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Monday 19 December 2011

Krismasi njema!

Posted by: Dan

Well, first of all, I’d like to ask how on earth it got to be Christmas time already? When did that happen? One minute we were arriving in Kenya in July, hung over, confused, excited and overwhelmed – and the next there were Christmas lights flashing from Nairobi’s shopping malls and Jingle Bells was playing on the radio. Yeesh. That sorta passed me by. Perhaps not surprising as I sit here in my shorts and teeshirt sweltering in our apartment in one of the coolest parts of the country…

It’s quite bizarre to find that Christmas still exists even here. We half-thought we might escape it this year, but nope, it seems Kenyans are well up for a bit of Santa Claus. Apparently the man himself will be at The Junction Mall in the Nairobi suburbs this very weekend. Not since I was a kid have I been so impressed with Santa’s ability to overcome the seemingly impossible logistical task of being in Nairobi, London, St.Albans, Winsford, Lancaster and Edinburgh all at the same time, catering for all our festive wishes!

Other similarities here are that all kinds of Nairobians travel “up-country” to their villages for the festive period, much like us all travelling home to see family in the UK.  But in Kenya, Christmas is the end of the school year and often the only time Kenyans take any break from work.  This might be the only time they can afford a bus fare hundreds of miles home, to check on their land and crops, and see both the extended family, and even the wives and children they live apart from.  Kenyan families are BIG (at least 4 children in normal) and the more wives you have, the more it grows so there’s lots of people to see.  From the Kenyan folks we know here, Christmas day seems much like any other Kenyan celebration (a wedding for example) in that Christian worship plays a leading role,  and animals are slaughtered for roasting (the Kenyan national dish of nyama choma).  The decorations, presents and rich food we see advertised here are only for the small, urban percentage of middle class Kenyans who can afford it.

Here in Nairobi, it’s emptying fast as everyone heads up-country; less traffic and shorter queues (hooray!). We confess to having no tinsel, no tree, no chocolate advent calendar…. but don’t feel sorry for us, because this year, our Christmas present is:

Dr Matthew Ball!



Our great friend arrived this week to spend Christmas with us, and much like Santa (but with a PhD), he came loaded with presents from back home:

Here it all is! Including shoes for Helen's pavement-less commute,
risotto rice, sweets, and a whole lot of cheese...
Such. Good. Cheese!



Right now we are feeling massively lucky and loved, what with everything Matt’s brought (including an epic amount of cheese and risotto rice – he’s a legend!), and all the things Jake brought us too (including a hard-drive full of films and our beloved West Wing – awesome). Last night turned into a huge Christmas-fest as we unwrapped a massive parcel from my Mum and Dad containing everything required to recreate a xmas dinner – including tinned turkey breast and mini Christmas puds! We were overwhelmed – thanks M&D! (and thanks Jake for dragging all 2.9kgs all the way from the UK!) :o)

Ready to unwrap Mum & Dad's parcel, G&T in hand...
Detailed instructions for unwrapping our "Do it yourself Jones Christmas Dinner"
Christmas turkey in a can!
Mini Christmas puds!
Happy with all our awesome Christmas presents!
And our good fortune continues, as we’ll all be spending Christmas day on a dhow boat on the Indian ocean with some other volunteers we know.  Delicious fish BBQ and swimming have been promised, so we’ll report back in the new year.  I can almost smell the jealous rage that that plan will have provoked… but I comfort myself with the thought that we are supporting Kenya’s struggling economy and tourist industry. Which is of course the only reason we’re going. We’re taking one for the team.

It has to be said that as UK friends tell us about the recent snowfalls, the cold British winter nights seem very very far away.  As we enter this, our only Kenyan festive season, I thought I’d tell you what we’ll miss, and what we won’t, about Christmas this year:

What we won’t miss:

·    Working hard up to the final day, and Christmas Day becoming just the Day of Recovery in which your Christmas cold starts.  This year we have a lovely long break (sorry!)

·    Trying to be everywhere at once.  Christmas for us is normally a tight schedule of visits to all those we love.  And while we miss you all, we don’t miss the mad dash through Christmas traffic jams round the M25, up the M1, and up the M6. Although now we realise these are NOTHING compared to an average daily commute in Nairobi.

·    Christmas TV (apart from the occasional good film)

·    The strangeness of spending so much money on presents, decorations, other Christmas things.  We can report that even if you take that all away, it’s still Christmas, folks.

·    The cold.  Helen, in particular, won’t miss cold, grey, rainy days stuck indoors.


And what we will miss:

·    Seeing our family.

·    Seeing our favourite small children, including our beautiful goddaughter Erin Arbuthnnot – we’re terrified you’ll all be grown-ups by the time we’ve blinked and spent a year abroad.

·    Walks.  I’ll miss winter walks in forest and countryside a la The Jones Family.

·    Eating my Mum’s food.

·    Cheese.  Helen is gutted that the Christmas cheese boards are so far away. [But wait – thanks to Matt and M&D, there’s cheese in our kitchen right now! Woohoo!]

·    Seeing lots of our good friends, you know who you are chaps.  We wish we could pour you all a glass of mulled wine and tell you how awesome you are, and how much it means to feel your support from back home.  Love and big warm Christmas hugs to you all.


May we wish you all “Krismasi njema na mwaka mpya wenye fanaka.”  That’s “Good Christmas and new year with prosperity”

Thanks to our loyal readers – we’ll be back for more Jonchard shenanigans as the adventure continues in 2012…

Sunday 18 December 2011

Blogs we love

With Christmas holidays rather dominating the month, December's going to be a quiet time for new blog posts.  So, to get you through the fallow weeks ahead, we're recommending some top-class blogs to read in our absence.


Funny, true and brilliantly written, these VSO volunteer blogs are penned by friends in Nairobi and provide an extensive back-catalogue of stories, people and cultural comment that puts more meat on the bones of the life we describe.  There are many subjects that affect us here, but we won't write about them because our blogging friends have already nailed it; no need to re-hash.


If you have time over the holidays, settle down and enjoy the treats within (glass of sherry in hand, optional).



Aurelia in Kenya



Taking a year our from her job at HM Treasury to be a VSO, Aurelia Valvota joined her fiance Tom when his PhD research brought him to Nairobi.  Read great tales of their adventures, the people they've met in the 'robi and all illustrated by Tom's gorgeous photographs.  Her year over, Aurelia has just left Kenya and is back in her home town of...St Albans!  We look forward to seeing her in 2012, I'm confident our paths will cross.

aureliainkenya.wordpress.com



It began in Africa


Allys and Eddie are our neighbours in South B.  And regular drinking buddies.  And regular dinner guests.  And regular work-out partners.  You get the idea.  It all began when we arrived in Nairobi exactly one year after they had, and they welcomed us to South B with helpful chat and local wisdom (Allys) and the enthusiasm of a labrador (Eddie).  Luckily, our relationship quickly moved on from, Guys, how do I...? and, Guys, where can we...? conversations into proper friendship. 

They have an awesome blog, to which we're loyal readers.  Much more than a purported 'blend of holiday snaps and half-baked cultural analysis,' this blog is 18 months mature, and ripe for digesting.  Plus, Eddie gets deported half-way through so that makes a good story. 

allyseddie.blogspot.com


So, enjoy.  I'd consider it a personal favour if you didn't switch allegiance from Jonchards in Kenya to these fine blogs, but I wouldn't blame you...

Thursday 15 December 2011

Jake meets Kenya

In which Jake comes to stay, and we visit a new place called Tourist Kenya

Posted by: Helen

He's the one on the left
For one glorious week earlier this month, we played host to our good friend Jake Cocker. Taking the chance to visit Africa for the first time, he just booked a flight from the UK and left the rest to us. 

We half expected Jake to be stared at everywhere we went, due to him being a) white, b) 4 foot 2 and c) still clinging to the colonial moustache he'd grown in honour of his 'Movember' fundraising efforts. But we were delighted to discover that Kenyans welcomed Jake with as much energy as everyone else. Yes, it’s probably due to his easy charm and extensive knowledge of the English Premier League, but I think it’s also because:
  • Tourist money is tourist money, and a guy with ready dollars in search of food and souvenirs is everyone’s friend; and
  • There’s a lot more disability in Kenya.  With poverty and disability having a complex relationship, people with disabilities make up a higher percentage of the population here.  Whilst I’m guessing it was a sight to see a short white guy on crutches, nowhere did we make the stir we might have expected.

We've all been friends for 10 years but had never really holidayed together - so how would it go? Answer: brilliantly. Nice to know that even on a different continent, nothing stops the long chats, long card games and even longer rounds of 'The Movie Game' that are an inevitable part of us all hanging out.  Although discovering that Jake couldn’t recall my birthday, degree subject or full name led to a small diplomatic incident that we’ll say no more about.

In honour of Jake, who needed a little more accessibility than our average visitor, we swallowed our snobby ‘we are volunteers – we are better than mere tourists’ mentality and for one week entered the very different world of ‘Tourist Kenya’.


Tourist Kenya


Whilst we’ve travelled around Kenya, and been to some of the touristy areas, we’d not been proper tourists in Kenya.  It's the world most of us inhabit when we come on holiday to Kenya.  It’s a truly lovely place to be, but initially, Dan and I found it very strange for the following reasons:

1.      There is no public transport in this world.  Instead of matatus and buses there are safari vans and lots of taxis.  There are no journeys crushed against a stranger in Tourist Kenya, no deafening music and no odour of stale male sweat (except Dan and Jake’s).  There’s still traffic and the occasional breakdown, but it’s a lot more comfortable

2.      You are greeted with ‘Jambo’...  Apparently true to coastal Swahili but mostly wheeled out just for the tourists, this greeting is easy to master since the response is also ‘Jambo’.  I never hear it in the Kenya we normally live in, but we were greeted in this way every time in Tourist Kenya.  Unable to let go of my volunteer credentials and Swahili training so easily, I generally replied ‘Mzuri sana’ (I am very fine) in a sarcastic tone.

3.      ...and The Jambo Song is sung a lot.  I’m telling you, this song only plays in Tourist Kenya.  After being here for 4 months, a UK friend who’d holidayed here assumed You must’ve heard The Jambo Song so much by now! We asked What’s The Jambo Song?  We found out once we’d entered Tourist Kenya: it was sung and played all the time. Generally AT us, or towards us, and sometimes followed by requests for money.

4.      No coins are needed.  The lowest note denomination here in Kenya is 50 shillings (35p), but in our everyday lives there’s a LOT of things that costs less than that.  In a normal week in Nairobi, Dan and I hoard coins like gold (exact change for buses, matatus and lunch means a lot less faff, and less chance of being ripped off), but during our week in Tourist Kenya, we didn’t even touch a coin.  Nothing is less than 50 shillings and contrary to normal Kenyan life, any small change is expected to be left as a tip.

5.      You meet Americans. Well, more precisely, you meet other tourists, but the Americans stick in my mind.  Whether on an organised tour or backpacking through the country, these folks are here in Kenya to see the wildlife and soak up the sun.  They were interested that we were living here, and shocked that we live in Nairobi (and how do you find the crime?), but mostly they were nice to be around.  An exception to that was a nameless woman from Florida who greeted the waiters with ‘Jumbo’ and asked her companions where the ‘pointy peak’ of Kilimanjaro was, was it hidden by clouds? When she learned that she was looking at it’s full, flat shape, she grumbled that back in the US there are ‘proper’ mountains.

6.      There’s a lot more flesh.  Most Kenyan women dress more modestly than those in the west.  To work here and be accepted, my day-to-day wardrobe quickly reduced to anything with sleeves; vest tops, shorter skirts and all shorts were out.  Dan wears shorts in the house but never outside, otherwise he looks like a tourist and gets ten times the street hassle. Occasionally I see white female tourists in Nairobi wearing <gasp> shorts or <gasp> strapless tops.  Whilst I don’t condemn these holidaymakers (I’m no different when I go holiday), after a few months it actually shocks me to see so much flesh on women not touting for business.  In Tourist Kenya, everyone looks like a prostitute.  Or so it seemed to me at first.  White women in tiny hotpants wandering down the supermarket aisles, and standing in the car park in a bikini top!!  Plus all of them wear shorts, everyone one of them, and sometimes strapless/backless/side-less tops.  Society is generally fine with it, and coastal Kenyans are used to it or join in, but at first I found it very shocking to see that much flesh after months of living in Kenya.  But, ever adaptable, and when in Rome, I flashed some leg on the beach (get me).


After a few days living in this new world of Tourist Kenya, we got used to how it all worked and had a truly wonderful time. Highlights included,
  • watching the horizon in Amboseli National Park, and seeing it simply litteredwith elephants, maybe 100 in all,
  • waking at dawn and looking towards Tanzania to see the snow-topped summit of Mount Kilimanjaro
  • snogging a Giraffe in Nairobi,
  • chatting about the latest Manchester United news with a Kenyan guy called George, in the dining carriage on the overnight train to Mombasa, as we all lurched and lurched with the train movements, trying to keep our soup in the bowl, and tea in the cup,
  • arriving at our enormous beach-front cottage and seeing the view,
  • Dan buying live crabs from the beach and cooking them in a big pot,
  • sailing on the Indian ocean in a warm breeze on a little wooden boat crewed by Omar and Pepe, to arrive at a beach bar where dozen oysters cost 2 quid and the white wine was ice cold...
A massive thank you to Jake for taking the plunge, trusting us to plan you a trip and giving us the excuse to live in Tourist Kenya for week.  It was fantastic to see you and we’re so glad you had a good time.  Hopefully not even your horrendous journey home will dint your view of this country.  It’s great to know that regardless of whether you’re in Kenya, or Tourist Kenya, the welcome is just as warm.

Pause the slideshow to go at your own pace, or click through to see bigger pictures in Picassa online....enjoy!


Wednesday 30 November 2011

Cocktails and Volunteering

Or: Exposing the hidden challenges of being a VSO in Nairobi.

Welcome to a blog post that’s longer than normal, but I believe it’s worth the journey; grab a cup of tea and see if you agree.  I promise the very next post will at have more than one picture to look at...



It’s VSO-ing, but not as we expected


When Dan and I first hatched a plan to be VSO volunteers, we did a typically large amount of research on what it might be like, and listened carefully as returned volunteers and VSO staff set our expectations.  From all those sources, a picture began to emerge...

The two of us are living in a one-room accommodation, walking to our rural placements and home before nightfall, preparing simple meals on a stove in the corner, and having every evening free to read, learn a musical instrument or write home.The main challenges we face are filling our time, being stuck in one place, eating the local food every day, and coping without home comforts like hot water and TV.

Once we were successfully through the VSO selection process, we waited a year to be matched to placements somewhere in developing world; will it be Nepal?  Guyana?  Or Uganda?  And all the while we had this same picture in our heads of what our lives would be like when we ‘volunteered overseas’.


Flash forward to now and here we are placed in Nairobi.  Safe to say the reality has been enormously different from our initial picture.  Take your pick from –


ü  Nairobi is a large, busy city with restaurants, cinemas and traffic jams.

ü  We’ve a hot shower, a spare room and a spacious kitchen.

ü  We can find all the ingredients for our favourite home cooked meals with varying degrees of ease,

o   Red wine (expensive on our salaries but widely available)

o   Fresh basil (cheap but available only across town)

o   Good cheese (expensive on our salaries and available certain places)

o   Risotto rice (very hard to get hold of and very expensive even by UK standards, but anything’s obtainable...)

ü  Evenings are spent watching TV and films on our laptop, skyping friends or meeting people for drinks, meals out and house parties.

ü  The main challenges we face are long and unpredictable commutes, having a social life that’s too busy, and fitting in all the holidays we’d like to take.


So far, so comfortable.  Lots of the time we feel we’ve really fallen on our feet with a placement in Nairobi:


Having a bad day?  Let’s treat ourselves to cocktails at the posh hotel across the highway.  Shoes falling apart?  Let’s visit a shoe shop in a shopping mall as shiny as those in Dubai.  Feeling homesick for our favourite Italian cafe back home?  Let’s go a coffee shop that serves wonderful cappuccinos.


You get the idea.  But therein lies the hidden challenge of being a VSO in a place so different from the place we first imagined.  The karaoke bars, Italian restaurants and exclusive spas are catering for the western, mainly white, expatriate population, and the steady stream of tourists and business people who arrive every day. We are not them, and (most of the time) we do not live like them.  But we look like we should.


The trouble with my skin colour


We’ve already written about being easily mistaken for tourists (see, A Kenya Staycation), and 5 months in, being constantly ‘welcomed’ to Kenya by ‘friendly helpers’ on the street is starting to grate on me.  But the most entrenched mistake people make about Dan and I, is that we’re living an expat lifestyle.


Our skin colour aligns us to the people living lives here that we cannot hope to afford on our small VSO salary; to people with business interests here in Kenya, and working for international NGOs like the UN and Save the Children.  These are the people who have a beautiful house in the white suburbs, only shop in the malls and send their children to posh international schools.  We look like them, so people expect certain things from us:


We’re expected have a car and/or driver

Back in the image of a rural placement, I expected to be stared at, but I never expected the people staring to be white. Waiting for the bus on the side of the road in a posh neighbourhood, a white woman driving past in a huge SUV can’t take her eyes off me.  She’s so baffled by the sight of a westerner taking the bus by herself that she hits the roadside puddle hard with her enormous front wheel, showering me in muddy water.


We’re expected have a ‘mzungu’ job

By which I mean a job with a western-world-size salary.  We recently met a Kenyan friend of my brother’s who grew up in Nairobi but now lives and works in Dubai.  A chatty, beautiful, middle-class young woman, Jacqui was astonished to discover I was being forced to walk down the railway tracks on my journey to work, and speechless when hearing of the tin shack from where I buy my lunch. Recovering, she asked, ‘And how is your stomach feeling after your lunch?  I would NEVER buy from those places.  You know you could get a good job here in Nairobi, and wouldn’t have to walk.  You should get a Mzungu job.’  It was hard to explain how I was choosing to volunteer, to a lady who was rightly most interested in improving her economic situation for herself and wider family.  After comparing our very different lifestyles in Nairobi, she concluded: ‘I’m Kenyan, but I’m more Mzungu than you are!


No-one expects us to do things ‘Kenyan-style’

A compliment my colleagues often give me is that I’m flexible.  They simply love that I eat the same food they do, that I walk to the roundabout through the mud and that I learn more and more Swahili – and use it.  I explain that I am here to fit in, and that we are trained to be sensitive and adaptable to a local culture.  But still they regale me with stories of the many White People They Have Known who hated this or screamed at that – and how they proud they are of me.  It feels the way it feels when you are showered in compliments for just ‘doing your job,’ but again and again people are surprised at how differently I behave from others with my skin colour.  I am Helen, Who Just Gets On With Things.  I even gather shock and awe in the street; watched everyday by a street-seller at the roundabout (where I’ve never seen another white woman), his word-for-word comment shouted at me as I passed, was ‘Madam,I admire the way you walk on the mud without fear!  There were maybe 20 other (Kenyan) women walking by at that time – but my journey, it seems, is a statement, an achievement.  Our behaviour here is sometimes seen as upsetting the Laws of Nature, so much so that we even find Kenyans encouraging us to behave as typical Mzungu so that the Order Of The Universe can be restored: on seeing three Mzungus boarding a matatu in town, the tout rushed over to stop Dan, Eddie and I, trying to lead us onto the larger, more comfortable bus.  He never thought for a moment that we might travel to work by matatu every day.

Although confounding expectations has been an unexpected part of the VSO experience, I’m assuming that we would have experienced similar reactions to our flexibility in the rural setting we first imagined.  But the difference, I am suggesting, is our proximity to the other foreigners living in ways that are ‘expected’ of them - my Kenyan colleagues are far more used to the habits of other westerners because there are so many of them here.  And I was simply unprepared for the sheer number of people continuing their western lifestyle here, or even improving on it; in the very same city where our standards of living are much lower than back home.



Angry thoughts – and why I’m wrong


Now, I’m about to share some thoughts I’m not proud of, but in the spirit of an honest blog, here goes... 


I feel occasional jealousy and anger, born of living so close to all the trappings of expat life, but not attaining it.  In our picture of rural VSO life, I was happy to do without all the luxuries I enjoy back home, because no-one else in the community would have them either.  But here, just to visit our doctor takes me into an area of town where British women younger than me have drivers and private gym membership.  I walk into the shopping mall with wet trainers having waded through the burst drain whilst getting off my second bus that morning; they spring out of their car into underground parking and tap-tap their way to the delicatessen in high heels that have never seen the mud.  Or so I imagine.  It’s the same feeling of injustice when I drag myself off a THREE HOUR bus journey across town after work, get drenched by the rain, and enter the shiny bar in my hiking boots (worn to cope with mud) that are now showering mud flakes across the floor; only to feel completely aggrieved when I hear laughter coming from the table of white, glossy-haired, expensively-dressed, chauffeur-driven 22-year-olds who DON’T KNOW THEY’RE BORN!!!   ARRRGHHHHH!!!!


<Deep breath> 


But once I’m calm, I’m embarrassed by the horrible materialism at the heart of this bitterness I’ve felt.  So, I’d like to conclude this blog post by reminding myself of the reasons why this ‘hidden challenge’ that we face by living as a VSO in Nairobi is silly at best, and disgusting at worst:


Silly.  As we’ve seen, the truth is that we really like having access to malls and bars and brie cheese that are available for the expat customers who live here.  That we feel homesick only occasionally is I’m sure in part due to the fact that red wine is just a short walk away!  In our initial picture of VSO life in a rural somewhere, I wonder how quickly I might have longed for the luxuries of home?  And we are truly lucky we can afford to sample all sides of Nairobi life, as described brilliantly by Dan in The Many-Sided Nairobi.


Ridiculous.  I’m not really trying to wage a class warfare against the nameless, faceless expat ‘enemy’.  Those with the fancy cars, and fancy jobs have troubles of their own, and raising children in a city plagued by insecurity would surely have me rushing for a car with the biggest wheels I could find.  Plus, quite a number of the people who have ‘more than me’ are not expatriates, they’re Kenyans who have achieved education and success.  These folks are simply enjoying the comforts of a city they can afford to take full advantage of – exactly what the rest of us do back home.  Finally, many of the people with such different lifestyles are now my friends.  Interesting, caring people from all over the western world, they have come to Kenya to help build it, just like us, whether through NGO work or through business.  Some of them have drivers, international work trips and an expense account.  But the grass is always greener; these are the friends who ask us to help them ‘break out’ of the ‘expat bubble’, whether by taking them on a matatu, for drinks in a ‘locals’ bar or hosting them in our vibrant neighbourhood.  NGO workers we’ve met have described a frustration that’s the very reverse of ours.  In their previous life they were volunteers and back-packers, but their new status as NGO workers brings a feeling of being cosseted by management, their movements restricted and travel dictated: they are not allowed to take a motorbike taxi, and barred from taking the bus anywhere, because it’s ‘too dangerous’.


Disgusting.  The ‘inequality’ I’m feeling is grossly inappropriate when I compare my life to those who have genuine complaints about the unfairness of Nairobi life.  The reality is that our living standards are hugely, massively, extraordinarily higher than the vast majority of Nairobians.  I find that I earn much more than my colleagues, even though I’m called a ‘volunteer’.  With my rent paid by VSO, and private medical insurance thrown in for free, my benefits package is well above those with whom I share an office.  Our apartment building wouldn’t meet any health and safety standards back home, but to live there, you need to be earning way above the average salary, and if I start to compare my life to the 60% of Nairobi residents who live in slums, I find we are not even in the same world.  I find it truly disgusting that I would dare complain about how we can’t afford cocktails every night of the week.


So while we do find it exhausting to constantly challenge the expectations of our skin colour, and we feel a little jealous of our car-driving countrymen and women when we trudge through a rain storm; the challenges of VSO life here in Nairobi are swamped by the benefits of experiencing Kenyan life from within.  I’m proud of that ‘achievement’ the street-seller congratulated me for in the mud, real or imagined.  We love knowing the back streets, moving freely around the city and sharing a few Swahili words with the roasted-maize guy in South B.  And I promise to check myself when having a moan about what others can ‘do’, ‘buy’ and ‘have.’  We’re happy here because our life is rich in so many other ways, not least because of the awesome VSO friends we’ve made in Nairobi, people who know exactly how it feels to rage about cheese, cocktails, and loud upstairs neighbours in a city where the main challenges are providing your family with clean water and a safe place to live.


.........


Further reading:  for a more accurate window on how ‘the other half live', I’ve been reading the Africa Expat Wives Club blog written by an (anonymous) British expat of 20 years, now living in Nairobi. A full-time Mum, she’s been blogging for the last 6 years about what life is really like when you make Africa your permanent home (unlike us visitors!).  It’s a very honest blog as she seems to not be scared of criticism.  Notable for being mentioned in the Telegraph (I know...) as she blogged during the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008.

Monday 28 November 2011

Death in Embakasi

Comparing my muddy commute in Nairobi to the Somme has caused some friends to call me pretentious (moi?); after all the mud experienced by soldiers in 1914 was truly life-threatening.  I was once employed to guide school groups around the battlefields of Northern France, and I remember the testimony of Great War soldiers who stood helpless as whole carriages disappeared into the deep mud.  Unable to help, they watched the men and horses drown.

It’s been very rainy over the last week here in Nairobi, and the mud where I work in Embakasi has become even worse.  But, even I admit to being something of a drama queen when I compare it to trench warfare in the last century.  Until today.
Last night here in Embakasi, someone drove their car into one of the rain-clogged construction ditches on the side of the road, and completely disappeared.  The traffic backed up this morning, as hundreds of people gathered to watch the car being dragged from beneath the muddy water.  My colleagues were talking about the driver, was he drunk?  ‘It doesn’t matter’, says my colleague Ken, ‘that one will be dead.’
The Chinese contractors here see no need to put barriers around every ditch; the foreman I saw who was assisting the dredging process looked uncomfortable being the centre of attention, and pretty annoyed that the road building would be put behind schedule.

Friday 18 November 2011

Life without seasons

Posted by: Helen

We arrived in Kenya in July, leaving behind the UK’s summer.  Flying across the equator, we arrived in Kenya’s winter, but the weather felt much the same. 

Now four months later, I sit at my desk in my office in Nairobi; looking out of the window and it still looks like July.  I have an odd sensational that time is standing still.  Where are my usual signs that the year is progressing?

?    the weather is not getting colder; in fact December and January are summer here, so it’s getting hotter

?    the days are not getting shorter; daylight on the equator is strictly 6am-6pm, all year round

?    where is Halloween, Bonfire night, Remembrance Sunday??

Then, suddenly, it appears that the year is nearly over.  The first recognisable symbol that time was passing came without warning: a string of coloured lights.  Christmas retail season has arrived in Kenya, targeting middle-class Kenyan cash in ways borrowed from the west: Christmas trees in glass-fronted shopping malls, and carol-themed jingles on the radio. I can’t believe it’s almost December. Christmas?!  Already?!  It just seems so wrong.

Back home I can be a bit of a scrooge, preferring long summer days spent outdoors, to cold ‘festive’ holidays stuck in the house.  But how can I grumble about Christmas this year, when the weather continues to heat up?  How can I complain when I’m free of pressured Christmas shopping and the usual decisions about where to be come Christmas day? 

So I won’t protest at all – I’ll embrace it.  Let’s have carols in the sunshine, and Christmas on the beach. And who wouldn’t thank their lucky stars for swimming outside in the sunshine in late November?  I think whining about this situation would prompt my friends and family back home to tell me ‘where to go’, whilst reminding me about drizzle, window condensation and cold fingers.

And yet still, the feeling remains: I miss the experience of seasons changing.  Autumn is Dan’s favourite time of year; never happier than when squelching through forest mud under clear blue skies, watching the leaves turning colour whilst we identify mushrooms.  OK, maybe it’s Mike Jones that knows all about the fungi (!), but in autumn, even I love an excuse to throw on an extra duvet and make soup.  As I embrace the mono-season here in Nairobi, I’m surprised to discover how much I miss the UK, just at the time of year when I normally start to grumble. 

I know it’s just new-ness, and in time the strange would become normal.  But our plan to spend just one year here, may mean that we have no time to get used to any strangeness we feel.  During her first few UK winters, my Brazilian friend Luana would often not leave her house between Friday night and Monday morning, seeing no need to expose her body to such extreme cold, if not for work.  She yearned for the warmth of ‘home’, but after almost 10 years in the UK, the cold no longer feels as harsh.  Now, she wraps up warm and heads out with a stoicism that matches her hard-won British citizenship; a sign of the long-term commitment she made to her adopted home.  (miss you, Lu!)

We have no plans to commit to Kenya in that way, although plenty of our follow volunteers want to – and do.  When he visited, my brother asked us what our plans were, whether we had become convinced of the benefits of an ex-pat lifestyle, as he has.  At the moment, all I can say is that my ‘Britishness’ is coming out here in the strangest of ways:  who would have believed I’d miss the sensation of summer ending, miss the cold weather, even miss a ‘proper’ English Christmas?  I find life here to be so very interesting, and every day is an adventure at the moment.  But, I’m clearly not ready to find new roots just yet, because right now, this life without seasons makes me feel very far from a place I still call home.

Why you shouldn't confuse our blog with reality

Posted by: Dan (with moral support and editing by Helen)
 

A word on this blog: we're loving writing it. But, it’s a lot like Facebook – which is always filled with witty comment, shiny, happy faces and extraordinary experiences. Rather than “I went to work today”. And aren’t we all glad of that? It would certainly be duller if it were more true. We're aiming for a blog full of carefully crafted, articulate, witty, well-rounded nuggets of cultural observations (ha!). And, yes, also close-ups of lions in the Maasai Mara just to make you all jealous. Don’t get me wrong, we are doing those wonderful things, we are incredibly lucky to visit once-in-a-lifetime places of a weekend here in Kenya. But that, of course, is much less than half the story......


Welcome to a blog post answering the question: "Why don't you talk about work?"
During our "In-Country Training", we were fresh volunteers, all sitting beside our new Kenyan employers. A member of the training team stood up and said, "Do not expect your volunteer to do much in the first three months". What?! We all looked at each other slightly incredulously...

It's four months on, and last weekend I found myself standing in front of a new intake of volunteers, fresh off the plane, jet-lagged and eager, and repeating this same advice. Presentation title: "Practicalities of Working in Kenya". I urged them to spend the first months learning about their organisation, and crucially, building relationships. "Do not", I said, "try to hit the ground running".
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"But you don't talk about work!", said a UK friend the other day, referring to our blog. And this got me worried. I don't want my friends and family in the UK thinking this blog says it all, that it's an accurate picture of our full experience here. We also have to go to work.

We find it hard to articulate "work" here. Firstly, VSO urges volunteers to be cautious about blogging about their placements. Sage advice - after all, this is a very public space. I've never written a blog before, and it's certainly strange to think that I'm writing for my Mum, my UK friends, fellow volunteers here, and of course, our Kenyan colleagues sometimes read it too. I have no intention of offending anyone with off-hand remarks. It helps that I like my colleagues, and have no real cause for complaint. But I've heard stories of volunteers who have totally screwed things up for themselves by writing insensitively about work.

Secondly, it needs to be couched in terms. “Work” is the absolute obsession of the Western world. We’re all trained to be Type A, workaholic, deliver deliver deliver productivity monkeys. What’s the first question people ask when they meet? “So, what do you do?” Our work is at the heart of our identity, going far deeper than, probably, it should.

It’s not the same here. And I apologise for any grand generalisations here, particularly to any Kenyans who are reading this. I certainly mean no offense, and I don't mean that Kenyans are lazy.

But still, in my experience I think it's true to say that Kenyans are not about work. Mornings and meetings start with a long and lovely round of greetings: Habari? How are you? What news? How is your family? How is your home? Kenyan life much more frequently revolves around (1) family, and (2) Church. I’m starting to think they have a lot more perspective than the British do, and an understanding of Work:Life balance that I envy.

It’s worth remembering that office work is a comparatively new thing here. We’re working with colleagues who are often the first generation to go to university or work in an office rather than in a field or at a road-side stall. They don’t yet have the highly evolved middle class angst and social rituals that British offices do. And sometimes I’m loath to be the representative that suggests that offices are the way to go. I’d sometimes much prefer to be ploughing, hunting or cooking than vexing over office politics. I’m proudly better at making fires and cooking meat than I am at writing project documents or “managing stakeholders”.

And work here can be frustrating. Volunteers can be idealists, recruited to "change the world". But what does that mean? I know even some of our UK acquaintances have struggled with the concept that we're doing office work here. We're not digging wells or handing out food aid. I write emails here, I use flipcharts.

But despite this, things can be very different for a lot of volunteers here. Imagine yourself in an office in the UK:
  • you often have no internet, no power, no running water
  • the working day is flexible, no-one is watching you, managing you
  • your work sometimes has little structure, often no team, and frequently no clear objectives
  • 'a productive day at work' can mean chatting with your colleagues, and drinking chai all day.

It sounds wonderful, yes? Frustrating maybe, but a very easy year. But it's difficult. And we've flown a long way to share skills, create change, improve things. You start to even miss bureaucracy...


Bureaucracy is what happens when relationships break down


For many Kenyans, talking and relationships are far more important than producing a document to deadline, sending an email or perfecting a powerpoint presentation. Speed is not of the essence, and Kenyans enjoy reminding us that they have their own sense of time.

Our new work-mates act very differently from our previous colleagues. Often they'll agree with everything you say, even when they disagree fundamentally and have no intention of following through. Our Swahili teacher says "Kenyans are not honest", which doesn't mean they're liars, but in Swahili, there's almost no way of articulating negativity. The answer to any question is "nzuri" or "sawa sawa" (variations on "good" and "fine"). Our Kenyan acquaintances will say "nzuri" even when the truth is that they haven't slept, a family member is in hospital, or they're in a foul mood. Translated into a work setting, and it becomes a real struggle to get honest, constructive feedback and criticism. My training sessions are "brilliant", "very good" and "excellent". Which is nice, but it's hard to tell how true...

What else? It's common for volunteers to complain "my colleagues share all their gossip in Swahili", "they agree to meet you but never turn up", or "I've produced the work they've asked for, but it's shelved, seemingly forgotten". Again there are many reasons behind these behaviours and none of them is spite or insult, but it can be hard not to take it personally. It takes time for all us VSO volunteers to learn what its all about, some things were never covered in our training, and we'll never understand the way everything works.

We Westerners struggle with that, particularly in the emotional bubble of a year's volunteering. It can lead some volunteers to question the whole concept of “development work”, as it feels dysfunctional against our UK benchmark. Although I can think of one or two UK organisations I’ve worked at who were just as dysfunctional as any we see here. And I guess if our placements here were perfectly functioning and ordered, then we wouldn’t be in the developing world, a nation in progress - and these organizations wouldn’t need us?

These are not yet fully-formed thoughts, so apologies if they are crude, unclear or touch a nerve with anyone. But I wanted to try to explain, to some extent, why we don't "talk about work" that much on our blog. At least you can take away from this long, rambly philosophizing that this experience is weird. And hard to explain. And confusing.

Sure, it was always going to be weird because of the matatus, the weather, the language – the Kenyan-ness of it all. But I didn’t quite expect our emotional reactions and wild mood swings because of these work challenges. Working in Kenya has slowly, slowly, unraveled and taken apart our work ethics; questioned why we work the way we do, how we live our lives, and how we see ourselves. So how do we put this all back together again? And how will we have changed?


It certainly bakes the noodle, so to speak.