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!