Life is Full

Jomo Kenyatta International

2008-04-19T17:06:59Z

This is my last entry from somewhere interesting, or at least that’s how it feels. Though the most overwhelming feeling is exhaustion. Physically, yes. Sleep last night wasn’t sound and the net didn’t quite cover the bed. But also a larger and quieter exhaustion, the mental toll that life here so naturally imposes.
What’s coming seems too new, almost too immense to allow enjoyable anticipation. I think about New York and Shannon and my family and home and I feel nothing. Maybe a silent satisfaction, but the larger idea of what’s happening is too big, composed of too many intricate parts to allow easy and descriptive enumeration.
At the same time, I look out the window at the palm trees and the tropical sun and I ask myself to drink them in, to enjoy and savor the little peculiarities that will soon be lost to sight and mind. But I can’t. I feel as even and blasé about here as I do about where I am going.
Perhaps that’s just how airports are?
I can remember so clearly arriving here. Gleaning so intensely for differences that the most pedestrian of variations seemed profoundly alien. I can recall these terminals and custom desks and stumbling through them guided by Peace Corps staff, exhausted and confused from the 18 hour flight. I could not believe how different things were here. This place – the first place – seems a touchstone for this whole experience because of how different it seemed then, and how normal it is now. It’s an airport. Like many others I have been to in Africa and at home.
Is the contrast of that moment and this one the same contrast that I will see arriving home? Will those faces and places seem as bizarre and unfamiliar as this place once did?
I’m desperate to know how I have changed (as I can only assume I have). But the mirror my recollection provides can only contrast the me I had when I arrived compared to me now. What seemed alien and strange has revealed itself as profoundly normal. Will my experience of these ticket desks and corridors be the same as my experience of myself once I have reached home? Will what seemed so normal here cause me to feel disoriented and out-of-place as I try to ease back into what I knew?
The distance between two moving points tells little about their distance from the start. These trees and this sky, the flags and license plates and colors of faces have all become such implicit assumptions. I’m excited to play with them, to see them change. I just find myself unable to fathom how and what that process will be.

Jomo Kenyatta International remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Kampala

2008-04-19T16:24:26Z

The dirt track from the matatu junction descends and then climbs back up towards the clearing upon which the temple is perched. We found our way here yesterday the same way we have discovered other places that we haven’t been before (which in Uganda is every place): asking directions and squinting out the window for landmarks or signs. When we got off here, we could see the coppery green of the temple’s dome poking out above the trees and we walked down the only road that led in that direction. Today, as yesterday, the greenery that overflows the side of the road is coated in red dust. It is the same red dust that covers our shoes and leaves a collar stain like makeup where it mixes with the sweat on the back of my neck. We are running late for the Sunday service.
Kampala is said to be built atop seven hills just like Rome. The Bahai Temple sits at the crest of one of these hills couched in a rambling set of gardens. It’s hard to describe what a shocking contrast this place is to downtown Kampala. The close cut lawns descend down the sides of the peak. Lines of bushes and copses of trees run in lines framing the view back towards the city. Yesterday there were a few people wandering the grounds: sitting on the grass or lying under trees. A group of little girls were racing down the hill, screaming as the slope accelerated them past their legs ability to keep up. They collapsed onto the grass, rolling the last 50 feet to the bottom, laughing all the way. The quiet of the exhausted and the destitute – so salient to the parks in Nairobi and Nakuru, Kericho and Kisumu – is absent here. This space itself seems pensive and welcoming. The quiet and the reflection it invites has drawn us back for today’s services.
Our Sunday best is no longer really in very good shape. I washed my only pair of pants and collared shirt in the sink last night, but the seat is wearing thru and the collar of the shirt has been hand scrubbed so many times that its frayed and losing color. It’s before nine, but the sun is already high and I am sweating.
Up at this time, carefully dressed and groomed, walking up a dirt road is powerfully reminiscent of Kitui. But so many things have been recently. Our Peace Corps training and homestay south-east of Nairobi was almost a year ago but walking here in the sun and dust, we could easily be headed into the Pastoral Center for our weekly group training. The view of Kampala sprawled out below the temple reminds me of standing atop Tsambani rock and the drums of Sunday worship floating lightly on the wind.
Why do we look towards the beginning as we approach the end? I worried for a time about what it means to bookend my experiences; to mark their ending a long way off and to consciously begin the process of summing them up. I take two points and try to find how they exist for one another. I try to measure and articulate the space between. I have worried, in the past and now, that this habit cannot help but strip the experience of vital and gorgeous details, in the same way any generalization loses the romance of its reality. Fortunately (or unfortunately) this experience has proven resistant to such compartmentalization. Daily I have trouble even wrapping my head around where I am. Placing that in contrast to where I was a year ago and considering it in the context of this whole experience is too much to hold at once.
At home I used to avoid learning about – much less using – public buses because I didn’t like the idea of boarding something whose route was unbounded by a set track. And this was in a space where I speak the language and am familiar with the geography. One of my goals in coming here was to confront the pit-of-the-stomach dread I felt with the idea of being dropped off alone in a totally unknown place. The experience of having not a clue about where I am or how to get to the next place is so reliably produced by this experience that it has become less something I confront and more something that I live with everyday. Being lost is an ongoing context to everything, anything else.
What does that mean? I am at a loss as to how to summarize that change. I can see where it began and where it will end, but I can’t yet contain it, understand it at once.
Every two points are related to one another, if only be nature of their mutual existence. Seeing a relationship between them, reading lessons or truths into their distance and sensation is little more than saying that they existed and you remain the link between them; I am the space between the past and present. And in that context, what I am confronting is the fact that I don’t know exactly who I will be when I return. I don’t know who I am now if only because I have come to learn that the self is as essential and objective as the location and attitude in which it is examined.
Time will take care of the reducing the details. In six months, a year, I won’t be able to recall what it’s like to be here well enough to be overwhelmed with it. ‘Permanent’ changes won’t be existent then any more than they are now, but the place will show a different me. I don’t have to worry about summarizing this experience or deciding on its lessons and impacts any more than I needed a detailed summary of the person I was before I arrived. These changes are not set, they cannot be known, detailed; they are a function of where I go next and what that situation demands. I will find myself a new way then, just as I have here.

Kampala remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Too Little, Too Late

2008-04-19T16:25:32Z

We tried to go to the museum and memorial here in Kigale before we left for rainforest camping but found it closed for diplomatic visits. President Bush is gradually realizing that his legacy will be one of diplomatic, military and economic failure and has taken, with a sudden and stinking desperation, to international relations as a hobby. His visits to East Africa carried an unctuous effort. Here in Kigale his visit to the genocide museum resulted in it being closed to tourists for two straight days. Returning on a bright and pleasantly breezy Tuesday, we found a faded floral wreath emblazoned with Bush’s name and an appropriately sober message of sympathy fourteen years too late. It was placed on a concrete foundation over the mass graves that were filled with the unidentified bodies that were rotting in Kigale’s streets back in 1994. These sit in a memorial garden that surrounds the genocide museum.
What is there to say about this place? About what has happened here and what it has meant to the people for whom this violence was not just a news story or a set of photographs in an air-conditioned and dimly lit museum?
There are facts. There is the fact that General Romeo Dallaire – officer in charge of the UN peace keeping mission in Rwanda – met with a government informant who offered proof that the Rwandan government was training youth groups to carry out a meticulously planned genocide. This plan was complete with government military support and annotated deathlists. There is the fact that this information was dismissed by the UN just weeks before President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by an unknown group. There is the fact that within hours of Habyarimana’s death roadblocks were set up in the streets of Kigale and the Interhamwe had begun the process of murdering, raping and torturing tens of thousands of people.
Too often in considering violence in Africa it is easy to understand and dismiss violence as a result of underlying ethnic tensions. We can chalk it up to the legacy of arbitrary borders created by an imposed government or the same supposed cultural differences that excuse a constant state of governmental corruption. There’s no need to understand what happened in any specific terms; it falls under a universal escape clause: it’s African and it’s ethnic. There’s nothing to understand. What I would have you take away from reading this is simple. What happened here was not unorganized. It was not a randomly expanded act of isolated savagery. The 800,000 fathers and mothers, sons and daughters murdered here were targeted over a period of months and years and the mechanism created and operated to extinguish their lives was coldly deliberate and intentional. What happened and what, therefore, could have been prevented was not spontaneous either in its planning or in its enactment.
Those are facts. They cannot carry the depth of meaning and emotion that I saw in the school group of high school age Rwandan youths with whom I went through the exhibits. Watching a video of interviews with survivors I was ashamed of my own feelings of sorrow and despair. I was embarrassed by how shallow any sense of loss I could summon must stand against their own. I watched as they wailed and sobbed, beat their hands against glass cases containing the clothes excavated off the bodies of those in the graves outside. 15…16? A year or two old when gangs of neighbors appeared at their doors with blunted machetes and bloody hands. I can’t grasp it. I can’t sit with it in the way that they do. In the face of that, what is there to do?
Nothing for now. Nothing for here. The healing that is taking place, the healing that may never end, is not a project for international concern. To make it so would be a disservice to those who perished and to any attempt for real and meaningful reconciliation. Whether this could have been prevented by the UN or the US or any other body is meaningless when it comes to truly shouldering the responsibility for what has happened.
I hesitated to write about our visit for this very reason. In the face of such astonishing loss – even absent our own government’s complicit silence when these things occurred – of what use are my pale descriptions? What could this piece transmit but its own inadequacy? Except that this personal sense of impotence in the face of such large forces is the same one that excuses our leaders from acknowledging tragedies like this one even as they continue to occur. When we stand aside and opt out of our own conscience because things seem overwhelming, that is when tragedy happens. When we cease to heed the courage of our convictions we leave the space for the kind of atrocities that were enacted here. Our penance for what happened here is refusing to give over to any sense of our own powerlessness. What we think, what we believe in the world matters. When we see something wrong, we must say something before it's too late.

Too Little, Too Late remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Mwanza

2008-03-15T13:55:59Z

The first few months I was here I couldn’t tell the Kenyans apart. The simplest way to say it was that they all looked the same to me. I didn’t realize it, but in my life at home I had grown accustomed to seeing one kind of face. If each race has a set of variables that tend to describe their proportions and colors, the shape of their chins or set of their eyes, then it would make sense that I am best equipped to detect subtle distinctions in the kind of face with which I am most familiar: my own. Over time I have improved and finding white faces the minority of what I have been surrounded by for the last ten months I now have the opposite problem. I am so unaccustomed to seeing white people that they all look the same to me. Waving to the girls at dinner just across from us on the patio, I get a mystified look and half hearted return wave.
But I am right. It is the Dutch girls from the bus office. At least, we think they are Dutch. They are from Holland and we can’t quite agree whether this makes them Dutch or Danish. Volunteers at a hospital in Mwanza they have been living here for two months and kick off tomorrow with a few weeks of travel before they head home. They had planned travel through Kenya but abandoned it in the wake of the election. This, combined with their exclamation of concern over our impending travel to Rwanda, makes them a casebook study in the danger that domestic disorder poses to a tourism industry. “Rwanda? Is that safe?” The genocide in Rwanda was 14 years ago next month and it is still discouraging visitors.
We found this place while we wandered about Mwanza today. The dining patio sits at the edge of the water, separated by a shallow wooden fence topped with small kerosene lanterns. I have been surprised at how calming the wide and quiet flatness of the lake is for me. It reminds me of home I suppose. The land around the lake seems new and ragged: hills climbing to an escarpment that surrounds the city center. The houses terrace up the hillsides creating the appearance of a Mediterranean village transplanted to central Africa. The water and coast are littered with boulders the size of houses, as though god had wandered along the shore scattering pebbles from his pockets. They poke out of the ground and water at intervals, like the ruins of some ancient settlement softened and rounded by centuries of wind and rain.
The Dutch (or Danish) girls are dining with an odd dozen ex-pats from work. Their co-workers resemble nothing so much as the cast of a primetime hospital drama. There’s a stunning, if vacant looking, blonde, a willowy and hippily dressed brunette. Standing slightly aloof is the older, rugged looking supervisor and the grim, tall, thin and dark counter-culture heartthrob. There’s a pop-band pretty boy in the white linen shirt, his tuft of tightly trimmed chin hair bronzed from the sun and a dumpy social misfit sitting with the pair of ambiguously ethnic minorities. The strongest aspect of their TV-drama resemblance is the exotic setting and honest joy that seems to pervade their dinner. Just watching them, I want to be a part of their group, their life. With little more than a cursory introduction, I find myself jealous of their lives. I imagine the houses, the lifestyle that their first world salaries command in this third world country. Their party stretches long into the night in my imagination, as they sip cocktails of fresh juice and imported vodka on the balcony of someone’s hillside home. Their conversation drifts in and out of English and Kiswahili, French and Dutch (or Danish) as they sit smoking clove cigarettes and waiting for the sun rise.
Watching them, wishing for the community and comfort they seem to possess in the midst of this strange and exotic land I start to see how I will remember the life I have left behind in Kenya. I’ve had dinners like this, sitting with my friends under the setting sun enveloped in a bond of common experience and mutual respect. Treasuring an isolation that makes the people and moments more precious than they would be anywhere else. Filled to overflowing with a true and honest desire to be here, now, and nowhere else with no one different. I have a quote written in one of my books to the effect that in travel we become all things: explorer and student, lover and academic, critic and creator and child. But I don’t know that we become residents. There’s a special sense of belonging in a place that’s not your own, of thriving in an adopted home. It’s not a role that we can “try on” as we might do with others. We visit places to try them out, to imagine our lives transplanted somewhere different, but there is a powerful difference between imagining a home and actually having one. It’s worth noting that, for a little while, I had one here.

Mwanza remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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The African Express

2008-03-15T13:35:09Z

The train station in Dar is cushioned from the street by a ring of families seated on their luggage, lounging in the grey light of the overcast day. The omnipresent and riotous mass of hawkers and street boys that surround the ferry to Zanzibar is absent here. The only things for sale in the street are the domestic supplies that three days on the train will require: five liter jugs of water and loafs of bread.
Rachel sits down with our bags and food on a bench just inside. While I am investigating the platforms a women sitting next to her asks for our two five-liter bottles. In broken English she indicates the child lying on the bench next to her. Rachel refuses just before the child’s actual mother returns to take her towards the train. As we rise to enter the platform we see at her feet already two five liter bottles, a mirror of what she asked us to give.
Third class is seating on a first-come first-serve basis. A stern, tightly packed crowd squeezes against the cars awaiting the conductor’s key. Across the platform sits an older train, one that has been gradually cannibalized over a decade of sitting in the yard. The glass is gone from the windows and the cushions from the seats. The light fixtures hang at the end of slack and worn wiring. Bare metal benches sit facing one another. The friction of a thousand sweating bodies has rubbed the paint from the metal leaving the dully glinting sheen of polished steel in the shape of legs and torsos. I imagine the struggle for these seats that has been repeated here over and over again – fighting for a comfort barely greater than the floor beneath it. And even after gaining a seat, three days of dust and bugs through open windows. Three days of unsleeping worry over luggage and theft. Rationed water and the sweet-sour stink of dirt and sweat.
In first class the compartment door has holes where the lock used to be that are plugged with wood scraps. The plastic light cover over the sole working fluorescent fixture is broken in a jagged streak. The pleather of the seats is ripped and faded from the sun. On each side of the door, facing the windows across the hallway, are one-way light panels with sliding covers propped open with scrap wood pieces. In the corner to the right of the window is a miraculously functional sink. I turn it on and wait for the pipe underneath to pool the water on the floor. Instead I hear it trickling down and out onto the tracks below. Above it, what might have been a medicine cabinet at one time is boarded over with the same wood that holds up the light panels and plugs the door. Down the hall, the toilet is a hole cut in the train carriage that drops right out onto the tracks. Squatting to release you can see the ground rushing by underneath. You watch as the contents of your bowels are splashed out across a half mile of track. We jury rig our mosquito net over the window and lay out our sleeping bags on the beds. We are shocked and delighted to find our rock-bottom expectations thoroughly contradicted even before a porter comes to the door with clean sheets and blankets. We are astonished to hear him ask us if we would like dinner delivered.
A half hour out of Dar Es Salaam the sound of car engines and paved roads on tires has disappeared. At our stops beside cornfields and tiny dirt crossings still more people run past us toward the third class cars and the only sound is the steam like hiss of the wheels as they slow to stop and gradually begin their roll again. The horn-blast signaling departure stands out like a beacon in the silence of the dusk. Sticking my head out the window as we enter a curve, I can see the train stretched our fore and aft, black heads leaning on arms as they watch the passing bush. The sounds of children and villages outside mingle with the voices of our neighbors and the people passing by in the hallway. We start and stop with an indeterminate and unfathomable regularity, as though god has asked us all to take a moment and dwell on this one spot. Consider this field and this sky. Absorb them honestly and fully.
There’s a dirty intimacy in this stifling space. Watching Rachel strip off her dusty, sweaty clothes to bathe with water from the tiny bowl of the sink, I imagine the scores of people sequestered in this space for two or three days of equatorial heat. Traveling with strangers or friends or family clinging to whatever ideas of personal space or hygiene are necessary to arrive at their destination. Rachel’s wet body under the dim bare bulb exudes a universality of human life startlingly distinct from the images of objectified female eroticism so often imbued in bathing. She stands half naked in this dirty and impersonal space as I will later and as people have since this train was new. Once upon a time the doors had locks and the floor was a solid mass of clean tile. The windows closed without bracing and the medicine cabinet was filled and emptied by each set of passengers who spent three days watching the landscape go coursing by. The clothes that lie piled on the bed and the walls that contain this bath are a changeable and ephemeral shell over a living, breathing thing. Rachel’s body enduring in the center of her manufactured skins; the endless procession of travelers removing the day’s dust continuing even as the floor has punctured, the locks failed and the windows cracked.
As night falls and the darkness outside carries only the mediated silence of a quiet summer rain. The light fades from the windows and the rhythmic beat of the train over the tracks fades from consciousness. Climbing into bed we turn out the light and find suddenly that the click-clack of the wheels over joined sections of track has diminished only within our own perception. In the dark, the motion and sound of the train become one thing cradling our senses and drawing us off to sleep.

The African Express remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Zanzibar

2008-03-12T08:00:34Z

Zanzibar has been an unforgiving experience when it comes to how I view myself. As my Kiswahili increasingly rusts in my brain and slows on my tongue it begins to feel as though I am losing a part of myself. It seems this trip is stripping me of the pride and strength I have cultivated from ten months of life here.
This place is packed with tourists, as it should be. The mechanisms are all in place to provide an experience that contrasts and comforts; one that challenges just enough to gratify, but not enough to draw any deep or profound questions. And though Rachel and I harp about authenticity - about real cultural experiences - what are we but culturally focused tourists? Elevating one variable of the experience above other equally imagined inputs to a fictionally ‘true’ whole. What’s ‘natural’ and what’s ‘normal’ is mostly a matter of picking a point in the progression and contrasting it with the present, the average or your preference. We search for essence and end up only shuttling between points of view.
The biggest blow to my sense of being special – of belonging in Africa– is how much I’ve enjoyed being here, camouflaged in a sea of white faces. How relieved I am to have my mistakes forgiven, to finally have the endless hawking and aggressive salesmanship actually apply to me. I can cease fighting the way I am viewed. I match, at last, the expectations daily foisted upon me.
Still, I can’t help feeling as though I have lost something, We share the streets with their overzealous tanning and corn-rowed auburn hair over pasty dry scalps. There’s the same ‘exotic’ African print cut into handbags and trousers, tank-tops and scarves. Cameras are slung over every arm and neck like guns. Every shop and duka echoes with the same argument and rotely memorized phrasebook exchanges. Rachel and I talk about them, snipe at their hair or dress as they come down the alley. We abuse them for reminding us of ourselves.
Most of my existence in Africa has been based around not being a tourist. I’ve struggled to validate my presence in tiny villages and back road bars through depth of commitment - by emphasizing the length of my stay. “I’m not a tourist. I live here.” Being special has become a burden. It started as a congratulation. As feeling better and more and different than those against whom I compared yourself. ‘Special’ ends as a violent and futile protest against a gathering sense of commonality. One that hollows you out and leaves an echo in the space you think you are supposed to fill. In truth, Rachel and I have been in a pissing contest since the day we stopped being volunteers and started being tourists - a word we shrink from using.
It dies hard because this whole thing started in a spirit of exceptionalism. We chose this trial; we elected this time to do something uncommon and unusual. Whether from a youthful temperament or some mix of deeply imbedded iconoclasm and historically posited guilt, we came to do and be something different. (Though it’s important to remember that we came to Africa to do it, a place where generations of white faces have arrived with similar sentiments of their own uniqueness.)
I feel sad to watch it slip away. Different or not, I felt different before. I had an honest pride in my choice to be here and my reasons for doing so. Now, the same thing I used to hold with a quiet confidence at the back of my hand has become an emblem I’m desperate to display. Instead of feeling special, I strive to prove that I am and it fills my interactions with calculated inferences and over-confident authority. My need to tell someone how it really is deepens in concert with a growing fear that I don’t really know. True or not, as I increasingly elevate the ‘authentic’ experience I can’t help but see how absurd my own lingering claim of uniqueness is becoming and, perhaps, how absurd it was to begin with.
The loss is less about my permanent self than about how I viewed myself here. And it’s not a loss. A year ago I would have seen it as so, but however I have grown tells me that it’s just a change; it’s a part of growing. I’m coming home not with a feeling that I’ve failed to authentically be here, but rather the knowledge that being anywhere has less to do with what you know or how long you’ve stayed as it does with feeling like you belong. As always, the only one who can truly validate your presence, your purpose, your intentions, is you.
The gradual relinquishing of my exceptional status is like a slow release of pressure as I come ascend from the depths, back towards the easy and familiar life I knew. To lose a part of something, it must begin with the kind of completeness that can never describe a life. I am not losing a part of myself, merely leaving it behind on the road to something new. I only hope that tomorrow finds me as optimistic and excited for the future as today.

Zanzibar remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Dar Es Salaam

2008-02-25T09:59:11Z

Dar Es Salaam remains mercifully untouched by the foreigners who flood its airport during tourist season. They flock north and south of the city to white sand beaches and swim up bars. Without them, the city is clean, orderly and largely sober, owing to a significant Muslim population. Municipal workers in orange vests and bare feet sweep the streets and cluster in small groups at roundabouts, picking up trash and maintaining the immaculate state of the streets. The roads are full of personal vehicles and motorcycles. There is little need for the endless streams of matatus that Nairobi’s vast spread demands; the city is comfortably walkable. We got lost repeatedly, only to find ourselves once again back at the intersection from which we started. The city has a geography comfortably grasped in a two hour walk, as opposed to Nairobi which I barely understand after a dozen trips over an eight month period.
When we were sequestered north of the city at the Jangwani Beach Hotel we were told that Dar was dangerous and that we were restricted from going for our own safety. We chaffed at this restriction on our freedom and sarcastically noted the absurdity of suggesting that Dar was too dangerous - the Kenyan office is located in a city nicknamed ‘Nairobbery.’ The reality is that Dar has a whole lot of nothing in a surprisingly small amount of space. It would have been better – and more accurate – to say: “Don’t go to Dar. You will just be bored. Not to mention two hours from your free meals and a 24 hour bar.”
However, the over eager diagnosis of peril was not merely a company line from the PC Tanzania office. Tanzanian volunteers we met decried ‘The Q Bar’ near the Peace Corps office in Dar as an out of control prostitute free-for-all. “Don’t bring too much cash,” they said, “And make sure you keep an eye on your drink.” This sounded great. James and Marcus and I were eagerly awaiting our chance to descend into the depravity of the Q Bar. Where we expected to be aswim in prostitutes and creepy old ex-pats we found instead a pleasant well lit courtyard bar that I would be happy taking my family to. This in contrast to ‘Casablanca’ in Mombasa, where a Tuesday night walk to use the restroom gets you three package pats. I imagine Tanzanian volunteers evacuated to Nairobi undergoing nervous breakdowns like the cousin from the sticks who warns you about Des Moines after 8p on a Friday and ends up at the Robert Taylor Homes at 2:30a after a Bull’s Championship. The end of their first day finding them mugged, hopelessly lost and emotionally destabilized.
The long and short of it is that Dar is boring. And slow. And hopelessly unsophisticated when compared to Nairobi. It is for those qualities that I find myself jealous of volunteers here. I have often wondered about my Peace Corps experience and the other ways it could have occurred. If I had chosen Agriculture – a Peace Corps work sector endlessly more structured and concrete than Public Health – and if I had been assigned to a country where I actually had to learn a language, would my feelings about being away from home be different?
Dar feels appropriate to the work of a Peace Corps Volunteer. Nairobi is hard edged and overgrown. It’s layers of grime and desperation and the shallow luster of new wealth built next to – on top of – dire poverty all constantly surround and assault you. Any public exposure is continually invasive: you are cajoled and needled in rude, heavily accented english. It is exhausting compared to the quiet peace of Dar.
A family friend high up in USAID told me that Peace Corps Kenya is Africa’s best Peace Corps Program. USAID probably thinks that because of the budget, the infrastructure, the endless chain of International Aid organizations and NGOs all comfortably nestled into Nairobi’s top-quality hospitality sector. There are good hospitals and reliable utilities and a high degree of political stability (at least until recently). But the same things that encourage the permanent installation of so much foreign money – as well as the money itself - is exactly what makes Kenya such a difficult and frustrating place in which to serve.
Too many of us found our service to be more about money – how much we could bring and how it looked on grant applications to possess a Peace Corps Volunteer – than about learning to live in another country. Kenyan’s I met without water or electricity knew to ask me for sponsorship for their children, a donation to this project or that foundation. Too often, before being a person, Peace Corps volunteers were dollar signs. Kenya which has (had) the most stable government and highest level of Western aid in East Africa, has the worst roads of all the countries I have visited. Its cities are dirtier, dingier and more broken down than any others. The money, it seems, is eating the country from the inside out. And its evident in the experience of the volunteers who serve there.
Visiting the Peace Corps office in Dar I spoke with a Tanzanian volunteer who felt a similar process was beginning to occur here as a result of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDs Relief (PEPFAR). Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into Tanzania to be spent on AIDs projects. Emily said that their Mid-Service training seemed to forget ideas of community integrations for a focus on grant writing, budgeting and accounting. Money as the center of Peace Corps Service just as it is the center of the America’s foreign policy in the third world. The fear it raises is that the Peace Corps too is becoming an organization more focused on throwing money and recording statistics than on person-to-person change; for host country nationals and for Peace Corps Volunteers.
The decision’s I’ve made - distinctions I have reached – here are life changing shifts of intention and perspective. The evacuation came at a good time for me and I am thankful for the manner in which it is making moving to the next part of my life easier. However, had I to do it over again, I would ask not to be in Kenya. I would wish for someplace like this. For the quiet and regional flavor of Dar Es Salaam or any other place not yet swallowed by the endless money blindly sent to change it.

Dar Es Salaam remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Mombasa Tourism

2008-02-19T10:34:40Z

I have a fair degree of certainty that this man has just woken from a sound sleep. Coming into the office it was deserted. Three desks littered with brochures, each emblazoned with doubtful English. Posters of electric blue lagoons and white sand beaches. Dusty carved figures and faded African prints. No people. Only after calling out a few times did a woman emerge from the far office, her expression indicating severe embarrassment to be caught carrying a cup of tea. She placed it on the desk in a brisk manner that suggests this was why she exited the back office in the first place. As though the Mombasa Tourism office can only operate with a fresh cup of chai steaming away on its desks.
I am already resigned to being here. It's half stubborn self definition and half the expectation of an experience like the one we are currently having. I have a rigid and thorny self definition: I am not a tourist; I live here. Except that, technically, I don't anymore. I want to remain unique and exceptional here. I want status – a ranking above normal – for the months of struggle towards integration with life here. The other half of my resignation is linked to this desire for special status. The people who need the tourism office are likely in pursuit of knowledge that we have already acquired. What you bargain for and what you don't. What a menu in a Kenyan restaurant actually means in terms of what's available. Where and when to walk in the city and what to carry. How to deal with street children and touts and hawkers. We've learned these things through months of mistakes and awkward moments of silence. It's knowledge – competency – that I am proud of and entering here seems to strip me of it.
James (as his name plate indicates) is the tourism officer. He exits the center rear office after a minute or so of knocking by the tea woman. The office he exits is dark. This, combined with the full, arms and head stretching, eye closing yawn that racks his upper body, causes him to resemble a bear staggering out of hibernation. Whether it's his nap being interrupted or his general feelings about his job – probably both – his enthusiasm is minimal to say the least.
We've come today for two reasons. The first is that tonight is our last night with Charles and he has volunteered to take us out to a nice dinner in celebration. We want seafood, but all we have been able to find is more than we want to ask Charles to pay. The second thing is the Lonely Planet myth of a cargo dhow ride to Zanzibar. Supposedly it is possible to pay for passage on a motarized cargo dhow going from Mombasa to Zanzibar. We want to know if such a thing is really possible.
In some sense, this is a stupid question since: a) if it is possible, it's not something the tourism office would or could sanction and b) anyone who has successfully negotiated with a commercial dhow to camp on their deck during an international port change is likely not to be the kind of person who would be sitting where we are right now, across the desk from a man whose primary job is dealing with foreigners who are intimidated by the prospect of taking a ride on a minibus and are still amazed by how hot it is here.
Rachel explains about dinner:
"We would like seafood, but a place like 'The Tamarind' is too expensive. We want something a step or two down." The Tamarind is said to be one of the best restaurants in East Africa. It's prices are on the high end for American fancy restaurants.
James stretches his jaw downward and repeatedly opens his eyes wide as though he's just put in contact lenses for the first time. He reaches to his right and, stifling a yawn, grabs a brochure and spreads it out in front of us.
"There is a wonderful restaurant here called: 'The Tamarind.' It is very famous."
Rachel and I exchange looks. I feel fairly certain that if we had started off describing our preference for human flesh roasted over burning tires, James would still have this brochure as his go-to.
"…um. Right. But like I said, The Tamarind is a little too expensive. Is there something a little cheaper?"
James closes one eye and then the other and purses his lips in thought.
"You're sure this place is too much for you to pay?" He appears unable to grasp that white people in Mombasa would be unable to afford something. He has a point. Indeed, as much as I feel conceitedly confident that we are not the type of travelers to use a tourism office, I have trouble imagining the ones who would. East Africa is not a casual destination. Visitors interested in tourism have most likely come from far enough away that they had a specific reason for making the trip. East Africa, and Mombasa in particular, is not the kind of convenient stopover where you think to yourself: "And, as long as we're passing through, let's kill a day or two in Mombasa! Gotta be something to do around there."
Given that, anyone who did arrive here without an actual purpose or even vague idea of what there is to do would likely possess a great deal of money and little judgment of how it should be spent. Blindly recommending 'The Tamarind' might work with such people. We, however are not that kind of traveler.
James tries for 'The Tamarind' once more, his office mate with the tea nodding her head: "It's very romantic…" before moving on to suggesting a two day dhow ride-snorkeling excursion.
"Right, but we are actually looking for a place to have dinner." He nods.
"Yes. They serve dinner on the boat both nights." He emphasizes this point by tapping his pen against the brochure.
Rachel continues an insistent line of questioning in pursuit of dining options. On the island of Mombasa there are apparently no more than six restaurants. According to the tea lady three of theses are: "Very romantic." James' final offering is unveiled with the smug satisfaction that suggests he was testing to see if we would refuse all his other options before he trusted us enough to mention his personal choice. From his desk drawer he removes a flyer for the Rehema Restaurant. This restaurant is across the seat. Turning around in my chair I can see the sign over the door. The flyer James offers us is the same one I was handed as we walked by looking for this office not more than twenty minutes ago. Though the description of the food is vague, I admit I am intrigued by the promise of air conditioning.
We move on, at last, to the dhow to Zanzibar. James sighs and presses the heels of his palms deep into his eye sockets as though we have presented him with a very difficult word problem.
"That is very illegal. There is no boat until Zanzibar."
James suggests (obviously) that we should fly. If we are determined to take the bus we should not go to the stage to get a ticket.
"It could be difficult. There may be danger for you. Someone else should go."
"Perhaps you can take us?" I offer, jumping into the conversation for the first time. I am imagining spending the afternoon torturing this man. Having him escort us everywhere. Asking him to be in photos with street children. Insisting he take us into a mosque during prayer. Having him translate ignorant, banal questions asked in overly loud annunciated English.
"No. I cannot. I must be here in the office, but your hotel can send someone, I am sure."
Qwale Guesthouse has a single full time staff member: a woman at the front desk who naps on a cushion on the floor in between customers. I suppose if one of us took over the front desk she could go.
I don't blame James for his half feigned interest and total lack of knowledge. His conduct and skill are spectacularly typical of the city and district employees I have dealt with in Kenya. Moreover, with the election violence, it would not surprise me to learn that we are the first tourists in here all week. I would probably be napping too.
As we get up to leave James makes his first unsolicited effort to be helpful.
"You must have a map." He hands us a two page fold-out Bata Shoe ad and points to the lower right corner where there is a 4X4 inch map of Mombasa. The Bata store locations are marked by large red stars that cover the names of nearby streets.
"Oh good," I say, "In case we have a sudden craving for quality footwear."
He nods enthusiastically. Whether this stems from the quality footwear or the fact that we are finally leaving, I can't tell.

Mombasa Tourism remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Lamu to Mombasa

2008-02-15T12:57:36Z

The wind has been turned off like a tap. For the last three days its been blowing non-stop, gale force. It has been preemptively ending card games, slamming doors and blowing bottles off tables. Rachel and I initially moved or mattress out to the roof-top terrace because the bedroom was so stiflingly hot. We suspend a mosquito net from the backs of four chairs and sleep out under the stars. The first night of the wind we woke in the pitch black shivering; a foreign enough sensation that we relished the goosebumps. But when we wake up this morning in the dark at five it’s still enough that we can hear the ocean lapping at the hulls of the dhows in the harbor. As we pick up our sheets and mattress under the slowly dimming stars we hear the first call to prayer of the day, the Arabic echoing clearly through the already warm morning air.
Downstairs in our rented apartment Charles is already awake, finishing his packing. Normally at this time of the year this guest house is fully booked. There are four two-person rooms on the second floor that share a small common room. The three-person apartment we have paid for on the third and a pair of stepped rooftop terraces and another bedroom for two on top of the house. There are two full time house boys and a chef constantly on duty. Normally our apartment would rent for $75 to $200 a day. We are paying 2000 shillings each per night, or the equivalent of about $8 a person. Normally holding 13-15 guests, the house now contains as many guests as staff. And we aren’t even needy guests, preferring to wash our own clothes in borrowed basins and shop for and cook our own meals in the fully equipped kitchen. Such is the state of Kenyan tourism in the wake of the election troubles.
We leave a fair sized tip as well as an odd collection of freebies: discarded weight from over-heavy packs. My Chacos were already on their last legs and I’ve ordered a new pair that should have arrived at home in the states by now. They are heavy and I’m glad to leave them on the floor by the bed. There’s also Charles’ tent. He’s reached that inevitable plateau where, trip or no trip, he just needs to go home. We will be parting ways after Mombasa and so the Kenyan bought tent that he was going to use in the parks in Rwanda is also being dropped. This is probably in his best interest considering that its constructed of a thick tarp like plastic that make it better suited to the humane suffocation of an aged and beloved pet than anything else. We also leave a Frisbee and hacky sack. A bottle of shaving cream. A half-finished jar of peanut butter. Ironically, every one of these objects are ones that most of the Kenyans I have met have only a passing familiarity with. Mwanza (our chef), holding out my sleeping bag and the Frisbee, asked me to explain just how you pitch a tent. We try to sneak off in the dark but they awake. Goodbyes and thank yous are breathily whispered through windows as we pass the ground floor room where they sleep.
The descending tide has left the sand uncharacteristically firm. Any coolness remaining in the pre-dawn air is soon overwhelmed by the exertion of schlepping our packs and the remaining tent down the beach. Fishing boats are already coming in with a morning catch. They heft the slick and shiny flesh on their shoulders as we pass. It’s three kilometers to Lamu. We gradually join a growing parade of travelers heading to the early ferry back to the mainland. Even a month ago, ferries ran from Lamu three times a day. With the decline in Western visters, its now down to just this one. If you want to leave without hiring a private boat you need to be in the main harbor by 7a.
We pack into a motarized dhow, the luggage piled in the bow twice as high as the gunnels. A sign says the max capacity is 100. In a space roughly the size of two station wagons end to end, there are roughly 70 people. There’s already no standing room remaining. They sit on the side rails, stand on the stern and the engine housing, they crouch in the bottom of the boat, sitting on carry-alls and duffels. I can’t see where the other 30 people would sit. Perhaps they cling gamely to the underside of the hull like barnacles. Climbing out is a similarly pushy and unorganized process to climbing in. The stone docks we climb are worn by wind and weather, the steps collapsing into one another as though the concrete had melted in the sun and run down towards the water in a river.
Sitting in the front of the bus, I find that an enterprising traveler has already commandeered much of my leg space with a 20 liter jerri-can and a cardboard box tied with string. The box, I will eventually learn, contains a rooster owned by the woman sitting behind me. Over the course of the seven hour trip she will repeatedly hand me corn to feed the chicken and periodically encourage me to kick the box until he audibly responds. Undoubtedly he is a fighting cock and needs to be kept angry. The radio on the bus is mercifully broken and aside from the armed guards sitting by the door – in the case of bush bandits – the most notable thing about the bus ride is just how unnotable it is. Seven hours squeezed between two other people, sweating in the equatorial heat, choking on dust from the road, a chicken in a box periodically interrupting my fevered dozing with an angry crow is astonishingly and casually normal. I never even take out my book.
In Mombasa it’s a short walk to the Qwale guesthouse. We stay in a triple. The florescent light won’t stop flickering and it’s the one room shower/sink/toilet combo again. The economy of space makes multi-tasking a breeze: you can spit toothpaste in the sink, pee in the toilet and stand under the shower at the same time. Apparently having rusted out over the course of its life, the showerhead has a plastic bag with holes poked in it stretched tightly across its underside. At the base of each bed is a topsheet, a towel and a small wad of toilet paper. Any paper left in the bathroom would be soaked.
We head down to the Likoni Ferry in search of a park where Somali immigrants gather in the afternoons to chew miraa, drink tea and scream at soccer matches in their native language. We find eventually a quieter spot than that outside a small duka. Our neighbor at the next table is the perfect kind of stranger. Helpful, coherent and totally uninterested in anything we are doing. He graciously answers a few questions and then goes back to his own chewing.
Miraa is a mild stimulant whose effect is augmented considerably by other substances. The scariest drunks here, in my experience, are those who stagger toward you and reveal white teeth covered in the green mulch of chewed miraa. It comes in small bundles – handfuls – of maybe 100 stems. Red/brown at the stiffer end up to green at the frayed remains of the leaves at the other. You pick off the leaves and chew with your back teeth from the softer green end towards the harder red one. When the pulp stops sliding easily, you switch to front teeth: peeling the pulp off the hard stem. It has a bitter, cotton-mouthing taste that fades as your gums and tongue go tingly or numb.
In my experience, its not a particularly potent or interesting amphetamine. The high is low-key and it grows slowly. It also requires an intensive investment of time and effort to extract a fairly minor payoff. However, the same attributes that would make it ill-fitted for Williamsburg Hipsters jauting about the East Village in the wee hours of a Sunday morning make sitting in the park for an afternoon chewing it a remarkably pleasant experience. It passes the time and leaves focus for other things, like playing cards, but you don’t even have to pay attention.
As the sun sets, we catch a matatu back to the center of town. The tout is at that pleasantly exhausted part of the day where he wakes only enough to take our money and shut the door before laying his head back against the window. We walk to get a late dinner of schwarma sandwiches at a café a few blocks from the hotel. Even close to 11p the streets of Mombasa feel safe and welcoming. A light breeze has cut the heat of the day and the sidewalks are full of families walking together in and out of the street lights. It is a far cry from the dim and frightening grime of Nairobi at this time of night.
On the way we pass a darkened city park where an LCD projector has been set up to show the latest game of the Africa’s Cup being played in Accra, Ghana. Men and women and children lounge, stretched out, on the grass, crouched in trees and seated on utility boxes and dry empty fountains as they watch. We sit outside on the sidewalk patio and hear the muffled cheers and gasps of the crowd as we eat.

Lamu to Mombasa remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Lamu

2008-02-05T06:16:56Z

Removing our shoes, we tie them around our necks to walk along the stone walls of the closed estates. High tide: the ocean waves quietly lapping against stone steps up to carved and ornamental double doors. The chalky white of dried salt on dark wood. We pass a boat yard with a rusted crain a launching ramp. The strong fish smell that tourists wrinkle their noses at; that locals know means work, money, food.
There are streams of pundas. The donkeys trot by with woven reed sacks draped over them, laden with concrete or thick rectangular cut coral stone, bags of flour or cans of water. Their thin brown fur is marked by a black stripe that runs the length of their back and down – like an arrow – the center of each leg. Like the donkey has grown from this central black line; it’s essential form: four legs, a body and head.
The largest road in Lamu town runs along the water. The shallow timber ribbed long boats with their patched and faded sails lined up in rows alongside. Balconies are a relief: sitting above the casual sight lines of the hawkers and dhow captains who greet with the unctuous tones of desperate salesmen. Above you are free to look, to touch with your eyes the things and people that it would be too much trouble to admit you notice when at play below.
The menu is Arabic or Bantu or something in between. Computers made in Japan and resold in India, pirated software from Morocco and a keyboard from Dubai: the Third World Computer. The sub-standard combined parts of the western world’s discarded office. Keyboards and thus menus where every “O” is an “Ω” and every “T” a “+.”
Back down into the narrow streets and cracked white walls; away from the open brilliance of the water. The streets stand at 90 degree angles. The intersections appearing without warning like a choice circumstances force on you unsuspecting. In front of a low, tumble-down building of faded concrete girls in head scarves and long dresses run barefoot with boys in brown shirts and smoky blue shirts: a recess game of tag prior to rules or authority. No one – and everyone – is “it”; they dart from one end of the yard to the other like flies around a street lamp in the dim light of dusk.
The crowded alleys and walkways bring everything closer: the sudden whiff of shit or roasting meat like walking into a wall. Smoke from fires and pipes. Trails of smeared donkey manure pressed into cracks in worn cobblestones by bare brown feet under full length white caftans topped with thick beards and embroidered kofias. Dark doorways into dim shops hung with brilliant colors or dusty shelves with monotonous brown paper packaging. A shop with no lights that we explore with kerosene lanterns like cavers in an ancient crypt; the dim golden light casting long deep shadows that dignify and age the brick-a-brack of tourist trade.
The charm, the disgust, the curiosity flow from the immediacy, the inescapable closeness and intensity of the claustrophobic labyrinth of crooked streets. There is no safe and comfortable tour behind tinted glass and cool climate conditioned air. The charm of these Swahili streets - like the fish and food markets whose narrow aisles fill with foreigners untouched by hunger or household – is their inescapable intimacy. It’s an earnest feeling engendered by a bankrupt mechanism.
The closer we come – the more detail this closeness forces upon us – the more disruptive our presence must be. Our proximity betrays the honesty of the experience in which we aspire to envelope ourselves. The longer we stay - the easier our passage - the more we bring with us the same things we hope to escape in coming.

Lamu remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Rescue Mission

2008-01-25T06:10:27Z

Yellow seems to be my color these days. On my left wrist, two filthy yellow bands. The thin strip of fabric from “Our Lady of Salvation” Cathedral in Rio De Janeiro was in a bundle of small gifts I received from my friend Kevin before I left home. Each of the three knots I have tied in it represent a wish. When it breaks, they will have come true. So far, it’s been on for eight months. The other is the nylon string I took off my Peace Corps Issue Rape Whistle (which I thought myself unlikely to use) and a small silver ring given to remind me that I am part of a circle – a family – no matter how far away I am. On my right wrist is the triple wrapped length of yellow nylon twine that our evacuation and Interruption-of-Service coordinator from DC used as a closing ceremony. Eileen was sent by Peace Corps Washington to assist partially because she was a volunteer evacuated from Thailand when she was around this age. We passed the length of twine around our circle. We each wrapped it once around our right wrist and then we gave it a tug. We cut for one another and tied for one another. To show we are connected, wherever we go; to keep us safe until we get home. And now, at my feet, lie my packed bags, a string of yellow yarn on each. Before we left staging in Philly, I helped hand out the yarn. The idea was to mark our bags, make them immediately apparent as our own. Given that its just yarn, it has far exceeded my expectations in terms of durability.
Were I still a Peace Corps Volunteer, I would be in violation of policy; you can’t return to your site if it’s been closed, particularly if it’s in Upper Rift. It’s my house, even though I only had it because I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, which I now am not. I guess that makes it some kind of de-militarized zone now.
If you end up with Interruption-of-Service (IS) Peace Corps sends a car to your house and they ship home one hundred pounds of personal items. All you have to do is remember everything that is in your house, each desired item’s exact location and a fairly precise estimate of its weight, since anything over a hundred pounds gets left behind. Do you want your books or your hiking boots? Your sketchpad or your journals? That jar of peanut butter or the oranges you imagined would be pleasantly ripe when you returned from Christmas but have now created their own ecosystem in the plastic bag they are sitting in on the kitchen table? (Given the smell coming out of the bag, I would take the peanut butter if I was you) Then it’s a simple matter of hoping that the security situation improves to the point that Peace Corps feels it is appropriate to send that oh-so-conspicuous white Land Rover up to your briefly adopted home.
Remember before service where Peace Corps kept telling you to get personal item insurance? Too late.
What I have been thinking about is this: there were 30 of us in Dar and another 20 or so here in Kenya, all removed from our sites without warning and given a ticket home without a chance to go back. Let’s be generous. Let’s say that only 40 of those people want things picked up from their site. Each pickup crew consists of a staff member from the office and one of our drivers. There are less than ten drivers. The sites that have been closed are all in Western, Nyanza and Rift; provinces that fill out the larger western end of Kenya. My site is one of the closer ones, midway between Kisumu and Nairobi. Traveling here from Nairobi today took me almost nine hours. Imagine trips twice that length. Now imagine doing that 40 times. Did I mention that you can only send drivers who are the appropriate ethnicity for the area where the volunteer’s house is located? Are you beginning to see why I am here? Why I have a little less than complete faith that Peace Corps will ever get up here to find that my stuff is already gone? Who pays the rent for a volunteer who is no longer working for their organization? Who pays the power bill? Who watches the house to prevent break-ins? Exactly.
So I came. And now, I’m sitting in the dark of the sitting room, staring down at yet another tiny strip of yellow hanging off each of my packed bags.
I got this couch the weekend before we left for Christmas. I can count the number of times I have sat on it on my ten fingers. To my left is a massive stack of books and notebooks, manuals and steno pads. On the cushions next to me a pile of clothes that didn’t make the cut.
Kip-Rotich, perhaps my most consistent companion here at site, came by earlier when he saw the light on for the first time in a month and a half. I like him. He’s a good kid. Smart, good humored, caring, enthusiastic. So I told him to pick some stuff that I was leaving behind. I gave him my radio, a box of pencils, blank notebooks, a map of Kenya, one of my Kiswah dictionaries. And before he left I asked him to keep the things that I gave him to himself until I was gone tomorrow. In my mind, I was thinking of the physical violence that resulted at Whitney and Brad’s site in Taveta last week when they simply laid out all the extra stuff on the lawn and told people to take what they wanted. Evidently, it is good that he took the dictionary, since he clearly didn’t understand the words I used to phrase my request that he not advertise that I was giving things away.
I don’t blame him particularly. I remember being his age; how it felt to get cool new things in a sudden surprising way. Needing to show someone. Forgetting the obvious followup question: “Where did you get that?” All the same, if he did understand my request and couldn’t help himself, he certainly didn’t struggle for very long. This time there are three kids at the door, mouths hanging open at the pile of books, unused computer cables, and half finished crosswords. Dennis, from next door, is actually drooling a little. I stop them at the door, suddenly very aware of just what I have done by being generous with Kip-Rotich. The sight of Dennis’ parents and two more adults from the next house over appearing behind the boys, quickly downgrading from a rapid jog to a casual saunter, reinforces my growing sense of dread. My, they seem cheery for 8:45 on a Wednesday night.
My plan was to give everything to my neighbor Alice, the nurse at the dispensary. She is a single mother, who has raised/is raising four kids. Her daughter is at university, her first son at secondary, and still around the house she has two more in Primary. Alice cares about me. Not about what I can do for her, not about the novelty of my skin color or accent. She has never asked me for a thing and if she ever did, I would want to give it. She is kind and hard working and has been generous of spirit, knowledge and time. I want Alice to have first dibs. I want her to get a break for once.
At this point, what I have actually done is made Alice the focal point of a community angry to be left out of free stuff from the mzungu. It’s not giving or not giving the stuff away that bothers me, it’s the idea that they are going to cause problems for her because they are angry with me and my choice. If I hadn’t started with Kip-Rotich, she could quietly absorb things without a great deal of attention. Now I have seven people of varying height and age peering avariciously over my shoulder into my slowly deflating home. I send them away. I tell them I am packing and we will sort it out in the morning. I will leave things outside the door. I will do anything. Please just go away.
They go.
Alice comes by later and is characteristically herself. She tells me not to worry. She will take care of it. It’s no problem. She will explain it. Alice reduces my stress level, she doesn’t exacerbate it. This is why I want her to get first dibs.
I hadn’t considered coming back to site before Rachel suggested it over the weekend. I had locked this place off in my mind. There was no coming back to it. So to have any sense of closure feels surprising. All the same, the closure I’ve found is remarkably unsentimental, remarkably unremarkable from the daily life that I lived here before the election. The people to whom I have explained my departure express sympathy, but there was more interest, more deep feeling when I had to explain cutting my forehead on a nail stuck in my choo door. That day, everyone wanted to hear about my problems.
The mad dash for free stuff, the total divorce from any thoughts of the propriety of taking things that my circumstances are forcing me to leave behind - the mob looting a corpse - doesn’t seem particularly crude to me. I can see phrasing it that way, portraying my struggle and sadness with leaving (which we are aware is minor) and the harsh inconsiderate carnival like atmosphere that ‘Mzungu Giveaway’ cultivated in a matter of minutes as hurtful. But it’s not really.
My frustration is mainly logistical. I knew that this reaction would occur. I simply let myself slide into doing something I had specifically planned to avoid. I guess, I am mainly concerned for my friend.
It’s so hard to separate the symptoms and the illness. Why do I only have one person here who I really want to give to? Did I want to be done because I didn’t integrate, or did I not integrate because whatever this experience is, it wasn’t for me? In Tanzania, our regional head health officer, Dr. Patty, told me that people put all their focus on the two years. That Peace Corps comes out of their brains more like a prison term than what it could be. Peace Corps is as long as you need it to be to get what you need to get. My presence here and the experience others have had of my presence can’t have made the world or me worse off. There’s nothing magical about exactly two years. When you go home is when you go home and says nothing about your success or failure unless you choose to define it in such narrow and empty terms. (If she lived here, I would also give Dr. Patty first dibs. And I would have her bake me more of those chocolate chip cookies.)
I have had a number of Déjà vu moments in the past week or so. Like right now. My laptop on the low table in front of the couch. The dark room and light cast diagonly across the floor from the open kitchen door. It’s a sense of remembering a moment before I experience it as happening now. I had the same sensation handing Anne Haviland my finished Description of Service in that stifling conference room at Peace Corps Tanzania.
In some sense, the feeling that I dreamed this before now – that it was a moment that had to come – is reassuring. Whether I didn’t work hard enough at this, or whether it could have turned out differently is of little consequence. The present is too strong a force to worry too much about the things that might have been. It has turned out this way. It is enough to say that things happened as they did. That I acted as myself. That I did the things I thought were right when I thought they were that way. I would like to think that I would never ask more than that of another person.
I spent a year preparing to come here. A job that bored me, a job I hated, a job that dulled my brain; simply treading water as I waited for departure. I traveled for weeks to say goodbye to this scattered network of important people. If there was one thing that I expected above everything else, it was to be gone for longer than this. And yet, I’m very happy with where this time has left me. Which, in the most dynamic and basic sense, is nothing more than somewhere different. I came because I knew that I would end up different, but I couldn’t stop myself from imagining the end as that same person.
Baclav Havel said that hope is not the conviction that things will turn out right, but the certainty that, however they turn out, they make sense. For me, that’s just another way of saying: wherever I end up, no matter how confusing or unlike my imagined end, its being able to figure out how I got there that matters most. Our sense of progress, satisfaction, growth comes from looking back and seeing things fall gestalt-like into place. Besides, if we always ended up where we imagined, I would be at Clown College. Which is something I may look into again in the coming months.

Rescue Mission remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Nairobi 2 of 2

2008-01-25T06:09:51Z

Charle’s house has that characteristic Peace Corps design motif wherein anything you find goes up on the walls. Hanging around the serving window between kitchen and sitting room, there are some pieces of yellow ribbon that came in a package as well as the hand addressed pieces of cardboard that came on the bikes shipped to us. Marching around the room atop the window frames – like a bizarre informal calendar - is a lengthening procession of empty wine bottles. On the desk are a set of British FHMs (the version with nudity). Published in 2004 they must have moved in and out of the Nairobi office repeatedly, the worn covers and taped pages reminding me of paperbacks in a prison library. With our pasta dinner, Charles adds his primary protein source: soy chunks. Their consistency is best described as wet sponge chunks. I kind of like it. I sleep full clothed on couch cushions pushed together with a towel for a blanket.
Awaking in the morning carries with it that strange perspectival adjustment of seeing in daylight a place you arrived at in the dark. Without the lengthening shadows, buildings shrink, distances reduce. Charles lives on the compound of the dispensary with other health workers and their families. The maternity building here has ceased construction just like the one at Patrick’s site. Both are funded by Constituency Development Funds. Essentially Aid money received by the Kenyan government and then dispersed by district, it has been frozen in the presence of the coming elections. This is to prevent it from being used to influence voters. The distinction is slight; you can’t move the money around, but you can still promise to move it once it’s unfrozen. Democracy is complicated enough without massive piles of free money to be waved around like a golden carrot on a stick; given the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled into third world economies, the legacy of poor government, corruption and violence in these countries is unsurprising.
This maternity ward is being paid for by foreign funds earmarked for infant mortality and as a result is, like Patrick’s, bigger than the dispensary itself. Supposing it does get finished (they often don’t, as the budget springs holes that leak into the pockets of enterprising bureaucrats and contractors) it will be essentially obsolete when (and if) they tarmac the road in the next few years. Nairobi and superior facilities are only a half hour away over better roads.
In the early days of international aid, it was given absent any strings. One of the solutions to the astonishing graft that resulted was to earmark money for specific goals dictated by donors (corruption continues but now requires receipts). These C.D.F. funds are for infant mortality, so regardless of future obsolescence (or current needs in this particular location), the maternity ward will be built. Or at least half built: the one at Patrick’s site was supposed to be finished over two and a half years ago. In the afternoon – sitting out front of his house – you can hear a loud and rhythmic metallic thumping as the wind gradually pulls out the nails holding the half finished roof on.
It’s a half hour matatu ride into Nairobi. We check our luggage at the Nakumatt. We will leave our bags here for several hours. We may or may not actually buy anything in the store. There is a bar just down the block with what appears to be a facsimile of the Taco Bell logo; the bar is called ‘Tacos.’ Like so many things in Kenya, it is a half complete reproduction of the original, unclear on the convention they are attempting to mimic. There is no Mexican food, it’s a Kenyan bar and restaurant just like all the others. The sign is just enough to draw us in as we search for a place to watch the Saturday afternoon football match. What appears to be cheap and lazy duplicating of an international trademarked brand reveals itself to be astonishingly effective mzungu marketing: we meet another group of volunteers midway through the game. They ask: “How do you guys know about ‘Tacos?’”
Charles and I, possessing our own pie-in-the-sky ideas about quitting Peace Corps and opening a campsite on the Coast, interrogate Mike, a Small-Enterprise-Development volunteer who is opening a campsite as an income-generating-activity in his community, south of Mombasa. With a scraggly Fu-Man-Chu and unkempt curly mop of dark hair, bronzed blonde at the edges, it becomes clear that Mike is very high. As he ruminates about his work and experience, I can see him enjoying being the older, more experienced purveyor of wisdom. Attaining competency here and being given the opportunity to self righteously educate others is one of the most satisfying aspects of watching the months roll by. It is the ultimate reward for the months of clueless flubbing, heatedly argued misunderstandings and continual asking of stupid questions. I routinely fantasize about bringing family and friends here primarily to watch their eyes fall out of their heads at the site of a bustling market or stage as I quietly, calmly and confidently navigate – lead them through – the chaos. A visit to the restrooms on the way out reveals the same uninventive graffiti here as in America: “Nipo Hapa.” I am here.
The Masai Market moves throughout Nairobi over the course of each week. On Saturdays, it’s very close to the city center occupying the parking lot of a Ministry of Justice building. This parking lot has the advantage of possessing only one entry and exit gate, creating a gauntlet of hawkers along the path between the two and ensuring that visitors must walk through the entire market before they can leave. We join the parade of tourists being herded into the gate and down the processional space. Separating from the stream and moving on my own through the craftsmen and their blankets of carvings, jewelry, paintings and dishes, I find them to be as kind and approachable as any of the other Kenyans I have met. A little humanity, an effort to engage them, is all that’s needed to move past the pushy salesmanship that my skin color naturally draws.
Killing with kindness is certainly something I have had to learn to do. Hawkers and beggars here are pushier than the US: telling them no takes longer. However, they receive ‘No’s much more graciously than salesmen and beggars in the US. It reminds me very much of the requests for child sponsorship I get as I walk through a new village; possibility without entitlement and so refusal without frustration. Charles stays outside the market, the hostility he has encountered at his site, at the stage in Limuru, and on his visits to Nairobi has drastically lowered his tolerance for the kind of pressure that the market exudes. I can’t say I blame him.
We walk through Uhuru Park towards Upper Hill Campsite, where we plan to stay for the night. On my final tour through the East Coast before I departed the states, I spent several days in NYC. I would never have thought that the endlessly forking paths of Central Park were distinctly American, but they are. The park as a journey, as an experience to move through is nothing like the layout of parks here. Uhuru is laid out just like the parks I have seen in Kericho and Kisumu. Wide open spaces, lacking paths, geometrically planted with a single tree equidistant from every other. The effect is of a set of individual plots of land, like a massive farm. Their use mirrors their layout: Kenyans sit in small individual groups under their respective trees. There is no one traveling through, no one using the larger space for a larger purpose, only individual plots used in individual pursuits. People in pursuit of individual space, instead of a larger space to share as a group.
Upper Hill is ideal. The shower – while still a rigid set of rusted pipes in a crumbling concrete cube – is the best hot shower I have had in six months. For 300 bob we get a mattress, sheets, pillows and mosquito net in the loft above the main dormitories. There is a large covered patio area with wood frame couches piled with overstuffed, lumpy pillows, low coffee tables and a wide assortment of card and board games. The bar, while not cheap, is reasonable for Nairobi. After six months of hotelis serving only ugali or rice with stew, the menu has a staggering variety of food. We have some drinks, we play Rummy and eat and go to bed happy.
In the morning, I watch the departing overland tour groups. If I take one thing from my Peace Corps experience, it will be how to pack for a trip. For this three day excursion, my backpack is actually too large. It takes a trip of more than three weeks for this bag to feel too small. The American’s, Aussies and Poles coming out to meet their drivers drag two and three massive rolling carryalls behind them leaving long trails in the gravel of the parking lot. They struggle and negotiate to fit all of their bags into the car, squeezing themselves in wherever they will fit, as though it was the luggage that was taking the trip instead of them. The Masai Mara is about seven hours away. Any upgrade in comfort that a private car might have offered over matatu is lost as they wedge themselves in between dusty hard edged carryalls, digging under eachother for seat belts, each with a backpack of “essentials” on their lap.
We wander down into the city. Javahouse is like an upscale IHOP. The prices are outrageous (at least on our salary) but the variety is astonishing. I typically give up trying to choose what I would like best and just order whatever I see first. Today it’s a bagel with cream cheese. I’m suspicious that it doesn’t taste quite right, but it’s been so long since I had a proper bagel or cream cheese that I can’t tell. I assume that when I finally return to the States and sit down to have a bagel the experience of feeling uncertain of whether I like it will be the same.
One goal of this trip is to familiarize myself enough with Nairobi that I don’t require a guide like Chuck. So we wander all over, following streets and noting landmarks. We wander into the “Nakumatt: Lifestyles” and sit on a couch costing the equivalent of twenty months salary. We see a sign for Heineken and go up for lunch. They don’t have Heineken. The waiter is surprised to find that Heineken is a beer. He thought it was a soccer club. This is tragically unsurprising.
The Peace Corps has three goals: learning about a foreign culture, sharing American culture and assisting development. Ordering ugali and stew, I note that because I spoke American English ordering Kenyan food, I have fulfilled two of the three goals. 66% is technically a passing grade. We pay more than the price of our accomadations for the evening to see “The Bourne Ultimatum.” Prior to the film they splice in an ancient scratched clip of a Kenyan flag waving in the sun as a brass band plays the national anthem. No one stands.
Back at Upper Hill we meet another group of volunteers staying the night. Mary has brought along a friend from her site, another American named Christy. She has saved for the last three years to finance this year long trip through East Africa. She has a chain of teaching jobs taking her through Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Her budget for the year is $30,000. This is 2.1 millions shillings. I mention that she should buy this couch I tried today. We also meet Randy. I don’t like Randy.
He reminds me of the kid at the concert wearing the T-shirt of the band he is seeing. Someone for whom the symbols they have acquired simulate for them the experience they think they should be having. Closing in on forty, Randy is covered in tribal tattoos and has his thinning hair pulled back in a pony-tail. He has been working in various aid jobs for the past eight years. With Randy, everything is a foregone conclusion; he knows what you are going to say and ‘dude…’ He won’t put his shirt on and talks to us about how being in Africa has to be more than an experience, it has to be a chapter of your life. I’m wondering how long it will be until he feels compelled to go smoke pot in the parking lot again.
Another volunteer, Carlos, told me this morning over coffee that two of the three dogs who make their home at Upperhill used to belong to Peace Corps volunteers. There is an overweight, over-furred Golden Retriever mutt. In the same state (I believe) that all whites in the tropics arrive at eventually, he looks genetically predisposed to suffer here, sweating under his thick fur and fat reserves whose only use would be surviving a long, dark winter. His contrasting counterpart is a beautiful Rhodesian Ridgeback, reminiscent of a lion with his taut rippling muscle under a fine thin coat. The name comes from the line of hair along the back and neck that stands in opposition to the dog’s foreward motion. Regardless of the physical difficulties they may or may not be suffering living on the equator, they are constantly surrounded by slightly intoxicated tourists whose only desire is to pet them and give them table scraps. They lead as ideal of a life as I could imagine for dogs. I can only guess that shortly after being abandoned by Peace Corps Volunteers - people whose thought process was: “I want to love something!” without conscious consideration of the circumstantial suffix “…for two years!” – they realized that what might have seemed like heaven, was nothing more than a pale imitation.
In the morning, during check-out, I meet Jorge, a Puerto-Rican traveling with his wife. He is on sabbatical from MIT and he and his wife are at the end of year long trip starting in Japan, moving through China, India and here before they head back to Boston. I make a note-to-self to acquire a life similar to Jorge’s.
Charles is planning on coming up north to visit us and wants to see the stage. For the first time, we will guide him through Nairobi so that he knows where the location of the Nakuru stage. We fail almost completely to live up to the remarkable standard he has set. James (the one with a declared knowledge of ‘exactly where the stage is’) has apparently demarcated by it’s proximity to a large red building. This presents two problems: 1) around said ‘red’ building, there are 360 degrees of possible location and 2) most of the buildings around River Road are red.
Wandering back and forth as we attempt to use Jame’s crimson-compass, we see ahead of us a gathering crowd. At the intersection of an alley and River Road, we come upon a dead man on the sidewalk. Struck by a matatu speeding out of the alley onto the street, his head is split open. I manage to combine my first image of a violent death with my first image of a human brain. It has happened recently enough that the police have not arrived. Then again, this is Nairobi. The fact that the police have not come says nothing about how recently it occurred. However, the brilliant red of the blood and its glossy wet surface as it spreads in a pool across the sidewalk is good indication that it has been a recent event. It occurs to me that he is probably like thousands of other young men here in Nairobi: family in Meru or Migore, Kisii or Busia to whom he sends a monthly check. They will wonder why they haven’t heard from him; they will hope that he’s okay. Wandering about, peering intensely at every visible red surface is suddenly very frustrating. I leave the group and ask at three consecutive storefronts for directions. Redundancy comfortably in hand, we finally work our way to the stage.
Sitting next to me in the matatu is Mama Suzanne. She lives in Nairobi but works in Nakuru as a hairdresser. Four times a week she squeezes into a matatu with both of her pre-schoolers for the 3 hour ride. She feels lucky to have work that provides for such a schedule of travel. As the ride goes on, she resembles furniture more than anything else as her children rearrange her arms, her bag, her hair to find a comfortable nook in which to lodge their heads and chests. A cushion against the jarring road and whistling wind.

Nairobi 2 of 2 remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Nairobi 1 of 2

2008-01-25T06:08:31Z

[quote]The work I feel best about here is the work with kids. This is both because it’s the most entertaining and fun and because it feels less a part of this larger fucked up system. It’s direct: they ask, I answer. So it says something that the very first chance I have to do exactly that is discarded so easily. The first impression the kids of Talai Primary will have of me will be that of an unscheduled absence; a broken promise. The urge I have been fighting for a week is surrendered to in a half hour: I’m going out of site. Again.
In one sense, I recognize that releases like this are necessary. It’s easy to tally up all the things that I have going for me – the trappings of material life that I enjoy with such ease, the minimal obligations and time required of my work – and question what I could possibly need a break from. Pleasure reading? Ten hours of sleep a night? All the same, I know that I need to forgive myself for feeling an urge for effortless conversation and for the easy and immediate empathy of other volunteers. I feel guilty nonetheless. Though I suppose if it really bothered me, I wouldn’t go.
As the matatu from Talai bounces up and down the rutted track towards Kabartonjo a shiny, well maintained Land Rover comes barreling up the road behind us at a speed possible only with US funded and maintained shocks. The presence of my white arm, frantically waving from a matatu full of dark faces is enough for it to stop. This is the reality of life as a Peace Corps Volunteer. If Aid work attracts ignorant idealists, then the Peace Corps attracts the subsection of that group who also like hardship. Or at least – it becomes clear as I climb into the front seat of the air-conditioned car – the idea of it.
It’s a frustrating decision, but not really a decision at all. We congratulate ourselves constantly on our use of public transport, on living at the level of those we are supposedly here to help; Peace Corps “integrates” at the most basic level. The falsity of this pretension is never more apparent, more visible, as when I am crawling over people out of the back of a matatu to claim my seat in a passing luxury vehicle.
The virtue of “ground level” work – of joining a community – is never really available. If I get sick, they send a car for me. They’ve shipped a bike from the states for my use and I don’t even want it. In the unlikely event that I got pregnant they would pay the flight home and back, though the cost of terminating the pregnancy would be up to me. I have vacation days and zero dependants and a free ticket home the instant I decide I’ve had enough. The Peace Corps is stepped down from the World Bank consultants writing reports by the pool at the Nairobi Hilton, but our “integration” is most strongly evident in the minds of those who will never really experience this place. Living here, even for a short time, lays plain all the things that slip below the radar of my daily concern; the laundry list of issues most Kenyans face that do not concern me or enter my life here. And when the opportunity comes for a free ride in an air conditioned SUV with working seat belts, we take it. Or at least I do. And though the decision saddens me, there was never any question of anything else happening.
Timothy Kibet, my director, is in the car. They are coming up the mountain from visiting Patrick’s site and giving him a ride to Kabarnet on their way back to Nairobi. Kibet came to my site last week. All the volunteers in my class are still on quarantine: unable to leave site for our first three months. The frustration of such forced isolation is good indication of its common sense. The ups and downs of total cultural immersion and sudden and complete isolation are difficult enough without the option of escaping to Nairobi or Kisumu every weekend. It is a good thing that Patrick and I are headed into Kabarnet to ‘go shopping.’ If Kibet wonders why our bags are already completely full, he doesn’t ask.
In the past I have heard people use experiences like this one as evidence that Kibet is clueless or simply doesn’t care. In fact, Kibet is merely an old hand at a game PCVs are only beginning to play. It’s called: how to keep your job while not doing any work. Kibet has a harder time of it than we do. Keeping my job means dealing with people basically unsure of what I am doing or why I am here and whose own jobs are laxly supervised and defined. Kibet has the challenge of dealing with over-entitled, anxious and youthly-self-righteous Americans. He has mastered an elegant balance between fulfilling his basic duties and providing us with as wide a berth as possible. His passing leaves no wake, ruffles no feathers. Were I he, I would do the same.
Peace Corps employees in Nairobi enjoy all the same benefits I do in terms of health care and drivers. They also receive off American and Kenyan holidays and earn a Western salary in a 3rd world economy. I currently pay for everything I need – including travel, drinking, eating out – on 15,000 shillings a month. The entry level sales job I held in the states before leaving paid the equivalent of 180,000 shillings a month. Kibet likely makes three times that. There is also the car allowance and security allowance given to US employees living abroad. A job like that doesn’t come along very often.
In Kabarnet, we halt short of having him actually drop us at the stage. James hasn’t arrived from Kimegul yet, so I take Patrick to see the city library for which I have recently acquired a membership. The only architecturally distinct building in Kabarnet, it’s a hold-over from Moi’s era. His Presidential Palace is just up the road, four stories, two wings with banquet hall and motor pool all surrounded by the tin metal shacks and sparsely planted shambas of apparently less important, less deserving Kenyans.
Reuben, the head nurse for the dispensary in Talai, has remarked several times that a library is needed to help the children to reach their potential. He ends his description of their glowing faces and sky-rocketing careers with the same lowered tone and breathy phrasing that accompanies most requests for money or favors here: “…and perhaps your friends in America, they will donate books.”
The requests and suggestions I receive here are often fairly pie-in-the-sky. Laptops for the primary school kids. Paving all the roads in town. Bringing modern large scale farming equipment for free use by farmers. They are proposed with a blind faith in Western wealth and power and with the first hand memory of the immense amounts of money that Aid has suddenly and surprisingly injected into minor and neglected corners of life here. Past experience shows that the possibility of winning the lottery – of asking for something huge and unreasonable and finding that the people of Norway or a group of churches in Georgia want to give it – is real. Projects like a library are typically proposed with so little thought to the actual obstacles in accomplishing them that I have adopted a blanket sort of optimism when responding. Asking why such equipment or facilities are necessary or how they will be constructed and then maintained is an inevitable dead end. These “What if…’s” are mentioned to me precisely because the people proposing lack the time, interest, knowledge or resources - or all of the above - to put it together themselves. In short they lack every aspect of the project that might prevent it from becoming just another poorly planned example of international aid throwing money at a dimly perceived community need.
The library Reuben has proposed is such an idea. He doesn’t have a clear idea of where it would go, or who would want to use it. He hasn’t thought about who would manage it once open or where money for maintaining and growing it would appear. All the same, I agree with him, a library couldn’t hurt. However, I have been pleased to inform him (several times now that I think about it) that the idea of getting books through donation is one about which I have a very definite and very negative opinion.
There are 36 branch libraries in Kenya (as well as a traveling donkey cart and camel caravan division for isolated areas). The library in Kabarnet (the largest and best in my district) is the source of my cynicism. It is full of donated books. Donated books are like donated canned goods. For every can of Hungry Man stew, there are eight cans of Purina Cat food (whether people intend this for starving pets or just think beggars can’t be choosers, I don’t know), four cans of pumpkin pie filling (probably the ones you forgot you had leftover from last year’s Thanksgiving when you went shopping this year) and two cans with the labels missing (presumably intended for famine victims hungry for a surprise).
I got a card because there are a few old editions of classics with cracked spines as well as a fair-sized section of children’s Kiswahili books, perfect for the aspiring language student. Most of the rest is trash. Which makes sense, since the books that are given away are typically ones that - if they weren’t something as inherently useful and valuable as a book - we’d just throw away; there’s an anthology of religious pamphlets spanning a half century, stacks of faded and torn National Geographic, trashy romance novels, spy thrillers. If it was overprinted: its here. It makes the rising literacy rate impressive; if this is what I thought reading made available, I don’t know that I’d be in such a hurry to learn either.
However, a book here – any book – is precious. The total book stock for the Kenyan National Library System is 800,129 for a population of around 37,000,000. (My alma mater in the states has 1.1 million volumes for less than 3,000 students.) Getting a card requires a letter of recommendation, proof of employment, and (in the case of a non-permanent residents like myself) a hefty deposit. There are two check-out desks and each book is recorded twice before being allowed out the door. Beyond that they routinely pat you down as you leave (unless you are white, in which case they just wave you through). I return a Bill Bryson book and some Hemingway. I check out Ender’s Game for Patrick who has never read it. James calls us from town and we head to the stage.
If I had stopped to consider for a moment longer before abandoning a school full of children actually interested in learning about public health, I would have realized that this trip to Nakuru assumes hosts whose presence is actually doubtful. The Barton’s are working in El Doret this month. Their original job in Nakuru ended after they tried to stop other employees (also earning a 1st world salary in a 3rd world economy) from stealing food meant for the poor. They were accused of racially slandering the thieving employees and changed jobs shortly after. At their new job, they haven’t seen their new supervisor in three months. Such is the bureaucracy of Peace Corps that they are secretly living and working in El Doret half the time: assisting their former supervisor, an ex-pat also dismissed because –as we will recall – his employees are thieves.
In the matatu headed south, already committed, we discover the absence of our hosts. Charles, another volunteer from our class, lives just a few hours south of Nakuru in Limuru, just outside Nariobi. A brief conference with him and we’re decided: it’s a weekend in Nairobi, not Nakuru. At 4p on Friday, he agrees to sleep and feed three and to guide us around Nairobi for two days. As much as PCVs (especially those in the throes of culture shock their first few months) may be suspicious or tired of neighbors, townspeople, children or drunks constantly pushing their heads thru curtains, knocking on the door far too early or late, and handling the dishes left on outdoor dish racks – I can only assume in the mistaken belief that I use my tea kettle as a secondary wallet - other volunteers are always welcome. It is an aspect of African culture that we shamelessly use and enjoy: circumstances over plans, guests over work.
Despite the copious anxiety that accompanies any initial journey to a place, the presence of the only white face (outside passing Land Rovers) standing on the side of the road is a guarantee that we have arrived in Limuru.
Charles is waiting with Aron, a Kikuyu youth who has been helping out with his after-school soccer club. Aron has insisted coming along as the encroaching twilight heralds danger for us whiteboys with full backpacks. Talking a bit on our way to get groceries, Aron mentions that he actually doesn’t feel safe by himself in Limuru after dark. I joke that if he’s not safe on his own, then parading around with four white boys with overstuffed bags must seem like a death-wish. He nods.
Laden with groceries and liquor, we arrive at the stage as the last of the light fades from the sky. Twenty minutes ago the sidewalks and streets were packed with bikes, donkey carts, hawkers and cars. Now things have emptied out and only those with nothing to lose or nowhere to go remain. Oh, and us, of course.
Charles stands on principle and refuses to board a matatu to his village at two times the normal price. In protest of a sum less than a quarter, we stand in the growing darkness waiting for the touts resolve to soften. The voices in the dark, the shadows from the colored fluorescent tube lighting that illuminates the inside of the matatus seem more threatening, more vicious in the dwindling twilight. Even separate from Aron’s warning, I have the distinct impression that we are, in fact, not particularly safe here.
At every matatu stage, our skin color entitles us to shouts and whistles, even the occasional grab (we are, after all, often the sole person who clearly doesn’t belong and therefore must be either coming or going) but usually these are directed at us. They are, in some sense, desirous of our attention. If not respectful, they at least address as people. Here, the comments bounce around and above us, flicking in and out of English, Swahili and Kikuyu. They aim to pull responses from eachother, not from us. We are rapidly beginning to resemble balls, tossed around for amusement. One trio, whose eyes I accidentally catch while avoiding someone else’s are thrown off balance when I respond in Swahili to their break-neck Kikuyu. As the two on the sides laugh at their friend’s sudden silence, I say again that I can’t understand when he speaks so fast. He stands and point at me, jabbing his fingers in the air. Deliberately speaking faster than before, his voice heightens in pitch and volume.
There are magic numbers when it comes to traveling with whites in a majority black country. Alone, I experience the highest level of available intimacy. People speak to me; they will speak with me and real conversations do occur. Two mzungu: I’m still welcomed, but it takes time and effort to move past the hawking or serving manners kept in store for visitors. Three: you are generally just left alone. Four, I realize as the blood rushes to my ears and I stammer out a reply whose phrasing accidentally takes the tone of: “I guess you don’t hear so good, huh?” looks like a gang. And here, in the dark, burdened by American made backpacks and sacks of groceries, our gang is outnumbered and clearly out of place.
Around this time (and partially at my urging) we board a matatu and taking advantage of experience, don’t mention the fare. Especially in the bigger cities, you often see wazungu with their quick-dry shorts and hiking-socked Merrils arguing with touts who are trying to forcibly pull their backpacks off and herd them into the vehicle. The secret is that those who know the fare don’t argue it. They simply hand over what they know is the proper amount and refuse to give more. Whether its because its after dark or because we’re a half hour out of Nairobi or – as Charles will insist later – it because, they are Kikuyus, this strategy doesn’t work tonight.
Aron and I are sitting at the back of the van as the three boys in front argue and curse at the tout. I attempt to interrogate the woman next to me as to the price she has paid. In a remarkable display of on-the-spot diplomacy – motivated by a desperate desire not to be involved – she says to ask the tout, as he will know the price. “True,” I say. In an unintentionally devious way, the argument at the front distracts him from charging Aron and I in the back.
Dropped by the highway where we arrived, we hurry up the embankment before the tout realizes his mistake. As we search for a cab to go the rest of the way to Chuck’s I repeatedly imagine the matatu screeching 180 degrees, careening across three lanes of traffic as the tout, his face cast in the blue glow of fluorescent leans out the open door with a machete, ready to panga our heads from our shoulders.
The only cab we can find, with seats like a twenty year old couch whose springs have collapsed, will take us as soon as the driver finishes the game of craps he is playing. They play on an overturned coke bottle carton between abandoned truck trailers by light of a pile of burning trash. He loses. I can’t help buy imagine that this will affect the price.
On the way back Chuck lays out the timid and pale character of the hostility we survived at the stage and the darker examples he’s experienced. His story of being hit by corn cobs and bottles while running reminds me of my own time on the Hopi Reservation in north-east Arizona. Being hit by a quarter full can of Schlitz as I ran along the embankment of a desert ridge, my immediate and overwhelming reaction was confusion; as though they certainly wouldn’t have thrown it if they knew who I was. It’s happened often enough to Chuck that the question of why is no longer compelling.
None of this was mentioned to Anne, Charle’s director, when she visited last week. This mirrors my experience of Kibet’s visit to me. I believe that the Peace Corps staff really does care about us, about our experience, our comfort, but the overlap between the things that negatively impact our lives and the things that happen to be under their control is minimal. Our problems mostly involve (at least from our perspective) not having enough money, something they can’t change anyway. The only card the administration really has to play is changing our site, a process so protracted, difficult and frustrating – since it mostly means starting over again all the processes of integrating that are frustrating you to begin with – that many volunteers choose to go home before being moved. And so we seldom mention difficulties to our directors due to a sense of it being a fruitless, time consuming endeavor to do so. Better to grin and bare it.

Nairobi 1 of 2 remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Secrets

2008-01-16T09:00:23Z

Nothing in Peace Corps is a secret. We enter in classes, 30 or 40 at a time and spend two months as a group before splitting up for site. These friendships interweave with others we meet later: volunteers in our area and those we meet at cross sector meetings. The result is a strong and flexible net of relationships that serves to share information far more effectively than any calling tree or email list. Each of us possesses one or two friends in every sector of work and region of the country that could be privy to information ahead of another and so the prospect of keeping information quarantined or isolated is more than challenging, it’s almost impossible.
In this case, we know we are being sent back to the States a half hour before the director in Dar Es Salaam calls to tell us that we need to have an ‘emergency meeting.’ As it happens in this case, the link that puts us one step ahead of the administration is mine. Rachel, having been shipped back to her site from Dar last week, texts me from Voi. Our director, Timothy Kibet, has just called her to let her know that the folks in Dar are being sent back to the states on Saturday. Why volunteers in-country merit this information before the actual individuals being shipped home is yet another mysterious facet of foreign federal bureaucracy. As we head towards a visit with a youth group in Dar, her text elicits a yelp of alarm; an exclamation of significance sufficient to immediately elicit probing by the others in the car. There are few people I trust here as much as Rachel, but such is the tremendous impact of this information that I feel compelled to call to confirm.
I miss Rachel. Phone calls are expensive here and I miss the sound of her voice, but the expressions on the faces of the others in the car cut the call short. Within a bureaucracy decisions are often opaque and sudden; in the effort to predict what is likely, we cling to even the most minor scraps of information, building vast chains of inferences out of tiny bits of data. In such an environment, the expression on my face is enough to quiet the car, to create such a tangible desire to know that the air seems pregnant with anticipation.
Talking to Rachel later in the day, she asked me how everyone took it.
“Like themselves,” I answered.
Each of us has our own manner of thinking these things through, of finding some mental ground to pace or dig or pile as we process any fact that carries so many others in its wake. Fact: I am going home. Fact: I will not be getting my stuff from site. Fact: I will not see my neighbors or friends in Kenya again. Fact: I will have spent a year preparing to come here and only 8 months in country. Fact: It is January in Chicago and the warmest clothing I have is a collared long sleeve shirt.
It’s only been three weeks of uncertainty. Not even a month since we had to begin adjusting our assumptions of the following day. (Strangely, the shift from circumstances dictated by the mob, to circumstances dictated by my government, made little difference in my own experience of personal impotence.) In such a short time, we have adjusted; we have begun to sit comfortably in a total vacuum of known facts, watching the possible futures fork out and over one another in an endless cluttered knot.
And so we each cope however we normally do as this fact forces us to adjust yet again. There’s unbridled optimism. Sarcasm and frustration. James and Marcus take the front seats, put on their headphones and go to sleep. I make to do lists in my head. I keep thinking of bank-robber movies, of tumblers in a lock falling into place with a sudden and unexpected click-clack, this massive and impenetrable vault sliding open with a slow, smooth, mechanical motion of inevitable finality. Suddenly things are tremendously clear, at least in comparison to an hour before.
Our visit to the youth center is perhaps the most awkward half hour of my life. It starts with each of us saying our names and where we are from. For the first time, in the past tense.
“My name is Nate and I used to work in Kabarnet.”
After that comes a question and answer session where our natural sense of conversational equilibrium kicks in only intermittently. In between staring vacantly into space, wondering about how much snow there is on the ground right now at our home of record, we stammer out a series of pointless and vague questions. We do not listen to the answers. We are rude. We do not care.
They ask us about language. Does anyone speak Kiswahili? Almost every day for the past 5 months, I have done flash cards twice a day. I have almost 1000 of them sitting in a tin box on my desk in Talai. I have filled two notebooks with exercises from Simplified Kiswahili. I spent the first two months in my village refusing to speak in English, training my neighbors and co-workers to speak to me only in Kiswahili. I was very lonely during that time. I wasn’t capable of having a satisfying conversation. But I stuck with it because I wanted to learn the language. I caused trouble for friends I visited at their sites.
“They keep asking about you. They want to know why I don’t speak Kiswahili. You’re a pain in the ass and you were only there for half a day.”
Answering questions in Kiswahili, it occurs to me that this will be one of the my last chances to use this thing I have worked so hard to acquire. In the grey, dark cold of a Chicago winter it won’t take long for verb conjugation, adjective ordering, and possessive prefixes to decompose in my recollection. I imagine a day far in the future returning here and stumbling over the phrases and accent that flow so easily through me now, like an runner gasping their way to the top of a hill, remembering their younger self and the easy strides that carried them.
Our meeting ends unceremoniously and we pile back into the vehicle to return to the Peace Corps Tanzania office for our ‘emergency meeting.’ We all move through cycles of silence and action. Speaking aloud to ourselves as much as to others.
The difference between potentiality and actual reality is astonishing. I had decided a month ago that I would likely be going home by summer. Before the election and the consolidation, the evacuation, I knew I was going home. So I have an easy time of it compared to my friends and colleagues in the car next to me. They weren’t prepared to make this decision, much less have it made for them. All the same, I am astonished at the endless set of options that have collapsed into one irreducible set of facts and the tremendous and wide reaching consequences of cementing even one thing. I’m already thinking through job options and unpacking my clothes from the basement. Eating stuffed pizza and walking the dog. Organizing my photos. Reacquainting myself with my music. Getting a new cell phone. Can I get my old number back?
When leaving for Kericho before New Year’s, I specifically chose to lighten my bag as much as possible. Stuffed into rusted out Nissan Mini-buses, knees jammed into seat backs, head brushing the ceiling, the equatorial sun glaring through the window: the comfort a second bag affords you when you arrive isn’t worth the cost of getting there. I neglected to even bring the charger for my phone or camera batteries. I will arrive home with one standard sized backpack. And only three quarters full. I won’t have to check any baggage. So there’s that.
I imagine walking thru O’Hare. I already know what outfit I will be wearing (since there aren’t many options). My shoes coated with dust from another continent. My hair lightened by the sun. It’s funny, but I am starting to realize that I imagined coming home much more clearly than I imagined my time here. Though I never imagined anything like this.

Secrets remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Evacuation

2008-01-11T10:18:14Z

This may be our last day in Kenya. The cars are supposed to arrive around ten to take us to the plantation air strip. A private plane has been chartered to Kisumu and then to Dar Es Salaam. Thus far, I am the only one up. Pushing aside the dirty plates and vegetable peelings, I brew the first of the three pots of coffee we will drink before departing. The kitchen is a mess. The night before last we made a large and luxurious meal to celebrate our arrival: chicken stew, coconut rice, sikumiwiki and cabbage. Discovering that our second night was also our last inspired another bout of Dionysian excess. We split and carried in several days worth of firewood that had to be burned. All the veggies and liquor and cheese we bought will go to waste if they are still here when we leave. We are trying to finish everything.
The day before yesterday the Stagematt in Kericho was open for the first time since the problems began. Hannah and Rachel went into town for us and bought supplies for a week or two. We had assumed that we were going to be here for a bit longer than two days. The line stretched out the door and around the block: scores of people who have spent the last week or so locked in their homes, rationing slowly dwindling supplies. The unctuous deference that so often accompanies white skin here was absent in the long line of anxious Kenyans awaiting entry in small groups. Guards carrying fully automatic weapons stood at intervals on the sidewalk, doubled up at the door.
When Anne called yesterday to see who had their passports with them we tempered our sudden excitement by arguing that it was preparatory more than anything else. Since preparation – by definition - always precedes action, I guess we were right, albeit with a shorter time frame than we expected. The others awake. We check news with the house’s satellite internet, take turns emailing family and friends to explain that this evening will find us in Dar Es Salaam. The drip brewing coffee machine in the house is the first that I have encountered in the past seven months. I add fresh milk to each of my three cups. I had kind of hoped to make milking the cow at dusk a routine, like splitting wood for the fire or making my bed each morning. Routine has a strangely vivid appeal in the face of this continual uncertainty.
Doug arrives with the vehicles; again the sterling white doors and fresh new tires of foreign funded transport. Driving to the airstrip he explains the passing convoys of tractors, their trailers packed to overflowing with dark faces. Members of the Kisii tribe have volunteered to leave the plantations in the hopes of avoiding violence. The explanation of how their presence might inspire such a problem is murky. Tribal rivalries, assumed political affiliations, language barriers: the common denominators of all conflict here.
The airstrip is on the crest of a hill; a single long strip of tarmac and a tin metal warehouse plastered with “No Smoking” signs. Climbing out of the SUVs into the sun, my stomach has a sickening boiling sensation: I haven’t had this much caffeine in months. From here we can see the tea fields stretching off to the horizon. The James Finlay Plantation employs 70,000 people; with their families, the total worker population is over 100,000. Marcus said that a few weeks ago he taught a class in a town an hour from the guest house. The entire drive there - and the visible horizon from the school – was tea. The plantation is large, and – from this vantage point – peaceful. Life here has continued much like normal, even as Kericho has filled with soldiers lobbing tear gas and shooting looters.
The plane is a twin prop. Fifteen seats. The pilot is Ugandan; he flies for an International NGO that brings doctors and medical supplies into impoverished areas. Whether the US Government is trading favors or paying cash, I don’t know. Given that Kenya Airways has halted flights out of Kisumu because of fuel shortages, it can’t be cheap to fly us in and out again.
The rich and vibrant green of Kericho’s fields and shambas gradually fades to a dry and dirty brown as the grasslands descend towards Lake Victoria. As the ground grows less fertile there are more and more abandoned dusty plots. Rough and rusted roofs in the center of compounds surrounded by rings and squares of trees appear like massive pupils staring up at us as we pass over. As we approach Kisumu we look for the greasy black smoke that marks the improvised road blocks we are flying to avoid. From this height the only real evidence is the black scorch marks of burned tires that stain the tarmac.
Touching down, we see what appears to be a stream of volunteers coming out to greet the plane. My friend Faith, having experienced riots and violence in Homa Bay during Parliamentary nominations a month ago, came to Kisumu for elections because she thought it would be safer. This did not turn out to be the case. She looks grim. Apparently she is one of the volunteers who is lacking their actual passport. The photocopies faxed by Peace Corps are causing problems with the customs officer. He has been threatening to prevent them from boarding the flight to Tanzania. I don’t blame him, but I don’t particularly like him either. I greet him in Kiswah. He feigns deep immersion in his work. During our interview he continually refers to my “tour group” and stops to send text messages on his phone. No doubt he lives in Kisumu and has much more pressing concerns than the stampede of rich whites attempting to flee the country. All the same, his disregard for the feelings or emotions of those under his jurisdiction is frustratingly typical of bureaucrats here.
Sitting in the lines of molded plastic seats that make up the terminal, a flat screen TV on the wall is tuned to CNN. The sound of jets cycling their engines periodically drowns out the American Presidential Election coverage. It’s -12 in Chicago. Blizzard conditions across the Western states. Obama has won in Iowa. I am delighted. For months I have been telling people in matatus and hotelis that I don’t think Obama will be able to pull out the win. International Newsweek is probably giving me Clinton-skewed information. Britney Spears had a four hour standoff with police. This tidbit and the grainy, poorly lit footage of someone being wheeled out of a comfortable looking Hollywood home is recycled every 15 minutes or so. In the midst of political unrest, as fuel and food supplies dwindle across the country and the word “genocide” is already being irresponsibly thrown around by politicians and journalists eager to start a fire, the event that I am most able to get information about concerns one woman’s inability to cope with her tremendous success, wealth and fame.
Walking to the hoteli at the edge of the parking lot, we pass seven EU Election Observer vehicles abandoned in the parking lot. The serious irregularities that they reported are the very source of the circumstances for their evacuation. I wonder who will come to fetch these cars; whether they will sit until a mob sets upon them. The waitress at the hoteli is as frazzled and impatient as all the other employees at the airport. No doubt the fact that their job becomes more pressing and stressful the more things fall apart around them is a potent cause for exhaustion. Marcus texts me and tells me that the plane has arrived. As we reenter the terminal I can see an old Russian military helicopter offloading another squad of soldiers.
The pilots, both Australian, have been flying a relay between Dar and Kisumu for most of the day. We are their fourth group with three more to go. In total there are almost 40 volunteers being shipped out to in groups of six and seven. I have never been on a private jet. The seats are hand stitched leather. We are offered snacks and use the power plug and fold out table to power Marcus’ laptop while we play a round of Tiger Wood’s PGA Golf. Flying out of Kisumu, over Lake Victoria, we can see the Laison that has choked the bay. A non-native water plant whose thick roots and leafy, floating top growth have crippled numerous sectors of the economy here, it lies in a field of brilliant green not unlike the tea in Kericho. It has choked the harbor preventing the movement of boats for fishing, transport and tourism. From here it appears as a field of solid green, like a tremendous flat soccer pitch planted at the edge of the water.
It’s a short flight in our twin engine private jet. I am boggled, yet again, at what it means to be a citizen of the richest country in the world. To find myself under its’ protection, to have its’ resources mobilized in my favor. In the space of two days, two sets of private planes were organized to evacuate me from a relatively luxurious and safe locale. Customs practices and proper documentation have been thrust aside; within the large list of people attempting to extricate themselves from troubles, our names have floated to the top by virtue of the place we were born. There is no deserving this. No earning it. Touching down, I am struck by the fact that I came here to try and see the other side of the order, to understand what lies at the bottom as I float at the top. I was hoping to find a way to make what I had meaningful, to give it purpose; to be able to congratulate myself on my insistence on earning what I’ve been given. On being a moral recipient of privilege.
Thinking of AIDS orphans, camped in the sun outside the Catholic Diocese in Kericho, waiting for food or water in the afternoon sun, it seems to me that the concept of earning anything – the idea that things happen for a reason – is yet another luxury I had easily assumed away as truth within the soft and easy choices of a Western life. In a certain sense, it easier to realize this than it is to maintain a sense of order. Increasingly I feel compelled to deny merit as a salient force.
We exit into a moist oven of tropical air. There’s another group of helpful Peace Corps staff to whisk us through customs, help us change money, offer phones for calls home. Our multiple entry visas to Tanzania are a hundred dollars each. Pat, the Tanzanian Country Director, peels out seven bills from a thick envelope of cash. With the stamp in our passports we are officially refugees. Like almost a quarter million true Kenyans, we have fled out homes in response to political unrest. It is a semantic coincidence that we can be labeled as such. For the seven of us, as things have gotten worse, our circumstances have only improved. From Marcus’ house in Kericho to the plantation cottage, a private jet and now, the Jangwani Sea Resort Hotel.
Sitting in the volunteer lounge at the Tanzanian Peace Corps Office, someone has looked up the resort on the internet. Two swimming pools, a 24 hour bar and restaurant, a private beach. Air conditioned rooms with mini-fridges and satellite TV. Free internet. We are given spending money, free rein in the volunteer library. A few of our group walk with Tanzanian volunteers to a neighborhood bar.
The excitement of a new country is a raw buzz against the dusty, aching tiredness of the day’s travel. We sit facing eachother on long benches in the back of yet another white Land Rover, crawling slowly through the Friday night traffic. Finally passing a minibus broken down on the side of the road, I realize that I was expecting a road block, a burning car, a crowd of people held at gunpoint by police. It strikes me for the first time that things here are precisely and mundanely normal. When things will return to such a state in Kenya is unknowable.

Evacuation remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Leftovers

2008-01-04T05:55:46Z

...

Leftovers remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Personal Politics

2008-01-04T05:53:19Z

Raila and Personal Politics

Raila Odinga visited Kabartonjo today. I saw him speak before more than a thousand people on the field of the primary school, just like I saw him a few weeks ago in Voi. For the Presidential candidates here, in Kenya, this week contains the sort of frenzied campaigning that Americans will experience in that final weeks before November next year. Kenyans head to the polls just after Christmas for the second free elections in their country’s history. If Raila Odinga defeats Moi Kibaki, the incumbent, it will be the first time in Africa’s history that a president has failed to be elected to a second term. A major accomplishment, since here the second term has historically led to a further consolidation of power making a third, a fourth, and an eventual moratorium on multi-party elections (such as the one repealed here in 1993) that much more likely.
I met James, the volunteer from just down the road in Kimegul at the rally. We talked about the coverage of Mitt Romney’s speech at Texas A+M, James’ alma mater. Relieving anxieties about his religious convictions, the clips and pictures we have seen here show Romney in front of a large, enthusiastic crowd. The message was apparently effective, giving Romney a jump in the polls as people gain increasing confidence that Mormonism isn’t a cult. James was telling me that the room in which Romney spoke holds, at most, three hundred people; hardly a number that would account for any change in national polls.
It is unlikely that Raila’s speech today -to more than three times that number - will make national news in Kenya. It certainly won’t merit mention on CNN.com or Bloomberg. Even if it did, even if it was in every national and international media outlet in the world, it would be impossible for it to have the kind of effect on Kenyans that Romney’s speech has arguably had on Americans. Many Kenyan’s lack the electricity (and the TV) that would be necessary to watch the news coverage. Few know how to use computers, even fewer have access to one with internet. And despite relatively high literacy rates, a significant portion of the population lacks the disposable income to buy a newspaper (supposing they even live somewhere they can get one). Here, the message that gets across is the one coming straight out of the candidate’s mouth as they speak, face to face, at fairgrounds, stadiums and even primary school soccer fields.
They say that all politics is local. Here, that is inescapably the case. Every one that saw Raila in person today is potentially one more vote for him come the 27th. In America, the politician who shakes your hand - who meets you in their ‘casual’ pressed khakis and button-down polo - needs to care more about the camera than the people they meet. They need three hundred people to look like a lot more. If you don’t like them after you see them in person, that’s okay, as long as the people who see the pictures do. It’s more important that it come across as a positive interaction, than that it actually be one.
In Kenya, the presentation and the reality have not yet parted ways. It makes it easier to grasp why African politics have for so long been decried as ‘charismatic’: the first hand experience of seeing a politician is often the only experience of them that people get. Politics is personal because it has to be.
The problem with such a system (so I am told) is that people never learn the issues. A half hour of face time can’t possibly leave a citizen informed enough to make an intelligent decision about where to cast their vote. Understanding the distinctions between candidates – knowing the issues - requires precisely the kind of access to newspapers, TV and the internet that most people here lack. This may well be true.
The people in my community – strongly in support of Raila – seem to be basing their decision mostly on a concept that change is good. This being only the second time they’ve have had such motive power, they are excited to use it in its most determinative form. Very few people have any idea how Raila will handle Kenya’s international debt, or what Kibaki will do about the crumbling colonial infrastructure. However, what is lacking in information, is more than present in enthusiasm.
For months, the primary topic of discussion as I have ridden in matatus, eaten in hotelis, and waited at the post office has been the coming election. From mamas selling bananas and guavas in the market to elderly folks lined up on benches in the town center, Kenyans are passionately involved in their politics. Raila’s presence in town today stopped everything. Shops were closed, the market was empty and throngs of people – dressed in their Sunday best – crowded the roads. Perhaps they aren’t informed about the issues (most Americans aren’t either) but every one I have talked to is eager and ready to cast their vote, whereas come November, vast numbers of Americans with the right to vote will neglect to do so. The endless photo ops and sound-bites, Youtube debates and editorials will fail to motivate most Americans to take an hour out of their day to engage in the simplest and most basic act of representative government.
Watching today it occurred to me that ‘charismatic’ politics are exactly what makes democracy here such a celebrated and important thing. It’s what makes Raila’s visit an event significant enough to put everyday life on hold and what ensures that next week the vast majority of Kenyans will use their voice and cast their vote. The memory of political corruption and repression certainly adds emphasis, but that’s because it reinforces the notion that this election isn’t just a show. It’s not just a massive public relations campaign centered around candidates interested in looking good first, and being good second. The simplicity and the vitality of Kenyan democracy comes from the fact that most Kenyans will only see their candidates face to face. It has to do with the fact that here, the presentation and reality remain very much the same.

Personal Politics remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Pride

2008-01-04T05:52:19Z

Mercury is a nicer bar than I ever went to in the states. Softly curving upholstered walls. Marble bathrooms. The spirits geometrically laid out on a backlit glass wall. Outside, in the parking lot I ask the guard if it will still be possible for us to get a matatu. It is, after all, almost 9p.
What we actually get on is a bus. I’ve traveled this route during rush hour: matatus packed full of uncharacteristically thorny Kenyans, fleeing city center back to slums at the edge of the grid. This is the same, but the silence is permeated with exhaustion of a more physical kind. It’s unlikely that these people started work any later than those I crammed in with this afternoon. These are ‘night jobs’; they start before it’s light and finish only once it’s dark again. The bus is dark and the street lamps bring an intermittent brightness, like a passing search-light, that lengthens and then shortens the shadows over their faces.
Tired though they may be, the entrance of three whites onto a bus already filled to standing room leaves a sudden sinking silence in the air. As though we’ve caught them doing something improper followed – in the same breath – with a realization that they aren’t the ones out of place.
The first quiet comment comes across my right shoulder.
Muze keti chako. Sell him your seat.
I turn. Sitaki kuketi. Si mbali. I don’t want to sit. It’s not far.
Thinking of being in New York before I left, it’s always astonishing to me how immediately people here will drop their barriers. It’s a tribute to the social nature of everyday life in Kenya, to the extent to which people interact and connect easily, continually. In this case it’s also a shameful reminder of how little effort whites have ever needed to make to adapt to the culture and life of people for whom this is not an adopted home. To find a white person who speaks even a little of the language that has grown and developed and lived in this place for a millennia is a novelty that’s usually taken as a compliment.
We talk a bit. He hands me a card: a smartly creased and clean version of the same political fold-outs that litter the sidewalks and streets here in the face of the approaching election.
Unmajua? Mtu na nguvu. You know him? A man with strength.
I wait for the pitch that always comes when someone mentions a politician to me. The fact that I can’t vote seems to make my support more desirable than is logical. An outsider, with no personal bias, makes a clear sort of moral victory when swayed to your side.
He holds out his hand. I return the card and he carefully places it back in his front shirt pocket. Getting off and walking back towards our hotel, it occurs to me that I don’t ever recall experiencing something like that before. Not here, not at home: never.
Democracy. A system where people are represented in a manner that broadens their dignity. Where they feel proud of those who carry their voice and those who work for them are honored to be chosen for such a task. I have often thought about whether a representative is chosen to act their conscience – to stand above the passions of their constituents and do what seems right for all – or to stand squarely with their supporters, to act their voice above all else. But I’ve never really considered that a politician might function to unite their supporters; to bind them together by becoming something that each person is proud of.
Sitting in a quiet darkness of a mutual exhaustion. Tired, sore from twelve hours of work. The same tomorrow. But tucked into your front pocket, a small warm piece of pride. A sense of being a part of something bigger, stronger than this quiet dark and a chain of equivalent tomorrows.

Pride remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Birds or Prey

2008-01-04T05:50:26Z

Just a few minutes ago, as I sat on my front stoop reading, an eagle or a hawk – some bird of prey – swooped down and lifted away one of the four chicks that have been ambling about the yard for the last week or so. My neighbor Alice had her son build a chicken coop over the last school holidays. This is the first set of new chicks. I have enjoyed watching them wandering about in formation behind their mother. I have attempted to stop them from eating Styrofoam. I have enjoyed – ever so slightly - the prospect of doing dishes because I know that once I sit down with the basin I use for cleaning, they will make their way over, awaiting the dumping of the inevitable bits of soaked rice or beans that stick to the bottom of my pots.
One of them is gone now and I have never seen such behavior from these chickens. Three of them ran under my legs and into my house in the aftermath; it took ten minutes and a broom to get them back out.
Generally, I was under the impression that the chickens had a pretty sweet life here. They wander about the compound. They peck at nothing. Sometimes they run rapidly from one end to the other fleeing some imagined danger that I cannot perceive, much less imagine. They eat, they poop, I would assume they sleep, though I have never actually observed this first hand (Alice assures me that it does occur). Periodically, it seems, they also watch their offspring get plucked off the ground and carried away into the air to be devoured in a tree. I find it ironic – given that they are birds, but because they are chickens– that neither the air nor the tree that figure so prominently in this fate are in any way conceivable to them. They are, after all, flightless birds who live in a box.
It’s clear – from their retreat to covered space of my own home – that they don’t imagine being plucked away into the sky is good. They didn’t watch it with that brainless, steady stare that seems to characterize most of their day. But I can’t see how they could know exactly what has occurred. They don’t hang out at bars with other birds who might be able to explain to them what a hawk is or where they live or how they hunt. (Unless they are sneaking out late at night when I am already asleep.)
As I write, they have regained their composure, collapsed back into their habits. I wonder if they are noticing that it is slightly easier to find food now that there is one less mouth. In any case, the event itself, is over. Little Cornell – as he may very well have been named – is gone. I somehow doubt that his sudden reappearance would engender a response anything like the one that accompanied his removal.
And I must say, dramatic though it may be, I find the return to normalcy rather comforting. For those that remain, the exigencies of their daily life will not wait. The extent to which they understand that Cornell is dead or dying - that one of the beings with whom they have spent every single moment of their brief little lives is gone and will not return - is meaningless. Whether they grasp it or not, whether they have little chicken tears welling up in their beady unblinking eyes, this fact is secondary to the fact that they are, frankly, still kind of hungry.
Life isn’t cruel so much as it is ongoing. There is a comforting certainty for me in the fact that in the long run, the basic overwhelming needs that drive life also ensure that no tragedy can be too overwhelming. No matter what else is lost or taken away, no matter how shocking or dark an event may be, I will probably still like bacon an awful lot. The tremendous towers of anxiety and fear and joy and confusion that I build as I attempt to create meaning in every individual happening of my life cannot dispel the fact that I need to eat, I need to sleep. That, right now, I kind of need to pee. And I know I’m just building another tower here, but this one has a stability I find soothing.

Birds or Prey remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Tanzania

2008-01-03T16:41:25Z

The seven of us here in Kericho, along with volunteers from two other locations in Kenya, are being evacuated to Tanzania for two weeks (at the minimum).
It's so that we can 'decompress.' If you have been reading, then you are aware how little in need we are of this (especially with our current resort style living).
All the same we are very excited to be seeing a new place and (of course) increasingly guilty about the treatment we are receiving.
I will update once we have arrived.

Tanzania remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Tea Country

2008-01-03T08:44:43Z

We wake up in the dark, chinks of brilliant sunlight thru the gaps on the steel shutters over the windows. My back hurts from yet another night squeezed on the air mattress. The shared single gradually deflates every night so that my center of weight sinks lower and lower, kinking my back and neck. Rachel's mom calls with her morning update, right on schedule. Apparently Red Cross is sending out calls for aid as over a thousand people, displaced by riots and fires, have surrounded the Kericho Police Station. Thats about a 20 minute walk from us. Last night in El Doret (about two hours from my home outside Kabarnet) 50 people taking refuge in a church were killed when it was set on fire.
The opposition leader, Raila Odinga, has built a sucessful multi-ethnic coalition which now finds itself at odds with Kibaki and his supporters(the dominant Kikuyu minority that has controlled much of the government for the last 40 years). The violence and destruction which began between party supporters has dissolved, as it always does, into tribalism. The only difference is that this time, the other tribes have unified against Kibaki and his Kikuyu base. The church burning and the attacks against a formerly dominant minority can't help but remind me of Rwanda. The fire was a rather shocking end to a fairly quiet day and precipitated a large number of phone calls from family and friends at home. They came throughout the night as we sat up in turn to repeat the same reassurances and explanations to our constituent bases in Colorado, California, Illinois, Alabama, Texas and Minnesota.
Today however - for the first time in almost a week - there is a real reason to get up. Today contains more than card playing, reading and the terrifying domesticity of going out for groceries without getting tear-gassed or shot. Each Peace Corps country has an Emergency Action Plan (EAP): a manual for what to do when things get like they are now. The most basic part of it is consolidation: volunteers move together to a secure central locations. This makes security - and when necessary, extraction - easier to manage. What is obvious now that was not before is that consolidation only works when we can a) travel and b) have somewhere safe to travel too. There is no gas in Kericho and anyway the roads are blocked by informal and sometimes violent roadblocks. Beyond that, the majority of the originally planned consolidation points are in larger cities like Kisumu, Nairobi, Mombasa, El Doret, and Nakuru. Essentially, in all the places where the worst violence is already occurring.
The new consolidation plan as developed by our Country Director Ken Puvak (who has been extraordinarily available, helpful and encouraging over the last week) is for us to go to the Walter Reed Project's guesthouse in the tea fields outside Kericho. They want us out of the city; somewhere with more security than Marcus' steel shutters and concrete walls can afford. We are mostly just excited to leave the two rooms we have been in for the past five days. We pack all the food and spices, our clothes and sleeping bags. Dan has a massive 45 pound trail backpack full of two weeks worth of clothes, books, batteries and - as we discovered last night - candles. In any other travel circumstances I would mock him, but given that I have already been away from site for a week and will be gone at least one more, my choice for space efficiency over comfort was a mistake. Should we have to run from a crowd while carrying our luggage (a distinct possibility) I will certainly win. But if in so doing, I get my pants dirty, and I only have one other set of bottoms to change into. Should we be evacuated to Tanzania or Uganda for a significant length of time, there is always a chance that the country will be closed to Peace Corps service by the US government. In that case, it questionable whether we will be allowed to retrieve anything from our homes here. Four or five notebooks of story ideas, journal entries, notes on the economics of development will be lost to me, along with my cowboy hat, my guitar, all my clothes and my laptop (newly smuggled from Tanzania). Small things in the face of the larger issues occuring around us, but regrets I can't help but consider watching Marcus indulge the luxury none of us have had: packing with the knowledge he may not come back.
The car arrives. Another in the endless chain of white Land Rovers that make up the mobile fleet of Western aid here. The Walter Reed Project is the medical research branch of the American Army and their office in Kericho does a lot of work on vaccines. The guest house is used for visiting VIPs or academics. We meet Doug, the Walter Reed director in Kericho. Within two minutes of driving we are further from Marcus' house than we have been in the last week. Charles' mom calls. It seems Kenya has successfully passed Pakistan in the international news queue; the first headline on CNN.com, Yahoo News and others is now election violence here in Kenya. Apparently fifty refuge seekers burned to death in a church is too dramatic to ignore. It's unfortunate that the odd 200 other people killed in the past few days didn't manage to die in such a unified and tragic way. If their deaths had been coordinated and more symbolic, maybe the would have made the news ticker during "Campaign 2008" coverage. We stop at the Barclay's near town center to empty out our bank accounts. Cash is a necessity at this point: the two loaves of bread we found yesterday were four times their normal price.
The roads are blocked once or twice every mile with makeshift barricades of stones or tires. There are massive scorch marks on the tarmac from fires the night before. The innumerable tiny road side stands are overturned and burned in the street. There are few cars. Looking down the main road in the center of Kericho, we can see the slums that sit just outside of town. Mile upon mile of steel shacks lacking running water or reliable electricity. At the Stagematt closest to the slums rioters broke through the steel bars over the windows. In the ensuing looting the police shot and killed 14 people. Among the sooty stains on the sidewalk, I can imagine their blood pooling in the street.
We head out of town, past the empty matatu stage and abandoned city park, up into the tea fields. The landscape is the same verdant green it always is. The tea fields stretching to the horizon have a quiet, meticulous order heedless of the chaos just a few minutes away. In the colonial era the tea estates were operated as countries of their own.They are gated and posess their own chains of supply to dry goods, vegetables and petrol. We pass rows and rows of worker's houses built in 30k gallon water tanks with windows; concentric circles arranged into towns.
The guest house lies deep in the body of the tea estate. Doug's house is just before ours off to the right. Small clusters of monkeys sit atop the tall wood fence. He tells us about the two Kikuyu families he is sheltering in the wake of the election. Our house is surrounded by meticulously maintained gardens and lawns. Our personal askari, Nelson, greets us, waving to the cars with his night stick tucked under his left arm.
Coming from the two rooms and all corn diet we have enjoyed for the last week, the house here is shocking: five bedrooms, two full baths with hot showers, a large kitchen, fully equipped dining room and den, satellite TV, a veranda with covered couches and chairs, a freezer full of meat, a 50lb bag of rice and a fireplace with a fully stocked wood shed. We are exhausted and overwhelmed by the opulence in which we suddenly find ourselves enveloped. There is a large finely clipped lawn and two friendly and playful dogs. We have gone from bomb shelter rationing to a vacation.
There is no way - even pooling resources - that the seven of us could afford such a beautiful and fully equipped house. We enjoy luxury, comfort and safety today expressly and explicitly because other people in Kericho are experiencing misery, destruction and death. The giddy pleasure of this safe, bright and comfortable place sits like a stone in my stomach as I consider Marcus' neighbors and co-workers back in their own homes. This compound is only the first of the dozen safety nets that await us with further violence and unrest. Those we have lived next door to for the last week do not have a safe-house to escape to, much less a whole other country. On any other random day I would be at site, in my own house, combatting lonliness and boredom, trying to build a life out of half understood interactions and good intentions. Instead, the tremendous death toll and hunger experienced by the citizens of Kericho has created for me a vacation in this place: a paradise in comparison to anything we have become accustomed to in the last seven months. I wonder, for the hundreth time, what it will be like to return to site after all this. Combined with that is the question of whether I will return at all; whether, after this is all over, I can see myself going back to site and picking up where I left off.

Tea Country remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Elections

2007-12-30T19:02:51Z

Sitting here, inside the house, there's not much to do. Seven of us, Peace Corps volunteers together for the holidays, ate dinner in more silence than accompanied our other meals today and yesterday. Outside there is the sound of muffled voices on loud speakers and radios. There are houses on fire a little ways down the street in both directions. Young men walk up and down the roads, dragging their machetes along the concrete. It's designed to scare people. It's working.
This afternoon, before the vegetable stand near the house was tear-gassed while we bought tomatoes, we saw people, presumably Kikuyus, walking towards the tea fields carrying large rice sacks stuffed with their valuables.They went to sleep in the woods, away from crowds and rioters. They were preparing for the worst. They were preparing for this.
President Kibaki is a Kikuyu - most people here are not. He was sworn in for his second term along with a dozen or so subordinates within a half hour of the results being announced this evening. Many of appointees are the same ones that were voted out of their Parliamentary seats in the elections three days ago; removals that seemed to indicate the broader disatisfaction with Kibaki's government. This, combined with some constituencies who reported for Kibaki with more votes than there were voters in the district, has led to wide-spread allegations and popular sentiment that, in the face of a narrow margin of victory, Kibaki's Party for National Unity has cheated.The fact that they swore him in a half hour after results were announced doesn't help.
They changed the location for the swearing-in and the space looked half empty, full of people applauding with the quiet and restrained enthusiasm of a gallows crowd. Rachel watched upstairs with neighbors who waved their finger at the man on the screen. Some sobbed. Some swore. Contrasting the violence that we can hear on the streets is this deep sadness. This feeling of loss. If an election has been stolen - as people here strongly believe is the case - then that's not the only thing and maybe not the most important one.
Samuel Huntington suggested that a Democracy cannot be said be legitimate until there have been two party changes. Until power has been effectively handed over to two different groups; to two sets of people each distinct in their relationships and allegiances. Kenya did it for the first time in 2002. At the end of his 22 years of consolidated power, Daniel Arap Moi fled the stage at his concession speech in Uhuru Park after the crowd began throwing mud. And though Kibaki's party was called NARC then and PNU now, power has not changed hands. The most basic defining attribute of democracy - choice - has not been exercised in a discernable way.
Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement has declared - and at this moment maintains - that they will not concede to what they consider fraudelent results.
This leaves us...nowhere.
Even if the allegations of fraud are true, the difference they made is only the few hundred thousand needed to push Kibaki over the top. Regardless the country is almost evenly divided between the two candidates which means that no matter what happens, half the people will find a leader they did not choose.
Where I come from elections can be disapointing, even sad, but they do not merit the tremendous sadness that I have seen in people tonight. We do not place quite so much hope in the individiuals who are chosen. We do not believe that the process of choosing will lead to an outcome that 'means something' in a larger historical way. And indeed, the systems - the bureacracy and ingrained rights afforded by our institutions - that compose our government merit such an indifferent viewpoint. Their complexity and our assumptions in relating to them ensure that any fundamental change will be hard fought and long coming. In a youthful Democracy like this one, such assumptions have not had the time or the experience to become ingrained, nor can they be so easily taken for granted. If results stand as they are now, Kibaki's continuued consolidation of power - and an even deeper resentment of the Kikuyu tribe that has dominated Kenyan government since independence - mean that the next set of elections will only be more turbulent, more tribalistic and more violent than these.
The harder cost to gauge is the spiritual one. It is easy to talk about the structures of power and their alteration under a president in his second term (people in the states are re-learning this lesson even now). Conflicts in Rwanda and many other places in Africa tell what happens when a dominant minority is finally thrown out of power and the oppressed majority finds themselves with an open mandate to redress grievances or seek revenge. These are matters of political and philosophical calculation and prediction.
What cannot be tallied or forcasted is what this perception of theft will do to people for whom Democracy is a new and untested method. Our elections in the states stand astride a massive and silent assumption, one so quietly and tacitly agreed upon that it never emerges as an issue. Democracy isn't as tragic at home because we don't invest miraculous hope in it, because we don't expect tremendous things. Our disapointment is a matter of degrees; our certain and unquestioned faith in choosing our leaders means that the failure is never systematic, only circumstantial. But such faith doesn't exist here. And that miraculous hope that comes with systemic change has been lost. The cost of that is unknowable and will mean much more to the future of this place than anything else.
In the meantime, we wait like everyone else. All the larger stores have been closed for a few days. After the tear-gassing today, it's questionable whether the mommas will return to sell fruits and vegetables by the road. We have enough rice and flour to last us a few days and we have been filling up cans and tubs in case the water stops running. We play cards. We read books. We turn on the radio at the top of every hour for news. Like I said, there's not much else for us to do.

Elections remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Kericho

2007-12-17T07:27:25Z

The primary thing that I try to keep in mind while traveling in Africa is that there is no system. Which is why – in a backwards sort of way – it makes sense that in Nakuru there is. The matatu stage is a sprawling, living space; its dimensions and supports measured and built out of the crowds of people that compose it. Throngs of hawkers, food stalls, vans and trucks, cobblers, beggars and touts fill it to overflowing. It engulfs the major indoor vegetable market and bleeds over into the used clothing and housewares market. Located north of Nairobi, Nakuru is a hub for embarking east towards Meru and Mt. Kenya, north to Lake Baringo and the Upper Rift, and west – over what is arguably the worst road I have ever traveled – to Kisumu and Lake Victoria. You can also head southwest, to tea country, which is where I am headed today.
I try to enter a matatu bound for Kericho and am rebuffed. It seems in Nakuru, tucked between shallow storefronts selling plastic basins and overprinted 50 Cent T-shirts, there are actually ticket windows. I am even more shocked to be informed that my ticket is not for this current matatu; I’m on the next one.
I have read that, in the aggregate, humans are getting taller, a result of improved nutrition. This leads me to believe that the Nissan and Toyota minibuses that compose the informal transportation sector here in Kenya were designed at some point in the 1880’s when the largest people were five feet tall and had perfectly symmetrical shoulders and waists. No doubt someone of my freakish 6’1’’ stature, carrying broad shoulders and large flat feet would have been forced to ride in a separate transport away from respectable, normal folk.
As my matatu pulls up I am shooed towards the front seat. Quite often on the road, matatus pass in segregated symmetry: whites in the front, Africans in the back. I am typically shown the front seat, even at the expense of Africans already seated there. You can argue it’s a hold-over from colonial era racism, but it probably has more to do with the learned habit of ferrying a generation of Westerners who grew up yelling: “Shotgun!” It works out fine regardless. Typically tourists in matatus are there because they want a chance to try out their Lonely Planet Swahili Phrasebook; they want to “mix with locals!” For every white person actually needing to go somewhere, there are two out ‘slumming’; the matatu as another taste of ‘authentic’ African culture. Riding in the front also means they can watch their bags and avoid having a baby or a sack of maize shoved on their lap. They can “mix with the locals!” with the certainty of reasonable limits.
Those of us in the back don’t particularly mind because: a) they are guests and b) they have just volunteered to be our crumple zone. No doubt when Nissan Minibuses were first designed back in the 19th century, they were pulled by horses and the risk of a high-speed head-on collision was minimal. But at some point, someone decided to install an engine behind the front row of seats making the first serious barrier to the powerful crushing force of an impact the bodies of those in the first row. You only have to pass so many matatus, rolled over and burned out in the median - their front ends exploded like a kernel of popcorn - to start to really enjoy the claustrophobic squeeze as you make your way to the back. In general, I try to sit as much in the middle as possible. When I travel alone this involves timing similar to double-dutch as I try to jump in after the person taking the window seat.
My matatu today, in compliance with Kenyan law, has a seatbelt. Moreover, someone has taken the additional step of jamming it in the closed position, helpfully ensuring that it cannot be tampered with or removed. I consider pulling up my legs and sliding under it, like slipping under the covers of a freshly made bed, but then imagine attempting the reverse of this maneuver as the matatu lies upside down in the median and the Aussies in the front seat scream: “ME LEGS!” I switch seats.
At home in Kabarnet, there is a police checkpoint on the way out of town to ensure that everyone has a seatbelt and that the bus is only carrying fourteen souls. Typically everyone sighs collective relief as we pull away, unclicking their belts just as we pull up to the police free pickup point (within visible distance of the officer we have just departed) and pack in eight extra people.
The sky today has the thick and clustered clouds that only reveal their beauty freed from the tunnel vision of building lined streets. Seen all at once, they are a heard of grey, fleecy buffalo calmly moving towards the horizon. We pass slow moving petrol tankers, each with a bicyclist or two - leaned over their handlebars - gripping the back of the trailer, like lampreys on sharks. Ahead, the clouds periodically part, momentarily releasing a golden shaft of light the size of a house enveloping this shamba or that intersection with a seemingly divine glow.
I’m dropped off on the side of the road outside Kericho. Marcus works at the Walter Reed Project Office there. They are doing clinical trials of an AIDS vaccine among other things. His house is a twenty minute walk from the Kericho-town center. Marcus and James greet me on the road, drinks already in hand. As it will turn out these are the only two cups in Marcus’ house. The options presented to me are a shallow bowl or an old Coke bottle. Preferring to make a tremendous mess each time I make a drink, as opposed to each time I drink one, I choose the bottle.
I would suggest that Marcus lacks a nesting instinct. Granted he has a very real and structured job that takes up time that a typical volunteer would use to obsess about their domestic state, but there is something distinctly Spartan about his home. It has the feeling of a very large closet: a place where Marcus stores his things (along with himself) when he’s not at work.
As it turns out, this is not entirely his influence. Prior to his occupation it was, in fact, a storeroom. A ¾ height plywood wall has been installed creating a bedroom that lies, awkwardly, directly in from the front door. Marcus is one of those few and fortunate volunteers who have a working indoor choo: a porcelain bowl installed in the slab. Moreover, the fact that the shower is installed directly over it means that cleaning up accidents is a breeze. You just have to be careful not to step down while soaping up. It is a shower of the kind that you elect to stand adjacent to and splash yourself with in order to avoid hypothermia. The water knob has been cleverly placed so that opening the door carelessly bangs it and provides a punitive spray of the vividly frigid water. The house is concrete construction with high ceilings and powerful looking steel bars and shutters over long windows. Essentially, Marcus lives in an armoire with blast doors.
I am glad to see my friends. Marcus is here as the final component of his Masters. He’s a stoic, or pretends to be. He wants to work in development and his time here is not for cultural exchange or character growth. He has little patience for people who whine about their comfort. At least within his work and his reasons for being here, he is quietly self assured and relaxed. I tend to think there are other parts of him that sit farther beneath the surface; emotions and aspirations that he shares with a limited number of people.
James, on the other hand, seems to keep everything on the surface. This is not to say that he lacks depth, only that what he has to give is immediately and continuously present. He is one of those rare, effortlessly social beings; constructing relationships, being likeable and affable is second nature to him. He’s so good at it, in fact, that he resorts to pushing people’s buttons for fun: enraging them until they scream at him and then patching things up. This is in fact precisely the process by which he and I became friends. I believe I told him to stop acting like a child.
We walk to dinner at the nearby Continental Hotel. The hotel was actually built expressly for President Moi to stay at when he visited Kericho. The road we walk is muddy and riddled with holes. The joke is that driving in Kenya nowadays consists of trying to avoid the leftover chunks of road. Across from the covered drive and landscaped lawns of the hotel are a line of sheet-metal dukas with houses and small gardens behind them. The dim glow of gas lamps in their windows contrasts the electric lights that pile six stories above us as we pass through the glass doors. I am once again astonished that in a country where I’ve seen someone stripped and beaten in the streets for stealing an orange, and edifice like this could be built for one man without any feeling of inconsistency.
We order nyama choma and millet ugali. We drink beers. Getting together with volunteers is like comparing trading cards. It’s visceral and vital and cathartic, but it’s mostly derivative. Everyone tells the same stories from dimly contrasted perspectives. I got asked for this or I thought I could do that. I didn’t understand and went here or there or any of the innumerable smaller events that occur in tandem for strangers in a strange land. We tell stories to each other, but to ourselves most of all. We justify our judgements or decisions by narrating to eachother and searching for confirmation of the wisdom of this lesson, the rationality of that choice. After that we drop back to the things we miss. Giving ourselves a chance to re-experience foods or routines that weigh heavy - though infrequent - on our unconscious recollection. I never remember things half as well as when I recollect them for other people. A dynamic that makes the private things I miss all the more poignant.
Two times over the course of dinner I encounter men at the urinal who are not peeing but rather counting money. Fairly intoxicated on my final bathroom trip before facing the bill, I wash my hands and step back up to the urinal to count out cash. I extend this gesture in the hopes someone will enter and see me. No one does.
I seldom walk in the dark here. The first reason is the often over-imagined danger of crime. The second is that here – when it is dark – it is very dark. There are no streetlights or porch lights, garden lamps or lit billboards. Aside from the brilliant headlights of passing cars -which succeed in destroying any night vision you can build up in the intervening time – it is simply pitch black. We stagger home in and out of puddles through cow shit and mud to Marcus’ front door.
In the morning we begin the first of our numerous trips to the overpriced, second rate tourists traps that Marcus has neglected to visit because he wanted to share them with guests. The Kericho Tea Hotel is an excellent example of a common sight in Kenya: the colonial era institution not quite successful enough to update but not dead enough to close. Everything from the black and white TV to the pleather armchairs looks much the way it did when colonialism ended. This may be a cunning bit of marketing on the part of the owners since a chance to imagine what life was like during colonialism is the only reason you would come and pay eighty shillings for a pot of tea (which, I might add, is weak and luke-warm). This is particularly irksome because, as we sit on the cracked and faded veranda in plastic 60s bubble chairs, all we can see is tea, stretching in tidily bordered fields to the horizon.
There is a gift shop, for tourists who have come this far and – for some inexplicable reason – wish to go no further. Like most gift shops here it saves you the trouble of bargaining by simply charging a price higher than any roadside vendor or craftmaker would dream of asking. There is a selection of English books by Western authors on African subjects. Assumedly for people who, prior to coming to Africa, hadn’t heard of Nelson Mandela or feel that – now that they have been here – they should learn what folks back home think of here.
There is a knobbed stick the length of my arm covered from top to bottom with beads, tassels, small hanging masks, cut pieces of a bronze looking metal. As though a half dozen tribal craftsmen were locked in a room and told to bedazzle this object until there was no more space to bedazzle. I confirm with the cashier that this Manhattan Project of souvenirs is in fact what it appears to be: a stick for beating cattle. It is.
I suppose there is something profound and ironic here: the object made symbol. Sold and bought as an embodiment of an entire culture because of its resemblance to a tool used for a job that its spangles and ornament would prevent it from doing. So that when people pick it up off your front hall table you can say “Ah yes. Picked that up in Tea Country. Used in cattle rituals. Fantastic tea there. Hot and cheap.”
I try to imagine my neighbors going about their daily tasks in a Western constructed image of traditional dress. Doing laundry in an ornate beaded chestplate. Carrying water in giant copper earrings and neck loops. Checking your spear at the Stagematt. As we leave I see that years of overweight tourists have slowly bent the diving board down until its end sits just under the surface of the swimming pool.
Walking in Nakuru with friends I saw a man fall into a five foot deep, six foot long trench the width of the sidewalk: he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going. From this, I guessed that there were much fewer accidents on African sidewalks and streets. Since, I reasoned, you couldn’t take for granted the presence of pavement or steps or that you wouldn’t encounter an open grave in the middle of the thoroughfare, people had to be more conscientious travelers. This is, of course, wrong. There are many more accidents and they are typically much worse. Still I fantasize about filling a town like Kericho with native New Yorkers and watching them trip into light poles, fall down uneven stairs, and catch their hand bags on barbed-wire park fences. All of this as barefoot Kenyans step agilely over them.
As we walk into town taxis, drunks and hawkers hiss at us. This is normal. It’s a socially neutral way to attract attention in Kenya. Regardless, we ignore it, knowing full well that protesting that you are not interested, don’t want anything, were looking at something else, have a lazy eye, are all considered the first step of a shrewd negotiating ploy. Foreigners who know the sound ignore it for this reason. Ironically, foreigners who don’t know it also ignore it (though they wonder whose tyres are leaking) which means that it principally attracts innocent bypassing Kenyans. This pleases neither them, nor the hawkers.
Entering the Stagematt is always calming. The Kenyan equivalent of Walmart, the wide aisles and quietly overflowing order of its shelves is a sharp contrast from the disorder of the streets outside. Everything I know to buy in Kenya is in the Stagematt. The low cost of labor and high occurrence of theft mean each aisle has one or two employees quietly surveying. As so often occurs when faced with so many things you hadn’t realized you wanted all along, we immediately split up and wander off alone. I come to staring at a battery powered bug killer you swing like a tennis racket. I see Marcus an aisle over comparing five gallon buckets of cooking fat. James alone has kept his focus (or at least stuck with his instincts). We find him in the liquor section a pack of cigarettes in his hand. We gather ingredients for a Mexican dinner of guacamole, spicy lime beef and chapatti. I buy Marcus a special gift glass so I can stop pouring vodka on the floor. Having observed a troupe of scavenging monkeys on the way in, James buys a loaf of bread.
On the way back James and I cross the garbage trench that borders the road and he begins tossing out bread. James has a bit of a preoccupation with monkeys; a few years ago a visit to the Lomburi monkey temples - two hours north of Bangkok - enflamed an enthusiasm into something a bit more. The experience ended badly; suffice to say that there comes a point where there are simply too many monkeys on you and you want all of them off you, now. It is perhaps the memory of this - as well as the increasing numbers of monkeys dropping around us like a gang of ambushing thieves - that inspires in James a degree of moderation and restraint I have seldom seen in him. “That’s enough,” he announces in a voice that clearly does not believe this is to be true.
Dinner is excellent, though protracted owning to the presence of only two spoons. James and Marcus share the bed, and I take the couch.
The tea fields in Kericho run from the paved road to the horizon in ordered terraced plots, interspersed with copses of slender, high trees. In one of those pieces of local wisdom repeated so many times that its irrationality is overwhelmed by its repetition, we have accepted that the trees actually create the rain that arrives with clockwork-like regularity every afternoon. The constant moisture leaves the ground muddy and wears deeper the pitted holes in the road. It also leaves the landscape a perennially verdant and vibrant green.
Entering the fields shortly after 10am – as the majority of people are on their way to church – we walk down paths that part the lush green sea of thick hedge-like tea plants. The flat and even tops of the bushes rise and fall from our waists to our shoulders like passing waves as the rut of the muddy path deepens and shallows. Our goal, unsurprisingly, is monkeys. We had planned to walk through the fields anyhow and with most of a loaf of bread still remaining, we have a half baked hope that the thicker trees that top the hillsides of the visible horizon are packed with playful primates.
There is something peaceful and fulfilling about encountering such neatly ordered nature: the arrow straight paths T-boning into one another, the trees planted in geometric rows so that a perfect transect of vertical trunks is visible from each and every angle: they are calming and quiet in the damp morning air. It seems to me a space out of Abbott’s Flatland, every line continuing in unerring straightness until its perspectival terminus at the horizon. Only the river, flushed from the constant rains, refuses to submit to ordering; its rushing din hidden by dense, wild undergrowth.
We cross an old bridge constructed and reconstructed, strengthened and patched with decades of leftover wood and come to plantation housing for the pickers. We see clothes drying and smoke from cooking fires, but there are no people. The sense of seamless order begins to feel slightly eery, like wandering through an abandoned house and finding a fire still burning, cups of tea steaming on the table. The forest at the top of the fields is older, but just as ordered. The covering canopy creates a dim greenish light. The forest floor is almost bare.
We reach a fallen tree; an element of disorder novel enough for pause. We sit and listen to the slow creak of the thin trunks swaying together in the wind. The narrow trunks and thick leaf cover leave the space contained but bare, like an immense empty warehouse. There are no monkeys. James scatters the remains of the bread around us on the forest floor. I imagine that we probably appear like terribly ineffective poachers: lacking proper equipment for catching or subduing our prey and clearly possessing only the barest knowledge of where our quarry is to be found.
We tramp back to Marcus’ and throw our mud splattered pants into a bucket to soak. I also throw in my cell phone, forgotten in a side pocket. Another dinner, another movie. In the morning, Marcus prepares to go to work and James and I pack up. We split off to different stages. Marcus goes to work. I buy some vegetables so I won’t have to rush to the market when I get home.
In Kericho there are no ticket windows and I find a seat in the back corner of a matatu. It’s stifling inside but I close my window to avoid having objects shoved between my face and my newspaper; pens clicked, flashlights flashed, candies rolled in their crinkly wrappers between dark fingers. Hawkers of every age and tribe swarm like a school of fish around each arriving and departing bus. There is tea, peanuts, bottled water, orange drink, milk, yogurt, perfume, newspapers, magazines, spelling charts, prayer books, coloring books, school work books, musical greeting cards, wood spoons, metal spoons, pocket knives, kitchen knives, butter knives, sufuriahs, CDs, DVDs, sunglasses, cell phone points and cases, calculators, tape measures, belts, wallets, bandanas, dish towels, curtain lace, watches, socks, undershirts, ties, hats, mechanical springs, rope, string, cookies, lollipops, bubble gum, hard candy, and steaming hot chai, served in the same cups over and over. All of it hoisted up on shoulders, draped over arms and around necks, held to sheets of plywood with rubber straps; it is Capitalism at its simplest and least gratifying level. On their feet, breathing engine fumes, carrying basins and boards over-loaded with sundries, the hawkers scramble in the morning sun. Ten tries for every sale. I get tired just watching them.
In the two seats next to me sit a husband and wife, each with a preschool age daughter on their lap. The one closest to me stares with that mouth open wonder bordering on fear. Throughout the ride she attempts to covertly stroke the hair on my arm. It’s between four and seven hours back to Kabarnet depending on traffic, road conditions, cattle movement. My knees already hurt from pressing against the tubular steel of the seat ahead of me.
As we drive out of Kericho the air in the window is moist and cool and the driver has a “Learn English” tape playing. The pickers are out in the fields. They ignore the precut paths, moving in tandem lines across the broad flat green, their bags floating atop the bushes beside them. Behind them, the thick vegetation retains the space of their passing, like wakes behind boats.

Kericho remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Why I Hate International Newsweek

2007-12-17T07:36:35Z

Given the monumental scale of graft that is salient to aid work, it shouldn’t be a big deal that some-where some-one some-how convinced some-bureaucrat that International Newsweek would be the best way to keep Peace Corps volunteers informed on world events. I surmise that Newsweek is reading-level, attention-span, interest-depth appropriate for the average American. Just because the average Peace Corps Volunteer has a higher level of interest in world events (given that, if you will recall, we have volunteered to go out into said world) doesn’t mean that Newsweek couldn’t be an important source of news and entertainment. No, what bothers me - what drives me to end each reading with a promise to throw it away as soon as it next appears in the mail - is the tremendous and cruelly ironic intersection of the magazine’s target demographic and my own daily life.
Rolex, Jaquet Droz, Tudor, Breitling, Patek Phillippe, Longines, Breguet. Have you heard of all of these watch companies? Probably not.
Why?
Because you are too poor. Or at least I am. These are companies whose ads tacitly admit their astonishing prices by attempting to convince you that you aren’t purchasing a watch, but a ready-made, mass-produced family heirloom. My last issue came with a copy of “Perpetual Spirit Magazine,” the equivalent of Rolex’s sweeps week apparently intended to break down anyone who hasn’t been swayed by seeing Roger Federer with one photo-shopped to his wrist on the inside cover every single week for the last seven months. Made with heavier, glossier paper (and only 18 pages shorter than my Newsweek) it was full of hard hitting articles about “going to the limit” in golf, car racing, equestrian competition and (this is when you know you have a good agent) playing the sitar; tasks that are no doubt more satisfying (though certainly not easier) with a two pound chunk of gold strapped to your wrist.
In between ads for the Lexus Hybrid SUV, Toshiba Central A/C units and earnest encouragement to visit the Dubai Duty Free is the most viewed articles on Newsweek.com. #1 this week: “The 8 Most Fattening Foods of Fall.” (Quantified to assist those whose attention spans couldn’t handle last weeks #1: “Fall’s Most Fattening Foods.”) Towards the back, there’s a weekly profile on niche luxury goods (Blinging Fishing Lures! Ooo! Functional!) and the “Four Hours in…” travel section. The layout – down to the order of the ads – is the same for every issue, a smart time-saving logic given that it’s designed for travelers to pick up at the newsstand. After all, what kind of moron would get a subscription to International Newsweek?
Are you getting the picture? The idea that this is a magazine designed for international business travelers is not revolutionary. It’s probably very effective. Americans traveling abroad, waiting in the climate controlled executive lounge in Dubai for their Emirate’s flight to Brussels, a fifth of Absolut from the duty free packed into their rolling carryon. Thinking to themselves: “You know…we could kind of use another heirloom for the kids. That reminds me, I should be investing in the future of global energy, but what company is the world’s leader in innovative energy solut- Hey! Wow! Thanks Newsweek!” And so on.
No, the point I want to make is that this magazine is sent to me. I don’t wear a watch, not because I haven’t found one of heirloom quality, but because people here don’t use clocks. Most of us don’t even have electricity, much less internet to scan articles about how and why we are getting too fat (another issue which you will be shocked to here is low on our list of priorities). When (on occasion) I do actually end up in a city with paved roads and refrigerated beverages, even then, I am unlikely to actually enter into a building equipped with fans, much less one with central air conditioning. And the odds of my traveling to Rejivyak are slim. The chances that given the opportunity to go, I would choose to stay for four hours are non-existent.
Everything in International Newsweek seems specifically designed to point out the things I can’t do, the objects I don’t have and the services I can neither afford nor access. It is the anti-thesis of my life here.
Moreover, by the very nature of the isolation and scarcity that makes it so irritating to read, International Newsweek is the only regular source of news that we receive. When the happy occasion arises that we meet one another and desire to discuss world events our conversation immediately stalls as we realize that our knowledge of current events is: a) based on the exact same vaguely summaried articles and b) at a ninth grade reading level (I cite as evidence the recent headline: “Warlordistan”).
And worst - worst of all - is that no matter how frustrated I may be with the fact that the shilling value of each issue could buy me food for that week or how tired I am of the Breitling ad with John Travolta and the caption “Career: Actor. Profession: Pilot.” the most galling part of receiving International Newsweek is that I can’t stop reading it. It remains my most reliable and consistent source (primarily by being my only source) of information about the world. Promise though I might to stop rotting my brain with it, I know it will stay right were it always does: piled on the edge of my desk awaiting a third reading.

Why I Hate International Newsweek remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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Thanksgiving

2007-12-07T13:28:29Z

We arrived yesterday, partially at my insistence. Thanksgiving is mostly about the preparations for me. The day spent in and out of the kitchen, the effortless and satisfying passage of time that comes with a list of low level tasks; a day of constant progress towards a real goal. Merely showing up for dinner – as we had originally planned - would have much the same feeling for me as going to a restaurant.
Charles slaughters the ducks and we pluck them. Their head lay on the ground near the pot, beaks moving up and down for a half hour. Rachel’s mom has sent fresh cranberries and stuffing mix. We spend the day cooking: sweet potatoes with coconut milk. garlic mashed potatoes. green beans with mushrooms. chocolate chip almond pumpkin bread and apple crisps. We drink wine. I start a small grease fire. The stove has one burner that never goes off and is constantly at maximum heat. The oven is broken and a significant part of our planning and discussions has to do with figuring out how to make everything when we have three less pots than we would like.
The table is four forklift pallets dragged over from next door and laid side by side to make a large square. It’s covered with lessos in brilliant blues and greens, yellows and reds. There are small sets of tea candles, and larger ones set into old brandy and wine bottles. The table gradually fills with people and food. When we finally sit down, Rachel and I are sweaty and tired. Our faces shine with grease from cooking. There is not enough space on my plate! I grab a leg of duck, a scoop of stuffing, green beans, garlic mashed potatoes and jellied cranberry sauce. I don’t need much. At Rachel’s insistence all kitchen staff were authorized to snack on ingredients as much as they like. I have violently abused this freedom.
There are ten of us. Darcy and Dan from the Coast. Two of the three Voi boys (Shane and Chris but no Jeff) and Tory from just outside town. Brad and Whitney from their home down near the Tanzanian border. Charles, Emily and myself from north of Nairobi. Today this is my family. We share what we are grateful for. We drink a little too much. Dinner morphs into that pleasantly casual space where picking directly from serving bowl with your hands is encouraged. I play guitar and sing on the porch. Gradually we drift off. Brad and Whitney are staying in town. The Voi Boys walk home carrying their pots and cushions.
Those remaining begin to fall asleep in their chairs; slouched down, their heads resting against chair backs. I try to remember what the end of Thanksgiving feels like at home. There’s no football to watch. No movies or Daily Show. No convenient non-participatory bookend to the evening. There’s only us.
I often wonder how many of us would end up friends if we all happened to meet in a bar together in the states. The family I have here today is in that respect much like my own. I did not choose them – I find it hard to say even what I would think of them where we to meet absent these extreme and binding circumstances – but I love them. Despite - probably because of - our differences, I feel blessed to sit among people for whom I have such an abiding respect and affection. It’s Thanksgiving and I am grateful for food, for friends, and for this miraculous and surprising life that I seem to be living.

Thanksgiving remains copyright of the author Natyb25, a member of the travel community Travellerspoint.

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