Vutakaka

Vutakaka Community Center

Khamisi Kitsao, the cutest little boy in TK

Traditional Giriama Dance

A chicken (we have lots of those)

Lamu

Lamu, a small town on an island in an archipelago of the same name, off the northern coast of Kenya, is touted as the best preservation of Swahili culture. Much smaller than Zanzibar, but treated as the Kenyan version, Lamu is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Though it lacked the white washed houses that I associate with Swahili culture, Lamu was full of donkeys, coral brick, and white sand beaches. And it is quite possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. Another volunteer said it reminded her of “an African version of Venice.”

Swahili Wedding

Swahili weddings are a fascinating mixture of Islamic tradition and Western style. While the brides must be virgins (complete with virginity testing), they are allowed to wear spaghetti strap white wedding dresses straight out of American pop culture. Because there are no men at the all-night disco, women come scantily clad in their best dresses sans bui bui, despite the fact that the entire male population of the town voyeuristically watches from behind 4-foot tall potato sack fences. The entire wedding—disco, lunch, and ceremony—is divided by gender. Not only do the bride and groom not spend the wedding together, they actually don’t partake in any of the festivities, only the ceremony. On the day of the wedding, the guests gather for dancing (an interesting mix of traditional Swahili music and Shakira, Akon, and Beyonce (pronounced with a silent “e”)), lunch (communal plates of dead animals), and hours of sitting and waiting for the bride (or in this case, brides) to show up. Meanwhile, the groom goes to the mosque to get married, while the bride waits at home. Once they are officially married (the groom agrees to the marriage at the mosque), the bride shows up to the party, where she stands on a dais decorated for valentine’s day and waits for her husband to come fetch her for the wedding night.

There are very few things about western culture that I find outright superior, but I have two words: honeymoon suite.

It’s one thing to sit through an hour long cultural discussion about traditional wedding practices and entirely another to share a wall with the awkward-and-uncomfortable couple on their wedding night. It’s funny how sex is so taboo, but having witnesses to the virginity testing is entirely acceptable.

Living in a Sexist State

Working for a women’s empowerment organization often makes me forget how destitute women really are in the world. Obviously, women are of lesser status in the majority world, but it’s easy to forget when working alongside wonderful, independent, powerful women.

Machismo is not the norm in Kenya. Men are polite and accommodating, even chivalrous. Honestly, my only friends here are men, but only because the women spend 18 hours a day boiling water for bathing, cooking three meals a day, sweeping dirt floors, working on their shamba (the Swahili word for farm), and raising hoards of children (the average in the village is between 4 and 7, but I personally know one family that has 19 children).

The men are not bad people. They aren’t subjugating their wives and daughters for fun (or so I’d like to believe); sexism is so deeply rooted in the cultural mores and religious practices that even the women believe that they are less worthy. While women are expected to be strict Muslims, wear their bui buis and hijabs, and pray five times a day, they are not allowed to enter mosques. Men must always be served first, even if that means that the women and girls must go without the food that they grew, gathered, and cooked.

A friend of mine, who is a nice, down to earth, friendly guy who refuses to let me pay for anything despite the fact that he makes about $12 a month. I recently went to visit his house where I met his entire family. When I suggested that we could do our own dishes, he guffawed as if I had suggested that he should attempt to give birth to quintuplets. Sincerely, he explained that when there are no women around, he was at the bottom of the hierarchy and had to do the family’s grunt work. But as long as his sisters were there, they must do everything. He laughed about how sometimes he has to beat his sisters. When I asked why, he replied, “If they don’t do everything I tell them to, I have to cane them. Otherwise they’ll never learn.”

I am trying to be a cultural relativist. But seeing women treated like dogs is difficult to stomach. And attempting to improve their situation by giving them education, jobs, and birth control is only making it worse for some of them. How are we supposed to reach gender equality without becoming cultural imperialists?

At the entry to Amboseli, one of Kenya’s smallest and busiest game parks, we were sucked into the tourist trap of going to see a Maasai village. The entire idea of watching a once-great tribe of people prostituting themselves in front of Muzungus for cash seemed unbearable. It is reminiscent of so many Native Americans who have been forced off their land, into the depths of alcoholism, or into the casino business. Of the options, running a casino to earn enough money to support an entire reservation is the lesser of the evils. When the rest of Kenya’s tribes made the shift toward “development,” the Maasai peoples were given the option of leaving their roots behind to join the pursuit of wealth in the cities, or maintaining their nomadic lifestyle and turning to tourism to earn enough money to buy textbooks for their primary school. Because the basis of their culture is subsistence—just enough livestock for milk and blood to feed the village, just enough water to keep themselves and their cows hydrated in the devastatingly dry savannah, and just enough shelter to protect themselves and their animals from the wild—the Maasai never had a need for money until the government commodified education, forcing them to sell themselves to tourists for $14 a pop. Fortunately, $14 bought us an educational tour of their village rather than a ritualistic bleeding or anything equally degrading. Their way of life is truly incredible. Despite the fact that most Maasai are at least six feet tall, their houses stand no higher than 4 feet and are made entirely out of tree branches and cow dung. When they slaughter a cow, they stretch the rawhide over a wooden frame to make a bed, eat the meat, and use the bones to handcraft their ceremonial jewelry. When the area gets dry and barren, they simply leave their circular village behind and construct a new one where their cows have a better chance of survival. It’s no wonder the West has such a fascination with these people. They represent everything we’ve abandoned—using (or rather, having) only what you need in order to survive.

Cliché Africa: Head-to-toe khaki, telephoto lenses, tents with running water and electricity, and lions chasing zebras across the savannah. Well, three out of four ain’t bad.

Seeing some of the world’s strangest creatures in their natural habitat is awe-inspiring, but being a tourist in a country where most the people won’t earn the cost of lunch in a month is tragic. The tourism industry is justified by the usual rhetoric: the money goes back into the local economy to help the poor. But most the tour companies are British, or at least based in Nairobi, so how exactly does the money get back to the local community? Of course, the industry provides jobs: tour guides who get to rest for a matter of hours each day, who are deaf from the constant hum of safari vans and long stretches of highway, and who see their families maybe twice a month; hotel staff who have to deal with the constant stream of spoiled Eurotrash complaining that there’s no hot water for measely tip money; and of course, the vultures who make their living selling useless souveniers for highly inflated prices.

Of course, the first time I saw an elephant ten feet away, I forgot all about the dirty feeling that I was contributing to the fall of humanity. Every warthog conjured up the opening verse of Hakuna Matata and the backdrop of Kilamanjaro and acacia trees fulfilled my quintessential image of Africa.

So Beautiful

The road to Takaungu

Takaungu Creek

Takaungu Beach

The Malindi Marine Park

Kenya is certainly not the most PC place in the world. There is a constant chatter of children shouting “Muzungu! Muzungu!” every time they see a white person. The N-word is thrown around like candy. Not only is it ubiquitous in music, people just use it in conversation. One of the men in town even took it on as his name. Needless to say, it makes me very uncomfortable.

The usual racial inclusiveness of the Pacific Northwest is not observed here. There are 42 ethnic groups in Kenya and they all have something to say about each other. Luo men are tall, dark, and handsome (according to a Luo man), and cocky and arrogant according to everyone else. Giriamas (the local group I'm living amongst) are seen as backwards and primitive by many other tribes, but are merely upholding long-standing traditions in their eyes. Many scholars have pointed to the ethnic divisions in Africa as the main reason so many countries are struggling--people put their tribe before their country, making nationalism nearly non-existent.

I love working for the non-profit sector because it gives me a sense of purpose—the work I’m doing is necessary and meaningful and I actually have skills I can contribute to a cause I believe in.

But tedious work for a cause is still tedious work, if only more painful due to the lack of resources. I have neither the patience nor skill to deal with ten year old computers that crash when attempting to install anti-virus software and take anywhere between 30 seconds and five minutes to open a blank document. The hard drives are overloaded with work from volunteers who left years ago and colonies of ants seem to enjoy living in the keyboards. A task that should take fifteen minutes can easily eat up two hours. Fortunately, American hyper-efficiency has yet to make its way to Kenya. The people here live a slow-paced lifestyle. In fact, they even have a phrase, “Pole pole,” which translates to “slowly, slowly,” to describe just about everything here. In between bouts of cussing at the computer, I’m becoming very Zen.

In addition to teaching English, math, and computer classes, I am working on transitioning the EAC Sewing Club into an independent cooperative run by the women themselves. The executive director of the EAC described it as a graduate level project in sustainable development. I am in no way educated or experienced in the field, though I was looking into development for my master’s work, so this, like so many other things, will be an interesting test run.

So far, though, my work in sustainable development has consisted of typing up price lists of all the products, converting the prices into U.S. dollars and euros, and taking pretty pictures of purses, skirts, and tablecloths. And somehow it all seems even less meaningful when sitting in front of a 90s Dell for eight hours a day.

Around the House

A view of the village from above

My first week in Africa has been stiflingly hot (despite the fact that it’s one of the coldest months of the year) and disarmingly friendly. I cannot remember the last time a stranger said hello to me on the street, even in uber-friendly Eugene. But in Takaungu, a little rural village on the eastern coast of Kenya, it’s considered rude not to greet everyone you pass. The children are so excited to see new (i.e. white) people; they literally chase after us in packs shouting, “Hello!”, “How are you?”, and “What is your name?” Only once has someone asked me for money.

I rode from the airport in a new silver Mitsubishi on the worst pothole-ridden dirt roads I’ve ever seen. My driver, the husband of EAC’s founder and executive director Suzanne Jeneby, quipped that in Kenya, you know someone is drunk when they’re driving straight. The road was littered with boda bodas (bicycle taxis), goats, chickens, and cows, and women carrying pails of water balanced on their heads, as well as freight trucks and matatus (8-person vans hollowed out to fit 15—Kenya’s solution to public transportation) swerving like madmen to avoid all of the above.

Everything about development in Kenya seems to fit that standard. The wealthier families have electricity, television, stereos, running water, but no toilets. Even the poorest people have cell phones, despite the fact that they have no electricity to charge them with. The people of Kenya are trying desperately to keep up with modern technology, but the government has yet to provide a proper platform for development. The schools are especially bad: when Kenya opened the schools to the public, everyone enrolled, but the government didn’t provide additional facilities or teachers, so one classroom with five desks and one teacher can have as many as 200 students.

It’s a bizarre juxtaposition of worlds when an entire family is huddled in one room to keep warm (because they all freeze when the temperature drops below 60) and the prolonged silence is broken by the all-too-familiar Nokia ring tone.
Takaungu Beach

I am working with the East African Center for the Empowerment of Women and Children (EAC) to bring the opportunities needed for development. The EAC opened a school (with an amazing 20:1 student faculty ratio), a health clinic, a farming school, technology classes, and a sewing group to enable women to earn an income. Many of the men are unemployed and spend their days “hanging out” in front of the local shop while their wives and daughters work 20 hour days to collect, clean, and prepare food while taking care of large hoards of small children. By empowering women to bring in their own income, the center is attempting to change the cycle of poverty that has gripped so many lives in rural Africa.

The impact of Westernization is evident at every turn. The television stations, based in Dubai, broadcast The OC, Friends, Scrubs, One Tree Hill, American Dreams, etc. Many of the shows make me blush; I can’t even imagine how they must affect the strictly Muslim women who cover themselves from head-to-toe in public. Teenagers listen to Tupac, Beyonce, and the Pussycat Dolls. Clothing shops sell Value Village rejects ranging from old Superbowl t-shirts to rhinestone-encrusted “Bootylicious” baby tees. Kenya seems to be a display of American culture at its finest.