Wednesday, December 05, 2007

the end???

Right now i'm freaking out that the term is so close to being over. Where did it go?? I got back to Mombasa yesterday, after pretty much the craziest three weeks I've ever had, and was surprised to find how comfortable it feels being back here. Lamu is wonderful but it is so small, and it just doesn't feel like home. Right now I'm staying with my host family again, which also means that I get to use my sister's laptop to write my 40-page paper instead of spending exhorbitant amounts at an internet cafe.
Yesterday I took a plane from Lamu to Malindi and a bus from Malindi to Mombasa alone, which stressed me out a lot. So much so, in fact, that I did anything but sleep the night before, and consequently was traveling alone with the large remaining portion of my budget for the month on five hours of sleep. Maybe not such a good idea.
Most of the trip was not a problem. The part that made me the most nervous was that once I left the Malindi airport, Omari, who works with SIT in Lamu, told me to just cross the road and wait for a bus or a matatu to Mombasa to pass. The airport is pretty isolated and I wasn't quite sure how that was going to work out.
In Malindi, I was walking down the long airport driveway with my big backpack on my back and my smaller one on my front when one of the women who had been on the plane from Lamu caught up with me. She asked me if I was taking the bus to Mombasa. I said yes. She said she was too, and I gave a probably audible sigh of relief. The second we got to the road a bus passed and when she raised her hand it drew to a stop. We got on, squished into the very back seat, where we were about 8 people in a space meant for five, and talked for the entire two hour ride. She's from Nairobi but works in Mombasa, and had just come back from a vacation in Lamu with her husband of seven months. Her husband was staying there because he is German and on vacation from his job in Munich, but she had to go back to work today. Her name is Purity and she speaks English, Kiswahili, Mehru, Kikuyu and Kamba. I wish I could speak that many languages. She's going to call me sometime before I leave if she's not busy so we can hang out and I can meet her husband.
But anyway, this is all to say that I worry far too much, and stuff works out in the end, but usually isn't improved by my freaking out. That's my life lesson of the day.
At my family's house, they were all busy getting ready for the dinner party they were having that night for a cousin who is visiting. I know most of the family from all the weddings I've been to (but don't ask me for names...no idea). They were all excited to see me. But I could summon up very little to keep conversations going. At around 9:30 I was laying on the bed talking to my sister and I fell asleep in the middle of the conversation. I woke up at 2 with my glasses on. I was very, very tired.
Today I powered through 15 pages of my paper, so that was good. Then I was locked into the house for a while because everyone was asleep and I didn't want to wake them up, so I ended up watching an 80's documentary about life in the Kalahari desert on KBC. I learned how to find water using some melon seeds and a baboon, so I guess that might come in handy someday. I also got really emotional when a group of pelicans almost died looking for water before the rains came. The music was setting it up to be really tragic but it wasn't in the end. All in all, it was better than my other choice, which was The View on Dubai One.
So I'm going to say goodbye for now because it's going to get dark soon, plus this internet cafe, while it is more than 50% cheaper than ones in Lamu, really stinks right now and keeps flaking out on me.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

All alone

Well, I'm back. I apologise profusely for the long absence. We've been all over the place and I've been trying to deal with choosing classes for coming back. Also, a lot has happened and the idea of writing it all was, quite frankly, intimidating.
So I'm not going to try to write it all. It's in my journal, or most of it. I will instead summarize what has happened since I last wrote:
-I went to six Swahili weddings in Mombasa (the food was good)
-A crow fell in the window of my host family's house and the servant cooked it, so we ate crow for dinner.
-My host sister got engaged to a man who is not her boyfriend and whom she does not love. But she seems okay with it...I wouldn't be. He's a mechanical engineer and has a really nice car.
-We took a ferry and bus into Tanzania on my birthday, then stayed in Tanga for the night and had an amazing lunch at our director's friend's house, then went caving and, later that night, dancing.
-I got Kilimanjaro for my birthday, just as Franz something or other of Germany got from Queen Victoria for his birthday years and years ago (that's why the Kenya border looks like it has a bite out of it--if she hadn't been so generous, Kilimanjaro would still belong to Kenya). The difference, however, was that the Kilimanjaro my classmates bought for me was a brand of beer and not a mountain.
-We then took another bus to Dar Es Salaam and then a fast ferry to Zanzibar, where we stayed for ten days.
-We were repulsed by how overrun Zanzibar was with tourists...but there's no wonder, since it's a gorgeous place.
-We got a ton of practice haggling in kiswahili with the shopkeepers there, who were more willing to accept a much lower price when they discovered we spoke the language and knew what prices things were actually supposed to be.
-I had lobster for the first time. It was delicious. Also I had barracuda and octopus and calamari.
-I drank a lot of sugarcane juice.
-We returned from Zanzibar and were given 46,000 KSH and cast out of SIT to go and write a paper for a month.

And that is where I am now. It's not really being cast out, since they know exactly where we're staying and when we're traveling and we have to call in several times in the next month to let them know we're okay. But we are on our own, researching, writing and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our day, until December 8th.
I'm in Lamu collecting stories about majini (singular=jini). Jinis come from some of the same traditions as Alladin's genie in a bottle but they're more into possessing people and taking out their malice on humans, and they very rarely sound anything like Robin Williams. They are Muslim folklore, but in East Africa the Middle Eastern traditions of jinis combine with African spiritual practices. They are often exorcised with verses from the Qur'an, but they aren't all Muslim, just as not all humans are Muslim. And in Lamu, since it is such an ancient town and society in general, there are jinis everywhere. Everyone has a cousin or a sibling who's been possessed, and many jinis apparently live both behind the house I'm living in and in the woods behind the power generator.
I have to go, actually, because this afternoon I'm meeting a mzee (a term of respect for an old man) to talk to him about the jinis he's seen. And I may or may not hang out by the power generator some night after midnight and try to find some jinis (assuming I can find someone who's not terrified to search for them who will go with me). Also, I'm going to talk to some of the waganga (witch doctors) who perform exorcisms. All in all, I have no idea where this project is going to go but I'm pretty excited about it.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Overwhelming hunger and the Idd festivities

The end of Ramadan is a time of great celebration and...can you guess? Eating! It is a painful experience, however, to await the cannons signifying end of Ramadan on Thursday night and to realize, in the end, the sheer futility of the hours you've been straining your ears. Since Idd (which is Eid spelled the Swahili way) only comes when the new moon has been spotted, it can happen either of two nights. In the US, Somalia and most of the Middle East Idd was on Friday. In Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya, the moon failed to appear. So...it was another day of sitting through lectures while fasting, and another day of horrendous deficits of attention (it is during lectures that I miss cheese and bagels and chinese food and mexican food and sushi the most. Accordingly, I don't listen too well.).
Friday afternoon was the hardest to fast through. My mouth was dry and all I could do was slouch on the couch in a comatose manner, barely speaking to my family. To make matters worse, Jamie Oliver is apparently pretty popular in the Middle East, and the Dubai TV station we watch plays his cooking show at 5:00 on weekdays. We break fast at around 6:15. It is bad, bad planning and after watching it I feel even more unhinged by hunger and thirst. "So much cholesterol," remarks my host mother, Sharifa, every time Jamie Oliver uses cheese in his dishes. Sometimes I just want to fall off the couch when she says this. I can't think of a meal I've eaten since I've been here that did not contain at least one fried thing. Most of the time oil makes up roughly half of the food mass laid out on any given table. And vegetables? Rare. And usually swimming in Blue Band, the margarine they use here.
As soon as the call to prayer started, the cannons at Fort Jesus rang out across the city. In the clearing in front of the house, children danced. Someone cranked up a boom box and played music loudly. It continued all night. For the first time in a month I ate normally, with no thought of storing enough caloric energy to get me through the next day.
Halfway through the next meal, my mom looked up from her shurba (chicken stew) "Tomorrow is Idd and we will eat. Then we will fast for the next six days."
I barely managed to keep my mouth closed; my lower jaw wanted so badly to hit the table, and maybe even the floor. Sharifa said that it would be fine if I wanted Shabani (the servant) to make breakfast and lunch for me. I didn't have to fast. But after some thought about how awkward that would be, I said I'd fast with them. So...I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. I'll have to relearn normal eating patterns.

Friday night, apart from being the last night of Ramadan, was also my sister's 21st birthday. We call her Fatma Shorty because she is very short. My cousin, who lives with us, is Fatma Tall. She is 15 but seems much older. Although they don't really celebrate birthdays here, she wanted to buy a new headscarf and some cosmetics for herself, so that evening we headed to the center of Old Town. During Ramadan, since people are cooking, working or sleeping all day, shops stay open far into the night and everyone wanders around socializing and buying clothes. It was the last night of Ramadan, so it was much like last minute Christmas shopping. All the people who hadn't gotten Idd clothes for their kids yet were crowded into the narrow streets, threading their way between street vendors and cars trying in vain to move forward.
I was with Fatma Short, Fatma Tall and their friend, Fatma. All three wore black buibuis and headscarves, and although each one had a different sparkly design on it, they were incredibly hard to follow. Fatma Short and Fatma the friend were wearing ninjas; when I asked about it they told me not to tell Sharifa. "Girls wear ninjas to go on secret dates," they told me. "We're not allowed to wear them out." And indeed, they got a lot of attention on the streets; hiding everything but your eyes if you are a teen is apparently a very flirty move.
While we were out, I bought a shirt for 450 shillings; the shopkeeper tried to charge me 600 but I said no and the Fatmas shouted "450! 450!" at him until he gave in. "Yeye ni ndugu yetu!" they shouted at him (she's our sibling!). Then I treated them all to ice cream for Fatma's birthday, with the added bonus that Fatma Tall and I got to watch the other two struggle to eat popsicles under their ninjas. It was pretty funny.
When we got home, the Fatmas had me try on a succession of outfits until I found one I could wear for Idd. Fatma Tall straightened my hair and I put Vaseline all over my arms and hands so that the henna I'd gotten earlier in the evening would darken overnight. After settling on an outfit, we girl-talked for a while and Fatma Shorty laughed at me. She couldn't believe I'd never had a boyfriend; she's had 4, but don't tell her mother. All except the most recent are secrets. The most recent, who is from Tanzania but works in Holland right now, has promised to come within the month and ask for her hand in marriage. She chats with him on MSN on her phone all day and they call each other at least once a day. My mother has invited me to the wedding, which they hope will be next July or August. I said I'd try to make it.

The next morning after breakfast, Fatma Tall put my hair up, lined my eyes with kohl and gave me lip gloss to wear. A succession of kids dressed in their shiny new Idd clothes and toting shiny new handbags marched through the house to Sharifa, seated on the couch in the living room. She gave them small change and they sat down and talked for a while, eating the snack pastries on the table and drinking juice. Then they moved on to visit the next relatives. I went next door and sat with my aunt and uncle and Thano, who is another student from our group and who is now my cousin, since they are his host parents. After a while Fatma Tall and Salma, her 13-year-old sister, took me around to meet all the relatives.
Over the course of the day, I met about 1000 relatives, drank more juice than I've ever drunk in my life and ate cake until I was on the verge of exploding. I also made 350 shillings, which the Fatmas laughed at me for. Little kids get money on Idd; people my age are mainly expected to stay home and greet visitors.
And what, you may ask, do the little kids do with all the loose change they end up with? The answer lies in the sketchy park on Makadara road. They fence it off and bring in rides and camels and horses and sound systems for a week. It's the Makadara fair, and during Idd it's the place to see and be seen. Salma and I were about to go to Makadara that evening ("hold onto your bag tightly," my mom told me.) when Sharifa's cell phone rang. "It's for you," she said, handing the phone to me. Thano and our cousin Ali were on the other end, wondering if I wanted to drive around Mombasa in a rented car for a few hours.
It turned out to be a bizarre night. Ali turned up the bass and blasted a variety of American and Swahili hip-hop mix cds, and we cruised through town past all the festivities. Makadara was crowded and screams and loud horns emerged from inside; the ice cream shops along the road were brightly lit and full and it took forever to get down one street with all the cars and people trying to move around. We ended up at an On-The-Run at a gas station outside of the city (you don't know how bizarre it is seeing an American chain gas station store like that here) and bought hot dogs, then ate them on the beach in Nyali. Then we drove around for a couple of hours, just seeing the city at night.
This entry is longer than it was supposed to be, and I managed to fit in about a third of what I wanted to talk about. My lunch break is almost over now and I have to go back for the third lecture of the day. Hopefully soon I will be able to write again, and when I do I need to write about:
Finally getting to Makadara
Weddings
My Swahili name
and various other things. But now I have to ford through rivers of rainwater mixed with various unappetizing things on my way back; the small rains season has officially started and I'm considering buying a canoe to ease transportation for the next two weeks.

Friday, October 12, 2007

back in Mombasa and other pertinent tidbits

We got back to Mombasa late Tuesday night, after a sad goodbye to Lamu and a horribly delayed flight out. I miss Lamu a lot and I'm currently trying to figure out how to go back there for my independent study project, which will hopefully be on children's songs in swahili culture. Also, sorry about the atrocious capitalization in this post. the shift key only works about half the time, but hey, internet is way cheaper here than it is on Lamu. it's also faster, since my host sister is studying IT in college and she told me where the best internet cafe is.

During our last week on Lamu, we had a men's panel and a women's panel discussion. the men's panel was before the women's so that, as our academic director told us, the men could say things and then the women could tell us the truth about them. And he's obviously done this many times before, because it was so true. The men made comments like, "only the woman has to be a virgin at marriage because it is the man's role to be the discoverer. The woman is the recipient." so who, we inquired, do the men sleep with, if all the Muslim girls are virgins? "Kikuyus," they told us. "And Bajunis." (Bajuni is the Swahili name for Somali immigrants) There was an older, formidable man whom everyone referred to as "chairman" who shut them all down; "The Quran says that both the man and the woman must be virgins at marriage," he said. None of the other men on the panel had a response.

There were various other notable comments over the course of the panel; "You wouldn't want a secondhand car, right? You want a new one. So you want to marry a virgin" and "Men are like frogs. they have to kiss many frogs before they find the right one." We all came out of the panel somewhat disgusted by the general attitude towards women that these men had. If that was the lot of women in this society, we wanted none of it.

The women's panel, however, was completely and totally different. The women were animated and lively and laughed all the time. Instead of justifying everything with the Quran, they explained polygamy in a more rational way; "No woman likes it," they said, "but sometimes it's necessary." If a woman is barren, the husband still wants children, so he can keep her as his wife and marry another one. If a man is a merchant and spends half of the year in another port on the Indian Ocean, he can take a wife in both his home and the other port so that he has family in each place. There was another good reason which I don't remember, which totally undercuts my story...but the thing the women stressed is that above all the man must be able to support each of his wives equally, economically, socially and biologically. It was obvious that while the men had not questioned many of these things, the women had--they had logical answers and explanations using modern society rather than the teachings of the Quran. And while there are still blatant injustices in the system, I think we all came out of the panel with the resolve to listen and try to understand more and judge less. The women on the panel were well-educated and strong, and it was very good to see that.

I also realized how lucky I am to be a woman studying here. As women students, we get to see the women's society, which is more hidden than the men's and, in my opinion, far more interesting. Spending time with our tutors in Lamu, we got access to a strong community of women who basically run their families, although in theory the man is the head of household. The man, in Swahili culture, has very little access to his own house. He provides economically, but traditionally when he comes home he either greets visitors on the benches outside of every house or goes to his bedroom. The house is the woman's territory, and she controls everything going on within it. Of course, traditions like that aren't always upheld; men and women eat together and watch TV together now, and houses are arranged to allow for more common space. Still, the general power structures in the household are upheld. Thus, while the guys in our group were wandering around Lamu meeting many, many different people each day with their tutors and breaking fast on the seafront, the girls were sitting in the kitchen in front of the jiko (charcoal stove) and talking to their tutors about anything and everything, learning about polygamy and secret dating and abortions and scandals and, of course, cooking. So take your pick...but I think we got the more interesting side of things.

There's so much more I could, and should, say about Lamu. Due to time constraints and independent study project proposals, however, I think I'm going to have to leave it here.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Tropical paradise much?

Alrighty then.  I'll start from the day we left Kaloleni; there's so much more to tell about my time there but I'm not going to go back and write it all.  Internet is expensive on Lamu (although, paradoxically, it's faster than internet in Mombasa) and there's too much else to write about.
We were supposed to be at the school at 6 AM (12 in the morning swahili time, since swahili time starts at sunrise and goes until sunset.).  But the problem with swahili time is that it is a bit like Suozzo time, but even more laid back.  I was up at 5:15 and packed by 5:45, but Gladys, my host mom, still had to finish making me breakfast, which was spaghetti and chai.  Then she had to get me a bottle of mnazi, which is palm wine made very cheaply and very regularly in the village.  It not being a Muslim village, there are pretty big problems with alcoholism there.  The problems aren't helped by the fact that a wine-bottle-sized portion of mnazi will cost you 30 KSH, which is less than 50 cents.  Mnazi is a pretty big part of life in the village when there are men around, but the women in my compound didn't really drink and the men are all away working, so I didn't get a chance to try it and most of the other students did.  My mama decided to send me off with a bottle so I could try it; once she'd bought it from the next door neighbor she had me try it to see if I liked it.  Coming on top of the large portion of plain pasta (I didn't have the heart to not finish it, it being my last meal and all) and two cups of excellent chai at 6 in the morning, it was...interesting.  So I said I liked it and stuck it in my backpack, panicking because we were running so late.  I finally persuaded the family to move towards the road and we passed by the shopkeeper who I'd talked with every day on the way to and from school.  He gave me two bracelets and a necklace and kissed my hand, which I really didn't know how to react to.  I thanked him profusely and we continued on our way.  Gladys and I got up the hill at about 5 to 7, just as the vans were pulling out to look for the latecomers.  They stuck my stuff into a van and, with a hug and a promise to come back and visit, I got in and we left Gladys waving goodbye in front of the school.  The sun was coming out from behind the clouds as we drove down the hill on the rocky dirt road, and the whole lanscape lit up green and lush, with smoke rising from the little thatch-roofed houses spotting the fields.
When I opened my backpack, I discovered that the mnazi had leaked and everything in the front pocket was wet.  My backpack smelled like alcoholic coconut, with a hint of sulfur, and my ipod was covered.  This led to the rechristening of my ipod "MnaziPod."  MnaziPod has somewhat recovered from the experience, but the screen is striped somewhat like a barcode and the battery life is about half of what it was.  But it still plays music, so it's all good.
Our next stop on our trip was Tsavo National Park.  The vans we rode in, we soon discovered, had pop-up tops, and once we got to Tsavo the driver popped them up.  I'm fairly sure you're not supposed to stick your head out the top while the van is moving, but we all did and I had bruises all over my arms to prove it.  Trying to cling to the side of a van on a bumpy dirt road isn't the safest thing in the world.
I have lots of pictures of animals I never thought I'd see up close; giraffes (twiga) and lions (simba) and elephants (tembo) and rhinos (viboko) and buffalo (nyati) and zebras (punda milia=striped donkey, not to be confused with punda malaya, which means donkey whore).  We had lunch at a gorgeous, fancy restaurant at the top of a mountain.  We were somewhat impressed by the food, but the bathrooms were the real hit with the group.  I flushed twice just to prove that I didn't have to squat over a hole in the ground anymore.
That evening as we crossed a set of railroad tracks next to a line of broken-down stone houses, the program director, Athman, called from the front, "if you don't like this, we can go somewhere else."  I started to get suspicious, both from the smile on his face and from the fact that someone had heard we'd been staying in tents.  We had no idea where we were going.  And they were, indeed, tents, we saw as we pulled up.  Huge tents.  We got out of the car and porters rushed to carry our backpacks; we reached the lounge area and a woman held out a tray of warm washcloths to wash the red dust off of our faces.  As we collapsed on the couches overlooking the pool, another woman walked around with long-stemmed cups of passionfruit juice with pink sugar lining the rim.  The tents had balconies and enormous beds and hot water and lights and just about everything we hadn't had for a week.  It was a game of contrasts.  It was the nicest hotel I'd ever stayed in, with an amazing gourmet European dinner and a huge breakfast and a massage tent and a bar and a warm pool and a view of the river where all of the animals in that area come to drink.  We'd just come from a week in a rural village, most of us without electricity, using outhouses and taking baths in tubs, where you had to make sure not to rub the walls if you were still wet from your bath because the mud plaster would smear off in clumps.  And though it was extremely comfortable, I couldn't help being extremely conscious of how extraneous and contrived this all was.
After another game drive on the other side of the park the next day, we headed on to Malindi for three days.  Malindi is a beautiful town with a gorgeous beach, but the tourists...ack!  They're all Italian, so I could understand the shopkeepers who shouted "Ciao!  Come stai?" at us as we walked past.  But they were terrible.  They walk around in tiny shorts and bikinis as though the town is a beachfront resort designed for their tanning purposes, while women in buibuis and ninjas walk past and men in prayer robes and kofias head to the mosque.  And because we were tourists too, there for so little time, we were automatically lumped in with the Europeans.  When they nodded and smiled at us on the street, we looked down and tried not to make eye contact.  Clothes that would be normal in the States look scandalous and disrespectful to us now.  It's strange.  But really, when I stood on the roof of our hostel in the evening, I could hear five mosques broadcasting nightly prayers.  The contrast is stunning; the beach a block away, a mosque right across the street.  It was a discordant clashing of cultures for us, but Malindi exists as it is now because of that tourism.  And we certainly had amazing luck with food, as we ate feasts at our program director's friend's house two of the nights and found a simple but filling meal that cost 1200 KSH for 12 of us on the third night.  That's about $1.50 each.  
After Malindi, we flew to Lamu, where we are now.  Lamu is an island off the coast, near the Somalia border.  There are no cars on the island, and the inhabitants are considered to speak the most accurate Kiswahili in Kenya.  In most places the Kiswahili is heavily influenced by the local Bantu dialects, but here everyone learns Kiswahili from the time they're born.  The streets are incredibly thin, and the main form of transport for building materials and anything else that needs to be carried is donkeys.  There is at least one mosque in every neighborhood, so deciding to fast here was very easy; everyone is doing it.  Lamu is basically a tropical paradise.  Pretty much.  Or as close as anything that's not sickeningly resort-like can come to it.  It's not weird to walk up to people and start asking them questions, which is good because for Kiswahili lessons we occasionally have to do that.  We each have a Swahili tutor who we see every day.  Mine is named Hadijah Mani.  She lives right near our house and has two kids: Athman is 7 and Mohammed is 2.  Athman is always playing with friends outside, but I hang out with Mohammed a lot.  He calls me Jambo, no matter how many times I tell him my name is Andrea.  He likes to throw things at me; the worst so far was a half-eaten guava, which was slimy.  Usually it's just plastic blocks.
My tutor is always cooking food to break fast with.  Usually it's deep-fried potatoes with hot sauce in between, and sometimes it's bajia- they're a little like tiny falafel, but they're made with cow peas (I don't know what those are, but they don't look like chickpeas).  Yesterday I got to fry sambusas, which are what they call samosas.  And the best thing about it is that I get to take home some of whatever she's making.  We talk about my day in Kiswahili and I ask a lot of questions about her life.  I'm getting really good at asking questions because people are so willing to answer them here.  She always sends me home right before it's time to break fast (fast closes at about 4:15 AM and opens at 6:15 PM).  The house we're staying in, Milimani house, is also our school building; we have class in the dining room, living room and the front office.  The front office is where the director and assistant director go to break fast with Fupes and Omari, who take care of the building.  I usually break fast with them and we drink tamarind juice and eat viazi and bajia and sambusa and these little rosewater-donut-ey things that are amazing.  Also we eat dates.  Immediately afterwards we go upstairs to the dining room for dinner, which means that by the end my stomach, which has shrunk over the course of the day, is painfully full regardless of how little I've eaten.
Oh, and I got a cell phone.  I really like it.  I text people from across the room because people in Milimani house are the only people whose numbers I know.

It's time to head back home and then to my tutor's house, but feel free to drop me emails...I may or may not write back, but I'll read them.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Hakuna Matata- it does not mean no worries

Hakuna matata actually translates to "no problems", more or less. So the Disney song is wrong.
Anyway, I'm back, at long last. So much has happened in the last few weeks, and it is going to be utterly impossible to summarize it all. But I'll start from the beginning and see how far I get.



I've been unhappy about where I left this blog for a while, because while Mombasa is a wonderful place, it's also a very unfamiliar one. On the Kenya coast in general, it's difficult to be a woman, especially one who doesn't cover her head, especially one who is white. When we're walking with the boys it's okay; everyone is eager to greet the wanafunzi, and we've met some great people because of that. Alone or in a group of girls, however, it's very different. The greetings we get are different, and the marriage proposals come often. In Mombasa, there are very few women on the street in Old Town, where our school is. It is an almost entirely Muslim area and those women who are walking down the street wear headscarves and don't greet people they don't know. Many also wear ninjas (yes, they're called that), which tie around the head, leaving just a slit for the eyes. The decision to wear a ninja depends, in most cases, upon how jealous a woman's husband is. The ninja is a relatively modern invention; up until very recently, women had to hold the cloth over their faces as they walked. Older women still wear these, meaning that they only have one hand to perform transactions and carry things.

In the midst of this, a white woman with an uncovered head sticks out a lot. One evening a man wearing a kofia (a round, flat-topped cloth hat that many Muslim men wear) pinched my butt and then had the nerve to walk past me and say "hello!" I was seething with anger, but what was I supposed to do? It was such an unfamiliar place, since it was my third day in Kenya, and I felt powerless. All I wanted to do was to draw attention away from myself. I stared at the ground and sped up with the other girls I was walking with, but I wanted to scream profanities at the man for his blatant cultural assumptions and for his brazen act of sexual harrassment.



Kaloleni, where we did our village homestays, was a breath of fresh air after the conservativism and closeness of Mombasa. It is in a predominantly Catholic area. Fewer women cover their heads, and those who do do so for the sun or just to keep their hair up. There are three schools in the area we were in and, on one of the roads, a succession of tiny shops that usually stock about 50 tomatoes, 4 cabbages, anti-malarial pills, salt, pepper, batteries and various other necessities. Some of them offer mobile phone battery recharges for 20 shillings; most people there have cell phones and few have electricity. The uniting language of the region is Kiswahili, but Kaloleni is a village populated by the Giriama tribe, so everyone speaks Kigiriama as their first language. They are similar, as both are Bantu languages, but colloquialisms tend to be very, very different.

My family lives about a half-hour walk away from our school building. I'm pretty sure they're well-to-do by village standards; we ate meat almost every night, and my babu (grandfather) is a former schoolteacher. He speaks good English, though we rarely talked, and listens to his boom box for a good portion of the day on the grass in the center of the compound. There are several buildings in the compound; my nyanya (grandmother, though it can also mean tomato) and babu's house, my mama's house, which she shares with her two children, Nema and Gandhi, my aunt's house (she's divorced, has three children and works as a typist at St. George's school for boys), my other aunt, Lucy's, house (she's 21, just married in march and her husband is in the army.) and a kitchen building. Also an outhouse and a building of unclear purpose, since I never saw anyone go in or out. Behind the compound is the shamba, or farm, where there are goats, cows, chickens, okra, maize, sukuma wiki (which is really good) and various other plants. All over the town there are coconut, mango, tomako (an awesome but very strange fruit), cashew and banana trees.

The week we were there was amaz ing and impossible to describe, but there were some highlights. After church on sunday (where we all had to go up and introduce ourselves in kiswahili) we had a tough but delicious meat for lunch. "What is this?" I asked. The women (men and women eat separately) smiled at me. "giraffe," they said. Yes, I ate giraffe. And yes, it was amazing. And yes, it is also highly illegal in Kenya.
One of my last tub baths I felt like maybe getting my hair cleaner than usual (everyone takes two baths a day, but it's so dusty that it rarely makes a difference). So i saved a little water in the container instead of filling the tub all the way, and I poured it over my head at the end. Looking down, I saw lots of little black spots on my shoulders. I realized they were ants and started to panic; safari ants here will bite, will latch on hard, and can devour a chicken in a matter of minutes. Then I realized that they were small ants and was more relieved than i have ever been in my life to have little ants all over me. There was apparently an ant colony in the bottom of the water container. That was fun.
Anyway, there's more to tell but not enough time right now. I have tons of pictures which i may be able to upload at some point, but don't hold out hope. We're in Lamu now, which is gorgeous. Also, I'm fasting for Ramadan. The fasting is easy, but the no water all day is not. But yeah. That's life. I feel closer to the culture, so I'm glad i'm doing it.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

my neighborhood

We're leaving Mombasa in 2 days and we won't be back here for about a month. In a month we'll be doing our urban homestays, and we met our families yesterday. My host mother said that I'm to think of her as my mom here in Mombasa. She said she and her daughters will speak only swahili to me so that I'll learn well, and also that they'll bring me to lots of Muslim weddings as soon as Ramadan finishes. She lives in old town (or mji wa kale), which is where we're staying now. i'm excited about that because this already feels like my neighborhood; I know a bunch of the vendors on our street because they love to help us with our swahili; on my way over to this cyber cafe, we got into a discussion with Cappuccino, a tour guide who knows a bunch of people on our program by name already, and he taught us how to say "we're going to the cyber cafe" (tunaenda wa cybercafe). Giraffe has a shop at the other end of the block and told us this morning that if we had any questions about the language, we were to come see him.

This morning we split up into pairs and went on a scavenger hunt kind of thing to try to find a place in the city, and we asked a man on the street where to find coast General Hospital once we were completely lost. He was a really nice guy named Omari who took us on a shortcut (i was suspicious...you don't do this in NYC. ever.) through old town and sat at the hospital with us for a while, teaching us swahili words and telling us about his job as a windsurfing instructor. Then he walked all the way back with us and he pointed us back to our road and gave us his cell phone number in case we wanted to keep in touch.

In Swahili class, we've learned the present and future tense, and it's an amazing language; it's so much fun, and it's also really easy. Next week we're doing homestays in a village and having swahili lessons and also cooking classes. The food here is great, and the coastal specialty is fish grilled coconut and lemon. The bones are treacherous, though.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Alive and well in Mombasa

Going through customs in Nairobi goes something like this:
Us: Hi, is this customs?
Customs lady: Yes.
Us: so...what do we need to do?
Customs lady: Are you continuring on from here?
Us: yes, to Mombasa.
Customs lady: the terminal to the left. Hurry. (she points and we run)

They don't even make you take your shoes off before you get on the plane. It's great.

Our first day on Mombasa is almost complete, and I've been functioning on about 3 hours of sleep on various flights since Saturday and five hours of sleep before the call to prayer at 5:30 this morning. Walking through the streets today following the assistant director, Ali, like confused little ducklings, we heard "jambo, wanafunzi! Jambo!" (Hi, students! Hi!) on every corner. It's true we stick out like sore thumbs. We wear ankle-length skirts, pants for the guys, and high-cut t-shirts, which pegs us somewhere between tourists (do I even need to describe them?) and locals (because, well, we're for the most part much paler than they are, we don't wear jeans and tank tops or traditional wrapped lengths of cloth like some of them do, and we don't wear robes and headscarves like the rest.)

the girls' apartment has views of the Indian Ocean from most of the rooms. My bed has a blue mosquito net which makes me feel like a princess. We can use the water to shower but not to drink, and the lights are harsh fluorescent. It's a gorgeous old building, painted white with middle-eastern-looking detailing around the roof and on the stairs. There's a parrot in the extra bathrooms down the hall which squawks all night and all day, and the shower has a broken window, which means that my shower this morning, aside from being one of the three most refreshing showers I've taken in my life (I could feel every ounce of travel dirt from the last two days and humid sweat from last night seep away), also had the most beautiful view of any shower I've ever used.

Today, after our tour of Mombasa, traditional Kenyan lunch and health and safety lectures, we got the books. I'd almost forgotten I was here to study, but the books were a startling reminder; there were about 7 of them and they were HEAVY. But they also look amazing, especially the swahili book; we start our swahili lessons tomorrow.

I'm sorry for the scattered post, but, as I said, I'm a bit tired. I'll try to post once more before we leave Mombasa, and after that I don't know when I'll be able to again.

Friday, August 24, 2007

One week and counting

September first is coming way too quickly for me to handle. There's just so much to be done, only I'm not sure what it all is because I've made about 15 different to do lists at various times in the past two weeks and I can only find one or two at this point. This wouldn't be a problem except that each list has a set of completely different things on it, depending on what I could remember at the time I made it, and I'm terrified that I'll forget something of the utmost importance because of my scatterbrained-ness. And then there are the things that are completely beyond my control; my contacts shipped today, and all I can do is keep my fingers crossed that they'll get here on time. The good news is that I only have one shot left (rabies) and have done most of my shopping. There is hope for me yet, I guess.
After an uncomfortable episode on Tuesday, I'm returned to a general state of calmness, coolness and collection. On Tuesday I had a series of panic attacks that left me with shaking hands, trying to regulate my breathing at my desk as the weight of all that was coming hit me in waves. Actually, though, I blame the Starbucks tall coffee I'd drunk for that. Apparently caffeine is not my thing. Granted, I know I tend to get pretty hyper and even a bit crazed on the rare occasions when I have coffee. I talk a lot and sometimes have uncontrollable giggle fits. This time, though, I had a coffee at 9:30 after lifeguarding and was shaking for the whole day at work until I got home at 7. Does caffeine really take that long to wear off?
So instead of drinking coffee at any time during this coming week, I'm going to
take deep breaths, plow ahead with my packing and bury myself in Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twin Peaks, various movies on my Netflix queue, The Amber Spyglass and...erm...my required reading. Bleargh.

Friday, July 27, 2007

It looms ahead, coming nearer and nearer each day...

I feel as though this initial entry should have an introduction of sorts, so here goes. I leave New York on September 1st and come back on December 16th, and during those four months I will be doing “Swahili Studies and Coastal Cultures,” to summarize using the course name. We’ll be in and out of internet cafĂ© territory, which tends to be the bigger cities, making this blog most likely a somewhat sporadic affair. But I’ll do my best to keep you posted on life in Kenya and I guess you'll just have to take what you can get.

So. It has come down to this: just over a month until my plane flies out of JFK, prescriptions to fill, vast quantities of sunscreen and hardcore DEET products to buy, rabies shots to get and some major mental preparation to do. To be quite honest, I have no idea where to start on that last one, although something tells me that at least part of the answer lies within my required reading books which are sitting on my shelf, virtually unopened.

Thankfully, as of today I have my Polio, Typhoid, Hepatitis A and Yellow Fever shots over with (and a set of flulike and uncomfortable side effects, as well as two bruised arms, to show for it). I also was relieved to find out that I’ll be taking the anti-malarial drug Malarone rather than Lariam, which I have heard horror stories about. Side effects seem to include, in some cases, long-term psychotic reactions and suicide attempts. So that’s good news, although it means I have to take it every day instead of every week.

One exciting development: last week I got my itinerary. Briefly, it is as follows:

Kenya: Swahili Studies & Coastal Cultures
Fall 2007 Program Schedule

9/2 – 9/6 Program Orientation & Introduction to Swahili Language: Mombasa

9/7 – 9/19 Rural Village Homestay, Community Service Tree Planting Project, Swahili Language Training and Game Safari: Kaloleni Village & Tsavo National Park & Malindi

9/20 – 10/8 Intensive Swahili Language Training, Coastal Studies Seminar & Field Study Seminar, Dhow Safari, and Swahili Tutors: Lamu & Kiwayuu

10/9 – 24 Mombasa Homestay, Coastal Studies Seminar, & Field Study Seminar: Mombasa.

10/25 – 10/27 Preparation & Meetings with ISP Advisors: Mombasa

10/28 – 10/7 Educational Excursion to the Island of Zanzibar via Tanga and Dar or the Sultanate of Oman

11/8 – 12/8 Independent Study Project

12/9 – 12/15 Independent Study Project Presentations & Program Evaluation

12/15 End of Scheduled Program

Note that the beginning of the Educational Excursion falls right on my birthday. That is quite exciting for me, although it occurs to me that I will be spending both my 20th birthday and this Thanksgiving on a continent I’ve never been to, with people I’ve only known for a couple of months, for the first time in my life. And that is a slightly scary prospect.
But we’ll see how it works out. As my mom would say, it’s an adventure.