Meeting my Church!

On Friday morning I hurriedly phoned the Methodist Guest House in Nairobi to try to reach David Berry, Celia Booher, or Rachel Aker or anyone I knew from the group of Second Presbyterian (and people from the interfaith leadership team) volunteers coming to Kenya that day.  I was so excited that people I knew and people coming from a program I was familiar with were coming to visit Kenya for the first time.  Two of the youth on the trip were in my bible study class in 2009-2010, so I couldn't wait to see them again!

I finally got a hold of someone on the phone and I was able to meet them at the Giraffe Center on the other side of Nairobi.  After one of the longest taxi trips I have been on in Nairobi (without traffic jams), I found the group enamored with a giraffe who was eating food pellets out of their mouths!  There I saw Rachel (one of the only youth I knew ahead of time, and was really happy to see the surprised sense of excitement when she figured out who I was.  The group took me on their whole day adventure from the Giraffe Center to the Elephant Orphanage, to Java House for lunch, to the "Alive and Kicking" football manufacturer, and to the Carnivore Restaurant for dinner!

They explained that the purpose of their trip was to build the relationship between the "Kenya Help Us" fundraising program in Indianapolis and the program beneficiaries in Kenya.  Each youth was developing a research project on a specific aspect of life in Kenya.  More information about the program here.  Some were looking at women's issues, others at Education, and others at many topics known to be of concern in the country.  They really wanted to know first hand what life was like for the people they were raising funds for.  This seems like a great approach because it gives these young Americans exposure to many issues that have not been a part of their lives in Indianapolis, while also being respectful of the people they are hoping to help.  They are not interested in telling these orphaned youth how to live a better life because it would take years for an outsider to understand the dynamics that have created the current environment.  However, they want to get feedback from the program coordinators and the orphans themselves as to what has changed in their lives and how they cope to existing conditions.  I hope there is time for me to teach them what I have learned about the issues they are researching.  Even after a year of working with many people and organizations, there are still many questions that I have about what it takes to provide positive opportunities to people growing up in marginalized communities.

It was really great to talk to some people from home about subjects so familiar to me and so foreign to my environment.  I talked to Noah and Ben about boy scouts and track and field, and I talked to David Berry and Emily Matthews about Seminary.  Many of the group members talked to me about their first impressions and how they had reached this point.  It was nice to be a mediator between the group and some of Kenyan culture as they made plans and worked with their drivers and program coordinators.  It was like a taste of what it will be like to go home I think.  I started telling stories of my experience here - some stories that I haven't told anyone about yet.  I forget how certain stories are really quite tragic and painful to hear for an outsider.  Some stories of treatment of girls in Pokot land and living conditions in much of Kenya were a bit shocking to hear about, but when you learn about these conditions from the people living it, you forget about the shocking reality because the people themselves tell you with smiling faces.  My sense of what is normal is a bit skewed for the time being.

At dinner, we were treated to extra plates of meat (which at a place called Carnivore, you can imagine is really good!), free drinks (non alcoholic of course), and a birthday cake to celebrate Christine's birthday!  This was all provided by the manager whose daughter is now working at a hospital in Indianapolis in part because of their connection to Emily Matthews who was a leader on this trip!  You can tell how proud he is of his daughter and how appreciative he is of the opportunities she was given.  Here you can see how the staff of Carnivore celebrates birthdays.  The manager got the entire staff including cooks, waiters, and anyone else wearing a staff uniform! :)

The Spark of Scouting Alive in Kenya

I was invited to attend a District Scout Camporee in Murang'a, Kenya this weekend by the District Executive who has been working with CWS Africa to provide adult leader trainings for expanding scouting in Murang'a District. 

The scouts I met did not have the capability to raise lots of money to do cool things like go to week long summer camps, trek across untouched wilderness, and build expensive monuments for historic events that are only historic because there is now a monument as we do in the US. They still had the same drive to learn scouting survival skills and enjoy entertaining each other with skits and songs, but there was something different. The songs they were singing were all new, written for specific needs and challenges in their community. One group of patrols was asked to come up with a song to sing to the President and Primeminister to ask them to settle the Internally Displaced People affected by post election violence. Another group of songs was about protecting the Mao Forest from deforestation due to development. Others had different environmental and peace related messages. They created the songs and skits right there! No regurgitating answers or copycatting. These guys made up new material just for these worthy messages.

It changes my understanding of the Kenyan school system a bit. Until now, I have only seen students looking for the "right" answer to give back to the teacher so they can pass the exam and move on to the next grade. I have been complaining that the tests (much like standardized tests in the US) make creativity a nuisance. Teachers only teach what is in the book and most students memorize the answers with out ever understanding why the Pythagorean theorem works or why what goes up must come down. I think it is much worse in Kenya than the US because teachers here are paid less than domestic workers. Teaching gives you such leadership and responsibility in the community, but not the financial appreciation from the government.


In any case, these kids were great. They were disciplined yet funny, caring and compassionate. The adult leadership was pretty hard on them, but that is what I have come to expect from adults in authority in Kenya... In any case, I enjoyed getting to meet over three hundred youth involved in the event. I also sang them a song from my boyscout camp: Ransburg. I sang them a song that was not in English, Kiswahili, Kikuyu, Arabic, or any other language as so to not put anyone at the advantage of understanding the song:) It is a repeat after me song. Here are the words:
FLEE
FLEE FLY
FLEE FLY FLOW
KUMALADA KUMALADA KUMALADA VISTA
OHH NO NO NOT THE VISTA
EENY MEANY DESAMINY OWALAWALAMINY
HEXAMINI SOLAMINY OOWALOWA
BEEBILLYOTTENDOTEN BOBOBODETENDOTTENBOBOBODETENDOTTEN BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ

It was great to hear their kikuyu accent try to pronounce the "L's" :)  They didn't get the last part AT ALL!
To see all photos from this trip, visit my facebook album here.

Writing for Church World Service

Eastern Africa Review

Since I started working for Church World Service in September, I have done many writing, video, and photo projects, but the one that sums up most of the work I have been doing is the biannual newsletter that CWSEA sends out to its partner organizations and donors.  I hope you can take some time to read about the people I have been working with here!  I have traveled to Tanzania, Rwanda, and all over Kenya to talk with the people who implement CWSEA programs and the beneficiaries.  I try to focus on understanding the experiences of people I meet.  Interpreting commentary from people that see you as a "donor" or a rich white person and speak in a language you don't understand leaves a lot of room for false impressions.  I think I need several more years working with each organization I have met in order to really understand the thoughts of the people involved.  Even so, communication can often be beyond words.  Just the smiles, stares, tears, and hugs shared can give you much more information than an hour of conversation. 

My fellow YAV, Grace, explained very well the reason why both she and I haven't written any blogs in the last few months.  I finally feel at home here in Kenya and have found people to share my stories with here.  I often think about things I want to tell friends like you (where ever you are), but life has become very busy!  My sister Katie and friend Paige came to visit from Chicago in January and we all were able to reflect on our own lives quite a bit.  We visited CWSEA programs and many of the friends I have made around the country.  I tortured them with many long bus rides and over-packed schedules!  Somehow we found a lot of time to talk.

"Lions! Ahh!"  Katie: "I think we should go."

Upon reflection of my life in Kenya, my aspirations, and other thoughts I found our conversations pulling me to the conclusion that I should be learning more about Theology and the church and going to seminary to solidify my ideas about community development, environmental stewardship, and interfaith partnership.  Since Katie and Paige are both ordained pastors, I wanted to make sure I wasn't just reacting to their coolness and jumping on the seminary band wagon.  After a month of thought and prayer and applications to seminary, it seems like I really want to go!

I have applied to Princeton, Union in NYC, and McCormick in Chicago.  I am not sure where I will end up, which is a huge turn from my original plans to go back to Indianapolis to start working for Urban Mountain Farms.  I still feel called to working in community development and staying involved in Urban Mountain Farms,  but I have put a lot of value on developing my personal theology to lead the work that I will do in the future.  I think God has been trying to get me to apply to seminary for almost a year now, but I have consistently ran from the idea until now.  I am excited for this new opportunity to return to the classroom and really challenge and solidify my ideas.  You can also read my seminary application essay if you want to know more about why I am going.

Let me know what you think about the articles I wrote for the EA Review!  It would be great to hear how you are doing.  Peace and Love.

Water for Life - Changing Lives in 2010

Alone in the Crowd

On my walk home from work today, I noticed a strange site on the opposite side of the street.  There was a man laying face down on the sidewalk.  This is on a busy sidewalk flanked by a highway and a local street where thousands of people walk daily to get on buses and matatus (minibuses) to get all over the city.  He was already on the ground when I first spotted him, so there must have been at least a hundred people that walked around him on this small sidewalk before someone started staring at him from a distance.  I walked across the street, crouched down and asked “are you ok?”  He responded in Swahili, and I quickly realized I was not going to be very helpful to him. 

It seemed as if he was having a seizure and was convulsing on the ground while staring at a small brown paper bag.  The man staring at a distance crouched down next to me and took some pills out of the bag to show to our patient.  More mumbled talking commenced before the man took two pills and delicately placed them in his mouth.  Then, he and another man in the growing crowd around us picked the fallen man up and sat him down on a small burm next to the sidewalk.  Seeing as my usefulness in the situation as a flag-raiser was over, I left the crowd of thirty people and a taxi that had stopped to ask about our patient.  He seemed to be ok now that he was not prostrate.

Sometimes I feel like I need someone to ask “are you ok?” even if it is in the wrong language.  This morning, the first thing my coworker, Michael, said to me when I came into the office was, “You look tired.”  He didn’t exactly ask if I was ok, but it was assumed that I would explain my new look.  I didn’t even realize I felt tired, let alone looked it.  I told him I had been up late reading a book and would wake up soon.  As the day drug on though, I realized I was tired.  I was also distracted from every task I tried to accomplish.  I started working on all five articles I am writing about various programs at Church World Service for the East Africa Review that I am publishing in January.  I kept floating from one subject to the next to feel busy, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.  I looked up and another of my coworkers who had arrived late asked why I looked so tired.  Do I really look that bad?

After a little more squirming through information on my computer, I decided these warning signs couldn’t be ignored.  I needed to do something about this tiredness!  I bolted out of the office in search of a future running path on our compound.  I have been looking for some regular source of exercise since arriving in Kenya, but nothing has really stuck with me.  You can’t really run on the streets during the day and there are no parks or affordable gyms near my apartment.  I walked past a flock of kindergartener sized, ugly-headed, long beaked birds that were milling in the trash pile at the back of the office compound.  Some flew away when I walked by which was a bit startling because their huge wings made a really loud flapping noise as they ascended into a neighboring tree.  Figuring out that there was no good place to run at my office was just the first in a string of events that I undertook today to establish more concrete “self care” strategies for my year here. 

My fellow YAV, Michael and I discussed how after going to the same church for two months, it still feels like we are visitors.  We are still getting to know the friends we have met there, we are still getting used to making the journey to the church early Sunday morning, and we are still trying to pay attention to the 45 minute sermons that accompany the wonderful half hour of praise music we are trying to learn.  What is hard to realize is that we really are still visitors in this country.  We are still new immigrants to a place that demands to be treated differently than the places we came from.  There are many things that I still haven’t done successfully on a regular basis: buying affordable groceries at the market in the nearby slum, exercising, washing clothes to name a few.  I still don’t have a regular routine. 

I am glad I am not alone here.  I have friends from work and church, my group of young adult volunteers, and other people all over the country and the world to talk to each day.  I don’t even have to speak the right language, and I can find someone to help me take care of me.  But I do have to do something to catch someone’s attention.  Luckily, this morning I didn’t have to wait until I was wriggling face down on the floor for someone to notice I looked different than “normal.”  Now I have the next 8 months to ask for help to identify what I need to do to function properly.

For most people, immigrating to Nairobi is not as easy as it has been for me.  The typical immigrant is a poor villager moving to the city to find a job to support his/her family.  Finding shelter, securing food, meeting new people, and beginning to look for a job is much harder when no one is helping you and very few people understand the language you are speaking.  The slums we marched through with Henry’s church last month are filled with millions of people who are living alone on the edge of starvation and may never feel at home there.   They live without electricity, running water, toilets, trash collection, secure housing, and opportunities for education.  To them, globalization has nothing to do with lightning fast internet, bananas from Peru, cars from Japan, and scissors from China.  Globalization is fishing them out of their secure village life and forcing them to look for a new way of life in a place much more foreign to them than it is to me.

Even with millions of people with the same human issues walking past you every day, you just need that one person to recognize when something is amiss.  I am glad I could at least ask the first question that led to my prostrate patient’s recovery.  I am grateful that I have people checking up on me in Kenya to figure out what is going on inside me.  I pray that everyone has someone that will stop to ask “are you ok?”

The Importance of Playing Checkers

Kadakoi is a small pastoral community in the heart of East Pokot, Kenya.  This is an area that has been plagued with drought over the last ten years because of climate change, but has been traditionally arid throughout history.  I visited Kadakoi as part of a video project to shed light on the success of Church World Service’s Water for Life program.  The program director would like to expand the program internally by being a better fundraiser and externally by making proposals to the Kenyan Government to expand funding of rural water projects with the Millennium Development Goal financing they have available.

Our visit to Kadakoi was different than other Evaluation and Monitoring visits I have been on so far.  Typically, I have been in a group of visitors including local program staff and CWS staff on a scheduled visit to many communities in a region in one day.  They welcome us warmly, show us the results of our project implementation, have a meeting to discuss future plans, and quickly leave after dancing in celebration to the local songs and drums.   This time, we spent two days with the same community from sun up to sun down.  The video crew preferred shooting during those times because the lighting makes images look natural and easy on the eyes.  At first we sat through a meeting with the whole community, which consists of some Christians who are a minority to those who practice the traditional religion of the village.  The pastor prayed and led the meeting with a speech about what has happened since CWS came to work with the village to establish a local water resource.

In this region of East Pokot, the only viable way to retrieve water is to drill a bore hole to establish a deep water well.  The first location that local surveyors determined to drill ended up having no water, but the disappointment was overcome by drilling a second bore hole that was successful.  This work was mainly done by our partner organization in the region, Farming Systems Kenya.  Drilling bore holes is expensive – up to $10,000 for one hole – because of the drilling equipment and, in this case, the remote location.  The community was responsible for providing local materials such as sand, stone, and water to construct the well and dig the trench to pipe the water from the bore hole to a central location.  Now anyone in the community can pay two to five shillings (2-5 cents) to get water for cooking and cleaning for the day locally.  Previously, women and children were responsible for collecting water in 20 liter jerry cans from polluted water sources over 10 kilometers away.  This took eight hours out of a woman’s day which was also filled with normal chores of cooking, cleaning clothes, building a home, and caring for livestock.  Needless to say, these women and children were constantly tired, easily got disease from contaminated water, and never had an opportunity to consider an education.

Now that these women can easily retrieve clean water within their community, they have eight extra healthy hours in their day to commit to other activities.  Children have been encouraged to go to school by their parents – instead of girls fetching water with their mothers and boys herding goats and cows.  A hotel, a restaurant, and a general store have all opened up around the new water point.  All these businesses are managed and operated by women.  There were many healthy babies being carried around during our visit, which is evidence of the health of the women and community as a whole.

During the day, we were not responsible for any official documentation, so I took the time to get to know some of the community members.  It was culturally appropriate for me to talk with the men first, so I joined a small group of men congregated next to the water point.  Some men were reading the newspaper, some were chatting with each other, and others were playing a game that I thought was checkers.  It ended up being a slightly different game, although I was able to beat one of the guys at it after figuring out the rules!  I played a few rounds while asking questions and then taught them how to play my version of checkers.  The guys I was talking with were either in school or had completed high school.  Luckily for me, this meant we could talk in English.

After narrowly defeating one of the guys at both his version of checkers and my own, I ventured out to talk with other members of the community.  I met a group of women grinding their local crop of corn into flour with a posho mill, a woman selling goods at her general store, a large group of women weaving baskets and selling vegetables from their gardens, and even a three year old girl collecting firewood for her mother’s restaurant kitchen.  None of these women had any advanced education like the men, and yet they looked as though they understood much more about community, business, and the products of their labor.

Many people in Kenya consider these Pokot men to be lazy.  They sit around on their elders chairs and watch the women do all the work – even building their house.  My coworker, Sammy, is not one of those people.  When he was visiting some of our partner communities in West Pokot two years ago, a group of cattle raiders crossed into the village where he was staying.  From the top of a hill where his guest house was located, he watched all the village men come together with their own AK47’s to protect the village from the raiders.  These men were able to hold off the raiders long enough for them to decide to move to the next town.  He points out that no women were involved in this dangerous mission.  “If you were to ask a Pokot woman if the men in her village are lazy, she will just laugh at you.”  This is because they consider these men very important for protection as well as for guidance.  During the long hours of sitting in the elder’s chairs, those men are discussing important business, marriages, and the effects of predicted weather patterns and government policy. 

So, playing checkers is very important for the survival of the entire community.  My question is why does it have to be only the men?  The water committee developed to oversee the continued maintenance of the water source is required to have equal numbers of men and women.  This has allowed women to take on a new role of leadership in a project that directly affects their lives.  The water committee members are all Christians in this particular village where the majority is not.  This has irritated existing views of the church in Kenya as being corrupt.  A lack of trust in the leadership of the community and their new resource is sure to cause problems in the future.  Perhaps a game of checkers could lead to a peaceful resolution.

For more images from this trip please visit my facebook photo album.

Kenyan Culture: Food