Getting Pushed and Pushing Back

March 25th, 2009

Firstly, I want to have a big shout out for my baby sister’s 20th birthday!!! Finally, I don’t feel quite like the oldest kid in our house anymore…but anyways, onto the important aspects of my life.

I’m not quite sure how to write about my past two weeks. I sincerely apologize if I am inarticulate or rambling in these posts, my internet time is a part of my budget and that means that I’m not afforded adequate time to write a blog worthy of my adventures, trials and tribulations!

Tomorrow will be the last day of what has been the accumulation of 9 weeks of learning, feeling, understanding, academic excitement (aka nerdiness), eye-opening experiencing. We have our Independent Study Proposal due on Friday, which is basically outlining what we’ll be doing exactly, where we’ll be doing it, research question, budget, methodology...etc. It’s been great practice if I ever decide to continue this kind of research and I apply for a grant or a fellowship, and now that I’ve been in Kenya getting more and more excited about what I’m doing, that is a venue that is very possible for my future. Since Saturday, I and 8 other students stayed at a hotel in Nairobi, and it was so amazing to experience freedom! We explored the city, made many Kenyan friends, lived it up basically. Then we remembered we had to do work! And that is why I have been on the computer all morning. But I wouldn’t have traded it for anything! It was so fun. One day, I even decided to explore on my own. I had gotten a contact from my African Politics professor at GW, so I decided to make my way across town to a foundation call the Heinrich Boll Building, which is a great private organization that supports organizations and publications that have to deal with gender equality, the environment, and sustainable development.

So I walked up the road from the hotel to catch some sort of transportation. It’s only 8 am and its already 85 degrees in the sun. I walk for about 20 minutes and I finally ask someone how to get downtown. I find myself asking for directions at least 15 times during the course of this excursion! I get on the bus, which is hard to describe. It’s packed to the edge with people, it’s hot and I’m punched with a hundred different odors at once. Not completely appealing, I’ve grown kind of fond of the body odor, the burning trash, the sun beating down on a sewage river…It’s all a part of this crazy setting that pushes me farther out of my comfort zone than I’ve ever thought possible. I am looking for Kimathi Road, which could be anything from a dirt path to the main road downtown I haven’t the slightest clue. Luckily, there is an elderly man sitting next to me who overhears a phone conversation I’m having, and he shows me exactly where to get off and how to get to the matatu station where I need to be. A matatu, by the way, is the main means of transportation in Nairobi, a major huge busy bustling city. A matatu is essentially a van that has certain routes, you can pick one up anywhere and it will take you according to its route where to go. Sounds simple, right? What you don’t know is that the matatu man (not the driver, the guy who collects the money and tries to “encourage” patrons to alight his matatu) will most definitely lie to anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing, and tell you that they are traveling in your direction when in fact you are going the totally opposite way. You find this out, of course, after you have paid them. Luckily, I have been prepared about this, and as I walk through downtown, admiring the beautiful buildings and taking in all the scenery (not too much though, that will get you accosted or hit by a bus—it would fit right in any German cautionary tale for children…) Then in the middle of the city is this parking lot full of dirty, smelly, rap-blowing matatus. It reminded me of a bees nest, this is their starting point, where they all come back to buzz. I’m being grabbed and handled, pulled in all directions toward no specific van, but I manage to throw off the men and the taunts with my favorite Kiswahili phrase “Potoa!” which is basically the equivalent of “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!”.

From this point on the rest of my trip was without many hiccups, except for when I got seriously lost trying to find “Forest Road” which is actually two roads, split apart by a roundabout of death. If there is one thing you have to know about Nairobi, cars do not, will not, will never ever ever stop or even falter for pedestrians. In fact, they speed up. So I ran between alternating cars, matatus and buses for about an hour and found myself in a bad part of town. I realized this once everyone started staring at me, yelling “Mzungu!” and various other hawks. I turned on my heel and speed-walked as fast as I could back to the crazy roundabout. This was when I gave up on my search for Heinrich Boll, and started my way home. About 3 minutes later, I turned at a sign that said “Forest Road” and right in front of me was beautiful white house with a black gate adorned with pink flowers, with a sign saying “Heinrich Boll Foundation”. I almost cried! Through all of the dust and the sun and the confusion I had made it through an African city all by myself and I actually succeeded in my destination! The man at the front desk was extremely nice to me, and I left with a stack of publications that they gave me for free, just for being a student interested in Kenyan development.

My one successful day out of a series of failed attempts. One of the greatest lessons that I’m learning here is how to let things go, how to realize that not everything is in your power, and most importantly that patience is the greatest virtue. Patience not only puts things in perspective, it lowers your blood pressure and allows time for deep breathing. This doesn’t just apply to being in a strange country and not understanding the customs, it also has to do with the people that I am with all day long who do not understand patience. This place has really rocked me. I have been pushed, slapped, bumped, pinched, spit on, cursed at, hawked at…I’m hit every day by rocks and matatus and people. I’m wicked bruised, literally, and I’m sure my feet are permanently red-brown and dented from pebbles. I also can now fully appreciate what I used to do when I was tired, dirty and spent…I would shower and curl in bed and watch a good movie. This has happened once this trip and it made me so homesick I cried. Homesickness is a weird thing…it’s like someone comes up behind you and grabs you by the back of the throat and pitches you forward into the dust. You’re okay, but you feel shaken, confused and entirely aware of your surroundings for the rest of the day. It’s a haunt that can’t be cured; you just have to keep trying to feel your way around and not lose sight of what it is that you can across the world for. Well, I’ve been racking up quite the bill. I hope you are all doing well, and I can’t wait to come home and share my experiences firsthand. However, I still have a lot more to go!


P.S. If you want to see some of the places that I'm talking about, I was told that youtube is a great source. Just type in things like Nairobi, Kibera, Mombasa...etc and I'm sure you'll find some videos that would help to paint a better picture so to speak.

Just a quick note...

"Mr. Obama noted that the recently enacted stimulus package called for spending some $5 billion on the Early Head Start and Head Start programs — an investment that he said would be rewarded by lower welfare rolls, fewer health care costs and less crime, as well as better classroom performance. He said he would ask Congress to finance a program that would provide grants to states that improve their early childhood programs." - NY TIMES

One of my favorite parts of the day is going online and seeing what is going on in America and finding things like THIS!!! I just wanted to tell everyone back home that I am ecstatic about what is going on in our country, what now with stem cell research and the stimulus package...I can't wait to see the difference between what America was when I left and what it will be in the short 4 months that I am gone. I am so proud to be an American!!

Call Me Hafsa

March 8th, 2009

Let me start off by apologizing for this post, I will try to sum up the past 2 weeks in as great of detail as possible, but just thinking about trying to describe everything that I have done, seen, learned and experienced is extremely overwhelming! But I will try…
So about 2 weeks ago our group took the overnight train to Mombasa, which was in itself an adventure. The cars are tiny and very old, the train randomly stopped in the middle of the night (in the middle of the African bush) for 2 hours, no one knows why…the food was pretty much inedible but everything was made up for by the amazing view of a million stars and the sunrise in the morning. I am so sorry that I can’t post pictures at the moment, the view was incredible. We passed many villages, and people and children would run out of their houses to come wave at us as the train went by.
We get to Mombasa, the major city on the coast, and it is HOT. I have never felt heat like I did in Mombasa, and it was unrelenting for the entire 2 weeks. There was not a moment, except maybe in the middle of the night, where I wasn’t sweating. We walked the streets to get a feel for the city and we also shopped for kangas, the traditional dress which is basically a giant piece of cloth that comes in 2 pieces, one to wear as a skirt and the other to wrap around your head. They aren’t necessary to wear in Mombasa, which is used to scantily clad white tourists, but in Bodo they are required. Bodo is the coastal village where we stayed for 9 days, about 2 hours south of Mombasa, only 9 kilometers from the coast of Zanzibar.
So we dressed awkwardly in our new attire, we looked vibrant and also very nervous, we must have been a very amusing sight: 25 white students holding onto yards of fabric hoping to God they don’t fall off and expose us…and we arrived in Bodo. Bodo is basically a page out of a National Geographic Magazine. The streets are made of sand, palm trees are everywhere, the houses are built of sticks and mud, the bathroom is a communal latrine and the shower is a bucket beneath the shade of a baobab tree. We waited for our host families to pick us up, and I was the last to be placed. My mother’s name is Senema, and she is a very old but amazing woman. She taught me how to cook over an open fire, squat in a very impossible position for a person as tall as me, clean my clothes by hand and she taught me plants that can be used as medicine to cure anything from jiggers (parasitic worms that live in the sand and nest in your toes) to polio to malaria. She welcomed me into her home and was one of the most amazing people I have ever met. She named me Hafsa, and she treated me like her own daughter. At night after dinner by kerosene lamp, we would go visit my very very extended family (almost everyone in the village is related someway or another) and we would kucheza dansi (dance) in the streets with my brothers, sisters, cousins and any child of the village who was around. One night they asked us to sing traditional American songs, so we sang “Don’t Stop Believin”, “Build me up Buttercup” and “Wannabe”. It was one of the most fun and amazing nights of my life! The stars are probably the most notable characteristic of Bodo, you look up and I swear you could see the entire Milky Way and universes beyond, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I should add that no one in my family spoke ANY English…least to say I learned a lot of Kiswahili and the art of hand gesturing. We spent many days at a sandbar called Paradise Lost where we would swim for hours in the beautiful Indian Ocean.
At the end of the 9 days, everyone in our group was extremely exhausted. It was difficult to sleep, because of the mosquitoes, sunburns, sand fleas, jiggers and chronic diarrhea, but it certainly brought us closer together as a group! I can honestly say I have never felt so comfortable talking about bowel movements with 25 random people, and there are some stories I’m sure I’ll never tell again.
But we learned a lot, and on the last day our families presented us with hand made presents (hats, fans, baskets, fishing nets…etc) and painted us with henna and braided our hair. From Bodo we traveled to Mombasa, to recuperate from our adventure and wash ourselves. It was an amazing amazing experience, now I am back in Nairobi preparing for our ACTFL Swahili exam next week. We will be here for 3 more weeks, and then we head off on our educational tour to Tanzania. I hope everyone is doing well; I miss you all very much!!!