Its 5am, I've just had to pee under the starlight for the second time tonight. Too much dufia/chai, not enough 'No, thanks.' I've been up a full hour trying to wait it out. Earlier in the evening when I took my bath my host mum took me to the real toilet. Its been eaten up by the road being constructed just outside the property, connecting Gacami to Thuti Primary. So I peed in the dark, guessing where
the hole had been when last I shined my phone's torch at it, else the dudes passing by, the ones talking to my host mum would have seen all my business through the spaces the termites or nature or design
have created between the
woodplanks.

Other than claiming some land, the road construction process has decimated the path to the loo so you have wade through the piled red earth, now bleached and dried out in the March sun to a powdery yellow tinge.

Thats the reason I cant use the real toilet, even if I weren't just a little sca-apprehensive, even though no one's out walking now, and the odd drunk isnt expected until Saturday night, four nights from now. 

A few things can be ascertained:Nyeri is warmer than
Meru. (Thank Goodness!) The nights are gentler.
I'm sleeping on the living room sofa, which turns out to be able to fold out into a bed, which i have to myself. When the sun rises I imagine I'll be able to see it rise through the spaces
in the wall's wood planks. In truth, the two inter connected rooms where my hostmum and her family sleep face East, while the livingroom faces West. But I'll look forward to morning anyway, if its just the same, at least there ought to be more light coming into the room, and it will be a new experience. The important thing is that its neither cold nor windy at night. The three kids more or less sleep together. They are a girl in Std 7, another in
standard one and a boy in standard
four. There is a 4th girl in form four
in boarding school close to muranga, I
think. The family has one cow,
a young heifer about two months
pregnant, and a goat. They buy their milk from a
neighbour.

My hostmum is a widow. I think I remember it having been some years since she lost her husband. You wonder now how that will influence the stated interest of this trip: Nyeri women and their husbands. In the light of the
woodfire last night, and the single tilly? lamp the family shares, it occurred to me that she is actually quite pretty. Its easier to value her industriousness and kindness first, but she is also pretty.
In the farm below (we're really on the side of a steep hill) we grow
coffee and macadamia as cash crops. There is also a bit of napier grass for the cow and for sale and some banana plants but not much else since its planting season for staple food crops.
As we made our way down the hill
to the river Thuti to bring up water for the home, we picked up
macademia nuts and beat them open on an old  tree trunk. The girl in
standard one particularly relished this
part. And there are kienyeji/ local variety mango
trees just coming into season. What luck!

I've promised to help with the digging. I know/ feel sure I got off easy in Maua, having a dude as a guide. It's a different set of circumstances and theres 6.5 acres to be farmed, on a steep hill. Peachy.

Cockerel. Goodmorning, its almost
light.

sent from my phone, forgive my mispellings and poor grammar...

1. I got an email from a lovely lovely soul and friend, W, who said
what a lovely project This Kenyan Life is and if I ever plan to go to
Nyeri, I can totally stay with his extended family.

2. I am part of a wonderful group of women, (please check out the
exhibition we caused, showing all this month at Alliance Francaise:
Being Wanjiku) and we were talking about the ridiculous idea forming
and formed in Kenyan minds about Nyeri women. Njoki Ngumi, a doctor,
shared her first hand experience on the silencing battered women
endure at the hands of both their husbands and how many times their
entire families (male + female members) are complicit in protecting
the men and further victimizing the women.

I thought I would go to Nyeri and see if its as bad as all that, and
immediately two weaving women offered their families and friends'
families. One was a farming family around Nyeri hill, the other a
professional couple (retired teachers) also around Nyeri Hill. For a
moment it looked like setting up the logistics of going to Nyeri would
be almost easy. Not so much. Those in the first family would be
traveling/were unavailable and there was no one of my age group for me
to follow around and imitate in the second family.

3. At IHub, I ran into another friend and mentor, B after a silence
several months long and I told her what I'd been doing, how I was
going off to Nyeri the following week and was still looking for
somewhere to stay & people to talk to. She said her mother was from
Othaya area, I ought to stay with her, shed love the company... Now,
she happens to be mother and grandmother to multiple and diversely
impressive humans in the creative industry, so of course I'm going to
hang out with her, and looking forward to it!

4. Then I randomly called another friend, N, and asked her point blank
if she was from Nyeri. No, she wasn't, but her hubbie was from the
Karatina side , and perhaps I could stay with his family? There was a
dog breeding son who fascinated me, but I thought I might end up
hanging out with an unmarried dude mostly, which would be bad since a)
I did a lot of that in Meru and need to create a diverse experience
from varying perspectives and b) as mentor and weaving woman Mshai
pointed out, the first point of the nyeri trip was a particularly
female experience.

5. My ma found me the contact of someone elses mother, who's worked in
education but is currently active in development conversation and
action in her area.

In the end, I decided to stay with W's aunt in othaya, and visit
with/interview pretty much everyone else, including a doctor contact
at Nyeri PGH thanks to N. N.

We're just passing Kiria-ini town, well into tea country. I don't know
how much further we have. There have been lots of policemen (at least
5 sets of two) inspecting our 14seater matatu for overloading, and I'm
happy to report that we have not needed to bribe anyone, or had any
near death experiences. Grateful. This is Trip#2 of 20.

It takes me five days to realize female circumcision is a real issue in parts of Meru County, a full day after an interview with the director of the KEMU Satellite Campus at Maua, where she mentioned it in passing. Female circumcision became a ‘real issue’ for this Meru trip when I asked my host brother, Star, about it. He said yes, it’s still practiced. What exactly did it mean, “still practiced.” Were his sisters circumcised? Yes. And his cousin, the 20 year-old cousin who came to the homestead to hang out, with whom I fetched water the first time, whose mother, a widow, seemed an industrious woman given her almost-finished 2 bedroomed stone house, her multiple farms, her last two children who had made it to high school? Yes.

The last time I had a direct conversation about female circumcision, we were definitely talking about the mutilation kind. It was Dar-es-salaam, I was 17, I was at a Steers restaurant in the fresh, glass-paned, tree-lined part of the city centre and happened to strike up a conversation with a Somali woman covered in black, save her face and hands. She’d lived in Kenya, and was in Tanzania trying to sort out travel papers for herself and others so they could go to the United States. I don’t know how we began to talk about circumcision, but she told me about her path, how her particular people circumcise, and about her (also Muslim) boyfriend, how patient he was being, how difficult it was for them to be intimate, how they were still trying.

She didn’t let me think that every Somali had gone through what she had, and perhaps I didn’t have relationships with many Somalis then for it to occur to me to wonder whether all of them had been through what my new friend had. But the opportunity of This Kenyan Life is the possibility of getting to know strangers and friends alike on a different plane, and accept them as you did before in your earlier ignorance. So I have fitfully began to wonder how many of my friends and acquaintances from parts of Meru have gone through a conversation about whether they will be circumcised or not, or actually went through it altogether. Granted, the proximity of one’s family to the epicentre of the missionary and it’s concurrent education movement anywhere across Kenya likely meant an early abandonment of all prior cultural practice for middleclass pursuits and freedoms, for better and worse. Which has given birth to third generation Christian and/or educated folk like me would have little to no recollection of our “traditional cultural practice” save for how many goats to expect during wedding negotiations. It’s made me realize that we as various kinds of Kenyans probably hear completely different messages when we listen to radio and other media discussions that involve us. This was underscored in a conversation with one of my mentors, and a Weaving friend about a moment when she was in college. In one class, part of their assigned reading was about “FGM” and while they were discussing the text, one colleague who’d been silent all through suddenly said, “But I’m not mutilated.”

I had planned to converse with various key people in the community, and was fortunate to locate the very helpful Dr. Kariuki, a gynaecologist at the Maua Methodist Hospital. It’s the best-equipped hospital in Maua. He told me the method of female circumcision commonly practiced among the Meru is clitoridectomy, where the clitoris is excised. He personally wouldn’t call it mutilation, he said, because it doesn’t interfere with birth or other bodily functions. Also, there is no comparison with the practices of the Borana, and other surrounding communities.

I wanted to ask about pleasure. Whether and how it mattered in this conversation. But I figured it wasn’t exactly a medical question, and came back to Nairobi with much of my wondering.

I want to make no assumptions as I write and think about this. There is a whole conversation to pursue later about rites of passage as indicators of maturity and indicators of development. About rituals that are brought forward long after the contexts in which they were created no longer exist. Whether they can actually be effective in their intended purpose.

Let me first try and scratch the surface on this pleasure question. I’d like to discuss sexual pleasure as related to a perceived right to enjoyment, and ideas about female circumcision as a way to exercise male domination.

Part of the desire of this project is to find and document the joy or pleasure of being alive and living in rural Kenya, following a similar if less extensive effort in Nairobi. It is not easy since i) I’m a middle-class city girl and happiest with city comforts including electricity, running water, my laptop, the internet, being able to hate on Java when the service is slow, going to the odd concert or movie, avoiding dust as much as possible...

The story of being the sole fetcher of water and preparer of food to male humans who have sired me, been birthed alongside me or paid dowry to have me perform these services, in exchange for shelter, clothing and food (that I shall plant, grow, harvest, store and cook) is not sexy. It is sometimes tempting to reduce the rural experience to that.

ii) It doesn’t help that we struggle as a country to express our joy. Aren’t we always “vumilia-(r)ing” “sukumana-ing” and otherwise just surviving, even when we are, actually okay?!

I was thus really glad to experience and observe moments when we got to sit and just chew on some sugarcane or peacefully chew on miraa as did my host-mother, while sat on the grass on Sunday afternoon. Later that day I drank the most fantastic tea at the home of one of her daughters. She was holed up together with two of her sisters, also just chilling, eating miraa. Star and I went to a rather dignified ‘hotel’ (read: bar) and read the newspaper, watched Citizen TV and drank soda. Star’s friend was there in his Sunday best, clearly having come from church, resplendent in a belt with pictures of Obama layered into the clear plastic buckle, drinking beer with friends and chewing miraa. Aside from miraa as a source of pleasure and past time, my host brother Star seems to really enjoy bananas, raw cassava as well as the millet porridge I made, actually using the word ‘-penda.’ He told stories about his circumcision while he drank the poridge; how they ate nothing else for the entirety of their ritual confinement…

I spoke to Star about this whole sexual pleasure story – telling him the feminist idea of female circumcision as a form of male domination, patriarchy. He told me how it was said to function to ‘cool women down.’ At the same time though, apparently some of his friends didn’t like how “dull” it made some women when they were busting a move, shall we say, beginning to prefer uncircumcised girls instead, who were better able to appreciate their efforts.

As a first year in college, I had the most random and detailed conversation with a Latino dude, Catholic, an immigrant to the US, originally from somewhere in Latin America. They (not sure which of these communities exactly “they” refers to here) don’t get circumcised. He was good enough to carefully explain i) what sex is like the first time when you have a foreskin (a real loss of virginity – the tear, and pain) ii) what sex was like thereafter (extra sensation) iii) what sex with him is like for his female partner at least as reported to him ☺ (extra sensation). In summary, it seems male circumcision limits the range of pleasure possible for men as it does women (lets keep this conversation limited to clitoridectomy and less invasive forms of female circumcision.)

But given the relative difficulty for most females in experiencing sexual pleasure, and all the work that they're also doing – I think the point of mutual limitation on pleasure in circumcision is worth stating as a new idea, for me at least. But for all my body parts, I can't say I'm more emancipated than they are. I was positively blushing recently at the apparent sexual freedom of one of my colleagues on a certain film set. And What-On-Earth will my mother and all her church friends (and my church friends) think when they learn of the things I've confessed to knowing and thinking AND put on the internet?! 

*This piece recognizes the positive effects male circumcision is said to have in preventing HIV transmission. Also, no real data exists on the prevalence of female circumcision in this particular area of Meru and in many other places around the country since the practice is illegal in Kenya.

On Saturday, about halfway through my stay near Kangeta, not far from Maua town in Meru County, I went to fetch water with my host sister, Margaret. We went with her delightful dirt-prone 4 years old daughter Monica. It seemed to be a bit of an outing for her; she hasn’t started school yet, and seemed to spend her days hanging out in the homestead with another boy about her age; a quiet one who liked to suck on a pink plastic umbrella handle. She wears these dresses that look like they were originally flower girl dresses for various lacy weddings, the original colour, not always clear. She and the little boy inadvertently helped me practice my Igembe-Meru greeting: 'Mugha', and the response, 'Kweya' (spellings mine). It is all I know how to say to them that they can understand and respond to in return.
It's Monica's first time. She carries two bottles, each about 750ml (approx.) on a cloth string. They bounce against each other as she makes her way excitedly up the steep hill to our destination about 700m away. I'm mostly concerned about making it down in one piece with the 20 litres of water Margaret and I will each carry on our backs on the way down, but Monica is just as carefree as always, nimbly negotiating the roots on the uneven earth beneath her tiny bare feet, the various crops and trees growing overhead around us. 
It costs 5 shillings to fill up each of our two containers, or mtungis. The water comes directly to this neighbouring family's home via an underground piped network. Margaret says my host family used to get their own water this way until one of their neighbours deliberately sabotaged their piping. There must be people like that in Nairobi, she intones. I have to agree; there are people like that everywhere. 

While we fill up our mtungis at the large water tank, the lady of the home learns that I'm from ‘the city,' a visitor, non-Meru, not even trying to marry into the community. She wants to know why Margaret is putting me to work. 'Nikupendelea kwake': it is her liking, Margaret says. She looks at me doubtfully. Margaret is tying the rope that will strap the filled mtungi/container to my body. I watch carefully, realizing I won’t have time to learn the tie, or to hoist the mtungi on myself the way she and the other women do. I wonder how it matters that I won’t. In a mix of language and energy that perhaps betray more than the tender-footedness of my Kiswahili, I try to defend my journey: 'Niliulizia. Ndio maana nilikuja kwenu'. I asked for it; it's why I came to visit you. ‘She’s just like Monica' Margaret continues, ‘she enjoys doing what the adults are doing, it makes her happy.

That was a light bulb moment for me. It’s true, my attitude throughout the trip, at least on the face of it, finds its closest simile in Monica, the child who will repeat words and seeming non-words to herself, is overjoyed to see and do everything along with the adults, and must be watched and guided lest she bites off more than she can chew.
During my 10 days in Meru I climbed 60-120 year old miraa trees to harvest the small red twigs. I learned how to pack it, chew it, the different grades of miraa and how pricing works. I helped my host brother feed the family’s three goats and gutted a chicken, the irony of my eagerness here impossible to escape, given that my parents in Nairobi keep 3 goats and many chicken and I never volunteer to do this work at home! With the women, I fetched water, ground about 1.5kg of millet and cooked it into uji (porridge) along with a few other meals in this blindingly smoky kitchen, even (tried to) split firewood with an ax.

The whole Miraa culture and business fascinates me. When I was younger I lived in a neighbourhood where crazed drivers hurtled massive pickup loads of miraa somewhere unknowable, where it was sold in every kiosk in the area. Years later I landed in the film industry and made friends with members of the crew who chewed it on particularly hard days. I never understood the point, declining when they offered it to me, observing the yellow-green muck between the teeth, the greening lip, the reported burn and bulge in the cheek, the bulge bigger than any chewing gum I ever desired, which I associated with the revulsion and effort in swallowing the vegetables my mother made me consume as a child 'for vitamins', 'because there are starving children in Somalia/Turkana/Ethiopia/The Slum', 'because I am your mother'.

There’s a lot I didn’t get to see or do, I was only there for the skinny side of ten days. But Margaret and her daughter Monica helped teach me that this experience involves not only seeing, but also being seen. My relatively outsider status made certain access, conversation and action difficult, nearly impossible, as well as other access, action and conversation possible and revealing. To illustrate, over the ten days I had both frank and restrained conversations around FGM/Female Circumcision, the prostitution legalization debate, homosexuality, male work vs female work as it existed in my host family and the larger community and resulting levels of access, the relationship of the church and the miraa industry, the impact of the industry on the institution of the family, and the good, the bad, the ugly and harmless about the miraa industry.

Since I’ve been back in the city I’ve had succeeding conversations about these things, and emerged with larger questions about the value of pleasure in our (rural?) spaces, the state of the family in the face of unchecked capitalism, problems in our transition from our former pre-colonial social leadership structures to our present post-independence moment, questions on quality of life in our various rural pre development present and certain Western post development scenarios we are unwittingly aspiring to, how relatively fortunate or unfortunate our multiple existences are, and who gets to define them. I could do an entire PHD thesis on just one of those subjects, and some folks have spent years in Meru alone doing exactly that. I hope to get to read some of their work when I’m done with all 20 rural home stays. Apparently I have my work cut out for me.

I’ll be posting some of these thoughts and questions that have emerged in the doing and conversing with regular and knowledgeable members of the community, including folks in government and the private sector working for the larger district. Ah, and a tutorial on how to eat Miraa. J

Thanks for coming along. 

 

The thing is, I'm a writer, and the work I produce tries to get to the naked of things, without any accompanying exposure. I'd hate for my work to leave anyone involved in it cold, or taken advantage of, at least not anything like when I'm driving into a mall, and they put a mirror to see the underside of my car, or open up the back to see inside my rear. It doesnt matter that they've asked me first; I mean it helps, but i am inside the car, i am part of it, or it is part of me at that moment, and there is a man beside me who has asked to put a mirror up my skirt, and I have let him?! He has slowly encircled me, checking every possible angle. I don't know that it helps that he sometimes appears disinterested in his mission, there is still that mirror...

here i am in another family's home. Not mine. They have welcomed me in, they have fed me, they have even given me the room of their youngest child to sleep in. I tap this post on my phone in absolute privacy. There is only some light snoring to be heard. A cockerel, i dare say the largest breed you will ever see, will cock-a-doodle again in a bit. There is a cat, perhaps two roving about in the house, but i am quite alone. There goes the cockerel.

The thing is, i dont promise to write lovely things about this, or any family I live with, I dont promise to write anything they already have or want to see about themselves, the writing may in fact betray more about me and my sightedness or blindness than theirs. But i am wont to protect their annonymity, their ability to dissociate from the writing once its done - heck, i do, and no one i ever wrote about, no incident that became the jumping off point of a poem ever had to have their photograph beside the poem (that bears complete, little or no resemblence to them).

Now i ask myself if thats my own stuff, Nairobi middleclass stuff. We can't fade. I can't fade. The pharmacist, if i ask, will know either one of my parents, my work as a poet, or before when i was just my parent's child, or they went to school with someone i know. I have to trust that whatever I'm drugs I'm getting arent interesting enough to tweet or make a phonecall about.

Photographs when I'm in 'research mode' are hard to make. I want to blend in, i dont want to feel or look like a tourist, or even the ethno-traveller that i am. I want to visit, get to know people, open my eyes, perhaps make notes out of sight, or post blogposts at 5am, just be.

But everyone knows exactly why I'm here, what i want to do. Perhaps I ought to honor that and document it every way technology allows, within the realms of decency, and having gotten over my Nairobi exposure issues.

I'm going to Meru next week, ever so slightly more aware of my ignorance.

What I have been/am still looking for: 
1. A family to live and work with for 10days - done :) 
2. A person 70+ to interview/converse with
3. An education practitioner in the area to interview/converse with for context
4. A healthcare practitioner in the area to interview/converse with for context
5. Some kind of citizen activity, project or meeting. be it CDF, NGO or partisan or otherwise political in nature.

How it's all happening: 

• Mr & Mrs K are old friends of my parent's. They know A & B. A lives in Meru town, B lives in Kithoka. I have no idea where Kithoka is, but I understand it's really "inside."
• My lawyer, G is from Chogoria, Meru. This I have discovered over the past week. Because I'm increasingly set on going to Maua area, he's going to talk to his sister, who's currently in Liberia because she went to high school in Meru and may know people from Maua well enough, still. We'll see.  
• My  friend M, I have also learnt this past fortnight, is from Chuka, he has an uncle, P, who's an agricultural engineer working with farmers across Meru. I'm really pushing for him (the uncle) to invest in finding me a family. I hope I will at least meet him or speak to him. 
• I have another friend, D, a musician who our mutual friend B mentioned may be at least partly from Meru. spoke to him - he's a Nairobi child. no networks in Meru, any through the parent may be too long winded to be interested.  
• Another musician, W, told me straight out, all he knows is where his grandparents house is. lol. sounds familiar.
• A fellow poet friend, P, sent me J's number. Funny thing is I went to high school here in Nairobi with J and her younger sister. They're also from Southern parts of Meru, but not as far as Chuka. She's talking to her mum to see if there are any possibilities. 
• I randomly met Dr. M last week at a reception at the home of the Director of the Goethe Institute. He's a researcher. He's from Meru, and introduced me to Dr. G, who is an academic who lives in Maua. She sounds cool, though perhaps non-commital as far as being a family - which I totally understand. How many times are you going to just let a stranger come to your house to "do some research on Kenyan families, and keep a blog." We will at least interact, though, but it's making me think that even the ideal budget I wanted when I was trying to raise money to do this is project was still meager. 
• Also, a techi friend S is apparently from Meru/Isiolo. His family lives in Meru town. Apparently Meru is a billion shilling a day economy. Perhaps I shall not stay in the town. It sounds like it's much like Big Rongai. 
• Another friend from the iHub introduced me to M, who happens to be an artist here in Nairobi, and who's family lives somewhere between Meru and Isiolo. His family sounded rather interesting actually in various ways, and they sound like they would appreciate having me over once they estabilished that I was a good person. Alas, there may not be time to arrange all of this. 
• I contacted a writer/thinker acquaintance U via email. He lives in the Meru area. We've never met, but his name sounds like he might be European in the ethnic sense, and settled here. he's married to a "local." We spoke on the phone today, he totally speaks swahili, and has the sensibilities of a Kenyan, like if i was to have this convo with my grandmother, the totally warm "come on over". And I didn't think I had very much social capital there at all. So they seem totally stereotypically(?) Kenyan in that sense, AND both of them aren't ethnically related to Meru. I love it! They have friends on the road on the way to Maua "deep inside" who it looks like I can stay with. He's away in some other part of the country working, but will come back and I'll get to meet him. His wife is brisk but warm. She told me where to get the 7-seater matatu - "Tearoom". She will meet me in Meru. Happiness all around.
• Oh! Last night, randomly, I was with my friend K, and as we walked out of Prestige Plaza, he saw a friend of his and said hi. He introduced us. Turns out she knew me from one of the concerts I was in at the Michael Joseph Centre last year. Turns out she's from Meru, from Nkubu, I think. And I tell her what I'm doing and she asks me if I have a place to stay and if I want I can totally stay with her grandmother and learn to pick tea. :) She taught me how to say hi in Kimeru (sp?!). I took her number :) Alas, I have forgotten how it goes. I will learn again. :D 

   All in all, for the moment, I've spoken to two sets of people who were "on the ground" in Meru, and it looks like the trip is finally (not a moment too soon!) real. 

Challenges I have encountered while trying to secure a place to stay and people to talk to in Meru using my social networks. (social networks here includes friends, acquaintances my parent’s friends etc.)

1.    The clustering contacts idea has proved hard to realize when I am manually moving the wheels, talking to people, etc. and mentally or physically fixing and choosing points on the map. I need to do more to get people to use the crowdmap <http://thiskenyanlife.crowdmap.com> for the crowdsourcing, And, I may have to communicate in a more directed way. And know I shall spend lots of money talking on the phone. 

2.     Degrees of separation, Social Capital and establishing trust: I knew this project was dependent on it. I knew there were risks involved and undertaken by potential hosts, recommenders and me, but seeing them play out has been a separate journey. 

3.     Dialing numbers. I'm actually an introvert, and shy. And not many people know the thinker side of me. Picking up the phone to dial a stranger or an acquaintance or friend and try to explain the project in simple terms, after having spent a year and a half developing it, takes a lot of energy. Sometimes I become overly verbose. And then the asking for help, this non-monitory investment that I want, and then the burden of not being able to take all the offered help. 

4.    It started to hit me mid-week that I would just have to close my eyes and just pick a place. I'm obviously leaning towards Maua. I'm told that's actually where they grow Miraa, as opposed to larger Meru. I probably should say not everyone in Maua grows it either, so I'm hoping to have a narrative that has Miraa farming somewhere, but I'm certainly not looking to write or have an exclusively Miraa experience. It's just that it's unique to the whole country. On a personal level, at some point I lived in Pumwani, and practically everyday we would see the heavy laden pickups driving through, and all the kiosks that sell it. And who hasn't been to those petrol stations in South C and Parklands where folk congregate at night to chew in their parked cars. (I've never understood it). In Pumwani, the street outside our house quite literally never slept, my dad offered narratives about how people take turns sleeping, so someone had to be awake all the time even if they didn't want to, as they had no bed at that moment. It will be awesome to see where those pickups come from, and the farms, even although i don't expect to uncover the mystery of the industry.

6.    Everywhere sounds interesting, even as I'm sure things will eventually get monotonous anywhere. Anyplace will teach me something, so how do you choose?!

7.    I hoped to have at least one person aged 15-30 in every home I would stay in - to have a sense of young peoples ideas, but also find in them a translater, and someone from whom I could learn the social role of my age group, (even if not or also gender). It goes without saying that as an urban, non-Meru person, I don't know what it means to be my age in this society, what behaviour is expected of me, what dress, etc. (I must tell you the story of Ngwatilo in denim in Kitaingo, near Kilome at some point) I wonder what this observation means, no young folk - what it's limits, freedoms and deception is. 

Thanks for getting this far through this long and long overdue post. :) 

Love, Peace & Great Stories.

 

I'm having a slow morning today. Partly because I slept before I got completely out of a foul mood. Try not to do that. 

So I watched this TED talk this morning by Kathryn Schulz "On Being Wrong" and it's making me understand why I was upset last night, and also about the risks I run in doing The Ngwatilo Kenya Project. A lot of what I'll be doing in these weeks before my first trip in February is counting the cost, planning, and running round in circles doubting the value of this project. 

This post probably falls under the last category.

Last night I had dinner with a bunch of St. Lawrence University students just starting their semester abroad in Kenya. Today they're on the road to Meru, to do a rural homestay for a week. I went to SLU as an undergraduate, and would have gone on a semester abroad anywhere before I came to Kenya. I feel a tinge of regret about that, although my experience in London and fellowship in South Africa and everything else are part of what have brought me to this point. The fact remains, those American students get to see more of my country than I have. And they do it when they are so young. Their director, Dr. Wairimu Ndirangu gets email after email of students trying to do their darndest to come back, and others just recognizing with her that their lives have changed forever. In retrospect, I'd have liked to see Kenya for myself, and through their eyes. I'll work towards that later this year when the next group comes. *Note to self.*

It was interesting listening to the students rationalizing their trip this week. I really related to their fear of being bored- of not knowing what to do with the time. I'm also worried about having everything pass over my head with all these languages i don't know. And then getting the censored version in Kiswahili or English.

Food. My uncle, who's lived in the States over 15 years traveled to Tanzania two weeks ago with a group of men from his church to build homes in some random village in Tanzania. He spoke of how some of his companions packed canned food supplies to last the 10days that they would be there. About how lunch everyday was muthokoi (beans and maize with the husks removed - part of a school feeding program - familiar?). By the third day they'd gotten sick of it and started mixing in the canned tuna to flavour the muthokoi. 

 

Will I cut myself some slack on my travels? Carry blueband or something to make food bearable where it struggles with my limits of bearability, or just stick it out. The point, afterall, is to immerse myself in all these Kenyans' 'real lives' - I have to do that as honestly as I can. 

Back to the video: one of the reasons I'm doing this is because I'm sick of watching videos from Turkana and seeing only starving women and children and old men - these lives that are characterized by nothing but hunger. Like they don't experience versions of the same things I experience in their environment. Joy, love, anger, stories, satisfaction, growth, change. i don't know. Is it possible that the TV guys are right? And if their lives have nothing about them but hunger, don't these Turkana folks [and insert other disenfranchised Kenyan] resemble me enough that all my working and middle-class friends and their parents and me and all of us who get to have a different experience ought to be wearing sack cloth and spending all our waking moments making sure, in all our various ways, that everyone has access to less basic concerns? 

Perhaps that was a loopy leap.

I was fortunate to learn to create poetry in an environment of research and scholarship. One of the books I read while I wrote the initial poems that went into "Blue Mothertongue" contained a sentence by Martha Minow, a legal scholar who was writing an analysis on US contemporary society. She says, "to decide who's suffering we care about" is also to "define ourselves and our communities." I cling to these words as I prepare to do The Ngwatilo Kenya Project. For me, it does have clear benefits in creating (easily compromised) nationalistic inclinations and easing ethnic and political tension but it's really about humanizing the other within, for theirs and our own benefit, outside of what commerce or the state desire. 

It looks like I'm going to Meru in February. Partly why i've chosen it for my first trip is because it seems somewhere in the middle on the scale of familiar and 'totally out there.' I paid attention to how the area did in KCPE and had a few conversations about the impact of the miraa industry on the margins of the society - all this is about developing a list of assumptions.

I'll be looking to build my contacts there over the next few weeks. I'll figure out exactly where I'm going and who I'll be staying with by next week. Walk with me as I begin The Ngwatilo Kenya Project and find ideas and people and propose things 'to hold on to.' 

I'm on it. The one that may most resemble yours involves a gym and sweat and targets. It's a late addition from last year that also didn't quite happen.

September. A conversation about a painting and my July 2011 concert lands me in a certain CEO's office, talkin about The Ngwatilo Kenya Project. He gives me the once over and wonders aloud if my body can handle the hardship that so many people in rural Kenya live as part of the normal. Be it walking forever to fetch water, hauling water back to homestead. firewood, all this walking and carrying and tilling and - goodness knows - i haven't actually gone anywhere yet. 

And I thought, wouldn't it suck to just make all Nairobi people look weak and unable to do any kind of real (read: manual) work if I got there and couldn't even do half of what those women typically do? So i resolved to go to the gym - build up my endurance, build up my strength levels. 

Ok- and I'm an urban girl who cares what she looks like sometimes: no.3: get rid of all unnecessary fat. 

Alas, it took until January 2nd to actually Go to a gym and start working.  

Knowledge share: at some point in my brother's education, he studied sports science - so I've been really blessed to have access to some of his textbooks, in particular, "Periodization: Theory and Methodoloy of Training" by Tudor O. Bompa. It's a hectic read, with diagrams and the mathematics & science of training for you to see how much you are and aren't achieving every time you work out.

I am becoming obsessed with my heart rate: If I keep this up through out the project I might even become one of those nike and ipod people (while carrying 20 litres of water in a mtungi [container] on my head and wearing nothing but an old NGO tshirt and leso.) :)

It's a great book - I'll try to share some of my lessons as I go along. All I have to say at the moment is lactic acid in your muscles is REALLY painful. Learn from it. Don't get it twice.

- peace.

Note to self: wouldn't it be cool to have a little sign out sentence thingi? ::DoList::