FIRST, APOLOGIES
Pole sana for the
long delay dear readers and karibuni to
our blog at last! A combination of pay per MB internet, unreliable/unavailable
electricity, and a packed scheduled has kept us away for too long but we are here
and ready to start chronicling our adventures of the past five weeks for you. I am writing to you now from our new place of residence, a
hostel in the town of Mbale, the headquarters of Vihiga County, Western Kenya.
OUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Hostel is a loose term to describe our situation here.
We are living in a room on the second floor of a relatively tall building (3
stories is quite tall by rural Kenyan standards) that also houses a bank and a
bakery below us. Sadly, although
the bakery wafts up delicious smells that sometimes overwhelm the scent of the
latrines below our window, their outputs are surprisingly tasteless. Never
trust a Kenyan cream puff. It is neither creamy nor puffy. We have not ventured
to try the curiously named “American doughnut” nor “pizza” based on our
previous disappointments. But they do squeeze a mean fruit juice.
Tonight is an unusually warm and usually loud night. Although
the warmth may have something to do with the end of the rainy season. We had a
terrific lightning storm earlier tonight that knocked out our power (but what
doesn't, really?) and had me seriously confused for a bit.
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| Our old room at the Ehaji's house in the village |
The lightning strikes were so bright and regular I thought
it was a nuclear attack or the the end of the world until it started raining. And now the
usual Mbale night noises are coming back: the sound of mosquitoes whining
(hopefully outside of our net), semi-domesticated dogs howling from nearby, the occasional car or motorbike bouncing over potholes and tonight what
sounds like-and might be-somebody dragging a rickety wheelbarrow full of
rusted cans up and down the road outside our window. Road is also a bit of a misnomer since the
main drag in Mbale is a wide dirt path with more potholes than surface but somehow
the local
piki piki (motorbike) drivers seem to
manage remarkably well and at impressive speeds.
It feels too hot to sleep under our mosquito net right now which is part of the reason I am up writing tonight. If
all our friends didn’t seem to be coming down with malaria lately I would
consider sleeping outside of the net.
NOTHIN BUT NETS
We are not entirely sure that everyone who says they are is sick with malaria. It seems to be a catchall term for illness in this area.
Which is pretty understandable given the high rates of infection and the fact
that visiting NGOs probably focus much of their energies on malaria education.
But all the same, I think sometimes people are probably sick with other things. It's hard to know.
I am looking forward to the real start of the dry season
when I hope there will be fewer mosquitoes and friends getting ill. We heard tonight
that when the bushes (i.e. corn) are cut down soon, the mosquitoes will go away,
too. We’re not sure if that’s because of the lack of rain or lack of places for
the mosquitoes to hide but it sounds good. Except that it will be
strange to look across the barren, brown fields once all the corn (they call it
maize or mahindi) is cut down.
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| We live a few km from the Equater. Sadly there is no dotted line. |
THE HEARTLANDS OF AFRICA
We’ve become completely accustomed to the ubiquitous maize fields
all around us. In some places you could just imagine you were somewhere in the
heartlands of America…at least in the other parts of Western Kenya where shambas (homesteads or farms) are large.
Here in Maragoli, the farmsteads are quite small and usually include some beans or Napier
grass or tea or banana trees planted along with the corn. But more on matters of crops later.
It is a bit strange to be in a place where the weather is so
predictable, at least during the rainy season: cool cloudy mornings, warm clear
afternoons, a brief hot period and then rain in the afternoon and evening.
Despite what I said about the heat tonight, this area is actually quite nice
most of the time, probably averaging in the mid-70s every day.
And it is so lush and green. If you don’t mind the fact that most everything growing here
is cultivated or weed. There are
not really any wild, indigenous plants. Every square inch of land in this area
of Kenya is planted with crops, grazed down to stubble by dairy cows or
goats, or used for a dirt road. But the overwhelming appearance is still
breathtaking, especially if you go riding on a motorbike through the hills
around sunset when the smoke comes pouring out of everyone’s tin sheeted or thatched roofs and
the air is cool and you can see enormous round stones perched on the hillsides.
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| Jackson and Jacob walk home through the village |
There is something about the smells in the evening, too. The
burning of the eucalyptus wood for cooking fires and the evening breeze makes a
wonderful spicy scent-much better than the daytime smells of cypress,
grass, and animal dung. But enough smells; you want to know all the juicy
and exciting details of living in rural Kenya!
SAME OLD, SAME OLD
Sad to say, life here is much like life everywhere else in many ways.
Mostly people worry about what they are going to eat today, hope their kids are
doing well in school, and complain about the same things as back home: politicians,
weather, and how darn expensive gas is. Then again, some things are very different. The ladies get caught eating houses, grown men hold hands,
and children do what they’re told…
Not to mention a few of the comforts of home are missing:
indoor plumbing and clean water, electricity, e-mail (for most people),
employment, window screens, books, grocery stores that stock fresh food, public transportation and
sanitation, paved roads (for the most part) just to name a few.
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| Decorating the teachers' office building with fresh flowers for Education Day |
The hostel that we are staying in, unlike our previous home in the
village, does have piped water and electricity, although both are inconsistent. We boil our water and cook our food on a tiny gas burner, which
has forced us to be creative about cooking. The nights we cook,
it takes several hours to eke out a meal but we usually end up with something
fairly palatable. I have not yet mastered the art of making soft Kenyan chapati (thin fried breads) on our gas
cooker nor have I –truth be told- even attempted the staple food of ugali yet. I have heard the best way to
test your ugali is to keep throwing
small pieces against the wall until it sticks, which might be an improvement on our current wall decor (mold).
THE MEAT AND POTATOES
Some foreigners have described ugali as a paste-like or playdough-like mixture of cornmeal and
maize. They must be eating some different ugali
from ours here in Vihiga. The kind we are served is more like a firm brick
of coarse, mildly flavored cornmeal. But it does grow on you. By the time we
leave I may very well feel, like any good Kenyan, that a meal without ugali is like a cheque without a
signature.
YO MAMA JOKES
There are some great sayings here. Though I don’t understand
enough Kiswahili yet to appreciate most of them, I imagine. My favorite insult
translates to “your girlfriend is so skinny that when she eats a peanut she
looks pregnant”. Kenyans are wonderfully appreciative of curves. I have twice
been complimented on my attractively sizeable calf muscles. That’s right. A
good-looking woman has to make a bit of noise when she walks so that when you
bring her home to your mama and aunties they won’t be worried she’ll collapse
on the way to the well. Maybe the style is a bit different in Nairobi
where there are no wells to be had…but I think there’s a lot to appreciate
about rural Kenyan culture. Or perhaps I should say Luhya culture since we are
living in a predominantly Luhya area.
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| The Gisambai Primary Class 7 boys prepare for their dance at Education Day |
KIMARAGOLI, KISWAHILI, KIMZUNGU, AND KEEPING SANE
Right now I feel like my Kiswahili (the prefix for languages
in Swahili is ‘ki’) is halfway decent for the brief
amount of time we have been here. But I can still only manage a few greetings
and a very short introduction in the local language, Kimaragoli. There are a
number of reasons why I think my “mother tongue” is progressing so poorly. For
one thing, the family we lived with for the first month rarely spoke in
Kimaragoli and all of our early Kiswahili phrases (Kula Eat! Shika Take it! Shuka Get down from there!) were learned
from Jackson and Evelyn and their kids. Second of all, there are no resources
to learn Kimaragoli. Signs are written in English or Kiswahili, as are
textbooks. And we have only seen one, rather esoteric looking book in Kimaragoli so
far.
And, the truth is, I am reluctant to put too much effort
into learning the language since I know that when I travel a few kilometers in
any direction, the native language will have changed. Sure, all the Luhya
languages are mostly intelligible to native speakers but there are a lot
of differences, too. But the trouble is that it makes people so darned happy when
one of us
wazungu attempts to speak
in mother tongue.
I get thunderous applause when I address
old farmer ladies in a few words of Kimaragoli at meetings and peoples’ faces
positively light up when you greet them with a simple
vuche or
ovendi? (‘Morning,
how are you?). I feel a bit like I am perpetuating some post-colonial
expectation when I insist on studying Kiswahili instead of mother tongue, too. But
maybe it can’t be helped.
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| Some girls running the hurdles at District Sports Day |
HAMJAMBO
Whatever language you attempt to speak or not here in Kenya,
just don’t forget to greet people. If you haven’t shaken at least fifty hands
in a day, you must have been hiding under a rock. Kenyans are warm and adamant
greeters. And it is nice. Every interaction begins with a handshake and a
greeting and an inquiry into one’s day, regardless of whether one has met every
day for the past week or even earlier in the same day.
And if you don’t stop and visit somebody’s home after you
have been invited, well shame on you. In fact, if you plan to be anywhere on
time in the village, you had better add in a couple extra hours to stop and
greet people and come in for a drink and some cooked bananas or mangoes or
avocadoes or beans and rice or maandazi (Kenyan
doughnut equivalent) or all of the above.
But not to worry. Kenyan time operates differently than time
in the US. We still haven’t quite figured it out. Sometimes things only start a
half an hour or so late, sometimes three hours, sometimes weeks. And distances
are not measured in kilometers but in the cost of public transportation required
to reach a place. Which is often dependent on one’s haggling abilities anyway.
Safe to say, it best to greet everyone on your way and worry less about getting
there on time.
KWAHERINI
Speaking of which, this little note is almost five pages and
I have not even gotten to the parts about what we have been doing all this
time-working at the local schools, volunteering with my hero Dr. Ruth Oniang’o
and ROP, planning poultry projects, starting a children’s library, visiting our
wonderful friends in Kisumu, getting bitten by caterpillars and more. But I
think all that will have to wait for our next installment since it is getting very
late and we have to be up early in the morning to meet our young friend Eugene
and buy roofing materials.
SO, PLEASE STAY TUNED!
There is much more to come…
Peace,
Julia
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| Some of our neighborhood friends in the village from top left to bottom right: Purity, Martyn, Willy, Brevin, Angela, Scholastica, Mayline, and Baby Lucky |
