A Kenyan Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, so I was pretty bummed about missing out on everything at home. Thursday I actually felt the most homesick I have since my first week in Kenya. Luckily, I have some wonderful friends here in the MSID program, and we decided to get together over the weekend for an American- style Thanksgiving feast right here in Kenya.
My friend Amanda, who stays in Kisumu, has a fabulous host family that graciously offered to let us take over their house all day on Saturday for cooking and catching up with everybody. I was especially excited to get to see everybody since I stay so far away from the rest of the group. I love my internship and my family and couldn’t possibly be happier anywhere else, but it sure was nice to see some familiar faces and be able to talk about the challenges of working for a Kenyan organization.

A few people had arrived on Friday to get some initial prep work done. For example, the turkey we bough was alive when we received it, so there was that to take care of. By the time I got to Amanda’s house early Saturday afternoon, about ten people were already busy cooking, chopping, or running back and forth from the market for more food. Everybody had an assignment: mine was apple pie. At home it’s not too tough to throw together an apple pie, but it’s a completely different undertaking here in Kenya. There’s no real temperature control on the ovens, so I had to keep a very close eye on the pies as they were baking. Also, there was no pie pan, so I had to rig one up out of about a million layers of aluminum foil shaped roughly like a shallow bowl. Everybody else was also forced to improvise traditional recipes. There was no cream of mushroom soup, so for green been casserole we had to cook some mushrooms with milk. No canned pumpkin so we bought a fresh pumpkin at a market for pie- making.
At the end of a long day cooking, we had prepared a feast that we could really be proud of. We had all the requisite Thanksgiving foods: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, fruit salad, vegetable salad, pasta salad, green been casserole, apple pie and pumpkin pie. Everything had been made completely from scratch. Oh, and since a few of us brought Kenyan friends or coworkers to dinner, and we wanted to provide dinner for Amanda’s family in exchange for letting us use their house, we had a total of 30 people to feed. All afternoon we were worried about not having enough food, but in true Turkey Day spirit, we instead had a refrigerator full of leftovers. The Kenyans present admitted they loved the food, though they did wish we could have thrown some ugali in there. After dinner was over, we had several heaping towers of dishes to wash and only a few liters of water to do the job, since there was no running water at the time. Finally, everything was cleaned up and we were able to just hang out and catch up with each other.

Sunday morning before I had to catch a matatu back to Ugunja, we went to a market in Kisumu (the largest open air market in East Africa, in fact) for a little bit of shopping and just to take in the sights. You could buy just about anything there: second hand clothing from the US, khangas (lengths of African printed cloth), spices, smoked fish fresh from Lake Victoria, cooking utensils, bootlegged DVD’s, weird things I couldn’t even guess the purpose of. We walked around for a while but it was very hot and very crowded so we didn’t last too long. On the way out, I got stuck in a jam between a few Kenyans, separated form the rest of my group. Luckily for me, Lucy had warned me that this particular market was “swarming with crooks” so I checked my pockets right away after I detached myself from the crowd. Yep, cell phone gone. I yelled to my friend Emily to stop the men before the got too far away. We listed to the advise of our program advisors: if you catch a pickpocket, make a big scene. So we yelled, loudly, for him to return the phone. There was no way the guy would have listened to a group of mzungu girls, but we attracted the attention of a few Kenyans who eventually convinced the guy to give it up. He looked spiteful and threw my phone down to the ground. I was just relieved that everything worked out fine.

I headed to the matatu stage a few blocks for the market and found one heading for Ugunja. I don’t think I’ve done justice to matatus yet, so here’s a quick overview. A matatu is a popular form of public transit in Kenya. In Nairobi people use them mostly to get around the city, but in the rural areas you can use them to travel long distances between cities. They’re roughly similar to utility vans and are meant to seat 14 people, but there’s not enough profit with 14 passengers, so it’s usually closer to 20. The matatu I took from Kisumu to Ugunja had 24 passengers, two of which were adorable African children that sat on my lap, one on each leg, the entire ride and chatted away in Swahili while I nodded and threw in a “Sawa Sawa” once in a while. Every matatu has both a driver and a conductor. The drivers job is to drive, the conductors job is to collect fare and, whenever the matatu slows down to below 30 mph, throw open the sliding door and hang out the side of the matatu to try to convince more passengers to get on. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve been hassled to get on a matatu heading the opposite direction from where I’m walking. They try to convince you that you don’t actually want to go to your intended destination, you want to go somewhere along their route. The conductor is also responsible for stacking people to maximize the number of passengers they can fit in. They get cranky whenever heavy people get in line because it cuts down on their income. Anyway, I waited about an hour for my matatu to fill up, then we were finally on the road headed for Ugunja. I noticed a small hole in the roof of the vehicle, right above my head. It didn’t bother my much until it started raining. Heavily. On my head. The kids on my lap got a kick out of that.

I alighted at Ugunja (Kenyans use a lot of very British expressions. You don’t stop or get off a bus, you alight) and found a piki piki to take me the rest of the way to Ukwala. I say I found a guy, but that’s giving myself too much credit. Instead, two dozen drivers swarmed around me the second I got off the matatu. I pointed to the tallest one, since he was easy to pick out, and told him to take me away. Since it had been raining, the road to Ukwala was washed out and it was a scary and muddy ride, but I made it home safely and before dark, all for the equivalent of $3 from Kisumu to Ukwala. I told Lucy about the pick pocketing episode and she said I would have been “doomed” if she hadn’t warned me. She also told me that smart women keep their phones and money tucked in their shirts so people can’t get to them. For the first time, I left the house for an overnight trip and when I got back she didn’t think I looked too thin. “I like this Thanksgiving of yours. You eat a lot and get fat, so you can be strong Africans”.