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Thursday 18 August 2011

Road scenes

Helen here.  Regular readers may now have gathered that my commute is usually the most interesting thing I do on a working day.  So, while I could enthrall you all with work tales of power cuts, idle web searching and the day the toilet cleaner salesman came to call, I will instead tell you about a few more scenes of life on the road in South Nairobi, if you'll allow me.  For those of you worried that I'm not contributing to the growth of this fine nation, I can assure you I'm actively seeking out a purpose here.  The minute it bears fruit, you'll be the first to know.

The stories that follow are not extraordinary in Kenya, and my fellow volunteers will be nodding sagely in recognition, but I wanted to write them down before this all becomes too normal to share.


The Mud
I think in the year I'm here, I will see this area transform. There is massive road construction here by Jomo Kenyatta International Airport as the Chinese contractors replace Roundabout with a flyover.   In the meantime, however, it looks like I'd imagine hell, because life continues around the construction.  Concrete blocks, huge ditches, trucks, belching fumes, hungry looking cattle picking through the large piles of rubbish, hawkers selling barbecued corn, warning triangles, belts; buses ploughing onto the pavement and scattering the pedestrians to create a hole in the standing traffic, the air thick with dust and me, walking through it all in my Topshop trousers. I thought this dust-bole was inhospitable before the rain.

The rain when it comes sometimes has an awesome power.  In the UK when it reaches itspeak of velocity you shelter for a moment until it eases off.  Here, it cranks up to top gear and stays.  All night.

By the next morning, Roundabout was the Somme, the ever-present dust now lay firmly on the ground, mixed into a deep, sticky paste. And I was unprepared, arriving into the office with mud-coated trousers and shoes that no longer look like shoes.  This is the end of the long rains, they tell me but it will get worse next year.  Sometimes the office vehicle has to pick up my colleagues from the end of the road in the mornings and drive them through the worst of the mud (lest they drown?). I'm going to need welly boots to survive, this much is certain.

The spin
To alleviate the dust in the dry periods (and you'd hope, to improve the respiratory health of the residents of Embakasi all year round), there are trucks which trickle water out the back, onto the wide, dusty roads.  My matatu was keeping a safe distance behind a weeing truck, but a saloon car only sees the gap in the traffic and accelerates fast around the matatu and into the freshly sprinkled road in front.  As I watch, it hits the slick and immediately slides sideways across the road, before breaking into the first of several, elegant, full spins.  It revolves in front of us, and again, as the matatu stops and we all look on in silence. The car comes to a stop.  Then it gingerly moves off and rights its direction and continues onwards, almost sheepishly.  The matatu moves off along the road once more, and no one says a word.

The Diversion

I've never before chosen my route to work based on the maximum available tarmac, but this was one of my learning experiences.  My normal morning matatu chugs along the highway and as it sometimes does, turns left into the area known as Imara.  I'm not sure if it's grown out from the city or existed before the city spread, but it has the feel of being it's own place, it's own industry, own high street.  The tarmac road runs through Imara and back out onto North Airport Road where my journey continues.  Except as we round the corner to join this road the matatu comes to a sudden stop.  We peer out of the grimy windows to see an enormous pile of earth blocking the way.  We watch as a large China Road and Bridge Corp truck scoops even more earth out of the ground to further the progress of the new North Airport Road.  The pile has appeared since the matatu crew worked this route earlier today, and it now completely blocks our way.  So what to do?  My matatu backs up, along the road, very fast. Then it launches off the tarmac and into Imara's side streets in search of a diversion.  We trundle past shops, stalls, a brightly painted primary school and tall blocks of flats including 'Sweet Apartments'.  The hard, packed earth road has given way to deeply rutted pathways but the Matatu doesn't slow.  This has the affect of swinging its passengers roughly from side to side, and I'm now I'm gripping the seat in front to brace myself and blessing the foresight of those who have padded the roof inside the vehicle.  The only thing in the western world that has prepared me for off-roading in a speeding minibus, is one of those simulator rides at a theme park -launch to the left - then to the right - up - down - swerve.  Luckily the Kenyan woman next to me is equally unimpressed and rolls her eyes to demonstrate this happens all the time.  But I'm really not enjoying this new leap into danger, as the matatu squeezes between two buildings and approaches a waterlogged ditch that looks to my eyes like a pond.  We're heading straight for it.  He wouldn't!  Would he?  As we get closer and closer it seems more likely he's just going to go for it.  With the confidence of a guy driving a monster-truck, we tip over the edge of the ditch and bounce through.  I open my eyes, I hadn't realised I'd closed them.  Surely it's over now?  No, there's 5 more full minutes of grinding on and on through the broken, jagged road before we come to a standstill.  I hadn't realised I'd tensed every muscle in my body.   I relax.  There's a proper pond in front of us this time and the matatu tout leaps out and starts shouting and pointing to a few people standing close by.  Recognising that a) the driver is lost and b) shouting at the pond will not make it move, a smartly dresed guy near the door sighs heavily and gets out.  Are we near Roundabout? I ask him and he cheerfully invites me to walk there, he's going that way.  So now on foot we weave our way through a back alley and out onto the main road, which was very close after all. His name is Elliot and he works at the airport, in ticketing.  Where are you from?  He's never been to the UK, but his father spent some years in Birmingham and he mentions Worcester and Stratford-upon-Avon like he's reminiscing about his own past.  A cheery goodbye at Roundabout and he is gone, leaving my faith restored in the good day/bad day balance of Nairobi life.

The crossing
Mombasa Road, south of town, 5.30pm on a Tuesday.  Matatus and side streets spit out scores of people onto the dirt edges along this long stretch of highway.  People on foot are everywhere, trying to get home, or get to work, or meet friends, or sell phone credit, or tout for business or deliver sacks of potatoes.  It's pretty busy, and as normal as I stand here, I'm 6 lanes away from the street that gets me home.  Crossing the first 3 lanes was easy today, a stalled truck and a matatu suddenly changing lanes has slowed the traffic right down, allowing me to trot across to the central reservation.  Where I wait.  I'm standing on a rutted piece of land, between screaming traffic charging in both directions, waiting for a gap in the southbound traffic so I can cross to my neighbourhood.  Waiting with me are a few commuters, a guy on a motorbike and a cow.  A few minutes pass, with no let-up in the waves of cars, trucks, buses, matatus and bikes.  I notice a man holding the hand of his small daughter.  Her face is inches from the traffic, but she knows not to move.  They wait, I wait, and we are joined by others in a long line waiting to cross.  More and more passengers alight from vehicles behind me and as the traffic slows southbound a massive influx of about 50 pedestrians join our ranks.  Followed by another.  Men in suits, women with heavy bags, a grandmother with a baby slung across her back.  Young men in boxy caps and trousers that hang low; young women with salon-fresh hair and almost unbelievably high heels.  I've been waiting for ten minutes now and the central reservation is getting really full now.  There are maybe 150 people standing with me, staring at the traffic whizzing by.  Slowly, slowly, a few bolder men towards the front start chancing a few steps out as the nearside traffic thins.  Which emboldens a few more and then it's a phenomenon - 150 people stepping into the oncoming traffic.  With no signal, we all walk together, allowing the weight of our numbers to create an organic zebra crossing.  All the traffic stops and watches us, and waits.  We spill into Kapiti road and along the other edge of the highway and disperse.  I walk for a while with the strangers who were part of the same rush.  We don't speak.  Everything finds a way here.






In the news today

Listening to radio breakfast news on my matatu this morning - 

'A herd of cows died as they sheltered with their herder from the rain storm last night.  The power lines carrying a high-voltage current connected with the water beneath the cows and 20 died.  A riot broke out amongst local people who all wanted the fresh meat for their families'

'A man was found defiling an 11-year old girl in a field, and had to be rescued by police from angry local people who were trying to kill him'

Riiiight.

I post these as interesting tales from a very different society, but also because they've been troubling me.  I'm a little overwhelmed by the lack of infrastructure, governance, wealth and education that run beneath these stories.  Where are we living?  And what on earth can we do?



Saturday 13 August 2011

Rubber-stamping

I can’t help but feel that we Brits have a lot to answer for. The guilt of the ex-colonial power. It’s strange to find in Kenya that, after all the struggle for independence, and with the uniquely African Kenya that we now experience, that the “British way of doing things” is still so prevalent, and often revered to a crazy degree…In this instance, I mean that most British of inventions – bureaucracy.

Yesterday we went to open a bank account. We’d put it off for quite a while, having heard that it would be a time-consuming chore. But now we were running out of cash. So off we went, promising our employers we’d be in the office just as soon as we were done.

As we walked into town (a new achievement to add to our list), we passed the usual rafts of street stalls and shacks. And in amongst the selling of shoes, fruit, tools and trousers, I notice three or four stalls dedicated to “Rubber stamps”. It strikes me as odd. Why would rubber stamps be such a thing that they deserve their own special stalls?

We’re in the bank. We’ve been there for hours
. It’s not our first attempt to open our account. We’ve provided paperwork, revised paperwork, proofs of ID, addresses, phone numbers, and in a scene reminiscent of the West Wing, we’ve been asked to “sign here, here, here and here, initial here, sign to acknowledge that I wrote your email address wrong here, sign here, initial here, and then sign here”. Then the same for Helen. Then our bank dude vanishes for an age. Then he returns. Then he sends us away to wait, as “the system is down”. We return a few hours later. And then the rubber stamps appear.

Stamp. Stamp. Stamp. Stamp. Then he moves on to page two. Of ten. Stamp. Stamp. He stamps four times around each section of the form, then puts his signature in the middle of each stamp. Then a different stamp comes out to stamp the same pages. Stamp, stamp. Then we pay 100 Shillings “to make the form legal”. Isn’t that what the rubber stamps do?

We refrain from derogatory comments, frustrated questioning or sighing impatiently, reminding ourselves to be flexible and adaptable. And eventually, finally, officially, we have a bank account! It’s taken six hours, from 10am to 4pm. This one, perfectly nice Kenyan bank dude has spent an entire day processing one bank account. Asante sana”, we say warmly.

As we prepare to leave the bank, which is a Barclays by the way, our bank dude observes with a grin that it would have been much quicker, but the British system requires them to do all this. British checks, British bureaucracy, a British bank. Then he slips in a concerned query about the rioting British citizens on London’s street, and suggests that our Prime Minister should call on Kenya for aid. He’s sure Kibaki would be happy to send some Kenyan police for back-up.

We are suitably chastised, and head out into the rush-hour Nairobi streets in urgent need of a beer.

Thursday 11 August 2011

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

Sunday 7 August 2011

A couple of quick wins...

A couple of small successes after three weeks at Special Education Professionals here in Nairobi. This week I helped them to fix a short film that they had created and add it to Youtube. Well, when I say "I", I obviously mean my web guru back in the UK, Mr Jake Cocker - thanks Jacob, you're a legend! (and happy 30th by the way).

There's something to be said about a small world when I'm exchanging emails with the UK for technical advice about websites, regardless of slow and intermittent internet connection here. VSO talks about "creating a global community" as a key tool of development. I can sort of see what they mean. It's not digging wells or handing out food parcels, but this week I spread the word about SEP through a short film and setting up a facebook group. This will help them to gain more members - professionals in Kenya who work with children with special needs, such as Occupational Therapists, Physios, Special Needs Teachers - all of whom are on facebook. And hopefully it will also help to raise awareness of the organisation more generally, increasing the chances of finding funding for our projects here.

Have a watch of the film, or follow us on facebook, and it'll tell you more about the awesome organisation I'll be working with this year...








Oh, and a quick PS - I discovered this week that there are monkeys in the trees outside my office window! They were after my crisps, cheeky buggers...


Monday 1 August 2011

“Drought and cattle theft have reduced me to a beggar”

I was worried that readers of this blog may be thinking us a little callous or ignorant since we have not mentioned properly the famine which the UN is now calling the worst in the Horn of Africa for 60 years.

I can assure you we’re not blind to it, though we do feel pretty helpless (beyond donating a little money that is). In our VSO training we talked about the huge complexity and unfairness of development issues, and how it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and feel “frozen” into inaction. Too true.

Kenya is a country with so many climates, geographies, and peoples, that it seems to be normal for those in bustling, temperate, rich/poor Nairobi to sometimes not know, or not notice, the situation for those in the arid, desert north. Until last week it would have been easy to forget ourselves. We asked a few Kenyans in Nairobi about the drought but got fairly un-explanatory answers. It seems “drought” is normal here, whereas the declaration of “famine” means much more.

Then last week, it felt like Nairobi woke up to the situation with the launch of the “Kenyans for Kenya” appeal. Spearheaded by the big businesses here (The Nation Group, Safaricom, Kenya Commercial Bank), the appeal aims to raise Half a Billion Shillings in four weeks (about £3 million). By the time I write this it will be out of date, but after just a few days, ordinary Kenyans with little money have donated an amazing Sh61 million by M-Pesa**. And the first consignment of food bought with the money is on its way to Turkana in the north to feed about 21,000 people.

The Kenyan government estimates that it will need more than Sh10.5 billion for relief, with the Treasury providing Sh8 billion, and a shortfall of Sh2.5 billion. The media here talks about the huge support provided by the World Food Programme, the US, the EU and others.

Meanwhile, in Dabaab on the border with Somalia, the world’s biggest refugee camps, built for 90,000, are now sheltering more than 400,000 Somalis fleeing the drought and conflict there (about the population of Bristol).

Anyway, I could write for hours but I guess I just wanted to say (to myself and you) that Kenyans are not just waiting for hand-outs from the western world, they’re helping each other just as we would. And there’s lots of reasons for this drought. Is it about a lack of water? Yes. Is it about poor government? Probably. Is it about a need to modernise agricultural practices? Maybe. Would more modern technology and better infrastructure help with all this? Yes. Is it about the conflict in Somalia creating an impossible burden of refugees on a country already struggling to feed its own? Yup. And would it help if Somalia wasn’t half-ruled by militia groups that refuse to allow aid into their country? Definitely.

So – it’s certainly challenging my view of Kenya and East Africa. I hope this helps a bit in explaining the situation (from a totally subjective, non-expert viewpoint), and avoids being one-dimensional about the crisis. There’s obviously much more useful sources of info if you want to read more. For Helen and I, we will continue to try to help in our small corners of Kenya’s challenges. They told us this wouldn’t be about “changing the world”, and they were right. But maybe we can do a little good, even if just by sharing our experiences here.



** M-Pesa deserves a dedicated blog-post at some point, which I shall be entitling “How mobile phones are transforming Africa”. It’s a pioneering service which allows Kenyans to transfer money from one phone to another. This allows the millions of Kenyans without bank accounts to pay, save, transfer and trade. And it’s so easy it’s now becoming the way to do business here.