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.

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.

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.