Men Hold Hands. Yeah. They even interlace fingers! These are not gay men (homosexuality is very rare and scandalous here), they could be two businessmen sauntering down the street, two high school guys walking home, two old men at the market. Over a month living here now and it still throws me off.
It’s Almost Like England. I never knew how much British influence Kenya/Africa has, thanks to its colonization long ago. The kids are not allowed in school without the official formal school uniform – collar shirt with a sweater and shorts or a skirt. It generally costs around $10 (a lot of shillings here, and thus the main reason a lot of kids aren’t in school).
Drivers seats are on the right side of the car, and cars drive on the right side of the road (unless they’re avoiding massive potholes on the right side of the road, which is 90% of the time).
Letter boxes and telephone booths all look like they were imported from London; so out of place on the dirt roads with dust and cow manure everywhere.
If someone is wearing a nice outfit, people will say they look “smart”, which I’m quite sure is not a Swahili term.When you ask the kids how they are (easy Swahili slang -- “sasa?”), they respond “Fit!”, which I also don’t think has any Swahili roots. In English, they call French fries chips, napkins servillettes, and pants are trousers.
Incidentally, the word pants means women’s underwear to Kenyans. This is especially funny in a restaurant when one of the guys spills something and asks for a napkin to wipe his pants with.. lots of weird looks from the waiters.
Americans Are Celebrities. When we take the bodas out to the orphanage on Saturdays, we drive through a rural village with around 40 small huts in it. As soon as they hear the bodas coming, every single kid and adult will run out of their hut to wave and shout “howayou!” Even in Kitaletown, where white people are seen pretty frequently, a Kenyan will stop a conversation with someone just to turn around and gawk at you, or say hi, or shout “mzungu!” in excitement. (Technically mzungu means European, but that’s cool with me.) If they find out you are from America, you are even more popular because they want to make sure you are voting for Obama.
After spending Friday morning at Oasis, Ina and I walked to downtown Kitale and hopped on a matatu to Kiminini, where Hope Bright Future Home is. TI sponsorts most of the kids here, and it's where we spend most of our Saturdays. Technically it is an orphanage, but it’s run with a healthier family-style approach than most orphanages here. Ben and Viriginia are the young Kenyan couple who parent the kids, with Elvis, 5, and Daniel, 1, their two biological children. All of the others, from age 3 to 16, are complete orphans, with both parents deceased. Among the 24 there’s Teddy and Navenda, two gorgeous teenage twin girls, siblings Mwangi, Veronica, and Martin, whose parents both died of AIDS last year, and Shiro, whose uncle put her into sex trade when her parents died until a social worker found her a place at HBF.
When we arrive (sharing 1 boda boda because the other boda drivers were harvesting corn that day), everyone runs out of the house for hugs; the shyer kids will shake your hand, the bolder ones will climb up onto your back and play with your hair. A few of the kids bring us guavas to eat from the tree outside; we talked with them about how their week was and cuddled with a few of the younger ones who had coughs and fevers (malaria). As soon as it gets dark, Ben lights a kerosene lantern and puts it in the middle of the livingroom, the kids say grace, and we all eat our big plates of rice and cabbage. Afterwards the kids ask Ben and Viriginia questions, about homework, things that happened at school, anything they want to talk about. After this everyone stands up and starts clapping together, and one of the girls starts a song thanking God for the day, while all the kids dance and sing/shout along (hands down my favourite part of the night). The boys head to the boys room and girls to the girls room, each with 8 bunk beds. Ina and I brush our teeth and washed our faces in the rain water outside, which all the kids found odd and entertaining. I share a bed with Valentine, who didn’t cough as much as the others but had a knack for yelling out random things in Swahili in her sleep, which was exciting.
We wake up at 6am to scrubbing noises, and find six kids helping Ben wash the walls and floor of the livingroom. The rest of them are mopping out the boys or girls rooms, or washing their school uniforms outside, or doing dishes by the mud hut kitchen. For breakfast we eat bread and butter and drank sweet, delicious chai. When the rest of the TI interns arrive for the usual Saturday visit, there are more hugs and the usual afternoon soccer game, with the younger girls playing enthusiastically with the teenage boys who could probably play professionally.
At 4 the bodas come to pick us up, we get sad hugs goodbye and remind everyone we’ll be back next Saturday.
The weird thing about HBF is that there is no chaos. You would never sit in the livingroom and think “Wow, there are definitely 26 kids living here.” Maybe it’s Ben and Virginia’s parenting, maybe it’s what some of the kids have been through, maybe it’s a God thing, but nobody bickers, all the big kids are always loving on the little kids, everyone’s looking out for each other, sharing things, playing together. You would never be able to tell who are biological siblings and which kids are there without any other family members, because everyone acts like they’re related. Ben and Virginia’s biological kids are treated exactly the same as all the others, except for maybe Daniel, who is spoiled rotten by all of the others because he is the baby of the house.
If you are seeing the pictures below, you should know that God exists. The internet is particularly fast (read: less slow) today, so I figured it was worth attempt #8937 at uploading them, and one hour later... here you go! There are from the first 2 weeks here..
A girl walking from Shimo. All babies here are carried this way. It is awesome.
Kids waiting for us at one of the distributions. What smiles!
Re-bagging all the 200 lb. bags of maize and beans for the food distributions.
With a little guy who stayed glued to me during the distributions in Shimo.
If you walk 30 minutes down the old train tracks that run through Kitale, you will find yourself next to a bunch of old warehouses. Walk behind the biggest one and you will find the little world of street kids that make up Oasis of Hope.
There are always a group of about 10 glue boys playing soccer just outside; on the right side is the office, where you can find the very wise and smiling Jeffrey, who started the place. In the middle of the grassy area is a very old, dead Toyota station wagon in which you can usually find Manuel, sitting in his “office” when he’s not teaching the kids. On the left is the large classroom where everyone does Bible, Kiswahili, Social Studies, and Maths together. In the breaks between classes, some kids play marbles in the dirt, some clean up the classroom, some scrounge up old pieces of notebooks to sketch on, and some play jacks with rocks.
At lunch time, everyone finds a spot to sit and someone passes out old plastic cups. The edges of the cups are jagged and crooked because the glue withdrawal makes the kids chew on almost everything. A boy brings a jug of river water over and fills the cups, and everyone rinses off their hands with it and drinks the rest. The cook brings in a gigantic pot of rice and a gigantic pot of beans, and huge portions are dished up and passed out. Everyone eats ravenously with their hands for 2 minutes, and then the plastic bags come out of the pockets. The remaining rice and beans are dumped into them for dinner that night, when the kids be back on the streets. Some of the older kids get extra food from the younger kids, and some of the kids from the slums give their food to the street kids. For whatever reason, there is never any fighting during this time. Boys haul more water in from the river and the girls wash all 60 plates and cups. At 2pm everyone leaves, walking in all different directions – some to town to beg, some to go refill their glue bottles, others back to the slums, and some to stake out where they will sleep that night. They walk away with bags of rice and beans sagging in their pockets and old winter coats with holes around their waists to sleep in.
And that’s a day at Oasis. It is both awesome and heartbreaking to spend time with these kids. To me they are so brave, so strong, so conflicting... these beautiful children with adult addictions, who have gone through things no child OR adult should ever have to deal with.
I hate seeing them later on the streets, with the glue bottles hidden under their shirts, but I wonder if I would be doing anything different if I'd experienced what some of them have. Probably not. I am just happy they care enough to come to Oasis each day, and that I have the privilege of hanging out with them.
On Monday I went with Anne, TI’s social worker, to talk with the teachers at the primary school (grades 1-8) in Shimo. Shimo is a slum a few blocks down from the compound with a big alcohol problem and lots of orphans; four girls recently dropped out of the school because of pregnancy. The teachers really wanted to start an after-school program for grades 6-8 to encourage the kids who are high(est) risk for dropping out. Enter Andrew, Nate, Lauren, and I…
On Tuesday we headed to the school at 3pm and found ourselves in a room with 130 kids in it, from 12 to 18 years old. We introduced ourselves and asked them each to write a question they had about anything on some note cards we brought.
Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into.
At 8pm that night we finished reading them all. Kids wrote up to 8 questions on one small card, and topics included everything from AIDS to Obama to dating.
A few that were particularly startling:
“How old are you when you get your period?” (written by a 13-year old girl)
“Where did HIV come from? I heard it was America. Is this true?”
“If you just started doing drugs and wanted to stop, what would you do?”
“Why do men rape small children?”
“What would you do if you’d been raped more than a week ago?”
“If you were 16 years old and did sex with an 11 year old, would it be a rape case?”
“How would you advise your father if he is a drunk?
“If somebody wants to be killed because you’ve refused to be his boyfriend, what would you do?”
“As a Christian, what would you do if you found a thief stealing maize from your garden?”
“If you live in a poverty family and your parents drink and when you arrive home they tell you to sell alcohol, and when you refuse you will not live there and you are a student, what will you do?”
How do we even begin to answer these?
We managed to divide all the questions into 8 major topics and hope to talk with them about one a week until December. Pray for us.
On a lighter note, some of the questions made us laugh quite a bit.
“How many boyfriends does a person really must have?”
“I’ve heard that in American they like eating snail and snake, true or false?”
“Why is our government so confused?”
“When I marry a European, will I have to pay a dowry or not?”
1. Kenyans do not use deodorant. 2. A retractable pen can keep a group of 10 kids entertained for an hour. 3. The food is amazing.
I can’t emphasize that last one enough; maybe a nice severe case of food poisoning will change things, but being a vegetarian seems to save me from long episodes with Mr. Loo. For breakfast we generally have passionfruit, little African bananas, mangoes, or green oranges, along with toast and avocado with salt and pepper. The avocados here are – no exaggeration – the size of footballs, and cost 15 shillings (about 10 cents) at the market.! Lunch involves white rice with spicy vegetable curry or plain red beans, accompanied by chapatti, a naan-like flatbread (very yum). Dinner is usually at the compound and as all us interns rotate with cooking, we’ve had everything from lattyja (Finnish crepes) to fettuccini with bruschetta to Texan tacos to banana coconut pancakes.
Glue Boys
Last week we each chose what projects we want to be involved with for the next few months. One of the places I’ll be working is called Oasis, in downtown Kitale. It is a drop-in shelter for street kids, open 5 days a week, where they serve breakfast, have Math, Social Studies, English, and Swahili classes, then serve a big lunch before closing at 2pm. Glue is the drug of choice for almost all these kids, because it is cheap and accessible, curbs the appetite and keeps them warm at night, not to mention gives a lot of them enough of a high to forget the abusive or parentless households they’ve left. You can find them all over Kitale, usually begging for money to buy more glue, or getting kicked around by shop owners, who treat them so badly. The kids aren’t allowed to enter Oasis with glue, so it encourages many of them to stay off it for most of the day. If a child shows enough self-discipline and commitment towards school, the teachers work with them for a few months, getting them back up to their grade level, so they can transfer to a boarding school, or move into a foster home and start at a local school. A few will go back to the streets, but the majority of kids from the Oasis program stick with it. There’s a recent movie I highly recommend called Glue Boys, filmed here in Kitale, about the street kids. Not only does it show the area I’m in, but a lot of the kids I’ll be working with. It also explains a lot about the vicious glue cycle; there is a huge corporation in the US deliberately producing glue without a very inexpensive nasal irritant in it, because they know their sales (to street kids) will drop significantly if they do. Who are these people with no moral compasses? How can some rich American businessman live with himself knowing his salary comes from starving orphans using his product for something it was never intended for, killing brain cells and burning up their lungs? It’s disgusting seeing people with so much being so greedy.
Anyway.
We are off to Shimo, the slum just down the road from the base, to speak with the teachers there about doing an after-school program with grades 6-8. Lots of doors opening up! Good stuff.
We are back in Kitale after a crazy couple days in Nairobi. We followed Daniel around the city like a row of ducklings clutching our bags for dear life. The boys bought drums at the market, the girls bartered for jewelry, and we all had real lattes at a Starbuck-esque café. On the 8-hour overnight bus ride home we passed 2 overturned semis, but did not get hijacked (which has been happening a lot at night on the roads from Nairobi to Kitale). It’s good to be back home in the boonies.
It should be noted that Kitale is next to the village where America’s potential future president’s grandmother came from, and his Dad is from a well known Kenyan tribe. There are people all over wearing Obama ’08 shirts, and even boda bodas and matatus with Obama’s face painted on them. Currently playing at a theatre in Nairobi: “Obama: The Musical!” (no joke). My personal favourite is a song I heard on the radio 5 minutes after arriving in Kenya, and have since heard almost every day since:
Well this is not about class, nor colour, race, nor creed, Make no mistake it’s te changes well all the people dem need
Then I’m a shout out.. Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, ooy ooy,
Now you can hear it in the morning (Obama!) And you can hear it in the evening (Obama!) Black man and white man shouting (Obama!) Dem hear the groove and dem is moving (Obama!)
It is not Hillary Clinton (Obama!), and it is not John McCain (Obama!) It is not Chuck Norris (Obama!), and I know it’s not John Wayne (Obama!) It is not the one Rambo (Obama!), And it is not the Terminator (Obama!) But the new trendsetter (Obama!) The mountain of the whole America and dem shout out…
African-American rise, and keep your eyes on the prize, Cause now none of them realize, the black men is in their eyes. Well it’s no joke, it’s a fact, we’re gonna point the white house black And I can’t believe it’s true, black gonna run the red white and blue.
-- Barack Obama by Cocoa Tea
In addition to all this, the town where Barrack’s grandma is from is now being referred to simply as “Obama”.
Needless to say, I’m pretty stoked to be here during the election. *a
One of the 5 dirtiest and most dangerous cities in the world! Yeeeah! Great to be here.
Apart from our hotel bathroom overflowing and the power going out about 5 times a day here, things are fine. We are here till tomorrow night, visiting one of Nairobi's major slums (it has 47, including one that is the largest in all of Africa), seeing off the old Canadian team, and visiting the markets.
After one week living in Kenya, I feel very qualified to note some significant cultural differences between this country and my own.
The main oddity is walking through the streets and having black people stop, turn, stare at you, and say “mzungu!” (white person). All the kids do it and a good percentage of adults. It is so bizarre. After they’ve gotten over the initial shock of your skin colour, many of them will say “how are you!” as though it’s a greeting instead of a question. If you ask them how they are, they will respond in perfect English, “I am fine thank you.” You can tell it’s the one thing they recited endlessly in school.
Speaking of school, when we visit schools here, we are infallibly ushered to some meeting room with a stage with seats on it, where everyone else sits on benches below us. We watch the kids perform some sort of song or dance, are given a choice of Fanta sodas, and fed a 5 course typical African meal. This happens everywhere. It gets frustrating after a few times when you just want to sit with the kids and not drink all 5 sodas they serve you (it is considered rude not to finish something you've been served here). But as we are constantly reminded, it is a cultural thing and they would consider themselves extremely rude NOT to treat us this way. Adjustments...
Another difference that is exceptionally difficult for my more feministic side to accept is that men reign supreme here, and it dictates most things about women’s lives. As Meredith so tactfully explained, “thighs and butt in Kenya are the equivalent of boobs in the North America”. So we generally wear long skirts when we go out to the projects, or capri pants. Exposed shoulders are also pretty risqué so let’s just say all us girls are getting killer farmer tans. (When we have free time on the compound, we put on shorts and tanks and try to counteract the bad tan lines we have from the week. The compound is pretty private so we can wear whatever, thank goodness.) However, even if you’re walking through town wearing the most modest clothing, men will gawk shamelessly at you. Saying ‘jambo’ or ‘how are you’ is considered leading them on, so you’re encouraged to just walk by in silence. (Words cannot describe how difficult this is for me.)
On that note, the last few days in town we’ve run into circumcision ceremonies, generally involving a mob of men running down the street with branches and the lucky fellow (usually in his 20’s) in the middle, naked and covered in white dust. No envy for the men here at that point. Today there was a ceremony for a guy in his sixties! Yowch.
Lastweek we went with our team of old Canadian folks to visit St. Anthony’s School for the Deaf and St. Theresa’s SpecialSchool for the Mentally Disabled.It was an interesting contrast since both had equal need but only one of them spent most of the time asking for funding. The kids at both were amazing; so well behaved and disciplined. Not surprisingly, the deaf school was pretty quiet and organized, but at least 120 mentally disabled kids sat for perfectly still for over an hour while we listened to speeches from the chairmen of the school. And no Ritalin in any of them! It was incredible. There is a very well-instilled respect here among kids… zero whining, assumed responsibility for any younger siblings, lots of manners.
We also went out to Kolongola, a community with a major AIDS problem, and did another food distribution. It was amazing to me how many of these young, quiet widowed women came up to accept their food and when we asked them what we could pray for, they just said “to be a good parent to my children”. The fact that that is such a priority for them in a time of so much chaos in their own lives and country is baffling to me. We were also able to tell Victor and Mary, the couple who run the aid program in Kolongola, that there was enough money from supporters to buy a nearby piece of land to build a community shelter on. Mary started yelling and crying and clapping and Victor explained that she has been fasting and praying for this land for months. It was such a great moment for everyone.
Hope everyone is well..
More when we're back home in Kitale!
*a
P.S. Edit… I am hoping the reason I’m not getting texts from anyone is because I typed one too many zeros on the original number I posted.. the revised is 011254715222112.
