all too familiar with how things work, and more often, don’t work. So we should have known better.

In fact, I think we did know better, but we were hoping that since there was a group of us that our demands might have some weight, as opposed to, for example, when I’m the only person complaining on a matatu stuffed with 25 people, even though everyone else is thinking the same thing but not willing to do anything about it.

It was low tide, and the beach was really long and flat, so it took us ten minutes to walk out to the boat. The water was knee-deep in some places and full of sea urchins. The Swedish girl had taken a liking to me in the van, and waded next to me, chatting away.

I’ve developed a reflex where if I see a young kid it means I have to speak to them in Swahili. So when this girl starting talking to me, I couldn’t stop marveling about the not-so-remarkable fact that a four-year-old was speaking to me in English.

“My Mum took me on a safari. There were a lot of zebras. We saw lions, and giraffes, and then we went to the zoo and saw monkeys,” she said. “Do you like elephants? Elephants are my favorite.”

“See those black spiky things in the water, under all the rocks?” I said, excited that I could use adjectives and adverbs.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Don’t step on them,” I said. “They’ll sting you and it’ll hurt.”

“Are they alive? Are they animals?” she asked. God, this girl was brilliant!

“Yes, they’re sea urchins,” I said.

There were several guides who were escorting us out to the boat. As we got to one area with a lot of sea urchins, one of them asked me, “Do you want me to carry your baby for you?”

This is one of the great mysteries of East Africa. It’s easily assumed that this blond, curly-haired, blue-eyed girl must be my daughter. If I travel with a male colleague who is white, I’m often asked if he’s my brother. And the lady at my bakery thinks Neetha and I are sisters.

“You think we resemble?” I’d ask, thinking maybe she was using the term “sister” loosely, like when touts at the stage say, “Eh, sister, why can’t you buy some sunglass?”

“Yes, you are so similar,” she’d say.

“But she is tall and dark brown, and I’m short and light brown,” I’d say.

“It is true,” she’d say. “But the face is the same.” Apparently the way Harold looks like Kumar.

Anyway, we finally arrived at our boat, a motorized wooden dhow covered with a makeshift tarp which, we surmised from the large UNHCR logo stamped on it, used to be a tent from a refugee camp. We climbed inside the dhow, and guess what? No life jackets. I know that deep down none of us were surprised, but we were indignant nonetheless.

“You lied to us,” we said. “You said you had life jackets in the boat. You’ve been sailing around without life jackets. That’s illegal.”

British Gael got out of the boat. “I’m going back to the beach. I won’t go without life jackets,” he announced to the captain. To us he whispered, “I’ll go rent the damn things.”

The captain and some of the guides scrambled to a neighboring boat and found some life jackets. “Here! We have some! We will bring them.”

This seemed to appease British Gael enough that he got back into the boat. We left the captain to collect life jackets and settled into our seats. We inspected two of the life jackets, which were indeed broken – all the buckles were missing. They were also archaic models that were counter-intuitive to put on and possessed questionable flotation properties, but we practiced putting them on until we thought we might be able to do it in an emergency.

“Hey, they only brought us two life jackets,” someone observed. There were five of us. “Hey, where are the other life jackets?”

It was too late. Our captain had already sped us out to sea.

“You know,” British Gael’s girlfriend said, “I’m actually licensed to operate this type of motorboat.”

“Well, you’re more qualified than anyone else here,” I said.

“That’s worrying,” British Gael said, as we turned to look at the captain, who had passed the duty of operating the boat to a boy who had inexplicably joined our trip.

“It can’t be more worrying than the fact that a 12-year-old is now driving our boat.”

We motored around for a long time, and the beach kept getting farther and farther away, until it was just a thin white strip in the distance. Occasionally we’d pass other dhows carrying tourists hoping to see dolphins, and our captain would ask if they’d seen any. Almost an hour passed and we hadn’t seen a thing, except for a few snorkelers we mistook for dolphins. Disappointment was starting to set in. After the life jacket fiasco it would have been nice to at least see some dolphins, even though we knew that dolphin sightings weren’t guaranteed on these trips.

“This is not a dolphin tour at all,” the Swedish girl sighed, verbalizing sentiments the rest of us were reluctant to say out loud, the way only a four-year-old can get away with.

A few minutes later, we finally spotted them. There were several groups swimming together, in threes.

“Jump in!” our captain said. We looked at each other hesitantly. They had explained that this was what we were supposed to do, but it didn’t feel very natural to jump into the deep blue sea with a bunch of very large dolphins whose size could have easily rendered us dismembered if they so chose.

One by one we lowered ourselves into the water. The dolphins barely noticed, and with our fins and snorkels we were able to keep up with them with a leisurely kick. Despite their size, they are incredibly docile. I think it helps that their mouth is shaped into a perma-smile.

Dolphins are more amazing and beautiful up close than anything you’ve ever seen on National Geographic. It was breathtaking to watch them frolick in the sapphire water. We could almost touch them, but they were obviously acclimated to random snorkel-wearing people wanting to do just that because they stayed just beyond arm’s reach. I followed one group for awhile. It was a calf and two adults, and they would dive deep, then swim in an upward spiral with the calf in the middle. Dolphins are apparently rather fond of log-rolling underwater. Another group let me follow them for a short distance, then the trailing dolphin decided to take a crap in my face. Nature wins again.

It was one of those experiences that could never last long enough. I see why this tour gets mixed reviews. The experience of swimming with dolphins is unmatched by anything else, but after awhile I did feel like my “following” became “chasing.” As with any opportunity to see wild animals in their natural habitat, there is obviously some human encroachment on their territory and habits. But like any experience that exposes us to new things – people, animals, art – we gain an appreciation that we wouldn’t otherwise have. People who have the rare opportunity to swim with dolphins, I think, inevitably walk away with an appreciation for the beauty of dolphins and of nature itself that few people will ever have. It’s a tradeoff.

This same dilemma exists for tourism in general. A lot of people mourn the disappearance of traditional cultures, especially as modern cultures have more access to vacation destinations in developing countries. But contact and exchange between different cultures has happened throughout history, and cultures are constantly evolving because of it.

With animals – and natural destinations like forests, mountains and oceans – no matter how lightly we tread, there will always be environmental degradation as a result of tourism. But without tourism, and opportunities to experience places different from our own, we couldn’t develop the compassion and understanding that bridges ignorance, hatred and indifference – some of our planet’s most abundant natural resources.

British People Talk Funny. After the dolphin adventure our guides prepared a very meager lunch of fish and rice for us on the beach. I didn’t quite understand the dearth of portions considering how all of my African friends are not shy about piling several pounds of food onto my plate and insisting on seconds. But I figured it was our guides’ way of skimming as much of our tour fees into his own pocket as possible, because really, wazungu have plenty of money. Why not steal what they’ve paid in good faith?

Anyway, most of our clothes were at least a little wet from wading from the boat, so as we were waiting for our one-minnow meal, I hung my jeans on a post next to British Gael’s towel and said, “Remind me to take my pants down after lunch.”

There was a confused pause, and then he said with a tiny, withering grin, “You mean your trousers.”

(Photo by Brady Zieman)

Languid Beach Days

2007-04-29T21:53:00.000+03:00

April 26, Thursday. We headed north to Nungwi and the white sand clear blue cliche that so many people flock here for. Really, there’s not much to say that’s not already revealed on postcards of every beach paradise destination in the world. What I can say is that I’ve needed a vacation like this for a long time. No more backpacking across a country with clown-caliber infrastructure and crap buses while people constantly try to steal your stuff and rip you off, in the name of feeling like a hard-core independent traveler. That’s been everyday life for almost two years now, and I’ve stopped trying to be a hero because after awhile, being a hero starts to feel a lot like suffering.

For the next few days I did nothing productive and was harassed almost zero times, except for when Brady harassed me because I went back to our bungalow and took a nap after breakfast. Oh, wait. He didn’t do that, because he was taking a nap on the beach. WE ARE SO LAZY AND PROUD OF IT!!

The beaches are distinctly, if not lawfully, segregated on this part of the island. They’re the one part of Zanzibar that a mzungu can go and never really interact with locals beyond hotel staff and tour operators. Clean, silky white beaches are reserved for wazungu and anyone else who looks like they can afford to stay in one of the airy bungalows on stilts overlooking the ocean. Dirty beaches are open to anyone, meaning Zanzibaris, who don’t mind trudging barefoot through rotting seaweed and large carpets of crushed seashells cutting your feet and black, possibly-once-alive-goo and discarded timber from dhow builders and dead fish and rusty nails and glass bottles and impromptu choos created by kids.

April 27, Friday. Brady and I decided to take a break from napping and drinking cocktails, and managed to get ourselves onto a boat to go snorkeling off the coast of the neighboring island of Mnemba. On our tour was a group of animated Mennonite missionaries from the U.S. and a British couple whom we would continue to run into as we (and they) made our way around the island.

I wouldn’t rank the reef here among the world’s best, but if you can appreciate coral reef ecosystems for what they are instead of for how they don’t live up to the Great Barrier Reef, then it’s still an underwater wonderland with at least a hundred species of fish and other sea creatures, including the school of tiny stinging jellyfish and that inexplicably makes you realize that yesterday’s dinner is knocking to go out.

“Excuse me,” I yelled to our boat captain while I treaded water and let jellyfish feed on me. “I need to help myself.”

“Big or small?”

“Um, big.” I was speaking Swahili so the other tourists wouldn’t know that I had to poo. “Can you take me up to the beach?”

[Laughter.] “It’s a private beach, you can’t go there. Just wait.”

“Until when? I can’t wait.”

[More laughter and no sympathy.]

April 28, Saturday. We spent a day wandering through some of the villages around Nungwi, collecting shells on the beach, and following the sound of drums and boys reciting Islamic prayers. Late in the afternoon we found ourselves at an aquarium next to Mnarani Lighthouse, just east of Nungwi. The aquarium is actually a sea turtle conservation project. It’s small; just a man-made pond fed by the tide, where sea turtles are bred and raised until they’re old enough to be released. The babies are kept in plastic basins labeled with the batch’s date of birth, and there is a row of basins and small pools with young turtles of varying ages, from a few weeks old to three or four years. The pond is home to at least 20 adult turtles as well as several species of excitable fish. Included in the ticket price is as much fresh seaweed as you want, which you can feed to the turtles as you sit in a small alcove where they like to gather.

Adult sea turtles are rather large, with shells as big as 3 feet long. Brady has this ability to find wonder and beauty in things that would begin to bore people (well, me) after a short time, so he was totally geeking out on the turtles, repeatedly circling the pond with his camera, mesmerized by their deliberate, unruffled industriousness.

In contrast, this one here (me) decided that it would be entertaining to try to touch one in the eyeball. Needless to say, don’t try to poke a sea turtle in the eye. They may not move very fast and it may not hurt, but they’ll still snap at you with their toothless mouths, and for some reason this act of aggression makes you feel like a bigger jackass than, say, having to make the following phone call:

“Hi, Medical? Can you get rabies from a sea turtle?”

April 29, today. Well, three days of white sand laziness was enough for us. Brady wanted to see some monkeys on his last day of vacation, so we headed to Jozani Rainforest, home of the rare red colobus monkey. Rare indeed, but not shy. One minute into our hike, a troupe migrated right in front of us, leaping on low branches from tree to tree. It was pretty clear that they weren’t actually migrating, they were just checking us out, hoping to have their pictures taken. Our guide said that during the week when there are fewer tourists, the monkeys even make their way into the forest service offices, looking for company.

Our guide also took us into a mangrove forest at low tide, which is much less impressive and much more smelly than at high tide. There was a crumbling, half-renovated boardwalk winding through dark, stinky stands of red and black mangroves and their ground-dwelling crab and spider companions. I’m going to be one of those annoying comparative tourists now, and say that Jozani Forest is not the place to see a really cool mangrove forest if you’re a mangrove layperson. Try Bako National Park in Sarawak, Borneo.

What did impress us, though, was our guide’s ability to engage us in a lively conversation about witchcraft and other black magic practiced by local tribes, and then as soon as we started asking too many questions, becoming silent and ushering us quickly out of the forest. Was it for our own good? Was it to cover his own arse? This island has been plundered and exploited by foreigners for centuries now, but some mysteries will always remain deep in the African rainforest, carefully guarded against the prying eyes and moral judgments of outsiders.

(Photos by Brady Zieman, except for red colobus)

Shopping for Spices in Stonetown

2007-04-25T16:51:00.000+03:00

It’s just sweltering hot. I may have grown up in Houston, the world’s best and most miserable sauna, but at least there they have air conditioning. Also, for the last 15 years I’ve lived in: Chicago, San Francisco, and at 2,000 meters in Kenya. I don’t know hot anymore. It’s been years since I’ve smelled myself, and hopefully will be years before I do again.

Brady suggested that we go in search of spices to buy in bulk. We had contemplated the spice tour, which is standard on most people’s Zanzibar itineraries, but decided against it when we were told we wouldn’t be able to buy bulk spices. I personally get a little lost with a handful of whole cardamoms or a pod of vanilla beans, but it sounded like I would get a culinary education, so we set off for the market.

Man, trying to buy spices in bulk is like trying to buy illegal drugs. The first few people we talked to just shook their heads mysteriously and told us it wasn’t possible. A few spice vendors began referring us to one particular guy, who they had to track down. Our “dealer” finally showed up and led us to an unmarked, unassuming closet squeezed between some stalls of fruit.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“What do you have?” we said.

He unlocked the thin, creaky wooden door to reveal a dark, dusty room full of large gunny sacks. The sweet scent of cloves, cardamom and a potpourri of other spices wafted out, along with a charming musty smell that would become all too familiar on this island pounded constantly by monsoon rains.

“Karibu, karibu,” he said, welcoming us inside the closet that didn’t appear to have room for us to stand in. “I have cinnamon. You want cinnamon? I have cloves. You want cloves? Cardamoms, good price for you cardamoms. Ginger, good price for you.”

An hour later, after explaining repeatedly that we don’t actually want a whole kilo of cinnamon, maybe just a quarter kilo, and being told repeatedly that “bulk” meant we had to buy at least half a kilo, or enough to make French toast for five generations of offspring, we walked off with a respectable stash of spices, all for less than $30. Our booty included three packets of saffron the size of my palm for about $5, not exactly shabby; a handful of whole nutmeg, although neither of us know how to get the spice from the nutmeg; whole green cardamoms; way too many black peppercorns; cloves; cinnamon; whole mustard seeds; white peppercorns; a bag of curry leaves and a bundle of vanilla pods.

So, um, if you come over to my house anytime in the next 75 years, I’ll make you pilau.

Urojo! As we were walking back from the market with our spices we passed a small crowd of people sitting inside a shop eating something out of bowls. Neither of us really noticed until Brady said, “Hey, do you smell that?”

I did, and it was beautiful. We backtracked until we found a couple of old mamas deep frying balls of unidentified starch-like substances.

“What is it?” I asked in Swahili.

“Five hundred shillings,” the mama said.

“No, I’m asking what it is,” I said.

“You tell her how much you want, for one hundred, two hundred, three hundred shillings, and she’ll give you,” one of the customers said.

“It has potatoes?” I suggested, trying to get an actual answer.

“Yes,” the mama said.

“And what are these balls?”

“How much do you want?” the mama demanded.

So much for improving communication by knowing the local language. “I’d like three hundred.”

Whatever it was, was delicious. It had potatoes, bajias made of chickpeas and fried cassava chips in a cold soup made of coconut, lemon juice and chili sauce. It was so good that we bought another bowl, and agreed to come back later.

And after a lot of asking around, I finally found my answer: It’s called urojo.

(Photos by Brady Zieman)

Look At Me, I’m in Zanzibar!

2007-04-24T16:42:00.000+03:00

I had eleven leave days to use before May 3, due to a Peace Corps policy restricting us from taking vacation during our last three months of service. So I’m off to Zanzibar Island, off the coast of Tanzania, with Brady in tow.

First of all, this has to be one of the coolest flights I’ve been on – Nairobi to Zanzibar. We flew right by the snows of Kilimanjaro, and the book title doesn’t lie. There’s lots of snow up there.

Tanzanian shillings are a bit shocking after Kenya. The exchange rate is about 1250 Tsh to 1 USD, and about 18 Tsh to 1 Ksh. So when the taxi driver wanted 10,000 shillings to take us to Stonetown, we were a bit stunned, until we realized it was less than 600 Kenyan shillings. (Later we would be at the market waiting for 250 Tsh (14 Ksh) in change, while all the vendors laughed at us for bothering with such a small amount. Hey, you can almost buy a soda for 14 Ksh in Kenya.)

Stonetown. It’s the main town on Zanzibar Island, where you’ll find most tourist accommodations and services, including internet and supermarkets. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, renowned for its old architecture, historical buildings and winding alleyways reminiscent of the various peoples who have inhabited the island throughout history.

Although it’s similar in feel to Lamu - waterfronts dotted with languid dhows bobbing on a gentle tide, whitewashed buildings, ornately carved wooden doorways, mosques, skull-numbing calls to prayer around the clock, and a distinctly Arabic feel – it’s also a typical African town with a chaotic bus stage (featuring the Tanzanian equivalent of matatus, dalla-dallas, which are basically glorified pickup trucks with two benches in the pickup bed for the comfort of the passengers who are packed in like sardines), random and alarmingly large piles of garbage everywhere, random and alarmingly large piles of not-so-mysterious brown stuff in places that are not the choo, vehicles spewing black clouds of toxic smoke into the air, and lots of people in various states of employment and/or sobriety harassing you for things, or for being foreign.

There’s a decent market in Stonetown, next to the stage, with decent local fruits and vegetables, and lots of spice vendors hoping for gullible tourists willing to pay mzungu prices. There’s also a pretty impressive chicken market with the equally impressive smell of live chickens, and conveniently located chicken-slaughterers and their vat of boiling water for people like me who prefer not to slaughter chickens ourselves. And of course, on the other side of town on the waterfront, a sizeable fish market with a sizeable fish market smell.

Quick Historical Geography, or Geographic History. For centuries Zanzibar has been a preferred destination for explorers, merchants and rulers from places as diverse as Portugal, Persia, Oman, India and Britain. Like many areas of the East African coast (Lamu comes to mind), there is an Italian ex-pat community on Zanzibar, whom I’d like to thank for bringing gelato to the non-Italian world.

The Zanzibar archipelago used to be made up of Zanzibar Island (called Unguja by locals), Pemba Island and Mombasa, all of which were part of the British Protectorate in the late 19th century. After independence from the British in the 1960s, Mombasa became part of Kenya while the remaining islands became part of Tanzania.

Interestingly, Tanzania was called Tanganyika until Zanzibar was incorporated into it. Mathematically: Tanganyika + Zanzibar = Tan-Zan-ia.

Today there is still a lot of political tension and resentment between mainland Tanzanians and Zanzibaris.

Also, Freddie Mercury Lived Here. The guy from the band Queen was apparently born and raised on Zanzibar, and someone was keen enough to exploit this bit of trivia to rake in tourist bucks. Such is the story of Mercury’s, a mostly mzungu joint overlooking the beach with spectacular sunset views, tasty seafood, half-decent cocktails (it’s still Africa, after all), cold beer and a selection of t-shirts that say, “Mzungu.” Prices are also “mzungu.” Despite this, Brady and I spent a good portion of our time in Stonetown keeping ourselves hydrated at Mercury’s, watching the pickup football (futbol) game on the beach, and the cast of characters that came with it, like the kid wearing a life vest ostensibly fashioned out of discarded foam padding from an shipment of TVs.

Speaking of TVs, there is a giant banyan tree in town that has, inexplicably, a broken and rather large-screened TV jabbed into the trunk at eye level.

(Photos by Brady Zieman, except Mt. Kilimanjaro)

This Is Why I Got A Cat

2007-04-22T16:10:00.000+03:00

Oh God! That's my yoga mat!!

Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Digging Through My Oddball Photos

2007-04-21T00:43:00.000+03:00

Lady Gay Lotion Makes You a Real Gay Lady

You Die In Our Wards, We Give You Discount

View Our Collection Of Bodies Abandoned By Loved Ones Who Couldn't Afford Our Mortuary Fees

Sunset Over Lake Victoria, From the Aptly Named Sunset Hotel in Kisumu

Pussy Wants Juju

2007-04-18T17:57:00.000+03:00

I’m teaching another of my apparently very popular HIV workshops, this time to members of Neetha’s organization, which provides support and care to orphans. Neetha herself is out of town for a different workshop, so I’m staying at her house for three days while I teach. Observation #1 about her house, which I’d never noticed because I’d never lived in it: Neetha owns exactly four dishes. One of these belongs to the cat.

Not that I’m complaining (too much); she’s letting me use her cooking gas, sleep in her bed, bathe with her self-fetched water, and drink the milk her neighbor brings her twice a day. Observation #2 about her house: Her cat looks like an evil Anime cat, complete with big pointy ears, giant Siamese eyes with black slits for pupils, and a tiny nose and mouth for expressing disapproval. It’s hilarious.

I also brought Fatso along, because I leaving her alone with three days worth of food usually results in lines of enthusiastic ants marching all over my house. So this morning I stuffed her into a pillowcase, and boarded a matatu to Neetha’s village. Fatso hates the pillowcase and was meowing loudly, which was immensely entertaining to all the other passengers, who couldn’t stop laughing.

“It’s a pussy?” they would ask.

“Yes,” I’d say, as if there was any doubt.

“It’s your pussy?”

“Yes,” I’d sigh, mentally noting the innuendo that would have existed if this conversation had happened in the States, but that was un-ironically absent because we were in Kenya. “It’s my pussy.”

After a few minutes I let Fatso out and held her in my lap for awhile, which seemed to calm her down a bit and make everyone giggle.

“Oh, you have such a beautiful pussy,” said the man in the front seat, as people behind me continued to laugh inexplicably. I knew they weren’t laughing about the word “pussy,” which is what I would’ve been laughing about, if I’d been laughing.

Fatso put her front paws on my chest, which sent the entire matatu into fresh gales of laughter.

“It wants juju!” the women howled.

Juju, I decided, must have something to do with breastfeeding or breastmilk, which didn’t make it any funnier to me. I let them enjoy themselves, thinking resigned thoughts about how juvenile their sense of humor was.

Apparently they took my non-involvement to mean that I hadn’t understood them. And apparently this joke was so good that they had to share it with me.

“Juju,” the matatu conductor tried to explain, looking at my boobs.

“I know,” I nodded vigorously, indicating that I understood and no further explanation was needed, especially not one using my boobs as a visual.

“Juju,” he said again. “Here.”

He put his finger an inch away from my nipple.

“I GOT IT,” I said, sending everyone into hysterics again.

Side Note On Ants, From My Aunt. Here’s a trick I learned from my relatives in Taiwan. Instead of spraying toxic Doom – aka Raid – all over your kitchen when you have an ant invasion, swab all the cracks in the counters, walls, floors, etc with that Chinese herbal stuff that’s made from camphor oil and menthol. I don’t know what it’s called but it’s basically liquid Tiger Balm, and it’s available in Kenya. It’ll keep the ants away until you get around to cleaning, and you won’t coat all your food with a tasty layer of poison. Plus your kitchen will smell just like a Chinese grandmother.

Oh Yeah, The Workshop. The workshop is based on a Training of Trainers (TOT) model, which emphasizes discussion and analysis of issues surrounding HIV/AIDS like cultural practices, gender inequality and communication skills, rather than rote memorization of acronyms and biology. So inevitably, the conversation turns to all sorts of interesting cultural insights and quotable quotes that sometimes end up on my blog.

For example, I always get stumped by the belief among adult Kenyans that if you talk with children about sex, they will immediately run out and try it. I tried to explain that studies comparing young people who attend sex education classes and those who attend abstinence-only classes show that there is no difference in the age at which these kids first have sex. Other studies show that kids who know more about sex tend to delay their sexual debut slightly longer than kids who don’t. Talking frankly about sex creates healthy attitudes, and empowers kids to make informed choices.

The response is always the same. “America is a very open society,” they say. “It’s okay to speak openly about sex and boyfriends and girlfriends. But here, we cannot.”

I never know what to say at this point, without sounding judgmental and inappropriate. Especially after someone said today, “If a girl brings her boyfriend home for lunch with her parents, she will be killed.”

Killed?

I wasn’t sure if they meant that literally, but the point was made.

Then there’s the insistence that condoms have holes, and the corresponding resistance to all my assurances to the contrary. I’ve decided that the “condoms have holes” myth has been so completely drilled into people’s heads that I’m fighting a losing battle trying to convince people otherwise. No matter what kinds of demonstrations I do – blowing up condoms and tying the end, submerging them in water to show there are no air bubbles escaping – or what kinds of numbers I present about diameters of HIV and oxygen and pores in latex – the “condoms have holes” damage is done, and thousands of PCVs all around the world can’t undo it.

The argument is seemingly convincing: Latex has microscopic pores in it. So HIV can sometimes pass through, rendering condoms effective only 75% of the time.

First of all it amazes me that someone went to the trouble to cook up something like this. My response is always to point out the math.

“The truth is that condoms are effective 99% of the time when used correctly. I know you may not believe me, and I can’t force you to. But let’s assume that your number is right, that they are only effective 75% of the time. So if you use a condom, chances are 25% that you could get HIV. But if you don’t, chances are much closer to 100% that you could get HIV. Which are better odds?”

People always state the obvious answer. They would choose to use condoms. But the truth is that the “condoms have holes” myth isn’t the biggest problem. It strikes me more as an elaborate stunt pulled by churches to further their own social agendas, and it distracts from other factors.

People don’t avoid condoms because they think they have holes. They avoid them because there’s so much social taboo against using them. With your wife, because you’re both supposed to be faithful. With your girlfriend, because only prostitutes use condoms. In general, because they don’t feel as good and it’s not manly. And ultimately, because you could go to all this effort to make sure you use condoms to protect yourself, and tomorrow you die in a matatu accident, not of AIDS.

How do you respond to such a complex litany of excuses? At this point, I’ve almost come full circle. It’s embarrassing to say this, but George W. would be proud.

Now, I just say, “Well, then, abstain.”

And then I think in my head, “It’ll save the world from irresponsible people spawning their irresponsibility into the already fetid gene pool, and their genital ulcers into other un-ulcerated genitals, and their HIV-positive dependency into the deep pockets of international aid ear-marked for this immense social, political and economic scourge that may or may not be out-smarted by worldwide intervention anytime soon.”

And it’s about as effective as saying, “Use condoms.”

The whole ABC (Abstain, Be Faithful, Use Condoms) prevention campaign is deceptively simple on the surface, and a hugely controversial teaching aid pitting abstinence-only finger-waggers against freedom-of-choice liberals. And in Kenya, it just seems useless for anyone who teaches about AIDS.

This is why I’ve latched onto this TOT curriculum. It’s focus is on talking about things that are hard to talk about. It teaches people about the one thing that has historically proven itself to resolve almost every conflict and problem in life, at the individual and universal level: communication.

Well that, and death.

Irritable Vowels (And Consonants) Syndrome: Another Rant

2007-04-02T20:28:00.000+03:00

Warning: This is an actual rant. Vitriolic bile included.

Dry Season Is Back, Give Me Money. Well, I don’t know if the sudden spike in people asking me for money actually has to do with dry season, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s just one of those things that will never change, just as all those brain-dead idiots all across the country will never stop ching-chonging me.

(Incredibly, it is easier to get people to understand why it’s rude to beg me for money, or my laptop, or my chickens, than it is to get them to understand that “ching-chong” is not an actual Chinese word. And forget trying to explain why it’s mortally offensive to have it screamed at you by a grown-up, yet questionably intelligent, human being.)

The standard once-a-day beg from the regulars – the glue kids in my town, the crazy old lady with no teeth, the poor old gangrene man with stubs for legs who sits along the Nairobi-Uganda highway in Eldoret, the random drunk guy staggering down the road at nine in the morning – is something I’ve learned to tolerate, and laugh about.

It’s now funny to me that the same three glue kids always say the same thing everytime they see me:

“Chinese! Chakula! Nipe tano!” Chinese! Food! Give me five bob!

…even though I’ve never given them anything in the two years I’ve walked down that street, except for the 17 explanations about how my name isn’t “Chinese.” Apparently sniffing glue significantly reduces one’s short term memory, as well as one’s overall brain function.

But there’s something about experiencing the same pattern of so-called friendship literally dozens of times, with invariably the same result each time, that sucks out every last drop of trust and compassion for anyone but my closest friends.

The pattern goes like this:

1. Random stranger approaches me, acts all friendly, learns my name, what work I’m doing here, where I come from.
2. Random stranger, who now refers to him/herself as my friend, proceeds to suggest that we work together in the future.
3. Guaranteed, within the next two times we meet, I get hit up for money, or a job, or both.
4. I explain that I don’t have whatever it is that is being requested.
5. My new fake friend calls me a liar. “But you must have a job for me. You are a mzungu.”

If my new fake friend is really optimistic, he or she will ask again, the next time, or the time after that. “Hallo, Justina, my friend. Can you help me with one thousand shillings? I will return it straight away tomorrow.”

I mean, let me count all the different ways that statement is insulting, rude, and dishonest.

No, let me not waste my time.

Yes, let me waste my time. It will make me feel better.

1. I am not your friend. Friends don’t act all friendly towards anyone with white skin (I have argued and argued that I am brown, but my Kenyan friends – the real ones – insist I am white), and snub this same white skin the moment they realize there’s no money flying out of attached white hands.

2. Do you think that because my skin is “white” (light brownish) that a thousand shillings is nothing to me? That I have endless supplies of crispy thousand bob notes to pass out to all my fake friends? Did you miss class they day they taught the word “mjitoleaji”? Well, here’s the makeup lesson: IT MEANS VOLUTEER. I WORK FOR FREE.

3. You will not return it ever. Even if you won the lottery, you would not return it. Why do I say this? First, because I know you don’t actually consider me your friend (see #1). Second, because the following actual quote from a former – and might I add, corrupt – co-worker sums up a common sentiment among my fake friends: “Why do you care what I did with the money? It came from a mzungu. It is not our money, so why should we take care of it?”

Anyway, these are my fake friends. The ones who “borrowed” 200 shillings with the clear intention of never paying it back. The ones who borrowed my phone from 7pm every night until 8am the next morning to send idiotic love messages to their 15-year-old girlfriend, who was basically trading sex for money to travel home during school breaks. The ones who “borrowed” 1000 shillings to pay hospital bills for their sick wife, who was never really sick, and who never had a baby who supposedly died, which spurred another request for money to pay for funeral expenses. The ones who learned my name so that they could ask me for a job, any job, I’ll do anything, I don’t care, because I don’t have any skills but my family is starving because my husband is a good-for-nothing drunk. The ones who hung out with me so that they could ask me to set them up with one of my “white gal friends,” one who is just bursting with eagerness to find a Kenyan husband to bring back to America.

My fake friends are the ones who taught me the hard way that nothing productive comes out of indulging a request for money, or a job, or a visa to America.

And my real friends are the ones who suffer the consequences.

Because being asked for money by a real friend, someone whose sincerity and friendship I trust, is profoundly upsetting. It feels like a betrayal, and my first reaction is to want to end the friendship.

I got an sms last week from Nick saying that he had been promised a job and that he wanted me to give him 1600 shillings for documentation fees (driver’s license, etc.) I was in Kisumu for a meeting at the time, so I just ignored him. I was angry that he was asking me for money because it suddenly made our friendship seem like a lie, something he had cultivated just so he could milk me for money some day.

All this time I thought he knew better than to become the cliché that everyone else is. But just like all the people he regularly bad-mouths and looks down on for their ignorance towards white skin, when the time came and he needed money, who was the first person he turned to? Not his friend Justina. No, he turned to his mzungu, Justina.

When I got back to site, he called me. I was still fuming and didn’t want to talk to him, so I ignored his calls. I knew I would only explode at him if I talked to him at that point. Sixteen hundred shillings is a sizeable chunk of money for a freaking MJITOLEAJI, but it seemed as if my white (light brownish) skin had blinded my friend to this fact. I locked my gate, drew the curtains and bolted my door so it would look like I wasn’t home, in case Nick dropped by. Four hours later, I decided I was being an idiot, and went to the market to shop for dinner. Nick found me there.

I was calmer, but still annoyed. He made friendly small talk for a few minutes before saying what he had really come there to say, as if it were a mystery to either of us.

“Did you get my sms last week?” he began.

“I’m not going to give you money,” I blurted out. “Sixteen hundred is a lot of money, and I can’t give it to you. I’ve had too many people asking me for money, and they cheat me, and they lie, and I just can’t give anyone money anymore. Sorry. I’d like to help you but I can’t.”

Nick’s usually cheery face fell ever so slightly, only noticeable to me. “Okay,” he said bravely. “I understand. It’s okay.”

It was a devastating blow to him. I felt a huge sense of relief, and a deep sense of guilt that I hadn’t helped my friend when he needed help. And I felt livid anger towards all my fake friends who taught me what happens when I help people who ask for help. Nick wasn’t lying about what he needed the money for, or how much he needed. But I was tired – I am tired – of feeling a sense of obligation to help someone simply because I have more than they do.

I would rather sit with the immense guilt, and the uncomfortable tension that will hang between us for the next few weeks, than internalize the resentment and anger that always comes with “loaning” money that I know will never be repaid, and more importantly will never reap the returns that the borrower is hoping for, whether it’s a job, an income-generating project, or a visa to America.

Money doesn’t buy as much as people think in Kenya, where so many hopes are precariously buoyed, and dashed, by false promises.

There Is, Of Course, A Rational Explanation. Rich told me this story recently: Once upon a time there was a PCV who wrote a proposal for a project she wanted to start at her site. When the funding came through, she asked her supervisor, a Kenyan, to manage the funds for the project. He was an honest man, and she trusted him implicitly.

The supervisor told her, “If you give me the funds, I’m obligated to give the money away to anyone who asks for it. That’s the way it is in our culture. Please, ask someone else to handle the funds because I will not use them properly.”

It kind of makes you want to trust him even more, doesn’t it?

I think this story explains a lot about why Kenyans are constantly asking me to give them things. This is a collectivist culture. People are obligated to help others when asked, especially if it is obvious that they have something to give. If a neighbor sees that you have more than enough food in your shamba to feed your family today, he will assume that the excess is available for his own consumption.

Even today, Matthew (my chicken caretaker) saw my flourishing onion plants and said, “I will come and take some.” He didn’t say, “You have so many onions, is it okay if I take a few?”

He also told me that he had been helping himself to my onions while I was away last week, which was a bit irritating because he hadn’t asked if it was okay. Instead, there was this implied expectation that of course it was okay, because I have so many, and I wasn’t even around last week to eat my onions, so he might as well.

I think this is the same logic that makes it culturally acceptable to walk into anyone’s house and expect to be fed. It’s why people always make extra food in case they have visitors, and why it’s not considered rude when someone – or some five people – show up for dinner unannounced.

It’s also the logic behind the publicly-extolled, privately-despised practice immortalized in the Kenyan national motto, “Harambee.” A harambee is basically a fundraiser that you hold when you need a large sum of money for something big, like school fees or a wedding. You invite everyone you know, especially people who have money, designate a “Guest of Honor” (a euphemism for the person who is expected to give the most money), and throw a big party with food and sodas. In exchange, everyone who attends is expected to donate to the cause. It’s a good concept in theory, and goes back to this collectivist idea that you are never alone. Your family, your friends, your tribe, and your community will never abandon you in a time of need. People who are bound together, stick together.

But in this second most corrupt country in Africa, some people also use harambees to exploit the system. There is immense social pressure to attend a harambee and contribute money. If you don’t, the logic goes, no one will be there for you when you need help. So some people throw harambees just to make free money, and lie about a cause. That’s what the good pastor and con-artist Nelson tried to do, a few months before he made his great escape from my village with tens of thousands of shillings of his neighbors’ money. Fortunately for the harambee, he was a poor organizer, and attempted to throw it together two days before. No one showed up, because most people hadn’t even received their invitations yet.

Anyway, I do get worked up when people ask me for things. Even if I live here for 15 more years (please shoot me if I do) I will still get worked up every time someone begins a sentence with, “You give me…” And I will still blow steam out of my ears every time my real friends ask for money, and spend a day or two contemplating the best way to dump them as coldly and harshly as possible.

But having the understanding that the distinction between “mine” and “yours” is much more blurred here than it is in my own culture helps soften all those initial reactions. My real friends here have given me so much more than I could ever give them – things that are immeasurable because they’re intangible. Sometimes it feels unfair that I refuse, on principle, to give them money when they ask for it.

There’s no good answer to this conflict I have with myself, but it’s comforting to know that because they’re my real friends, they’re not keeping score.

April 16, 2007. I just got a letter from my beloved homestay family in Kitui asking for 28,000 shillings to install electricity.

They’re not keeping score.

They’re not keeping score.

They’re not keeping score.

Notes of Marginal Interest

2007-03-31T23:57:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-19T23:24:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-15T20:04:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-15T16:15:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-09T15:13:00.000+03:00

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

2007-03-07T10:25:00.001+03:00

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

2007-03-07T10:21:00.001+03:00

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.)

Pockets, Not Pyramids

2007-02-05T18:37:00.000+03:00

The Ministry of Health (MOH) recently started including little paper inserts with the boxes of 100 condoms that they distribute to hospitals, dispensaries and VCTs. The inserts contain instructions on how to use and dispose of condoms. If you cut out the shape printed on the inserts, fold along the dotted lines, and glue the sides together, you end up with a little envelope-like pocket that holds three condoms, with the instructions appearing on the outside.

Neetha and I first noticed these paper inserts a few months ago. One day, while trying to stay awake during a speech by some unidentified MOH officer, we tried to fold one into a condom pocket. It took about ten minutes to make one pocket (we didn’t have any scissors so we resorted to tearing carefully), and we decided that we frankly didn’t have the patience or manual dexterity to make another one.

It didn’t make any sense why the MOH thought anyone would take the time to make themselves a condom pocket. Wouldn’t a person who was taking condoms want to spend that time taking more condoms, instead of folding a flimsy piece of paper that could only hold three? Many branded condoms sold in Kenya come in similar pockets made of cardboard, so they’re sturdy. But these do-it-yourself pockets from the MOH were made of newsprint, and were too time-consuming to be practical. We wrote it off as a well-intentioned but pointless idea.

Side note: The thought occurred to me later that maybe the inserts weren’t the MOH’s idea, but the condom manufacturer’s idea. MOH condoms are manufactured by a company in China, which always makes me laugh since all my life my Taiwanese parents have insisted that nothing made in China should be trusted. Therefore, something that could mean the difference between a long, healthy life or genital ulcer disease should especially not be trusted. But I digress. The AIDS prevalence rate in Kenya has been cut in half in the last five years, so go Chinese condoms! Either way, there’s no explanation anywhere about exactly what these inserts are for or how to fold them into a condom pocket. Perhaps the assumption was that it would be obvious. After all, Neetha and I figured it out.

Today I was in the office with Godi, who was compiling month-end reports. He had a stack of these inserts on the table and was using the backs as scratch paper. It seemed a little inappropriate for a VCT counselor to be doing this, but since I’ve never seen a single person take an insert, I couldn’t fault him for recycling. As he told me about his day, I absent-mindedly started folding one of them into a condom pocket. Ten minutes later, when I finally finished, he looked confused.

“What have you made?” he asked.

“You can put three condoms inside and take them with you,” I explained, showing him how the instructions appeared on the outside of the pocket. “It takes forever, though. I don’t know who would actually spend time making them.”

He was impressed. “How did you know you can cut it and fold it like that? I thought it was just instructions for using condoms.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “There’s a shape that looked like it should be cut and folded into a pocket.”

“You know, people don’t like to take condoms,” he said. “They won’t go and take them from a big box like you have. They fear to be seen. So it is good that you have made this.”

He told me that the MOH is phasing out the current “Box-O-One-Hundred” packaging and coming out with smaller, more discreet condom pockets like the one I had just made, that holds three condoms. Except that fortunately, the new pockets will be made of cardboard, not newsprint.

“Do you think people prefer the smaller pocket?” I asked. “I thought people liked to take many condoms at a time.”

“Most people will only take condoms if they are given, for example during a VCT session,” Godi said. “But if they see these small pockets with three condoms inside, they might take them, because they don’t look like condoms.”

I didn’t really agree with the last statement, since the pockets have instructions on the outside with pictures of someone putting on a condom. But he had a point.

We keep hundreds of boxes of condoms (100 condoms per box) in the reception area for people to take as they please, but I’ve never seen anyone take one. It’s perhaps too intimidating to be seen taking condoms from a tall pyramid of Box-O’-One-Hundred-Condoms, despite the fact that people are here for an HIV test, which presumably means they’re having sex and could benefit from condoms. But as is often the case in Kenya, what is most obvious cannot be talked about or acknowledged publicly.

Two more counselors came into the office and saw me stuffing condoms into these little gossamer envelopes. They were amused, despite the fact that they talk about and handle condoms everyday. “Unafanya nini, Justina?” What are you doing?

I showed them how to cut and fold the insert into a condom pocket, and they got excited.

“I never knew what these papers were for,” one said as she started cutting and folding more pockets for me to stuff.

“It looks so smart,” the other said. “People will like these because they can hide condoms inside.”

“We’ll start putting condoms in these pockets and putting them out in the reception area for people to take.”

“And we can put together more in our free time, so people can be taking them.”

They started passing out Packet-O-Three-Condoms to other staff members. “We have a gift for you,” they said, reveling in the opportunity to make their colleagues uncomfortable.

“Oh, no, I don’t use these things,” my co-workers would protest in horror.

I was surprised that so many of my colleagues became awkward when they were offered condoms, and were quick to distance themselves from the notion. Despite years working for an organization that deals with HIV, STDs, and sex on a daily basis, they still had so much internalized stigma about condoms.

I felt a sense of accomplishment today, accidental though it was. The counselors are excited about this new way of packaging condoms that will make people less shy to take them, and learned that the MOH didn’t just provide a stack of free scratch paper with every box of condoms.

Uvula Update. Nicholas didn’t have his uvula cut off after all. The guy who was supposed to chop it off for him ended up using a syringe to shoot his uvula full of an herbal concoction that shrank it to a manageable size. His throat is feeling much better, and his uvula is, he claims, much smaller.

The Indian Staring Project. I heard on the BBC this morning about a woman in India who organized 35 women to sit together along a busy street, where men usually go to stare at women. These women spent the day staring at men as they walked by, to make a statement about the cultural practice of men in India staring and harassing women on the street. Men who were “caught” in the project were interviewed and said that being stared at by 35 women was upsetting and made them feel self-conscious. They agreed that it was an effective way to get them to understand how it makes women feel to be stared at like objects everywhere we go.

I wonder how well a Wazungu Staring Project would work. Somehow I imagine that 35 wazungu sitting at my market attempting to stare down locals would only draw more intense staring from everyone around. Hats off to the women in India, though. I admire their courage and creativity, and look forward to returning to the land where staring is so taboo that, when I was eight, my mom chewed me a new hole for staring at a woman sitting behind us at church whose singing was as amazing as the fat lady’s at the opera. I’ve never stared again. God bless America.

Conversations With Kenyans

2007-01-31T15:42:00.000+03:00

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

2007-01-26T15:38:00.000+03:00

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

2007-01-17T22:26:00.000+03:00

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

2007-01-15T14:32:00.000+03:00

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

2007-01-02T09:13:00.000+03:00

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.

Playing With Technology in the USA

2006-12-26T05:55:00.000+03:00

Okay so I've just rediscovered the Blogger feature where you can post photos. Whee! I'm going to go a bit nuts here, so bear with me. Check old posts for new pictures, too.

Typical moody countryside after rain.

I found this chameleon in my yard one day and decided to try to make it turn unnatural colors, like the shade of this folder.

My living room.

Every few months someone brings a camel to town and tries to sell rides.

Another volunteer and I tried to make tofu. We put the curds in an American-flag bandana and hung them to drain on a clothesline made of an old electrical cord. His neighbor was like, "Why do you disrespect your country's flag?" What greater display of Mom-and-apple-pie respect is there than soybeans?

Home for a Holiday Visit

2006-12-21T06:40:00.000+03:00

Frankfurt Airport. I’m writing on a napkin. None of the shops here sell notepads. They sell plenty of perfume and booze, though. Not that I have any euros on me. I’m only carrying Kenyan shillings, which sounds really quaint and irrelevant from here. The developed world hasn’t been as much of a shock as I expected yet, except for winter. The weather report on the plane said temps here would be 23 degrees F and, well, they are. I’m freezing my ass off. I didn’t bring any warm clothes. I’m keeping myself warm with my inflatable neck pillow. There’s this huge Christmas light display here, festive and tasteful, and I’m probably the only person who isn’t completely numbed to Christmas lights. Me, and the Japanese guy snapping photos of it like mad.

I’m already noticing ways that I’ve adapted to Kenyan village life. Despite my last post, I’ve forgotten how to queue. I keep catching myself rushing forward to fill any empty space closer to the front of the line, and edging closer to the person in front of me to prevent any determined mamas from cutting in line. When I got on the plane in Nairobi my first observation was, “Everyone is white.” We were going to Johannesburg so I guess that made sense. And I’ve forgotten that not everyone lives on the equator because it’s 7:30am and still pitch black outside.

I know I'm in the west because: No one has ching-chonged me yet, and there’s a 100 percent chance no one will in the next three weeks. People are mostly odorless. No one stares. No one peers over my shoulder at whatever I’m doing (although I caught myself doing that to someone on the plane).

In Nairobi I asked a security guard, “Where is the South African Airways counter?” He pointed and said, “There.” I said, “Where?” He said, “There.” I said, “Where?” He said, “Just there.” I said, “Where?” He said, “You are not seeing?” NO, OBVIOUSLY NOT.

In Frankfurt I asked a guy at the information desk, “Where is the United Airlines terminal?” He pointed and said, “See the blue sign above the counter? You’ll go there and check in at 9 am. They’ll tell you which gate to go to.” Ah, communication.

Washington Dulles Airport, 3:45pm, EST. Well, it was only an 8.5 hour flight but it felt like forever, probably because I didn’t sleep. They managed to lose my bag, too. Merry Christmas, everyone. Your gifts are still in Germany. Or South Africa. Or Kenya.

As we were taxiing to the terminal after landing in DC, I caught a glimpse of an American flag flying somewhere on the tarmac. I realized it’s been 19 months since I’ve set foot in the U.S. The flight attendant said, “To all our passengers, welcome to the United States. And to our returning citizens, welcome home,” and I lost it. Big hot tears rolled into my lap, and the German girl in the seat next to me scowled and edged away. The guy at the customs counter said the same thing. “Welcome home.” Is it standard protocol or did they recognize the look of a battered American returning from the front lines of rural Africa? Maybe that’s too dramatic. But I’ve imagined this feeling for the last few months, although I forgot to imagine the Borders and Starbucks that I saw as soon as I stepped off the plane. American consumerism doesn’t disappoint.

Everyone has a giant phone now. Do they show movies or something?

My friend Zadok just immigrated to the U.S. He is marrying a Peace Corps volunteer who finished her service last year. I went to his going away party in my village. I met his family, visited his home and saw what he was about to leave behind. I was envious that he was going to America forever (Kenyans say people who immigrate to the U.S. never return to Kenya) and I was only going for a three week holiday, but I didn’t envy the isolation, the longing for the familiar and the frustration with cultural oddities that he’s about to experience. America may seem at first to be closer to heaven for many immigrants, but moving to another country always ends up feeling farther from home no matter how many people say the streets are paved in gold.

Addendum, Dec 22: I got an email from Zadok today saying he is great and having the time of his life with his fiancee and her family. Karibu Merikani! :)

A Matatu Story With a Happy Ending

2006-12-16T00:10:00.000+03:00

Schools are having their graduation ceremonies and everyone is going home for the holidays. Traveling by matatu today was a nightmare. I was at the stage in Eldoret this afternoon, trying to find a vehicle back to my town. So were 150 other people vying for 14 seats. (In reality, they were vying for about 25 “seats” – empty space inside a matatu that you can cram a person into.)

Everytime a matatu pulled up, there was a mad rush of people pushing each other out of the way so they could board. Kenyans don’t queue. And no one takes it personally if someone else pushes them out of the way and snatches a seat.

As many times as I’ve seen this scene, it still annoyed me. There were at least five touts whose job it was to load people into vehicles in some sort of organized way, but they were all standing around doing nothing while passengers stampeded into the matatu like crazed bovine.

“DOESN’T ANYONE KNOW HOW TO QUEUE?” I said loudly, to no one in particular. Complaining loudly to no one in particular has become my main coping mechanism for idiocy and chaos. “YOU CAN’T JUST PUSH PEOPLE OUT OF THE WAY WHEN THEY’VE BEEN WAITING LONGER THAN YOU. AND WHY AREN’T THESE TOUTS DOING THEIR JOBS? THEY SHOULD BE TELLING PEOPLE TO QUEUE.”

“It’s true,” a man next to me said. “That’s the way it should be.” I hadn’t noticed him before, but he was standing there, watching people crush each other in the doorway of the matatu. He looked like he wanted to board, but wasn’t up for shoving and throwing elbows.

I was slightly surprised by his reaction. Kenyans usually just laugh or ignore me completely when I complain. I felt encouraged by his support, so I grabbed one of the touts by the arm and repeated, “Why don’t you tell people to queue? Isn’t that your job? You can’t have everyone trying to crowd onto the matatu at once.”

The tout just gave me a blank stare. He didn’t understand English. The man next to me quickly translated, and the tout responded the way most touts respond to suggestions from passengers – he turned his back on us and walked away. I started to think of things to say for my next round of loud complaining to no one in particular.

I didn’t have to. The tout must have taken our advice because people were slowly beginning to queue. It was a small miracle. I’ve only seen Kenyans queue up for matatus in Nairobi, and even then only for about three different routes (out of hundreds). I followed the man next to me to the back of the line, which already had 20 people in it. A minute later it stretched halfway down the block. And we were the only route whose passengers were waiting in line. None of the other routes seemed to notice or care that suddenly there was efficiency in their midst, and that maybe they could learn from it.

I was just impressed that someone had listened to me. People were boarding the matatu without pushing or otherwise trying to hurt each other, and the touts were even making sure no one was trying to cut to the front of the line. It made me want to say I told you so, but I couldn’t think of how to say it in Swahili.

Ona, nilikuambia hivyo.

Finally A Quiet Moment To Dish

2006-12-11T12:24:00.000+03:00

World AIDS Day 2006. Well, we pulled it off successfully, sort of. The boda-bodas got to race, we registered 35 people to participate in an HIV workshop (pending funding), they got awesome prizes, free food and water, and bragging rights. In reality, we took a bunch of shortcuts so that to the public it looked organized. To give you a little sampling of the bigger frustration, the district coordinating body didn’t announce the venue until four days before the event. FOUR DAYS. My co-workers weren’t kidding about last minute “planning” skills of local leaders, although they left out the part about the finger-pointing and refusal to accept responsibility for failure...and curiously enough, the simultaneous eagerness to take credit for someone else’s work.

Eric, Neetha and Adrienne came to my site to help out with race-day logisitics. We passed out World AIDS Day stickers, caps and flags, water, biscuits and bread; numbered the racers, registered last-minute entrants, and motored through town as part of the parade. Students from a nearby university, which was hosting the main event, marched with banners and flags, and wore yellow t-shirts that said, “I Care To Know My HIV Status. Do You?” A matatu tout ran up to us as we were riding in our vehicle and said, “Let me ask you just one question. Those students marching, do they have AIDS? Because some of them are so beautiful, I hope not.”

Adrienne and I had ridden the route on our Peace Corps-issue mountain bikes a few days earlier to mark checkpoints and get a sense for how long the race would take. We stopped several times for pouring rain, food and water, and it took us six hours to complete the 54 km route. The boda-bodas completed the route in just over two hours on their clunky fake-Chinese bikes like the ones you see to the left.

There were the usual speeches, poems and skits, as well as a prize-giving ceremony for the racers, who had stuffed themselves full of bread, biscuits and glucose powder. That stuff is fascinating. Glucose is given to people when they’re sick, to kids as a snack during school, and as sustenance during strenuous activity. The best part is that you just pour a small mound into the palm of your hand and lick it clean, so after awhile all the boda-bodas had white powder all over their mouths and noses. It did NOT resemble a coke-snorting convention. Hehe.

Thanksgiving Day 2006. It is a Peace Corps tradition to match volunteers to American ex-pat host families for Thanksgiving each year. I spent Thanksgiving with a couple who works for a U.S. government agency in Nairobi, and allow me to make a note to myself for future reference: Foreign Service Officer = cushy lifestyle. The husband served in the Peace Corps several decades ago, and the wife has lived and worked all over the world. They invited me and two other volunteers into their cavernous home in the suburbs of Nairobi. It’s a 100 percent American house, with Kenyan flare – two giant, friendly dogs, a giant refrigerator, a giant washer and dryer, giant fluffy towels that smell like dryer sheets, flushing toilets, hot water, bathtubs, housekeeper and housekeeper quarters, satellite TV, soon-to-arrive wireless internet, landscaped gardens, two series of gates and guards, U.S. government-issue Land Rover, elaborate security system, marble fireplace, wood floors…oh, God, stop me now. Anyway, an oasis of American comfort (uh, luxury) in a developing country, and I didn’t even feel guilty being there. I’ve definitely been in the village too long. Thank God I’m going home to get a good dose of vulgar American consumerism and gluttony to make me appreciate the simplicity of Kenyan village life.

But I digress. Thanksgiving dinner was the works: a 20-lb turkey, mushroom gravy (real mushrooms!), autumn vegetables, salad (oh loverly raw vegetables), another turkey breast marinated in beer, butternut squash soup, pie, pie, pie…and they are wine collectors so for the first time in Kenya I actually drank good wine.

It made my day. It made my week and month, too. It was a vacation to a familiar place I’d never been to before, with familiar people I’d never met before. It’s pretty amazing how in Kenya you can put a bunch of American strangers together who really don’t have that much in common, and we easily find so much in common. It’s true a lot of it comes from a consumer culture we share (“Cranberry sauce. Where are we going to find cranberry sauce?”) But a lot of it also comes from traditions we share, and from a very specific set of values that we’re not aware we share with each other until we live in a place like Kenya that is so different, and baffling, and challenging to all the beliefs we assumed were pretty universal. They’re not. We can’t understand why they’re not, because they seem so obviously right, and true, and best. But we can share that inability to understand with other American ex-pats, and it’s comforting…it’s a realization that even 20,000 (50,000?) miles from home, we’re not alone.

Has It Really Been Almost a Month Since My Last Post?

2006-12-08T21:44:00.000+03:00

Spontanaeity is the Spice of Life. On any given day I could easily end up in a place I never even knew existed. Like today. I am attending a day-long seminar on the topic of Tribal Clashes: Why Communities Should Live in Harmony. The woman at my organization who was originally invited to attend couldn’t go, and neither could her replacement. So at the last minute they sent the low lady on the totem pole – me.

Now I’m not convinced that I’m even an appropriate attendee for this seminar, since its objective is to engage members of various tribes in north Rift Valley in a discussion of how to co-exist peacefully. Not that I’m complaining. I get to be a fly on the wall while Kenyans debate and air all their grievances about their culture, their police, their local administration and their government. It’s not often that I would get to sit among such a large group of vocal, articulate Kenyans sharing their thoughts on an issue that frustrates them even more than it frustrates me – tribalism. Also I get to practice my Kiswahili comprehension skills. Current level: every other word makes sense.

Other Stuff I’ve Been Doing. I spent Thanksgiving with an American family in Nairobi. Adrienne and I miraculously pulled off a successful and widely gossiped-about World AIDS Day boda-boda race with the help of my wonderful organization and some other intrepid PCVs. I went to Iten to help Amber with a small-scale version of Camp GLOW in her community. I’m currently harboring a Peace Corps refugee named Adrienne (same as above) who has been driven out of her community by nervous, power-crazed nuns, until her new site fixes up her house. And I hired my friend Nicholas to teach me Kiswahili, because I’m way too lazy to practice on my own. He is a Luhya, which according to the Kenyan stereotype means he speaks decent Kiswahili, unlike the Nandis.

I'm Actually Working

2006-11-15T23:39:00.000+03:00

I’ve been pretty busy at work lately. I bet I can count on one hand the number of Peace Corps volunteers who have ever said that. Six months ago (back at miserable old Site #1) I couldn’t say that.

Adrienne and I are trying to put together a boda-boda (bicycle taxi) race for World AIDS Day, December 1. It’s part of a larger project that we’re trying to find funding for; in exchange for participating in the race, the boda-boda operators have to attend an HIV/AIDS seminar. Sounds like bribery? They wouldn’t race or attend the seminar if there weren’t prizes and food involved. So much for knowledge for the sake of empowerment and all that other sustainable development crap. People are the same all over the world. Ultimately we just want free food and free stuff. Especially free food. Yum yum.

Boda-boda operators are men usually between the ages of 15-30 who transport people around town on their bikes. They are a perfect group to reach out to about HIV/AIDS because statistically speaking they are a population with a high vulnerability to HIV infection. Meaning they’re young, they’re poor, they’re generally not very educated (high school graduates would fall on the high end of the schooling spectrum among these guys), and many have substance abuse problems or visit prostitutes. Also, they interact with people in the community on a daily basis while taxiing them around, so they’re also a perfect channel for disseminating information about HIV/AIDS, after they’ve mastered the correct information in the seminar.

Anyway, World AIDS Day is exactly two weeks away. The planning committee in our area still hasn’t announced the venue. When I pointed this out to my co-workers two weeks ago they just laughed heartily.

“Only one month left and they still don’t have a venue?” I sighed. “How am I supposed to plan?”

“Oh, Justina, that’s just the way we do it in Africa. It could even be decided the day before.”

It. Could. Be. What?

So there’s two weeks left and Adrienne and I are scrambling to get everything done amidst the Thanksgiving holidays. We’re testing out "the way they do it in Africa." Last year Hillary and I organized International Women’s Day in our village. We started planning on March 5. International Women’s Day is March 8 every year. I happened to be out of town for the actual festivities; instead I left Hillary with a schedule of events and a box of purple ribbons to sell. Apparently it was a big success and the community loved it. So I won’t rule out the possibility of a successful, albeit disorganized, World AIDS Day bike race.

Droning On About Stuff

2006-11-06T06:55:00.000+03:00

My Laptop Is My Life. Especially after I discovered wireless internet nearby. It’s pretty amazing how much more normal I feel when I can access the internet and do my work on a single machine again. IBM ThinkPad, I love you. Last Saturday I spent a solid six hours surfing, downloading, checking email, blogging, reading PDFs, cutting and pasting and saving like a normal human being. My friend even brought me a slice of homemade cake and homemade cereal while I was working. HOMEMADE CEREAL! There are some benefits to living in a place where cereal is unaffordable. People make it at home. It’s brilliant.

On Sunday I’d planned to spend the whole day writing grad school essays and making lesson plans for the workshop I’m teaching this week. On my laptop, of course. The kids next door were screaming their high-pitched, ear-piercing, spoiled-brat, I’m-training-to-be-the-next-Idi-Amin screams even before I woke up in the morning. I decided, once I was out of bed, that today was not a day I could deal with it. I mean, no day ever is, but today someone’s screaming brat would surely be promoted to glory rather unpleasantly if I had to listen to glass-shattering squeals all day. I went outside and approached some of the kids wearily.

“Hi, I want to talk to you,” I said in English. I was tired of having this conversation and didn’t feel like trying to say it in Kiswahili. “I have a lot of work to do today, and I really need you all to be quiet today.”

The kids looked down at the ground and didn’t say anything. “Are you getting me?” I said in Kiswahili.

The oldest girl whispered, “Yes,” still staring at the ground. I wasn’t so sure, since I had never spoken to them in English before.

“Mzungu anasema nini? Anataka nini?” their mom screamed from inside the house.

“She’s saying she has a lot of work to do and she wants us to be quiet today,” they replied in Kiswahili. I guess they understood after all.

That didn’t mean, however, that they did anything about it. They continued to scream for absolutely no reason (the usual reason they scream) while I made breakfast, washed my earplugs and sporadically yelled, “Nyamasa!” (Be quiet!) from inside my house when their screaming became unbearable – I mean, more unbearable than usual. Somehow I did not beat a single one of them.

Suddenly, after an hour, something started to feel strange in my house. Something unfamiliar, but welcome. Silence was everywhere. I looked out the window and there were no kids. Had they gone to church? I doubted any pastor would tolerate these spawns of Satan screaming through his entire service, and their mom probably knew better than to put her spoiled, uncontrollable kids on display for all her church friends to see.

Whatever the reason, they were gone. Quick, bust out the laptop! I wanted to take advantage of the quiet before the kids came screaming back to their house, screaming for attention so that they could scream about nothing for a mother who would just let them scream.

Curses! The electricity was out in the whole town. All this peace and quiet and no way to power my laptop. I decided to try to get some work done anyway, thinking maybe the electricity would be back by the time the laptop battery ran out of juice.

It didn’t come back, and my battery was at 8%. I was starting to feel a strange yet familiar sensation – Type A anxiety. I have work to do! I have no electricity!

Neetha saved the day. I packed up my laptop and hopped a matatu to her house. When I got there I immediately plugged in, put on some MP3s, and started typing. We gossiped and ate chocolate Hob Nobs (the best non-American cookie in Kenya, because Oreos are found in some supermarkets) under the bright warm glow of a light bulb. She boiled water in an electric tea kettle, then later did her toenails…why? Because thanks to electricity, she could see them. Beautiful, friendly electricity.

This Chick Drives Me Crazy. I just read a book called The Cruelest Journey, a travelogue of one American woman’s 600-mile kayak trip down the Niger River to the fabled city of Timbuktu in Mali, West Africa. Kira Salak is a travel writer, adventurer and pretty kick ass lady who decided to do this trip that few Westerners have attempted, much less survived. Not to spoil the ending or anything, but she survives.

Her prose is pretty straightforward and precise and, in my opinion, not particularly lyrical, although who am I to judge since she has written for National Geographic Adventure, among other enviable pubs, and I am a prolific, expert contributor to my own blog (readership: approximately 6 fans around the world.) Despite this, I found myself relating deeply to her insights about her trip, cross-cultural navigations and travel in general.

I came to Kenya knowing my two years here wasn’t going to be a safari in paradise. At the time, of course, I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I knew that I was willing to do it because I would get something valuable in return. I never thought too much about what that thing was; it was always some abstract notion of understanding and awareness of the world beyond what I could get by staying in the States.

But then Salak says, “Hardship is more honest: it tells us that we don’t have enough patience yet, nor humility, nor gratitude…Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion.”

I’d add to this, that while I have a lot more compassion after being here in Kenya, I also have a much more realistic view of things—one that might, to someone who hasn’t been here, seem cynical, pessimistic or racist. I think that you can’t truly have compassion for people, places and cultures you don’t know unless you’ve had a good dose of their reality.

I think what I had before I came here was a lopsided compassion. It came from this idea that people are oppressed because of Big Bad factors beyond their control – governments, white colonists, cultural imperialists, capitalists. It was a perspective that, while well-intentioned, removed any personal responsibility from people’s situations. It’s true that most people who are suffering were forced there by circumstances beyond their control, but I’ve also seen – and been frustrated by – the ways individuals allow these situations to be perpetuated. The implication here is not, however, that all they have to do is pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It’s not that simple, of course. I think compassion comes when you understand all the forces acting on a particular situation, and you go away accepting it. Not judging whether it needs to be changed or not, but accepting that it just is, for now.

It’s not a very easy thing to have, compassion. Most of the time mine is obscured by frustration and judgment, my usual reactions to hardship. Humility allows us to reach through these clouds and find our compassion again. I think most of the time I don’t open myself up enough to feeling humbled.

The friendly smile and warm greeting from Neetha’s neighbor who brings her milk everyday.

The reminder that my co-worker, who I normally think of as a simple village grandmother whose job has become a mindless routine to her, has raised a house full of kids and grandkids while holding down high-profile jobs and well-respected positions in the community for decades, in a culture where few women hold leadership positions and those who do are often not taken seriously.

The young mama sitting next to me on a matatu who kept asking whether I knew where I was going because she saw that I wasn’t a local and wanted to make sure I arrived safely.

My friend who went out of his way to help me find wireless internet last weekend, then brought me “lunch” – freshly baked cake, homemade cereal and fruit.

Stopping to notice a breathtaking sunset over the escarpment, or a long hedge of bougainvillea in Nairobi blooming in seven brilliant colors.

At one point during her trip, one of many days when she is exhausted from the baffling and often hostile reactions she gets from villagers she passes on the river, Salak describes seeing a flock of birds diving and rising again and again over the river in perfect unison, at one point swooping so close to her kayak that she thinks she can touch them. In that moment she’s able to step outside herself just long enough to appreciate what she’s just seen, and she realizes that even when you’re not in a frame of mind to notice beauty, it will always find you.

Beauty finds me through these moments of humility. The beauty not only of nature, a force so powerful that my mind can’t truly conceive of it, but the beauty of humanity, which I usually forget exists because I find myself surrounded constantly by the ugliness of humanity, much of it my own.

Too much philosophical reflection; my brain hurts and my face has a serious, serious expression on it. This is the stuff heart attacks are made of.

But before I move on, I want to recommend this book to some people I know would really appreciate it, for various reasons. First and foremost, Phillippa. This book is all you, sister. Also Nandita, Patrick McD, Kroll, Dan (the Man) and all my other travel buds around the world.

Keep That Milk From Getting Lonely. Neetha sent me to the supermarket to get a liter of cold milk one day when she came to visit me. (The supermarket in my town just got a refrigerated case and I put in a request for cheese!! IN MY TOWN!! Also available now: butter and yogurt. Dairy heaven.)

I met her at my house, milk in hand, and she announced that she had brought some treats. She reached into a plastic bag and pulled out a package of real, live, genuine Oreo cookies. I almost keeled over with happiness.

Milk was poured. Oreos were dunked. No one said a word. We just smiled big cookie-stained smiles.

It sparked a bit of patriotism in me. Those of you who know me know I’m not exactly a flag-waving patriot. (My mom might say I’m a flag-burning liberal.) From now on when I visit other volunteers, I try to bring a package of Oreos and cold milk, just for the ten minutes of silent camaraderie. For the unspoken understanding just between Americans: Oh, Ar, Ee, Oh.

Totally Trivial Tidbits

2006-10-30T21:33:00.000+03:00

Three Kinds of Floss. Yup, there were only three kinds of floss at Sun City Supermarket (formerly Uchumi) in Kisumu. I don’t think flossing is a regular part of oral hygiene here, although using toothpicks is, judging from how ubiquitous they are in every eatery joint and from the fact that they’re found next to the toothbrushes at the store. Needless to say, I didn’t find my favorite floss, the Johnson&Johnson woven mint flavored floss, and the floss I ended up buying was expensive and shreds under normal use despite claims on the packaging that it doesn’t. Most ironically of all, I floss more here than I ever did in the U.S.

Kalenjin Runners. You might have heard that the winner of the recent Chicago marathon fell on his arse right after crossing the finish line. The guy is from the Kalenjin tribe that lives in my area, and some of my co-workers know him way back when he owned a barber shop in their village. “Imagine, he used to be a humble barber and now he’s a millionaire.” A millionaire who nearly cracked his head on the finish line. The male and female winners of last weekend’s Nairobi marathon are also both Kalenjins. I’m so proud of my tribe.

One thing I won’t miss about Kenya. Having black boogers all the time.

Wisdom. We were watching Out of Africa last week; it was the first time any of us – Tony, Neetha and me - had ever seen it. A lot of the scenes are set to crisp, clean classical music (Mozart, mostly) and the Kenyan countryside is portrayed as pristine wilderness teaming with wildlife and Kikuyu warriors happily going about their lives in traditional dress, some with full time jobs as pleasant, mild-mannered servants to British colonists. Idyllic and unrealistic.

“I find it ironic that the movie sets Africa to Mozart. It’s so incongruous,” I said.

“But that’s basically what the British did to Kenya,” Tony said.

FOUND: FREE WIRELESS INTERNET IN KENYA!! Now that I have a cool laptop, I’ve gone in search of wireless internet. Java House at Adams Arcade and at the Junction in Nairobi both have free wi-fi, and there is a university about an hour’s bike ride from my town that has wireless for 1 shilling a minute. Life almost feels normal again! Happy meter = high.

Should’ve Bought the Fourth

2006-10-27T20:37:00.000+03:00

I took the night train to Nairobi a few weeks ago with Shinita and Tony. When we tried to book a sleeper cabin for ourselves – two women and one man – we were advised to buy the fourth space (a cabin sleeps four) if we wanted to stay together, because putting a stranger in our mixed-gender cabin might make that person feel uncomfortable. If we didn’t pay for the fourth spot, they would put us in different cabins and we would have to stay with strangers, albeit of the same sex.

“It’s just a trick to make the mzungus pay more,” we said. “There’s plenty of space and we’ll be able to move into the same cabin after we leave the station.” It was kind of like the stadium seating mentality for a losing baseball team. Wait a few innings, then move from your cheap nosebleed seats to the more expensive empty seats on the first baseline.

“No need to buy the fourth spot.”

Shinita and I went to put our luggage down in the cabin we were sharing. There were already two large mamas, a nine-year-old boy (kids are never counted as people on transport vehicles), tons of luggage and a heavy layer of ripe, rather putrid body odor in there. Shinita and I looked at each other and heaved a mutual sigh.

We hurried out and went to Tony’s cabin to assess whether we’d be able to stay there. There was only one other passenger in his cabin, a respectable-looking, unscented older man with one small bag. Sweet. We were both thinking the same thing – we’d be staying in Tony’s cabin tonight.

The cabin mate immediate struck up a conversation with us as the train pulled out of the station in Kisumu. He was a university professor in Nairobi, obviously well-educated, but with that weird inferiority complex that compelled him to want to have deep, philosophical conversations with any mzungu he met.

Sometimes Kenyans who have traveled or studied abroad exude this nervous eagerness to talk to mzungus, and it always has an undertone of needing to prove that they’re educated. It’s like they’re saying, “I know you white people think Africans are ignorant, but don’t assume I’m just like all the rest.” It often leaves me feeling awkward and guilty, because I’ve suddenly been cast as a dual agent of someone’s inadequacy and subsequent self-affirmation.

And tonight we just didn’t feel like discussing The Evolution of Gender Roles Among the Nilotic Peoples: From the Pre-Colonial Era to Post-Modernism with this man who was obviously more intelligent than all three of us combined. We just wanted to eat crackers and cheese and quote lines from American movies.

“Maybe we should have bought the fourth spot,” Shinita said. Tony and I nodded, our mouths full of turkey cold cuts.

Several hours later, the conductor brought two more men into the cabin and announced that they would also be staying in there. The two men eyed us suspiciously. Shinita and I were beginning to lose hope for an odor-free night of sleep. We didn’t want to go back to our two-mamas-and-a-boy sleeper cabin.

“Are you sure there’s no room for them in any other male cabins?” we asked. The conductor nodded, but we weren’t so sure. Shinita and I decided to conduct our own investigation by walking the length of the sleeper car and peering into each cabin.

It was no use. All the cabins were full.

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” Shinita said.

The three of us went to the dining car to review our alternatives, which were dwindling to nothing, and because some of Tony’s cabin mates were looking sleepy. We also wanted some privacy from the hyper-philosophical professor, who didn’t seem to be getting sleepy anytime soon. Strangely enough, he seemed to materialize out of nowhere as we were sitting down at a table in the dining car.

“I’ll join you,” he said, with a look on his face like he was eager to ask us what we thought of The Role of Christian Thought In Traditionally Animist Societies and Its Impact on the Legacy of Female Genital Mutilation.

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” Shinita muttered.

5am. I was jolted awake by a familiar yet disturbing sound. I was too groggy to remember what it was right at that moment, only that whatever it was woke me up. I looked out at the blackness and tried to catch glimpses of the room I was in. Where was I?

The train began to move and it came back to me. I looked across the cabin at the Shinita-shaped lump of blanket, then noticed how certain odors can have physical weight in tightly-enclosed sleeper cabins. Should have bought the fourth.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

Um.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

I looked across at Shinita again to see if she was hearing the same thing. “There’s a cock outside the window,” I mumbled, to everyone in particular.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“There’s a cock outside!” I said again.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“No,” Shinita said, finally awake. “It’s in here. It’s in our room.”

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

She was right. It was in bed with the mama sleeping in the bunk below me.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

It was also in bed with a second cock. “Not the kind of cocks we’d like in our beds,” Shinita would later say.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“Ma’am,” Shinita said to the mama. “You’re gonna have to take that outside.”

I grinned into my pillow. Good old Shinita, telling it like it is.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

The mama below me started to move around, and the two roosters started clucking indignantly, protesting being stuffed into a bag. “BAWK! BAWK BAWK BAWK!” Oh, God, she’s going to break their necks, I thought.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

Apparently, being tied up, stuffed into a bag, and thrown into a corner of a sleeper cabin on a moving train doesn’t stop a rooster from crowing. “Bok bok bok bok bok,” they said, in between crows.

“Bok BOK bok bok bok bok,” I said, and Shinita snickered.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“COCKLE DOODLE DOO,” I said, proud of my unusual talent for imitating chickens. It was only funny until the fourth time, so they crowed for another hour, unaccompanied by me.

“Look, ma’am,” Shinita said, an hour later. “This is completely inappropriate. Remove those chickens from this room right now, please.”

“They’re not my chickens,” the mama said. “They belong to my friend and I don’t know where she’s sleeping.”

Oh yeah, I left out one part of the story. While we were trying to stake a claim to the two empty bunks in Tony’s cabin, a third mama tried to stake a claim to one of our bunks in the cabin we were originally assigned. The conductor had to chase her out, after he chased me and Shinita out of Tony’s cabin. It turned out that this third mama had only paid for a third class ticket (sleeping upright in regular train seats), not a more expensive sleeper car ticket, and was trying to sneak into the sleeper car.

“I don’t care whose chickens those are,” Shinita replied. “You let her leave them here, so you need to get them out of here.” The mama slowly rolled out of her bed, gathered up the chickens, heaved the door open (FRESH AIR! FRESH AIR!) and went to find her friend, the attempted bunk thief and chicken abandoner. Peace and quiet at last.

8am. “Good morning,” Tony was standing in the doorway of our cabin, looking well-rested. “How’d you guys sleep?”

We glared at him through puffy eyes and he started laughing. “What happened?” he said.

“Did you hear a rooster last night?”

“Yeah, it was outside the train.”

“No, it was in here. Two of them, in this room.”

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” he said.

8:15am. “Gawd, something STINKS in here,” Shinita said.

9:30am. “Excuse me,” the mama with the little boy said. She seemed annoyed with us in general, but spoke to me timidly. “I’m going to change him now. Is it okay?”

Change his clothes? I thought. A nine-year-old boy can’t change his own clothes? But I gave her a friendly shrug and said, “Sure, go ahead.”

The mama laid the boy on his back and yanked down his pants. Suddenly everything became clear. The odor whose fetid warmth we had been enveloped in all night as we tried to sleep through crowing roosters, and whose intensity had been growing for the last hour, was coming from the boy. The boy’s diapers, to be exact.

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” Shinita sighed.

Surrounded by Petty Criminals

2006-10-20T14:33:00.000+03:00

Pickpocket Receives the Gift of Life. This morning I noticed a big slash at the bottom of one of my daypacks. I thought maybe I’d caught it on something somewhere, but upon further inspection I realized it was a pretty clean slash. Someone apparently had tried to cut open the bottom of my bag so that they could steal whatever dropped out. I don’t know where or when it happened, but I’m thinking it was someone sitting next to me on a matatu. The cut only penetrated an outside pocket, where I don’t usually store anything valuable, but I did notice that a condom was missing.

Why am I carrying condoms in my daypack, you ask? To hand out to people who ask me for money, of course. It’s a trick I learned from Eric, a PCV who finished his service in July.

“Chinese, you give me 50 bob.”

“Oh, I’m SOOOO sorry. I don’t have 50 bob today. But how about a condom?”

“You give me 50 bob.”

“With this condom I’m offering you the gift of life—a life free of AIDS, STIs and unwanted pregnancy. Surely that’s worth more than any amount of shillingies I could give you.”

Somewhere out there, there is a pickpocket who has inadvertently received the gift of life from me as well, probably along with some used Kleenex and old bus receipts. I wonder if he realizes how fortunate he is.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Prison Workshop, Day 2. I went back to the prison a few days later for the second part of the workshop, with Godi as my sidekick again. We opened by asking everyone whether they had talked to anyone about AIDS since our first meeting.

The prison welfare officer said he had spoken to some of the inmates and found that a lot of people had heard of AIDS but didn’t know much about it.

One woman talked to her kids and found out that they knew a few facts about AIDS, but not much about the sexual aspect of it. (At this point I thought, “Like the part about unprotected sex being the leading cause of HIV transmission?”)

Another woman talked to her husband, who was “impressed” with the conversation and who decided he wanted to visit a VCT for an HIV test. (At this point I thought, “It’s none of my business why a married man who should theoretically have had only one partner for years now thinks he might have been exposed to HIV.”)

She also talked to her fourth grade son, who she found out had been taught about AIDS in school. This actually surprised me, that a parent doesn’t know that most primary and secondary schools in Kenya incorporate HIV/AIDS topics into the curriculum. In even the most remote bush schools that I’ve visited, there is at least one teacher who is trained to be the school’s designated HIV/AIDS educator. The exact quality of this instruction is another issue (many teachers are trained through organizations like Education for Life, a Catholic-sponsored, “abstinence-only-because-condoms-have-holes” program), but it’s safe to say that students in every grade, in nearly every school, have been taught the basics.

The other participants said they hadn’t run into anyone they felt they needed to talk to about AIDS. I was thinking, “You haven’t run into your kids, your spouse or your neighbors? You been under a rock or something?”

I didn’t have to say a word. Another participant replied, “I disagree with my colleagues who say they didn’t meet anyone to talk to. You all have husbands, wives and children. You all know other staff who have families. These are the people we should be talking to about AIDS.”

Good on ya, sister.

The day’s agenda was pretty heavy: identifying the roots of the AIDS problem in Kenya, breaking silence and cultural stigma, understanding the importance of communication. I passed out a graph showing AIDS prevalence among men and women of various age groups, then asked people to talk about why young girls between 15-29 and men between 25-40 tended to be the age groups most vulnerable to getting HIV.

It wasn’t an easy discussion to facilitate. I kept wanting to launch into an angry rant about what a deeply misogynistic society I thought Kenya was. I never did, which is a testament to how far I’ve come in a year and a half here. As Westerners we need to listen to what Kenyans have to say about their own culture.

This is what they had to say:

“Well obviously I will not marry a 60-year-old lady. That is why young girls get HIV more than older women.”

“Women tend to marry around 15-29 while men will wait until they are 30.”

“Women are often forced to have sex.”

“Women will be beaten if they refuse sex, especially if the man is drunk.”

“Women will not say no to their husbands because they fear divorce.”

“It’s time for women to stand up for themselves. Men want women to speak out, too.”

“If a woman is too busy with the kids and the home to have sex with her husband, the man will go find someone else.”

“If you want to show your wife you love her, why not offer to help her with her work, then she can give you sex after.”

“If my wife denies me my rights as a husband, don’t I have every right to look for someone else? If she’s not satisfying me, she is denying me my rights.”

“There is a saying in Swahili, that no cock can have only one hen.”

Godi came through again, saying things I wanted to say, but in a Kenyan voice. I’m hoping to make him a permanent addition to my workshops. I can learn a lot from him about how to talk to Kenyans about things that are probably none of my business as a foreigner, like how men and women relate to each other in this country. In the end, even if I say everything he says exactly the way he says them, as a Kenyan he will always be a more effective advocate for the ideas I’m trying to teach.

“We must begin to weigh human rights versus our own culture. As women, you must say no to men when you mean no, as an example to our girls. If our girls grow up seeing that Mami never says no to Dadi, she will not learn to say no.”

“Communication is the most important thing. If your partner is not satisfying you, talk to her. She will not know unless you tell her.”

“Let us expect the same things from both partners in a relationship. Don’t let one partner’s expectations be sidelined.”

Road Rules

2006-10-19T21:09:00.000+03:00

We were driving back from a meeting in a neighboring village this afternoon when a matatu overtook us on the right, honking and swerving impatiently. It cut in front of us and swerved across the lane to the curb, stopping suddenly to pick up some awaiting passengers. Our driver patiently slowed down, then went around the matatu, which was still loading passengers. A few seconds later, the same matatu caught up to us and swerved hard towards us, trying to run us off the road. The roads here are full of crap drivers, but this was all so sudden and unprovoked that even I could tell this wasn’t just incompetent driving. It was intentional harassment.

“God, WHAT is that guy’s problem?” I said indignantly, a hard edge in my voice. We had been chatting in our vehicle, but the incident had stopped our conversation in mid-sentence.

My two co-workers just shrugged and continued talking to each other as if someone deliberately trying to run other vehicles off the road were normal. I pulled out my notebook and pen and took the license plate of the offending matatu, and was about to announce it triumphantly. Then I decided against it, feeling like they would just wonder why Americans get so worked up about little things, and then feel the need to punish someone who has wronged us.

It was one of those incidents that first highlights a Kenyan peculiarity, then upon further thought highlights an American peculiarity. My first reaction to my co-workers was, why do they let people do rude or dangerous things to them, and seem resigned to it? I interpreted their nonchalance as learned disempowerment: a lifetime of being treated unfairly and no longer getting worked up about it because they know they can’t do anything about it.

I fully acknowledge that this is just my skewed and naïve Western perspective. I have no idea why my co-workers didn’t seem to mind that we had almost been driven off the road, and that there was still someone out there driving a matatu who has little regard for the safety of other people. I’m sure the idea of taking the matatu’s plates and reporting it to the police never crossed their minds, and if I told them I had a mind to do so, they would have just laughed at me. Report it to the police, one of the most corrupt institutions in the country? What’s that going to accomplish?

I think that Americans take things very personally. We’re a bit narcissistic. To me, it wasn’t just some idiot endangering other people on the road. It was some idiot endangering ME. We also have a deep sense of justice – this idea that every action has a consequence, and everyone must be rewarded or punished in a way that fits the action. We are not a forgiving culture the way Kenyans are. Instead we need closure. You can see this in the way nearly every American movie has a conclusive ending. They get together. They get the bad guy. They survive hardship.

We are big believers in fairness. Then we step outside our borders and see what our moms have been telling us all our lives: Life ain’t fair. Maybe Kenyans have just accepted this fact. And maybe Americans have never understood this fact. We are constantly trying to impose our idea of fairness on a world that doesn’t play by those rules.

Kenya Prison Days

2006-10-13T22:30:00.000+03:00

Day 1. The welfare officer from the government prison in my town wanted my organization to train their staff and inmates on HIV/AIDS. They requested that we come twice a month because of the high inmate turnover. I’ve seen those prisoners before; they wear black and white striped uniforms, trudge around with their hands and feet chained together and always have a small crew of armed guards following them. They embody every stereotype of prison inmates there is, and I didn’t really feel like going there twice a month to entertain each new batch of dirt-encrusted petty criminals.

Instead, I agreed to do a training of trainers (TOT), where I would train a few staff members to become HIV/AIDS educators for the prison community. The prison houses over 300 prisoners at any one time, and has a staff of 170. The staff lives on the prison compound with their families, so the “honest” portion of the prison community numbers around 500 to 600. It seemed like a population that I could talk to without cringing and getting heebie-jeebies.

Interestingly enough, the prison dispensary has a VCT for staff members only. I guess the government of Kenya thinks VCT services for prison staff is a noble investment, but as of now they’ve left prisoners to fend for themselves as far as VCT services go.

I prepared a six-hour workshop for four staff members, that has turned out to be a three-day workshop for nine staff members, and multiple requests for additional workshops. It has been quite a sleeper success due to a number of fortuitous circumstances that were originally kind of annoying.

The first annoying circumstance was that I suddenly felt lazy and overwhelmed at the last minute. I really wanted to do a TOT, rather than the standard biology lesson on HIV/AIDS and the “ABCs: Abstain-Be Faithful-Use a Condom” sermon that puts everyone to sleep. But I had never actually done a TOT before, so three days before the workshop I still had nothing prepared, and was feeling like I had been too ambitious. How was I supposed to come up with six hours of material on how to educate other people on HIV/AIDS? I needed to focus on teaching these folks how to teach other people, but I don’t even know how to teach, much less how to teach about teaching.

I decided that instead of thinking about it, I would go biking with Adrienne. When I got to her house, she had a pile of notes on TOT from a Health Education manual put out by Peace Corps volunteers of years past. It was perfect. And I realized that no PCV should really ever have to create her own lesson plans from scratch, because almost everything has been done before. Sometimes when you’re all alone in the bush, it’s easy to forget simple PCV truths like this.

Wednesday morning, the day of the workshop, I went to the office to meet my co-worker who was supposed to teach the workshop with me. We had agreed to start the workshop at 9am (the unspoken rule being that we were on Kenyan time). At 9:30 she still hadn’t arrived. I asked my supervisor if he had seen her yet. “She will come,” he said, Kenyanly.

At 11:30 she still hadn’t arrived. My supervisor chose that moment to finally tell me, “I talked to her yesterday and we agreed that you will teach the workshop with Godi.”

Godi and I had both been in the office all morning. Why were we both being told NOW that there had been a change of plan that was decided yesterday, without consulting either of us? Why weren’t we told when we first arrived in the morning, so that we could be on our way? Why was something that seemed so obvious and logical not done in an obvious and logical way?

I set off to the prison with Godi, who is a trained VCT counselor with no experience teaching in the community. I briefed him on the teaching outline I had put together, and crossed my fingers. By the time we arrived, everyone had gone to lunch. By the time we started the workshop, the sun was starting to drop in the sky.

One of the biggest frustrations for PCVs who teach about AIDS is that we are often told not to talk about condoms. Instead, a lot of schools and churches insist that the only behavior-change we should be teaching is abstinence. After having so many of my three-hour presentations instantly invalidated by teachers and principals who stand up after my lesson and say to a roomful of high school boys, “You students, you do not need condoms, because you are not having sex. I don’t want to see you having any condoms, they are not for you,” my definition of behavior change had become “tell people ALL their options, so they can make an informed decision.” In other words, I will always teach about the C of the ABCs of preventing HIV transmission: condoms.

But the focus of the TOT workshop I put together was on the one behavior change that I usually forget about in my eagerness to promote condoms, but that I think is far more important than using condoms. It’s called talking.

It seems so simple, but HIV is a taboo topic in Kenya because sex is a taboo topic. So I opened the workshop by asking everyone to write down every word they could think of related to sex and HIV/AIDS that made them uncomfortable. There was a chorus of giggles, and sporadic embarrassed snickering throughout the activity, but in the end we were able to write a long list on the board.

Then I asked the group to name people who they would feel comfortable saying these words to, and whom they wouldn’t. The answers weren’t surprising: you can use words like penis and vagina with agemates and sexual partners, but not with parents, polite company of the opposite sex, pastors or your children. Given these answers, I was impressed that this group of men and women, who were all workmates, and considerably different in age and job rank, were beginning to open up and speak freely, especially the women. A rare, healthy group dynamic was beginning to form, because I had forced people to say “penis” and “vagina” in their mother tongue.

Then I asked the group if they thought it was important to talk to any of the people they felt uncomfortable talking to about sex. Suddenly everyone was talking about their kids.

“I don’t know if my 9-year-old boy has had sex yet. But I don’t want to talk to him about it because then he’ll go and have sex.”

“There’s so much sex on TV that sometimes I have to turn it off when I see my kid watching. But that just makes him want to watch more, because I don’t know how to tell him that sex is bad and that he’s not supposed to watch it.”

Sometimes it got kind of weird.

“There is a problem if I try to tell my son and daughter about sex. If I strip them both naked and say, you have one of these, and she has one of these, and if you put this into that, then it feels really good, then how do I then go back and tell them, but you must go outside to find a partner, you cannot be partners with each other?”

Um, yeah.

As the group shared their concerns, it was hard for me not to blurt out my personal opinions about what they were saying. But I knew that anything I said would be interpreted as a Western mind telling Africans to change their ways without understanding why Africans are they way they are.

Instead, I let Godi talk. And he shined. All his experience counseling VCT clients came through.

“It’s important to create an atmosphere of openness with your children, so they’ll feel like they can talk to you about things.”

“If you act like sex is a shameful thing, like flipping off the TV with no further explanation, your kids will think it’s a shameful thing that shouldn’t be talked about.”

“You need to empower your kids with all the information about sex, so they can make choices for themselves.”

Exactly what I would have said. The group was really receptive, but I think if I had said the same thing, they might not have accepted it as readily as they did when it came from Godi, a fellow Kenyan.

The next day of the workshop, half the group reported that they had talked to their partners and kids about HIV with great success, and one woman’s husband even wanted to visit a VCT.

[Next installment: Day 2.]

Peace Corps Bi-Polar Disorder

2006-10-07T22:03:00.000+03:00

Depressive. I’ve been a crankypants for about two months straight. Last night seemed the worst, although everything that happens here is one big superlative, so it’s hard to say when something outdoes something else.

One of my co-workers passed away last weekend, and yesterday we all went to Eldoret to fetch the body. It was a day-long event, packing 15 people into two vehicles, driving to the hospital, waiting for the paperwork, loading the body into the back of the Land Cruiser, bringing it back to the morgue in our town, viewing the body, going to visit the surviving family.

Death rituals in the Kalenjin tribe are very subdued, and this one was no exception. I wasn’t sure if it was because that’s the way you’re supposed to carry yourself, or because everyone felt understandably somber, or because people go to so many funerals that it just becomes another obligation to fulfill.

We spent most of the day patiently staring off into space, waiting for something to happen. We drove to Eldoret in silence. We waited for the paperwork in silence. We watched the body being carried into the vehicle in silence (although some women were singing a quiet dirge as they brought it from the morgue). We drove back to town in silence. We sat in the family’s house in silence. We were served lunch in silence. There were a few speeches (of course), several long prayers, and a song, and then we all went home.

To someone from a Western country where people don’t die that often, there is something unsettling about the way people relate to death here. Or maybe it’s not so much the WAY people relate to it as much as it’s that I don’t really know how they relate. I just see a lot of matter-of-fact expressions on people’s faces, and I don’t know if it’s stunned grief or boredom or a healthy acceptance of death as a phase of life.

A lot of tribes are very comfortable with death and their rituals are very lively, emotionally intense affairs, with lots of screaming, crying, dancing and drumming into the night. The Kalenjins are traditionally very fearful of death, and before the Christians told them to stop acting like such sinful Pagans, they would simply dump sick people in the forest to die, sometimes tying a long rope to the person’s leg so they could yank on it every once in awhile from the village to see if he was dead yet, because the presence of death among the living was such a taboo. But even the Kalenjins seem more comfortable with death than the average Westerner. My conversations with people in town about my late co-worker often went like this:

Person in town: Sorry to hear about the loss of your colleague.

Me: Thanks. It’s very sad. He was so young.

Person: It’s not bad. It’s just natural. BEATRICE!! CUSTOMER WANTS CHAI! BRING IT AND HURRY!

A few months ago we were trying to develop some HR policies for our organization, and the topic of funeral leave came up. People disagreed on the appropriate number of days to grant each employee. How many days of funeral leave do you think a person might need per year? I was thinking, oh, five. They finally agreed on something like 20, which was a lot fewer than originally proposed. The argument was that giving people “only” 20 days would force them to only attend funerals of people who are close to them, rather than those of distant relatives and neighbors, whose funerals people might go to just to get free food and vacation days. My supervisor said he has lost four close family members in the last year, so 20 days (5 days per funeral) seemed reasonable to him.

I’d never been to my late co-worker’s house before, so I was surprised when we went to visit his family that the house was large, clean, and brightly-painted, on several acres of rolling farmland. There was even a stone-terraced flower garden in front of the house, something I’ve never seen before in a village home.

“Koskei loved flowers,” one of my co-workers told me.

“What? You’re kidding.” Koskei was not the kind of person you’d expect to love flowers. He was a former policeman, edgy all around, a persistent chain-smoker with stained teeth, chapped lips and a scowl.

“He could go somewhere and see a nice flower, and he’d buy it and plant it at home.”

Tough packaging around a gentle heart.

There was no coffin, so my co-worker’s body was wrapped in a thin sheet that hugged all the sharp contours of his thin shape. When the morgue worker uncovered his face for viewing, I saw that instead of a toe tag, they had glued a label to the deceased’s forehead. His widow looked exhausted and shellshocked.

I got home and felt awful. There were still two hours of daylight left, so I decided to dig in the garden a bit. Except I decided to lie on my bed and rest first. When I woke up, it was dark outside, and my nose was cold. I kicked off the sleeping bag I had somehow managed to cover myself with, stumbled out of bed and wandered through my house, wondering why it was pitch black. The electricity was out on the compound. I couldn’t even see my neighbors’ houses. I fumbled around for matches and candles, sifting through my thoughts trying to remember what was real and what were remnants of the dream I’d just had.

Fetching a body from Eldoret, real. Failing to work in the garden, real. Zafar coming to visit, not real. Feeling miserable about the world outside my door, real. Neetha and I going camping, not real. Canvas tents pitched on a university campus, wandering through a maze of corridors getting lost trying to find the library dim lights through windows losing track of time it’s night it’s evening in my dream even right now.

I carried a candle to the living room and set it on the coffee table. I was still groggy, and stared for a long time at a wet brown splatter across a piece of notebook paper. What the hell IS that? What the HELL is that? WHAT the HELL is THAT?

Poo?

I looked up. There was a slug on the ceiling. There was a trace of poo a few inches behind it. The rest of it had plummeted onto the notebook paper, on my coffee table.

I contemplated ETing. Early Termination of service. Weird, emotionless funeral rituals. Weird, merciless invasions of slugs with very active bowels. Spoiled, screaming neighbor’s kid destined to be the next dictator of Kenya.

I woke up this morning at 6:48am. Then again at 7:09. Then again at 8:11. Lazy lump of protoplasm bolts out of bed, puts on a kettle of water for a bath, and sighs. Can I really take ten more months of this?

Manic. While I wait for my water to boil, I inhale the sun radiating through the windows. The sky is clear blue. Suddenly my heart is light and my soul is open. I’m not sure why. Yesterday sucked, but today I feel fine. In fact, I feel great. I haven’t felt this calm and present in months.

An hour later I board a matatu to Eldoret and don’t feel a single hint of impatience, anger, or neurotic defensiveness. I wander through the city, shopping for a belt and a black shirt that I’ve been needing for a long time. I make friendly conversation. I banter good-naturedly with vendors who quote me outrageous mzungu prices. I’m at peace; nothing can touch me.

Depressive. I’m at war with Kenya once again. The internet was so slow that I got nothing done. Three hours of my precious, limited life, wasted on waiting for pages to download. For files to upload. For logins to be authenticated. The cyber cafe staff gave me the familiar refrain. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

It continues to baffle and impress me how many people don’t mind waiting for hours on end for nothing to be achieved. I mean, it’s kind of silly, really, that Westerners should measure the quality of time spent throughout their life through achievements and money. Once you’re dead does any of that matter? But I have no other framework for conceptualizing my life, so my answer is yes. Three hours of constantly being PAINFULLY aware (watching the green squares at the bottom of the browser window slowly creeping across the white bar) that I’m not getting anything accomplished reversed the mysterious bout of calm I’d had in the morning. I was tense, agitated, and ready to clobber the next person who crossed me.

And I did. I emerged from the cyber café, and a bunch of boys suddenly converged behind me. Hm, that’s not obvious. I felt a heavy tug on my backpack. I turned around and found one pocket unzipped, exposing a wad of toilet paper and a Clif Bar, neither of which I’d be too upset to lose. But it was the principle of the matter. The boys suddenly split in different directions, and I followed one of them. When I caught up to him, I gave him a hard shove and he stumbled.

“What problem?” he shouted indignantly.

“You tried to steal from me,” I sneered. “Thief.”

“No,” he said, then tried to defend himself to everyone around us.

“I saw you,” I said. “Mwizi! Mwizi!” Thief, thief! People stared and the boy tried to defend himself more desperately. I walked away, satisfied that I had made him nervous but let it go before people around us cared enough to organize a thorough thief-whooping.

Manic. Give it another two months and maybe I’ll have something to write here.

Home Is A Nice Blackhead

2006-10-07T13:07:00.000+03:00

Rusinga Island Is a Remote, Underdeveloped, Poo-Dotted Paradise. There is a group of PCVs COSing (Close-of-Service) in two weeks, so Rob decided to have a going-away party at his site, a small island in Lake Victoria. From my site I had to take three matatus, a ferry and (theoretically) a boda boda across a causeway from a neighboring island. Fortunately one of the party-goers was an Irish NGO employee visiting from Nairobi, with his 4-wheel drive all-terrain pickup, so we nixed the boda boda for door-to-door service from the ferry
dock to Rob’s house, including a complementary in-transit beer. It was a perfect, drama-free ending to seven hours of dusty, sweaty, brain stem-jolting, jaw-clenching, I-will-not-strangle-this-rude-jerk-who-reeks-like-a-goat travel. We arrived with lobotomy grins and a small buzz growing in our heads.

Oddly enough, the island is arid and dotted with cacti even though it’s surrounded by water. Maybe that shouldn’t seem odd. There’s no electricity or running water at Rob’s house, and the beach is a ten-minute hike away. Basic vegetables and fish are available nearby, but not that nearby. There are giant cockroaches in his choo, which offered an interesting opportunity to observe the habits of Americans. ALL Americans are afraid of giant cockroaches, so all the Americans at the party decided to pee NEXT to the choo at night.

Because Rob is Rob, his house looks like an artist’s studio in San Francisco. He built an easel, tables and counter space that are all color coordinated. He designed a Zen rock garden in his back yard. His house is full of sculptures made from locally-available garbage like rusty steel wires, shells, and sticks. He made sconces for his walls out of tomato sauce tins.

His neighbors are the standard-issue dusty, snot-encrusted kids who hover at the edge of his compound staring for hours, except that because Rusinga is Luo country, they speak neither Swahili nor English, which made it interesting when he asked them to fetch water for us. “Bring pee,” he said. “Pi” is the Luo word for water.

The beach near the house has actual waves. Good news for people who don’t want schistosomiasis, those little snails that burrow into your skin and set up camp in your liver, eventually expelling tasty trails of parasitic eggs in their wake. We hiked out to the beach in the middle of the day, when the heat got so oppressive we couldn’t even sit in the shade without panting. Half the kids in the village followed us. The other half was already stripped naked and waiting for us when we arrived.

Swimming in Kenya is a culturally revealing activity. Nowhere else do boys and girls publicly expose every part of their body that is a taboo to reveal, and yet it’s all completely devoid of sexual meaning. It was just a bunch of butt-naked kids yelling and playing like they couldn’t believe their luck to be tossing a football and paddling an inner tube with six grownup mzungus. There was nothing on that beach except pure, child-like joy. There was even a mama washing clothes on the beach, wearing nothing but a half-slip around her waist, boobies wobbling to and fro. She could tie them in a knot she could tie them in a bow she could throw them over her shoulder like a Continental soldier…

How Many PCVs Does It Take to Extract A Guinea Worm? The second morning on Rusinga Island, one of the volunteers discovered a huge blackhead on another volunteer’s back.

“Oh, let me squeeze it,” she begged. Girls love to squeeze things out of people’s backs. Why is that?

Mr. Blackhead had just applied sunscreen, so she couldn’t get a good squeeze in. People with dry hands lined up. People with dry hands squeezed. Mr. Blackhead winced. Some black stuff came out. People with dry hands squeezed some more. Some yellow stuff came out. Someone started giving a running commentary.

“EEWWW,” she’d say. “EEEEEWWWW.”

Tweezers came out. More people squeezed and more people tweezed. Mr. Blackhead’s eyes glazed over.

“Wait!” said the volunteer wielding tweezers. “I think there’s a worm in there.”

“Whatever,” we said.

“No, really,” she said. “Hold these. I’m going to squeeze some more.”

“Doesn’t squeezing just spread the bacteria?”

Mr. Blackhead rolled his eyes and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. “What the hell is going on back there?” he said.

“OH MY F***ING GOD!!” said Miss Running Commentary. “OH. MY. GOD.”

“Wait! I see it,” the blackhead huntress said. “Oh, wait. It went back inside.”

People lined up. People peered into the hole where the blackhead had been. It was a worm all right.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEKK!”

“Hey guys?” Rob said. “I just found something in my med kit called The Extruder. Or The Extractor. Something like that.” It was a plastic yellow pump with a suction cup at the end. It was used. Repeatedly. Mr. Blackhead breathed through his mouth.

“I thought you were just supposed to use a matchstick and wrap the worm around it.”

“Medical is not going to be happy about this.”

An hour later Team PCV had extracted a centimeter of the worm. The rest of it went back inside. Mr. Blackhead looked exhausted.

“What now?” someone asked. After a few moments we shrugged at each other, swabbed the wound with vodka and went to the beach for a swim.

Happy Birthday To Me. On Tuesday I was still tired from my trip to Rusinga Island. I barely remembered my own birthday, until I started getting birthday SMSes. (Thanks Mom and Dad! And thanks Nick for the phone call!) Around mid-afternoon I finally got my act together enough to invite a few volunteers to go out to dinner.

It started out with a sampling of Tony’s experimental batch of mead (like apple juice with no sugar and no acid, not bad for the first try) and good gossip about American politics and misbehavin’ PCVs. It ended up being way too much bar-hopping in my town, something I will never do again. Why would I go to a place designated for drunk, idiotic men peeing all over themselves when I spend most days avoiding them everywhere I go? By midnight I was exhausted, mostly from being irritated at drunk bar patrons bursting through doors and asking us for money, but Tony and Neetha still wanted to watch a gladiator movie, so we went back to my house.

“Your chickens are fighting. Their house is too small.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Ow! That brown one just bit me.”

“It wasn’t the brown one.”

“Yes, it was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Intelligent conversation was futile, so I put on the DVD. We munched popcorn and squinted at Russell Crowe on my laptop screen until we fell asleep. Four hours later, the sun was beaming through my curtains. I heard Tony wheeling his bike out the door, while Neetha slept like a log next to me, dead to the world.

“I’m going home to start breakfast. Come over in a bit, and bring some eggs,” he said as he passed by, inexplicably chipper and not hungover.

Thirty minutes later Neetha and I hopped on a matatu to Tony’s house. Four drunk idiots sitting in the back row harrassed us loudly in slurred mother tongue, while the rest of the passengers stared and snickered. It was too early to deal with this crap, and I still had a short fuse from the night before, so I turned to the drunk next to me and said, “Unalewa.” You’re drunk.

A simple, obvious statement but such a direct, honest and audible observation of un-Christian behavior that a sober person would have been shamed into silence. “Nani?” he said, as if he didn’t know. Who?

“Wewe,” I said, pointing at him. “Na wewe, na wewe, na wewe.” I pointed to each of his friends, who all laughed at me.

“How can you know?” he said.

“Because you all stink kabisa,” I said. “And you talk like drunks.” I started making slurred jibberish sounds to demonstrate, and the entire matatu burst into laughter, mumbling to each other about my moronic behavior, and doing nothing to improve my perception of alcohol abuse in Kenya. It was only 8:30 in the morning and I was already feeling my fingers tingle with a desire to snap someone’s neck.

Tony served up his signature breakfast hash, a lovely Mexican-themed concoction of potatoes, tomatoes, bok choy, and egg. Adrienne came by, and I had a thought as I was shoveling food into my mouth and washing it down with non-instant coffee that we were four Peace Corps volunteers doing nothing together on a Wednesday morning and if we stepped outside the house we would be in the U.S.

I have those moments occasionally, usually when I’m engrossed in a movie or a book, or a conversation with other volunteers in a place where there’s no one staring at us, when I’m convinced that the world beyond my immediate senses is the comfortable, welcoming and safe place that was all I ever knew before I came here. And the inevitable disappointment that follows when I remember that it’s not. That when I open the door, step outside, and walk as fast as I can with my head down, I’m back in a strange, infuriating place that has become my reality, a reality that everyone else around me finds to be normal, and yet there’s nothing that will ever be normal, much less acceptable, about it to me, which in turn is even more infuriating and disorienting.

So I spend a lot more time seeking cultural refuge these days, both actively and with the help of my odd subconscious, which will convince me in those moments of intense fixation that my physical environment resembles home. I’ve shut down a lot of the little pores that used to occasionally let Kenya in, the ones that I used to keep open because everytime I braved the frustration or discomfort just a few seconds longer than I wanted to, I was rewarded with a new personal connection, or a new cultural insight, or just a smile. Now I no longer have the energy to be an open-hearted cross-cultural ambassador, even for a few seconds. Now I walk head down, with long strides, and ignore everyone who doesn’t greet me by name. I spend my free time with Americans, and old Kenyan friends. I don’t try to make new friends in my community. I’m burned out by so many social and cultural gaps in understanding that I won’t even start to list them.

It goes in waves. It used to go in more extreme waves, where I could be completely shut off one week, then the next week be perfectly happy to play with kids and shrug off ignorant, well-intentioned remarks from strangers. Now it’s a flatter wave of varying degrees of closedness. It’s for sanity and for survival. I wish I were a bigger person than this. Maybe one day I will be. But not today.

Natl Bk Wk

2006-09-27T11:06:00.000+03:00

It’s God country. Yesterday a man stopped me as I was passing on the street and said, “Good morning, madam.”

“Good morning,” I said, having no idea who he was.

“Good morning and God bless in the name of the Lord our Father who gave us this blessed morning so that we may be grateful for what He has given us this day so that we may be grateful to be alive this blessing of life that I am so grateful to our great Lord for giving us and God bless you madam God bless us all we are so grateful for this wonderful gift he has given us today to be alive to serve him it is such a blessing from our glorious God Almighty Lord and let us now go forth and serve his name and celebrate the name of Jesus our Almighty Father madam I am so grateful to be alive…”

“Okay, see you,” I said, walking away.

Natl bk wk. The perils of SMSing someone who isn’t used to your abbreviations:

Me: natl bk wk opening 2day at library im givn talk on vct u shud come if ur in town.

Neetha: National black week? I think I must have missed something.

Yesterday was opening day of National Book Week, September 25-29. Why is opening day on the second day of the week? I don’t know. It’s Kenya. The director of my VCT was invited to give a talk on HIV/AIDS and VCTs. Since he is both busy and important, they sent me instead. I’m neither busy nor important, just a curious sideshow. Perfect for attracting attendees to an event that didn’t draw many attendees.

This event was a perfect specimen of “organized” events in Kenya. Because.

1. It started five hours late.
2. None of the guest speakers showed up.
3. The actual “guest of honor” was basically yanked off the street to replace the original guest of honor who didn’t show up. To his credit, he was a good speaker.
4. They expected hundreds of attendees and only 50 showed up.
5. Of these, most of them were school kids looking for an excuse to miss class.

I should have expected that a “library” in Kenya only vaguely resembles a library in the U.S., both in physical structure and in its relationship to the community. The District Librarian, who runs the library and who was running the event, said that when he goes to schools and other groups to tell them about the library, most people think it’s a place where you go to buy books.

One first grade class attending the event yesterday gave a stunning performance that illustrated why this might be the case. On cue, they all recited:

“A. Library. Is. A. Place. Where. Books. Are. Kept.”

So is a bookstore. So is a closet. So is under the bed.

The current library is two “temporary” buildings, one for childrens books and one for adult books, each only half full of books. Their collection is pretty dismal, although I will say they have a beautiful hardcover copy of the Quran, in Arabic with English translation. Like a lot of community-based projects, it seems like they’ve adopted a “we’ll take whatever we can get” policy. They have a set of reference books from 1952, a reference for what, I don’t know. The spine just says REFERENCE. Next to it is a set of Encyclopedia Britannica from who knows when. All the books in the adult section are obscure, dry texts on obscure, dry topics that no one in the community – I promise – would ever use. They have a few novels – including gag-meister Lisa Beamer’s book “Let’s Roll,” about September 11 – donated by a former Peace Corps volunteer, and a relatively decent children’s book collection.

One of the library’s main audiences is students who come to do research before their exams. I don’t understand what relevant information they might find at the library, unless it’s some random textbook lodged between the dusty volumes of irrelevant information.

I tried to feel out the library staff to see what kind of vision they had for the place. They want to expand their book collection. They want to have robust resources on HIV/AIDS, magazines, leisure reading materials (fiction novels), and childrens’ books. They want to have a computer lab. Most of all, they want to build a “real” building, even though their current buildings are more than enough room to house their current books. The staff has a lot of great ideas that need a lot of careful prioritizing.

National libraries in Kenya like this one are government funded. They get grants each year to purchase books, and have a partnership with an NGO that distributes donated books to developing countries, so every three months or so they get new books. I always took for granted public libraries in the U.S. They’re just there. They’re just well-diversified. There are just books for every number in the Dewey decimal system. Childrens’ books for every reading level. Adult books for every taste. Dizzying reference books that put me to sleep. Periodicals archived back to the dark ages. And that’s just the offline stuff.

My tiny personal book collection here in Kenya would be far more relevant and interesting and useful to the average person in my town than the books at the library. That is a pretty unfortunate reality. But the local community is still in the early stages of understanding the importance, and the magic, of books. I talked a little about it during my speech, but everyone’s eyes just glazed over.

“I remember when I was growing up I loved to read. Books bring the outside world right to you, worlds that you’d never be able to access just being at home or going to school. The world is such an amazing place that you wouldn’t even know about without books…”

Glaze, glaze, glaze. One kid’s head bobbed to the side and his eyes rolled back into his head. Dead asleep.

The guest of honor stood up to make his speech: “I’m going to tell you a story about a pauper who went begging for money. He begged and begged until finally a pastor took pity on him and gave him a Bible. Before giving the pauper the Bible, the pastor put a lot of money inside, but didn’t tell the man. The pastor told him, “Read this Bible and pray everyday for God to help you find money, and one day you will get what you ask for.” Well the pauper was lazy, and didn’t like to read, so he went home and put the Bible on his shelf. “I ask a man for money and all he gives me is a stupid Bible,” he thought. A year later the pastor sees the pauper again, and the pauper is still dressed in rags. The pastor asks, “What happened? Did you read the Bible like I told you?” The pauper says, “No, I don’t like to read. I needed money and you just gave me a stupid Bible. What good are you?” And the pastor knew that the pauper was a fool, and would always be poor. The moral of the story: If you want to hide something from a fool, put it in a book. If you don’t want to be a foolish person, learn to read.”

Laughter and applause.

Ah, nothing like scaring kids into wanting to read. Well, the truth hurts. Might as well use it to get people to do what you want them to do.

Nairobi Is Another Planet (Unlike Pluto)

2006-09-22T22:55:00.000+03:00

Most recent case of mistaken identity:

Person I’ve just met: “Justina, that’s a Mexican name.”

Me: “Well, um, I don’t know. Probably not.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“No, but I studied French.”

“Your accent is American but it’s like you’re a Mexican.”

“Interesting.”

But my favorite is, “You’re American? You must be a Red Indian.” I can’t help it; I just say, “Yes, you’re right. I’m a Red Indian.” If Kenyans ever asked if I was Native American it would be no fun to say, “Yes, I’m Native American.” I just think it’s great that Kenyans have a name to describe people who are neither red nor Indian.

Most recent re-realization of an obvious fact: There is a whole other world in Kenya called Nairobi. I was talking to one of the researchers who is collecting data from our district for a study on antiviral gels that might protect women from getting HIV. She and all of her colleagues are from Nairobi – born and raised. I asked her that question that Kenyans always ask me that drives me crazy: “So how do you find this place?”

“It’s so boring,” she said. “On weekends I have to go to Kisumu or Nairobi or Eldoret, otherwise I’ll feel so bored.”

Coming from a year in the village, I think my new town is an impressive oasis of developed civilization, but I think if I were coming from Nairobi it would be different. What am I talking about? Everytime I come back from Nairobi I go through a readjustment period. It’s not as severe as culture shock, but it’s realigning my expectations back to village life – people staring open-mouthed everywhere I go, people screaming racist things everywhere I go, mamas selling vegetables at the market who think I don’t understand them complaining to each other in Kiswahili that I’m so rude because I didn’t buy anything from them, peoples’ hands suddenly springing out horizontally towards me, palms up, as soon as they see my pale skin. “You give me fifty bob. You give me bread. You buy me soda.” NO NO NO NO NO NO.

*SIGH* I feel her on Nairobi. Java House is just a comfort zone. A refuge where I can drown my cross-cultural sorrows in an espresso sundae and an actual green salad with actual Romaine lettuce. I never even liked Romaine lettuce before Kenya. Now it’s just so crispy and fresh and raw, a combination not found outside the capital city, in food or elsewhere.

The researcher was telling me about some of the other communities she’s been posted to for other projects. She was in a village near the Ugandan border one time, and it was market day. Her co-worker said, “Don’t look to your right. Just look left and you’ll be okay.” So of course she looked to her right. There were crowds of naked men bathing in the river. So she looked left. There were crowds of naked women bathing in a different section of the river. And thousands of people milling about at the nearby market, paying no attention.

“I’m a Kenyan and I realized there are places in Kenya that I just don’t know about,” she said.

Another time she was sent to do research in a remote village on the coast. She was told not to wear trousers because women who wore trousers in that area were assumed to be prostitutes. When she got there, wearing a skirt, she realized that the women in the village wore traditional skirts made from lesos (large pieces of colorful fabric) tied together so that they puff out really big around their hips…and nothing above the waist.

“I don’t know why wearing trousers makes me a prostitute when all the women in the village are going around showing their breasts and they’re not prostitutes,” she said.

She also told me about an area just inland from the coast, where she was doing research for an iron-supplement project. “It’s an area that gets a lot of relief food,” she explained.

“Oh, is it a drought area?”

“It’s dry but they do get short rains throughout the year,” she said. “They could grow food but they’re just lazy.”

“Lazy?”

“It’s easier to rely on relief food,” she said.

“How do you know the problem is laziness?” I asked.

“Everyone knows those people are lazy,” she said, authoritatively.

I won’t completely agree. But I won’t completely disagree either. When you live where you see what really goes on in these poor rural areas, you see beyond the clear-cut, academic explanations. As much as compassionate observers like to (rightly) point to all sorts of other contributing factors – a corrupt, irresponsible government, poverty, lack of access to education, a sense of disempowerment – it’s naïve to insist that there’s not a tiny bit of laziness as a result. Laziness – and every other development-crippling vice – isn’t innate, of course. There are extremely valid reasons for it. But it has been hard for me to get past the guilt of judgment and moral superiority and just be able to draw a Problem Tree (for a problem such as “No Income”) with one root called “Laziness.” To ignore that it exists is to paint an incomplete picture, and ultimately to leave one problem unaddressed.

What Have I Been Up To Lately?

2006-09-21T22:19:00.000+03:00

Book currently reading: God of Small Things, by Arundati Roy. A brilliant writer, a genius with words, highly recommended.

Music currently listening to: A bunch of MP3 mixes Lynn and her co-worker Joshua sent me. Thanks, y’all! I love them, cheeseball tunes and all. God bless the 80s.

Last movie watched: The New World, the “bonus” flick on a gladiators-themed, 8-movie DVD. God bless cheap (ahem*pirated*ahem) DVDs from Nairobi.

Last good movie watched: Spirited Away, for the second time. (Send Miyazake flicks! Princess Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service. Send Margaret Cho. Send Eddy Izzard. SATC. Six Feet Under. Anything except gladiator movies.)

Current project at work: Teaching a computer skills workshop. My sitemate Tony stopped by my office today and I said, “I’m teaching my co-workers how to turn on the computer.” He laughed. I was serious. My co-workers were pretty stoked to learn the word for “keyboard,” “monitor,” “CPU/hard drive,” and “mouse.” Today they learned how to minimize and maximize windows, how to drag and resize them, how to copy files to different folders, and how to type a letter. I won’t say it was two solid hours of gratification watching them get excited as they learned. The gratification was there, but it’s hard to describe what it’s like to teach in Kenya. It’s easier to rant about the failures of the education system here. About students who graduate from high school with the critical thinking skills of a primary school student. About students who always say they understand when they clearly don’t, because they’re afraid to ask questions for fear of being ridiculed, and when asked to articulate what they don’t understand, are unable to. About asking someone with a college education a simple question such as, “What is counselor supervision?” and getting the answer, “It’s for counselors.” Teaching this workshop has made me realize how smart some of my co-workers are, even though their chosen career is, for example, um, janitorial engineering. They ask questions that show they are trying to piece together some cause-and-effect relationships behind how these programs and functionalities work. The sad thing is that most of the time, and for most of their lives, they’ll never have the opportunity to realize their full potential. In most situations they’re not expected to, or their voice, their ideas and opinions are not valued, and therefore never requested, or even suppressed. So after awhile they just do what they’re told and keep quiet the rest of the time. It has really made me understand the value of an education – especially for women – and the value of money, in a way that I never have before.

Latest time-wasting craze: The daily sudoku puzzle in the paper.

Latest attempt to recreate the comforts of home: Tuesday night, when I had two other volunteers over for dinner. Earlier that day my co-worker had given me a giant bag of oyster mushrooms – yes, oyster mushrooms, which I didn’t think existed in Kenya. It turns out she’s friends with a group of mamas who grow oyster mushrooms and sell them as an IGA (income-generating activity), which means I now have a mushroom hookup. It was one of the happier moments of my Peace Corps service, up there with the first time I had a Javahouse espresso mocha chip sundae in Nairobi, and every time I get a letter or package or postcard in the mail (keep ‘em coming, folks, put a smile on your favorite PCV’s face today!) Dinner was pineapple curry and Justina’s special mushroom mystery surprise, followed by a (bad) selection from Tony’s gladiators DVD, a giant vat of popcorn and chocolate. By 10pm our tummies were full of uncommon non-Kenyan food, and our brains were full of a very bad movie about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, with lovely cinematography. Tony went home to put yeast in his mead. Really, it’s not a metaphor. He’s actually making mead. Neetha and I stayed up for another three hours gossiping in American (an actual language.) I LOVE BEING NEAR CIVILIZATION!! The next morning I made spinach-mushroom crepes, and Neetha said, “Oh my God, you made crepes!”

Current domestic source of befuddlement and mild insanity: Mysterious curls of poo on my walls. How does poo get on the wall? I thought I had a mouse but mice don’t run up the wall to poo. Hickory dickory dock. I get a lot of slugs, so maybe they’re leaving their poo on the walls. But there aren’t any slime trails around the poo, which makes me wonder if it’s coming from geckos. Whatever it is, it’s gross, and rude.

Still wondering: Should I have gone back to Nairobi a day early from Lamu to meet Barak Obama? He had a meet-and-greet with Peace Corps volunteers at the embassy. It’s the media coverage that’s killing me, along with hearing other volunteers rave about what it was like to meet him. Guess what I learned? Obama is charismatic as hell. Obama has a great sense of humor. Obama knows how to deflect idiotic questions. Dammit I missed him! Even today there was an article about him in the paper. Kenyans LOOOOVE this guy. Although they love him a little less after he gave a speech at Nairobi University saying that corruption and tribalism are crippling Kenya. Three weeks later politicians are still complaining that he was given misinformation about Kenya’s political scandals from the opposition party, and that his portrayal of corruption here was wrong, but nonetheless he should stop talking about things that are none of his business. Because the best way to deal with problems is to tell people to stop pointing them out.

Word Games

2006-09-11T22:58:00.000+03:00

Mondegreens, Kenyan style. I’m going to try to start a collection of these. A Mondegreen is San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll’s term for that phenomenon when you’re listening to song lyrics and think they’re saying something different from what they actually are.

He says, "For those of you who have not yet received the pamphlet (mailed free to anyone who buys me an automobile), the word Mondegreen, meaning a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric, was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright.

As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright. A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green, Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism."

These aren’t exactly Mondegreens because they weren’t sung to me, only recited in a normal Kenyan accent, but confusion ensued anyway.

1. One day Hillary called me sounding really distressed. “I lost my hand,” he said.

“You lost your WHAT?” I said, shock setting in as I imagined having to get used to a one-handed Hillary. “Your hand?”

“Yes, my hand,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “How? What happened?” Some thugs attacked him in the middle of the night and chopped it off with a machete. He got it caught in the grinder at the maize mill. A rabid dog went nuts and bit it off.

“She went into labor, but by the time they arrived at the hospital she had died,” he said.

Long pause.

“OHH,” I said. “Your AUNT. You lost your aunt.”

“Yes, I lost my hand,” he said.

[Nandis often add an “h” where there is none or remove an “h” when there is one. They also pronounce “p” as “b” and vice versa, “s” as “z” and vice versa, and “j” as “ch” and vice versa.]

2. One of our teachers told us during training, “The Luo tribe, we like feces.”

“You like feces?”

“Yes, Luos love to eat feces. We make our living as feecermen around Lake Victoria.”

“Fishermen? You catch fish in Lake Victoria?”

“Yes, there’s lots of feces in the lake.”

Mondegreens, American Style. Peace Corps volunteers all agree, Kenyans can’t make heads or tails of our accents, either.

1. Me: “Hi, I’d like to buy a Celtel card.” (A card that allows you to put prepaid credit on your cell phone.)

Vendor: “You want what? Carrots?”

2. Americans can’t roll their “r”s. Kenyans can’t hear “r”s that aren’t rolled.

Me: “Where’s the train station?”

Taxi driver: “Where is…? China?”

Vacation Posts To Come

2006-09-08T12:43:00.000+03:00

I plan to post some notes from my trip to the coast, I promise. Check back here...sometime.

The Merits of Site-Rathood, The Merits of Patience

2006-09-03T20:15:00.000+03:00

I have a site mate in my town. Peace Corps is a different experience when you have another volunteer nearby. I don’t feel as isolated as I did in my old village, where the only other foreigners were the Chinese road crew, whom I couldn’t really communicate with, and whose existence guaranteed that no one would ever grasp the concept of Pacific Rim immigration to America.

“But you look just like those Chinese of the road. You’re not American.”

“That’s because you don’t know what Americans look like.”

“But you must have a background in China.”

“No, my parents are from Taiwan.”

“Oh! How do you find Kenya as compared to Taiwan?”

“I don’t know. I live in America.”

Having a site mate also means it’s easier to be a site rat – to stay at site for several weeks without needing to leave. I used to take off for a bigger town every chance I got at my last site, if only to have fried fish and a milkshake made from real ice cream, or to meet up with other volunteers to blow off steam over cold beer. Now stress relief is only a text message away.

“U wana come over for dinner? I’m conducting a chow mein experiment. No guarantees on edibility.”

“Yeah…nimpo tomorrow morning?”

“Okay. What’s playing at the 5 bob movie house?”

It’s a nice feeling of solidarity. We speak American. We roll our eyes at each other when we’re harassed for money or when people stare as we’re walking around town. We try to make familiar food with unfamiliar ingredients. We speculate about where to find wireless internet, drool over my new laptop, eat popcorn and drink Trader Joe’s tea while watching DVDs, talk openly about our bowel problems, commiserate about cross-cultural frustrations, and spend Sunday mornings practicing nimpo while the rest of the country dies of boredom in church.

Having a site mate validates my perceptions and reactions to the confusing culture I live in. My neighbors might act hostile towards me for whatever inexplicable reason that they would never tell me about if their lives depended on it, but at least I have someone nearby who can say, “Yeah, I get that from people, too. I don’t understand it.” And suddenly I have someone to not understand it with. It’s great.

The difference is all in the immediacy. All this validation was available to me when I was living in my old village; it was just so much less accessible. I had to wait until the weekend, travel 2 ½ hours, and hope to run into someone who was also in town.

In addition to my site mate, there are two other volunteers who live within 30 minutes of my town. It’s like a Peace Corps Volunteer zoo, at least to all the people staring when we’re together, but the monkey house isn’t so far from the ostrich habitat and the hyrax exhibit and the snake farm, and I’m glad I can bust out of my cage whenever something gives me the urge to jump up and down baring my teeth, screaming and scratching my armpits.

More on the Disempowerment Thing. People may feel disempowered, but let them see their own abilities, and they just fly.

My first week at my new organization, my co-worker shoved a handwritten letter in my face.

“Can you type this for me? I need it right away,” he said.

“Wull, why don’t you do it yourself?” I said.

“You’re much faster. I don’t know how to type,” he said.

“Then this is your opportunity to learn,” I said.

“I don’t have time today. I’ll learn next time,” he said.

“Well who’s going to type your letter today?”

He looked at Carren, who started shaking her head. “Do you know how much work I have today?” she said.

I sat him down in front of my laptop and told him to start typing. He just stared at the blank screen.

“What do you want to do first?” I asked.

“I want to write the address on the right hand side,” he said. I showed him the Tab key. I also showed him the Space Bar, the Shift key for making capital letters, and the Return to go to the next line.

He wasn’t lying about not knowing how to type. It was agonizing watching him hunting and pecking for keys that I knew by heart, so I asked if he wanted to know anything else, and left him alone. An hour later I came back, and he was beaming. He had finished his two-sentence letter, all by himself. He was extremely proud of himself, and so was I. It was obvious that he’d had an incredible sense of accomplishment that day, and it was gratifying to see “sustainable development” at work, especially after wondering if I had been too harsh making him type the letter himself. Dr. Phil is a total cheeseball, but that day I had to say, tough love ain’t such a bad policy.

Back From Vacation

2006-09-01T21:52:00.000+03:00

I got a new laptop! My brother so kindly brought me a sleek, lightweight little number and I just started playing with it tonight. I’m looking at it going, they make this stuff in the first world? Ship me home now! I mean, this thing doesn’t even have a PS/2 port for my mouse. Apparently in the 21st century developed world, mice use USB ports. And a little red light that senses movement, instead of a rolling dust magnet called a “mouse ball, snicker, snicker.”

Post-Vacation Decompression. Nick and Cath are winding down their whirlwind tour of Kenya, hopefully catching their flight out tonight. First I have to send them a big thank you (THANK YOU!) for tugging so much crap across the Atlantic for me, including probably 15 pounds of Clif Bars, trail mix, dried fruit, cereal, giant Toblerones and Swiss chocolate. Thanks to Mika and Guillaume for the 15 pounds of Clif Bars, trail mix, dried fruit, cereal (gone in three days), photos and hilarious letter. Thanks Mom for all the wrinkle cream and plane tickets. Hm, wrinkle cream and plane tickets sound like some ex-pat formula for coping in the developing world.

Just slowly transitioning back to PCV life since my wageni left town. It’s weird having just moved to a new site and organization with only a year left here. I’m not exactly starting over from scratch, but I still have to take the three-month “do nothing” period, where my primary responsibility to is to listen and observe and learn the needs of the organization and community, but restrain myself from starting any projects. I’m not strictly following this rule since there are other volunteers in my town who have asked me to help out with their projects, and I’m still working with a few groups from my last site. Hm, I feel like I’ve written this before in a previous post, and it sounded just as boring then as it does now.

What I Would Name My Dog If I Had One. We had a three-day intensive language training in June where I was speaking Kiswahili like a pro, and then promptly got lazy and forgot it all by the time I got back to my village. But the one thing I do remember is that there are at least three different expressions for “good Kiswahili.”

“Kiswahili sanifu means fluent Swahili,” our instructor, Kitui, said. “Kiswahili halisi means proper Swahili. And so does Kiswahili mwafaka.”

The four of us in the class started giggling. “What was the last one?”

“Kiswahili mwafaka,” he said.

“Mwafaka?” we repeated. Kitui nodded. Pretty soon we were four adults in our twenties and thirties with tears streaming down our faces laughing. Poor Kitui just looked at us quizzically and tried to continue the lesson.

“Very good,” he said, each time we pronounced “mwafaka” and burst into more tears laughing.

We finally stopped hyperventilating and collected ourselves, and explained why we were acting like idiots. “Mwafaka sounds like a curse word in English,” we said. “It gives the statement, ‘I speak Kiswahili mwafaka,’ a bit of a different connotation.”

Every so often our language instructors put on a skit for us where they imitate dumb things PCVs have done in their classes. Would not be surprised if this one shows up in their performance.

Phases of the Moon, Phases of Obsessive Anger. Okay, I’ll be honest. Living in Kenya involves a lot more negative emotiveness than I let on in my blog. As if you hadn’t guessed. In fact this blog is a diplomatic miracle by some estimates. But the frustration is mostly personal internal struggles with impersonal external factors, all manifesting themselves as obsessive rants in my head in the privacy of my own home or out loud in a safe circle of drunk, raving PCVs.

Anyway, the objects of my frustrations have evolved over time, although mostly boil down to the same things that have frustrated me from the beginning. Right now, it’s a sense of disempowerment and lack of problem solving skills on an individual level.

All my frustrations were triggered afresh three weeks ago when I met with a community group in the sugar belt near Kisumu, whom I’ve been working with for three or four months now. My irritatable, opinionated version is that this group seemed to think that creating change in their communities requires very little effort on their part. By “very little effort” I mean they had never truly thought through the project in question. What problem do they want to address? What is the best way to address it? Does the community really need it, or are there already systems, institutions or infrastructure in place that can be improved upon with fewer resources to solve the same problem? Or do they want to start the project in question because there happens to be a lot of government money available for, say, orphan and vulnerable children (OVC) projects this year?

I’m not EXACTLY saying this group was reluctant to get off their arses. I’m just saying there was a failure to grasp the reality of what goes into starting a large project like, for example, setting up an orphan support center. An honest mistake.

It’s one thing when a group approaches me and doesn’t really know where to begin. That’s common and understandable. People don’t have access to information about their own communities the way we’re used to in the U.S. The last time I’d met with this group, about six weeks ago, I had asked them to seriously consider the questions above, along with a bunch of others. I gave them a detailed list of items to investigate in order to conduct a needs assessment in their community and research what needed to be done to get the project off the ground, to sustain it, and to expand it long term.

I got to the meeting and they hadn’t done any of the research – recommendations I had made not for a giddy power trip, but because I believed it was the best place for them to start. So I tried to get them started again. I asked them if they knew of any similar existing services in their community, and they said no. I asked how they knew, and they said they lived there, so they knew.

It turned out that there were five other organizations that were already offering the exact same service in their community. Not two. Not even four. FIVE. And in this room full of so-called leaders and motivated change-agents, none of them had even made an effort to find out more about their own community. Why didn’t they consider any of my recommendations? If I answered that question honestly, this blog would lose its diplomatic miracle status. I’d even given this group a hard copy detailing how to conduct a needs assessment, one that I had written specifically for their project and their community, not a generic photocopy I got from one of my Peace Corps training manuals.

In the last meeting they had expressed interest in sending one of their members for a workshop. I had given them the phone number for a guy at an NGO who sponsors these workshops. Today I asked them if they had contacted him.

“No,” they said. “We wanted you to do it for us.”

“I don’t know this guy,” I said. “I’ve never met him. I’ve never spoken to him. I only know his name. The workshop is for your group, not for me. I’m not understanding why you want me to call him.”

“Because you’re a mzungu and you have more credibility.”

“It’s time to lend yourselves some credibility then,” I said.

On top of all that, the group’s chairperson handed me an application form that he had completed. When I asked what it was for, he said didn’t know. I asked why he had filled out the form and he grinned sheepishly because again, he didn’t know. I then asked what he wanted me to do with the form. He was either too embarrassed to tell me, or he didn’t know, because he couldn’t even speak at that point.

“My recommendation is that you contact the organization that gave you this form and find out exactly what it’s for,” I said. “Then you can decide if it’s really something you want to submit to them.”

I got the feeling I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. The guy is no dummy. And yet I was telling him, because he was acting like he didn’t know better. Why?

Why? Why?

There are times in Kenya when I’m truly baffled by people’s behavior. Anthropologists say that there is a rational explanation for everything people do. I don’t need a PhD in anthropology to say that that’s crap.

I left the meeting feeling like I had wasted not just that afternoon (including the time and cost of transport, which I paid for myself), but all the previous meetings I’d ever had with this group. They’d gotten nowhere. Okay, to be fair, they had registered themselves with the national governing body, and secured an office space, all for a project that would turn out to be redundant in their community. In their excitement to start this project, ostensibly because they wanted to apply for money as soon as possible, they had failed to think through their real reasons for wanting to do it, and whether those reasons had anything to do with benefiting their community. They ended up investing time and money to start a project that they scrapped in the end.

I was ready to abandon this group. Let them wallow in their harsh sugar belt lives. They didn’t have the commitment, independence, or problem solving skills to bring development to their communities. I went back to the crisp climate of my town nestled in the tea-covered escarpment and complained to my co-worker.

“Oh, no,” she laughed. It was a very Kenyan response which a year ago would have sent me through the roof. This is funny to you? Now I take it for what it is – sympathy and understanding and shared frustration disguised as light-hearted amusement. It’s like a member of a widow’s group once told me, “We women hide our suffering by being patient.”

Anyway, my co-worker eventually convinced me to change my mind. “Be patient,” she said, a familiar sentiment. “Don’t give up on them. This is how our Kenyan people are.”

She was right. I fumed for three days, the sugar belt group’s chairman sent me an sms apologizing for their lack of commitment and organization, and I am still planning to meet them again. I’m reevaluating my own approach and communication style to make sure they understand my role and their responsibilities. But next time, they’re paying for my transport.

Hock A Loogie At This One

2006-08-19T11:50:00.000+03:00

Yesterday’s sunset was amazing. I was coming back from a community mobilization in a remote village that was hosting a 100th anniversary celebration of Seventh-Day Adventists in Kenya. In other words, it was a typical Kenyan event full of long speeches, long prayers, a cake cutting, and people clamoring to have their picture taken with the mzungu. As we sped along the winding highway, the sun dropped quickly behind purple hills, coloring the sky orange, pink and yellow, as tea plantations began shrinking into dark green shadows.

It reminded me of chasing a sunset over Malibu beach in LA, parking my car and sprinting out to the ocean only to realize the sun had already dropped below the horizon. But in the purple light that remained, I noticed something I’d never seen before – dolphins leaping in the surf, dancing just for me, laughing at the only idiot on the beach who thought she could catch a falling star.

“Wow, that sunset is beautiful,” I said to Salina. I was back in Africa.

“Hm,” she said, looking out her window in the opposite direction with no apparent interest. I thought she’d heard wrong, so I mentioned it again.

“Aren’t those colors amazing?” I said, pointing to the sky.

“Mm,” she said again, still staring out the window.

“Ben,” I said to our driver. “Don’t you think that’s a nice sunset?”

He mumbled a vague affirmation and fiddled with the radio, not even glancing at the sunset. It was like I had pointed out grass to him. I couldn’t understand why something so unique and breathtaking to me was essentially invisible to my co-workers.

I felt irritated, the usual irrational case of, “Why can’t people who are different from me stop being different from me?” that afflicts people living in other cultures. It was like they couldn’t appreciate what I was trying to show them because they’d watched the sun go down every day of their lives. I’ve seen lots of sunsets, but seeing a new one never diminishes the magic of any of the others, so shouldn’t it be the same for them?

I tried again. “Salina,” I said. “When you look at that sunset, what do you think?”

“I think that night is coming,” she said.

“But when you see all those colors like fire, don’t you feel like it’s something special, not just something in the sky?” I said.

“You know,” she said. “A long time ago the Nandis used to bless the sun by spitting at it because we believed it brings life. So in the morning we’d spit at the sun as it came up, and in the evening we’d spit at the sun as it went down.”

Finally we were getting somewhere.

"But what about now when you see the sun setting?” I said.

“I want to spit at it,” she said, and we all laughed.

Typical Day In the Neighborhood

2006-07-31T14:40:00.000+03:00

Sundays are for church, thank God. My day off. I went to Eldoret to run some errands and meet a friend. Sunday is always the most laid back day of the week because everyone is in church all morning. My new organization has a strict dress code – no trousers for ladies, and no t-shirts. That rules out most of my wardrobe, so I had to make a trip to the mitumba, or open-air used clothing market.

Eldoret has a lively mitumba but apparently not on Sunday mornings. There were only about seven vendors (as opposed to the usual hundreds), but I still managed to get four nice shirts (collars and buttons) for 10 shillings each. You can’t beat the Kenyan mitumba, man; that’s where I’m buying all my clothes before I return to America.

Around 3pm the multitudes of mitumba vendors were sprung from church and began to set up shop along the side streets in town. It was a bit overwhelming because there are the street “stalls” which are just a plastic tarp on the sidewalk (I mean “sidewalk”) with a pile of clothes selling for so cheap that you don’t even have to bargain (ten shillings for shirts, 20 shillings for trousers in odd sizes, colors and fabrics), and the dukas (permanent shops) that sell both used clothes and somewhat fashionable new clothes from China for 600 shillings or more.

Next to the mitumba were a bunch of mamas selling the usual selection of vegetables and fruit…and lethargic termites squirming in a large bag. I had to stop and stare. All around me people were laughing and yelling at each other in mother tongue.

“Blah blah blah blah China blah blah,” they said to each other, which I took to mean, “The China is looking at the termites.”

The vendor pulled out a plastic bag and started filling it with termites for me.

“No thanks, not today,” I said. “Why don’t they fly away? They still have their wings.”

“They cannot,” a man next to me said. “They are inside the bag.”

An old mama had just bought a bag of termites, flitting their wings with a doomed sort of resignation, and offered me some. I shook my head and watched her stuff a handful in her mouth.

“Why do you fear?” the man said to me. “They cannot harm.”

“They are so sweet when you fry them,” the mama told me, still shoving live termites into her mouth, wings and all.

“Okay,” I said, walking away quickly. “I will come another day.”

I hate hawkers. I boarded a matatu back to my town, and settled in next to a man who was arguing with a hawker who was shaking a book of first grade Kiswahili lessons in his face.

“I’m not studying Kiswahili these days,” he said, in Kiswahili.

The hawker didn’t budge. “Why can’t you take one?” he said.

“I don’t want this book today,” the passenger said.

The hawker held the book in his face and still didn’t move, as if he hadn’t heard.

“Bwana!” the passenger said. “I said I’m not buying it today.”

The hawker lingered motionlessly for another minute, still waving the book in the passenger’s face, waiting for the passenger to stop ignoring him, then gave up and went away, fortunately for him because I was contemplating how hard to punch him.

I hate matatus. Our matatu started to leave town, and I noticed we were taking a detour on a muddy dirt road, through maize fields.

“Why are we going this way?” I asked the man next to me.

“Ahh,” the man said. “Sijui Kiingereza. Kiswahili tu.” I don’t know English. Only Kiswahili.
“Kwa nini tunapitia njia hii?” I said.

“Iko traffic huko mbele,” he said. There’s traffic ahead.

I didn’t understand why there was traffic coming out of Eldoret on a Sunday evening. It took a few minutes for me to realize he meant there were traffic cops along the road, and our driver was trying to avoid them.

“Kwa nini wanafanya kama hii?” I said. Why are they doing this?

“Kwa sababu wako watu wengi,” he explained. Because there are too many passengers in the vehicle.

“Ai, hiyo ni mbaya,” I said. This sucks. “Ni haramu.” It’s illegal.

“Kweli, ni haramu,” he said. Yes, it’s totally illegal. “Wanataka pesa mingi.” But the conductors want to make more money.

Matatus are limited to 14 passengers by law, but conductors typically pack as many people in as they can because it means more money, unless they’re traveling a road with police checks. If the traffic cops discover that a matatu is operating over capacity, or that someone isn’t wearing a seatbelt, or that the vehicle’s license, registration or insurance is expired, they fine the conductor, driver, or offending passenger. Sounds like a pretty good road safety system, doesn’t it?

In reality, the police checks have only managed to ensure compliance on the few main highways where they are stationed, but in the sticks, which is most of Kenya, matatus are basically death traps packed so full of people that you can see eyeballs pressed up against the windows, with the conductor and some passengers literally hanging out the open door. And if the traffic cop finds a matatu in violation of one of the road rules, they are willing to accept a bribe rather than levying a fine.

Kenyans have been riding in over-filled matatus all their lives and have stopped wasting their breath complaining. I’ve been here just long enough to feel enough satisfaction complaining openly to lame conductors, which usually embarrasses them because they’re not used to being confronted, that it somewhat makes up for the fact that the conductor never actually reduces the passenger count to 14, or fixes the broken seat belts, or turns down the radio, or opens the window.

We managed to avoid the first police check, but we were stopped at the next one. I looked around and noticed that we were over capacity by four or five people. The conductor got out, went behind the vehicle and spoke quietly to the cop, and we were on our way without any argument.

Fifteen minutes and four stops later, our conductor was still stuffing more people in. The man next to me said, “Gari imejaa, tuende.” The vehicle is full, let’s go. He was the only person saying anything to the conductor.

The conductor ignored him, of course, and we went on our way, with three passengers hanging out the door. Several stops and five more passengers later, I lost my patience.

“Kwa nini unafanya kama hii?” I said loudly. Why are you doing this? “Ni haramu kujaza kabisa kama hii.” It’s illegal to fill the vehicle so full.

“Kwa nini unacomplain?” the jerk face conductor said. Why are you complaining? “Unaweza kutembea.” You can walk, then.

This did not please me, so I stopped speaking in Kiswahili.

“You’re doing something illegal, you know it’s illegal, you know you’re wrong, and you’re telling me to walk? You’re only supposed to have fifteen people in this vehicle and we have at least 20 or 25,” I sputtered, teetering on the threshold of strangling him, a not uncommon way for me to be in matatus, matatu stages, open-air markets, and anyplace where there are idle or drunk men.

The man next to me said, “Fourteen, it’s only supposed to have fourteen people.”

“We have fourteen people,” the conductor lied, as all the extra passengers crouched silently in the aisles.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” I said, loudly, as the man next to me laughed. “You count how many people there are here. This is illegal.”

“It’s not illegal,” the conductor lied. “If it were illegal then why did that policeman let us go through with extra passengers?”

“Because you gave him some kitu kidogo, maybe,” I said, using the Kiswahili euphemism for bribe, which translates as something small.

“What is kitu kidogo?” he said. “I don’t know that word.”

“Of course you do,” I said, speaking even more loudly. “Kitu kidogo ni bribe.”

“I don’t know that,” he said again. “There’s no kitu kidogo.”

“Ulilipa kitu kidogo,” I said, just to clarify for everyone on the matatu. You paid a bribe. “That’s why they let us pass with too many people on board.”

“Corruption,” the man next to me muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear. I was glad at least one person was willing to back me up publicly.

A Somewhat Flawless Move, A Relatively Flawless New Site

2006-07-29T11:19:00.000+03:00

[First installment]

The lowdown on the new house. I’m settling in well to my new digs. My new organization, a well-funded, well-organized VCT in a town only one hour from my old village, sent their giant Land Cruiser to pick me up, along with all my worldly Kenyan possessions, and take me to my new house. This place is huge compared to my one room in the forest back in the village. I have a one-bedroom house with a kitchen, large living room, bathroom and toilet. The water comes on somewhat predicatably every other day, but it only comes out of the kitchen tap (not the showerhead, bathroom sink or toilet), and usually early in the morning (6:30 am, when I’m never conscious) or in the middle of the night (3am, when I’m never conscious). If I fill the toilet tank with water, it flushes in true Kenyan fashion, churning violently for 3 seconds and invariably leaving some traces of, uh, debris. For three days I stubbornly tried to use a pee bucket, with a daily hike to the neighbor’s choo for disposal, but I generate enough waste water from washing dishes and bathing that I can just pour-flush the toilet. I have a small yard enclosed by a high concrete wall, about half a point (1/20 of an acre), one corner of which is dedicated to rotting garbage. The previous tenant planted a few pumpkins; I may try to plant some vegetables but the soil doesn’t look very fertile. I’m surrounded by neighbors on all sides, who have all planted maize, so I should probably say I’m surrounded by fields of maize on all sides, plus an assortment of kids who are all relatively well-behaved, although their curiousity has already caused them to accidentally kick over a bucket of water in my kitchen and accidentally steal a nail from my coffee table. Note: I have room for a coffee table!! The compound is a far cry from the lush forest full of monkeys, rolling fields of tea and pineapples, and year-round springs of my last site, but I can’t complain about having a much bigger house in exchange.

The mattress saga. I inherited my “new” bed from the woman who was living in my new house before me. She told me the bed was 4x6. I’ve been sleeping on a 4x6 mattress, which my old organization bought for me when I first moved in last year. So I offered to buy the mattress off them for the current retail value based. It was a convoluted way to help out some of the members of the VCT who hadn’t been paid any allowances for over a year because my supervisor simply refused, citing “a complete lack of funds.” Mysteriously, he somehow had enough funds to buy a second printer for the VCT, a purchase which was neither discussed with nor approved by any other members. But such were, and still are, the ways of the “disorganization” I used to work for. Anyway, I paid the money directly to the treasurer, and instructed her to put it into the VCT’s petty cash account, which she would then use to pay a few people some back allowances they’re owed. It’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of shillings they are owed, but they were grateful.

Sean had kindly come from Kisumu to help me move. When we arrived at my new house and put the mattress into the bed, we discovered to our dismay that the bed was only 3.5x6. Kenyan bed frames are like boxes that you drop the mattress into. So my too-big mattress curled awkwardly over the edge, forming a concave, soft little pit that I could sleep in if I didn’t mind always being rolled into the middle where there is already a Justina-shaped imprint. It was already 7pm and I was getting worried.

“We need to make this mattress fit the frame,” I said, getting my German carving knife out of the kitchen.

Sean stared at me. “Justina!” he said, eyeing the knife. “It’s not a cake!”

He suggested that I asked a fundi (carpenter) to extend the frame a few inches on either side to accommodate the mattress. I said, why pay to extend the frame when I could cut the mattress for free? We started sending smses to other volunteers.

“Depends on the quality of the mattress,” Kumiko wrote.

“Woah, that’s a tough one. How much would it cost to extend the frame? I’d probably just leave it hanging off the edge myself,” Jenly wrote.

“Extend the frame,” Willie wrote.

“Tell Justina to chill out,” John wrote.

“I wouldn’t cut it,” Ali wrote. “And Pat says to return the mattress and get the right size.”

Enough people seemed to think cutting the mattress was weird, so I agreed to think about it some more. The next day I went to a fundi to ask for an estimate on a frame extension.

“One thousand bob,” he said.

“What?? A new bed costs 2,000 bob,” I said.

“No,” he lied. “A new bed costs 3,500.”

“Just cut the mattress, then,” I said, handing him my carving knife. He agreed to cut the mattress, tighten the bolts on the frame, which was really wobbly and squeaky from the last tenant and we’ll not wonder the exact reason, fix a chair leg that broke during my move, and hammer a bunch of nails into my concrete walls, all for 400 shillings. Not a bad deal, I thought.

It was definitely a jua kali job (literally “under the hot sun,” a term for the open-air shops where fundis craft their products, many of which turn out pretty ghetto); the chopped edge of the mattress ended up with a feathered, uh, texture, but after taping the fabric cover back with duct tape, you could barely tell the difference. Well, except the mattress is still about half an inch too wide, so I have to stuff the edge into the frame, which makes it more firm (good), but which also makes it harder to tuck in blankets and the mosquito net.

“UR CRAZY!!” Sean smsed me when I told him. “That totally goes against nature! Which of our advisors ever said, ‘Justina, cut the matres?’ It doesn’t make sense!”

[Next installment: My new organization, an amazingly well-run and productive place, for Kenya]

Two Very Brilliant Things I’ve Discovered In Kenya

2006-07-17T23:33:00.000+03:00

1. Pee buckets

Jenly turned me on to these. Then I realized at our cross-sector meeting that a lot of other volunteers use them, too, because we had a 15-minute roundtable discussion over dinner about pee bucket techniques. It’s just like it sounds – a plastic bucket you pee in.

When we went to Jenly’s site for Eco Day she announced enthusiastically that we were all welcome to share her pee bucket with her. The choo was a short hike from her house along an uneven dirt path, so peeing in her bucket was more convenient at night or whenever we felt lazy.

On my way home from her site, I stopped in Kapsabet and shopped for the perfect pee bucket – I was looking for just the right size and color, with a lid. I found a 5-L sea green one for 30 shillings, and when I got home, I immediately wrote Pee Bucket on it so that no one would decide to drink or wash their clothes in it. My own choo is only 25 yards from my house and has a light, so there has never been an issue of accidentally dropping the flashlight in there or crashing into a tree along the way. But it has always been one of the worst smelling family choos in Kenya, because I share it with three other adults and seven kids whose idea of using the choo is to use ANYPLACE in the choo (How exactly do you land a piece of poo right in the corner unless you’re firing it out of a cannon?) During the day the biggest flies in Africa, who happen to all live down inside my choo, find their way out of the hole and zoom around the stall buzzing at the top of their lungs. After awhile I just became impervious to the smells and the deafening hum and the pus-filled bodies crashing into my butt. The only thing that bothered me was that my clothes would be impregnated with the choo smell for hours even after a 30-second stint.

But the pee bucket has changed all that. Now I pour a few teaspoons of bleach and a cup of water into the bucket, and wait for it to fill up. It’s impressive how much fluid passes through me each day. It’s impressive how I no longer worry about whose body excretions I’m tracking from the choo into my house on the bottom of my flip flops, or whether the choo smell from my clothes is seeping through my skin into my bloodstream. Tonight I tried using my pee bucket as a poo bucket, after consulting with other Peace Corps pee bucket experts. The key is lining the bucket with a plastic bag. I’m not sure how I feel about it after only one experience. It was cool to lift a heavy bag of poo and wonder if the reason I walk so slow sometimes is that I’m carrying around a couple extra pounds of pure poo. It’s also cool to be able to poo anywhere in my house, or to be able to send text messages or write a letter while I’m on the bucket. But pooing in a place that’s not a toilet or choo seems incongruous with my limited ideas of proper poo sanitation.

If you visit me, you get to use the Guest Bucket.

2. Murenda

My favorite vegetable in the world is kong xin cai, also known as ying cai in Taiwan. It might also have an English name, water convolulous, whatever that is. I tried to plant some in my shamba but I think I planted them too early and they never germinated. Then I discovered murenda, a local vegetable also called murere, or riwek in the local Nandi language. It tastes almost exactly like kong xin cai, but its appearance and texture are different. The leaves produce this gooey substance and if you don’t cook it long enough the leaves are slightly prickly. There is a local vegetable in Borneo called jungle fern that looks completely different from both murenda and kong xin cai, but tastes almost the same. Jungle fern is also gooey, and the edible parts are the leaves and young shoots, which end in a curly tendril. A plate of sautéed jungle fern looks like little green seahorse tails tossed with spinach.

Countdown to Farewell

2006-07-15T23:25:00.000+03:00

Well just as I’m finally feeling like a part of my village, I’ve made my decision: I’m getting a site change. Today I rode my bike past one of the primary schools in town, and instead of the eighth grade boys stopping their football game to screech, “China china yangyangyangyang howayoo howayoo hiiiii,” in modulated nasal voices, they just said, “Hallo, madame, howayoo?” and continued playing.

Yesterday I passed the same school and some of the older girls asked me to join their game of jump rope, which ended up being the most hilarious thing they’d seen in years because I couldn’t clear the twine they were holding 2 feet off the ground. Today they greeted me by name, if only to outdo the boys, who only know me as madame.

Peddling past the familiar fields of maize that hug the rolling foothills of the purple escarpment looming in the distance, I started to think of all the things, and all the people, I’m going to miss from my village.

• Most of all, and most obviously, my friends Hillary, Julia, Emily and Mwalimu Nancy
• the neighbors’ kids, all the different shopkeepers, vendors and other people around town whom I buy things from – Chumba, who is probably the most honest and down-to-earth shopkeeper I’ve ever met in Kenya
• and his neighbor who sells my favorite bread (United, unsliced)
• Nellie at the agrovet
• Mary and Joshua (or is it Joseph) at the hoteli
• the ladies at the posta
• Julius and the characters at the petrol station
• the woman who never smiles who runs the duka (shop) where I buy potatoes and green peppers
• the bored youths who run the only supermarket in town
• Eric, my tomato vendor, who is STILL trying to set me up with his brother
• all the mamas who sell me vegetables
• the old old Mzee who wheels around jerrycans of water with his fiercely loyal and slightly less old dog with the saggy nipples
• the two or three rotating Luo fundis (tailors) whose collective ability to understand my English seems to fluctuate from proficient to less than zero in a single minute
• all the high school girls I’ve befriended from my school and others around the village
• the Luhya kids who scream my name when they see me after I taught them that screaming China is bad behavior
• our DO who has the best deadpan humor in all of Rift Valley and borrowed all my back issues of Newsweek and who must not be that corrupt because he’s been around for almost nine months now
• the matatus drivers and drunks who sideline as matatu touts when they’re coherent enough to make out potential customers coming from a distance
• the nurses and other hospital staff at the Mission Hospital
• the cook at the Catholic parish who owns two bicycles he souped up himself
• the precocious eighth grade midget at the School for the Disabled who I hope will become the first female President of Kenya
• Alfred the water technician who lives next door and always seems to be passing me on the road
• the farm manager and his staff who used to visit me in the shamba to admire my crops hoping to score some free zucchini and squash
• the old Mzee who spends all day every day tending only one cow which happens to always wander onto the VCT premises and eat all the plants intended for landscaping
• the divisional public health officer who always seems to have somewhere important to rush off to on his motorcycle but was always happy to talk to me about whatever work I was doing in the community (a rare trait in these parts)
• the black-and-white Colobus monkeys chortling in the trees next to my house

Wow this is not even an exhaustive list but you get the idea. The move seems like it has been a long time coming, but the logistics have come together quickly and I'll probably be whisked off to my new home without much time to say goodbye.

Pondering On the Slow Train

2006-07-13T09:15:00.000+03:00

We're on the slowest train in Africa, rattling our way through the Rift Valley, peering down into lush green valleys full of maize, dense forests, velvety pasturelands and a thin jagged brown river. I've just asked Devin and Shinita why there's so much poverty in Kenya when everywhere we look there is an abundance of natural resource, fertile farmland and healthy crops. It's a complicated question, and we debate for about ten minutes before we shrug our shoulders and sigh in resignation. We don't really know the answer. Kenyans don't really know the answer.

A Kenyan Peace Corps staff member once old me, "Your village has no excuse for being poor. You have fertile soil, constant rain, lots of land for farming and grazing, your cows give lots of milk, you have tea and pineapple cash crops." On an individual level it seems like people just aren't organized and forward thinking enough to use their resources to their full potential. But that's an oversimplified interpretation. "It would be so simple, if only they would..." It's easier said than done.

Then there's the bigger picture. Road infrastructure is so poor that transport costs are prohibitive for most small scale farmers who try to sell domestically. The U.S. and other developed nations' farm subsidies make the cost of exporting Kenyan cash crops prohibitive as well, except for the largest growers. NGOs buy up a lot of the crops from rich landowners, so neither the money nor the food goes back to the local communities. And then there's...for example...

In my community there is a civil servant, a government employee, who is known to be corrupt. He is supposed to serve our location, which is one of the smallest administrative jurisdictions (it goes, top to bottom: national, provincial, district, division, location, and sublocation). He answers to the Ministry of Health in Nairobi, the national headquarters, NOT to his bosses at the District, who are all aware of his irresponsible work ethic. Because all the decision-making is centralized at the headquarters, the process of getting him fired for his widely known professional transgressions would take a lot of organization, patience and time. When this civil servant steals money from community groups made up of village farmers - who have no reliable transport, no cell phone, no internet access and no money - he knows that for these poor communities, organizing to throw out the bums probably wouldn't be a very rational use of their time. On top of all this, there so much turnover in all the levels of Ministry admin that a case can easily get lost in the shuffle everytime someone new comes on board.

I want to read a book called As They See It, by Raymond Downing, an American doctor who has lived in Kenya for over 15 years, whom I met a few weeks ago. In his book he talks about AIDS in Africa and why Africans - leaders and villagers - think it has continued to spread despite the increased availability of information and drugs. I think a lot of his findings can be applied to a lot of the social problems in Africa, including poverty, and I also think that until Westerners start listening to what Africans have to say about their own problems, and letting Africans find their own solutions, we're not going to see a lot of improvements. Western solutions, in my opinion, haven't worked because they're not tailored for African culture. How could they be when we don't understand it, and after being in Africa for decades we still can't understand it? There's a lot of PCVs who feel like the best solution would be for all foreign aid to just pull out of Kenya kabisa, cold turkey. The presence of foreigners only reinforces a false sense of dependence on Western-designed solutions that don't work in non-Western cultures.

--------------

Kiswahili language lesson:

In our sleeper car there is this sign over the window that says, in both Swahili and English:

Ni hatari kujitokeza nje ya dirisha.
It is dangerous to lean out of the window.

I find the word kujitokeza humorous. It's translated as "to lean" but when you break it down literally it looks like this:

ku = to
ji = reflexive verb infix meaning to do something to yourself, e.g.

jitayarisha -> prepare (yourself), get (yourself) ready; tayari = ready
jisaidia -> help yourself, an idiom meaning to use the toilet
jifunza -> learn, or literally, to teach yourself

toka = go out of
eza = causative verb suffix indicating that something is being made to happen

So, kujitokeza literally means to make yourself go out (the window). Somehow all those actions you inflict on yourself just to stick you body out the window makes for a funny image in my head.

Listening Skills

2006-07-03T16:09:00.000+03:00

I realized this weekend that by the time my COS (close of service) rolls around in August 2007 I will have attended three July 4th parties sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Nairobi, which is basically a chance for American embassy staff, PCVs and Marines to get together and eat hot dogs and have a tug of war. PCVs always get a goody bag full of free toothpaste, soap and other hygiene products donated by various companies who know how dirty and cheap we are. Score.

Life in Kenya has been a bit disorienting lately. It's weird to have a capital like Nairobi, where there are so many western-style amenities and a large middle class, and then go back to a place dotted with mud huts and banana farms and women carrying firewood on their heads. It used to be that I looked forward to going home to the serenity and familiarity of my village, but lately my community doesn't really feel like my own (drop me an email if I haven't told you all about my supervisor going nuts), and towns like Kisumu, Nairobi and Eldoret are my refuge from a culture that I understand better than ever, yet accept no more than I did a year ago.

I met an American grad student at the July 4th party who is doing a summer internship with the UN in Kenya. She was the perfect example of why I've become a little jaded about the international development community. I really think most development workers have impressive academic credentials from top universities, are pretty intelligent people who have lived in different countries, and can regress the hell out of any policy issue, but have never spent enough time in the cultures they're working for to really understand why most sustainable development programs are neither sustainable nor development.

The longer I'm here the more I understand why Kenyan culture is the way it is, and the more I realize I'll never fully understand why Kenyan culture is the way it is. I see that there is logic to the way people behave, whether I agree with the value system it's based on or not. And I realize that the reason most development programs aren't successful is because the people designing and implementing them don't understand the culture and people that they're trying to benefit. Development needs to happen at the hands of locals, not foreigners with good hearts, deep pockets and no freaking clue.

I wonder how many policy makers and program designers have actually lived in a rural Kenyan village, talked to people living their about all the things affecting them - traditional customs like circumcision and wife inheritance, gender roles, HIV. I met an American doctor living in Western Kenya who has spent years researching the AIDS epidemic from a Kenyan cultural perspective. His observation over the years is that when Americans brought over "AIDS awareness," they actually brought over the American moral debate and culture war over AIDS - teaching abstinence-only vs. autonomous decision-making skills - and we've never bothered to ask Kenyans what they think of AIDS in their own country. And how can we distinguish what they really think from what Western health and development workers have told them to think?

The doctor facilitated a lively discussion between PCVs, Kenyan Peace Corps staff and Kenyans from the local community about the way the development industry has dealt with AIDS in Africa. One of the Kenyan Peace Corps staff asked, "Why can't we just tell everyone who is HIV positive to stop having sex instead of just giving out ARVs, which don't cure them but only help them live longer? New infections are caused by infected people having sex after all."

There was a lot of thinly veiled eye rolling and scowling from the Americans, but the only comment was from one PCV who said, insightfully I thought, that in any other audience the Kenyan would have been instantly torn apart by the Americans for his views. In most situations I think we're all still quick to pounce on any views that go against our own value system, but personally it was a reminder of how hard it is for me to be humble and not jump to conclusions everytime a Kenyan says something that offends me. And yet as little as I understand Kenya, I still understand a thousand times more than most Americans.

As I was explaining to the American grad student how deeply ingrained female circumcision, wife inheritance and other traditional practices are in Kenyan culture (in many tribes they are fading quickly but in the villages you still see a lot of resistance to change), she kept scowling and shaking her head and saying, "There must be a way to educate people so they stop doing these things." And I realized how perfectly her question embodied all the well-intentioned arrogance and utter cluelessness of Western aid workers, including Peace Corps volunteers (though to a lesser, more cynical degree). Somewhere in there we all know that the only people who can address Kenya's problems are Kenyans. But yet we all want to do something to help.

I tend to think all we can do is let Kenyans tell us about themselves, then go back to America and tell our friends and family about it. The Peace Corps has three official goals, paraphrased below, but I think only two of them are realistic.

1. To provide the host country with volunteers trained with some semblance of technical knowledge in some area of development the host country needs. Health, education, small enterprise, fish farming...etc.

2. To create a cultural exchange that raises host country nationals' awareness of Americans and our culture.

3. To create a cultural exchange that raises Americans' awarenes of host cultures.

Asante Sana and Xie Xie to Gogo in Taipei (Auntie Chen-May)

2006-06-14T13:46:00.000+03:00

My family was pretty concerned after I wrote that
diatribe about my fruit fly problem. My mom emailed me
with her personal tips for preventing fruit fly
infestations (eat bananas fast) and my aunt in Taiwan
immediately took to the streets in search of flypaper
and a battery-powered flyswatter. They arrived today,
and let me just say, my aunt rocks! I've been using a
fly strip that another volunteer bought at Nakumatt
and kindly gave me to try out. My mom had said that
she went in search of flystrips in Houston and was
told that they were no longer sold because they
discovered that one brand manufactured by Shell Oil
emitted toxic gasses. The flystrip I got here
definitely had a funny smell, but it was made in
Germany and said non-toxic all over it. I hung it up
just to see if it worked, and was a bit disappointed
at first. For some reason I assumed flypaper would
have a scent that attracts flied, like honey, or
carrion of the African savannah, or poo. But nothing
seemed all that interest in smelling the flystrip
except for a few tiny gnats. It was only after I went
away for a week and came to home find everything stuck
to my flystrip - fruit flies, gnats, mosquitos, moths
- that I realized that it's when I'm not home to leave
dirty dishes and ripe pineapples lying around that the
flystrip starts becoming more appetizing to things
trapped in my house.

Anyway, the flypaper that my aunt sent me is basically
unscented goo on a large piece of floded cardboard,
which you can turn inside out and hang. I like it
better than the strip because you can swat it at a
fruit fly and it will stick. I've had a lot of laughs
today watching fruit flies try to pry their legs off
the goo. I'm going to hell.

The best part is that it's actually printed all over
with little housefly images, as if flies will look at
it and think, "Wow, let me go check out that big
housefly party going on at the flypaper."

The battery-powered flyswatter scares me a bit,
although I think it shows how much I've regressed as a
compassionate being. The packaging is all in Chinese
except for a part that says, dubiously, "Absolutely
safe for people." The flyswatter basically looks like
a small tennis racket with a wire grid in the head.
When you hold the button down it sends a live current
into the grid, and when you swat at something, it
pulverizes it. I tried it on an unfortunate fruit fly,
not expecting the loud crackle accompanied by a flash
of purple as the poor bugger was essentially fried
into oblivion. The first time I did it, it seemed
cruel. The fifth time, it was just a lot of fun. Ah,
the genius of Taiwanese gadgets. Ah, the
imperviousness of Peace Corps Volunteers. I'm going to
hell.

----- Notes of Note -----

1. Radio commercial for Dorman's coffee, spoofing
Kenyan speech patterns - hilarious only to Kenyans and
expats:

[Man's voice]: I'd like to order a
cappuchi...cappuchino.
[Woman's voice]: I'd like to have an
espress...espresso.
[Voiceover]: Somet hings are unique to Kenya. Like
high-quality domestic-grown coffee...

2. Kenyan parliamentarians complaining about various
provisions of the sexual offenses bill that were
eventually removed, leaving a disappointing shell of
minimum legal recourses for most survivors of sexual
violence:

"If we mandate jail sentences for marital rape, 1.5
million Kisii men will go to jail. And we can't have
that."

3. Heard on a radio station in Nairobi:

"The best oldies, from when Michael was white, and
Whitney was clean."

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The Day Before Camp GLOW

2006-05-27T09:51:00.000+03:00

Just wanted to write a quick post before I turn into a whirling dervish trying to clean my place and get ready to go to Nairobi in less than one hour. Two girls from my village got selected to attend Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), a week-long experiential learning camp dedicated to empowering girls and exposing them to the possibilities of their future. Peace Corps is paying for all their costs of attending. They are giddy as hell that they get to take a week off from school, learn about girls’ empowerment, and stay in Nairobi. Seeing them so excited, grinning ear to ear for the last two weeks, has made me really excited for them. Nellie says she has never been to Nairobi in her life, and the chance to travel outside their school compound, much less their village, is rare.

A PCV who just returned from the first session (there are two sessions, one last week and one this week) said it was “amazing” and that it gave him hope for change. PCVs are usually pretty cynical about the possibility of change, and PC-run events are usually so disorganized as to be more frustrating than effective, so I took it as a pretty rave review.

I invited my campers over yesterday evening to help me make some teaching materials for camp. I gave them a list of quotes by women, and asked them to design signs that will be hung around the conference room at the camp. I thought it would be a fun activity that would let them express their creative side, but they were really unsure of what to do, and they asked me to demonstrate first. Once they understood, they began scrawling freely with markers and gossiping between themselves. I love high school girls.

These girls, and most students I’ve met here, are so bright and full of potential, but I’ve started to notice how the rigid education system takes its toll. Students are taught all the answers, and they are taught not to deviate from them. They are also not used to being asked to assert their own decisions. I visited a primary school one day, and the headmaster would instruct the students to remove their pullover sweaters whenever HE felt warm, and put them back on whenever HE felt cold. Every student had to do as he was told. I was wondering, what if some of the students felt cold and didn’t want to remove their sweaters? Yesterday whenever I asked Nellie and Harriet what they wanted to do, or how they wanted to do something, they got really uncomfortable and had to hesitate a long time before answering. There is certainly value in teaching strong memorization skills and respect for authority, but I imagine that when students get to extremely advanced levels of schooling, there is a huge learning curve that could be flattened if secondary schools were to incorporate more analytical and critical thinking skills into the curriculum.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting the 32 or so girls from around Kenya that were selected for the camp, and I imagine that they will grow a lot in the next week. Stay tuned.

A Lingering Question from the Maasai Mara

2006-05-23T21:46:00.000+03:00

I met this group of American travelers when I was at the Maasai Mara with Patrick in March. They were fascinated with the fact that I’m a Peace Corps volunteer, and suddenly I found myself cornered at the head of the dinner table while everyone shouted questions at me as if I were holding a press conference.

A few people in the group had done some short-term volunteer work as part of their trip. It was an acknowledgement of their sheltered middle-class American life, and their attempt to step out of it and see what the “real” Africa is like. Poverty! Death! Civil Unrest! They figured the best way to do it was to spend a few weeks volunteering with AIDS orphans in Uganda and Tanzania.

One older couple was so moved by what they saw at the orphanage that the idea that what they had experienced might be my daily life left them in awe. The husband, Don, asked me, “How do you deal with seeing such sad things everyday?”

I didn’t know how to answer him, because I was thinking, “I really don’t see sad things everyday. Maybe I should start paying more attention.”

I just shrugged and gave him some lame answer. “I don’t know, I guess you just get used to it.”

But the truth is that Africa is not a land of perpetual tragedy. Yes, I walk around my village and see poverty everywhere. Very few people own clothes without at least a hole in them. Hungry babies toddle barefoot and commando through chicken poo while their drunk fathers stagger around the market. From our Western perspective, this is all very tragic. For my Kenyan friends in the village, this is life. Life is hard. But why should it be tragic?

One day Hillary was unusually quiet so I asked him if something was bothering him.

“Yes,” he said. “I am really struggling to find money for my family. And I’m really disturbed about the way the meeting went today.”

We commiserated about the meeting, and then I said, “So what can you do about your family?”

I thought he was in a real bind and wanted to ask to borrow money, but he only said, “Oh, I will find a way. I have been living this way for over thirty years. It’s the way of life.”

That was the moment I realized that I could stop feeling guilty for not giving people money when they ask. No Kenyan has ever taken it personally when I say no. People were struggling before I arrived and they’ll be struggling after I leave. It sounds selfish and heartless, but the truth is that it’s not my responsibility to feed another person’s family. I have helped some of my friends in the past, either with money to buy food, to start an income-generating project, or to take their sick wife to the hospital, and I will probably help someone again.

But it’s some strange sense of socialism that I picked up somewhere, that makes me feel guilty when I don’t help someone who has less money than me. The fact is that MY money can’t help most people. I’m just a microeconomic insignificance. I’m not really even helping the people I’ve helped. I’m glad my friend was able to take his wife to the hospital in time. I’m glad when my friend’s kids can eat dinner. But the next time they need money and I’m not around, what will they do? Maybe they will find money, maybe they won’t. But that’s tomorrow’s worry. Am I really helping when I only solve today’s worry? (As a development worker, I say no.)

I still think about Don’s question a lot. Maybe I’m just obtuse, or maybe I’ve become desensitized to what I see. But sometimes I really do forget how poor some of my friends are. One friend told me that he hasn’t had money to buy soap lately, and that he has been eating dinner outside, under the moonlight, because he can’t afford to buy paraffin for his lamp. It suddenly struck me as tragic, and I felt completely helpless to do anything for him.

Kenyans put on such a strong face. I’ve met widows who tell me about their lives, and I think, “I would not be alive at your ripe old age. I would have jumped off the escarpment by now.” Once during a meeting a widow was explaining how she had nothing because a tree fell on her house and crushed it in a storm. She started sobbing and I remember thinking, “I’ve never seen a Kenyan cry. This is new.”

An interesting cultural note. I can’t attest to fully understanding the meaning attached to crying in Kenya, but to oversimplify, I gather that it is seen as a sign of weakness. In the U.S., crying is seen as a normal and healthy way to express emotion. In Kenya, men should NEVER cry, at least in the Nandi tribe. Women don’t bother to cry. It doesn’t do any good, they say. After we left the meeting where the widow broke into tears, Hillary said, “She shouldn’t have cried. It doesn’t bring the house back.” (Talk about major emotional invalidation. As much as I like him, I wanted to strangle him.) Instead, women are supposed to be patient through their suffering. It makes it sense how Christianity has taken hold so strongly here. It’s easier to accept suffering when you believe that God has a better life for you after this one.

There is a lot of happiness in these communities. Struggle and suffering are as much a part of life as love and celebration. By extension, death is much more an accepted part of life here, even though mourning is observed just as ritualistically as it is in our culture. You can’t escape the reality of death when you live so much closer to the cycle of life than we do in the West. Crops grow and die; cows, chickens and sheep are born and die; babies are born and die; young and old alike get sick and die.

It’s not the things I see that are hard to deal with. What I do feel sadness about are the root causes of the things I see everyday. Corruption. Tribalism. Gender inequality. Things that are invisible pour les yeux, yet very real.

I think the key to dealing with the frustration of these things is accepting why I’m here. I can do my tiny part – talking to girls, encouraging them to be leaders, etc – but mostly my power lies in my circus sideshow novelty. People come to barazas, meetings and lectures because they want to hear what the mzungu has to say. Sometimes it’s the only time so many people get together in a single place, and it’s when I can suggest to groups how to begin working together. Sure they could do it without me, but up until now they haven’t. Why not use my freak status to mobilize them? I won’t single-handedly weed out corruption or anything else, but once these communities stare at each other across these packed classrooms and see their own power, maybe they will.

Most of all, the key is accepting that I will most likely leave here after two years and have only left one legacy – not of a person who helped build a new gravity-fed water tank or lifted 20 widows out of poverty…let’s get real, it probably ain’t gonna happen – but of the kind-hearted mzungu who strangely looked like a China but spoke some Kiswahili and liked ugali and had an amazing shamba and some pretty good notes about HIV and AIDS.

But even then, I flatter myself.

Lunch in a Kenyan Home, or How Many Peace Corps Volunteers Does It Take To Catch a Kuku (Hen)?

2006-05-11T19:55:00.000+03:00

A. One, plus three of the neighbor’s kids.

My friend Chumo is back from Nairobi, on break from studying at the Franciscan brotherhood. He invited me to visit his home today, which I learned is different from a “house.” In Kenya if you say “home” it means the place you were raised – basically your parents’ house. If you say “house” it means the place you live now if you are married. The rule applies in both English and Swahili.

I learned this the hard way. Today I asked some school kids, “Nyumba yako ni wapi?” Where is your house?

They looked confused and uncomfortable. Chumo explained that I had just asked these first graders where the house is that they live in with their spouses, and now they were all freaked out.

I should have said, “Nyumbani kwenu ni wapi?” Where is your home?

Before I left to go to Chumo’s house this morning (I’m using the American “house” terminology here) I went to my shamba to pick some vegetables as a gift. I discovered mutant zucchini and packed one in my backpack, along with two mutant squash. In the U.S. I’d never seen zucchini longer than 7-8 inches. Some of my zucchini have reached 18 inches, and are still growing. Even the yellow squash are huge, about the size of a large butternut squash.

I met Pastor Nelson on the way and he offered to bike with me up to Chumo’s house. In true Kenyan fashion, we had to make a detour to visit his neighbor’s mother, who I’d never met. She welcomed us warmly, and served us tea and bread. She and her daughter retreated to the back of the house while Nelson and I ate. I asked later if it was some kind of custom, because I felt weird sitting in a stranger’s house eating their food and drinking their tea while they weren’t having any. Nelson explained that it was a matter of practicality – the mother and daughter had already taken tea. They came back out and I impressed them with my camera – they couldn’t believe you could see the picture right after taking it. The mother went to the back of the house again, and came back with a live hen, fresh chili peppers (I have a reputation in the village for appreciating fresh chili peppers, which most Kenyans avoid) and four large avocados, useful for knocking dead unfortunate roosters hanging out under ripe avocado trees. In return I gave her two yellow squash – not exactly a fair trade, but it was all I had to offer.

We continued on to Chumo’s house for lunch, where we met Julia and Emily. I met Chumo’s mom and sisters, who brought out bean stew, potato stew and rice. We chatted until the rain started pouring so hard on the iron sheet roofing that we couldn’t hear each other, then just watched Julia crochet a chair cover. Everyone was impressed with the size of my zucchini, and in return Chumo’s mom presented me with five kilos of potatoes from their shamba. When we were leaving she packed my new hen in a plastic grocery bag with a little hole poked in the side so the hen could stick her head out and look around.

Julia and Emily were still laughing at me for saying, “Oh, don’t worry about the plastic bag, I’ll just put her inside my backpack.”

“Oh, Justina, you have amused me so much,” Julia said. “The hen will suffocate in your bag.”

Ah. Didn’t think of that.

I guess the plastic bag served several purposes, because the kuku was covered in her own poo by the time I reached home with her three hours later. Edward, one of the headmaster’s kids, came over and helped me untie her wings and legs.

She got busy eating grass, but the sun was going down and the other chickens were already in the coop. I tried to herd her towards the coop with a stick, but she was more interested in eating grass. She barely noticed that I was poking her in the butt trying to get her to walk, and I thought, well maybe this is why she’s the slowpoke that got caught and presented to me. And I also kept thinking, “Bird flu can be passed to humans through blood and feces,” so I didn’t want to touch her poo-covered body.

Brilliantly, I decided to speak to her in Kiswahili. She’s a Kenyan chicken after all.

“We,” I said. “Enda nyumbani.” Hey, you. Go inside the house.

Sharon, the housegirl’s daughter, watched me in silence, too stunned at my stupidity to even laugh. She called to the other kids in the house, and Kip and Victor (aged 4 and 6) came out to help. The hen clucked indignantly as we chased her around the compound, and the rooster started clucking disapprovingly from inside the coop.

“Bok bok bok bok beh GAWK,” she’d say.

“Bok BOK bok bok bok bok,” he’d reply.

Chickens ain’t so dumb; she followed the sound of his clucking until she found the coop, and went inside willingly. Once again, nature proves that so-called dumb animals are much smarter than people.

An Open Letter to Fruit Flies (Drosophilus I Hatus Yewous) Everywhere

2006-05-07T16:43:00.000+03:00

I hate you, in case you can’t read Latin. Who said you could invade my house in droves? Is there a sign on my door that says “Karibu Fruit Flies”? NO. Just because my door is open does not mean you can come in. And what’s with the buzzing around right outside the door all day long until I have to come out and use the choo? Y’all need lives. My doorstep is not the only place you can find sumptuous rotting things to feed on.

Oh, wait, you already know that, because you’ve all COME INTO MY HOUSE UNINVITED AND SAMPLED MY FOOD. You’ve sampled my fruit tray. You’ve sampled my onion and garlic bowl. You’ve sampled my garbage can. You’ve sampled my dirty dishes.

You know what’s really rude about all this? When you’re done eating MY food, you don’t just say thanks and leave. You go over to my mosquito net and hang out. IT’S TREATED WITH POISON YOU IDIOTS. WHY AREN’T YOU DYING? Your nightly dance party on my net is inexcusable.

As 245 of your former colleagues know, I’ve declared war. At first I just took out my trash and washed my dishes everyday. But that’s too much work just to keep a bunch of dim-witted fruit flies at bay. Then I sprayed my house with Doom. Do you understand Doom? It’s supposed to make you die. What’s wrong with all of you? Why are you still living in my poisoned house?

Well, guess what. I have a new lethal weapon. It’s a cardboard mailer converted into a flyswatter. And it works like a charm. Maybe some of you are better fliers than others, and some of you choose your resting points more strategically (narrow edges of bed frames, bookshelves, plastic buckets and basins, and soft surfaces like curtains can’t protect you forever, suckers), but eventually, the flyswatter gets you all. The 245 flattened carcasses in my garbage don’t lie. The new pattern on my walls, made from the splattered blood and pus of Drosophilus I Hatus Yewous, don’t lie. It’s like artwork. I call it “Staccato in Black and Red.”

I know what you’re thinking: My karma ain’t doing so hot right now. Oh, please. You are so full of yourselves. You’re FRUIT FLIES. Not birds or cats or even spiders. There is no guilt here. Every time I get to watch your red and yellow guts squirt out of your bloated little bodies due to a fatal blow, I feel a sense of satisfaction. The only annoying thing with you people is that your damp little corpses stick to my garbage bag, and it’s my last one. Can’t you do something about that? I hate having to see all of you looking ridiculously contorted every time I walk past my garbage can.

I know what you’re thinking now: Why can’t I just live in peace with you all? You’re not doing me any harm. And my response is: If you didn’t come into my house, I wouldn’t have to kill you. Doesn’t that sound fair?

OH MY GOD YOU’RE HAVING SEX IN MY HOUSE!! I just saw some tiny ones of you. That’s the ultimate insult. It’s one thing to invite yourselves in, eat, and leave poo on my food. But I’m not running a brothel here. Can’t you take your private business outside?

I told some other PCVs about you. Y’all are in trouble now. One of them says he has a lovely recipe for fruit fly stir fry, and that you function much like raisins. Obviously I don’t have much use for you, but it looks like other people do. As soon as I collect enough of you, I’m selling you by the kilo, cheap.

Heeere, fruity fruity fruity. Heeere fruity fruity.

A Question For the Gardeners Out There

2006-05-07T16:37:00.000+03:00

How do you prevent mustard greens from flowering? My plants were doing great for about 3 weeks, then suddenly they all burst into bright yellow flowers. That would be cool if I weren’t growing them for food, but I can’t help feeling like I’m being denied my right to eat these guys. It seems like I’ll pick a few leaves, then in a few days the plant decides to flower. Some of them started flowering without even waiting for me to pick their leaves. Am I waiting too long to harvest the leaves?

Laptop Woes, Turkana Heroes, and Their Dogs

2006-05-05T23:57:00.000+03:00

It’s Cinco de Mayo and six months ago Mika sent me a package via surface mail. It arrived today. Everything was intact, but at the time that she started writing the enclosed letter (in September) she hadn’t had her baby yet. Now little Elise is eight months old, and so are all the Clif Bars, soy sauce packs (about 67), trail mix, and McCormick’s pasta seasonings she sent me. Thanks, Mika and Guillaume, for all the goodies. You have set a new record for the longest time a package has taken to reach me, previously held by my parents, who sent a package in July that arrived in November. Still in the running are the Girl Scout cookies Nandita sent by surface mail in February.

Well, Nick sent me a laptop through somewhat circuitous means last month. He mailed it to Seattle, to the Australian cousin of an American woman I met here who was working for an NGO in Bungoma. The cousin brought the laptop when she came to visit in April (the American, and her cousin, have both since returned to the U.S.) I trekked to Nairobi to pick it up, took a detour with it through Webuye to visit another PCV who bribed me to come over with an offer of his fartin’est chili, and finally arrived with it in my village a few days later.

Like most high-tech gadgets that arrive in Kenya for me, it went inexplicably kaput soon after. I took it to my friend Joseph, who is the IT guy at the college of social work in my village, to see if he could do anything. He took it home to Eldoret for the weekend, to take advantage of Eldoret’s access to the rest of the modern world.

It turns out Joseph is a Turkana, originally from the Lake Turkana region in northern Kenya. I don’t meet many people from the remote northern or northeastern regions of Kenya, so I got inquisitive. He told me how he ended up visiting the U.S. for a few months to help a Belgian friend, who was getting a master’s at Johns Hopkins, with a presentation. The friend’s thesis was on a disease common among the Turkanas. I forget the name exactly, but what interested the student was how some cultural practices of the Turkanas contribute to the spread of the disease among humans. It’s a bacteria (or parasite or virus?) that usually affects domestic animals like cows and dogs. Dogs are valued highly in Turkana culture, and a typical Turkana family can have six or seven dogs, each one for a specific purpose. Some live in the house and some live outside, depending on their purpose. (An interesting bit of gross trivia, as long as you’re not eating: Turkanas used to train dogs to keep their babies clean. In other words, when a baby pooed itself, the dog would come along and lick up the mess. Eeew.) Because Turkanas are in such close contact with their dogs - living, sleeping, sharing food and water, stepping in feces – they often contract the disease from their dogs.

Turkana is an area that I – and many Kenyans – don’t know much about, except that they’re famous for really amazing woven baskets, so it was fascinating to pick Joseph’s brain about his home. From the little I’ve heard and read, Turkana is extremely isolated and undeveloped, far more so than any of the communities I work with in my village. The landscape is supposed to be beautiful, especially around Lake Turkana. The more intrepid brands of tourists find their way up their often enough, and the areas close to the border with Sudan and Ethiopia are saturated with NGOs, which makes prices for accommodation and food really expensive for visitors, an unexpected irony given the poverty in the area. Joseph described Turkana as a place that’s still “uncivilized, where people still walk around nearly naked.” A lot of kids don’t go to school because there are no schools nearby. He says that Turkanas think of their place as a different world altogether from the rest of the country, so that when they travel out of the region, they say, “I’m going to Kenya.”

With Joseph’s help, his friend’s presentation was a huge success. People all assumed Joseph was a doctor, when in reality he only had a 12th grade education. The friend was so grateful that he offered to pay for Joseph to go to university, an opportunity that very few Kenyans have. And now, lucky me, there is someone in my village who knows more about computers than I do. It’s not bad being the second most knowledgeable computer person around, although the fact that I am, is sad.

Fun With Bugs and a Very Tall Escarpment

2006-05-02T12:08:00.000+03:00

May 2, 2006. Tuesday, 12:08pm.

I’ve been ignoring these fruit flies in my room for four days now. Well, not totally ignoring them so much as avoiding direct confrontation. I took out my trash. I did the dishes. I sprayed the room with Doom. This morning they were still around, going about their happy little business eating ripe fruit and sucking on old food particles stuck to things. No respect. It was time to get serious.

I went on a violent smashing campaign using a makeshift flyswatter. It was a decidedly un-Buddhist, uncompassionate assault with the goal of splattering their little juicy bodies to create as wide a diameter of pus stain as possible. I got at least twenty of them. Another fifty or so had died on my window sill, where for some reason most bugs in my house go to die, so I swept their shriveled little carcasses into the trash too. My garbage can is a fruit fly graveyard, with assorted cockroaches, ants, termites and unidentified hard-shelled species. Yum, time for lunch.

Yesterday I went to meet a community group located on the other side of the escarpment. Hillary had the brilliant idea to ride our bikes there. It was two hours of squeezing our brakes all the way downhill, a 2,000m drop into lush plains full of sugar cane. In the back of my mind I thought, the return trip is going to suck. But it was another gorgeous, Technicolor morning, about 70 degrees with a warm, friendly sun; the kind of day that makes you feel like nothing in the world could possibly make you happier at that given moment. Blue skies, white clouds, green farmland, wildflowers, and purple hills in the distance. We could see a light blue strip on the horizon – Lake Victoria. The village we visited was the most remote place I’ve ever seen in Kenya. Their land is extremely fertile, and sugar cane is the major cash crop. We could even see smoke rising from the sugar factory about 20 km away. Most residents have water gravity-piped to their houses, because of the scores of streams that flow down from the escarpment. But electricity is non-existent, there are no health services, and the one road through the village is full of potholes (okay, so even major highways in Kenya are full of potholes) and is only serviced by a few matatus a day.

The group we met wants to start a VCT in their village. The national body governing AIDS-related development activities, NACC (National AIDS Control Council), allocates funds every year for certain types of projects, all with convenient acronyms so you can always sound like you’re at a spelling bee. This year their focus has been named TOWA, or Total War on AIDS. They are targeting care of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and people living with HIV/AIDs (PLWHAs), and moving away from awareness and prevention of new infections because a study shows that 97.5 percent of Kenyans know how AIDS is spread and how to prevent it.

But in this remote village the stigma and denial is still there, and access to services that de-stigmatize the disease are non-existent. There have been a few mobile VCTs that have found their way to the village, and there were always lines of people out the door waiting to be tested, so the demand is there. I told them I’d see what I could do. NACC funded the VCT I’m attached to, but there can be a lot of politics involved with successfully submitting a proposal to NACC. The group’s leader, David, went on a tirade about how the biggest problem in Kenya is lack of proper governance. (In other words, you-know-what.)

“We have the potential to develop this area. We have land, we have crops, we have water. The problem is that we don’t have political goodwill,” he said. “Politicians are only helping themselves and their families, not their people.”

Like so many other villages I’ve visited, it kills me to see how they are marginalized because of corrupt leaders, especially because their area is so rich in natural resources. Biking through the area, dwarfed by the sprawling acres of sugar cane, I thought for sure that with people would be doing well and sending their kids to college. David told me that people who sell their sugar cane to the factory often never actually get paid for it, depending on who’s in charge at the factory. “Fortunately the younger generation is starting to not accept this kind of system,” he continued. “But the change is so slow.”

I asked him if he had attended college or university. He has natural charisma and leadership abilities, and he’s passionate and motivated. David only smiled and shook his head, rubbing his thumb against his fingertips to indicate no money. “But it’s never too late,” he said. “You can always get more education even if you are looking into your own grave.”

I like this guy.

After the meeting, David and some other members of his group helped us find a route that would take us back up the escarpment in the shortest time. David kept saying, “You should just spend the night here, and go back tomorrow.” It was 3:30pm and if I had known it would be another four hours back home, uphill all the way like your parents used to say, I would have taken him up on the offer. We could see the rain clouds moving towards us across the plains below. The wind picked up. Hillary put on his jacket. We didn’t bother getting on our bikes because it was too steep and rocky. Mountain biking for leisure is fun, when you’re on Mt. Tam and there’s a bar with cold beer at the top. Mountain biking to beat the sunset with only a small bowl of ugali and beef stew in your stomach, is torture.

It started drizzling a cold, uninspired drizzle. It was nice of God not to make it a pelting hailstorm, I will say that much. Hillary kept saying, “This is the last hill,” and I kept chewing him a new b-hole for being wrong. It wasn’t the last hill for a long, long, LONG time. We didn’t reach my house until it was pitch black. Hillary helped himself to a glass of water and left in a hurry, eager to escape my grumpiness, the worst he’s ever endured. I took the most beautiful, steaming hot bucket bath I’ve ever taken in my life, splashing like there was no tomorrow. The euphoria I’d felt that morning coasting down the steep side of the escarpment seemed like a week ago, but at least I was home. Then I fell into bed.

Kenya Tour Winds Down With Earth Day

2006-04-28T15:31:00.000+03:00

April 28, 2006. Friday, 3:31pm.
I just made the most amazing fried rice ever. I say that every time I make fried rice, so maybe by the time I leave here I will be cooking award-winning fried rice. Today was yellow squash fried rice, using squash and green onions fresh from my shamba. Fry up and salt to taste: yellow squash, dried fried onions (thanks Mom!), green onions, 1 egg (fresh from my chicken’s arse, sans bird flu), soy sauce. Peace Corps is an exercise in how to cook vegetarian when your mindset is that you haven’t really eaten unless your food has meat in it. I once saw this t-shirt that said: I’m a vegetarian not because I love animals, but because I hate vegetables. And my favorite quote from our technical trainer, Kibet: I’m a nyamatarian. (Nyama = meat).

Anyway, I’m finally winding down my two-month unintentional tour of Kenya, at least for now. It was hard readjusting to the relative isolation of life in the village when I got home yesterday afternoon, especially because I don’t have any plans to leave my site for another month. It’s a weird duality of experiences here. With other volunteers and ex-pats my social nature comes out, and in the village I like to be a creature of solitude once the sun goes down and everyone retreats into the safety of their own homes.

But after this last trip I had a hard time switching back to site rat life - cooking quietly at home, weeding contentedly in the shamba, rating songs on my iTunes playlists, curling up under a blanket in fuzzy pajamas to read about the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill (thanks Lynn!). I managed to do all those things but I missed having people around. With the right group of PCVs we always manage to have engaging conversations about African politics, racial diversity in America, tribalism in Kenya, immigration, genocide, gender inequality, Burts Bees beauty products, Italian food, Chinese food, Thai food, Mexican food, the best chocolate in Kenya, Dave Chappelle, movies, Buddhism, and of course, the latest Peace Corps gossip. This last trip was only two days, to help Jen with her community’s Earth Day. Her supervisor had rounded up local environment and public health officers, politicians, and school kids to pick up trash in the town center and plant over 1,500 trees.

SMS to Lexie, from me: Need help w/chikn dance.its hand thing,wing thing,booty shake thing right?Words go:nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh.Anythn else?

To me, from Lexie: Yup that’s it! Kenyans love it!

Goal # 3 of the U.S. Peace Corps: To share knowledge and culture about Americans with host country communities.

A small group of PCVs met up in Jen’s village on Wednesday morning. We went to the D.O.’s office and joined like 300 primary school kids. As we stood around and chatted while the officials made preparations, the kids slowly creeped closer to us to get a better look at the mzungu freak show.

“It’s amazing how stealthy they are,” one of us observed.

“You can’t see them moving toward us, but next thing you know they’ve got us surrounded,” someone else noted.

“It’s kind of uncomfortable,” someone else said.

“OK EVERYONE! WANT TO LEARN THE CHICKEN DANCE?”

Like most lessons I’ve taught in Kenya, the first time around it was the wazungu making fools of ourselves to a crowd of students stunned into silence. They’re imitating chickens. But soon they warmed up to us, especially when we shook our booties as fast as we possibly could, and after a few rounds we even convinced one of the more enthusiastic boys to take over as the dance leader.

The festivities lasted all day and it was the most fun I’ve ever had picking up the most filthy trash I’ve ever seen in my life. A lot of the kids were picking up trash barefoot, and we had to tell one girl to leave a random pile of garbage where it was because it wasn’t going to fit into our bag. Of course, this being Kenya, the day ended with several riveting hours of boring speeches. It was after 3pm and we hadn’t had lunch yet. But we were on stage in the guest of honor section so we couldn’t excuse ourselves. Plus we wouldn’t be allowed to leave until we each had made a speech. The last speaker said, “The good thing about going last is that everyone has already said everything. The bad thing about going last is that I end up repeating what everyone has already said.” And then he proceeded to speak for another 15 minutes.

Rafting Wrap-Up, Or How I Found My Sense of Humor in Uganda (How Did It Get All the Way Over There?)

2006-04-13T15:18:00.000+03:00

So a month later I am posting something called Rafting Wrap-Up, mostly because I just received an sms out of the blue from one of the rescue kayakers in Uganda who saved my ass about 20 times, and was suddenly reminded that I haven’t blogged yet about one of the best things to do in Africa: raft the Nile. Better late than never I guess.

There is a running tradition in PC/Kenya that each group of volunteers goes rafting in Uganda right after in-service training, about three months into their service. Because of the lockdown in November, our IST was postponed to December, and our rafting trip was postponed to March. I’ve been a swimmer my whole life but I don’t think those skills really cross over to being catapulted out of a raft into churning Class 5 rapids with euphemistic names like The Bad Place and The Dead Dutchman. So I was a bit reluctant to go. I’ve rafted a few times before, in the U.S. and in Thailand, but nothing more than Class 3 rapids. Rapids are graded from Class 1 through 6, and as PCV Misty, a veteran rafter, explains, Class 6 = Death.

Just a plug here for Nile River Explorers in Jinja, Uganda. There are three rafting outfitters that ply that stretch of the Nile flowing from Lake Victoria. Nile River Explorers supposedly is the cheapest, especially with the Peace Corps discount. The camp faces west over the river and has a nice bar, dorms, private cabins, campsite and best of all, shower stalls with one wall “missing” that looks out over the Nile. The staff and guides are top-notch, well-trained and take your safety seriously. Of all the outfitters I’ve ever rafted with anywhere in the world, NRE is the most professional and their guides and rescue kayakers are world-class. Many of them are on the Ugandan kayaking team.

Our whole group of 27 PCVs showed up at the put-in area the first day lathered in sunscreen and giddy with excitement, or second thoughts (“I’m voluntarily marching towards my own death. Admittedly a rather romantic one, in which my cold purple corpse could be floating down the longest and most legendary river in the world, eventually becoming an evening feast for crocodiles, Nile perch and cormorants.”)

A small flock of inflatable orange rafts was waiting for us on the bank of the river, while our guides tried to look busy (shirtless and flexing their muscles) doing some final maintenance on these thin tubes of rubber that meant the difference between returning to our noble lives as PCVs in Kenya, and a letter that begins, “We regret to inform you…”

Obviously the risks involved with rafting are smaller than I’m making it sound. The designated “safety talker,” Juma, hopped onto the end of his raft and began his speech.

“I’m Juma and I’m here to talk to you about safety. Unfortunately I don’t speak much English so hopefully you’ll eventually figure it out yourself.”

What’s this? Something strangely foreign yet familiar. A sense of humor? I haven’t seen one of those in awhile.

“To put on your life jacket, make sure you pull the straps really, really tight around your chest. Make sure it’s so tight you can’t breathe, because you don’t need to breathe when you’re underwater.”

After the safety talk, we selected our rafts. I climbed into a raft with Jen L, Tom, John, Tessa, and Patrick (who later bailed due to that fact that he’s smarter than the rest of us). We settled into our chosen seats, paddles resting in our laps, helmets and life jackets strapped on tightly. The boat was still well inland, on the sandy bank. Our guide, Alex, came over to introduce himself, but instead just looked at us like we were idiots. “You’re all facing the wrong way,” he said.

Oh.

He instructed us to get out of the boat and carry it into the water. Good advice. Once we were on the river, Alex gave us another safety talk, about how to handle our paddles without decapitating or inflicting lifetime head injuries upon each other, how to respond to the commands he would use to guide us through each rapid (“Get down doesn’t mean get funky and start shaking your booty. It means crouch down inside the boat so that all your weight is lower.”), how to fall out of the boat, how to get back into the boat, how to float down the river, and how to communicate with the safety kayakers.

“Okay, are we ready to hit our first rapid?” Alex said in the most charming Ugandan-New Zealand accent ever.

“Uhh…” We’d probably never feel ready.

“Don’t worry, this is the first time I’ve ever guided anyone on the river. Hakuna matiti!” (No boobs.) “Oh, I mean, hakuna matata.” (No problem.)

As all the rafts made their way downstream towards the first rapid, a laid-back Class 2, we heard one boat scream, “Alex’s mom is a pregnant gecko!”

In retaliation, Alex had us yell, “Juma is a lizard!”

A few moments later Juma sailed by and said, “Hey Alex, how are your wife and my two kids?”

I started to realize that despite the fact that our guides were probably recycling these jokes and one-liners day after day for each new batch of rafters, I was laughing. Really hard. Like I hadn’t laughed in months. MONTHS.

I needed to lighten up at site. Lately there had been nothing to distract me from obsessing for hours on end about how absurdly offensive it is to be screamed at everywhere I go for looking different. Or about the suffering and struggle that people, especially women, in my community go through every day because of corruption and gender inequality.

Alex was a great guide, and a deadpan comedian who rarely cracked a smile at his own jokes, but laughed at everyone else’s stupid comments (the operative phrase being “laughed AT”, not WITH). Strangely enough, he claims he’s never been outside of Uganda, yet his accent sounds like someone who has lived in New Zealand for years. He took us all the way down the river without letting us flip, except for the very last fall, an insane Class 6 (“Death”) that involved a short portage to the last section, which was calm enough to be rated a Class 5. This was where “The Bad Spot” was.

We watched two rafts ahead of us sail right through with no problems, and we thought, “Maybe it just looks treacherous. We can do it.”

No, we couldn’t. We all shot out of the raft like cannon fodder, and within seconds the rescue kayakers had converged on us and plucked us all out of the water. We took a short hike to the pickup point, where our buses and a BBQ picnic were waiting for us. And by BBQ picnic, I mean the best lukewarm steak, salad and beer I’ve ever eaten in my life. The staff hustled us onto the bus so they could clean up before the rains came.

“Who’s going rafting tomorrow?” someone asked.

Not me. I had to get back to site. It couldn’t possibly get any better than today.

----------------

The next morning, I was on a truck with six other PCVs to go rafting again. We were the crazies, going back for a second dose of life-threatening adrenaline. (Not really, Mom.) Everyone else opted for a day of relaxation (read: drinking beer at the bar), hiking and swimming along the river bank, kayaking lessons, or for the truly fearless, bungee jumping over the river.

Each raft holds six rafters plus a guide, and there were seven in our group, so I volunteered to go in a raft with a bunch of strangers – a British couple and a German woman. I thought that fewer people in the boat meant we’d flip less often. I was wrong. We flipped on nearly every Class 3 and larger rapid.

Later I found out that just for kicks the guides basically instruct you in a way that makes the boat flip or not, depending on how much swimming he or she wants to see you do that day. Our guide was Juma, and he was a grinning troublemaker. Thanks to him, I got to know all the rescue kayakers pretty well.

And honestly, the more times I got thrown out of the boat, the more I began to shed my fear of the river. Most of the rapids look intimidating, but even the “washing machine” spots that suck you under and churn you around like an old pair of jeans eventually spit you out after 5 or 10 seconds, and then your life jacket forces you back to the surface. What makes it scary is when you don’t know the dynamics of these spots, and you think you’re being sucked to the bottom of the river. The guides warned us of sketchy places, and made it a point to avoid them, telling us which direction to swim if we got thrown out of the boat.

I had a painful sunburn on the top of my thighs from the day before, so I wore a long skirt in the boat. It seemed like a good idea at first, but ended up being a big drag, literally, everytime I fell in and tried to swim. But I didn’t want to be sizzling for another six hours because of what Misty describes as “basically sitting on a mirror all day.”

I didn’t have to worry about that. After an hour the equatorial sun started retreating behind some clouds. Some ominous gray clouds rose from the horizon behind us, and by lunch time we were basically paddling to outrun the storm.

The other three rafters in my boat stared at my head and started laughing hysterically.

“Look at your hair!” the German woman said. “It’s standing straight up!”

I looked at her hair and it was doing the same thing. It was like something out of a cartoon, long strands of hair sticking up perfectly straight, as if she had stuck her finger in an electrical socket.

“Um,” I said. “Isn’t this what happens to people just before they’re about to be struck by lightning?”

No one else seemed to think it was very plausible, and I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone, but (whisper) we didn’t get struck by lightning. But the storm had caught up to us, and it started raining big, heavy drops. The wind picked up.

“Juma, let’s paddle,” we said to our guide. “We’re getting cold.”

I was glad I’d worn my skirt after all, because although it was wet, it was still warmer to cover my legs with it than not at all. Even Juma was starting to shiver, and while we paddled, he huddled down in a ball inside the boat to keep warm.

“What a crap guide,” I said. “He’s so scared of the river he’s shivering.” I was still trying to get even with him for knocking me off balance when I was trying to dive off the edge of the boat earlier in the day. I’d fallen in sideways and sucked in a nose-full of schistosomiasis-infested Nile water.

All the rafts rendez-voused at the top of a big fall, a Class 5. The rain was pounding down in a blinding sheet now, and combined with sound of the roaring falls, everyone in my boat was basically staring glassy-eyed and intimidated at the rapids ahead of us, which we could barely see. Jen, the one female guide (who has a body of steel), paddled up with a bag of long-sleeved nylon pullovers and passed them to us as we gratefully reached out our cold, white, snot-covered hands.

“Let’s go,” Juma said after we’d put on our pullovers. We looked at each other in confusion. Go where? It’s raining.

We paddled into a rock-enclosed eddy to the right of the falls, and hung out for a few minutes. He just wanted us to find a calmer spot to rest, I thought, much to my relief. We were all still being pelted by cold rain, and I was in no mood to go over those giant falls and be cast into the water when I was already feeling hypothermic.

“How long do you think it will be until the rain lets up?” I asked Juma. He shrugged.

“Let’s go,” he said again. I looked at the other people in the boat, who all looked as nervous as I did. We started paddling obediently, but we weren’t sure what he was thinking. We weren’t ready to go over the falls. “Paddle forward!”

The raft edged out of the eddy and downstream towards the rapid.

“Juma, we don’t want to go yet,” I said. The German woman behind me looked terrified.

“Paddle right!” he said. The boat straightened and we were heading into the falls.

“Wait,” I said. We all said it. “Wait! We don’t want to go yet!” The German woman started to cry. We stopped paddling in protest, but Juma paddled us closer to the falls.

“Juma!” I yelled. “Stop! Stop!” I imagined us all being flipped out of the boat and the German woman drowning in her panic. But it was too late. The rapids sucked in our raft eagerly and we were in the middle of it, being tossed high in the air on whitewater, then plunging down into the base of the waves, dwarfed by heartless, sparkling sea green.

“GET DOWN!!” Juma bellowed. We did. A large wave crashed over our heads and into our boat, but miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, we were still afloat and upright, and the rapids were behind us. We all looked at each other, then broke into huge grins. We’d made it! And we were warmer, because the river felt like bathwater compared to the rain.

“Let’s do it again! The water’s warm!” the British woman said.

I looked at the German woman, who was also smiling with relief. Then I looked at Juma, who was calm, but wouldn’t make eye contact with us. He seemed annoyed and hurt that we hadn’t trusted him.

At that moment, I realized that maybe an American guide would have waited until we were ready to go over the falls, but our Ugandan guide, despite ignoring our pleas, trusted his own instincts enough to take us through the falls safely. It’s not the way I would have done it, but even though we didn’t know it at the time, Juma knew the river, and his own skills, well enough to know he wasn’t compromising our safety. I loved this man.

The rain eased to a determined, but not aggressive, hammering. None of the guides had ever seen rain like this on the river before. Most of them had kayaked this stretch hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. Even though we were rafting the same route as yesterday, it felt like we were on a different river altogether. The rapids were no more or less brutal, but the weather made everything a greenish gray, and the rain elevated all our audio and visual surroundings to melodrama. The day was beautiful in its own right – moody, stark, and cold. We were literally at one with nature, not exactly embraced in her warm, reassuring bosom, but swallowed into her belly.

The day before had been one of those clear-blue African skies days, leisurely floating past vibrant green banana farms and the funny round huts common in this area of Uganda. Cormorants perched on poop-encrusted rocks, lazily fanning their wings to dry. The sun bore down on us, with no respect for SPF 45. Our legs, which had been covered by long skirts and trousers for the last nine months to protect the sensibilities of our conservative village communities, fried. Fortunately the safety helmets we were wearing, which made us all look like kids on the short bus, were dense enough that they shielded our faces, ears and scalps from the sun. I was one of the luckier whities. My legs only felt like they were on fire for two days. I could still walk, gingerly, and I never blistered. I only peeled – huge, satisfying sheets of skin, in clean wide strips. If you looked closely at the peels, you could even see the little holes where the hair follicles were. It was fascinating, to me only.

The rest of our trip was relatively uneventful. Juma directed us right into the roilingest part of each rapid and we were consistently tossed out of the boat as it flipped over, but by then we were all comfortable bobbing down the river in our life jackets, with our feet pointing up and in front of us, while safety kayakers chased after us. BBQ and beer greeted us at the end again, and the crazies all agreed that our second day on the river was even better than the first. No regrets.

When you visit Kenya, I’ll take you to Uganda.

Post-Larium Dreams

2006-04-03T08:23:00.000+03:00

April 3, 2006, Monday. 8:23am. Post-Larium Dreams

Well I stopped the Larium but I’m still getting weird dreams. I just woke up from a dream about discovering a gigantic cricket on my mosquito net. I mean GINORMOUS. Lobster-like. In fact it was inexplicably orange, as if someone had steamed it for a Cajun stew, and I thought its Alaskan king crab legs looked quite mouth-watering. PCV Shinita was staying over and was still sleeping in my bed. I woke her up and showed it to her. She looked at it, then PICKED IT UP as if it were a lobster and said, “What should we do with this?”

At this point you have to understand who Shinita is. This is the girl who thinks anything with more than four legs needs to be dead, but there’s to be no smashing with rubber flip flops or anything of the sort. If she sees a bug she recoils violently and immediately sprays it to death with Doom, the Kenyan equivalent of Raid. She singlehandedly keeps the Doom company in business. Everywhere she goes there is a can of Doom in her hand, or at least in her backpack. If she plans to sleep somewhere, it will get a healthy coating of Doom before she lies down. If there’s a single bug in your house she will spray the entire premises until you can’t see each other because of the cloud of Doom working its poisonous magic. She calls herself the “expert tucker” because she is so skilled at tucking her mosquito net into her bed that not even a virus could get through. If there’s even a tiny hole in her net she will scour her house until she finds a piece of dental floss or duct tape to patch it.

So in my dream Shinita picks up the cricket nonchalantly and says, “What should we do with this?” We discuss various options for awhile but can’t up with any good decision. Finally Shinita just opens the door and lobs the cricket onto my front lawn. It lands like a grenade, exploding and scattering dirt and cricket parts all over my yard.

“Wow, that was cool!” I said. “Did you know it was going to do that?”

“No, but I guess it’s gone now,” she said.

Then I woke up, and there were no crickets in my room, giant or otherwise.

Shamba Update

2006-04-02T10:27:00.000+03:00

Rainy season is in full swing and that means three things:

1. I’M FREEZING MY ARSE OFF. Every evening is an exercise in finding all the warm clothes in my house and piling them over my body, and finding something, ANYTHING, to cook just so I can light the stove. This peanut butter needs warming…that sort of thing. More importantly, I’m experimenting with how long I can go without having to bathe, because it gets pretty cold once the clothes comes off. I’m at day four right now, not quite a Peace Corps record since Ten-Day Sean easily drop-kicks my ass, but definitely a personal record.

2. If I set a cup, bowl or basin of anything down for more than five seconds, something will manage to fly or leapfrog into it. I’ve discovered a second definition for the term “spooning.” Take a spoon and scoop out whatever just kamikazied itself into my tea or bathwater. Fruit flies, moths, crickets, spiders, unidentified exotic species. I could start a veritable bug collection.

3. My shamba is growing!!

The headmaster at my school generously gave me two points of land, which is a sprawling one-fifth of an acre, for me to experiment with my gardening skills. Can I just say that the squash family is an eager and hardy bunch? My squash are already six inches tall and blooming with leaves, and the zucchini aren’t so far behind. The cucumbers are smaller, and only about a third of the seeds sprouted, but I might be eating cucumber salad this year! I’ve gotten in the habit of saving the seeds of everything I eat: garlic, green peppers, chili peppers, plums. And potatoes must be the cockroaches of the food crop world because they never die. I’m getting potatoes where I didn’t even plant potatoes! I’m planning garlicky buttery mashed potatoes every night, a nice change from Kenyan rice, which has been disappointing so far. Still under observation: tiny sprouts of broccoli, carrots, ginger, spinach, sweet red pepper and sugar peas. Another PCV gave me a little basil plant that he rescued from flowerpot death; I have fantasies of mozzarella and tomato drizzled with olive oil and fresh basil, but I may have to substitute paneer, which I can make for free using a bandana, vinegar and salt.

So all this and half of my plot is still fallow. I discovered an NGO in Eldoret that teaches workshops on how to start small agricultural and craft-making businesses. To compliment their agriculture classes they sell all kinds of not-so-local plants like strawberries. STRAWBERRIES! In Kenya! The cold and damp climate here has also spawned mushrooms in my shamba, but I’m told they’re poisonous. Disappointing. Apparently you have to forage deep in the forest to find edible mushrooms, and there’s already an army of locals that know all the secret places I don’t know. Fortunately there is another NGO near Kisumu that teaches farmers how to impregnate spores in cow poo or other favorable environments for growing edible mushrooms.

My shamba has also been my conference room. I think almost every half-decent idea, and lots of crap ideas, have come from a hoeing or weeding session with Hillary, debriefing each other on recent outreaches or meetings and exchanging ideas over clods of soil flying everywhere.

Not that working in the shamba is a constant high-powered strategic planning session. Usually we just say:

Me: Is this a weed?
Hillary: Yes.
Me: Is this a weed?
Hillary: Yes.
Me: How about this one?
Hillary: Yes.
Me: I should pull these weeds.
Hillary: NO! THOSE ARE YOUR CARROTS!

The AIDS Club Visits

2006-04-01T23:09:00.000+03:00

I’m working with a group of high school girls who have formed an AIDS Club at their school. Their patron, Mr. O, teaches religion at the school. Mr. O lost a brother to AIDS a few years ago and got involved with the AIDS Club to help his students get all the information they can about HIV/AIDS, and hopefully spare themselves and their families a similar fate. But he also teaches religion at a Christian-sponsored girls’ school.

So Hillary and I found our presentations being interrupted periodically by Mr. O’s reminders:

“As Christians you say NO to sex.”
“None of my girls here are infected, let me assure you.” How do you know? Have they all been tested? “No but they are all good girls.”
“I don’t want to see any of you putting those condoms into your pockets. You don’t have any reason to use them.”

There was definitely the usual tension among the students – of not wanting to ask every question that came to mind because the teacher was there – but Mr. O insisted on a STRA-TA environment, where everyone is expected to engage in STRAight TAlk and students are encouraged to share openly in exchange for being given honest answers.

I am becoming a fan of all-girls schools because I’ve found that the girls I’ve met who attend all-girls high schools are more confident and outspoken than their counterparts in co-ed schools, and most have a sense that they are as smart as, if not smarter, than boys, and entitled to the same educational opportunities.

Most of the time when I ask students for questions about AIDS I get asked the same things – how long can you live with HIV/AIDS, where did AIDS come from, what do you do if you find out you have HIV?

This crowd had no shortage of probing questions I’d never gotten before.

“Can a pregnant woman have sex?”
“Does lesbianism spread HIV?”
“Can a virgin use a female condom? How about a pregnant woman?”
“Why do women get AIDS more often than men?”

It was interesting insight into what teenage girls think and worry about. Lesbianism? Who knew? In co-ed schools where students feel that they are being watched and judged not only by their teachers and principal, but also by peers of the opposite sex, I rarely sense any willingness from students to reveal their true concerns about AIDS, and by default, sex.

Hillary also opened the discussion about whether women had a say when it came to sex and contraceptives. Half the group said Yes women can always say no to sex or tell their partner to use a condom, while the other half shook their heads No.

“What about a married woman?” he asked.

“No,” they all said. “A married woman can’t tell her husband No.”

Mr. O said, “This is why we want you to know all there is to know about AIDS and sex. So you can choose a good husband who will respect you when you say no or when you want him to use a condom, instead of choosing an idiot.”

Score one for Mr. O. He’s on my team! Even though some of the things he said gave me the shivers (“Keep in mind that if you get HIV, you might cause your parents to divorce. Your father will blame your mother for not educating you about HIV and he’ll leave because it’s the mother’s responsibility to teach girls properly.”), he has an open mind and knows he doesn’t know everything. I’m finding that it’s not enough for me to talk to girls about gender equality and empowerment. It’s nice to have female role models and peers for hatin’-on-men sessions, but for women to gain equality men have to buy into the cause as well. And it’s also nice for girls to see that not all men are rotten, that there are men who support and encourage their growth as individuals and as a collective group, which is why I keep Hillary around when I speak to girls and womens’ groups.

It was also a myth-busting session. Hillary was reading statistics on HIV prevalence by province in Kenya, with Nyanza Province having the highest infection rate by far, due mainly to cultural practices, and a fishing industry that depends on migrant workers. Everyone turned and giggled at Mr. O because he’s from Nyanza.

Quite keenly, I thought, Mr. O said, “You may think it’s just a Luo problem because we Luos are all living in Nyanza, but many of your relatives go to Kisumu to work. Many of your relatives might travel to Kisumu to be tested for HIV because they don’t want to be seen at a VCT near their home. So those numbers could include your people, the Kalenjins, not just those other tribes you normally think of who get AIDS.”

Score two for Mr. O.

Nairobi is a Cloud of Poison But Still

2006-03-26T13:46:00.000+03:00

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

2006-03-24T00:48:00.000+03:00

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.