Life in Nairobi

After being in a pretty rural area for about three weeks, it is pretty nice to be back in a big city.  My room is located in Ongata Rongai, which is a suburb of Nairobi.  I’m really close to supermarkets and malls, so I am able to stock up on supplies pretty easily

My room is in a building populated by college students who go to nearby Nazarene University.  It is kind of like being in a dorm/ fraternity.  We all eat together and the TV is in a common area where all the guys gather to SCREAM at soccer games.  Sunday Funday is definitely a thing here, just replace football with soccer and the liquor stores are open so no one drives to Wisconsin. 

I have a double room to myself and I’m a good four years older than everyone else so I kind of feel like an RA.  I’ve never felt old or nerdy before until now.  I’m trying to build up my Villa Sandra street cred by cracking my door and playing my music equally loud as everyone else.  Everyone is super nice, though, and are helping me do things like find taxis and turn on my hot water.

My room is pretty big and has a private bathroom, with the infamous showerhead that pours out over the whole bathroom.  I have a hilarious velvety red bedspread that pairs with my mosquito net and dark wood bed to create quite a moody scene.  I’ve put up some pictures and set up my desk so it feels really homey.  The pride of my room is my hot pot.  You have to boil water to drink it here, and I was sick and tired of buying 5 liter jugs of water every two days, so I invested in my future.  I even got some powdered milk and nescafe.

I’m back to handwashing my laundry, too.  Expect me to have really muscular arms when I return.  

View from the hall outside my room

View from my window

Moody Bed Scene

World Literacy Day and New Friends

World Literacy Day and New Friends
The first Monday that I worked was World Literacy Day, and since a major mission of the HO is to increase literacy by making literature in mother tongues more widely available, we did a few special activities.  I made a powerpoint of a story called “Tom Tom,” about an old man who sells bananas, and we read them with class two.  I got a lot of good pictures for the HO, most of which I will not share here because they are of children who didn’t ask to have their pictures distributed.  We did run into a snag when the laptop died and the solar charger malfunctioned, but it was overall an interesting day.  Memorization and repetition figure highly into the instruction methods here, but there really are not a lot of resources like paper and writing utensils to do very much else.

I am also making some new friends here.  Caren is 28 and the most youthful and energetic teacher.  I was amazed when she said she has two sons at home.  We go on walks together and actually talk about more than the obvious how-are-africa-and-america-different topics.  She definitely took me under her wing and has offered to take me to visit Obama’s grandma in January!  She (Obama GMA) lives about 40 miles away from here.

Caren

Cathy and Mary are very maternal and call me “good daughter.”  It is hilarious showing them some of the tech stuff because it is just like watching any other grandma get all wide-eyed and panicky in front of a computer

Cathy and I on WLD

Willis is the middle-school science teacher who has decided I will be his wife.  He told his mother about me.  He is a really funny and jovial guy.

Willis

Humphreys is serious and I don’t quite get him yet.  He is really nice, though, and always bustling around working at school.

Humphreys

Wilburforce drives me to school, so we get the chattiest time of anyone (about an hour a day together on a motorcycle).  He is very nice but he’s suspect because he asked if I would like to marry a married man and have a polygamous family.  Maybe I’m reading into it, but about ½ the guys I have met here propose, so….

Me and Miriam, and ECD teacher

I am also approached and talked to by a lot of people when I run errands or just go for a walk.  I understand I am an oddity, but it can be a hassle.  Everyone is really nice but I just can’t trust everyone who comes up and talks to me.  Some people are truly nice and curious and want to make the outsider feel welcome (let’s be real, it’s obvious I am an outsider).  Some want to convert me to Evangelism (it is big here).  Some want to marry me.  So it is pretty nice to have a group of people to work with that I really enjoy and trust.

Munanga School

Working at Munanga Primary School

I am settled in and quite comfortable at my sugar plantation hotel now.  It rains nearly every day and the electricity will go out for hours at a time, but the staff is so nice and helpful, and the food is fantastic.  

Depending on the weather, I go into Munanga primary school between 7 and 11 every day.  If it rains too much, the roads are not passable by boda boda (passenger motorcycle), which is how I get to school.  Even when I wait for the sun to dry out the road, I usually still have to walk the last ½ mile or so.   This is really important because the teachers have vowed to make sure I gain 10 kg during my stay here.  I’m not about to let that happen.  

 

Wilburforce and Caren

Munanga school has no access to electricity or running water (they do have a borehole and latrines), and the teachers and kids have to walk about 3 miles to get there every day (and again after lunch), so this is a very different school environment than I have ever been in.  I am supposed to help the teachers get oral histories recorded in mother tongue by members of the community and put them up on the HO website, then use the technology given to them by HO to use the stories in the classroom.  We had a focus group the first day and the teachers said they were using the projectors and computers in the classroom, but I quickly realized that they were stretching the truth a little.  They really did not know how to use the projectors or solar charger and I think they did not want to tell D this so that they would not use their subsidy.  I really felt for them because I know the organization doesn’t have the resources or time to really train them with the technology, and the projectors were not the most user friendly.  My first day was spent getting all their tech kits up and running.  

Humphreys talking about the program

On day two (a Monday), I already felt so comfortable in the school.  I am sort of set up in the head teacher’s office, but I actually get up, walk around sit with other teachers, and sit in the sun outside.  If you know my very well you know when I get into work mode I don’t like distractions or moving around, so this is a little out of the ordinary for me.  I know that since part of my job will be to follow up on the focus group and gather some information from the teachers, I will really need them to trust me.  Also, they are my only friends in town, so let’s be real, I need to nurture these friendships.  

 

view through the main school building

The schedule of the day usually involves me setting up and working until 11 in the office, then we take tea at 11.  African chai is so good, with lots of milk and spices, so it tastes like what we call “chai tea” in the US.  Chai means tea, so this name is kind of funny.  It translates to “tea chai.”  We usually have tea with chapatti or mandazi, which are like slightly less sweet donuts.  After tea I bring my work outside and switch between chatting with the teachers and conducting informal interviews.  Lunch is at 1:30 and is usually dried beef, kale and ugali.  The rest of the day I just do what is needed.  Sometimes the teachers want IT help or they want me to help with typing up emails or stories.  Sometimes I just end up chatting as the teachers’ days get less busy.  We all have a lot of questions about how things differ between the US and Kenya.

 

This is the kitchen

After school I go home, shower (I AM FILTHY AT THIS POINT), and have dinner.  I am usually in bed by 9!  Hard as I try to drink water and hang out in the shade, I am usually dehydrated enough and tired enough from the sun that I am exhausted at the end of the day.

kinder classroom set up for a story on the projector

Living Luhya

Less than two days after arriving in Nairobi, I hopped on a plane and flew all of half an hour to Kisumu, a town in the west of Kenya on the shores of Lake Victoria.  I was initially nervous to leave again so soon, but I really, really like western Kenya.   A car took us about 1 ½ hours away to the county of Kakamega, pretty close to the Ugandan border.   This is the home of the Luhya people, among other indigenous groups.  They are closely related to the Luo people, which you might recognize because President Obama’s dad in Luo.  His family is actually from Nyang’oma Kogelo, which is about a 40 minute drive from where I will be staying (near Shibale, though the closest town that will show on a map is likely Mumias).  

We went straight to the Munanga School, a rural K-8 school a few miles outside of town where I will be working.  Just to clarify, I will not be teaching here, which is good, because I am not qualified to teach in Kenya nor do I speak any of the ~5 Oluwanga dialects that most of these kids speak.  Few know any English, and most don’t even speak fluent Kiswahili.  I am qualified, however, to do some capacity building with the teachers, help with IT, and gather information on project deliverables for my host organization (HO) (I won’t name the HO in my blog because I want to feel free to really express myself here and not have the blog pop up if someone were to google the org.  You can easily learn about the org from my facebook page that you probably used to link to this blog! ).  Sound boring?  Luckily it isn’t for me!  

Before we got to the school, however, our car got hopelessly stuck in the mud.  I’m talking a big 4WD truck here.  Rainy season is getting started, and the mud was thick clay.  We walked the rest of the way, which was mildly hilarious because I had been planning on changing in the hotel first and was wearing a floor (mud)-length dress and sandals.  We walked past many small farms where families were growing sugarcane and maize and I continued my new deep relationship with goats.  Everyone has a goat it seems.   Most of the homes were small and round packed mud houses with thatched roofs and neat lawns kept closely cropped by the friendly goats and cattle.  

The school itself seems impossibly small for the ~500 students but has a huge lawn and courtyard, and I bet that classes gather outside as well.  I met several instructors, including Humphreys and Willis, who were a huge help to me on that first day.  I could tell the teachers were tense because Dorcas was also here to hold a focus group, and they have been falling a little behind on their outcomes for the HO due to some issues with IT and a lack of internet connectivity.   Humphreys and Willis were loose and happy though, and they interacted with Dorcas like old pals.  They spoke in English a lot, but did some codeswitching to Kiswahili, so I didn’t know everything that was going on.  

After a tour we had a really amazing lunch that I could tell was prepared especially to welcome us.  We had kuku (chicken) stew, which is chicken with a red broth, rice, sautéed kale, chapati (sort of like thinner naan), and ugali, a maize dough.   They brought in water to wash our hands, because they were going to be our utensils.  I was pretty down with using my hands to soak the ugali in the tasty broth, but I nearly burned my finger tips off when I dug into the hot chicken.  Lesson learned: patience. Soon I was super full and sleepy.  A few of the teachers left with Dorcas to take care of some business and left me with Willis.  He joked about being the first black person I must have ever seen and told me that his people are secretly ruling the US through Obama.  An older man came in and spoke with him in Oluwanga, and he introduced me as his little sister.  In short, Willis is hilarious.  He was also hard at work finding me a place to stay for the next 16 nights in town, and was feeling very protective of me.  After a little negotiating, HO increased my budget a little so I could stay at the guesthouse Willis had his heart set on, because he said it was much safer.  When he suggested the other guesthouses closer to the road wouldn’t be safe, it was hard for anyone to say no. 

 

Ducha Lorenzetti, my old friend (hot shower!)

The car had gotten out of the mud and driven back to town, so Humphreys, Dorcas and I walked back to the nearby town of Eshiakula (like French chocolat), followed by a horde of school children who had just gotten out of class.  The walk was filled with the soundtrack of mzungu, mzungu! (white person).  We got to the car and drove right into Mumias Sugar, the huge sugar plantation and factory in town.  I would be staying in the guesthouse, which was not only safe but boasted a golf course, pool, sports facility, and perfectly groomed boulevards.  There is a little grocery store on the property a little less than a mile from my room, which is nice because I can’t afford to eat all my meals in the guesthouse kitchen.  After that long day I fell asleep at 7 pm, safely tucked under my mosquito net.