Monday, October 19, 2009

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.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

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.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

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.