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...