Your Kenyan TV Guide

Being on the equator means 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. Everyday. All year long. 6:30 to 6:30. The Swahili way of telling time is actually based on this twelve-hour schedule. 7am is saa moja, hour one, since it is the first hour of daylight. Similarly, 7pm is also saa moja, hour one after sunset.

As Jane mentions in her list-loving blog post, darkness by 7pm also means that I am home-bound by 7pm, or taking a taxi. It makes the nights pretty long when I have to head back from walking around the beach and settle down in the apartment before 6:30 to avoid being out after dark. So I have had to find ways to amuse myself on the long Kenyan nights.

I am still working on my Swahili and Kenyan cooking and I've been tuning up my ukulele skills (song recommendations are always appreciated).  But after dinner is cooked, I sit down in front on TV to consume my attempt at a Kenyan meal.

I know, I know, you wouldn't think that I should be watching TV. You are in Kenya, Elizabeth, and your Swahili skills are still abysmal. You should be studying. And, my mom is saying, didn't I send you with at least a few good books? You haven't even gotten up to the exciting part of Out of Africa yet! Yes, yes this is all true. However, you can also learn a lot about a country's culture through its TV programs. Take the US, for example. We love seeing doctors with drama and solving gory crime-scene mysteries, watching high schoolers learn important lessons through song and scandal and cat fights on "reality" TV.

Kenya likes gospel music, news and soap operas, mostly of the Mexican telenovela variety.

Although I get a few international channels (much more than I had expected), including my faves FashionTV and Style (just kidding) and NatGeoWild (the best!), I often fall back on the national Kenyan channels, including NTV, KTN, e.tvAfrica, and Citizen TV.

I now have the nightly TV schedule down-pat.

7pm: News on every channel, in Swahili. Usually, they are all covering the same stories. So if you miss the story on one channel, or want more details, just flip to the other channel. Also fun to learn, the main sports they follow are football (of the non-American, or "soccer" variety) and RUGBY! Woo rugby woo!!!

Oh Jose Miguel. So dreamy. Apparently.

8pm: Soap opera time. Each channel has its own, but my favorite is Soy Tu Duena. So much drama. Valentina is the noble, beautiful and strong protagonist, who runs a hacienda on her own and is whose only weakness is her love for the sought-after Jose Miguel. After some confusion, they break up, which causes great distress to both. But they joyfully reunite while sitting watch at the hospital bed of young Troy, a little boy who is in a coma. But then they break up again when Valentina has worries over what Jose Miguel has done with her evil harlot cousin, Ivana. There are side stories between the maid and delivery boy and Valentina's friend and the local store ower.  Leonor, Jose Miguel's conniving mother, and Rosendo, the evil former foreman of Valentina's hacienda, are the clear villains.

A wonderful and comforting thing about Mexican telenovelas is that you always know exactly who are the villains and who are the heroes. And even better, despite any interluding love affairs, you know that in the end, true love will prevail.

9pm: News in English. I understand this version a little better. However, even though all the reporters speak in English, a lot of the interviews are still in Swahili. Another opportunity to learn, right? My favorite is NTV tonight. One news story which has been really interesting to follow has been the Independence Day celebrations for the newly-created South Sudan. And since South Sudan doesn't really have any sort of economy beyond subsistence farming and is just coming off a long civil war, it should be interesting to continue to follow the development of this brand new country.

She spells her name the same way my mom does. Interesting coincidence. 

10pm: Teresa. So scandalous. Teresa is very seductive, but also a good catholic girl (of course). And she's going to marry Arturo for his money, even though she really loves Mariano. And then her friend had an affair with Arturo's business partner, Ruben and is now going to have his baby and also ends up being the nurse for his daughter, Aida, after she goes into shock when her fiance dies. And that's just in the first thirty minutes. It is so juicy.

Teresa plays with men's hearts all to achieve her greedy goals of wealth and power.
I bet her lipstick is called Vicious Trollop.

There are also a number of Kenyan soap operas, including Demigods, which is really good, and even American soap operas, like The Young and the Restless.

These soap operas are so juicy, it makes me wonder why I never got into them before. Maybe it's because they weren't on prime time in the US. Or maybe because I don't speak Spanish and here all the telenovelas feature wonderfully amusing voice overs. Or maybe it's because I don't have a TV at college. Whatever the reason, Valentina and her hacienda and Teresa and her intrigues are something that I wasn't expecting to find in Kenya and will probably miss when I leave.

Commercials also tell a lot about a country. A frequent theme in commercials here are problems we don't even consider in the US, like malaria and typhoid. Mortein Doom has a variety of amusing commercials featuring mosquitoes with jet-packs bent on spreading malaria.

Tune into Kenyan TV between 4 and 6pm or any time on Sunday, and gospel music is the rule. Which is a weird combination of large gospel choirs swaying back and forth and holding their hands up to the heaven and people walking around cities rapping about God. More on the seeming paradoxes of gospel music to come.


P.S. Blogging is so fun that this post is super long. Thanks for reading, if you got all the way to the end. Also, it distracted me from my cooking. Which resulted in over-cooked (read "burnt") ugali. So it seems my prowess as a Kenyan cook is still a work in progress. However, I did discover that "over cooking" ugali is a great way to make tortilla chips. Win. It is like one of those accidental moments of brilliance.