"Kwaheri Kenya!" (Goodbye Kenya!)
I spent 9 weeks living in Kakamega. 63 days full of challenges, surprises, and learning. And now I've been home for just a week, already back to my American way of life. Going from drinking chai, walking everywhere, and bucket showers, to drinking tap water, driving everywhere, and long, hot "normal" showers.
Although I've quickly adapted back to my old habits and lifestyle, a few things from Kenya will stay with me for the long run. The relationships I developed, with my host family especially. The memories of everyday life (...and of adventurous excursions). A more mature perspective on development work. A broader perspective on cultural practices. A greater appreciation for living as a minority. And a better insight to how many more similarities than differences we share with our friends in Kakamega.
I wanted to take this last blog post to share a few final photos (along with a couple stories) to anyone still interested.
First of all, here's the cool gorge in Naivasha I had mentioned earlier. The one featured in Tomb Raider 2. There used to be a river running through it, but has since become just a trickling stream.
Another look at my house. This was the hallway, with my room on the left and the kitchen, storage room, and "shower" room on the right. The containers lined up on the side were used to store water. There was one running tap, so once or twice a week they would be refilled. Most of the pictured containers were used as extra storage in case there was a drought or some other issue with the tap. The tap basically served as a water source (rather than having to fetch water from a river or gather rain water), but was never used like a shower or sink. The bucket sitting on top of the containers is what I would use to take my bucket showers. And I would stand just outside the blue door on a ledge outside to brush my teeth.
Here's a view of the pit latrine that all the houses in my compound shared. A compound is just a name for a common piece of land with several buildings. The compound at work consisted of a church, a kitchen, offices, the associated tailoring school, and the pastor's home. The compound at home consisted of 3 distinct buildings (but 5 families), non of whom were related. However, it is common for extended family members to live together and fill a compound. My family didn't interact much with the neighbors in our compound, only while selling milk or crossing paths outside.
The door on the left is for the pit latrine, and the door on the right is for the shower room (a room with a small drainage hole in the back). Luckily I didn't have to make the trek outside to shower; we had our own shower room right inside our house. But the one-minute walk to the pit latrine I was not allowed to make on my own at night, even with a gated compound (...with a very simple-to-open latch) and a watch dog (...a very friendly watch dog). So maybe the night-time accompaniment to the latrine was appropriate.
This is the kitchen. All dishes would be cooked on the charcoal-fueled "jiko" under the chimney. There's a lantern on the table-top because the electricity was out at the time (I guess my camera has a powerful flash). The electricity would go out most nights around or just before dinner time, so cooking in the dark became a common activity. Momma Mary would sit on the low bench in front of the chimney place, while I would bring in a stool for myself and do the chopping, mixing, and cutting on the closer corner of the table. It was a bit crammed, but it always worked.
This is the part of the kitchen hidden by the doorway in the previous photo. The hardened ceramic jug was what Momma Mary liked the call "the African refrigerator." It only held water (that had been previously boiled for purification), but did a surprisingly good job of keeping the water cooler than room temperature. Which, especially in that kitchen, could get pretty hot! The two other containers were also purified water, and we used that water to wash and cook the food. The large wooden stick is used for cooking large quantities of ugali (a thick, stiff corn flour/water mixture). We always used a smaller one at home, since we were just cooking for three and a half. I have a ugali stick out in my room at home as one of the gifts my host mom left me. :)
My host family!! They were so wonderful. The left is Momma Mary, right is my host dad (Stomas, but I never called him by name because it was hard for me to pronounce), and center is Zungu, their 2-year-old granddaughter.
I thought this photo was a better representation of Zungu's adorably cheeky personality. Our interactions (although maybe limited by the language barrier) consisted of simple Swahili commands and a lot of expressive faces. It was just about the saddest thing, though, when I had to say goodbye. She did not like it at all when her playmate got in that car, closed the door, and left her there.
My extended family. These were many of the relatives who stayed with us during the preparations for the funeral. The woman furthest to your right with the little girl on her lap is my host sister Joanna. She took care of me when my host mom was off preparing for the funeral.
A picture of the church at Mahiakalo Child Development Center. The offices were in a separate building, but the church was the focal point of the compound. For one last sum-up of the "internship" part of my summer: I spent the first two weeks doing a needs-/opportunity-assessment of the center. From there my work plan was my independent responsibility, more so than I had anticipated. I decided to set up a simple Excel spreadsheet designed for making the tracking of child updates much easier. I spent one day per week giving lessons to the post-secondary school children aged 19 to 21. My two favorite topics were on technology (check out this TED talk I showed them on the social media revolution) and peer mentoring. The peer mentoring lesson developed into a peer mentoring program, with 14 different mentors (age 19-21) responsible for 8 kids (age 12-14) each. I wrote and distributed a questionnaire about the children's general interest in the program, and tweaked the program (food choices, game time, mentoring, library) based on the results. Lastly I renumbered the library books to help organize them by subject. All small things, but I hope my work helped make a small, positive, sustainable change. More importantly, I hope I portrayed a positive image for what I was representing (FSD, Duke, the Midwest) and left my coworkers and the children with fond memories.
Here's me on a bodaboda with my personal driver, Steve. He would often take me from Mahiakalo CDC back home after a long day of work. After he learned I liked to run in the mornings, he commented that he'd like to start running too, and suggested we go after work. So for the last two weeks, I ran with my bodaboda driver on a 50-ft stretch of field in a schoolyard. I would run in my work clothes (long skirts and modest shirts) and my bare feet. By this time of evening, school was out of session, so we were only accompanied by the cheers and laughter of the neighborhood children. One day when we drove up (on the bicycle) for practice, 20 children were chanting "Welcome, welcome, welcome, visitor!" They started running along with us when we began practice. I'm sure it was quite a sight.
At long last, I arrived back home, safe and sound. And I was greeted by my anxious parents, my brother and a few cousins, and my very best friends! What a warm welcome after 40+ hours of travel, getting totally lost in Amsterdam, and almost missing my connecting flight to Chicago. It's good to be home.
And that's that! My trip to Kenya. Not as a visitor or a foreigner, but as an intern and a partner. As a sister and a daughter. Here's to the most challenging, rousing, inspiring experience. Kwaheri Kenya! You will not be forgotten.
