Arrival in Ukwala

Hey everybody. Sorry it took me forever to get a post up about my new family and my internship, but to be honest it's been an exhausting week and blogging has not been priority number one.

Last Sunday morning at 5:oo a.m. Joe the Trusty Taxi Man was in my driveway in Nairobi, waiting to get us to the bus station. There were four of us in the Jamhuri area that had to go to Kisumu, so we shared a taxi downtown to the Akamba bus station. Jane, our internship organizer, met us at the bus station. Interestingly enough, the man that gave a guest lecture for us on "Art in Africa" was also on the bus with his own group of students, heading for Kampala (in Uganda). The bus made pretty good time, and we arrived in Kisumu by about 1 p.m. We had a quick lunch at a local restaurant, and one by one families started arriving to collect their new students. Soon it was just me, Jane, and Betty, another MSID organizer, left in the restaurant. We grabbed another taxi to take us two hours further down the road to Ukwala. When we arrived at my new home, Jane and Betty pretty much just dumped me off: they stopped in to use the restroom, then headed back for Kisumu. My immediate impression of Ukwala and my house was that I'd have a lot of adjusting to do.

My front yard, complete with cows, chickens, sheep, and a mango tree. Unfortunately mangoes are not currently in season in this part of the country.

View from my bedroom window. My bedroom itself consists of a bed, a chair, and a mosquito net. No dresser, closet, mirror, anything. I will admit that sleeping under a mosquito net makes me feel like something of a princess- you know those canopy beds little girls sometimes have. Yeah, I never had one of those, I had to wait almost 20 years and go to Africa to live like a princess.

My family consists of Mama Lucy, Baba John, and their three sons. As it happens, none of the three sons are in the house right now- two are at boarding school around Kisumu and the oldest studies medicine in California. This seems like a good time to mention that boarding school here really doesn't have the same connotation as it does in the U.S. It's about the same price as public school and has far higher educational standards, so many families send their children away for high school. We do have three high school aged boys in the house, however: a herdsboy who cares for the animals, a house help boy who also works in the garden a lot, and an orphan that Lucy and John took in.

Lucy is about the best host mother a person could ask for. She's very warm and welcoming and absolutely hilarious. She, like Margaret (my Nairobi mom) is on a mission to make me gain weight before I go home. She has hosted a number of other volunteers, both through MSID as well as clinicians traveling independently to volunteer at Matibabu. John is considerably more quiet and reserved.

My internship itself is at the Matibabu Foundation, a clinic and outreach center started in Ukwala through a donation by an American doctor but staffed almost exclusively by Kenyans (aside from the volunteers that come in shifts throughout the year). I will readily admit that my first day at the clinic was quite a challenge. I arrived early on Monday morning, ready to get really involved with patients and "make a difference". The first obstacle I encountered was a language barrier. While in Nairobi we all studied Kiswahili, but I am very much still a beginner. However, even the minimal Swahili speaking ability I gained is virtually useless because the predominant language spoken in this area is Luo, the "mother tongue" of this region based on traditional tribal lands. In the U.S. day one at a new job would typically consist of an extensive orientation and description of the job and the responsibilities. This is not the case in rural Kenya. The rest of the staff knew an American would be arriving, but they didn't know the specific date I would arrive, how long I'll be staying, or my background and skills. So, the first thing anybody said to me was "What will you do here?" Hmmm, I was just about to ask the same question.

Me at a local restaurant with my new boss, Dr. Fred. He's a great guy and a wonderful physician.

I expressed some of my basic interests and goals for my internship, then was handed a cooler full of vaccines and showed a line of children waiting to be immunized. Apparently the staff was under the impression that I was a fully qualified doctor, which I obviously am not. Over the course of that first morning I was also asked my opinion on the diagnosis of a patient that presented with "fatigue, weakness, and persistent cough". In this part of the world, those symptoms could mean a lot of different conditions. Eventually I settled in with the nurse filtering incoming patients and taking vital signs. That was easy enough, but I felt like I was just getting in the way because I constantly needed somebody standing over my shoulder to help interpret for those people who don't speak Swahili, or who had a hard time understanding my own broken Swahili. Eventually I made my way to the diagnostic lab. I was warned by the country director of Matibabu that Richard, the lab director, really wanted me to join the lab staff. I was less than enthusiastic- I've spent a lot of time in labs and was hoping to do more with direct patient contact. To my great surprise and delight, that was possible in the diagnostic lab at Matibabu. Patients come into the lab with test orders from the clinician, we conduct the tests while they wait, then send them back to the doc with their results in hand so they can be accurately diagnoses and given an appropriate course of treatment. The lab staff are fun to work with and spending time there has given me a good overview of the major disease burdens of the area, namely malaria and HIV. I do finger pricks for dozens of small children every day, and most of the malaria rapid tests come back positive. It's difficult to see such little kids so sick with a disease that is so easy to prevent. Unfortunately, a lot of the HIV tests are also positive. The lab here has very different standards to prevent contamination of surfaces and lab workers, but that's just not something I want to discuss.

Observing a stool sample in the diagnostic lab for the presence of pathogens.

Other than my work in the lab, I'm still aiding in a child immunization project and general maternal- child health initiatives. The work week is technically defined as Monday through Friday, 8-5 and Saturday 9-12, but if there are still patients waiting at the official end of the day, the entire staff stays as long as it takes to care for everybody without a single complaint uttered. People travel a good distance to receive care at Matibabu and it would be inhumane to turn them away after they waited in the hot sun for hours. The work is rewarding though often still frustrating because of what I perceive as a lack of organization, and when I come home at the end of the day I am always willing to take as many servings of Lucy's delicious food as she wants to serve me.

Parting shot: my back yard.

Thoughts on leaving Nairobi

Today is Friday, October 23 (Happy Mole Day everybody). I'm leaving for my internship in Ukwala at 5 am on Sunday morning. The last few days I've been thinking a lot about the upcoming move. All along, I sort of viewed the classroom phase here in Nairobi as a stopover in the bigger picture of my experience here in Kenya. Even before I left home I was a lot more excited for the internship segment. Now that the time to move has actually arrived, however, I have some mixed feelings about the entire situation. I am still unbelievably excited for what I'll be doing in Ukwala and I'm anxious to see another side of Kenya. But recently, Nairobi has become more appealing (or is it just less unappealing?) to me. This may be in part because of the arrival of the rains, which I mentioned in a previous post. For our first several weeks here in Kenya, everything was brown. One of my very first impressions of Nairobi was that the city was nothing but an expansive dusty brown wasteland. With just a few days of rain I've been amazed at how lush everything has become. I was on a bus home from the city center the other day and was completely taken aback by how pretty and green one of the big public parks was.

Another important thing: my host mother here is amazing. She and our houseguest, Rosemary (the divorced woman featured in a previous post) are so much fun to talk to. I finally feel comfortable sitting around and having long conversations with them and they've really helped me understand a lot about life in Kenya. When I first arrived at my homestay I was frustrated because I felt like nobody in the house ever wanted to interact with me. The most contact we ever had during the day was around the TV together after dinner. I've since learned how to take the initiative to form a relationship with my family and my efforts have paid off. On Wednesday night my mom took me to a bar in downtown Nairobi to see one of her favorite bands play traditional African music. The music was great but even better was the time spent with my host mom. She's something of a celebrity in the Nairobi music scene; she loves to go out dancing and a lot of the members of different bands know her by name and came up to greet us at the table where we were sitting. Oh, and it must be a cold day in hell because Emily Barker was the first one on the dance floor. Yep, my mom decided it was time to dance within ten minutes of the start of the performance. I tried to explain to her that I don't dance well and that I certainly don't dance when nobody else is, but she was having none of that. So we danced the night away, came home late and even though I was so tired I just wanted to collapse into bed, she made me eat some ndengu (a sort of lentil soup) before I could go to sleep. "I just want you to add so much weight before you go back to America" she explained to me.

Now might be a good time to mention that Kenyans express a lot of their feeling for a person through food. For the last week or so my mom has been sharing her love for me by making huge quantities of my favorite dishes. She always insists that I take about 40 times as much as the rest of the family combined. She claims to be concerned that my next host family won't feed me enough, so I figure she just wants me to eat enough this week to last the next month and half.

Today I had to run a few errands, so at the same time I said goodbye to my Jamhuri neighborhood. I've received a number of complaints (despite my earlier warning that I accept only positive comments) that there aren't enough pictures on this blog. Which may be fair considering there aren't any pictures. Let's see what I can do about that.

So here we have a variety of snapshots from my neighborhood and the area near my house. I walk around here everyday on my way to school, or downtown or anywhere really. Notice the dirt roads... it didn't rain yet today so walking was fine but when it gets muddy these roads become very chaotic.

If you look in some of the pictures here you can see a good deal of garbage all around on the grass and in the gutters. Solid waste management is lacking in Nairobi, so people throw their garbage wherever they feel is convenient, then every few weeks somebody sort of rakes it into big piles to be burned. Unfortunately this makes the whole neighborhood smell pretty awful.

After living in this neighborhood for an seven weeks I really feel at home here. I think it will be interesting to see how my perspective on this area changes after I return from my internship. My host mom told me I have to spend at least a few days with her before I'm allowed to travel when we all come back to Nairobi in December, so at least I know I'm not saying goodbye forever this weekend. I should mention that besides my human neighbors, I share the roads with the herds of cows the Maasai bring into town to graze. The most important thing to remember when you're walking along and you see a herd of cattle: the cows have the right of way, always.

A Day in the Life

I’ve been here long enough that I should have done a post like this a lot earlier, but I’m on Kenya time now. So my average day starts around 5 am. I don’t have to wake up until 7 for school, but the compound that my house is in has three other houses. There are twenty Sudanese refugees living in the three bedroom house above mine, so there is somebody awake up there at pretty much every hour of the day. So anyway, around 5 a.m. one of the kids starts screaming or banging around, which sets off a domino effect of adults yelling at the kid, then other kids waking up and getting in on the screaming. I roll around and try to sleep a little more, even though experience tells me this will fail. The roosters that live on the street outside my house start crowing and by that point there’s no more delaying the inevitable. I get up and read or check my email or watch the morning news. I do not bathe, but more about that later. I greet the friendly family of cockroaches that live in my wardrobe as I get dressed. By a little after 7, my house help has breakfast out for me. Breakfast is white bread and jam, sometimes a banana, sometimes leftover chapati from the night before, and always tea. “Every time is tea time in Kenya”. It’s true, they’re not kidding. On the subject of tea, or chai as it is called in Kiswahili- it’s different from tea in the U.S. It’s always made with milk (always whole milk) and is spicier than tea in the US but it’s hard to explain.

I meet the five other girls that live in the Jamhuri neighborhood of Nairobi at a kiosk down the road from my house by 7:30. Within ten minutes or so my friend Emily is there. She’s supposed to be there at 7:30 just like the rest of us but never is. Then we set off for school. It’s about a 45 minute walk to African Nazarene University, where our classes are held. The first few minutes of the walk are enjoyable enough, but then we reach Ngong Road, which is the busy road we have to walk along for most of our journey. Kenyans haven’t though of sidewalks yet so we walk along the dirt paths on either side of the road with the other pedestrians. We get our daily recommended value of diesel exhaust within the first 12 steps or so. You know that one driver in the US that cuts everybody off and practically kills six different people and then gets irritated and acts like it’s everybody else’s fault? Yep, that’s every single driver in Nairobi. Just in case things get dull on the walk to school, there’s always the morning matatu accident or public brawl over matatu fare to keep things interesting.

We arrive at school and attend classes, which are typically interesting and engaging in a way nothing I’ve ever studied in the US has been. I think it helps that all the staff is Kenyan so we’re exposed to a biased but also insightful perspective of issues in East Africa and the developing world in general. At 10:30 there’s a tea break, of course, any time is tea time. Never forget that. Tea time is intended to last 15 minutes, so usually by 11 or 11:15 we’re back in class. Kenyan time is very lose and there’s really no point in ever scheduling something to happen at a specific time because it just doesn’t work that way here. Things begin once everybody is present and comfortable and has a belly full of tea. Lunch is at 12:45 (ish) and I usually order the delicious food that is catered right to school by the wife of one of our advisors, Simon. If not I go directly against the advice of program administrators and eat a 50 cent meal at a roadside food stand. I can’t even begin to speculate about how much nice new fauna is probably settling into my stomach.

After school gets done at 3:30 I usually go play soccer at the Jamhuri field or head over to the MSID office a few blocks away from Nazarene to study. The office features a nice library with some recent books but most of the literature is older than, well, me. Off-topic point: I am the youngest one on this trip and I get crap for it on a daily basis, which is fine. Anyway, by 6 or 6:30 I head home because I have to be in by dark, rules of my host mother and strongly suggested by the program anyway. Besides, there’s 6:00 tea to be had. Most days a friend or relative of my host family is over for tea, but the Kenyan tradition is to not fill me in at ALL regarding who’s in the house, so I make polite conversation with people I don’t know at all and usually just remain in the dark. The other morning, I was pouring my tea when I woman I’ve never seen before in my life walked out of one of the bedrooms, grabbed my by the hips, kissed me, and had some tea herself. I still have no idea who she was, but that sort of thing doesn’t even warrant consideration on my part anymore.

By about 8 most nights we eat dinner and watch a good deal of stupid TV. There are badly translated Spanish telenovelas, strange Nigerian movies, and Japanese dramas that I just don’t get. My personal favorite program here was Tusker Project Fame (season 3), which is like American Idol but so much better because it’s Kenyan and, at least at the beginning of the season, none of the contestants were remotely talented. My personal favorite performer, Alpha, won the season. Actually, the prizes for winning sort of intrigued me. Aside from a 5 million shilling cash prize (somewhere around $65000) and a recording contract, Alpha won health insurance and internet access for one year. I realize there’s a big push for universal health insurance in the US but the concept is practically nonexistent here. And internet is expensive and hard to come by. It seems to me these prizes actually have the capacity to really change the winner’s life.

After I can’t possibly watch any more television, it’s bathing time. This is a stressful part of my daily routine. Until a week ago, I came home from school brown every day because I was covered in dirt. Now I come home a darker shade of brown because I’m covered in mud. If there’s water for a shower, I’m thrilled. If there’s HOT water for a shower I practically start crying. If, however, it’s a normal day, my house help heats a few liters of water for me so I can bath out of a plastic tub. There exists a logistical issue regarding this kind of bathing. I have to conduct a sort of triage to assess what parts of my body most need cleaning on each particular day because the water will not be nearly clean enough to wash everywhere. The minute my hands go into the water it becomes cloudy. If it happens to be a hair washing day, I dunk my head in and the water is no longer transparent. You get the picture. I’m lucky that my house help likes me enough to warm the water though, a good number of other students get their bucket bath ice cold. I realized I’ve mentioned house help here a few times and there’s so much more to say about that topic that I’ll have to make it a separate post.

By the time that’s all done I’m exhausted so I do a little homework and go to bed. After I say goodnight to my cockroach friends, of course. I fall asleep to the sounds of the people in the house above me banging around some more.

That was long. If any of you actually read the whole thing, I’ll be impressed at your commitment. I welcome comments or praise but certainly not criticism.

Mefloquine Dreams

So obviously living in a country where malaria is one of the top five causes of morbidity and mortality, I have been doing well to follow my doctor- prescribed course of preventative antimalarial prophylaxis. My doctor prescribed Mefloquine to me, which is one of a number of drugs available for prevention of malaria. As it was explained to me, I was put on Mefloquine rather than any other drug because some are known to cause heightened photosensitivity, which would be a serious problem because I am both very near the equator and at a much higher altitude than I was in Wisconsin, so the sun is a good deal more intense. There is also a good deal of drug resistance, but apparently malaria in Kenya is still sensitive to Mefloquine. I also only have to take it once a week, so I had to carry a lot less pills than the once- a- day doxycycline folks. It seems as there were a number of compelling reasons to go for Mefloquine and to be honest my doctor didn’t really discuss any options with me, just handed me a prescription.
Here’s what they didn’t explain to me and what I probably should have realized before I departed: Mefloquine, according to the FDA, has an impressive list of side effects including “severe depression, anxiety, paranoia, aggression, nightmares, vivid dreams, insomnia, seizures, birth defects, peripheral motor-sensory neuropathy,vestibular (balance) damage and central nervous system problems”. None of those actually seem to desirable to me. I haven’t had any issues with my balance so far and I’m no more anxious than you all know I’ve always been, but let me tell you the vivid dream thing has happened to everybody here that‘s on Mefloquine. When you think of vivid dreams you probably think maybe a particularly intense dream once in a while, the kind where you still remember a lot of the details when you wake up. This is not the case. Sometimes it’s hard to tell dream from reality because there’s a very seamless transition from dream to waking and I’ll often remember word- for- word the conversations I had in dreams, or they’ll be really pertinent to what’s going on in my daily life.

So far I’ve been lucky because none of the dreams have actually been that unsettling, just strange. But there have been a lot of cases in which Peace Corps volunteers get sent home before the end of their contracts because they can no longer distinguish dream from reality or they experience serious mood issues. Oh, and get this: in the 1990’s there was an issue called the Somalia Affair. A Somali citizen was murdered while in the custody of peacekeeping troops from Canada. Mefloquine toxicity was implicated in the incident. Cases of this severity are few and far between and I plan on returning to the US with my sanity mostly intact, however.

It’s frustrating to be in a situation in which we’re constantly reminded about the dangers of living in Nairobi, or where we see cases of extreme poverty every day, and to have some stupid medication creating heightened feelings of “paranoia and depression”. It also really puts things in perspective, because as I dwell on disturbing, or even comical, dreams, there are thousands of people around the country that have no access to antimalarials. Or they get a drug to treat an existing case of malaria, but instead of one person in a household taking a full course of treatment, all five people that are sick in the house each take a day or two worth of medicine, so nobody recovers.

In related news, this may seem like a Debbie Downer post, but I am in fact still having a wonderful time here, I’m glad to be here and looking forward to helping at the clinic I’ll be working at even if my contribution is almost insignificantly minute. There’s a lot to take in every day and always a lot to think about.

A preview of things to come

Today at school, we had our last formal International Development class, wrapping up Professor Jama’s material in the academic portion of the MSID program. The rest of the school day was dedicated to briefing us on our last week in Nairobi and what to expect at our internships. Basically, next week we will have one more guest lecture on ethno-musicology, regular class on Monday, Tuesday no school because it’s a public holiday (there are a LOT of those here), Wednesday we have our Kiswahili final exam, then Thursday and Friday we have off to pack for our internships and work on our term papers for our other classes. I have a lot of work to do there, but we won’t talk about that for now….
For our internships, we are basically clustered in four different parts of Kenya. There will be a group in or near Mombasa on the coast, a group around Mt. Kenya in the cities of Meru or Embu, a few who will remain in Nairobi, and a group of us that will be in or near Kisumu in western Kenya. We are grouped this way primarily because it is logistically practical to have all of us in a few central areas, and also so that in the case of a national security issue, we are all either near international airports or could be removed from the country by crossing the border (ie into Tanzania or Uganda). But that is the sort of discussion that makes people very nervous, and the program has only had to evacuate students once in the past, following the 2007 presidential election. We were told that we have no reason to be worried about evacuation, but that Jama is a warden of the US Embassy here in Nairobi, so we will be among the first to know if any concerns should arise.
My internship will be in Ukwala, which I am told is a very, very small town in a very, very rural part of Kenya’s Nyanza Province, near Lake Victoria and the Ugandan border. Ukwala is about three or four hours from Kisumu, so my placement is actually about as remote as possible. Though I am considered part of the Kisumu group, I will be largely on my own. This is something that is both incredibly exciting for me but also makes me a little anxious. We will be at our internships for six weeks, and we’ll live with another host family for that period of time. I can’t think of another time in my life when I have been completely isolated from people I know for six weeks. However, my advisor Jane told me that my host family is wonderful and I’ll have a lot of opportunities to get really involved with my internship.
I will be working for the Matibabu Foundation providing health serviced to the rural poor in that area. I am lucky in that they are really letting me take charge of what I do for my time there. The organization focuses on women and children’s health, so I’ll likely work primarily in a maternal- child health initiative, a pediatric de- worming project, and HIV/ AIDS nutritional support and outreach. More details to follow once I actually start!!

And the rainy season has begun

I have declared today as the official start of the short rains in Nairobi. It rained one or two other times since we’ve been here, but always at night and only for a few minutes. That all changed today. Last night it poured for a good deal of the night, then again this afternoon there was an hour or so of consistent rain.
This period is known as the “short rains”, supposedly because when it rains it only lasts for fifteen minutes to a half hour. In my experience from today, this is false. It rains much longer than that.
The arrival of the short rains in Kenya marks the end of a drought that had been causing problems here in Kenya for several months, ever since the long rains failed to come around April when they were expected. I mentioned in an earlier post that the drought was one of the reasons for the rationing of water and electricity here, but the rationing is now being lifted in most parts of Kenya.
The arrival of the rains was long overdue for the farmers that have lost crops and the ranchers that have been moving further and further into Nairobi to let their cattle graze. The national meteorology department of Kenya had been predicting El Nino rain patters ever since we got here at the beginning of September, and over the last week or so various parts of the country finally started to see some precipitation, and now the Nairobi area too is officially out of the drought.
As much as the rain was needed, its arrival created some problems in Nairobi today. The drivers in this city are never careful or cautious, but today the roads were in complete mayhem. The streets quickly flooded, so cars, buses and matatus splashed through the huge lakes that formed over Nairobi’s busiest roads. There aren’t many formal sidewalks, even along major roads, just dirt paths of to the side. These obviously are now just extended mud pits with garbage and animal waste floating around. Some pedestrians took to walking down the center of traffic on busy streets.
By the time the rain stopped and the sky cleared up, life resumed it’s usual pace. Street vendors quickly got their blankets laid back out, their clothing or produce or DVD’s carefully arranged on top once again.
We’ve been told that the western part of Kenya, where I will be going for my internship in just one week, is expecting a few more weeks of prolonged rains. I may need to buy some rain boots, or “gum boots” as they’re called here.

Divorce

In the US, divorce is a relatively common event in the course of a marriage. In fact, with a divorce rate of nearly 50%, your average marriage is just as likely to end as it is to succeed. My immediate impression of Kenyan marriage customs is that divorce is rare but gradually becoming more acceptable.
In my host house, we currently have a guest living with us. She is a middle aged woman with two children who is currently in the process of getting divorced from her husband. She is staying with us for as long as it takes for her to find a new apartment that she can afford, since her husband is keeping their former residence. In fact, it seems as though according to law and/or custom here, her soon to be ex- husband is entitled to basically all assets of the marriage. This is ironic, because the woman is seeking a divorce at least in part because she has been the sole provider for the household for some time now. Her husband is out of work and has not been pursuing another job because, at least according to our friend, he was perfectly happy to let her do all of the work. In the US, the typical plan of action would be one in which the couple basically split their shared assets evenly, but apparently society here still leans toward a patriarchal concept of ownership.
In the case of the couple’s two children, it seems as though full custody will also go to the father, although not much has been mentioned about this. The children go to boarding school a few hours away, so the transition should be a little easier for them. Again, this seems different from the US. Except in cases of obvious abuse or neglect, a judge typically feels sympathy for the mother and assumes she will to a better job of raising the children. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but there are fewer fathers with full custody than there are mothers. I believe the father in this case may have been awarded custody because it was assumed that, as a male, he would be able to better provide for the children financially, though it seems as though that’s not actually the case.
I read an article recently in one of Nairobi’s newspapers about a growing trend in divorce. To me, that means divorce is becoming more acceptable, but I think there are some interesting social implications to this trend. It could be that divorce rates are increasing because of outside influence from Western societies, especially the US, where divorce has long been a feasible solution to getting out of any marriage. This is in contrast to the values of African society, that suggest you stay with our husband or wife for life, except in the case of wife sharing in the event of the death of a husband. More divorces could be a positive sign, suggesting that women in Kenya are becoming more liberated and able to protect their interests. Conversely, it could have negative social impacts on family structure and could reflect the fact that outside influence has convinced Kenyans that the easiest way to solve any minor dispute in a marriage is simply to get out of it.

New laws in Nairobi

Today I read in the Nairobi newspaper about a few new laws coming into effect in the city. They include bans against blowing one’s nose in public without a tissue or handkerchief, talking on a mobile phone while crossing the street, and “making noise”. Violation of these acts results in a penalty of Ksh 2000 (the equivalent of about $25) and/ or 3 months in jail. I have some thoughts to express regarding the need for and implementation of such laws.
Firstly, a city like Nairobi has much bigger things to worry about than public mobile talkers and nose blowers. The article cites “cleaning up Nairobi” as one major reason for the advent of the new laws. It seems to me cleaning up the massive heaps of garbage lining the ditches or perhaps reprimanding reckless drivers or petty criminals would accomplish this goal much, much more efficiently. Harsher penalties against people who litter would prevent the city from getting so dirty in the first place, against those who steal would make it safer. I don’t feel either of those goals are achieved by cracking down on people who have runny noses.
Secondly, “making noise” is how half the people on the streets of Nairobi make a living. They call out to passerby, encouraging them to buy their product or board their matatu. Now, as a pedestrian in the city, I don’t especially enjoy being hassled like this, but I do respect that these people need to make a living and to do so, they need to yell. Furthermore, “making noise” is subject to opinion. It’s difficult to draw the line between one street vendor who is yelling at an acceptable level and another who is simple belligerent.
Finally, with a police force as corrupt as that of Nairobi, this will simple turn into another source of income for officers. If a policeman sees you walking across a street while talking on your mobile phone, he’ll just charge you a few hundred shillings on the spot. The perpetrator will of course prefer this to the declared fine or jail time, but it leave a lot of room for expanding rather than reigning in police corruption.