Celebrating one month in Kenya

We’ve been in Kenya for one month – to us it feels like a significant landmark.  Come! Celebrate with us, as we count down the top 10:

Things we’ve discovered…

1. How to get around on buses, matatus and on foot.  It’s about guile, courage, having a few bob in your pocket, faking confidence so you don’t look like a tourist, and enjoying the bonkersness. We haven’t mastered it yet, but we’ve got the basics.
2. How to engage the services of friendly Kenyan tradesmen such as plumbers, electricians, rubbish-collectors, and landlords. Use Kenyan English, slip in the occasional Swahili, smile a lot, and overcome the fear of negotiation. Worth it when the result is a hot shower / functioning wiring / water bill paid.
3. Some things taste the same here (thai green curry, pringles, coke, pasta), and some things don’t (greens, ugali, peanut butter, delicious fruits, dry cake).
4. Help is never far away – VSO volunteers here before us, Kenyan colleagues and perfect strangers haven’t hesitated in answering our many questions as we figure out life here (including “where can I get a hair cut?”, “is this the bus to town?”, “does power-rationing happen often?” and “what is the loud banging noise?”).
5. Kenya outside Nairobi is really beautiful...

Flamingos at Lake Naivasha





*sigh*



   6.    Contact with people back home makes a huge difference.  The support and enthusiasm from family and friends has been just the tonic on our bad days here.  Thanks everyone.

   7.    How to tell the difference between line, braid, weave and wig – the wonderful, ever-changing hairstyles of Kenyan women.  Thanks Aurelia, check out her blog here. 

  8.     Nairobi can be a little cold – or more accurately, you acclimatize quickly after spending the first few weeks saying “This isn’t cold! You don’t know what cold is”.

   9.    It was easier to put aside our proletarian guilt and hire a woman to handwash all our clothes once we’d tried to do it ourselves and it took 6 hours! Repeat after me, “we’re providing employment”.

  10.   The world is smaller than we thought.  We give skype tours of our flat to friends and family; we add our Kenyan friends on Facebook, and hear about their children and divorces; our local supermarket has HP sauce; everyone you meet supports Manchester United or Arsenal; Harry Potter plays at our local cinema; and world news is…world news.

And things we haven’t worked out yet…

1. What exactly our jobs are here (it's quite normal, apparently)
2. How to respond to people who ask “When you go back home to the UK, can you take me with you?”
3. Why our wonderful hot shower sometimes smells fine, and sometimes smells like an OPEN SEWER.
4. What our colleagues are saying all the time.  Swahili fluency doesn’t happen overnight, and we’re sure we’re missing out on tons of key information/gossip/jokes about mzungus.
5. What Helen is actually supposed to DO in the office during a day-long power cut.
6. How much we should pay for our fruit and veg from the street stalls.  Is that a fair price?  Or the price for Whites?
7. What exactly IS happening in the UK?  The story made front page news here in Kenya, and people here are puzzled that looting would happen in the ‘developed’ world (Radio DJ: “is Britain a failed state?”).

   8.   How to import fresh sandwiches / sushi / all manner of lunchtime choices from the UK.

   9.   If our new air freshener is offering services beyond its remit?

   10.    Exactly how we’re supposed to change the world.

We’re celebrating our achievements so far with cheap Safari gin and warm tonic water, but the choice is yours…

Helen and Dan x