Rough Hands, New Lifestyle

My hands are beginning to look ROUGH. It's because I've actually been using them...

... mainly in my household chores. They are numerous, despite the fact that my apartment is just a 12x12ft room with a small bathroom attached. To begin with, there's laundry to do, and hand-washing is the name of the game. Once a week I sit in my bathroom with a plastic bucket in front of me and I scrub clothes for a good hour-and-a-half. When I wash my jeans, bedsheets, and bath towel in particular, I feel as though I'm wrestling with some big guy. Every time I challenge him to a match he resists being beaten down, wrung out, and hung out to dry, and usually gets the upper hand over my weakened, aching muscles. And the detergent. It burns! My knuckles have bruises from that detergent; the white powder sizzles the already-raw skin on my fingers and it continues to burn hours after I've finished doing my laundry.

My apartment complex

Do I complain about hand-washing my wardrobe every week? No, not at all. Instead I've developed an appreciation for the effort that goes into a seemingly simple task. I've always taken doing laundry for granted back home where everyone lives by their machine washers and dryers without a second thought. In particular, I've come to admire the Kenyan women who I've seen sitting on the street corners of Nairobi, waiting for cars to pull over and hire them to do washing or other house-holds chores for just a few Kenyan shillings.

But of course there's also cooking, a much more enjoyable endeavor! Ugali, Chapatis, Egg Chapatis, Rice Pilau, Vegetable Stew, Fried Rice, Ndengu (aka lentil stew), sauces, relishes, mashed banana dishes... when it comes to Kenyan food, I've tried many things. Yet I admit I have not yet mastered the art of making chapatis. A "chapati" is basically just flat bread fried in oil and eaten with Ndengu or other kinds of stew. Yet during the mixing process, the chapati dough must be exactly the right consistency with enough oil added so that the bread doesn't become dry and brittle, but remains soft and flexible. Then the rolling requires artful skill and attention. The chapati is useless, according to a Kenyan friend of mine, if it is not rolled in a perfect circle with just the right thickness. I'm glad that friend wasn't around the last time I tried making Chapatis because it turned out to be a fiasco. My little kitchenette in the apartment looked like a war-torn disaster zone, and I even got a battle scar, burning my forearm on the hot frying pan as I tried desperately to role a perfect chapati circle! But I'm fine. Just learning, I suppose. Next time will be better, but I think I'll wait a few days and let my burn heal before I attempt making chapatis again.

Cooking and doing laundry are of course essential tasks for me here. Yet they have both become increasingly difficult to accomplish due to the water shortages I've been experiencing in my home. With the country currently facing a severe drought, water rationing has become a normal part of every day life. Some days, maybe even two or three days in a row, I wake up in the morning to find that there is no water in the pipes. In these cases I resort to my water storage tank, graciously supplied to me by my OAIC office even though it was expensive. When using it I carefully measure how much water I fetch in the bucket to wash my dishes, take a bath, or do my laundry. I've come to realize the amount of water I've been wasting back home in my comfortable, yet somewhat irresponsible, American lifestyle. Other mornings I wake to water gushing out of the faucet. Those are the days I rejoice and cherish a hot shower right away before the water vanishes again unexpectedly. I can only imagine what this water shortage situation looks like in Nairobi's slum communities such as Kiambio or Kibera, and elsewhere around Kenya, where entire families do not have the luxury of a nice water storage tank sitting right outside their door...

So even though my hands are becoming rougher every day, for me it means that I am adjusting to a new lifestyle here in Kenya. I shake hands with people whose palms are rougher than my own, acknowledging the strength and capability required for various aspects of Kenyan life, and I aspire to it!

Some interesting photos from these past few weeks:

Several cows riding in the back of a small pick-up truck, Downtown Nairobi.

The graduation ceremony for Daniel (center), a co-worker of mine from OAIC. Also pictured: Daniel's family&friends, and John Padwick, a British expatriate and one of my supervisors at OAIC.

At the Animal Orphanage, Nairobi National Park.


Uhuru Park, Downtown Nairobi.

Ethiopian Food. It may look unappetizing here, but the taste is fantastic.

Ngong Women's Cooperative

Members of Ngong Women's Cooperative

Yesterday I went with a colleague of mine to visit a women's cooperative connected with the OAIC in a town called Ngong right outside of Nairobi. The group had formed after the 2007 post-election violence, when more than 1500 Kenyans lost their lives in the ethnic clashes that ravaged the country. Nairobi's slum neighborhoods felt the impact of the violence more severely than other areas of the city. Houses were burned, stores looted, and people murdered because of their tribal or political affiliations.

After meeting with the Ngong Women's Cooperative, I realized I was witnessing the aftermath of this violence first hand. Many of the members had lost their homes and businesses to fire and vandalism during the conflict. With families to support and mouths to feed, the women had banded together as a group and appealed for a loan from the OAIC to start small-scale businesses. The large group is divided into subgroups of five women each, and these subgroups hold one another accountable for repaying their loans in small increments over a period of time. Now the members have been able to open vegetable kiosks at the market, beauty salons, and tailoring businesses as a result of their cooperative.

I visited a group member named Alice's beauty salon, which was just a small tin shack with a chair and a small shelf of chemical hair products on one wall. Alice told me that for a while business had been good and that she had a lot of regular customers. Yet in recent months her clients have dwindled. Many people, she explained, are beginning to prioritized other basic needs such as food over plaiting their hair. The current economic hardship that many Kenyans face and the increased prices on commodities have had a clear impact on people like Alice. Yet the beautician remained optimistic, saying that she had almost finished repaying her first loan, and that with her second loan she would buy a hairdryer for her salon.

I felt like yesterday's meeting was very successful and that the women accepted me into their midst. They asked me who I was and why I was visiting them, wanting to know how they could benefit directly from my work. When I told them that I wanted to hear their stories and experiences in order to share them with the public (ie. potential donors), the women were excited. They wish to make their group known in a wider context, to show what they are doing at the grassroots level and to attract future support for their cooperative.

I will revisit the group again tomorrow and spend the entire afternoon with them. They've offered to take me around to see their businesses and to meet more of their members. Hopefully I will be able to take pictures (with the women's consent, of course!) to display on our new OAIC website. I also want to capture the essence of their group by recording the members' individual as well as collective experiences, and sharing these stories with wider African as well as international communities.

Beginning Work at the OAIC

My YAV group with some friends from Meru.

It's about time for another post!
So a lot has happened since I was last in touch. My group of volunteers split up and moved out to our individual work sites around the country. It wasn't as dramatic for me because I only had to move right down the street, whereas a few of the other volunteers moved to towns several hours away from Nairobi.

This year I'll be working at the Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC), which is an ecumenical body with branches all around the African continent. African Instituted (or Independent) Churches began during the colonial period as a reaction against the Christian missionary efforts of European colonizers. These independent churches blend traditional values and practices with more mainstream forms of Christianity. The OAIC fosters a number of social programs in AIC communities such as HIV/Aids outreach, food security, and the empowerment of women and youth.

The organization's headquarters are located here in Nairobi, and I'm working for their international office in the communications department. My main job will be to collect stories from the field, and write articles about what is happening on the ground at the various sites connected with the OAIC. This means there is a lot of travel in store for me, around Kenya, East Africa, and the African continent. Actually, I just found out that in November I'll go to Nigeria and Botswana to visit the OAIC offices in those two countries. There is also a possibility that I'll go to Ghana later in the year, which would be excellent! I'm very excited about the opportunity to travel and see different parts of Africa, and maybe to visit Ghana again. The work really draws on my anthropology experience a lot, which is great and not something I fully anticipated. And I'm becoming more and more interested in communications as a field, so we'll see where that leads.

Cooking Kenyan food-- Ugali and stew

I've been learning to take matatu's (minibuses) around the city... they are crazy. They drive up on sidewalks and across round-about medians, and I've almost been run down by several now. Not to worry! I'm fine. I've also been learning to cook Kenyan food. Chapatis is probably my favorite. It's like Indian flatbread and you eat it with this lentil stew called "ndengu". So delicious. It's been nice meeting some Kenyans through work, and through the guest house where I was staying before I moved into my apartment. I've made good friends already, and they've been taking me around the city and showing me the ropes.

I hope you are enjoying reading my posts, even though I know they are few and far in between... I promise to work on that!