5/25/06

The matatu adventure continues. On Wednesday, I rode with my co-worker several miles outside of town to visit two watatonos(groups of borrowers) Once you get out of town a ways, the matatus become pretty scarce. On our way back, we started out riding in one very dilapidated matatu and we hadn’t gone very far when the word on the road was that the police were patrolling the matatus. So, because this particular van wasn’t compliant, the driver drove off the road behind some buildings where we had to get out and go back to the road to find another matatu. By the time we got to the road there were at least 30 people waiting for the next matatu to come along. Finally an empty one arrived and everyone pushed forward fighting for the 8 available seats. Bernard and I muscled our way in, thankfully, because Bernard said in that area you could wait for up to an 2 hours for a matatu to come by. So once again we set off for town. We hadn’t gone very far when the matatu died. The driver spent several minutes trying to start it unsuccessfully while all the passengers made suggestions. Finally, the men in the matatu got out and pushed to he could jump start it. We went a few more miles when it quit again, and again the men pushed to get it started. That happened twice more until we finally reached town. It really pays to not be in a hurry here in Kenya.

Every morning I take a matatu to work which is about a 10 or 15 minute drive, depending on if which driver I get. Sometimes they go unbelievably fast and I’m just praying that I make it through one more matatu trip. I’m really relieved when we reach the speed bumps on the outskirts of Kakamega, but that relief is tempered by the fact that if I sit in the back seat, every time we charge over a speed bump I hit my head on the roof of the matatu.

I apologize if my English is getting a little weird. The Kenyans speak British English mixed with a unique translation from Kiswahili to English and in order to communicate in English I have had to adapt my English to their style. Everyone who has gone to school through at least the 8th grade speaks passable English, but just like me when I speak Kiswahili, they have such a heavy accent that it’s like trying to understand yet another foreign language. Then to top it off, the people in this district switch back and forth among English, Kiswahili and Kiluhya which is the local language of the tribe that lives in this part of Kenya. So sometimes I’m not sure if I’m not understanding the Kiswahili or if people are speaking Kiluhya The older people and people who haven’t gone to school don’t speak any English so I have learned just a few words of Kiluhya to be polite. I don’t think I am really up to learning two languages at once. Another interesting thing is that all three men at my office are from different tribes and can’t understand each other’s language, so they have to speak either Kiswahili or English. By the way, I didn’t know until I got here that the language is called Kiswahili and the people who live in the coastal region are the Swahili people. I am slowly getting a few more words and everyone claims that in another month I will be fluent. I think they are just being nice.

All right, nobody will be surprised but I am getting an F in Kenyan cooking. Tonight I was relegated to plucking leaves off a plant that Violet will cook for dinner. We are having two vegetables that I have never seen before and no one knows the English name for. However, I sat out back with a neighbor lady while I plucked leaves and we were able to exchange a few words of Kiswahili. The hard part about Kenya is that every tribe(there are 42 tribes in Kenya) speaks it’s own language and can’t understand each other. I think all of the people in Kakamega are members of the Luhya tribe and speak Kiluhya as well as British English and Kiswahili. And because they talk with their mouths closed likes the British and speak very softly, even understanding English is challenging. They laugh a lot when I speak Kiswahili, but it’s all good-natured. I can’t believe that even after a week I am starting to understand some and able to reply in basic sentences. The little girls are helping me learn a lot of vocabulary and don’t seem to mind helping me.

My colleague at K-Rep is Bernard Chege. He is a young man of about 30 who has a master’s degree in Economics. He is working for an NGO like K-Rep because there are few professional jobs available and many qualified people apply for every job. He is from a much more prosperous town and went to the university in Nairobi, so moving to Kakamega is a big change for him. He told me that Kakamega is not as modern as other large Kenyan towns.

Because I am working with AIDS victims, I am learning a great deal about the disease, which they refer to as a pandemic here. The national rate of infection is about 7% but the rate in Kakamega is considerable higher, about 10%. People in the groups I am working with die quite often and it is hard for the group members to maintain morale when they are starkly reminded of their own impending death. Death is so prevalent here, in fact, that you commonly see a display of coffins for sale alongside the road.

The focus in Kenya for battling aids is to raise awareness of the disease, minimize the stigma associated with it and through education, change people’s behavior. Apparently, the prevailing attitude is when someone learns that they are infected with HIV, their response is anger and they want to seek revenge by deliberately spreading the disease. That, coupled with the denial of people who are at risk to be tested or to accept the results of the test, make fighting AIDS an uphill battle.

The little girl Fiona is still sick and her parents have been very worried. They say she has malaria but she has been sick for a while so they took her back to the doctor. While there she was tested for typhoid, which tested negative thankfully, so the doctor gave her a different antibiotic. I imagine with a wide variety of diseases here that this is a prime place for bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. In any event, they have seemed very worried about her, and I think because there is a greater chance of death here than we are used to and that thought must always loom in their mind.

5/15/06

Hello everbody,

sorry it has taken me so long to get stuff on my blog. the computers here are very very very slow and i am working most of the day. but here is some stuff i have written in the past few days that i hope gives you an idea about life here in kenya. it really is a different world!

My Kakamega host family is Patrick and Violet Makanga and their two daughters, Sylvia and Fiona. Actually, all Kenyans have 3 names, including their African name which is used among family members. The Makangas are from what I have so far observed a typical middle class family in Kakamega. They live in a neighborhood a couple of miles from the town of Kakamega called Ilesi. They live in a nice house which Patrick built himself on a about an acre of land. The house has three bedrooms, 2 “kind of bathrooms”, a big living room and dining room and a very small kitchen. Currently the water line is broken so there is no running water so water is carried in from the spigot outside. When we bathe, we heat up water in the kitchen and then take a bath in the shower. Patrick has a friend in Switzerland so I think his house has some untypical Kenyan touches, like a decorative hardwood ceiling and a built in entertainment center at one end of the living room. There is an outside kitchen where a young boy helper sleeps and a barn where Violet has 4 cows and 2 calves. She milks the cows daily and we drink the fresh milk in chai tea, which is a mixture of half tea, half milk. She sells milk by the cup to young children from around the neighborhood who line up at the back door every night. She charges about 15 cents for a cup. She also has a garden where she grows the vegetables that we eat.

Patrick is an accountant at the provincial government offices and Violet works at Tele-Com. The girls are in school each day from 8:00 to 5:00. The Makangas belong to the Luhya tribe which is the third largest tribe in Kenya. Patrick and Violet speak Luhya and English, while the girls speak English and Swahili, which they are learning at school. Patrick, like many Africans, also runs various other enterprises such as very small farms and 2 guesthouses, which aren’t doing too well currently as the economy is Kenya is really suffering.

African food is very simple. Breakfast is bread and jam and chai. I eat out for lunch for about $1. When we come home for work, we have tea time, with chai and bread. Dinner is served around 9:00 and consists every night of ugali, meat and cooked kale. Ugali is a mixture of cornmeal and water that is boiled and is like a very doughy dumpling. You eat with you hands and pull a piece of ugali off the serving, roll it into a ball and use is to pick up kale and meat and then eat it. It doesn’t take much to fill me up. It seems that the whole purpose of food in Africa is to fill you up without costing very much. In spite of the high carbohydrate diet, everyone but me, is rail thin.

When I arrived, the littlest girl was having a bout of malaria. I didn’t realize that pretty much all Africans have malaria and just cope with the occurrences when they occur. Apparently there is some effective medication to treat the symptoms so they are usually only sick for one or two days. We do sleep with mosquito nets at night, but during the rainy season, which is right now, there are lots of mosquitos. I was just wondering why we don’t have malaria carrying mosquitos in the U.S.

5/18/06

Today I am recording a few random interesting observations and things that I have learned in the last week about Kenya. May though July is considered winter in Kakamega and considered the rainy season. Although this might be an unusual year, since I have been here the weather has not been unpleasant. It is almost always sunny with scattered clouds in the morning and fairly warm, probably about 70 degrees. Many days it clouds up in the afternoon or evening and thunders, lightening and rains very heavily but only for about 3 hours. The soil is claylike, what they call colleche in Texas so the rain stands around in puddles and doesn’t sink very quickly so things quickly get muddy. I’ve seen lots of cars and trucks stuck in the mud with lots of people working to get them unstuck. Everyone here seems prepared for the rain, most with umbrellas but those without use a variety of things to cover their heads. I have seen shower caps, plastic bags, washrags, scarves and such. But with this much rainfall, the country surrounding Kakamega is really lush. Numerous trees and a variety of things growing, all of which have been planted either to eat or feed the animals.

The women in town dress very stylishly and wear bright cheerful colors, but not wild or garish. Many women wear skirts with blouses and jackets but the most common thing is a skirt with a top that comes down over the hips and is about thigh length. I brought very plain clothes with me and feel somewhat dowdy so Violet is going to show me the clothing shops on the weekend and I’ll see if I can buy some African clothes that I feel comfortable in but don’t feel like I am trying to somehow “go native”. The men dress very formally for work, always with a coat and tie. The school children all wear brightly colored uniforms with sweaters over the top. All the different schools have distinctively different colors. In Kenya, parents must buy the uniforms and shoes to be able to send the kids to school and there are many people who simply can’t afford it. In spite of the challenging surroundings, everyone is very clean and well groomed and take a lot of pride in their appearance.

Today, Bernard and I rode to a group meeting on boda bodas and they were too tall for me to get on gracefully so I had to hop up and the boda boda drivers found that really funny. Bernard told me it was funny because I am an older woman and jumping is very unusual for women here in Kenya. When you use public transportation you literally are taking you own life into your hands. Thee boda boda drivers go very fast and weave in and out of traffic just barely missing cars and people. The other day my driver passed too close to a little girl and I hit her and spun her around. I haven’t seen a boda boda fall over yet and I imagine they are pretty careful because it would be bad for business if they injured or killed someone. All the streets and roads are in terrible shape. Potholes are everywhere and so are speed bumps, even on the boda boda paths. I like riding the boda boda because it is such a scenic way to travel, but I have to hang on to the handle provided because it is so rough. As far as the matatu vans and private vehicles, I don’t think there are any standard rules on the roads. In Kenya, everyone drives on the left side of the road and as long as no one is coming they actually drive in the middle of the road until someone else is coming the other way. Then both drivers scoot way over to their side of the road to get past. There is no shoulder on the road, only an abrupt drop off of about 4 or 5 inches. The public vans are called matatus and cost 30 shillings, which is about 40 cents. They are supposed to take only the allowed number of passengers and everyone is supposed to wear seat belts, but the matatu drivers always cram too many people in and the conductor hangs out the door of the van. If the police stop them, they pay them a bribe to keep from getting fined. I read about a matatu fatal crash today on the highway and that wasn’t reassuring at all, but since owning a car in Kenya is a real luxury and hardly anyone can afford it there is no other choice of transportation.

i have arrived

The drive from Nairobi to my town of Kakamega was wonderful. This western part of Kenya is very beautiful, green, lush, mountainous. There were all kinds of crops growing along the way, alot of corn, kale, wheat, and in the mountains, many many acres of tea, which i have never seen growing before. It is like small bushes and they pick off the top shoots for the tea leaves. We briefly passed by Lake Victoria which is about an hours drive from my town. Needless to say, once we got outside of Nairobi, the roads were very rough and not at all maintained. The bus ride took about 9 hours although I imagine it is about only about 300 miles.

The town of Kakamega is very rural and resembles the rural African towns that you see in documentaries and movies. There is a great deal of poverty here. In fact, the people who are considered well off are similar in economic resources to those who live in poverty in the US while those in true poverty here are like nothing you could compare to in the US.

I start work tomorrow at my organization which is called K-Rep. The primary focus of this organization is to target extremely poor people who are infected or associated with someome affected with AID/HIV for very small loans that can be used in some sort of very small business, such as a roadside stall, which will provide them with enough income to feed themselves and their families.

In working here, I will definitely be learning and using exclusively Swahili so I am spending alot of time studying and will probably be in the baby talk stage for a couple of months. The Kenyans are very friendly and love helping me to learn the language as well

Welcome to my Kenya blog. I hope you enjoy my stories and photos from Kenya and I look forward to your comments. It will be wonderful to keep in touch with everyone while I'm gone. I'm gonna miss you all very much!!!!