Kwaheri Kenya

I’ve come to the end of my time in Kenya.  I had originally planned on being here until December 18^th, but things have slowed down at the school/orphanage (there is nothing to do) and there aren’t many new volunteers coming in, so it’s a little boring.  My sister Hillary and I will be doing some volunteering together in South Africa, but she won’t be there until January 11^th, so I have a month plus a week to kill.  I haven’t got all the money in the world so I can’t do anything too extreme (I had originally wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro but the cheapest price I could find for that was over $1000, so that’s a no).  I’ve bought a bus ticket to Uganda and it leaves on Friday at 7PM.  It will take me approximately 13 hours and will deliver me to a little town called Jinja, which sits on the Nile River, right near Lake Victoria.  My plan is to stay there for a bit, at least a week, until I get bored and then fly to South Africa.  I’m going to meet up with a couple volunteers that I met here in Kenya, they’re currently in Durban, South Africa, and travel around with them for a while.  There is an outside chance that I will try to make it to South Africa by December 11^th because the people I want to meet up with are seeing Lil’ Wayne in Durban then (haha “Weezy”).  It would be about $100, and I don’t even like Lil’ Wayne, like, at all, but it’s been forever since I’ve seen a show and hey, it’s something to do.

But back to Kenya.  The last week or so since my last blog post has been pretty uneventful for the most part, but there are two major things to talk about.  Firstly, before Cheyenne and Kaylee left (two Americans that I got pretty close with over the past month or so) we did a walking tour of Kibera.  For those who don’t know what it is, well, words can hardly do justice.  Kibera is a city within a city.  To put it simply, it is a gigantic slum unlike any I’d seen yet.  The number of people living there is estimated at somewhere around 1.5 million people, but that’s a rough guess at best (in all likelihood there are many more people living there).  It is located in the middle of Nairobi, about a twenty minute walk from where I am staying. Currently, it is the largest slum in Africa and the second largest in the world (I think the largest is somewhere in India, makes sense).  Every Tuesday and Thursday, some of the volunteers lead an excursion into the heart of this fascinating place, but it’s not so that we can gawk at extreme poverty.  Fadhili runs a feeding program that attempts to help several families living in the slum.  There are currently seven (I think) families on the program, and the idea is to help them get self-sufficient.  It is not meant to be a permanent thing; the families are meant to let the food that we deliver help them through their financial struggles temporarily as they find their own feet.  After that, the families are weaned off of the program and more needy people are targeted.  The tour around Kibera consisted of going to the houses of said families (though calling them ‘houses’ is a huge stretch) and delivering food.  There is also a weekly questionnaire that they must answer (through a translator) so that we can monitor their progress, if there is any.  We ask them how they are feeling, health-wise, compared to the previous week, what they have done to earn income (again, if they did at all) and how successful they were, and so on. 

While the program is surely a good thing for those that receive the food, I couldn’t help but feel badly for the people we were interviewing.  Here we were, 5 mzungus (white-people, or more accurately, English-speaking people) walking around this dirty, winding mess of small, crowded huts, entering people’s homes and asking them extremely personal questions.  One woman, a very old woman who was attempting to put her grandchildren through school (a truly amazing individual) was crippled by osteoporosis and had trouble even leaving her home.  She relied on begging for money about twice a week, but it was very rarely successful (imagine trying to beg for money in a slum, who would give you anything?).  Furthermore, she was extremely embarrassed by this, and only answered the question reluctantly.  She looked around the room at each of us as the translator/tour guide/whatever he was told us that she went begging yesterday with no success, and it was clear to me that she was gauging our reactions.  She was so embarrassed to have to resort to something as shameful as begging, but she was elderly and in very poor physical condition; she had little other option.  I mean, she was letting us into her home, barely big enough to fit us all, and we were asking her how much money she made from begging in the past week.  Maybe I’m overdoing this, but I felt terrible for her; I wish I could have somehow communicated that there was nothing to be embarrassed about.  On the contrary, she was inspiring.  Her daughter had run away in hopes of a better life and left her mother with the children to take care of, and she was doing literally everything in her power to put them through school.  Another thing that worried me a little bit is the fact that once a week she had (comparatively) rich non-Africans wandering into her home.  Most people here are friendly, but there is a general dislike for anyone white, or rather anyone from Canada, USA, England, Australia etc. especially in a place of extreme poverty such as this.  In the back of my mind, I felt that as soon as we left, her neighbours would start to harass her.  “Why do you get two bags of flour and beans and not me?” I mean, it’s a good thing that we’re helping the people that we visit, but I just know that they put up with a lot of shit as a result, and in the end it’s probably only barely worth it.

We visited several other families, and that was more of the same for the most part, though the woman whose story I went over in the last paragraph was probably the one that sticks with me the most. We had also brought along some fabric to donate to a program that had been set up for young women.  It was a sewing program that attempted to give some of the residents of the slum some real life job skills by teaching them how to make dresses and other things.  They also sold the products of course, which helped bring in some income.  The people were exceedingly friendly and welcoming, and we stayed there for maybe twenty minutes to see how things worked (I had never seen a foot-operated sewing machine before, cool stuff).

Before we left Kibera, we walked up a hill to the “lookout point” for some tacky white-people photos.  It was while up there that I realized how truly massive this place really was.  We had been walking around for hours and were exhausted due to the extremely muddy and hard to navigate “roads”, but we had barely even dented the outskirts of Kibera.  Our feeding program was focussed on one particular area, which makes sense of course.  Standing up there, looking out over this gigantic mess of metal huts and winding streets was an absolutely surreal experience.  While I was essentially looking at the visual representation of some of the worst poverty in the world, it was quite beautiful in its own way.  Most of the people we talked to had been living in Kibera their whole lives, or close to it, sometimes upwards of 50 or 60 years, and it was home for them.  Sure it was dirty, crime-ridden, and massive, but it was their home, and it was beautiful in its own way.  Something struck me as we stood up there and took in the sights, and I was somehow inspired by what I was seeing.  Here were over a million people living their day-to-day lives in conditions that most of us would not be able to stomach for more than a few hours, and they were happy.  They didn’t need an Xbox when they had a stick and a tire, they didn’t need three meals a day, and they didn’t need insane amounts of money or material belongings.  They had their lives and each other, and that was plenty.  Sorry for the sappiness, but it was really something quite extraordinary to behold.  It’s a day I will never forget, for all the right reasons.

We had gotten a bus there but walked back.  It took us only twenty minutes to get back to Junciton (the shopping mall down the road from where I’m staying).  I’m not sure if I’ll be able to communicate what a mindfuck that was, but just think about it.  We walked from the largest slum in Africa, to a fucking shopping mall (with a KFC, Apple Store, etc.) in twenty minutes.  I bought lunch there; it came to 440 Ksh (around $4.50).  That’s more than the woman in the first house we visited makes in two weeks, and she feeds a family of six.  Twenty minutes from this gigantic slum lays the polar opposite of Kibera: a place where rich people can buy meaningless “stuff” and shove overpriced food down their throat-holes.  Again, I don’t think I’m doing a very good job describing how weird this was, but just try to picture it. 

So that was our day in Kibera, a bizarre but unique place.  Cheyenne and Kaylee both left that weekend and so I was temporarily left alone again.  But soon enough, three volunteers from Australia arrived and turned my boring day-to-day world upside down.  They were meant to be staying in Nakuru but their experience there had been very unpleasant, so they cut that short and came to spend their last five days or so at Regina’s house with me.  This brings me to the second “major thing” that I mentioned in the beginning of this post.  These girls like to party, which was fine by me because I have done virtually none of that during my time here.  On Friday night, we played some drinking games down in their room and had a great time.  After a while I went upstairs to get Njenga (the son of Regina, about 20 years old).  Actually I was sent up there on a drunken dare to act gay and try to convince him that I wanted to sex him right up (fucking drinking games man).  He realized (obviously) that we were drunk and rushed downstairs to join us. Njenga parties all the time, unbeknownst to his pastor parents, and jumped at the opportunity to party with some mzungus.  We gave him some vodka, played some shitty music, and got sloppy together; it was great fun.  That was fine. Friday was a great night.  But the real story came on Saturday night. Njenga attempted to recreate the exact same night that had occurred on Friday, but this time brought a friend with him (also named Njenga, he was “Ed” for the night).  Now I’ve hung out with this guy before and he seemed alright, but I had heard that Regina was not keen on his son hanging around with him at all.  He was supposed to be a bad influence or something.  Now, those of you that party will surely know that the best nights are a one-off kind of thing, hardly possible to recreate.  That’s what Friday was, and that’s what Njenga wanted Saturday to be.  The thing was that we (the volunteers) weren’t into it.  We weren’t drinking or playing King’s Cup like we were on Friday, it just wasn’t happening. But the two Njengas tried their best to make it happen and drank copious amounts of vodka.

There had been a little bit of chemistry between Njenga and one of the volunteers the night before (I lie, between Njenga and all three of the female volunteers: Njenga’s not hard on the eyes) which was undoubtedly fuelled by alcohol.  This night though, only Njenga was drunk, and belligerently so (very unattractive) and any chemistry had evaporated.  This didn’t stop him though. He climbed up on to one of the volunteer’s beds (after being forcefully rejected by another) and started, um, laying down the moves?  At first it was kind of funny, then it was kind of awkward but still funny, then it was just awkward, then it was closer to actual rape.  He had this girl pinned and was like slobbering all over her ear while the other Njenga (Ed) filmed it on someone’s phone (WTF?), the whole time saying “this is happening!”  He even turned off the lights at one point, but we raised hell and he turned them right back on.  It eventually got to the point where I had to physically intervene and pull Njenga off of this poor girl.  I’m not going to go into details, but it was gross.  The only reason we didn’t jump in earlier was because everyone was laughing (genuinely at first, awkwardly later) which somehow painted the situation as less intense then it was.  When it got to the point that he was actually preventing her from moving, the laughter faded quickly and we pulled him off.  He then passed out on the bunk above the one where I was sitting, and we temporarily forgot about it.  About ten minutes later, he fucking puked on me.  Yes, he puked on me.  At first I just thought he had spilled a drink but the smell was familiar, and when I realized that was because it smelled like the dinner I had eaten that night, I flipped out and ran to the shower.   It was gross, and that was basically the last straw.  There was puke all over one of the volunteer’s beds, and the other Njenga was starting to act really creepy.  We called it a night, let the two Njenga’s pass out in that room, and the three girls came to sleep in my room, with the door locked. 

After a bit of laughing at the weirdness of the night, we went to sleep.  About ten minutes later, I heard someone trying to open my door, and then begin to knock when it wasn’t moving.  I opened the door. It was the other Njenga (Ed). Njenga #1 had passed out, but Ed seemed very sober (we later realized he had been faking drunkenness).  His English was poor, and I don’t speak Swahili, so it was an awkward conversation.  The gist of it was that he thought we were still partying. He kept on asking me “what’s up?”  When I finally communicated that, no, we didn’t want to keep partying (we hadn’t even been drinking) he seemed upset and said something along the lines of ‘oh well I’ll just come hang out in here with you then.’  I shot that down right away of course, and basically told him ‘it’s over man, we’re in bed. You can sleep down here but not in this room, go to sleep.’

So that was that.  Except that it wasn’t.  We started talking again and the girls asked me if their stuff would be safe in their room.  I hadn’t even thought about that. I assumed that this guy was legitimate; I had hung out with him before.  I then mentioned that during our conversation he was holding a Fanta bottle, but we hadn’t heard him leave the house to go buy it.  At that point one of the girls went “shit ok so he went through my bag” and we went over to the other room to see what was up.  When I tried to open the door, he was holding it shut and wouldn’t let us in.  We barged our way in and quickly realized that the girls’ stuff was everywhere.  It wasn’t soon before one of them noticed $2000 Australian dollars was missing (most of it was later found hidden under some clothes).  We started to freak out and didn’t know what to do.  Our Njenga was passed-out (not even a bed falling on top of him woke him up) and Njenga #2, who had clearly just gone through their stuff, was pretending to sleep.  It was 3:00 AM and we had no other option.  We didn’t want to get Njenga in trouble because his mum doesn’t know that he drinks, he’s not exactly allowed to, but there was no other option at this point but to wake up Regina.  So that’s what we did.  Two of the girls went upstairs to get her while I tried to keep things in control downstairs.  Njenga #2 was playing stupid: “Oh what’s the problem? Oh no is something missing? Oh no what is it?” and our Njenga was still passed out with a bed on top of him.  Regina came downstairs to find her son passed out, nearly impossible to wake, and the four of us freaking out.  We had been smoking in the room (Njenga’s idea, he supplied the smoking materials) and were worried about the smell.  Long story short: both Njenga’s were up shit creek without a paddle.

When the dust settled and we woke up the next day, it felt like it had all been a dream.  Njenga #2 had been faking being drunk and was planning some weird shit.  While looking through his pockets for the missing money, we not only found that, but a box of condoms as well.  That grossed the girls out, understandably.  Njenga #1 felt terrible for letting this guy into his house after his mother’s repeated warnings that he was bad news, and has apparently cut off communication with him. He was also in a world of hurt with his mother, who had no idea that he drank at all, let alone would drink to the point of puking and passing out in the volunteer’s rooms downstairs.  Luckily for him, his dad, Pastor George, was in South Africa preaching, or else I’m certain we would have witnessed some serious ass-kicking.  In the end, we’re pretty sure that Njenga #2 didn’t get away with much money (though we think some was missing), but he had taken an expired ID (good one, you now have an unusable ID of a white female, how would that be useful?) and a bracelet.  Furthermore, he had eaten all of the food that the girls had in their room, and there were crumbs everywhere, including in a pile of laundry (underwear, specifically) on one of their beds, meaning he was either using the panties as a napkin, or he was sniffing them.  Each option is equally revolting.  Basically, it was a traumatizing experience for the girls, and I’m somehow grateful that I only got vomited on. Everything is sorted out now. Regina is finally talking to her son again and Njenga #2 will hopefully never be seen around here again.  Regina opted to not tell Pastor George what had happened when he got back a couple nights ago, which I’m thankful for, because even though he acted like an ass, I like Njenga and didn’t want him to get the shit beat out of him.

Oh and then on Monday Jnenga crashed his dad’s car, which he’s not allowed to drive.  Regina took the blame because he had been driving her to school on her own request, but regardless, I bet George was pissed.  Overall, it wasn’t a pleasant few days for Njenga.

So that’s what happened this last weekend, sounds like fun doesn’t it?  I’m now starting to try to get all my stuff together and trying to get in the mindset of being on the road again.  I’ve gotten comfortable here over the past two and a half months, but I need to remember that I’m travelling in one of the most dangerous places in the world with all my belongings on my back.  I have a thirteen hour bus ride to endure in a couple of days, during which I will have to cross the Kenya/Uganda border (in the middle of the night).  So it’s time to get my game face on.   I have had easy access to internet for the past two months, hence all my random facebook and sputnik posts, but that will end soon.  So to those I have been talking with, if you don’t see any action on my facebook for a few days, that’s fine; I probably haven’t been abducted and sold into slavery.  I have gotten used to being on the internet every day but it won’t be like that anymore.  I will still try to update this blog when I get the chance, and I hope I can upload photos soon (I took pictures of Kibera) but if not, so be it. 

It’s goodbye to Kenya and off to Uganda.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the mind-vomit that I have recorded here in an attempt to capture this place that I have grown so fond of.  Until next time, take it easy.