What Kilifi is like

A friend of mine asked me to describe what it's like in Kenya to her nearly 13-year old daughter. So, I figured it would be a good thing to post on my blog, too. Here it is:

We live in Kilifi, which is on the coast about an hour north of Mombasa. It's very hot and humid here all the time. It varies from hot and rainy to hotter and dry (but humid), and really, really hot and desert dry (but still humid). Nairobi is about an hour away by plane or about 7-8 hours on a bus and it's much cooler there because it's at a higher altitude.

Although Kenya is a pretty stable country, the government is also rather corrupt. As a result, the people seem to accept their fate and don't try to improve things. It's rather sad, because they are wonderful people and the country has lots of resources and a lot of potential. Nairobi is a "real" city and there is obviously a lot of money there. But, the people in power don't give anything to the people, so they are rich and most of the general population is poor. Many people here live in houses made of sticks and mud with thatched roofs made of palm leaves. Many don't have enough to eat more than one meal a day.

It's a bit uncomfortable for me to live here as a white person who is extremely rich by their standards, simply because I come from a country that has lots of money. It gets a bit overwhelming, wanting to help people and realizing that you can't help everyone, and how much is really helping, etc. etc. We have a gardner and a night watchman that our landlady provides. They get paid no more than $100 a month. Our gardner has a wife and three kids -- his house roof caved in from the last rains we had in October. When the roof caves, the mud walls melt... We gave him some money to help to pay for a new roof. We occasionally give him token gifts of clothes and shoes and food supplies from time to time. But is that enough? Doesn't seem like it. People here see a white face and they know that person has lots of money, so they are always asking for handouts or loans or trying to sell the "mazungu" something. Children frequently chase after a white person shouting "mazungu! mazungu!" and they sometimes ask for money or sweets. They don't consider it rude, they are happy to see the white person because they might be lucky enough to get a free handout. (Imagine a little white kid shouting "black person" at an African American in the US...uh, don't think so!!)

As I said before, there is no residential mail service. Most roads don't have names. People burn their garbage on the side of the roads, so there's often the smell of smoke in the air. They often recycle, but out of necessity, not out of respect for the environment (there are plastic bags floating around EVERYWHERE). Children play with pangas (really big knives), balls made of tied up plastic bags or handmade little wooden carts that have a long extended steering wheel that they push along as they walk. A few paved roads, but most are dirt. Cattle, goats, chickens roam freely. Monkeys too!

Most of the people here are either Muslim or Christian. There are lots of Christian churches of different denominations. The muslim mosques have Imams who do the call to prayer several times a day and they do prayers over loudspeakers. It's a bit annoyng when we can hear two or three going at once because they don't synchronize their prayers and it often clashes horribly (I suppose my musical ear is especially sensitive to this)!! Mombasa and, to a lesser extent, Kilifi have a lot of Swahili people -- these are basically a cross between Arabic and African cultures... The Arabs came here for trading a few hundred years ago, as Mombasa is a big sea port.

Most Swahili food is not terribly exciting. A lot of it is familiar to me, because I lived in NC for 15 years and the slaves brought their food to NC, which is now considered "southern cuisine." Things like beans & rice, collard greens, grits & okra. They eat similar things here in Kenya: beans, rice, mchicha & sukuma (chopped, cooked leafy green vegetables or spinach), ugali (maize meal, sort of like polenta or grits), various stews with beef or goat. They also make stews with plaintains and various lentil dishes. They also eat a lot of "nyama choma" which is grilled meat (often goat, beef or chicken, sometimes pork). There are also influences from Indian food. They also use a lot of chili/hot pepper sauce (pili pili), which helps. Of course, since we're on the coast, there's lots of fish here -- tuna, kingfish, red snapper, prawns, crabs, etc. Here in Kilifi and more in Malindi (just north of us) there are a lot of Italians (ya know, mafia types...), so it's pretty easy to get Italian food around here also!

There are also a good number of old-school Brits and Germans who tend to be very colonialist in their attitude toward Kenyans, which is also a bit difficult to stomach (they're usually in the over-60 age -- some call them KC's, or "Kenyan Cowboys"). And then there are the couples consisting of the pretty young Kenyan women and the old white men... a bit nauseating, although I'm sure the Kenyan girls are quite happy to have an old white sugar daddy to take care of them...

Updates

Yeah, I'm not really doing much updating of this site anymore. I might once in awhile, but you're better off just being my friend on Facebook, cuz that's mostly where I spend my online time. Plus, if I update here, it should feed into Facebook anyway.

Volunteering in Kenya

Last weekend, Susan and I volunteered to help with a food drive for drought victims in Kenya. We went to a village area called Dungicha, which is only about 1.5 hour drive northwest of Kilifi (not far at all, but the dirt roads slow you down!). It was a really good experience and we had fun while also helping some people. We gave out an amazing amount of food, which consisted of 2.5 kg of lard, 6 kg of rice, 6 kg of lentils, and 20 kg of corn flour, plus some sugar and salt. It was nice to be able to give that much food, but it was amazing to think that one or two women would have to carry all that weight (on their heads, of course!) while walking for probably several miles. It really makes one appreciate how easy some of us have it in this world.

Here are some photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/barckhoff/VolunteeringInKenya

Getting an internet connection

We are lucky enough to be able to get an Internet connection at home via a uni-directional microwave (micro as in small, not the sort that cooks your food) mast that is connected to the network at the medical center where we're working. The Internet is connected to the house next door, but not to our house (which is the guest house of the house next door), despite the fact that the mast is actually closer to our house. I brought my modem from Australia (which, thankfully, I did NOT dump as ballast when my suitcase was over the weight limit), which also happens to have LAN ports, so I could easily link up to the hub at the other house. Only thing was, I had a 3 foot Ethernet cable and I needed something closer to 40 meters!

So, I asked the IT guys at the medical center to get me a quote for a 50 meter cable (a little extra, just in case). After several weeks of waiting, they finally gave me a quote for an entire SPOOL of Ethernet cable, which is 350 meters. WAY more than I needed. Then, they tried to sell me an outdoor wireless modem, which would cost more than double the 350 meter cable to buy and install. Mind you, it took about a month to get this quote. In the meantime, my office mate, Tony, said he knew a guy who could sell me some cable, but I wanted to wait to get the quote from the other guys (not realizing how long it would take). Finally, after I got the ridiculous "more than I need" quotes, I called Tony's friend, and he said he could bring it the next day. Hallelujah!

Then, Tony's friend calls him and then Tony tells me that it would be two 20 metre cables that I could connect together. I said, no I don't want them to connect together because they have to be outside and I don't want the connections getting rained on, etc. I said I wanted a continuous outdoor cable, 50 meters. So he called his friend to tell him this, and then the friend brought a 50 meter *indoor* cable. Ugh. Well, I figured, it's still got plastic around it and Tony tells me that I can put it inside a tube that I can get at the hardware store. So, okay, I bought the cable (which, by the way was ten times cheaper than the 350 meter cable), but now it didn't have connectors on the ends (to plug into the hub/modem). So, Tony goes into town, procures some RJ-45 connectors and then asks the hardware guy at the medical center to put the connectors on. A couple days go by and I bug him to finish the job and I finally get my cable with connectors on Friday afternoon. I take the cable home and connect it up, it works -- yay! But now I have to go buy a tube to protect it from sun/rain, etc. So, Saturday, I go buy a tube (actually a PVC garden hose) and try it out on the cable. Damn, the connector is too fat to go through the tube. Now, a dilemma: do I remove the connector, wait until Monday and then ask the guy to reattach the connector, or do I slice the hose down the side, put the cable inside, then tape it up with duct tape (a perfectly DIY redneck sort of thing to do).

I decided I didn't want to be without the cable any longer, so I painstakingly cut the 18 meter hose (the houses are actually pretty close together and much of the cable has to go inside the houses) lengthwise with a pair of pruning shears that Susan just happened to buy while we were at the hardware store. I then slip the cable inside the hose through it's new seam (this really is much easier than pushing it through the hose, I'm sure!). In the meantime, Susan and I had gone to the beach with some friends for the afternoon and now it was evening and the hardware store is closed, so I can't buy any tape and Susan would really like to get online...

So, we decide to string the cable between the houses and hook it back up, with the hose with the split along it gaping in places. We put it through the shutters of the upstairs window, over the outside kitchen door light, sort of tie it to a pipe and then over a decorative turret thingy between the walls around the houses, then under the eaves of the roof and through the window of the neighbors house (there is no glass on the window, only iron bars -- it's warm here). The cable is then pushed through a series of other indoor windows and holes in one of the bathrooms, then hung on some wall lights. It's strung inside the neighbor's house like a string of Christmas lights. Finally, after all that, it's connected to the Internet hub in the middle of the house (mind you, this house is pretty large).

I did buy little cable clips to attach the cable to the wall and make it look nicer, but we don't have a hammer yet... So, who knows if we'll actually get around to sealing up the PVC hose with duct tape? Maybe it doesn't matter? Who cares if the rains come and fill up the hose? Surely, it's the sun that's a bigger threat, and now it's got some protection from that. The indoor cable still has a plastic coating... it can't be that bad... Besides, we might not live in this house very long...

And the best part is, we now have a nice, full-throttle 54 Mbps Internet connection.

Photos from Kilifi

OK, so I'm too lazy to write about anything, but I did at least getting around to posting some photos of Kilifi. Here are photos from Mnarani Club, Arab mosque ruins (ca. 14th century) from Mnarani village area, the Kilifi Boat Yard, photos of the house we're staying in and some photos from a sunset sail on a dhow that we went on with some new friends.

http://picasaweb.google.com/barckhoff/KilifiFebruary2009

Enjoy!

Shopping list

For those of you who are curious, I went shopping for a few groceries and I bought the following items:

1 mango
1 cucumber
1 zucchini
2 tomatoes (roma)
3 onions (red)
1 bunch bananas
2 carrots
2 limes (small)

Total cost: 165 Kenyan shillings = ~ $2.07 US

Then I bought a 500 gm bag of Kenyan Blue Mountain coffee for 700 Ksh @ ~ $8.80 US

So, the coffee is comparable to what one would pay in US (I think?) but the fruit & veg were a bargain! Anyway, I thought some of you might be interested...

Fun with public transport

Susan and I had our very first excursion to the Nakumatt on Valentine's Day. Nakumatt is the big Kenyan version of Wal-Mart (you may have heard in the news about the one in Nairobi that burned down a few weeks ago). The nearest one is the north side of Mombasa, so we had to take a mutatu (small bus/passenger van) from Kilifi. The Nakumatt is in a little shopping center with a cafe where we had Kenyan/Mexican (Keny-exican? Ken-Mex?) veggie quesadillas and Susan ordered an iced coffee which was very tasty! The Nakumatt was a nice little piece of civilization and we were able to buy exciting things like sheets and Zip-loc bags and other assorted household items. However, the trip to and from the Nakumatt in the mutatus was rather frightening. Generally, the mutatus are in varying states of disrepair and they drive about 100 miles an hour and try to pass every vehicle they encounter on a 2-lane (one lane each way, without the actual "lanes") so they are constantly speeding up and then braking to dodge oncoming traffic, etc. Of course, they also cram more people than they need to into the mutatus, so it is very cramped as well. Overall, they drive the vehicles VERY hard, which just puts them in a greater state of disrepair which makes them that much more unsafe, not to mention the reckless driving habits. I discovered that looking ahead or behind as we were traveling was not an option for me because it was simply too scary, so I had to force myself to look out the side (which was a better view anyway). It's a good thing I don't get motion sickness... actually, as we were riding, I felt that I might have the potential to GET motion sickness, but I didn't and we survived! Anyway, we've been discussing the possibility of buying a car here, but we want to wait until Susan actually gets PAID (which is a problem, considering that Susan's efforts at getting an overseas UK bank account has been in limbo for months). After the mutatu experiences, I found myself wanting our own car much more urgently...