Plus 1 minus 1

Daraja and the platform has been left behind, and we are now in the buzzing capitol of Nairobi.

The last couple of days at Daraja consisted of a visit to a women’s group, a heartbreaking documentary about female circumcision and finally an introduction to Masai dancing and singing.

We left Thursday morning after a night of pouring rain that only stopped for a moment as we filed into the matatus with all our bags. How they ever managed to fit all of us and our enormous amounts of luggage into three matatus will forever remain a mystery to me.

The trip back to Nairobi felt just as long as coming up a week earlier. This time it rained all the way though, so the temperature was bearable. As we got closer to the center of the city traffic worsened and got really insane at some point in a very random intersection that was completely jammed from all directions as hundreds of cars attempted to cut across non-existing lanes. An inexplicable sight.

Eventually we made it to the YMCA around late-lunch time and were installed in dorms. Lunch was a welcome change from the beans of Daraja and felt almost European, a relief to many.

Most of the group went to Kibera, the slums of Nairobi, but Charlotte and I decided to wait and go next time we are in Nairobi instead as we have been given a number of a guide some of the other girls recommended. So we stayed back and spent some time reading in the sun. Later on we wanted to find a cinema close by so we headed towards downtown – or so we thought. I’m sure it is the Lonely Planet map and not my sense of direction that’s off, but we did manage to walk the wrong way. We had gone out late afternoon and weren’t sure about the time of dark, so we didn’t make it to the cinema but just wandered around in a nearby park instead.

We’re staying at dorms again, this time with six girls to a room smaller than the ones at Daraja and it feels a little cramped. Everyone seems to silently be looking forward to getting properly settled with one other person and not having to live out of a backpack(which, by the way, is significantly harder than living out of a suitcase).

Friday morning we were all picked up by a proper-sized bus for a rendezvous with Teresia at Action Aid Kenya’s office. The nurses were to register with the Kenyan Nurses Council and we were given other pieces of information as well as contact information for our host families.

The girls fill out forms for the Kenyan Nurses Council



Charlotte and I had a plus 1 minus 1 day. When we first arrived at the office, we were told that it seemed the situation in Isiolo had died down and we could probably go on Wednesday(happiness ensured and we started planning for the two extra days in Nairobi). A few hours later however, a counter-message came in and told us to hold off on Isiolo for a while yet. The highest powers of AAK had to approve on the security assessment before we could go.

All right, it’s a darn shame, but what can you do, right? We then started preparing for the change of plans. Instead of going to Isiolo, we will go back to Nanyuki to live with a family while working in a nearby town with the local AA office there.

Else-Marie

But we live for fast-paced, so within another hour, we had learned that the Danish director of ActionAid would be coming to Nairobi on Tuesday and we quickly made arrangements with Teresia to stay put when the rest of the group went off on Sunday to their placements. She set up a meeting for us with the Emergency response coordinator for Monday and the message to show up at the office on Tuesday for a chance to meet the great Dane. Plan is to then head for Nanyuki on Wednesday.

The rest of the group had left the office to go back to the Y while Charlotte and I as well as a couple of other girls with unresolved placement-issues had stayed behind. As we finished around 5pm and got in the car that would take us back, we hit traffic. Friday afternoon traffic in Copenhagen is nothing compared to the ridiculousness of Friday afternoon traffic in Nairobi. It’s really interesting to go through traffic when traffic laws seem non-existent. A 15 min drive in normal traffic took us close to two hours and we were back at the Y around 7pm.

Plus 1 minus 1 equals square one.

Lessons learned

It’s not all fun and games, people – we are here to learn.

I will try to pass some of that newly acquired knowledge on to you(so if you don’t care about facts and figures from Kenya: thank you for coming, I’ll see you next entry).

The week here at Daraja is almost over and although I was apprehensive at first, I really am glad the arrangement has been so. We’ve been introduced to Kenyan culture very well through a little bit of teaching and a lot of interacting. They are not trying to paint a pretty picture – they are trying to give us a realistic view of how people live.

Today was all about poverty, rural and urban – and how is poverty measured exactly? Who decides what poverty is? Do you know you are poor if nobody tells you? A fascinating topic indeed.

Heading out of Daraja for a tour of the local community

Daraja is conveniently located close to a somewhat small village, so after a 30 min lesson we ventured out with our local guides and saw the four major employments available to the villagers here:

-         Brewing alcohol. The locals will buy and drink this brew which is nearly 100 % alcohol and often sleep it off at the place of purchase. It is illegal to make, but the village here has maybe five brewers. If you get caught, you have to either pay a fine of around 15.000 KSh(100 KSh is approx. 6 kr. or 1 USD) or go to jail for 3 years! For some people it’s the only way to make money, so they take the risk. They will usually get caught when fighting breaks out between the drunken locals and the police is called.

-        Selling sand. They dig out the sand from a small valley just outside the village. A man can dig up towards 10 tons a day and he will earn 500 KSh per ton. A truck will then come and bring the sand to town, where it is sold and used for construction. There’s a fine line between wanting the rain or wanting drought as the sand needs water, but if the water is there, you can’t dig.

-        Quarry. Stones are cut from the ground in a pretty shallow quarry to make stones for constructing houses. A man can shape 25 stones on a good day and can make up towards 5000 KSh in a day. It’s hard work though and injuries do occur.

A demonstration of the stone shaping process

-        Making charcoal. Several pits of dirt cover wood being burned to make charcoal. It’s a slow process though and from cutting down trees, which are an hour’s drive away, to the final product, it takes a week. They sell bags of 50 or 90 kg and they cost 400 and 800 KSh respectively.

All the options are available to everyone in the village. If you get tired of digging sand, you can try quarrying as everyone owns the ground.

After a very hot couple of hours under the burning sun, we had lunch back at school and then went to Nanyuki to visit the slums. The slums here are not nearly as bad as the one we’ll be visiting in Nairobi later in the week, we are told, and I’m sure the people who’ve been to Nairobi are quite right. The Nanyuki slums didn’t feel very “slum-y”. Sure, it was a bit dirty and people lived close and poorly, but it wasn’t terrible. We got a guided tour with a local young resident, who assured us that if you had the will-power, making it out of the slums was not hard, which was an up-lifting message. Also, living in the slums is fairly cheap(800 KSh a month), so some people use living there as a way to save money for school for themselves or their children. Our guide said she took whatever jobs she could find and sometimes worked five jobs a day. She’s saving money to study medicine.
One of the major issues at the slums is obviously unemployment as social security is a city in Russia(I don’t know the English equivalent to this good, old Danish saying, so bare with my direct translation) so the men turn to stealing and women turn to prostitution to make ends meet. In Nanyuki prostitution is a really big problem. The town is home to both the Kenyan Air Force and a British army base(they use the climate to train for missions in similar climates – like Afghanistan) and these two groups are the biggest contributors to the prostitution industry – which is really terrible.

A large market place in the Nanyuki slums

So poverty sucks. But still, there are a lot of smiles and people seem somewhat content. Maybe they know that things can’t easily change and they really do make do with what they have. As long as they have a roof over their heads and are able to feed their families, they don’t have a need for the same materialistic benefits that we are so accustomed to. Interesting.

Sawa – that was the lesson on poverty. Here comes a list of random facts that I’ve picked up here and there and have nowhere else to put:

·        Swahili has 7 groups of nouns that all change the first one or two letters of the word when it goes from singular to plural – like mzungu becomes wazungu.

·       There are 42 different tribes in Kenya divided into three major groups(in order of size and thereby power): the bantu, the nilotes and the cushites. The tribes obviously have many names and just to name a few are here four that I remember: Masai, Kikuyu, Somali and Turkana

·       Some tribes still practice female circumcision and only a few years ago up towards 70 % of all Kenyan girls were circumcised. Thankfully, the number is decreasing.

·       For university, young people usually choose between Nairobi or Kampala, Uganda.

·       If you have good enough grades on your final exams in high school(A- at least, I think), the government will pay for the whole shebang when you go to university.

·       Food at Daraja has very few components. It seems all meals are made on one or more of the following ingredients: maize, rice, eggs, potatoes, onions, carrots and beans - lots and lots of beans.

·       The Boulangerie café in Nanyuki makes the most awesome milkshakes!

·       We shower in water from the river and drink rain water that has been boiled.

·       You WILL get burned if you do not wear sunscreen – and even if you do. Evidence: 25 very burned wazungus after spending 5 hours total in the sun.

Butterflies searching for food in the mud on the banks of the river near Daraja

Wazungus* in matatus

*Mzungu is the term for white people - wazungus is the plural

We got a touch of the African wildlife today as we walked among baboons.

At 7 am a matatu was waiting for our group of 11 girls to take us to a baboon herd a 45 min ride from Daraja. Matatus are like buses or taxis or a little bit of both. Matatus will have routes like buses, but can also be booked like a taxi. And the size of them is something in-between – well, closer to a taxi size than a bus really. Think of an ordinary size van and add seating for 12 – or 14 perhaps as it does seat 2 people in front with the driver(the “death seat” according to Lonely Planet). I’m sure it’s a sight for sore eyes to watch a matatu full of wazungus at 7 in the morning being shaken into a state of awake as the van speeds along the dirt road shaking and rattling. It’s quite an experience.

 Adding to the awesome fun it is to ride a matatu in the first place, is riding in it with certain types of girls. The kind of girls who wants to take pictures of everything and needs the driver to stop for the yet another group of donkeys. Or the kind of girls that scream at the sight of a giraffe or a zebra. Granted it is a spectacular view to see these animals almost roaming freely(there was some kind of enclosure, although it did cover a vast majority of land), but do you really need to scream? I think not.

Baboons hanging out in a tree

Oh well, as said, that just adds to the experience. We made it to the baboon place having only stopped a few times for cows crossing, giraffe sightings and to pick up our guide. After climbing down some rocks we came upon the herd pretty fast and spent about an hour or so just tracking them a little while further down. They didn’t seem to mind us and let us come pretty close.

Male baboon taking a nap

We were back at Daraja around 11 after another bumpy ride and stops for animal and rock sightings(don’t ask). Most of the others went to the closest town, Nanyuki, while Charlotte and I stayed back and spent most of the nice and quiet afternoon reading, taking a shower(the water is really only warm after 3pm when the sun has heated it) and getting a briefing on our internship situation by the local coordinator.

These beautiful blue birds are everywhere at Daraja. Here one is feeding the other.

We knew before leaving Denmark that Isiolo most likely would not be safe to go to right away due to a re-surfaced tribal conflict, so we arrived in Kenya not really knowing where we would end up. But Teresia, the local coordinator and real cool lady, talked to us and told us that it’s hard to get decent intel at the moment and to be on the safe side, we were to start out with another branch of the regional office in a different town until they are sure that things have died down enough for our arrival in Isiolo. I feel very secure in the hands of ActionAid and MS as it really feels like they have things under control. Besides, they have absolutely no interest in sending us somewhere it is not safe for us to be. So there will be no going close to Somali borders and no going to Isiolo until they are sure the situation is under control.

We don’t worry, so neither should you.

Hakuna matata.

African lilly

Twinkle, twinkle, little star

I am a girl, so I’m allowed to say it: Kenyan children are SO adorable!

Kids outside Daraja

Sunday was quite the cultural experience for us. We ventured off to church in the local village 10 minutes walk from Daraja for the service we were told would start at 10 African time. That turned out to be pretty accurate as the service started around 10:30. There was a lot of singing – all to the same wannabe hip-hop rhythm blasted through the small mud-hut church from an old keyboard connected to two large speakers powered by the only power source in the village – a small generator. After several groups had performed a little song and dance in front of the congregation, our little group was asked to do the same. We had been warned before going, fortunately, so we came prepared – sort of – and ended up saying a prayer in Danish.

Three hours later the service ended with everyone forming a large circle outside the church and shaking hands with everyone. One of the locals came up to us and offered to show us around, which we gratefully accepted and got a private tour through the village.

After a late lunch, we wanted to climb the hill inside the compound, but were coerced by an 8 year old girl to go with her. So instead of climbing a hill we spent an hour playing “teacher and two bad students” until we managed to drag her out and get her to come with us. She found a friend and the four of us went off to climb the hill, although we went outside the fence. And we didn’t make it far before the rain came. It felt pretty ironic that we found ourselves soaked to the skin in the middle of Africa.

Bargaining for the return of Charlotte’s camera and some dry clothes later, we were off again this time to cook with a local family. We were put to work right away under intense supervision of four kids who found us really strange. It took them a while, but suddenly we made contact over the various translations of potato, onion and carrot. After that we were like oversized white dolls to them and they were amused by touching our skin and braiding our hair! Two of the kids found a particular interest in the mole I have on my chin – they couldn’t for the life of them figure out what that weird brown spot was.

We had a lovely dinner with the family and made our way back to the compound as night fell upon Daraja. Charlotte and I had our last imported chocolate in the chairs outside our “dorm” as we sat in the dark under the twinkling stars on the African sky.

Wide open spaces of Africa

Wow.
That’s really the first word to cross my mind when thinking of the immediate reaction to Kenya.
Wow.

Arriving in Nairobi was problem-free and the trip itself(Copenhagen-Heathrow-Nairobi) was, dare I say it, almost comfortable – and I’ve never experienced as soft a landing as when we touched ground in Nairobi.

                                                             At Heathrow waiting to board

Charlotte and I are the only ones from Emergency and Risk Management, but the first week we will be with a group of 25 nursing students who will be interning at various hospitals around Kenya and Uganda at the same time as us.

First we’ll be staying at the so-called platform, which is a week of getting to know the country, the language, the culture and the people. After a bumpy 4 ½ hour ride from Nairobi, we arrived at the Daraja school for girls, where MS rents space, living quarters and dining possibilities. We were introduced to the place and the routines and all collapsed in our beds right after dinner.

On a tour of the Daraja campus

                                                          
The following days were spent on classes in Swahili, culture, body language and getting to know the millennium goals. In addition we visited a local school and hospital. It was fascinating and maybe a little daunting to see the kind of facilities they have. Some of the nursing students were rather shocked after the hospital visit and are embarking on their internships with a great deal of apprehension. Can’t say I blame them though. They are expected to do much more here than they would ever be at home and some of the conditions are quite horrid. The hospital we visited has 1 nurse to a ward of 50 people and in a hospital that has around 400 patients coming in everyday, there are about 7 doctors. Also, most beds sleep four people – each with their own disease. The waiting list for non-emergency operations can be up towards 1 year or more. 

Kids at the local school

                                                           

Visiting the district hospital in Nanyuki

Poor conditions are everywhere, but the people seem really friendly and hospitable. And the setting…well, the setting is amazing here at the platform. We’re in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town and supermarket is 45 minutes away on a very bumpy road where it’s essential that you swerve to miss the potholes every 50 m or less. But if you can distract yourself from the bumping and swerving, the scenery is gorgeous. Open wide space as far as you can see with the occasional mountain top here and there and somewhere behind the clouds in the not too far distance is Mt. Kenya.

All along the road there are Masai herders with their cows, goats, donkeys or even dromedaries. Cacti spot the plains and the rays of the sun break through the clouds like it was a scene in The Lion King. On the way back from town today we came across a herd of zebras and a small group of monkeys.

A herd of dromedaries we came across on a walk outside Daraja

The wide open space is what really gets to me – the way you can look far away into the distance and see no other signs of civilization than a Masai and his goats or a small shed here and there. Does it get much better than that? I’ll let you know.