12.

My trip is reaching its close very quickly. I have about 10 days left in Chogoria and I will be sad to go. I feel like I have made some real strides in understanding things here, but there are still some areas that will remain unclear.

Thursday, we (Cara, Doreen Kageni, and myself) loaded the PCEA landrover with Macho (Henry) driving and headed out to Marimanti. Marimanti is the part of Tharaka that Millicent Garama works in. It is further out than Kajimpau where my sister congregation in. The main town is actually pretty decent in size and there is a tiny little hospital. This was a market day and the town was busy. The Tharaka South market by Kajimpau is filled with baskets, mats, shoes made out of old tires, and the standard electronic junk like flashlights. The market at Marimanti was mostly clothing and bananas. LOTS of bananas. On the 4 hour drive to get there we passed an irrigation project run by the Ministry of Agriculture. They were growing mostly bananas, but there were also papayas and maize. I have never seen such thick groves of bananas and the bunches were enormous! This really cemented in my mind the change that could take place with the introduction of an irrigation scheme for the Rural Development Project in Kajimpau. In talking to locals about it, I have heard that the best way to get a project like that going is really through the Ministry of Agriculture. They will send a representative to the area to hold meetings and explain the need and the benefits to the people. This helps to smooth out any bumps in the road on a local level as well as informs the government about development in the area and increases their awareness of the needs of those people. It sounds logical to me. Also, since they have started similar projects in the area, their guidance would probably not be amiss. I am sorry that I couldn’t get any pictures of the project that I saw it was incredible. I thought we would drive by it again on the way home, but we took a different route.

One of the things I was really interested in seeing in Marimanti, was a guesthouse that Millicent told me about last time we met. I did get pictures of it. Marimanti is closer to Kajimpau than Chogoria, and I thought that if in the future we were doing some work there it might be nice to have accommodation close by. The guesthouse was immaculate. Brand new, it can house up to 48 people comfortably with heated showers, nice beds, mosquito nets, and bathrooms with flush toilets. I was shocked. I guess they usually cater to small conventions, and there was a really nice meeting room immediately when you walk in to the building. I asked how much they charge and the rate was 1k in shillings per bed per night. This is a bit expensive, but by when you translate that into dollars it is about $15 per night and for such a nice place I think it would be worth it. There was also another place just down the road that wasn’t quite as good, but could serve the same purpose and would probably be a bit cheaper. Millicent called it “The Base” and many people that have worked for her NGO (PLAN International) have lived there for some time. This facility could also house a bunch of people.

My thoughts about Tharaka before this trip were that it was a place that definitely called to me, but I could never live there. This feeling was dramatically altered by Millicent. Not only could you live there, but you could probably live there comfortably. (I’d still be a bit nervous about malaria!)

We met a little girl at PLAN, and gave her a ride to the other part of town where she lives. She had just recently been fitted with a prosthetic leg as had gone in for a checkup at the little hospital. Millicent told us her story. Her mother was walking one day when she found a shiny metal thing in the sand. It was pretty so she took it home to show her family. While her daughter (in third grade) was looking at it and playing with it, it exploded. Apparently, unexploded grenades and bombs are often found in the forest and the desert where the military used to practice (British) as well as some are left by warring tribes and war lords from some time back. This was not the first time I had heard of this happening. The price for scrap metal is quite high, so when these items are discovered people take them to sell, or sometimes they just look interesting so they are brought home. It is really sad, and many adults and children have lost their limbs as well as their lives.

Millicent took us way out into Tharaka. Past the houses with tin roofs, past the huts with the thatched roofs, when there are no huts in sight but a few crumbling mud ones and you have crossed three rivers of sand there is tiny school. This school and the people that live near it needed water, clean drinking water. In Tharaka during the dry season the water from the boreholes is too salty to drink. In this area us was usually too salty to drink even during the rainy season and they had to walk very far to get there in the first place. PLAN, the only NGO in the area, saw the need and so they built a “Rock Catchment.” Millicent tried to explain this to me a few weeks ago but I just couldn’t envision it. It was well worth the 4 hour drive from Chogoria to get there! The natural resources of the area consist of enormous stones, sand, and more sand. How do you get water when this is all you have? I will tell you. Use the rocks and the sand. What they have done is scrubbed clean one o the huge rock faces and around the perimeter they have put cement channels. These channels collect any rainwater that touches the stone and siphons it into a huge tank at the bottom. The land around the stone is fenced off to keep animals from roaming through and contaminating the stone. There is not a lot of rain even during the rainy season, but the rock is so huge that their tank is insufficient to contain all of the water that could be collected. The water from the tank is only for drinking purposes, if you want to wash clothes you must collect water from somewhere else. This water project also raises a bit of money. If you want to use it you have to pay a small fee. People that use the water regularly pay a membership fee and then it is only a shilling to fill their water jug. If you are not a member, I believe I was told the fee is 10 shillings. This is extremely inexpensive when you consider that a small bottle of water in Chogoria is about 25 shillings. The poverty level of the community is taken into account and the small profits o to the maintenance of the system and the surplus is saved to build another tank someday. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. I took more pictures of that rock than anything else so far this trip. We hiked up to the top of the rock so that we could really understand how it worked and see the surrounding area. I would have been content to stay up there all day, but they wanted to take us to the market as well. I would really like to go back to that area again and if any of you get the opportunity to go there on future trips to Kenya, please jump at the chance. It is a bit of a hike for sure, but well worth it.

Friday I went to the Kieganguru primary day school just outside of Chogoria town. We actually took a matatu, but we could have walked. Janice the chairlady of the Chogoria church’s Women Guild is the new headmistress of this school. When we were having lunch together discussing the Guild, she brought up her school and I decided that I should visit before I go back. She told me about the needs of the school and that the children often come to school (where there are no meals served currently) without having eaten sometimes even for a few days. She told me that she has had several faint during the morning assembly because of hunger. The atmosphere of the school was very different than the other schools I have visited. The children at this school obviously have some real self-esteem issues. At other schools, the children are excited to see me and want to ask me so many questions; here many would not even look up from their desks. A member of this community told me that is was probably because their English was not very good and they were afraid, but that is not what I saw in their eyes. I am so glad that Janice has taken over, and her deputy Mr. Bundi was a jolly man with a lot of enthusiasm. The school actually has a lot of unutilized resources. The amount of land that they have is three times what they can use for the school alone; it has just sat unused for years. Janice wants to start a meal program at the school so much of the property has been planted with maize. There is also coffee, but no one has harvested it, it was just sitting there. I asked if there would be more vegetables and some beans planted next time and I think they will, water is plentiful and so is the land. The test scores at the school are very low and much of that is probably because hungry children don’t learn and develop properly. There was a block of classrooms that is currently sitting unused, and these will be used for a kitchen and serving area when the food program starts. I have a lot of hope for the future of that school. As long as the students and staff take advantage of what is available to them and work hard for a few years, everything will change from the attitudes of the community, the self-esteem of the pupils, the test scores, everything. I hope to get a report from someone in the future that the school has turned around; I really believe that it will. Before I left, the students gathered to lower the flag. They sang a song for me, I sang a song for them, and we all prayed together teachers, students, and staff before walking down the dusty road to our homes.

11.

Milimani continued…

The previous morning Ashford was a bit late in picking me up, this was not big surprise and not that big of a deal, but everyone here knows that I like to be on time (at least on time by their standards) and so they were very apologetic and were going to make a big effort to be on time this particular morning. They were not. Usually there is a mechanical problem with a vehicle, or you stop to pick up 10 people on the way, buy a newspaper, and talk to someone’s brother or uncle, whatever it is just how things are done. I don’t get too worked up about it I just head to David’s office where we chat or I read the paper. This morning I sat in his office and perused the paper and when Irene and Ashford showed up I found out that there was a man who had been beating his wife (he said what with but I didn’t understand) and it had put a bunch of holes in her head and she had bruises around her neck so Ashford was called to settle the dispute and take her to the hospital. We also found out that David’s brother-in-law had just died suddenly so it was a sad morning.

On the way to Milimani we stopped by Gregory’s furniture shop so that I could get a CD from him to reinstall a program on one of the computers at the school. It ended up not working which was too bad, but this gave me the chance to finish the paper and read the one from the previous day. I think it is really interesting to read the papers here especially the opinion pages and international news; they have an interesting take on world events.

One thing that constantly confuses me here is everyone seems to think that in America there is something called a “marriage contract” whereby people can be married for 5 or so years at a time and after that just walk away and pick someone else. I have never heard of such a thing, I have no idea where that comes from, but every other person I meet asks me about it. I know we have a high divorce rate and some of the Vegas marriages are a bit sketchy, but other than that I am at a loss.

This particular day at Milimani was the start of what I have decided to call “The Great Kenyan Chicken Fiasco.” I would not say that I grew up in a very rural area, but we had chickens, ducks, and various other poultry when I was living at home. I have helped slaughter these fowl and it was not a big deal to me. Irene and Ashford gave me a rooster. The idea was to have the cooks at the school there slaughter it for me, but I ended up having to go to town a bit earlier than planned. Over the course of the school day Chanticleer (not the rooster pictured on this site, that one comes later) strutted about the courtyard crowing and eating his fill of insects and such. When it came time for me to leave the staff and students had to chase him all over and Festus the head boy was the one who eventually caught him. So they tied up his legs and put him in the car with us. Once we got to Girl’s Boarding, we brought the pretty rooster to the kitchen staff to take care of for me and then they were going to bring it to my room so I could cook it. I ran away very quickly after he was handed to the man chopping firewood.

In the US when you buy a chicken at the supermarket it is nice and clean and all the nasty bits have been taken out. This was not the case when I was brought my gift an hour later. The head was removed and he was plucked but that was it. I only have one knife here and it is about “as sharp as a chemistry teacher’s cardigan” to borrow a quote from a favorite Britcom. I was still okay with the whole thing and decided to try my hand again at fried chicken. I had a “chicken masala” spice mix and used that to season the flour, but before I could get that far I had to get the bird into pieces that would fit in my little frying pan. I watch the food network and have been cooking for sometime so I didn’t think that this would be a problem. The counters are basically porous concrete and I didn’t want to cut it up on there because I didn’t think that I would be able to clean it well enough later, so I chose the stainless steel sink instead.

This was a bad decision. To cut this part of the story down a bit (I will give you more graphic details after I get home if you are interested) I will just say that the plumbing here is unreliable at best. If you put anything down the drain besides water, you get to do a bit of plumbing. I think I am getting pretty good at it (at least with the kitchen sink). Needless to say it was not the most pleasant experience of my life and I scrubbed up to my elbows with bleach later.

Back to Chanticleer. The innards and neck didn’t bother me nearly as much as the feet. Who leaves the feet on anyway! I thought it would be simple enough to break the joint and get them off. I wasn’t really. So with my glorified butter knife I chopped the tendons around the joint (or so thought) and went to snap the joint apart. I didn’t do a good job of getting through the tendon, because as I bent his leg the headless rooster grabbed my arm. I’m glad that no one was there to see my reaction and I’m fairly sure that God is still laughing at me. I must have jumped four feet in the air, threw the carcass and knife into the sink, and was almost out the door of the kitchen before I realized what had happened. It was a bit traumatic but also funny. The fried chicken I made was actually really good I couldn’t eat the whole chicken, but it was a lovely present.

I thought that this would be the end of the chicken trauma for a while at least. I told Cara all about it the next day and she had a good laugh. That morning, (Friday) we were to meet with the Chogoria South Women’s Guild and their chair lady Selena (lovely cheerful lady who is actually from the Nendeni (arid mission area) adjacent to Kajimpau in Tharaka (my church’s sister congregation)). We had a long chat with the ladies there and Felix the moderator of that presbytery. The churches that these ladies represented didn’t seem to have sister congregations and there was some hurt feeling over that so I explained that we were currently in the process of revising that. I also explained that in some of the churches in ND there are maybe only 10 members and some of the reasons why that happens. After I explained this to them, they were okay and understood the difficulty we were having in matching up the churches. However, the ladies in this area were much more motivated than some of the group I have met with and I think when they are paired up with congregations in the US good things will come. The devotion and scripture reading that we shared together that day was about being patient and waiting for God to do things in his own time. I shared with them about my last trip to Kenya and how I had always thought that I would come back, but was planning on going after I graduated from college. How this trip came together in such a short time is definitely the hand of God. The people that I have met and the experiences I have had (most of which are not posted here) are not by chance. God’s time is always best.

After the meeting Eliud picked Cara and me up from the church and took us to the Kirumi primary school and to his school the Igwanjau Academy. We stopped at these places briefly and then went to meet his wife at their home for lunch. There was a little old lady who didn’t speak English who joined us for the meal. With Eliud translating she told us that she was among the first people in the region to get married during the day time. Before that, marriages took place at night. I thought that was fascinating and something I had never even heard of. I not sure if it was from her, Eliud, or maybe both but as we went to leave the house I was again presented with a beautiful cock to have for my supper. Eliud told me that he wanted to slaughter me a pig, I’m rather glad that he didn’t, the rooster was a great gift and one I will never forget. I can’t imagine what I would do with a pig! Cara took a picture of me with my rooster Chanticleer II, Eliud, wife, and the little old lady.

After we got the rooster into the car we went back to the Kirumi School and had the typical tour / greeting of all of the students. Once we had visited all of the classes, the students assembled outside and they performed several songs and dances for us, one of these was about a boy who was afraid of the circumciser. It was really funny, but pertinent to the boys who were singing and dancing as they are in Std. 8 and circumcision is what is in store for them at the end of the year.

At the next school we didn’t have as much time so the teachers decided that after greeting all of the students we should sit and talk to the two oldest classes. The teachers wanted us to tell the students how to do well in school, how to improve your test scores, how to get into a university, etc. This is all well and good, but the Kenyan educational system and procedures are different from the American ones. We kept things very general and eventually the kids just started asking us questions about the US and college. One of the teachers asked me to sing a song because they had heard that I help with the Sunday school music in church. I sang a song and I even surprised myself, it sounded pretty good. Then they wanted me to teach the kids how to sing like that… AYE! So I did a few little warm up things with them and talked about how the voice is controlled by muscles and compared athletics to training your voice, warming up is like stretching before you run, breathing is important, etc. One thing I have noticed here is that a lot of the “singing” that goes on is really glorified shouting so I also said that if you are singing and it hurts you are doing something wrong, louder does not mean better and you can actually do permanent damage to your voice. We had a good time and if anything we tried to impart to the kids that we are learning the same things as they are in school and that Kenya is not so different than the US in the grand scheme of things. School is still expensive, homework is still boring, and school food is never good. (Except at Milimani)

10.

So, Monday I was at the Chogoria Girl’s High School. I went to an English class in the morning under the pretext of observing, however, I have found that wherever I go to “observe” I will end up teaching something. Usually, I think that this is because the students just want to talk to me and the teacher sees me teaching them something as the most orderly way for me to interact with the kids in the context of the classroom. The class was a Form 3 which is equivalent to our grade 11. The lesson began with the teacher giving the students the instruction to “Indicate by cycling the word” where the underlined letters are pronounced differently. The first set consisted of “ooze, fool, too, and poor” with the double ‘oo’ underlined. The students and the teacher had a hard time with this. While the teacher looked for the answer in her book, I told the children to pay close attention to the shape and movement of their lips as they said the words. The problem was that they pronounced all of the sounds the same, so I read them very slowly with my American accent. The second set was “Then, through, think, and thin” with the ‘th’ underlined. They struggled with this one as well, so I told them to pay attention to how their tongues touched their front teeth as they pronounced the words. I was then asked to continue the lesson on simile and metaphor as seen in a short poem from their books. After that, the girls asked me questions about school in the US. I mentioned I was here to do some research on the changing roles of women in Kenyan society. The teacher then gave me one of the novels that the class was reading about a Luo woman (one of the many tribes of Kenya and noted for being the enemies of the Kikuyu and Meru who are found in this region) because she felt it was a fairly accurate portrayal of the life of a woman here. I read half the book in one night, it is fairly short. While I don’t think that there was much new information in it than what I have already heard and read, it was an interesting look at what content children are allowed to read in school. The girls reading this book were 16 and 17, and I was shocked at some of the explicit descriptions and details in the text. I would elaborate further, but I know that there is a mixed audience reading this blog.

Today I asked Irene Ndiga who has been a teacher, head teacher, headmistress, and now manager of various schools in Kenya about the standards for such content in school texts. It seems that there really aren’t any. The ministry of education just picks things from publishers, gives them a grade level, and schools choose what they want to adopt for there students from a packet which is produced every year. I imagine this is similar to the scholastic book form that elementary children receive from their schools so often; a picture of the book and 5 or so lines of description.

After the English class it was time for lunch. That day the teachers were treated to a chicken and soda lunch by one of the parents who was very pleased about their child’s results in the school. Chicken is a real treat here! (Although they aren’t very expensive, a cheap chicken costs about 250 ksh)

After lunch I was taken to “observe” a computer class. I will preface this by saying that my knowledge of computers I feel is rather limited. I know how to do a lot of things but my understanding of many of the technical aspects of the machines is not up to snuff. I thought it was really interesting to see what the children were learning about computers. To me the lesson seemed a bit scattered. They covered a lot of terminology but it didn’t seem to go together in such a way that the girls would be able to see the practical application of what they were learning. The teacher talked about input devices as “ peripherals that accept data and transfer it to the CPU” and output devices as “anything that feeds information from the CPU to the user… in the form of hard copy or soft copy.” This was all well and good, but then he went on to introduce the idea of pixels. His definition was a pixel “is the smallest part of the display that can be changed” The students did not understand and so he drew a square on the chalkboard and made a dot inside and called that a pixel. The girls continued to ask questions, they understood that pixels were very small, but he never told them how they could change as in his definition and this is what confused them. I was trying to think of something that the students would be better able to visualize than a dot on the board. I chimed in with the teacher’s permission. I told the girls to imagine a skyscraper, like in Nairobi, covered with windows. A pixel is like one of those windows and the light can be turned on or off the pattern of lights on and off in the windows is what makes up the image that we see on the computer screen. I’m not sure that this was the best way to describe it to them but I think they got the general idea. The lesson continued with hi giving more terms and descriptions and I am fairly certain that much of it was inaccurate, but like I said computers are not my specialty so I held me tongue, until he tried to explain the difference between an LCD screen and CRT monitor. He openly admitted to the girls that he had no idea how either worked. I know how a CRT monitor works so he let me explain that to the girls and I told them the little I know about LCD screens. One thing that I have a hard time with here is that they have new technology like laptops, but no one knows how to take care of them and how to treat them properly. This was my opportunity to tell people to keep their fingers off the LCD screens and I jumped at it. They all have calculators so we discussed how when you touch those screens the image distorts. The same principle applies to flat panel computer screens. If you poke them too hard you can damage them so don’t touch!

After this lesson I had the opportunity to sit in the library with two of the girls working at the school until they can get accepted into a university. They had finished secondary last year, but in Kenya there is a year wait to find out if you are accepted into a University you do not go directly like in the States. We sat and chatted for some time about marriage practices and the expectations of a wife/woman in Kenya today. One of the girls was a Muslim (although she did not have her hair covered) and the other was a Christian from a very rural area. It was interesting to get their different perspectives on the changing customs and traditions.

One of the events I was looking forward to the most was the Chogoria Music Festival. All of the primary schools have teams that practice poem recitation, songs, traditional dances, and even public speaking. Then they all meet at one of the area schools and invite representatives from the board of education to be the judges. It was outside in an open field adjacent to one of the schools (I can’t remember the name just now) that had a huge mango tree in the middle. The teachers roped of a square in front of the tree to be an arena for the kids to sing and dance in. People showed up with food carts and sodas to sell. The day would have been perfect, but it was sprinkling rain and cold. The kids all did a great job. It was really fun to watch the dances especially. Most of the schools had assembled costumes, made hats, and even painted the children. I have a lot of pictures and some video from the day. The cutest entry was preprimary and maybe up to Std. 1 children that dressed up like adults in little suits and hats and the girls all had little white dresses and hats. They sang a medley of English folk tunes like “here we go loop de loo” and they had little dances for each one. Cara and I wanted to scoop them all up and take them home! They were just precious! One of the more humorous groups to us was from Chogoria Girl’s Boarding where I am staying. The girls were wearing bright yellow shirts that said “no sex.” This had nothing to do with their song. I think they got the shirts because they were cheap and enough for all of the girls to be wearing the same thing.

On Wed. and Thursday I was able to go back to Milimani. I'm not sure what is so attractive to me about this school. Irene the manager is “no nonsense” woman, but a sage in the business and workings of a school. Her head teacher Stella is young, energetic, involved in all aspects of the school, and shows a real enthusiasm for motivating and encouraging the students through her example. I also have to say that I have had lunch and supper at many schools in the area and the cooks at Milimani are just better. I’m not sure what the difference is, maybe they use a bit more salt or cook the maize longer, but I would even pay for my lunch there and that is a compliment! The teachers are very friendly and I have really enjoyed their classes. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the entire staff of the school is excellent because Irene wouldn’t stand for anything else. She works very hard and expects the same from those around her. Wed. the students were busy all day taking an exam so it was fairly quiet. Stella took me for a walk through the countryside with the intent of showing me where the foresters live up on the mountain. We did a bit of off-roading and ended up jumping over elephant piles, slogging through swamp, chased by an angry cow, and scaling the hill through the middle of someone’s tea. It was eventful to say the least. We never got to the forester’s because of the cow, so she took me to visit a church and another neighboring primary school. When we got back, classes were over and it was time for the Christian Club meeting. They said some prayers and sang a few songs and then I was given the opportunity to teach the kids some songs. This was good because I haven’t had time to teach songs to all of the classes and there were some jealousy issues. Now all of the kids got a chance to learn them.

After the meeting was over, I sat with the kitchen ladies who were sorting through the rice taking out the little pebbles, and grains which were still in their husks. This was dusty work but it gave me a great chance to commune with Kenyan women. We sat in a circle and talked about marriage practices and expectations for a while. The women were obviously comfortable with me and there were no men around so I was able to ask a lot of questions that I usually don’t get answers to. We talked about abuse and how common it is first. In my book it says that in Kenya more often than not alcohol and abuse go hand-in-hand. I would venture to guess that this is the case around the world, but I asked about it nonetheless. It was clear that the women had never thought about it that way. They told me that it was more a case of culture than alcohol and it is not as accepted as it used to be. While they didn’t seem very concerned with physical abuse, they were actually eager to tell me about mental abuse. The book also talked about this and how mental or emotional abuse goes along with the physical. In many regions women were treated like children by their husbands. They were not allowed to control any of the money or even know if there was any. They were talked down to like they were unable to make any decisions and weren’t allowed to anyway. This was only mentioned by the women and then they went on about how it is just expected that your husband will have an affair, and if you confront him about it when he does, that is when he will beat you. My western brain was shouting, “It is expected that your husband will have an affair! That is ridiculous!” What I actually said was, “So, you all seem to agree that this behavior is common, but how common is it really?” One lady told me that 99% of husbands will cheat and the rest nodded in agreement. I have struggled with that figure for a while. Surely it must be a bit inflated, but they looked so convinced. My shocked expression and relative loss for words prompted one of the ladies to say, “Your husband will just tell you ‘a man cannot live on githeri alone.’” Githeri is the staple food of this region made of maize and beans (sometimes they throw in some cabbage and onions) which are boiled together for hours. I was too flabbergasted to think of anything else so I then asked about polygamy. It isn’t common anymore in this region. I believe they told me that in the Western province it still happens although it s becoming less common now. One comment that the book made that I initially shrugged off was that it was a commonly held belief that in Kenya there are more women than men and this justified polygamy for some time because people thought that it was actually for the benefit of women. More would be able to marry and have their own children in a polygamist community. The actual percentage of men and women in Kenya after the last census was almost exactly 50/50 give or take a little on both sides. The conversation continued with the ladies trying to decide which Kenyan man I should marry and me inquiring about how much would be paid to my family in the way of cattle, grains, and such. This was interspersed with tips on how to pick through the rice more efficiently and other skills I would need to develop to be a Kenyan wife, like how to make the millet porridge that is so popular here.

Milimani to be continued…

9.

I just got back from a trip to Nairobi with the staff and committee of the Chogoria Complex. Before we left I told a few people in emails that I thought it was going to be a real experience, forsooth it was!

The day before we left, I was talking to David about how no one here seems to be on time, ever, and that it was hard for me to adjust to. I don’t have a problem with 10 minutes here and there, but (as Ashford told me here) the general rule is to take what time someone tells you and add an hour to that. Aye! Church doesn’t even start on time. “What time does the service start, 9 okay,” 10:15 rolls around and things finally get going and I have noticed that the service will start and after the first prayer and a song or two THEN everyone is there. So when I asked David what time we were leaving in the morning and he told me 5am, I was skeptical to say the least. Those that know me well know that I am anything but a morning person, so the prospect of being ready to leave at 5 and then having to wait around a hour for people to show up would not make me happy. David, in his infinite wisdom, said, “Maybe it is best that I just call you when we are ready to go.” Good plan. I said, “That sounds excellent. We will plan on being ready at 5 and then you can just let us (Cara and myself) know when to come down.” So around 5:30 we got the call and around 6 we finally had everyone and left.

Since we left so early they decided that we should stop in Embu at the Morning Glory Inn to take tea. I had an Andazi, which is roughly the Kenyan equivalent of a doughnut. It is a triangle piece of fried bread, which is lightly sweetened. It is hard to go wrong with a deep fried starch! After Embu, we were finally on the road to Nairobi. The first place we stopped was at “Mamba Village.” Mamba is the word for crocodile, and they had a lot of them! They are really interesting animals and I found out that a crocodile doesn’t have a tongue. I’m pretty sure that alligators do however. They had one croc who was 34 years old and he was huge. I’m fairly sure that if he was hungry he could have swallowed me. It was an interesting little park and after the crocs we found a spot in the picnic area there to have the meeting. This trip was really for the teachers and the committee to get together and discuss things that have been going on at the school, test results, and share any ideas to improve things. I think the meeting went really well and everyone there was first and foremost concerned with the children’s future and making their education the best it could be. There was one parent, however, who voiced some concern about the number of textbooks that the children had access to. I learned that it is common for a book to be shared between two pupils. No one but that parent seemed to think that this was an issue. She was wondering if there was a way for parents to be able to pay for extra books so that their children didn’t have to share, and then maybe their scores would improve. The answer to her query was that for all of the books that the children have to share there is a supplemental one as well so “there is no problem.” I guess I understand both sides of this. The school is trying to save funds and the Complex offers things tot heir students that many other day schools don’t, but at the same time I think I would have found it hard to share a textbook with another student, especially when it came time to work on assignments.

School texts is an area of interest and concern at home for many. There have been a few who have mailed really nice textbooks to schools in Kenya, but the problem is the Kenyans have there own books with their own curriculum and it is on that same material that all of the children across the country are tested on for their national exams. While they like the books, they are only used as reference material or supplemental to the other books published here. (I say this knowing that there is a closet in my parent’s basement filled with used literature books that I had planned on sending over). This also seems to be the story for Sunday school curriculum. The PCEA (Presbyterian Church of East Africa) prints curriculum that is sent out to all of the presbyteries and is distributed to all of the churches from there. This way all of the children across Kenya that go to Sunday school are given the same material and the content has been approved by the big wigs. This is very different from how things are handled at home. It has been my experience that curriculum is decided on a church-by-church basis by the Christian education committee or Sunday school superintendent of that congregation. I am finding that the Kenyans have a real respect for authority and when it comes to decisions about course content they give complete authority to those in power. While I think that this may lead to lack of creativity, I also think that in Kenya, where there is so much potential for growth and development, standardization of educational materials isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They are working really hard on equality issues of all sorts. One of, if not the biggest, factors in reaching a point where people come close to being equal in a society is education. If a child is very bright but comes from a poor family and thus goes to a cheap day school, is it right that the rich kid in the boarding school gets better and more accurate texts to learn from? What the government is doing by limiting the choices in educational texts is leveling the playing field for children from different socio-economic groups. Church and school go hand in hand here so it is no surprise that the churches have copied this principal.

Back to the trip, David had been trying for some time to find accommodation for everyone affordably in Nairobi. No luck. Before we left, he asked Shem (The headmaster of the Kimuchia School where Cara is staying) for recommendations. He gave David a lead of a place and so we went. The rooms were 700ksh for a single and 1400ksh for a double (at the current exchange rate that means it was about $20 a person) The Kenyans thought that this was really expensive! David was thinking of everyone on the trip however and said that he would be staying here with us and if anyone wanted to find accommodation elsewhere they were welcome, just be back by 8am. The rooms were just fine. I’ve stayed in worse in the states. It was a small room (you couldn’t open the door all the way because of the bed) and the beds were firm to say the least. It was roughly what I would estimate it would be like to sleep on a pile of corrugated cardboard, not rock hard but pretty close. This was then wrapped in plastic, with light pink sheets that had the hotel name stamped on them; the pillowcases were the same also with the stamp. (They are big on stamping things here) The pillow was pretty good, better than the one I have here in Chogoria, but it had nothing on my nice down-filled one at home. The bathroom was small and moldy, but it had a toilet and it flushed. Cara and I each had part of a roll of toilet paper on the end of the bed with a towel and mini soap. The shower was basically right above the toilet as the whole bathroom was about the size of a large coffee table. We opted not to take showers, but it would have been just fine. For supper we walked across the street and ate at the “Roast House” where I had my standard “chicken and chips” i.e. unbreaded fried chicken and fries, and passion fruit juice. Kenyan sodas are nouvelle for a while when it is hard to order a water and know that it is safe to drink, but soda all the time gets old. I have started ordering juice at a few places because I have found that it is 100% fresh juice that they squeeze themselves more often than not. I also feel better knowing that it is juice with vitamins and not soda with sugar and some more sugar. When you walk in the door you are greeted by the rather unpleasant sight of giant sausages, strange foot+ long rolls of meat, and other things I couldn’t or at least didn’t try to identify. I had a really bad headache and we went to bed around 7, but talked for several hours after that. It was a long day and it was nice to just lay in the dark and relax even if we didn’t go to sleep right away. This was downtown Nairobi and there was a club across the street so it wasn’t very quiet, but it was still quieter than the girls outside my window. (They’re in 5th grade and at a boarding school, I don’t blame them for being noisy in the least)

The morning was breakfast at 7:30 to make sure we were ready to go at 8 like we were told, but as we loaded the bus at 8 we found out that many had just showed up and were just going to breakfast (again at the Roast House restaurant across the street) So we sat on the bus and waited for them. This may sound like complaining. I don’t mean it to be. It did get tiresome, but it is part of Kenyan culture and I have accepted that this is just the way it is going to be. It was funny to Cara and me because just the day before at the meeting they were talking about how punctuality is one of the major areas that could improve the school, and what does everyone do, show up late.

We went to the Kenya International Conference Center which is smack dab in the middle of all of the government buildings and we were going to go to the roof to see the view of Nairobi. After going through the standard metal detectors, we proceeded to the elevators where we were told to make a line. Cara and I have also found that Kenyans are more than willing to budge and even push you out of the way in a line so as a result we were towards the end of the queue. This was not a bad thing as it turned out because the first group to go up in the elevator got stuck midway for twenty minutes! With the number of people that crammed in there, it would not have been one of the more enjoyable experience of the trip and one I was just fine missing out on. Eventually, we all got to the roof (Helicopter pad) and it really was pretty neat. Last summer I went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, but there you have a hard time getting nice pictures because it is wrapped in chain link fence. This was just open! There was a rail so that you didn’t fall off the building but not cage to obstruct the view. There was a photographer that followed us up from the street and we had him take a few group photos that he had processed and then sold to the group. While he was getting the film done we went to a supermarket.

Ah, supermarkets… Every trip to a bigger city that Cara or myself have been a part of here, they always stop at a supermarket before going home. Everyone buys things like soap and toilet paper, all stuff you can get here in Chogoria. We joke that it is just like taking the country kids to the city, you go to shop. And shop they did… All the way home. Before getting back on the bus we went to a supermarket called “Woolmatt” and then we went to a reptile garden. Before we left Nairobi someone insisted that we stop at another supermarket (this one was bigger) “Nakumatt” on Thika road. After that we finally got on the road, or so we thought, After Nairobi, I think we stopped at the markets of every other town to buy what ever the local specialty was, including: oranges, pishori rice, and fish. The fish thing was truly an experience. I would never buy fish from a kid on the side of the road who cam running up to my car waving the dead things on a rope. This is a common practice here. You pull over and the boys come running with their wares, be it slimy catfish or bag of tomatoes, wave it in front of your face, and if you want it you ask the price maybe bargin a bit and buy it. I was mortified! Everyone bought fish! The lady sitting behind me said, “What don’t you eat fish, they are fresh they just catch them and sell them…” Yeah I get it, and it really wasn’t that big of a deal, just not something I’d do, and more or less just culture shock. I was also worried that with several hours left of the trip home and a bus filled to the brim with people, produce, and fish, we would be a bit on the stinky side before all was said and done. But, when in Kenya the exhaust fumes on the roads tend to cover up any other odors, so I guess it was fine or Ididn’t notice.

Just through observation and listening to the teachers around me, that trip was probably the most useful chunk of time I have spent here in terms of understanding another culture. You really get to know people when you travel with them, and the shopping bit (mostly the fish thing) was eye opening indeed!

8.

Well today was definitely an adventure. One of the things I said I wanted to learn about was African style dresses and dressmaking. I have visited Joyce’s shop where she apprentices girls to teach them the dressmaking business. I have also gone to the Kajaimpau Tharaka Polytechnic a few times (Polytechnic means that it is basically a trade school. This one offers stone carving and tailoring.) I asked Joyce what the difference in training was between a shop like hers and the polytechnic schools. She said that in the polytechnic schools you are taught the basics of sewing, tailoring, and embroidery, but in the end you are not taught how to run a business. The polytechnic program takes two years and you don’t get “certification” in the end so you end up taking a position in a shop like hers anyway. You need to learn how to work with customers, take their orders, etc. I didn’t ask what the tuition difference was however. So, today as the dressmaking saga continued, Cara and I had decided that we would employ Joyce to make dresses for us. This way we would be involved in the process. At 8 am, Cara and I met Joyce at her Dress shop and then we walked into Chogoria to get a matatu to Meru (Matatus are basically 15 passenger vans that drive back and forth between towns and are the easiest and cheapest way to get around if you don’t own a car). I have always been a little leery of riding them because they tend to be the worst drivers on the road. Even though it is illegal now (in 2004 a seatbelt law was instituted) they still cram more people than the capacity allows. At one point we had 21 people, a baby, and everyone’s luggage in there. This was when we crossed the police checkpoint, but the guy hoped out bribed the police and got back in. (Look of disapproval) He had to pay them a lot and they probably would have made more money off of the trip if they had just followed the rules. In America I would have complained that since I only got half a seat I would only pay half the price, alas. Matatu aside, we got to Meru and Joyce took us to the big fabric shops where she goes to pick out her materials. We went to many and Cara ended up with the standard batik giraffe on green, I got green and I forget what other color, but it wasn’t batik, just the pretty shiny material that the really nice dresses here are made out of. Joyce took us to where she takes her creations to get the fancy embroidery done. She does some simpler things with the machines in her shops for table linens and such (mostly flowers). I didn’t give her exact specifications about what I wanted, because I want to see what she would do on her own. The only thing I said is that I don’t want huge sleeves but I do want the embroidery. (There will be left over fabric so I ordered a matching one for my new niece when she gets a bit bigger) The fabric stores were really fun I wanted to buy everything. There were so many fabrics that were absolutely ridiculous and I loved them but would never wear them. I told Joyce I wanted bright green but with a pattern so she picked out this material that was lime green with yellow, red, and blue striped buckets on it! A few days ago I saw a lady with a dress that had cupcakes all over. Fantastic, but I wanted something that I might wear at least once. Joyce also took us to the Meru market and I got a few pineapples. They are little and very cute. The only problem is that all this citrus fruit that everyone has been feeding me is giving me canker sores. Once we got back to Chogoria Joyce took my measurements. There were about 4 other ladies just hanging around the shop (really just to see what my measurements were) My waist was 25 inches and this little old lady in curlers said, “well mine is 15” and laughed. I can guarantee it was nowhere near 15 inches. I thought it was really interesting that they use inches for tailoring. Everything else is metric; I just assumed that she would be using centimeters.

Looking out the window there is a guy at Edwin’s cutting down the gorgeous purple vines that were arching across the path into their yard. It makes me really sad. I had this great view of fuchsia flowers draped gracefully just beyond the banana tree, and now they are all gone. Hacked down by a man with a really big knife.

7.

So I have just spent the last two hours trying to get the other laptop started. Aye! Then it turned off and I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t start, it was plugged in but nothing. Then I remembered that the electricity is out. In the US it is just expected that when you plug something in to the electrical socket there is power, but here the power fluctuates a lot and I think they might even shut it off in the middle of the day when they aren’t using it for anything really. Who knows? So, I will have to delay my other computer work until later.

I was reading in my book and a quote from the text really struck me last night. “Education is even better than cows.” The section was talking about how before education was made more affordable again by the Kibaki regime, some mothers would go with out food just to send their children to school.

There seems to have been a lot of controversy over the importance of education and I have found that this often depends a lot on region (or more specifically ethnic group, but Kenyans don’t like to talk about ethnic groups because tribalism is viewed as a part of their culture that causes nothing but conflict. As an outsider, it is hard to understand some of this but I am getting bits and pieces. I do however think that a lot of Kenya’s rich cultural heritage is being lost by large groups of people ignoring much of what makes their ethnic group unique.) For instance, the Somali (tribe not citizens of the neighboring country) feared education because missionaries set up most of the schools and they didn’t want their children to be converted. There also seems to have been a belief among many in the very rural areas that girls who went to school would end up being prostitutes. In Kenyan English, this term can also be used to describe a girl who has rejected the teachings of her elders and lives immorally, not necessarily as the Western conception of prostitute as one who accepts money for sex. To many this is equivalent. Another belief (it has disappeared now) was that a family would not benefit from educating their daughters because they would get married off and support the husband’s family. Now that polygamy is dying out (there also seems to be a belief that there are more women than men in Kenya so polygamy was important because it gave more women the chance to have children and a husband) many parents see that a girl who is educated will be less of a burden because she is more likely to find steady employment and can help support the family if she doesn’t get married, and maybe even if she does.

It is so interesting that the sudden increase in education levels of women in Kenya seems to have gone hand in hand with the increase in divorce rates. After some thought, I understand. Much is expected of the traditional Kenyan woman. Food must always be ready for the husband when he wants it. She was responsible for educating the children, the shamba (garden where most of the family’s food comes from), keeping the house clean, and raising the children. Educating the children seems to have been a huge burden because if the woman had no income she would have to ask her husband (who could refuse to pay school fees) or her relatives. It was also common practice to beat your wife and treat her like a child. Now that they are educated, the women know their rights, earn just as much or more than their husbands, and if they are mistreated simply ask for a divorce. Another explanation for better treatment of women which I feel goes hand in hand with education is that you will hear many say, “because we have gone to church.” With colonialism came missionaries and with the missionaries came the schools and thus western ideas. This is all tightly linked together.

I was invited to supper at my friend David Mbae’s house and the evening was highly educational for me both in conversation and observation. I wouldn’t call David a typical Kenyan by any means. He is computer literate, emails people around the world daily, and has traveled outside the continent many times. I see in him a very intriguing mixture of traditional Kenyan (especially Kimeru) customs and modern western ideas. For supper, his wife served us (David, Gregory the local computer guru, and myself), but she ate in the kitchen. David obliquely mentioned this again today. Traditional Kimeru men after circumcision (still done after completion of grade 8) will not even enter a kitchen and sometimes not even the mother’s house. This is a right of passage and to enter would be childish now that he is considered a man. Last year, we had a few men from Chogoria come to the US to visit and a few stayed in my parents’ home. In the US it is common in many houses that the dining of the entire family is done on the kitchen table, in the kitchen. They thought it was so funny that my brother even did the dishes after the supper they had eaten in the kitchen with the women.

At dinner with David and Gregory, I mentioned divorce. David said that it was not common, but Gregory disagreed. He told me that among David’s generation (he is in his 50’s) divorce is not common, and that that generation just preferred to separate and cut off contact without formalizing a divorce. Gregory is probably in his mid twenties and he said that among his generation it is becoming increasingly common but usually there is a separation first. David told me today as we were taking afternoon tea in his office, that he goes to school very early, so he prepares his own breakfast so that his wife doesn’t have to get up so soon. I thought that was great. I doubt his wife usually serves him his supper and then eats in the kitchen on a regular basis. It might have just been because Gregory was there as a male guest so she was being more formal. In fact after Gregory had finished eating she joined us in the room and David poured my drinking chocolate not his wife.

I will be having supper in the homes of several more families before I go home. I am interested to see just how traditionally those dinners will go.

Side note on chapattis (flat bread much like a thick flour tortilla but a bit oily): I have discovered that there are actually many different kinds of chapattis; one even has pumpkin in it. I was trying to explain lefse and that is what they tried to compare it to. Pumpkin chapattis sounds pretty good to me. The ladies told me the ingredients depend on how much time you have. Sometimes they use milk instead of water, or add eggs, pumpkin, a bit of mashed banana, etc.

6.

I had a busy day today. I finally got to meet up with Cara again, and I was glad to check up on her to make sure she was okay. The presbytery driver took me to pick up Cara so I could see where she was living. Shem and Lucy have a very nice house and I think that Cara will do very well there. I think that she will learn a bit more Kiswahili than me because Shem’s children teach her new words at supper every night. After we got Cara we went back to the complex to pick up David and then headed to the nursery to pick up baby trees to plant. We got over a hundred and some passion fruit plants as well. Then we went back to the complex again to pick up Edwin Mwirabua. We passed him on the road to the school and turned around to head back to the market area to wait for him. After we had the reverend, we went to the school he was the chairman of called Kalewa it is a mixed secondary day school. This means that it is not separated into boys and girls like most schools are, a high school, and there are no facilities for the students to board there. Edwin showed us the math textbooks that Rev. Dr. Matt Stith donated to the school.
I told Edwin that I brought greetings from Bob Edwards at the Minot church and said that he was anxious to speak with him. Apparently the Minot church has donated a lot to the school, I think in computers, but the problem now is that there is nowhere for the computers to be used so they are building a room. Right now the room I was shown was a foundation about three bricks high and some dirt, the computers are locked up in a closet. To me this seems a bit backwards, but hakuna matata. They are doing things te Kenyan way. After some sodas and “biscuits” (round cookies that tasted a lot like animal crackers), we greeted all of the students and everyone gathered to plant trees. Someone had already dug the holes and the forester insisted on shoveling the dirt so really there was not a lot to do, and this is not a surprise. I planted one tree and one passion fruit plant at the school and then we moved on to Gianchuku to meet with the women there who have the reforestation project that Sharon was telling me about. We had lunch at the school there and I have to say, that was the best food I have ever had here! The women sang for us and so did the students. Edwin decided that my Kenyan name should be Makena, which means one who is always happy. The ladies and the students all started calling me by that name and everyone laughed because when ever they said it I smiled. One of the ladies there really took a liking to me and I found out she had a daughter named Makena. I’m not certain what her name was so in Kenyan tradition I will just call her “Momma Makena.” Momma Makena and I planted a tree together and she was by far the most spirited singer in the group. The ladies were singing in “mother tongue” so I did not understand, but when Momma Makena was leading the ladies we were told that they were singing about us and how they loved us so much they would carry us on their backs even when they were working in the shamba. She called herself my mother and I think that of all the women I have met so far, she is probably the one with whom I would be able to identify with the most. We are both cheerful, sing loud, dance a lot, and command attention. The ladies were so wonderful I really hope I get to see them again. I hope that when my mother comes here she will be able to see them as well and check on the trees I have planted.

After Gianchuku, we went to David’s mother’s house to see the nursery that the women have there. It was so much larger than I anticipated. They have a small amount of space but hundreds and hundreds of trees that they have started. David’s mother Edith is the most darling woman I have ever seen. She is about 4 ft. tall and just amazing. She has worked so hard for so long and there is such love in her eyes. Esther was also there throughout the day. You can really tell the family resemblance between David, Dunston, Esther, and their mother. They all have the same nose and are very short compared to the other Kenyans. We talked a bit about deforestation and how it is becoming a big problem in Kenya due to lack of firewood and building supplies. Though no one said it but me, I think that this is such an important project for economic, environmental, and spiritual reasons. The women work together with what ever they have and are ensuring that God’s creation is taken care of. They are right on the side of the mountain and surrounded by hills carpeted in tea and coffee. I wish the pictures I have could do the color justice, but they cannot. We don’t have that bright green at home. I’m not sure if it is because the sun is so much closer here on the equator, or the elevation, but the green is green.

I didn’t really get a chance to ask more questions today. However, I did learn a bit about coffee and tea harvesting. Cara and I decided that when we go to visit Joyce the Youth Secretary at her dress making shop we will try to employ her to make us some dresses. I think it will be a lot of fun! If it works, I will wear it when I give presentations about my trip around the presbytery or at least bring it along.

For the traditional insect portion of my daily essay I will share that today I was bitten many times by a very angry ant. It hurt, I squished him. I thought there was a thorn in my sock for a long time but it was just the angry red ant.

I shared my thoughts about hanging underwear outside with Cara, she told me that hers are already washed by the house girl and outside for all to see at Shem's polka dot house. I need to remember to take a picture. The house really has polka dots it is so cute!

Tonight I made spaghetti. I cooked down my tomatoes with a green pepper and some salt for the sauce. It was quite good. I’m not sure what I am going to do with that cabbage…

Tomorrow I am going to meet David for the service at the Chogoria church shared with the boarding school.

A few pictures...

Liz the “Librarian” from Std. 8 at the Complex where NDSU English Club sent the first box of books. In the picture you can actually see the majority of the library. It is mostly used for reference and not pleasure reading. The students are rarely allowed to take books home because they never bring them back.

Jenna “Makena” (vernacular name which means one who is always happy) at the river by the Mutonga Quarry. A few weeks before there was a “lorry” which went into the river and many people died. The truck is still there, they haven’t been able to get it out. I have another picture of the quary where the men working there carved "Jesus Saves" into the rock face. Cara the other American here has gotten tan, but I am still the whitest white person in Africa I'm quite sure!

p.s. This photo was taken by Shem's daughter Kendi

5.

Last night there was a really big bug. I don’t know what it was but I hit it with a coaster and it is still underneath. I plan on removing it later and throwing it outside. It was about two inches long, brown, as big around as my pinky finger and had wings sort of like a termite. Maybe there is a book out there, “Insects of Kenya” I will figure it out when I get home. (Brief note on said insect: I checked about an hour later to throw it outside and it was gone… I don’t know where it went or who took it… gross)

I am sitting in my sitting area typing and eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Jane gave me so many bananas to eat and I still have the mangoes. I think I will eat one for supper with some fried eggs and toast, unless someone insists on taking me to supper again. Next time I go to the market, I think I will get some drinking chocolate to try, and some bread. On my own I prefer my tea without the milk, they think this is strange and bring me milk everyday anyway. So, if I have drinking chocolate maybe I will drink the milk then and there will be calcium in my diet. Milk will probably be the first thing I buy in the airport on my way home…

Outside my window there is a green banana tree. In Kenya there are two types of bananas the large green ones, and the small yellow ones. I have discovered that the green thing we ate so much of last time I was here, and thought was peas and potatoes mashed together, was actually green bananas and potatoes mashed together and mixed with corn. It is interesting to watch the bananas develop from inside the flower. Just beyond the tree is Rev. Edwin Mwirabua’s house.

Yesterday David took his brother, the head teacher of the Gianchuku School, and me to the restaurant “Seasons” in town. The restaurant was quaint and we had chicken and chips. I didn’t clean my plate but the food was good and the Stoney was great. I think it is funny that they name businesses after ours, for instance you will pass on the road a “Holiday INN” but it is nothing more that a tin shed which can be rented for the night. They have green Fanta here. I haven’t had one yet but I will. I tried one on my last trip and I remember liking it. Maybe when I go to town next I will get some sodas.

This morning I went to the classroom 8 Violet, I helped pass out their exams and take their scores. It went okay. Then I let the girls ask me whatever questions they wanted. Several gave me their addresses to find them pen pals. I foresee this pen pal thing being a problem. When school starts again in the fall I think I need to head to some classes and find girls to take these names and addresses. There are a few girls in my church who are interested, but maybe in the presbytery somewhere we have a 6th, 7th, or 8th grade teacher who would be willing to take a bunch of addresses to their students. The girls really are sweet and curious.

When I get home I think I know how to expand my book project. I will just keep a list of the libraries I have visited and what their needs are. When I get home I will have a better understanding of where things should go and the addresses and contacts to mail them to.

The first shipment of children’s books that I sent to David are a welcome addition to their library and are some of the better books that they have, however I am finding out that the libraries here run a bit differently. The Complex library is not always open to the students. They are allowed to come by class and they get 30 minutes to read the books. They are most interested in reference material, and didn’t have a lot of anything. David’s school especially focuses on international awareness. The students are encouraged to find out about other countries, but Liz (the librarian who is in standard 8) said that she only has reference material for a few European countries. The girls school here has a lot more books, but they are required to read a book a week, and are interested in more storybooks like the ones my English Club shipped at the end of the school year. Actually, I’m not sure that they got shipped because I didn’t take them there, but I sent Eunice the address, and if they haven’t gone yet I will send them when I get home.

Yesterday I made soup and put onions in it. I still can’t get the smell out of my fingers!

(Later)

I have just gotten back from the Complex. The computer teacher was out practicing with the children for the school athletics competition. David let me into the computer room and I showed him how to defragment and scan the computers. He sent in two girls to learn from me. I taught them how to take apart and clean the mouse (they break a lot and I think some preventative maintenance would not be amiss), how to use a few shortcuts to end programs and open the start menu without using the mouse, and how to run the scanning and defragmenting programs. The computer guy stopped by and we had a bit of a chat regarding my lack of Internet and very expensive phone issue. He was easy to understand and explained the problem well. So there is at least one person here who knows what is going on in computer land. I told him what I was teaching the girls and he said that it was good, but whenever he has a problem with his computer, he just wipes the hard drive and starts over. He does have an external drive to back up all of his music though.

The girls were Giselle and Becky. Giselle hopes to become a doctor and Becky wants to be a lawyer. They were very bright and I think they work hard. We sat and talked for some time about language and school. All of the students here think that it is fascinating that teachers in the US can be arrested for beating their students, and even parents for beating their children. David’s brother was telling me that teachers using the cane on their students was common, but now the teachers can get in trouble for it so it is rare. I asked the girls about marriage and how they will choose their husbands. They giggled, so I asked if their parents will choose or if they will choose. They said that they will choose but their parents will have some influence. The portion of the book that I read last night went into detail about “dowry and ‘bride price.’” In Kenya, they use the term “dowry” to describe the gifts that a man brings to the family of the girl he intends to marry. The other term is “bride price” and can be used interchangeably. The book said that now that the economy has turned to money holding more value than goods, some families are now requesting that the dowry be paid in cash, but this causes problems because now a man can say that he paid X amount for his wife and X amount for his car. The other system of giving cows, goats, millet, etc. seems to be more out of respect for the family of the girl than an actual purchase price. I asked the girls if their husbands in the future will have to pay the dowry, and they said that they probably would because it ties the families together and is an honored tradition. I asked them how much influence their families will have on their decision to marry a man. They told me that they will bring him to meet the family and later their parents will tell them if it is okay. They said that the only type of person that their parents wouldn’t allow would be a “Luo” because they are not circumcised. They told me that part of becoming a man for the Meru is circumcision of the boys. This is done after completion of standard 8 and then they are considered a man. Curiously enough on my last trip I brought a Discover magazine along to read and one of the articles talked about how AIDS spread in Africa and that it was less common in regions that practiced circumcision. In recent years, they have discovered that there is actually a scientific link between circumcision and AIDS because there is a small gland which is found in the skin often removed that has been found to affect how easily the disease is passed on. I believe I read that if a man has been circumcised he is 1/3 less likely to spread the disease. The book also talked about “female circumcision” and “the cut” but that is in a later portion and not very applicable to this region.

After my time in the computer lab, I came home and did a bit of laundry. I decided that it was probably better to do it now so that it can dry before I run out of clothes. I also washed the pillow cover; it was pretty gross. I have been putting it under the bedclothes so that my head doesn’t have to touch it. It smells like it got wet a long time ago and then sat and no one has washed it. The pillow itself is the root of the problem. I didn’t have any way to really wash that so I sprayed it with my foot spray to kill a few things and remove some of the odor. The bar of laundry soap that I got smells amazing. It is like walking into an import store. I’m not sure what the smell is, reminiscent of sandalwood. I will bring it home. It was actually kind of fun to wash my clothes in plastic “basins.” I laughed. Maybe I will get sick of it by the time I leave, but it is no bother right now. I do, however, refuse to hang my underwear out on the line. Edwin Mwirabua does NOT need to see those! I have hung them in one of the spare bedrooms that had a rope running across one of the corners and that will be just fine. I am looking forward to wearing the clothes I washed because I want to smell like the soap. The bar of soap to be used for the dishes is not as nice, but it still smells good. Yes mother, I have been washing my dishes.

The first few days I was not inclined to drink tea, but today I realized that if I am not drinking tea, what am I drinking? I actually LOVE tea, just not with milk in it and not over brewed like most people in the world make it. It does not take ten minutes or even 3 to brew, two is more than enough otherwise it begins to get bitter.

Trash or rubbish has been a bit of a problem. Like any other American, I like to throw things away. I have learned my lesson. If I cook and there are leftovers and I have gotten rid of all of my plastic bags, where do you put the waste? Good question. Also the obligatory ladies restroom garbage can is not always available. What do you do then? This is also a good question. The answer to both of these is to just figure it out. You just keep the garbage items until you have somewhere to put them.

I need to bring home a bunch of tea if for no other reason than to put it in a drawer so that it smells good. The girls’ teeth here are so white, but I think mine will be very stained by the time I get home.

Today, now that they have seen me a bit more the students are more willing to talk to me and ask me questions instead of running away.

I did have the mango and eggs for supper followed by many cups of tea. “It is good.”

3.

This morning I met with the librarian, who is also in charge of the English and Kiswahili lessons. I went through the library to see what they have and how it is arranged. The Kiswahili books have their own section, but they only have maybe 3 racks of them. The English books are placed into these sections: Fiction/Storybooks, Reference, Science and Technology, and Newspapers (no plastic covers). I think they would like me to help the girls with their English and reading lessons, and hopefully I can pick up some Kiswahili at the same time. The librarian is also learning about computers and would like to apply her knowledge to the library. She would like to organize the library and store her information electronically to better keep track of what she has and where it is. I think this is a great idea and I will think hard about the best solution. However, without a designed program I’m not sure how to approach this. There is also the problem of how the library is organized in the first place. They have started general sections and the books are arranged alphabetically by title. I think that if I had more time at the school I might reorganize the books by subject within their sections. The other thing that I thought might be helpful would be a system that also takes into account reading level.

We then went to the computer lab. This has 20 computers so the girls need to double up on them. The teacher said that she had trouble with the mouses breaking a lot. I noticed that some of the cords are in tough shape on the optical ones and on the standard ball mouse I showed her how to take the ball out and clean the inside. She said that it seemed that every day the computers had to be fixed. I had her turn one on so I could see what programs were installed and what the children were learning. She is teaching them very basic left click, right click, drag and drop, formatting, etc. The children are also supposed to learn excel, but I know very little about that. They currently have Windows 98 installed, but are saving up to purchase XP and more computers. I looked at the system tools and showed her “Disk Defragmenter” and also “Scandisk.” Their computers have never been defragmented so that is a relatively high priority on my list.

4.

The children had all finished their exams yesterday to compete against the other schools. Today was spent in the field running races and doing field events to decide which pupils would go on to represent the school in local, regional, and maybe even national competitions. They run so hard and when they have finished another student is assigned to help them walk so that they don’t collapse. The teachers and I sat under some trees and the students would come and report their results to us. The teacher that was in charge of placing them had bottle caps that they had written numbers onto. The students were so tired I felt so bad for them and worried that they would make themselves sick. The teachers had tins of glucose and they would put a spoonful into the children’s hands after they had reported their places. Licking dry glucose powder after running that far… I’m not certain that that is something I would choose, but who knows maybe it helps. I’m sure it boosts your blood sugar very quickly.

I spoke for some time with the teachers from Chogoria Girl’s Boarding School. They asked me a lot of questions about the US. They were interested to hear that even America has homeless people. I explained some of our government and charitable programs organized to take care of these people. They asked me, “How come it is that you can have people without homes when there are so many jobs.” I tried to explain that some people can’t find steady jobs and others don’t want them. (They didn’t really believe me.) I also said that lots of times they are people struggling with drug and alcohol addictions or maybe they are crazy. I have found that when you are trying to that someone is mentally ill or challenged, often the Kenyans have a hard time understanding, it is easier to say crazy and in their vernacular this means the same thing.

We also talked a bit about hair. At first I was confused because when they said “salon” to me it sounded like “saloon.” I was not sure how to answer “and do you go to the ‘saloon,’ what do you go there for?” No, I do not go to get my hair relaxed; it is this limp naturally…

Today I have been asking questions about marriage. “Which of you are married? At what age is it most common for women to get married?” While I got some answers, I was asked more about American customs. My reading tonight centered around marriages and how a spouse is chosen. The book talked about kidnapping brides (uncommon but it still happens) and also “dowry” or “bride price.” The topic of marriage is especially interesting to me at this point in my life because now is when my friends are starting to get married. Purity, the librarian here, is 26 and not married. I asked her if she intends to get married some day and she said that she would like to but not right now. I asked her if she had a man picked out yet and she was obviously not certain that this was a question that she should really answer. She said that she didn’t have anyone in mind yet, but I suspect otherwise. The other teachers I spent the afternoon with were all married. They didn’t say anything about their husbands however. I think that after they are a bit more comfortable with me they will be more likely to answer questions like that. I have not asked yet.

Doreen also came to see me today. I’m so glad that I get to meet her finally. She is a very energetic and motivated woman. Doreen is the woman who works at the computer center. (The infamous computer center funded by the presbytery) Currently she is on leave to complete a course in accounting. She said that in Kenya, after secondary, there are 6 levels of accounting training. Each level is 6 months and then there is an exam. She finished the first two levels right away, and then worked a bit, and now she is back working on her 3rd level. She will take her exam next week, so we have rescheduled our visit together to after she finishes the course. After completing the 6 levels she hopes to go on to the university to get a degree. I asked her if she was married yet. (I already knew she wasn’t) She said no and giggled. I asked her if she had anyone picked out and she does but she hasn’t decided when she will marry him. She said after she finishes level 4, “then I will decide.” I tried to get her to tell me about dating practices, but I couldn’t explain myself clearly or she didn’t want to tell me. She said “you need to research to see if he has good morals, or if he is a drunkard or a smoker… because then you can choose somebody else.”

I asked Doreen about divorce and if it is common, because yesterday David’s brother (I can’t remember his name) and I were speaking broadly about women’s empowerment, rights, education, etc. at lunch. He mentioned that education meant that women were now aware of their rights, so an educated woman is the one who will say, “I want a divorce.” I really liked his brother, he was very willing to laugh, answer my questions, and give lots of information. Doreen said that divorce is becoming more common now, but even more common is separation without divorce. The book also backed up this claim. Both sources said that when the man tires of the woman or likes another, he will just move to another town and abandon his first wife. Of course polygamy is still practiced here, though it is less common. I asked Doreen about this as well. She told me that the church and the government only support and sanction one marriage. She said that locally multiple wives will be accepted, in the church it is frowned upon and in fact once you have been married in the church, even if you get a divorce, the church (Presbyterian) will not allow you to marry another until the first spouse has died. The government will only recognize the first wife. I remember hearing on my last visit and the book also said that change in Kenya is often explained by saying, “…because we have gone to church.”

I have also spent a good deal of time trying to understand the school system here. Who pays the teachers, what determines their pay, how they get a job, the difference between private and public schools, etc. and the Kenyans would say, “I think I have got it.”

The schools have three terms with three 3-week breaks between them. They begin school in preprimary at 4 and go for two years. Then, they move to primary for 8 years. These classes are referred to as Standard 1, Standard 2, and so on. After Primary, if they have passed their exams, they are placed in Secondary schools. Kenyan President Kibaki is running on the platform for the next election that he intends to make secondary education free. This is a big step! The four years of Secondary education are referred to as Form 1 through Form 4. After completion of Form 4, you take another exam to see if you can get into a University (if you say college they get confused). Right now many students stop going to school after primary because it is expensive. Those that finish Secondary have the option of going on to a polytechnic school (rather like our tech or trade schools) or to a program that trains you to be a teacher for preprimary children.

It is only my second day cooking and I feel I am fairly proficient with the gas cook top. I have a lot of produce that I need to eat tomorrow or the next day. I have some mangoes and some bananas that need to disappear quickly. I think I will make fried bananas again and just eat the mangoes. As I learned from Phil on my last trip, I will not eat all my mangoes at once. He was sick for days! Last time I was here the girl’s dormitory for standard 7 and 8 was just being built. Now it is thoroughly lived in. Outside my window is where the girls are hanging their washing. I feel bad for them because it has rained every day I have been here so far and it takes so long to dry in the first place. Lesson learned 2nd day: if you get washcloth completely wet on first day, second day it is still wet.

My bed is quite amazing. I’m not complaining, it really is just fine, but I think it is funny when compared to American standards. We spend so much time complaining about our mattresses, myself included. The foam pad that I have for the top of my mattress is equivalent to what by bed is here. It is a simple bed frame with shelved headboard and under the mattress are slats of wood. On top of that the mattress is two pieces of foam about an inch and a half each. I can feel every board on the bed, but it really isn’t so bad if you can place yourself so that your shoulder blades and butt go in between the boards.

I got a bit sunburned today, but only on my neck. I remembered to put sunscreen everywhere else!

I also went to the Chogoria Girl’s Church today for their morning service. At the end Jane introduced me and asked me to sing the girls a song. I sang “You Are My Hiding Place” I think a few of the girls knew it.

I would like to be able to spend some time with the girls and get a perspective on the roles of women in Kenya from young eyes. Right now they are a bit afraid of me. They want to be near to me so they follow me around and giggle, but if I talk to them they run away and giggle more.

2.

(A brief note before this story; I HATE SPIDERS!)

As I was boiling my milk, a spider crawled out of the wall. I thought our spiders at home were hairy! This was the “Elvis Presley” of spiders; he had quite the ‘do. At first I was calm, and looked around for something to squish him with. I had an empty juice box and thought that that would keep my fingers a sufficient distance from him so that if I missed, the chance of him coming into contact with my skin would be minimal.

He moved. I missed. He jumped. I shrieked. No one came to rescue me…

He landed in my empty milk pitcher, so I quickly filled it up with water. He thought that he escaped but I reigned supreme… at least for now.

Now that I have finished with the milk, I am boiling some water “for 20 minutes to kill the amoeba.” I wanted to go to bed, but it is better to do this now so that if I need it tomorrow, it will be ready.

For supper, I had Ugali and beef and cabbage stew. Ugali is very similar to polenta except it is white and not quite as firm. It is made with cornmeal and water and boiled for 3 hours. The cabbage stew was fine, just very greasy. Lunch was corn and beans. The corn is reminiscent of hominy corn and run of the mill beans boiled together with some cabbage. Instead of cutting the corn off the cob like we do, they let it dry and then cook it for hours. It is still quite hard in the end but edible. I don’t like it much, but it is fine.

I have told Jane that she can teach me how to make all of the Kenyan dishes and I will show her some of ours. I discovered today that there are avocado trees in the complex. Perhaps I will make guacamole and tortilla chips or maybe French toast. There is no maple syrup but I do have a tin of strawberry jam.

Internet!!!

I finally have the internet!

It has been a real learning experience for me to "pole pole"(take it easy/ go slowly) and allow things to happen in "Kenyan time."

I have been writing a lot and I would still like to share what I have written and thought over the past few weeks. It will be dated information, but still new to all of you. I have been having a great time and I'm learning so many things. I am safe, healthy, and in good hands.

Please feel free to leave comments on this page.

1.

I arrived in Nairobi safely and was picked up at the airport by Shem and David. We got stuck in traffic trying to get to Peter’s office. Not a big surprise considering it was 7am and every one was trying to get to work. Finally, we arrived and Peter took us all to get some breakfast. We left David with the car and went to get a cell phone and sim card. Through a series of events that took hours and would take hours to explain, we ended up spending 26,000 Ksh for the package of the phone, data cable, and software. We then went to the Celtel shop to get it configured and realized that the software was not compatible with my laptop. So, I will borrow one of David’s to work on my Blog. This whole business plus stopping for a few groceries on the way home took over 12 hours. It was well after dark by the time we got back and Rev. Mwirabua still wanted to greet me and Jane wanted to feed me. I finally got to bed after 11 and Jane wanted me for breakfast at 9 (which was very late for her, she gets up at 5:30).

I assumed I was staying with Jane in her house, and that she would be here during the week and at home over the weekend, however it turns out that in the Chogoria Girl’s Boarding School there is a building attached to the school that has several floors, each one a large apartment. The floor I was given to stay in is actually larger than Jane’s. It has three bedrooms, two small and one large. I have a big dining/sitting area, a small balcony, a bathroom, and one of the sweet housemothers will be bringing me a giant jug of hot water to bathe with. She wanted to bring it in the morning and the evening, but I told her that only in the morning was necessary. I can’t imagine hauling that up the stairs twice a day! Right outside of my window are the dorms for the young girls. The older girls are on the other side of the school in the newer building that was just being built when I was here in 2004. Those of you that have been to Chogoria Girl’s Boarding School might be able to figure out where I am staying from my description.

Jane took me to the market today and we bought groceries and a small gas stove. It is similar to our camping stoves, but with a bigger tank of gas.

I was just interrupted by a knock at my door. It was Millicent the housemother again bringing me fresh milk from the cow. She was just here about 20 minutes ago bringing me tea. She thought it was funny that I had never boiled my milk before. Yet another thing I am learning on this trip. (Joye, I had the milk thing explained to me and I will be careful, no I do not have a refrigerator)

Jane and I were talking this afternoon about what I should help with at the school and I think the best thing for me would be to assist the computer teacher. The other thing she thought would be to help organize the library, but I’m not sure what system (if there is one) they use and how fluent in it I will be.

This morning was a brisk 65 degrees which warmed to probably 75 in the afternoon. Jane in her huge sweater thought I was crazy to be wearing a short-sleeved shirt. She will be bringing me an extra blanket in just a bit.

This week ended up being an excellent time for me to visit because the students are taking exams. This means that Jane has a bit more time in her day than she usually would to make sure I have everything I need and know how to do things.

The girls outside are very noisy, but they sing beautifully!

"All My Bags Are Packed, I'm Ready to Go..."

It is not even midnight and everything is ready to go for tomorrow. I was hoping to get everything into my hiking pack so I would only have one checked piece of luggage. Alas! It just wasn't meant to be. I only packed three pairs of shoes! In reality, I think I did okay. I'd have to say that probably half of what I am bringing over is a gift or donation, and I intend to leave most of my clothes there.

It hasn't sunk in yet that I will be gone for two months! I haven't even had time to think about it yet. I just finished finals and handed in my last paper this morning. It's okay though, I will have plenty of time on the plane.

I just want to say thank you to everyone again for everything. So many people helped out in so many different ways. I'm really blessed to have such wonderful people in my life! I would especially like to thank Sharon for literally emailing everyone and their uncle in Kenya to make sure that everything was arranged and that I would be safe. Sharon you are an amazing woman!

This is just a test

This is just a test to make sure that I can post pictures from my computer without web hosting somewhere. This picture was taken on my last night in Venice last summer on tour with the NDSU Concert Choir. We sang in the street and all of the little Italian ladies leaned out their windows to listen to us. The gelato was definitely a highlight! Don't worry, I didn't actually lick the gelato statue.

Asante Sana! Thank You!

I thought I'd write a quick note to say thank you to everyone whose has come together to support me on this trip. I really appreciate all of the contributions, advice, and well wishes from everyone. I'm so lucky to have such wonderful friends and family!

I leave in 12 days and there is so much left to do. I need to move out of my apartment, finish class projects, finals, pack, figure out how to get bills paid while I'm gone, and teach my mother how to care for my carnivorous plants. It is going to be a lot of work, but it will all get done somehow.

The book I have chosen to read in conjunction with this trip is "I Laugh So I Won't Cry: Kenya's Women Tell The Story Of Their Lives" by Helena Halperin. In this book, the author has interviewed women from different tribal backgrounds, levels of education (or lack of), and economic levels to get a perspective on many different aspects of the lives of women in Kenya. I decided that since I was focusing a major part of my trip on women, it was only fitting that my literature selection reflect that as well. I have flipped through it a bit and it looks really interesting, but I haven't had time to really sit down and start reading yet.

Karibu!

Welcome Friends!

This is where I intend to post pictures and updates (hopefully regularly) during my two month trip through Kenya May 14th through July 12th this summer. This site was started as part of a project for a class I'm taking at NDSU. I will write here often to record my progress, keep in touch with my instructor, and share my experiences with everyone back home. Please feel free to leave me comments on my posts.