Face to face with Hardships

Coming back to Kenya feels like moving from one world to another, very different, one. As if I wasn't already aware of this, it was brought home to me further yesterday in a conversation that I had with my househelp. Esther works for me 2 mornings a week, and following the departure of two of my colleagues for a year’s furlough, I’m now her sole employer. Her wage is not exactly a king’s ransom. Whilst a single lady, so with no family of her own to support, as the firstborn in the family, she is expected to provide for her parents.
And this is where her story becomes very sad. According to Esther, her family once had a tea plantation covering many acres. Now however, this has been substantially reduced, her father having lost the land, largely, presumably, on account of his drinking habit. As a result of imbibing some noxious brew, he has been in hospital for the last few months, in what sounds like a coma. Hospitalisation isn’t free, and the longer he’s there, the greater the bills are.
Esther is the firstborn of nine – six boys and three girls, so you’d think there’d be plenty of family support for her parents. However, her brothers have unfortunately followed in her father’s footsteps and are drunks, while her two sisters, who she’s not seen for 15 years, are prostitutes on the streets of Nairobi. So, who does the family look to for financial provision? Esther. Thankfully, her church has been very supportive, and had a harambee (whip-round), coming up with about £650 for the hospital bills. A niece and nephew are also in the mix, children of one of her sisters. They’ve been left with their grandparents. Who is expected to pay their school fees?.... And so it goes on.
It struck me how heavy the burden of responsibility sits on Esther’s shoulders. She who has her own health issues, and is in need of more work so that she can provide for herself, let alone everyone else. And yet, I know that she’s not alone, and that her story is replicated many times throughout this country and continent. I know that there are genuine hardships in the UK, but I don't think that anyone would argue that it is on a different scale here.

'First' Impressions

I’ve been back in Nairobi for 3 days after 5 months in the UK and US. A good time to make observations on things here, before they become ‘normal’ again. So, what are my first impressions?
• Dust and dirt. The streets are dirty, with lots of loose dirt and stones. Everything soon gets coated with fine brown dust.
• Various sounds:-
    o Dogs barking at night in my neighbourhood. One starts; others join in; it all builds up; and then, suddenly, it all stops, and peace returns.
    o The raucous calls of Hadada Ibis, flying overhead.
    o The thunderous sound of lorries bouncing down the pot-holed road.
    o Cockerels in the morning.
    o A thud in the tree outside my flat, as a Sykes Monkey leaps down from the roof into the branches.
• Potholes. People say they have them in the UK. They don’t!
• Road construction, and the resulting detours onto remarkably unsmooth, undulating, roughly hewn alternatives, making the drive to the shopping centre feel more like an off-road rally, than just nipping out to the Kenyan answer to Sainsburys or Tesco!
• Driving through red traffic lights, because it’s what you do – at least at some of the roundabouts. Knowing just which ones is an art form!

Boxes, boxes and more boxes

You have a house in the UK, but you don’t live there. You have a home in Nairobi, but periodically you need to return to the UK for several months, spending time communicating with supporters. What is the common denominator here? My answer would be boxes! Boxes containing household items that were left in the UK when I moved out to Kenya : Some in the loft of my house in Horsham; others containing more valuable items (and winter clothes) in my parents’ loft in Nottingham. And now, boxes in my flat in Nairobi in every nook and cranny I could find, and with a friend, containing personal items (clothing and toiletries) , non-perishable food, and ornaments etc that I’d be concerned about getting damaged if they were left in my department, with a variety of people using it while I’m away. Plus suitcases of clothes, gifts, toiletries, work materials and miscellaneous things that I’ve brought with me to the UK for the 5 months that I’m here.

Given the amount of travel I’ll be doing around the UK these next few months, I suspect that packing and unpacking is going to be even more a part of life here than it is when I’m in Kenya. Remembering which box everything is in, even including which country(!), is going to be challenging. As will be knowing what to leave where……..

As someone who likes to be unpacked and have a sense of being settled and of ‘home’, my response to all this is - Boxes?! Argh!

Things I’ll miss about Kenya…….and things I won’t!

In 12 days’ time, I fly to the UK where I’ll be based for the next 5 months, principally to put on my other hat of communications and marketing person, to reconnect with my supporters there, and hopefully build up some more financial support in order to come back to Nairobi in September. Having spent 8.5 of the last 9 years based in Kenya (I had a 7-month furlough in 2007), it’s a very strange thought to be upping sticks for that period of time (particularly as I’ll be continuing the work that I do here, just remotely). However, it will be good to see friends and family, and to see them hopefully more than just once during a trip home! I’ve been in the process this last week of packing up my flat, emptying out various cupboards and drawers, so that it’s available for others to sub-let while I’m gone. In all of this transition, I’ve been reflecting on what I will and won’t miss about life here, these next few months.

I will miss:
 The climate! In Nairobi, it’s always summer, be that a good English summer, or a bad English summer.
 People. Lots of wonderful people, some of whom, sadly, will have left for good by the time I come back.
 Nairobi Orchestra. 3 performances in the next couple of months!! My challenge is going to be keeping my practice up while I’m gone (and living a fairly nomadic lifestyle) so that I can have my regular place back when I return!
 The countryside. Stunning, and so varied.
 Bird and animal life. (Nothing quite like seeing giraffe at the side of the road, looking out at a Hartlaub turaco on a bird table when working at a friend’s house, or feeding the bushbabies that come to their garden every night!)
 Though inflation is high here (currently 16%), life is generally much more affordable than in the UK.
 Being able to eat outdoors all year round.

I won't miss:

* The dust and pollution.

* The traffic and others' driving. Gridlock rather too often, and people then thoughtlessly making it worse in their attempt to get ahead.

* Being stared at regularly.

* Security issues.

I know that I could come up with more, if I were to give it much thought. However, it is good to see that the first list is longer than the second, and that's probably a good place to stop!

 

The Park by the City

We’re coming to the end of a 2-week internal audit in our Finance department. It’s internal rather than external, which to me means that they’re here principally to help us, pointing out weaknesses in our internal controls etc. The Internal Audit system within SIL relies on volunteers, obviously with relevant skills and experience, giving of their time, and finances (they pay for their own flights) to come. I think they’re amazing! We have two people this time – Krista who works in the finance department with SIL in Papua New Guinea, and Bob who’s a CPA in Orlando, Florida.
However, this blog isn’t mean to be about the audit, though it was on account of the auditors that I made a long overdue trip into Nairobi National Park on Saturday (so that they’d see a bit more of Kenya than our office!). As I live on that side of Nairobi, it only took about 10 minutes or so to get there in the morning (it can be more like 45 minutes later on in the day!). As soon as you pass through the gates, you’re in a different world, away from the traffic and noise and pollution. Quite a tonic! It was exceedingly dry, the grass though reasonably high, a bleached brown colour. And we weren’t long before we saw our first animal – a giraffe eating acacia leaves, somehow managing to negotiate its tongue around the sharp, long thorns. And from thereon, we did so well with animal sightings. Masses of zebra, hartebeest and gazelles. Great herds of buffalo, their black shapes distinctive against the brown grass. And groups of giraffe, their necks at an acute angle to the ground. It seemed to be ostrich time, the males being particularly visible with their black and white feathers (the duller females blended into the landscape rather more!). The first treat was a group of 3 male lions lying 100m or so from the side of the road, barely visible were it not for the group of vehicles indicating that there was something there! Thankfully for us, they raised themselves up after a while, and whilst one evidently figured he’d had enough and sauntered off, the other two posed rather magnificently. Better still was coming across our own lion (plus at least one lioness, though she was somewhat obscured by vegetation) at the southernmost end of the park, with no other cars in sight. That’s always more gratifying! A rather grislier sight was a flock of particularly argumentative vultures tearing at, what appeared to be, a relatively fresh zebra carcass. The noise they made was quite something! It was obviously all a bit much for some, as they stood off at a distant, not joining in the fray, perhaps waiting to get their share when the noisy ones were done!

What a magnificent pose!

Our auditors enjoying a picnic lunch - rather close to where those lions had been earlier!!

The vultures' very noisy and argumentative lunch!

Wildebeest



Still some water at least in one of the rivers



The game of 'Who's going to get off the road first?'!

It had been quite a while since I’d last been in the park. In my first few years here, I went in regularly, making the most of what used to be an affordable annual pass. However, in just 6 years, that quadrupled in price, such that you need to go about 23 times to make it worthwhile (rather than just paying for each time separately). Partly because of that, I hardly go at all these days, which is a shame, as it really is very beautiful. I hope that the Kenya Wildlife Service and the government continue to ensure that these areas are protected from development, and that the corridors that the animals pass through are kept open (Nairobi is a migratory park). It is a huge asset to have on the city’s doorstep, and it was good to see a number of people making use of it on Saturday. Mind you, these days, some inhabitants of the park have moved, there having been many sightings of lions in a residential area nearby!!

Dust and Pollution

Other than a week at the end of February, there’s been no rain since Christmas. And Nairobi is hot! Not Ouagadougou, Juba, N’djamena ….. 40C, hot admittedly, but still consistently in the low 30s, with blazing sunshine. I love it! However, a downside of this relentless heat is the dust. Clouds of it puff up round my feet as I walk down the dirt road to work, and when cars pass by, it’s not just my legs that are coated in the red dust – I’m covered. A regular routine now is to head straight to the bathroom when I get home, sit on the counter, and give my feet and legs a good wash, before doing anything else in the flat. Clothes are being more regularly washed at the moment, trouser and skirt hems quickly taking on a reddish-brown hue. As I leave Kenya soon for 5 months in the UK, today was my last day for wearing one pair of formerly cream shoes for work - they are now being consigned to the bin!

The other factor that causes things to get dirty much faster here is the pollution. Unlike the UK, vehicle exhaust emissions don’t appear to be monitored. Chief culprits tend to be lorries, chuffing out great plumes of black smoke. Unfortunately, I don’t always have my camera to hand at such times (!), but did at least capture a couple of such polluters one day, ironically one of them a ‘clean water’ tanker!

Online Check-In

For several years now, I’ve checked in online prior to flights. This has several benefits:

• Being able to select my seat. I always opt for a window seat (generally a little bit more room for bags by my feet, as well as being able to lean against the side of the airplane, and the view of course on a daytime flight). I also generally go for one that at that point, hasn’t got anyone checked in the adjacent seat. A number of times this has still been the case on the flight itself, which means more room to spread out.
• Not needing to be at the airport quite so early before a flight. Nairobi airport (Jomo Kenyatta International) doesn’t have that much to do, so the shorter the time spent waiting there, the better.
• Usually (but not always) a much shorter queue at the bag-drop desk than the check-in desks.
However, a couple of weeks ago, this method completely backfired. I’d been in Yaounde, Cameroon for a week, working with the Finance staff there. My return flight was scheduled for 11:15pm on the Friday night. However, on the Thursday I received notice from our Nairobi office that the runway at JKIA (Jomo Kenyatta International Airport) was to undergo maintenance over a 24 hour period, leading to flight delays, so I contacted my travel agent to see how this would affect my flight. I hadn’t heard back from her before the time for online check-in, so did that, and printed off my boarding pass. On the Friday morning, I received an email from Carol telling me that the flight had been rescheduled to 3am on the Saturday morning, and sure enough, when I checked on Kenya Airway’s website, the 11:15pm flight was cancelled, and now showing was a 3am flight. So, again, I checked in online, and printed off the boarding pass.
The taxi showed up at 12:30am as arranged, and we had a traffic-free 25 minute drive to Nsimalen airport. (Part of the way we were following an open-sided truck full of plantain, evidently on its way to Equatorial Guinea, where, my taxi-driver told me, the price of plantain is three times that in Cameroon.) The Kenya Airways plane was already at the airport which was good, though it seemed a little strange that it was there already, given that the turnaround time is normally about an hour, and the time now was 1am, so 2 hours before the scheduled departure time. However, on entering the terminal building, I was told that that flight was in fact about to leave, and that I was too late! As a recap, it wasn’t meant (according to my travel agent, the website and my boarding pass) to leave until 3am, and this was 1am…..
Ironically, I’d been thankful that I’d heard of the change in departure time, thinking that I was saving myself a long wait at the airport in the middle of the night. Instead, had I been oblivious to the change, I’d actually have been better off! Clearly, Kenya Airways hadn’t anticipated that people would be using their online check-in system (there were in fact just 4 of us), and claimed that they hadn’t informed us, so were free to change it again. (Is their website not a means of communication?!)


From the inside of the Kenya Airways
office, in a deserted airport

Whilst they took no responsibility for their part in my missing the flight, they did at least book me onto the next flight – 36 hours later, on Sunday morning. What followed for me, was a 2+ hour wait in the Kenya Airways office, while the staff there finished work, so that I could get a ride back to the SIL centre with them, my taxi driver having left, claiming that this was KQ’s responsibility to sort out, which was fair enough. Thankfully, I’d got the location of the SIL centre from him before he left, as I'd had no clue otherwise how to find it! The dilemma that I then had was how to get back into my room, having dropped the key into the keybox, which requires a combination to open the padlock – a combination that I didn’t have…… The guard at the gate, thankfully had the phone number of the guesthouse manager, and let me use his phone (my Kenyan SIM just allowed incoming rather than outgoing calls and txts). So, by 4am I was back in my room, unpacking, remaking the bed, and sending txt messages via skype to our logistics person in Nairobi to tell her that the taxi wouldn’t be needed that morning after all.
So, will I checkin online next time (2 weeks from now)? Yes, though if there are any flight time changes, I may be a little bit more cautious!

Custom-Made

There are aspects of life here that become normal, and yet would be difficult to replicate at home in the UK, unless of course you happened to be wealthy. Having someone clean my house and do the ironing isn’t something that would ever have occurred to me in Horsham. Yet, here I am in Nairobi, living on a rather reduced income, and Esther comes to clean and iron 2 mornings a week. Having a househelp isn’t so much a luxury (though it is very nice indeed to have all that side of things done!), as an expectation, providing employment and therefore an income to someone, and thereby, to their family as well. Another aspect is having furniture custom-made. Again, not something I’d ever have contemplated in the UK. However, here, there aren’t the Ikeas, Homebases, John Lewis etc etc. What you do have however are lots of ‘jua kali’ (literally, hot sun, as the furniture is generally made on the side of the road) small businesses, with people making a living using their carpentry and / or metalwork skills. There are of course a range of standards, and getting what you want isn’t always a given, though I’ve so far at least, been happy with the various bookshelves, armchairs, chests of drawers and bedside tables that I’ve had made.
I wound up a couple of weeks before Christmas in need of a new guest bed, having purchased a nice new sprung mattress to replace the thin foam one I’d had, only to discover that it was 3” longer than the bedframe, and that the bed couldn’t quite tolerate those extra few inches – all the joints came apart! With all the rain that we’ve had, I didn’t quite fancy trudging through the mud looking at the various bedframes on display on Ngong Road, nor did I reckon much to their likely state, having been completely open to the elements. Instead, I went to Don Bosco Boys’ Town in Karen, as recommended by friends who live out that way. This is a centre that was set up in 1985 by the Salesians of Don Bosco, to train young people from poor areas in technical skills. These include welding, secretarial, motor vehicle mechanics, electrical, masonry, plumbing, and tailoring, as well as carpentry. All that I provided was a quick sketch of the sort of design I was looking for, the dimensions of the mattress (pretty important that this one was the right size!), and a choice of wood (cypress or mahogany was the choice). Just over 2 weeks later, I drove out to pick the bedframe up (which thankfully could be disassembled so that it fit in my car!), and that night I was sleeping in my new, very comfortable, bed (my parents being in my bed!).