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