Friday, June 11, 2010

The land of bananas.

The day after the Perkins family arrived in Nairobi, we visited my homestay family in Ayany for lunch and a walk around Kibera. This was a place that had become so familiar and comfortable to me that it was difficult to step out of my own perspective and realize how different my parents must have felt while we walked around the neighborhood. This whole perspective deal was something I had to work on throughout the trip. The next afternoon we went to the City Market for some open-air bargaining and procurement of this and that. There are some overly-eager dealers in this market and at first it was a bit overwhelming for everyone, but by the time we left Mom had gotten used to just how different shopping was out here compared to the Galleria in Edina. I would say it’s definitely not the most enjoyable or relaxing experience. We ate at Carnivore one evening. Crocodile meat tastes like leather soaked in a dead walleye stew. Nasty stuff. Three days in Nairobi is plenty of time for a tourist’s satisfaction.

We hit up a 2-day classic safari in Amboseli National Park, just north of the Tanzanian border and situated in the foothills of Mt. Kilimanjaro. We stayed at a surprisingly swanky place called the Sopa Lodge. The name of the game at most of these luxurious resorts? Never-ending service. This kinda got to all of us by the end of the trip. Every little thing was taken care of and all our needs were met. The pool had some striking views of the mountain, which seems to have lost some snow since I last saw it in March. Amboseli is known for the famous elephante, and boy did we see ‘em. Elephants swimming in the swamps, elephants eating lots of grass, huge male elephants staring us down, yup, we saw ‘em. Very cool. We also saw a plethora of other creatures, namely a whole herd of giraffes (they stared us down for about 10 minutes) and a lone hippo walking around. Then it was back to Nairobi for a night before flying out to Zanzibar the next morning. This group of 50 islands off the coast of Tanzania is collectively known as Zanzibar, though the largest island is usually holds that name. That’s where we went. It’s a semi-autonomous entity of Tanzania and there are some complicated political issues surrounding Zanzibar that I just don’t understand. It’s also one of the birthplaces of the Swahili culture. Though we stayed in a sun-baked resort out of town, we got to go on a spice tour and check out Stone Town (the historic part of the island complete with Swahili architecture and a narrow streets). For those of you who are familiar with Mombasa, Stone Town is similar to Old Town. Makes sense I guess. Zanzibar used to be the numero uno spice production site in the world, so they kinda know how to spice it up. I ate cloves off the tree, black peppers out of the pod (bad idea, don’t do it), and had the opportunity to smell the bark of a cinnamon tree. Spices are where it’s at.

We spent a lot of time on the beach just relaxing. Back in Nairobi last Tuesday, it was time to do some mad packing, eat some Ethiopian delicacies with the homestay and Perkins fam, and then head out to Kampala, Uganda on an overnight bus. All in all, I had spent four months in Kenya. My mind if still a bit of mush about the whole spring, so I really can’t say how this time has changed me or changed how I perceive the world around me. It’s been grand, but I have yet to reflect about my time there in a fully holistic way.

Before I left for Uganda, I thought a lot about how I approached my time in Kenya and how this might be different. I really want to approach Uganda with the same energy, enthusiasm and curiosity that I so cherished this past spring. After a week out here in the land of many a hill, I think I need to make more of an effort. It’s been good, no doubt, but I think I need to recapture some of that energy. On the other hand, it’s good just to be here with Petie. It’s funny being here in a place that is at once very different and very similar to Kenya. I’ve found myself taking note of every little difference or similarity. Petie’s probably hearing a lot more than she wants to about the transportation system in Nairobi compared to Kampala. There are motorcycles (boda bodas) everywhere here. It makes for a bit more alertness when crossing the street, but they’re supa convenient. They also have matatu-like vans out here that are simply referred to as taxis. The drivers aren’t quite as crazy as Kenya and they’re relatively safe at all times of the day.

A few other tidbits about how life in Kampala seems to be different than Nairobi? It’s a bit safer, maybe a lot more safe than Nairobi. I walked and hopped on a boda boda to meet Petie for dinner the other night and it was a surprisingly new and unfamiliar experience to be out and about at night. Living in a hostel near Makarere University adds some youthfulness that I didn’t really experience in Nairobi. Petie is friends with a lot of cool people and in retrospect I think one thing that I could’ve done better in Kenya was to make more university-aged Kenyan friends. But so it goes. Matoke, a cooked banana dish, is THE staple dish out here. Bananas prepared in any way are a hit. There’s also a delightful food called g-nut paste. Odd name, tasty taste. Most of the other food is comparable to Kenya. The currency exchange is something like 2000 Ugandan shillings to 1 US dollar, as compared to 74 Kenyan shillings to the dollar. Needless to say, I’ve yet to master the money. I feel like I’m walking around with a grip everywhere I go when in reality I’ve got a couple of bucks. Kampala is built on a bunch of hills (at least seven) and it adds a lot of landscape to the place. People also go out a lot here with Tuesday and Thursday nights as the primo party nights. I think the Ugandan folks may also be friendlier than Kenyan folks as a whole. Oh yeah, the interwebs here are quite frustrating at times and it looks like cyber cafes with looming time deadlines will be my connection back home these days.

In the newspaper yesterday, there’s was a story about two nuns who had been arrested after a marijuana field was found in their convent. They said it was for the pigs.

I started my internship with the Uganda Debt Network last Friday. I guess I’ve been placed in the Policy Analysis and Socioeconomic Research program, but in reality I just don’t understand this organization well enough to know where I fit in. As of now, it’s been a bit unfulfilling. I haven’t been given many tasks by my supervisor. She’s real smart on fiscal policy stuff, but it’s tough to be a supervisor and I don’t know if they’ve had many foreign interns. I’ve attended a few meetings and perused a lot of readings. It’s a strange situation to be an intern out here. I don’t understand any of the work dynamics and I don’t know how assertive to be or not be in my search for mental stimulation. I guess I’m learning how to approach an internship. I’m not here for very long, so at some point I just need to man up and make some moves.

Word on the street is that Sai Chavali was driving a golf cart all over the Colby campus last weekend. Who in their right mind would allow such a public danger?

I miss the freedom to be ridiculous. There were some times this past spring in Kenya, but Colby and the friends back home just foster an air of pure mayhem that I can’t bring here all the time. There’s a certain mask that I don out here, something that just doesn’t let me wear all the neon I want, or try to read a book while slacklining, or help choreograph a dance to Umbrella with the Sally Bros, or tackle Peter into a huge pile of snow, or climb anything that looks climbable, or just lay down in a perfectly grassed field. I wouldn’t choose to be back home right now, but I do miss that span of absurdness and its ability to just let me be me.

Friday, June 4, 2010

A funky time of flux and running pumbas

Alrighty, sorry about lagging on the blog deal. But I’ve got an excuse or two, so Hillbill, just wait and see.

Since my last post, a part of my life can be defined in a sentence or two. I wrote. And then I wrote some more. In the last week of our Independent Study Project period (May 2-May 8), I spent the better part of each day perusing interview notes, reading journal articles, conducting follow-up interviews, and attempting to organize my thoughts about community and social media. Writing this paper was unlike any paper back at Colbs because my audience wasn’t just a lone professor. I was writing this paper for a number of individuals and organizations that may actually gain something from my writing. It was the sort of pressure that made me scrutinize every sentence, but I enjoyed it. Media space/journalism has become an increasingly tempting future I may want to explore. I learned a lot from this project and I felt that I was contributing to something more than a grade or my own writing skills. At times my project became a bit intellectual, almost stepping away from what’s actually happening in reality to a theoretical fantasy world. But that fantasy world was also exciting because I began to understand the possibilities for media in Kenya, and they are bordering revolutionary. I keep coming back to a phrase coined by a sally bro I know. Jacobo Marty once said, “The realization of possibility nourishes life.” It’s a lot of blah, but if you’d like to take a gander on some rainy day just let me know and I’ll email ya a copy of my final paper.

Living with my homestay family and becoming more a part of the community around me added so much to my project and my last month in Nairobi. I now appreciate the series of unfortunate events that prohibited me from going to the refugee camp and I would not have wanted it any other way. Throughout the semester I was a bit frustrated by all our traveling around Kenya and Tanzania. On one hand it’s mad cool to move around and foster a wider world perspective, but on the other hand Nairobi and my homestay digs were already a place so different from my home that I just wanted to spend as much time there as possible. The first two months of this semester represented a time in which I could only understand (and thus become a part of) a certain degree of life here, culture and all. There was some barrier I would always hit, something that inhibited me from truly understanding what was going on. Most often I think that barrier was all in my head.

This may sound a bit negative, but it’s what I’ve felt and I’m just going to let it flow. For a while, I felt as if I could explain everything. Political corruption? Ah, that just has something to do with who Kenya’s leaders are accountable to and the sense of entitlement amongst the political elite. The dude walking around in full Maasai get-up? He just wants to make some bills. After a couple of months, I thought I had grasped the whole picture of the general Kenyan culture and how that culture influences daily life. Yeah, it’s a weighty statement, one that I was pissed at myself for even thinking. Maybe part of this view comes out of the fact that where I was living in an urban metropolis, so many Kenyans have no time to build upon the existing culture because their days are consumed by the basic necessities of life. There’s literally no time to even think about something outside the daily tasks. But this past month has given me glimpses of something more. I’ve realized that part of living somewhere away from home involves patience amidst whatever it is you’re experiencing. In order for the pull of home and the foreignness of the unknown to fade, there’s got to be a whole lotta patience in the mix. There needs to be a patience to see what’s not at first apparent. It’s all about the layers.

My past month has also been defined by transition. After everybody was done writing, the whole group trekked it out to a swanky beach resort in the coastal town of Malindi to wrap up the program. We went a bit mzungu chzi chzi (crazy tourist) with the three swimming pools, buffets, and outrageously large beds. Each student also presented his or her ISP topic. Back in Nairobi it was time for peeps to head off in all directions. In an effort to see more and experience things much different than what I know, I’ve necessarily chosen to be in a constant state of flux. So many people move in and out of the mix with these transitions, and this time the flux kinda got to me. One day in particular threw me into a bit of a funk. On this day I had to say goodbye to a dear homeslice by the name of Kags. Not fun. Then I joined my friend Erinn’s American family as they walked and talked around part of Kibera. We spent awhile in the hills just outside the slums where I had run countless times before. As we were walking on the narrow trail towards the slums, five finely dressed men tried to mug us. All in all they were crummy thieves and didn’t have any weapons, so they only got away with a broken camera case with no camera. The whole deal lasted all of 10 seconds and started with Erinn mightily yelling at the first man who grabbed her arm. Erinn’s mother got pushed to the ground but held fast to her camera. Right after, we kinda bolted into the slums and onto a main road, quickly walking back towards Ayany. As we were walking on the main road, a great many people were telling us that they were very sorry for what had happened. From this part of the slums, anyone outside could see our little incident unfold on the hill. Afterwards, I had to say a quick goodbye to Erinn, a sal who also became a very close homeslice.

It was about the time when I got back to my homestay that this funk sorta settled in. Part of it came from what had just occurred. It wasn’t so much the act of getting mugged that shook me up, but the fact that we had been mugged in a place that I frequented so often this past spring. As a mzungu group of five with a few cameras, we were prime meat for thieves. That situation would never have arisen if Erinn or I had been on our own in those hills. So I was bummed for helping create the conditions that led to some people taking such strong and violent action to make a few bucks. But even more than that, the reaction of the Kibera residents hit me as an unfortunate response to unequal circumstances of existence. To me, people saying sorry as we walked through on the road meant that they were ashamed of the stereotypes of Kibera and how those stereotypes are perpetuated by incidents such as this. It was almost as if to say; “We’re sorry, that isn’t what it’s like to live here. Kibera is not THAT.”

The other part of the funk came from these two best buds heading out. As I walked through Ayany later that afternoon, I realized just how much a part of my Kenyan experience Erinn, Kags, and a few others had become. These are the sallys I had adventured with and contemplated with and found mad tasty homemade peanut butter with. Without them, it felt as though I were at Colby after finals when everyone else had dipped out. It’s an eerie feeling and one that has the potential to drive a person crazy. I think I approached this semester as a very independent experience, one that I was determined not to be too mzunguish about. But I’ve found that I’m not as independent as I thought I was, and maybe that’s a good thing. Without these folks, my time in Kenya would not have been a period I look back upon with such joy and nostalgia.

Amidst this funk, I scrambled out to Hell’s Gate National Park for a couple of days with a friend who was still around. We rented bikes and saw lots of running warthog (pumba) butts, fearless zebras, and an unknown varmint with big teeth that chased us away from a primo snack spot.

A few days after the program, the Perkins family came out to visit. We explored Nairobi, visited Amboseli National Park, and chilled on the island of Zanzibar, which is definitely not a chilly place. Right now I just want to post this so y’all don’t think I’ve gone AWOL, but I’ll talk about this family trip and Uganda a bit in my next blog, which will be much timelier than this one. Oh yeah, I’ve made it to Kampala and found the fabulous Petie Pabs. It’s my third day here and I just started my internship with the Uganda Debt Network, but more on this later.

Enjoy the summertime steez for those of you back home. And, as always, I’d be tickled to hear about your hooliganisms and adventures, even if it’s just a story of a seemingly uneventful day.