Final Random Thoughts About Kenya

Kenya is the most overtly Christian country I have ever been in. There are churches EVERYWHERE, lots of missionaries (We were surrounded by missionary groups when we stayed at the Methodist House in Nairobi.), most of the people we met had Christian names, and it's not at all unusual for people to include references to God or the Lord in their comments about anything and everything. I am not a religious person so all of the overt God stuff took some getting used to I must admit and I feel really ambivalent about the role religion plays in Kenyan culture. On the one hand, life is really difficult over there so I appreciate how religion gives Kenyans strength, inspiration and hope, but on the other hand, religion can also encourage passivity and acceptance of the way things are because those things are "God's will." Also, I was uniformly offended by groups that were building large new (and expensive) churches in Kenya. If they truly care about the Kenyans, they should use their money on things that will really improve lives and ease suffering, not on buildings.

Kenyans are very entrepreneurial. I have never seen a country with more small businesses. I suppose the number of businesses is driven by the fact that there are so few employers, especially in the rural areas, so people have no other option by to try to eke out livings through self employment. Even so, the number of tiny enterprises lining the road in every little town we drove through was impressive. Equally impressive (and amusing) were the names of many of these businesses and the combination of businesses people were running. Here are a few:

Butchery and bar (Seems like a potentially dangerous combination especially at the end of a long night of drinking. Yet, we saw a lot of these.)

Hotel and seamstress

Driving school and computer college

Tailor shop and feed store

Hardware and car wash

Hotel and tires

Auto parts and chemist (A chemist is a pharmacist)

St Theresa Hospital and Funeral Home (I saved the best for last!)

I was really impressed by the spirit of Kenyans, their ability to endure and their sense of hope in the face of the fundamentally difficult issues they face. For example, despite the dire situations that many, many people live in, nearly everyone Beth and I met had a ready smile for us. Also, there appear to be numerous small Kenyan-based organizations trying to improve Kenya in important ways. Their very existence reflects a sense of sense of optimism and hope. Of course, the efforts of such organizations are but a drop in the bucket of what it will take if the lives of Kenyans are going to improve in appreciable and lasting ways.

Volunteering with AFK gave Beth and me a way to make a a small difference in the lives of some Kenyans. Although the needs of the people in that country are so great that it would have been easy to get discouraged and to question whether we were having any impact at all, I think we both focused on the fact that each of us in small ways were making a difference one person at a time, even if all we were doing was making a dirty-faced child laugh and smile for a little while or helping ease someone's physical discomfort, if only temporarily. In this regard, since I've been back my thoughts have often returned to Modesta, the darling and obviously intelligent girl two other AFK volunteers (Eric and Audrey) and I worked with during our second day in Kaimbiu. I wonder whether the fact that I called her "Little Teacher" might have planted a seed in her brain regarding what she could be in life. Perhaps because of my nickname for her she will actually try to become a teacher someday and create a better life for herself than she has now. You never know.

Back in the US

Beth and I flew out of Cairo yesterday morning for JFK. We were very sad to leave Egypt, which we consider to be our home away from home, but we were looking forward to seeing our loved ones in the US, using nice bathrooms and sleeping in comfy beds, and we were already planning our next trip to Egypt. Our flight was uneventful and the 11 or so hours we spent in the air passed quickly.

When we arrived in Stamford, our Mom had a great meal ready for us, which we ate outside on their patio. Later, we gave everyone the gifts we had bought for them in Egypt or Kenya. Immediately after dinner, Beth and Roger headed for their home after she and I exchanged a teary goodbye, because Beth had to work the next day.

Another great sister vacation was over, but there would be more to come.

Last Day in Kenya and Goodbyes in Egypt

Yesterday Beth and I left Meru for Nairobi so we could catch a 4AM flight to Cairo. We said our goodbyes to the rest of the AFK volunteers and to our fearless leaders, Wayne and Emily, and were on our way after much picture taking.

We passed through much of the same scenery that we had seen on the way to Meru, but after a while, we changed routes and so we saw new things, like rice fields. Working in those fields did not look like a pleasant way to earn a living. Wet and back-breaking.

Once we arrived in Nairobi, we met up with Jimmy and Faith. We had met them earlier in our trip but this time we got to spend one-on-one time with them and got to know each of them better. Jimmy is super friendly and very animated -- a lot of fun. His wife is quieter, but very nice. They seem like a great couple.

After a drive through downtown Nairobi and through a wealthy part of the city full of beautiful old mansions mostly made of stucco or stone with red-tiled roofs, we passed by the US Embassy, a lot of UN buildings and eventually arrived at a mall, which was located behind a big wall with a gate and guards. Once inside, we headed for the food court, which turned out to be jammed packed with people eating, drinking and watching the World Cup (Germany vs Argentina). Given the neighborhood, the place was full of people from all over the world. Beth Faith and I ordered Thai food; Jimmy had a pizza.

Over dinner, Jimmy and Faith talked about what it's like to live in Nairobi, where people do not walk around at night and avoid certain neighborhoods entirely for fear of being robbed, kidnapped or killed. They also told us about the 2007 post-election violence in Nairobi and how Jimmy was in the city at their home with little to eat for a couple weeks, while Faith and their young boy remained at her mother's home in the country where it was safer. They also told us about how Kenyans believe that all Americans get married and divorced almost right away and they laughed with amazement when we told them about Petsmart and Petco, that Americans take their animals to a special doctor and that some people dress up their pets and even sleep with them. In Kenya, dogs and cats are considered nuisances and certainly not part of the family.

Once we finished eating, we headed for the airport where Beth and I said our goodbyes to Jimmy, Faith and our driver, Francis. Then we settled in for a long wait until we could check in for our flight to Cairo -- four long hours to be exact, sitting on two of the four hard plastic chairs available. There was no where to purchase food or water and we got quite cold as the evening wore on because our seats were near an open window. Finally, at about 1:30AM, we were allowed to check in, after which we found a coffee shop and hung out there for several more hours. It was a popular place because there were comfortable places to sleep, TVs and good coffee.

Our 4:30 flight left a half hour late and we arrived in Cairo, bleary-eyed, at 10AM. We called Mohamed from the airport who sent a driver to pick us up and take us back to the Luna. Once we checked in, unpacked a bit and washed some clothes, we caught a cab to Maadi and met Mohamed for lunch at a tiny restaurant with wonderful food -- moist grilled chicken and lamb kofta, a salad of cut up ripe tomatoes, onion, sweet cucumbers, cilantro and serrano peppers, hummus, and bread. The food tasted especially delicious after the boring and generally bad food we ate in Kenya.

After lunch we went to Mohamed's brother's flat, where Mohamed lives, and watched TV with him and his sister-in-law, who is due to have her first baby in September. She plied us with all sorts of drinks -- cold apple juice, a hot mixture of lemon and honey to help alleviate my congestion (thanks to the dust and dirt of Kenya and Egypt), and hot sugary tea. Mohamed also ordered Umm Ali for Beth and me, our favorite Egyptian desert. It's a hot baked dish of flaky pastry, coconut, pistachios, yellow raisins and milk, all mixed together.

Later Mohamed left and when he returned he announced that he had a surprise for us. It turned out to be our friend Sandy, the young woman who went to Siwa with us and who works for Mohamed's brother. It was great to see her again and to tell her all about our experiences in Kenya. Both she and Mohamed were fascinated by our photos and asked us a lot of questions about Kenya.

After Sandy left, we had dinner. Beth and I were not at all hungry after just having had a huge lunch four hours before, but we had to eat at least a little food -- chicken, a tomato and cucumber salad, and delicious eggplant or aubergine as the Egyptians call it.

Once we finished our meal, Mohamed drove us back to the Luna. He is not the most confident driver in Cairo traffic, especially at night and downtown where the traffic is especially crazy, but despite a few wrong turns, we made our way back to our hotel where we said goodbye and see you next year to our "brother" Mohamed. Beth and I were very sad to leave him.

Another Day At the School

I worked all day again yesterday at the Ruana Secondary School and this time Eric and I actually felt good about what we accomplished by the time the day was over because we put together all of the library shelves (with some help from Boniface, the mathematics teacher at the school, who was a really nice guy. He will be in charge of the library.) and some of them were filled with books. The library looked like a real library!!! I think that the library team will return tomorrow to finish shelving everything.

The education team also felt good about their day because they sensed that the members of their audience, educators primarily, were truly engaged in their presentations.

As we had done the day before, we broke for chai and sandwhiches in the AM, but this time we ate under a tent that had been errected by some of the students. Lunch was also served under the tent. I had passion fruit for the first time. It was good, but very seedy like a pomegranate. The passion fruit had just been picked from a bush on the school property.

Before we left the Ruana Secondary School at the end of the day, Boniface gathered all of the students together. They thanked us for what we had done and we had a group photo taken. Then we headed back to Meru with a stop at the Nakamot, which is referred to as the Walmart of Kenya. Other than the fact that the store is large and has lots of merchandise, I did not see much of a similarity, but it definitely appeared to be the best place in Meru to shop for groceries, body care products, household goods, and so on.

When we arrived back at our hotel, a woman and a man from Meru were busy setting up tables full of mostly locally-made items to sell to us. Among the more unusual items were a nativity set made out of dried banana leaves and set inside a large gourd, the scene from the Last Supper also made of dried banana leaves, wonderful jewelry, some of which was made of bone, dried banana leaves, beads or wood, carved wooden masks, and beautifully carved ebony bowls. Members of our group purchased quite a few of these items.

As we have done every night in Meru, most of the group gathered in the bar for dinner and conversation. Beth and I shared an order of vegetable samosas and spinach paneer with naan. Most everyone stayed up late to watch the match between Ghana and Uruguay in the World Cup. Everyone was rooting for Ghana, but sadly the team lost in a shoot out.

Tomorrow Beth and I leave for Nairobi so we can fly to Cairo early Sunday AM. The rest of the group will go back to St Lucy's School and maybe to a game park and then return to Nairobi to catch a flight back to London and then various flights to the US.

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As we did

Meru and Environs

Beth and the rest of the medical team had a long day because they saw many, many people at the medical clinic they conducted about 20 minutes or so outside of Meru and did not get back to the hotel until after dark. She and some of the other team members will run the clinic again tomorrow, while the rest of the medical team will go to St Lucy's School for the Blind, which educates children with serious vision impairments who have been abandoned by their families. Many of the children are albino.

I spent my day at the Ruana Secondary School. Eric, one of my volunteer buddies, and I had the task of building shelves for the school's new library. The library team meanwhile spent the day teaching people the basics of organizing and running a school library.

Eric and I had a somewhat frustrating day trying to figure out how to assemble the shelves without instructions or the right tools. Eventually however, we figured out how to put the shelves together and actually managed to assemble one using the screwdriver on Eric's knife and a hunk of wood as a hammer.

At one point during the shelf assembly process, we had a large audience watching us. Boys from the school were lined up in front of each of the windows at the back of the library building and about 25 girls were inside. I think they were less interested in the shelf building than they were in watching two white people, especially one with blond curly hair -- a rare sight for sure in Kenya.

The school served us chai and sandwiches in the AM and traditional Kenyan food for lunch. Lunch was pretty much the standard Kenyan fare -- rice, a stew with vegetables and grisly meat, a mixture of potatoes, peas and spinach, all mashed together -- naan and soda. It was my first opportunity to drink chai in Kenya. I had heard about it from Beth, who drank it all of the time when she was in the country 30 plus years ago and had raved about it to me. It is not anything like what is sold as chai in this country. I liked it a lot.

The education team spent the day observing classes at the Ruana Secondary School. This is the first time that AFK has worked with a Kenyan secondary school so the organization was anxious to see what kind of education the students were receiving. Everyone came away quite impressed. The teachers appeared to be doing a good job of engaging the students and the students were paying attention. More than can be said about many classrooms in this country! (By the way, the textbooks at the school are in such bad shape that students cannot take them home to study.)

The medical team also noted that the teachers are beginning to think, "What now?" given that they will soon have a library full of books. The books will allow them to move away from an emphasis on rote learning and toward self-learning through research projects. It will be a big step for the teachers and the students. Very exciting.

The drive to and from the school took us along part of the road that we had travelled to get to Meru from Nairobi so we got to enjoy more of the beautiful scenery. We also passed by countless school children walking along the road headed home from school, men pushing bicycles piled high with heavy bags or plastic crates full of stuff up long, hills (on the way down the hills, the men essentially function as human bike brakes.), and women walking up steep well-worn red dirt paths bent over under the weight of the bundles of banana leaves or stacks of branches on their backs.

Forgot to mention something in my previous post. On the drive from Nairobi to Meru, we passed over the Equator. Today we passed over it twice.

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Silverbeck and our Drive to Meru

Yesterday all of the AFK volunteers left Nairobi for Meru, a town in the mountains about 4 hours NE of Nairobi. On our way to Meru, we stopped off at the Silverbeck Academy, where the education team had worked the day before. The school had about 6 classrooms, each in its own building. Each dirt floor classroom was furnished with simple wooden benches attached to desks and a chalkboard. (I felt like I was looking at an American classroom back in the pioneer days.) Hanging from the ceilings in nearly all of the classrooms were large sheets of colored paper with information and/or drawings on them, like English words and their definitions, anatomy drawings, information about the solar system, a geometry lesson, and so on. In one classroom, cutouts of the planets also hung from the ceiling and there were geography and science projects on the floor at the front of other classrooms, including a replica of a water filtration system and a three dimensional replica of a game park. It was obvious that there was a lot of learning going on at Silverbeck Academy. In fact a son of one of our drivers (Lawrence) attended the school and is now in college at Purdue. Although Silverbeck is light years away from American schools in terms of appearance and resources (nary a textbook or a computer in sight), it seems to be doing a good job educating its students.

Wayne wanted everyone with AFK to see the school and he wanted to get feedback from the head of the school as well as from parents and teachers regarding the presentations the education team had made to them the day before. He also wanted to know if the books that AFK had shipped to the school earlier in the year were the kinds of books they wanted. He got positive feedback about everything.

The drive to Meru took us through beautiful country. We passed by large, lush green fields of coffee and tea plants, pineapples and banana trees, small farms, deep valleys and rushing brooks. We also passed by miles of fields of pale brown grass blowing in the wind -- like in the movie Out of Africa (I fully expected to see a lion or two emerge from the grass.) -- and goats, sheep and cattle grazing by the side of the road. Once we had reached a high elevation, we also saw huge, fluffy cumulous clouds hovering over mountain peaks in the distance.

We also drove through many big and small towns on our trip to Meru. In every town, the road we were on was lined with small shop after shop selling everything from clothing and hardware to car supplies, animal feed, grains and fruit. There were also countless tiny hair salons, bars, butcheries, restaurants and driving schools. (Driving schools in a country where most people cannot afford a car? Go figure.) Every business had its own hand-painted sign, some of which were very amusing.

We also drove through the town of Runda. It was very very different from every other town along the way because it was full of large homes and nicely landscaped grounds. Runda is home to diplomats, UN staff, and high ranking government officials from many countries, Cabinet Ministers, and the like.

We stopped at The Trout Tree Restaurant for lunch. It was such a cool place! The restaurant is built around a huge fig tree and is essentially a tree house a la the Swiss Family Robinson. There were trout ponds below the restaurant, wooden bridges over a stream, winding paths, and gorgeous trees and plants. It was beautiful.

The food and service at The Trout Tree matched the location -- they were great. After the so so food we had been eating in Nairobi, the wonderful food we ate that afternoon was a real treat. Another treat was the opportunity to see a number of Colobus monkeys close up when we were walking into the restaurant. The monkeys are black with white faces and and long, showy white tails. They are nearly extinct.

We arrived at the Three Steers Hotel in Meru in the late afternoon. It's a simple place, but clean and totally adequate. Later most of the AFK volunteers gathered in the bar to eat samosas, masala chips (fries covered with a masala sauce) and drink beer.

Kaimbiu

We went to Kaimbiu yesterday, another Nairobi slum. Although the living conditions there appeared to be better than those in Kibera, there were no paved roads for the most part in Kaimbiu, water spewed out from broken pipes in some areas turning the roads into small lakes, parts of the roads were full of smoking garbage with goats foraging in it for food, and all of the tiny businesses and homes were made of either sheet metal or dried dung mixed with straw. (Note: One of the businesses we saw was named the Texas Salon! A friend took a picture of it so I hope to post it eventually.)

We spent most of the day at a community center in Kaimbiu located next door to the chief's office. The medical team worked inside the unlit center. Two other volunteers and I worked outside in a dusty parking lot. We were in charge of activities for kids and we were totally unprepared for the number of kids who showed up. So far, working with those kids has been the most emotionally gut-wrenching experience I have had in Kenya. I fought back tears most of the day and really wanted the opportunity to just be somewhere by myself to sob for a little while. The reason why it was so difficult was that all of the kids, ranging in age from about 3 to about 11 or 12, appeared to have nothing in the way of toys based on their enthusiastic responses to what we gave them, which included just about everything we had. We started out by passing out all of the 75 animal puppet/dolls we had brought with us and then we gave those who did not receive a doll, pieces of yellow and red yarn. The kids were happy with anything and everything. No complaining or whining as would probably have happened in the US. Eventually, one us got a ride to an office and brought back a box of construction paper and crayons that had been shipped by AFK. So, we passed out the construction paper with two crayons per child. Once we had passed out all of the paper, we passed out the remaining crayons and then we let kids take the remaining crayon boxes. I put stickers on kids' heads and then on their hands and arms, nearly depleting my supply, and we fed kids pieces of our energy bars and cut up a chocolate bar and fed small pieces of the bar to as many children as possible.

Once we had given away every possible item we could give away, we began taking the kids' photos. That was a lot of fun. First we took group photos, but then some of the children wanted individual photos. At first, the individual photos were serious, but then eventually some of the children began making funny faces or posing. Every time we took a photo they would all crowd around us and take turns looking at it. I think that for most of them it was the first time they had ever seen their own image.

The medical team was busy all day seeing the mostly mothers and children, who lined up outside the Center waiting their turn. They ended up sending two young children, including an infant, to the hospital because they had very high temperatures and needed more medical care than the team could provide. Also, they said that every child they saw had head lice, ringworm, respiratory problems, rhinitis, and that every child was dehydrated. Those problems seem to be facts of life for the children of the Nairobi slums.

After the medical team had completed its work, we drove about 20 minutes to a church center where Jane Njoroge, the head of the Voluntary Counselors of Kenya (VCK), www.vocoke.com, and some of her volunteers, served us a delicious lunch of home-cooked Kenyan food. (AFK provides VCK with support and assistance. VCK community volunteers provide HIV/AIDs counseling, awareness services, like educating women and children about their legal rights, help take care of orphans and widows affected by AIDS, create income-generating projects, and run a home-based reading program, among other things. VCK works throughout Kenya with members of any tribe.)

Jane introduced us to some of the orphans being supported through AFK's Orphan Support program, including one of the two boys and the girl that Beth and I have been sponsoring for several years. (The Chebi children had driven 8 hours with their uncle to meet us. Sadly, one of the boys was not able to travel because he had hurt his arm and had something else wrong; I was never clear exactly what the other problem was.)

After the formal part of the program was over, Beth and I went outside with the Chebis and an interpreter, to talk and to give each child some gifts we had brought for them from the US --a bracelet and small mirror for the girl, a soccer ball and pump, Texas Longhorn tee-shirts, Yankee baseball caps for the boys and flashlights with extra batteries for all. They were very, very shy, but seemed pleased with their gifts. Will try to post photos of the kids with Beth and me later.

On our way to and from Kaimbiu, we drove through downtown Nairobi for the first time. It was a mass of people and busses. Some of the busses were headed out to rural communities in Kenya and their roofs were piled high with luggage, boxes, crates, bags of maize and tires. Although there were some large office buildings and government buildings downtown, everything we saw looked neglected and rundown, which is the way it seems to be throughout Kenya, courtesy of a neglectful government. Not sure yet where we are headed tomorrow. Stay tuned.