So it’s around 6:30 in the morning in Amsterdam right now. Hannah and I are just beginning a seven hour wait until our flight to Chicago. The flight to Amsterdam was ok overall. I got stuck in a middle seat between two businessmen flying to German for a cheese packaging show. So they talked about cheese a lot. There’s not much to do here in the airport but word is that there is a McDonalds in this terminal. I’m currently four months clean from McDonalds but that ends in about fifteen minutes. I suppose it’s time to talk about the weekend adventures of Kisumu:
Because we all had four fifteen page term papers due after our internships, we spent a lot of time thinking about working on our papers. There was very little action but we sure did think about it a lot. We also worked around 40 hours a week so our weekend travel was limited. The first weekend we hung around Kisumu and checked out the local watering holes. There aren’t many and they are a lot different than the clubs in Nairobi. Nairobi has a lot of very upscale clubs that at times made us look like vagabonds. When people go out in Nairobi, they go all out. Jeans and a t shirt are just not acceptable. Kisumu? Well the bars are usually pretty run down and the people inside them are usually less than reputable. (Quick sidetrack: I’m looking out the window at the airport looking at the grounds crew and its weird seeing white people working. The white people in Kenya are tourists or IGO/NGO staff for the most part and are definitely not heaving 40lb bags onto a conveyor belt. Let the readjustment begin.) We found some good spots the first weekend and also found my favorite restaurant called Green Garden. It’s definitely the nicest restaurant in Kisumu and the average entrée runs for about 7 dollars. It was good living. Good pasta and pretty good pizza. I went there a total of five times in six weeks. The next weekend was by far the best weekend of Kisumu and maybe of the entire four months. Myself and six other MSIDers made the journey to Jinja, Uganda to go whitewater rafting on the Nile. Grade 5 whitewater rafting that is. There’s not much more to say than that it was amazing. Definitely the craziest thing I’ve ever done. Talking to my friend Danny back in the states before we went, he said “Oh man you better be careful. I went whitewater rafting in Colorado on Grade 3 rapids and we almost flipped!!!” Well, we flipped on five out of the eight rapids. We wanted to flip so our raft guide made it happen. There are some great pics on facebook and I was also able to strap a waterproof camera to my life vest so there should be some good videos up when I get back. Overall, Uganda was awesome. We stayed at this really cool hostel on the Nile one night and in town the next night. Also, if you see a picture that I’m tagged in on Facebook taking out 1 million Ugandan Shillings, it’s true. I was a Ugandan millionaire. Dan forgot his debit card (there’s a lot more of that to come) so I had to spot him. 1 million Ugandan shillings comes out to be a little over 400 US. Whitewater rafting this summer anyone?? The next weekend was spent pretending to do work. I did actually go visit Dan in Maseno. Maseno is about a half hour matatu ride from Kisumu. We went up there to go to Mr and Mrs Maseno University. It’s this huge competition put on by Coca Cola to crown, you guessed it, Mr and Mrs Maseno University. The guys part was basically a body building competition and the ladies part was what you’d expect. There were thousands of people there and the competition was emceed by a comedian who frequents the Kenyan late night show Churchill Live. It was fun for a while but then we were reminded we were in Kenya when the power went out, four times. One time half the lights on stage blew up. We left a little after 1 in the morning but we could hear it going on from Dan’s house until 5. The fourth weekend I went to Nyeri (three hours north of Nairobi) to visit my friend Paige. Nyeri is in the Mount Kenya region and for anyone who knows coffee, this is likely the best place in the world to grow coffee. We spent the first day walking around Nyeri town. Nyeri is at a much higher altitude than Kisumu so it was wonderful to escape the heat for a little while. The next day we randomly ended up going on a safari at a national park on the foothills of Mount Kenya. We had planned on going to this national park to go exploring for the day but we ended up on a safari bus for four hours. I finally got to see elephants. These aren’t your savannah elephants that you see on national geographic. These are mountain elephants. Yes, they do exist. It was really funny because they would try to hide behind a six inch wide tree to avoid being seen. They were very bashful. We chased one with the bus for a few minutes. We also saw our favorite animal, the warthog. These little guys are so funny to watch. When they see people, they freeze, stare at you for a few seconds, promptly turn their heads and then run in the opposite direction taking little steps because of their short legs. We got off the bus for a while towards the end of the safari and while we were sitting on a log, a warthog peaked his head out from behind a bush and came out to study us. He ran away after a little bit but came back later with a few more warthogs to check us out. We were convinced warthogs are the intelligence services of the animal kingdom. Overall it was a much needed relaxing weekend. I got to stay with my Nairobi host family on the way there and on the way back for a night so it was nice to get a real shower! The last weekend was a blur of paper writing. The Kisumu Krew spent a lot of time on this rooftop bar working on our papers. Again, not much was accomplished but we all got a serious start. One of the weekends at home was a unique and powerful church experience. I don’t remember which weekend it was but my host family had been talking about me coming to church with them for days. My host dad’s dad (Babu) has been sick for two years now and has been homebound. Because he hasn’t been able to go to church during that time, my host mom and dad decided to bring the church to him. Babu lives with one of my host dads brothers in a nice house with a front yard a little outside of Kisumu town. Tents were set up, the entire church choir showed up along with dozens of members of the congregation. Babu was wheeled out on the porch to get a front row seat. It was over four hours long but it was really cool to see an entire congregation rally around one person. That’s it for the weekends. Time for McDonalds.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Coming Home
I’m coming home. We’ve been in the air now for about an hour and a half. Looks like we are just crossing the Ethiopian border into Sudan. I still have a full 22 hours left on my journey back to Chicago so I figured I’d use this time to catch up on two months of blogging. We will start with my internship experience with Victoria Boda Boda SACCO.
Working at Victoria Boda Boda SACCO was an absolute roller coaster. Just when I thought I had things figured out, everything changed. Then just when I thought I’d seen an issue from the correct angle, I’d find out someone has been lying to me the entire time and my original thinking had been correct. That was of course until I found out about something else. Yeah, that’s what it was like. For starters, the first three weeks or so of my internship was dedicated to meeting as many of the clients as I could out in the field. This involved a lot of travel by piki piki (motorcycle). Many of the villages we visited were so remote that not even matatus went there on a regular basis or even at all. Sometimes we would take a matatu for an hour to one place and then have to piki piki our way for another hour to finally reach the clients. It was a lot of fun at first but then my butt started getting sore so it lost some of its zeal. Meeting the clients was an interesting experience because most all of them had the exact same story: they were pissed off that they weren’t getting their money, whether it was in the form of a loan or their savings. One of the more frustrating aspects of meeting with clients was the language barrier. We spent two months in Nairobi learning Kiswahili and it was rather useless in most places that we went. Some villages were so remote that they only learned their tribal language (Luo) and did not learn English or their national language, Kiswahili. It felt like I was back traveling in Ecuador or Mexico with Irving. I needed a translator everywhere I went. After compiling weeks of complaints, I moved on to the administrative and managerial parts of the business. I got to go through “the books”, sit in on board meetings (obviously I couldn’t just “sit in” on these meetings. My views were clearly known at all meetings) and work side by side with the manager. Victoria Boda Boda SACCO is going through some very difficult times right now. There is a 39% default rate on loans, employees are not getting paid and money is not being dispersed at all. There is a total freeze on all lending. After spending time with the staff and clients, I concluded that the problems were the managements fault. After spending time the management, I concluded that it was the staffs fault. After looking at correspondences between Victoria and the government, I concluded that it was the governments fault. And finally after I did some serious Professor Vasquez “critical thinking”, I concluded that I am happy that I do not run, work for or depend on a business in Kenya. Victoria is in a wild wild west showdown right now and neither side is blinking. The staff gets paid so little, if they get paid at all, that they have to look elsewhere for work or decided not to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They get paid the equivalent of about 30 bucks a month. Yes, a month. To live on your own and make just enough to get by, someone in the Kisumu are would need to make the equivalent of about 475 dollars a month. That’s just to get by and the staff at Victoria is only making 30 measly dollars a month. As of right now, the staff hasn’t been paid for three months. And if you are wondering if those lost months of pay get made up in the future, the answer is no. On the other side, the management is not getting the collection of money from the staff to pay them and the default rate is so high partly as a result of poor work done by the field agents. And the management sees no incentive right now to pay the staff more if they are not doing their work. Then the government came in and made everything worse. They made a promise to give Victoria a 10 million Kenyan shilling loan… two years ago. The money has never some. The management made a truly awful decision to sell hundreds of loan request forms to members to jumpstart the process. They figured that if the applications were completed before the money came, that when the money did actually come, all they had to do was distribute the money. While it may make sense to everyone across the pond, trusting the government is a fool’s mistake. I asked our manager, Richard, about why he did this many times and he never really had an answer. I had been in Kenya for a few months now and had the knowledge not to trust the government with a piece of paper but Richard, who has lived in Kisumu for over fifty years, decided to sell these forms without having a check in hand. Members paid 500 shillings to get these forms and the vast majority has never received a loan. That’s a lot of angry people who live on around a dollar a day. What was cool about my time there was that they truly valued my opinion and wanted my input on everything. This was not because I had proved to be a good problem solver or a good businessman (im a political science major if you forgot) but it was because I was white; a mzungu. They trust white people because they believe we all come from the riches of the west. One thing I did not realize until I got to Victoria was that I had a ton of business experience by virtue of living in the US for over twenty one years. We know what a good business is and how one works. We can look at an issue, like stealing from collections or not documenting petty cash expenses and know that’s not the way things are supposed to work. There was definitely not a shortage of issues to point out. At the end, I got to share my experiences with the board by reading through my final report. My final message to them was that if they wanted to run like a real business, they had to start acting like it. It starts with showing up to work on time, or at least being less than three hours late, doing what you’re told and actually giving a damn about the work you are doing. At that last point, I kindly motioned toward two board members who were sound asleep with their heads on the table. For those who were awake and were listening to my “New Way Forward” presentation, they were very receptive to my ideas and actually planned to implement a few of them right away. The most frustrating part about my time at Victoria was that I felt like I cared about the business and the livelihood of those who depended on it, staff and clients, more than the staff did. This is typical of Kenyans though, I am sad to say. Many who find themselves in a bad situation feel they have no resources or means to get out of it and end up becoming content. It’s frustrating because the way out is a clearly marked exit door with an instruction list attached to it. So that’s enough about my internship. If you want to hear more, believe it or not but there is a lot more. There are two reports and a ten page paper. Ps, I had a chicken pot pie for dinner. It was pretty good but as always, ill check back in a few hours to see how it’s doing.
Working at Victoria Boda Boda SACCO was an absolute roller coaster. Just when I thought I had things figured out, everything changed. Then just when I thought I’d seen an issue from the correct angle, I’d find out someone has been lying to me the entire time and my original thinking had been correct. That was of course until I found out about something else. Yeah, that’s what it was like. For starters, the first three weeks or so of my internship was dedicated to meeting as many of the clients as I could out in the field. This involved a lot of travel by piki piki (motorcycle). Many of the villages we visited were so remote that not even matatus went there on a regular basis or even at all. Sometimes we would take a matatu for an hour to one place and then have to piki piki our way for another hour to finally reach the clients. It was a lot of fun at first but then my butt started getting sore so it lost some of its zeal. Meeting the clients was an interesting experience because most all of them had the exact same story: they were pissed off that they weren’t getting their money, whether it was in the form of a loan or their savings. One of the more frustrating aspects of meeting with clients was the language barrier. We spent two months in Nairobi learning Kiswahili and it was rather useless in most places that we went. Some villages were so remote that they only learned their tribal language (Luo) and did not learn English or their national language, Kiswahili. It felt like I was back traveling in Ecuador or Mexico with Irving. I needed a translator everywhere I went. After compiling weeks of complaints, I moved on to the administrative and managerial parts of the business. I got to go through “the books”, sit in on board meetings (obviously I couldn’t just “sit in” on these meetings. My views were clearly known at all meetings) and work side by side with the manager. Victoria Boda Boda SACCO is going through some very difficult times right now. There is a 39% default rate on loans, employees are not getting paid and money is not being dispersed at all. There is a total freeze on all lending. After spending time with the staff and clients, I concluded that the problems were the managements fault. After spending time the management, I concluded that it was the staffs fault. After looking at correspondences between Victoria and the government, I concluded that it was the governments fault. And finally after I did some serious Professor Vasquez “critical thinking”, I concluded that I am happy that I do not run, work for or depend on a business in Kenya. Victoria is in a wild wild west showdown right now and neither side is blinking. The staff gets paid so little, if they get paid at all, that they have to look elsewhere for work or decided not to do their jobs to the best of their ability. They get paid the equivalent of about 30 bucks a month. Yes, a month. To live on your own and make just enough to get by, someone in the Kisumu are would need to make the equivalent of about 475 dollars a month. That’s just to get by and the staff at Victoria is only making 30 measly dollars a month. As of right now, the staff hasn’t been paid for three months. And if you are wondering if those lost months of pay get made up in the future, the answer is no. On the other side, the management is not getting the collection of money from the staff to pay them and the default rate is so high partly as a result of poor work done by the field agents. And the management sees no incentive right now to pay the staff more if they are not doing their work. Then the government came in and made everything worse. They made a promise to give Victoria a 10 million Kenyan shilling loan… two years ago. The money has never some. The management made a truly awful decision to sell hundreds of loan request forms to members to jumpstart the process. They figured that if the applications were completed before the money came, that when the money did actually come, all they had to do was distribute the money. While it may make sense to everyone across the pond, trusting the government is a fool’s mistake. I asked our manager, Richard, about why he did this many times and he never really had an answer. I had been in Kenya for a few months now and had the knowledge not to trust the government with a piece of paper but Richard, who has lived in Kisumu for over fifty years, decided to sell these forms without having a check in hand. Members paid 500 shillings to get these forms and the vast majority has never received a loan. That’s a lot of angry people who live on around a dollar a day. What was cool about my time there was that they truly valued my opinion and wanted my input on everything. This was not because I had proved to be a good problem solver or a good businessman (im a political science major if you forgot) but it was because I was white; a mzungu. They trust white people because they believe we all come from the riches of the west. One thing I did not realize until I got to Victoria was that I had a ton of business experience by virtue of living in the US for over twenty one years. We know what a good business is and how one works. We can look at an issue, like stealing from collections or not documenting petty cash expenses and know that’s not the way things are supposed to work. There was definitely not a shortage of issues to point out. At the end, I got to share my experiences with the board by reading through my final report. My final message to them was that if they wanted to run like a real business, they had to start acting like it. It starts with showing up to work on time, or at least being less than three hours late, doing what you’re told and actually giving a damn about the work you are doing. At that last point, I kindly motioned toward two board members who were sound asleep with their heads on the table. For those who were awake and were listening to my “New Way Forward” presentation, they were very receptive to my ideas and actually planned to implement a few of them right away. The most frustrating part about my time at Victoria was that I felt like I cared about the business and the livelihood of those who depended on it, staff and clients, more than the staff did. This is typical of Kenyans though, I am sad to say. Many who find themselves in a bad situation feel they have no resources or means to get out of it and end up becoming content. It’s frustrating because the way out is a clearly marked exit door with an instruction list attached to it. So that’s enough about my internship. If you want to hear more, believe it or not but there is a lot more. There are two reports and a ten page paper. Ps, I had a chicken pot pie for dinner. It was pretty good but as always, ill check back in a few hours to see how it’s doing.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Nairobi to Kisumu
Leaving Nairobi, friends and host family included, was very hard to do. Eight weeks with seeing my friends everyday and seven weeks living with my host family was an amazing time and it was coming to an end. Orientation was hard to leave just because we were all getting to know each other and it was weird knowing that we were not going to be with each other every second of every day. Leaving Nairobi was even worse. We were just getting used to and familiar with our families and the city and now it was time to leave. Looking back on the program guide, one week of orientation, seven weeks of classes and six weeks of an internship sounds so easy. But there is a lot of shuffling around and getting thrown into new environments with new people. I think the hardest part for me was just coming to the realization that a good chunk of the program was over. After our internships, we had a week of exams and then it was really over. I have enjoyed every second of this program and home now feels like a distant fantasy land. If leaving orientation and Nairobi was this difficult, leaving altogether will be quite a challenge. I’m not looking forward to that.
There are eight of us out of the 24 that are living in the Kisumu region. Four of us are in the city and four are on the outskirts. We left for Kisumu on Sunday morning and arrived there around 4:30. Jane took us to a restaurant across the street from the bus stage where we would meet our families. My new host mom, Mama Gift, arrived after we ate to take me home. It was about a thirty second walk. I am a fan of our location. There is a large estate of houses called Railways, right next to the city center. My new family consists of Mama Gift, Baba (Father) Gift, a three year old boy named Praise but we call him Junior, a 10/11 year old girl named Gift and then two older cousins, Daisy who is 18 and Otieno who is around my age. It is very common in Kenya for the parents to be called Mama and Baba + one of the child’s names. It is a lively house to say the least. Junior is a lot of fun. I was telling Keith, 17, and Carrey, 15, about my new family a couple of weeks ago. I told them I had a three year old brother and a 10 year old sister, “Not much different than you two.” Mama Gift is a teacher at a local private school and Baba Gift is a sales rep for a local radio station. Kisumu is a little bit hotter than Nairobs (Nairobbery is its nickname) but it has since cooled down quite a bit as the rainy season approaches. It’s still hot though. After a painfully bureaucratic process of security my internship, I ended up getting an internship at Victoria Boda Boda and SACCO (Savings and Credit Co-Operative). We had tried many other places before Victoria because it is a little ways away from the city but we either never got answers back or they made up some BS excuse. As we later found out and confirmed from higher sources of which I am not privy to know their names, I was believed to be a spy. While I like the title of being a spy, it didn’t work out to well. Corruption is on every level of business, public and private here. They were worried about an American spy coming in to check on their finances. While it is quite funny, it is also disturbing. This is supposed to be money for the poorest of the poor to help develop their lives. Victoria is a cooperative society which means there is nothing to hide. The money in the pool comes from all of its 1200 clients. There is no outside money or capital of any sort to be filtered away into someone’s pocket. Victoria has savings accounts and shares accounts. The savings are for saving and the shares accounts are for loans. As a member of the society, you are to contribute a minimum of 23 shillings, (about 27 cents or so USD) to your account (ie the big pool) six days out of the seven day week. While this doesn’t always happen for various reasons, Victoria has grown enormously in Kisumu. Many years ago (I have no idea how long ago) it was started as a cooperative society to give loans to parents so they could buy their kid a bike to go to school. Good schools in the outside communities are far and few between which leaves people less likely to go to school. Bikes also improve their quality of life as they can get places faster (grocery store, hospital, you name it). Since then they have expanded into a full micro finance institution. They give asset loans for houses and such, school loans, bike loans and what we call a biashara boost loan. Biashara means business and these loans are for micro businesses. So what have I been doing? I’ve joined the road warriors. We’ve been traveling around the outside rural areas of Kisumu to collect payments, run workshops on savings and loans, answer questions and to hear the members complains and comments. A cooperative society is not like a regular bank. Banks have outside investments. Victoria big pool of money only comes from the small contributions made by its members. With that said, only a certain few people can have access to a chunk of the big pool at a time. Some loan requests get delayed for months and those people get very upset. Last week I went out to a rural area where we met a youth group of motorcycle and bike taxis. They had been asking for loans to by a new motorcycle to replace a bike for a few months. The delays keep coming and that’s the nature of a SACCO. One man, about my age, came up to me, and made a passionate plea in Luo. I don’t speak a word of Luo so my coworker Nancy translated for me. Since I was from the rich USA, the man wanted me to give him a word of encouragement and reason to keep fighting to stay alive. I asked Nancy to repeat that again in hopes that I had heard it wrong. Nope. If you know me well, I am seldom rendered speechless. I always have something to say. After getting over the initial shock, it took me another 80 or 90 “Mississippi” to think of something to say. I told him that he had made the first step to bettering his like by wanting more and that Victoria will help him get there. “You just have to be patient.” Hardly inspirational words but he was satisfied. It is hard to be patient though when a good portion of your daily income is not going to food but is going to your savings. A big problem I see here is that some people are satisfied with their current living conditions. Living conditions of which we would find just plain awful. Wanting more is the first step and it was encouraging to see this youth group want more.
There are eight of us out of the 24 that are living in the Kisumu region. Four of us are in the city and four are on the outskirts. We left for Kisumu on Sunday morning and arrived there around 4:30. Jane took us to a restaurant across the street from the bus stage where we would meet our families. My new host mom, Mama Gift, arrived after we ate to take me home. It was about a thirty second walk. I am a fan of our location. There is a large estate of houses called Railways, right next to the city center. My new family consists of Mama Gift, Baba (Father) Gift, a three year old boy named Praise but we call him Junior, a 10/11 year old girl named Gift and then two older cousins, Daisy who is 18 and Otieno who is around my age. It is very common in Kenya for the parents to be called Mama and Baba + one of the child’s names. It is a lively house to say the least. Junior is a lot of fun. I was telling Keith, 17, and Carrey, 15, about my new family a couple of weeks ago. I told them I had a three year old brother and a 10 year old sister, “Not much different than you two.” Mama Gift is a teacher at a local private school and Baba Gift is a sales rep for a local radio station. Kisumu is a little bit hotter than Nairobs (Nairobbery is its nickname) but it has since cooled down quite a bit as the rainy season approaches. It’s still hot though. After a painfully bureaucratic process of security my internship, I ended up getting an internship at Victoria Boda Boda and SACCO (Savings and Credit Co-Operative). We had tried many other places before Victoria because it is a little ways away from the city but we either never got answers back or they made up some BS excuse. As we later found out and confirmed from higher sources of which I am not privy to know their names, I was believed to be a spy. While I like the title of being a spy, it didn’t work out to well. Corruption is on every level of business, public and private here. They were worried about an American spy coming in to check on their finances. While it is quite funny, it is also disturbing. This is supposed to be money for the poorest of the poor to help develop their lives. Victoria is a cooperative society which means there is nothing to hide. The money in the pool comes from all of its 1200 clients. There is no outside money or capital of any sort to be filtered away into someone’s pocket. Victoria has savings accounts and shares accounts. The savings are for saving and the shares accounts are for loans. As a member of the society, you are to contribute a minimum of 23 shillings, (about 27 cents or so USD) to your account (ie the big pool) six days out of the seven day week. While this doesn’t always happen for various reasons, Victoria has grown enormously in Kisumu. Many years ago (I have no idea how long ago) it was started as a cooperative society to give loans to parents so they could buy their kid a bike to go to school. Good schools in the outside communities are far and few between which leaves people less likely to go to school. Bikes also improve their quality of life as they can get places faster (grocery store, hospital, you name it). Since then they have expanded into a full micro finance institution. They give asset loans for houses and such, school loans, bike loans and what we call a biashara boost loan. Biashara means business and these loans are for micro businesses. So what have I been doing? I’ve joined the road warriors. We’ve been traveling around the outside rural areas of Kisumu to collect payments, run workshops on savings and loans, answer questions and to hear the members complains and comments. A cooperative society is not like a regular bank. Banks have outside investments. Victoria big pool of money only comes from the small contributions made by its members. With that said, only a certain few people can have access to a chunk of the big pool at a time. Some loan requests get delayed for months and those people get very upset. Last week I went out to a rural area where we met a youth group of motorcycle and bike taxis. They had been asking for loans to by a new motorcycle to replace a bike for a few months. The delays keep coming and that’s the nature of a SACCO. One man, about my age, came up to me, and made a passionate plea in Luo. I don’t speak a word of Luo so my coworker Nancy translated for me. Since I was from the rich USA, the man wanted me to give him a word of encouragement and reason to keep fighting to stay alive. I asked Nancy to repeat that again in hopes that I had heard it wrong. Nope. If you know me well, I am seldom rendered speechless. I always have something to say. After getting over the initial shock, it took me another 80 or 90 “Mississippi” to think of something to say. I told him that he had made the first step to bettering his like by wanting more and that Victoria will help him get there. “You just have to be patient.” Hardly inspirational words but he was satisfied. It is hard to be patient though when a good portion of your daily income is not going to food but is going to your savings. A big problem I see here is that some people are satisfied with their current living conditions. Living conditions of which we would find just plain awful. Wanting more is the first step and it was encouraging to see this youth group want more.
Mombasa
The next weekend after the tear gas: Mombasa. My friends Dan, Kyle, Hannah, Paige and myself made the journey to Mombasa. We had Friday off of class so we left on a night bus Thursday night. I slept for about ten minutes out of the seven and a half hour cruise. We got in a little after 5 am when it was still pitch black. We waited out in the bus lounge for a half hour or so until we went to our hotel. After a much needed three hour sweaty nap, we headed out on the town. Mombasa is hot. Really hot. In St. Louis in the summer when its 95 degrees with 90 percent humidity, no one goes outside unless it’s the walk to their air conditioned car. Life does not stop in Mombasa. In fact, people continue to wear jeans and long sleeve t shirts. I will never understand. The first place we went was to an old military fort called Fort Jesus. I could explain its significance but after writing down the tear gas story, I’m all out of descriptive adjectives. I suggest Wikipedia. We took a tour with a local guide for about an hour. It was hot so our level of attention was very low. After the tour we continued with the guide to see old town. As the name suggests, this is the oldest part of Mombasa that is where the first Arabs settled. After the tour we went back to the hotel for showers and naps. We ended up going out to a club right down the street from our hotel. Unlike Nairobi, you can actually walk around at night with a fairly high level of security. That’s not because of police but because of witchcraft. Yes, witchcraft. Mombasa is heavily populated by Muslims and they believe strongly in witchcraft. People are so afraid to break steal or mug someone because they believe they will be cursed by a witch. For whatever their reasons, it was nice to walk at night. The club was a pretty good time. The only bad part was the large presence of prostitutes. As Dan and I walked to the bathroom, we were stopped multiple times by women asking if we needed anything. We felt pretty good about ourselves for all the attention until we realized they were prostitutes. We had some good laughs over it and then continued to drink our Tuskers responsibly and listen to the Kenyan remixed music. The next day was beach day. We went south of Mombasa to a place called Forty Thieves Bar, Grill & Beach on Diani Beach. It was the best day I’ve had in Kenya in a long time. The beach was a perfect white and there was not a cloud in the sky. Paige and I rode camels down the beach, Dan, Kyle and I had bro talk while playing Frisbee and we relaxed in the water. If there is one criticism I have of the beach in Mombasa, it is that the water is like bath water. The Indian Ocean on the Kenyan border gets the sun head on causing it to be very warm. When I first did my Baywatch run and dive into the water, I was expecting a great deal of relief from the hot sun. Nope. Not even refreshing. It was definitely colder than the outside air though. What a great day it was. That night we went back to the hotel, showered and then went to eat. After that, we retired to our rooms and went to sleep. Paige found a tree house hotel near Forty Thieves that we are going to stay at for a few days after the program. Beaches, tree houses and tropical weather? I’m excited.
Tear Gas
After another three week break from blogging, I’m back again. Lots to talk about. I moved to Kisumu last Sunday but before I get to that, I’m going to back up a few weeks and talk about the end of Nairobi. As in the past, the weekdays have been like any other weekdays at school so unless you want to hear about subjects like the effect of negative ethnic politics on development or the strengths and weaknesses of the new 2010 Constitution, I will move straight to the weekends. Three weekends ago, the last weekend in Feb, I went to a Kenya Premier League soccer game with my Kiswahili teacher, Emmanuel. Gor Mahia is the most popular team in Kenya so we decided to go to that game. Gor is a really good team but is known for its rowdy fans. Last year, seven fans were killed during a clash with another team’s fans. Unlike most clashes in Kenya that result in death, this was regular citizen A killing regular citizen B. Not Policeman A gunning down citizen A as he was running away. Anyways, as we got to the stadium, I was getting really excited: it was opening day. After a long offseason, it was a new year for the KPL and Gor. The mood outside the stadium was electric. Gor wears a green and white jersey and since the opposition team was new and therefore had not but a single fan there, the line to the gate was a sea of green. I decided to wear my Kenya national jersey because I figured that would be a neutral jersey incase all hell was to break loose. This thought came to me before I knew that the other team, Posta Rangers, would not have a single fan. Walk around the stadium, I was called some rather colorful names, in English, Kiswahili and shang (Swahili slang). Emmanuel and my host brothers Keith and Carrey translated as fast as they could. Some of the nicer comments were “You wazungu… you do realize that Kenya is not playing, right?” and just a plain old “$*&# you”. Again, those were the nice comments. After we successfully bribed the ticket agent for tickets, we got in line to go in the stadium. As we were waiting in line, a police truck rolled up and out came the po po. Instead of police hats, they wore full helmets complete with a visor/shield. Instead of handcuffs, they each were packing four canisters of tear gas. Instead of a gun, they carried a reinforced night stick. As I found out later, they are not allowed to carry guns for the same reason prison guards can’t carry guns. They are afraid they will be over powered and the fans will now have a gun. This was another reminder of exactly where I was. TIA. Once we got into the stadium, we saw a huge group of people going nuts on one side of the field while they were singing the Gor anthem. Emmanuel asked me where I wanted to sit and I pointed to the mob. He clearly answered “Hapana”. That means no. He said this is where a bunch of drunks and thungs hung out and that it was a serious security concern to sit there. Especially for me to sit there. He pointed to the opposite side of the stadium where about a hundred fans were sitting and we went to sit there. I think I’ve drawn out this story long enough so I’ll get to the good part. Gor, who was a heavy favorite, found themselves down 3-0 in the 79th minute. After the third goal was scored, I said to Keith, “Better get the riot police ready”. As a joke of course. A few minutes later, the game was stopped for no apparent reason. We were all looking around looking for an explanation. In a few minutes we found out that fans were throwing things, bottles, shards of glass and rocks, at the linesman. He had missed an offsides call in their point of view so they retaliated. After a brief meeting of referees and linesmen in the middle of the field, they decided to keep the game going. But two minutes later it was stopped again. He was getting pummeled with bottles again. All of the players walked off the field this time. Fans from the rowdy side started throwing whatever they could onto the field and were coming down from the stands to the barbed wire fence that surrounds the field. The game was then officially called by the referees but the fun was only just beginning. A group of fans were shaking the gate to the field to try to get in. There was a huge chain locking the gate and the task looked formidable. From the other side of the field where we were sitting, I asked Keith if he thought they would get in and he said “They always do”. People were starting to run out of the stadium but Emmanuel told us to stay put because he didn’t want us to get caught in a stampede. Good choice. I said I also wanted to stay for the inevitable tear gas that would come if they got on the field. Again, I said this as a joke. After a full five minutes of attempting to break down the gate, they succeeded. The fans came pouring on to the field like they had just won the NCAA tournament. Most started grabbing the advertisement banners that surrounded the field and then threw them into the middle of the field. Enter the security forces. About twenty full SWAT geared po po started a march on the field. In a fourth of July spectacle, the tear gas started flying. In the movies, tear gas is thrown on the ground and then the gas starts to slowly come out. Not in Kenya. They explode like a firework. The fans started throwing them back at the security forces which made for quite the spectacle. About five or six canisters went off in total. The tear gas started spreading in the stadium and it was headed right for us. We stared running away but we did not succeed. It hit all of us full force. It stung pretty badly for about five to ten minutes. As the fans started to run away, we made our way down to leave as the situation appeared under control. When we got back to the house, my host Mom said this was business as usual for the KPL. This is another reminder of how far this country has to go. I could have told this story in about three sentences but I wanted to tell it all for my benefit. It will be a good story to look back on in the years to come.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
US Embassy Tour - A Brief Visit to the Homeland
About a month ago I put in an inquiry to USAID (United States Agency for International Development) about getting a tour for our group. Since our program is all about international development, I thought it would be cool to see where our tax money goes to help develop other countries. USAID is the largest foreign donor to Kenya. To give you an idea of what USAID does for Kenya, 99% of HIV/AIDS patients on ARV’s (Anti-Retro Virals) receive their medicine from USAID. While the sustainability of the program is in question, there is no question that USAID saves countless lives in Kenya. Anyways, a few weeks ago I got an email back from someone with an @usaid.gov email address with the greeting “Greetings Fellow MSIDer”. Come to find out, a grad student who did MSID-Kenya a few years ago never left Kenya and has been working at USAID since then. After chatting back and forth for a while, we decided that we would have her come and talk to us during class. She came on Monday to talk to us for about an hour and a half. Very interesting stuff and it’s a topic that I have become interested in. She was also able to get us in for a tour of the US Embassy in Nairobi today. After a lengthy process of clearing security, we were able to get into the compound and get a tour of the building. We didn’t get to go into any of the “this is where the good stuff goes down” places because they all require a certain security clearance but it was still really cool to see the building. We could definitely tell that we were back on US territory because everything was spotless and clean. The smell of Pine sol was very welcoming. While we were on the tour we saw a blind man navigating his way through one of the hallways. The lady giving us the tour guide stopped and said hello to him but quickly moved us down the hall to show us a picture. The US Embassy in Kenya was bombed in 1998. Hundreds of people died including around 14 Americans and about 30 or so Kenyans working at the Embassy. That’s not including the vast amount of people outside the building. The picture we were standing in front of was a large group of Kenyans who were the Kenyan survivors of the attack. In the front row was a man with the same walking stick. This man had survived the blast but had been so close to the source of the explosion that he became blind. All these years later, he still works at the Embassy. Things have changed considerable at the Embassy since then. It’s a few miles away from downtown now and it is a “blast proof” building which makes it look like a jail. The experience of being at the Embassy was great. Not only was it nice to be back on US soil but it was nice to see the life of a Foreign Service Officer. This is a career that I have recently been kicking around in my head. If there is one knock on the MSID program it’s that it will make you question everything that you thought you wanted to do with your life. I kind of figured this would happen but as I’ve told my Mom and Dad, I didn’t think it would hit this quick or hard. A lot of us in this program are in the same boat. While it may be frustrating it’s like starting a new journey. Who knows where it will take me. In other news, Carrey is leaving in a few hours to go to school near Kisumu. He’ll be a Freshman!!! They are actually called Form 1’s. Since he delayed for a few weeks going to school so that he could get into a better school (I’ll explain the education system here in another post) he will be coming back for midterm breaks in a week so it won’t be too bad. Time in Nairobi is winding down. I leave two weeks from Sunday for Kisumu. It’s gonna be a hot one.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Mom, I went to Church
Let’s talk about the Sunday’s. I left them out of the previous entry for a specific reason. Mom: with the exception of last weekend because I was traveling, I have been to church every Sunday. The first church I went to is called Winners Chapel. The rest of the fam had gone to their respective churches early which left me and Carrey to go by ourselves. What an experience. This church has a main sanctuary of around a thousand seats, possibly more, and then overflow seating that can take in 2000 outside in these huge tents. The service was a little over two hours long and a lot of it had to do with witchcraft. About 75 percent of Kenyans believe in witchcraft. They are the agents of the devil. People gave testimonies during the service in which they praised God for killing a witch in their village back home. Everyone erupts in applause. The sermon was very passionate. I’m not a hundred percent sure what it was about, but he was yelling a lot. Inside the tent was a flat screen TV with speakers. Kenyans love loud music and loud sermons apparently. It was so loud that I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying because the speakers were distorting so badly. Very interesting service though. I was definitely the only white person there so I got a lot of looks. That always adds to the experience.
The next church I went to was Carrey’s Dad’s church. It is a Nigerian Church in the Hilton hotel downtown Nairobi. What made this experience so interesting was that the pastor had come over the night before with his wife for a private prayer sessions. I went downstairs to sit in for about 45 minutes and I was happy I did. The way they pray is unlike anything I’ve seen. Everyone is standing, even if it was just five of us. Everyone sways back and forth, and everyone is very passionate about what they are praying for. The final prayer took about ten minutes. The rest was just question and answer time about things that were going on in their lives and what God meant by each thing that had happened. So the next day I went to the church. There was a small half hour bible study before the service and since the pastors wife knew me, she made me, Carrey and his Dad sit in the front row. As if I didn’t already stick out enough in a crowd of a few hundred Kenyans, the one white guy (me) was in the front row. Throughout the whole service, 4 hours in total… yes 4 hours, people would randomly come up and take pictures of me. Very awkward. This service was a special one because they had a guest preacher. This lady had some fire. She preached on and on about how men weren’t living up to their roles and how women need to find stronger men. She stepped down from the pulpit after about five minutes and spent the last hour and a half pacing back and forth about two feet in front of me. I was the only white guy there, in the front row and arms length away from a prominent female evangelist preaching about how men are the cause of the problems in Kenyan families, all the while people are coming up to take pictures of me. For 4 hours!!! After a short reception for visitors, I was happy to go home.
Going to Laura’s church two weeks ago was quite a treat. This church is called Mavuno and it would definitely be the church that I would go to if I lived here permanently. They are known for being very contemporary and for being focused on today’s issues. This service was all about what you need to do to accomplish God’s work. If you don’t have any money, there are serious limits to what you can accomplish. This was all about saving money and how to be responsible. The underlying point was the money is not evil but the love of money is what’s evil. If you say you want to do God’s work, be serious and build some wealth so that you can do great things. One of the men in the congregation was a CFO of a Nairobi based consulting agency. He came up and talked for about twenty minutes about how to save and the downfalls that Kenyans have fallen into. The pastor actually said, “Let’s be serious… Kenyans are awful at saving money as are African Americans in the United States. Let’s change that right here, right now.” The music was great, as was the music at all of the other churches I went to, and so was the message. People actually walked away uplifted and had a plan for how they were going to do the best work they could. I’m going back there this Sunday with the rest of the fam.
The next church I went to was Carrey’s Dad’s church. It is a Nigerian Church in the Hilton hotel downtown Nairobi. What made this experience so interesting was that the pastor had come over the night before with his wife for a private prayer sessions. I went downstairs to sit in for about 45 minutes and I was happy I did. The way they pray is unlike anything I’ve seen. Everyone is standing, even if it was just five of us. Everyone sways back and forth, and everyone is very passionate about what they are praying for. The final prayer took about ten minutes. The rest was just question and answer time about things that were going on in their lives and what God meant by each thing that had happened. So the next day I went to the church. There was a small half hour bible study before the service and since the pastors wife knew me, she made me, Carrey and his Dad sit in the front row. As if I didn’t already stick out enough in a crowd of a few hundred Kenyans, the one white guy (me) was in the front row. Throughout the whole service, 4 hours in total… yes 4 hours, people would randomly come up and take pictures of me. Very awkward. This service was a special one because they had a guest preacher. This lady had some fire. She preached on and on about how men weren’t living up to their roles and how women need to find stronger men. She stepped down from the pulpit after about five minutes and spent the last hour and a half pacing back and forth about two feet in front of me. I was the only white guy there, in the front row and arms length away from a prominent female evangelist preaching about how men are the cause of the problems in Kenyan families, all the while people are coming up to take pictures of me. For 4 hours!!! After a short reception for visitors, I was happy to go home.
Going to Laura’s church two weeks ago was quite a treat. This church is called Mavuno and it would definitely be the church that I would go to if I lived here permanently. They are known for being very contemporary and for being focused on today’s issues. This service was all about what you need to do to accomplish God’s work. If you don’t have any money, there are serious limits to what you can accomplish. This was all about saving money and how to be responsible. The underlying point was the money is not evil but the love of money is what’s evil. If you say you want to do God’s work, be serious and build some wealth so that you can do great things. One of the men in the congregation was a CFO of a Nairobi based consulting agency. He came up and talked for about twenty minutes about how to save and the downfalls that Kenyans have fallen into. The pastor actually said, “Let’s be serious… Kenyans are awful at saving money as are African Americans in the United States. Let’s change that right here, right now.” The music was great, as was the music at all of the other churches I went to, and so was the message. People actually walked away uplifted and had a plan for how they were going to do the best work they could. I’m going back there this Sunday with the rest of the fam.
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