I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I didn’t really love my OA trip. Blasphemous in most Princeton circles, I know. (OA, for those of you who aren’t in Princeton circles, stands for Outdoor Action, a program that organizes pre-matriculation backpacking trips for incoming Princeton freshmen in order to give the freshmen a chance to bond before the year starts. The trips are technically optional, but the unspoken rule is that unless you have a really great excuse, you do your OA trip and like it). I met some awesome people on OA and would definitely still sign up if I was a freshman again, but at the end of the day, I’m a girl who likes to take a shower and sleep in a bed.
But I’m also a girl who has her books shelved in combination alphabetical/size order, traded with herself on GameBoy to catch all 150 Pokemon, and can’t stand it when people leave just one bite of food on their plate. As a result, even though my practical side wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of a cold, showerless three-day hike, my OCD side decided that there was no way I was going to spend three months in Kenya, two hours from the mountain after which it was named (“Kenya” is believed to be a corruption of local tribal words for “God’s resting place,” since tribal lore has it that God resides within the mountain. When Kenya became an independent nation, it took its name from the mountain), without climbing said mountain. And so it was that on Friday morning I strengthened my resolve, plastered on a determined smile, and joined four other Mpalans in a mutatu heading for the base of Mount Kenya.
Before
Based on the recommendations of other Princetonians who had previously hiked Mount Kenya while staying at Mpala, we hired a guy named “Cool John” (who, I learned, so christened himself as a young adult in order to distinguish himself from a rival tour guide also named “John”) to organize and lead our trip. Here’s the really great thing about paying a bunch of money for a guided expedition: porters. Four porters accompanied myself, the four other Mpalans, and Cool John all the way up the mountain to carry our sleeping bags and clothing from campsite to campsite, prepare our meals, and keep us amply supplied with biscuits and hot water. We even saw one porter for another group carrying a plastic lawn table. I’ll admit that I felt some inner conflict at the wimpiness and sheer first-world crassness of relying on porters for help. But I’ll also admit that I like backpacking a lot more without the backpacks.
In fact, I don’t know if I would have made it without porters, because Mount Kenya, topping off at just about 17,000 feet, is nearly three times as tall as any mountain you’d encounter on an OA trip on the East Coast. The cool thing about this is that you can see the ecosystems changing drastically as you go: from a broadleaf rainforest filled with baboons at the starting gate, into the sparser bamboo forest:
through scrubby vegetation and wildflowers:
past bizarre high-altitude plants:
and the adorably fat rock hyrax:
and ultimately ending at the barren rock and snow of the summit.
The other cool thing about this is the temperature. Turns out that even at the equator, mountains are cold: a truth that none of us were quite prepared for,
Really not prepared for. Above, insulation improvisation.
and for which we compensated by imbibing copious amounts of tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and, when conditions were truly dire, chili-powder-spiked hot water.
I don’t believe I’ve ever peed in so many different scenic spots in such a short time.
I peed here.
Also here.
And scenic it most definitely was. In some ways, it’s nice that Kilimanjaro gets so much of the mountaineering traffic in Africa, because it leaves the Mount Kenya trail and the summit pretty much clear for everybody else. (Though we did still meet some fascinating people, like Lillian, the software developer from New York with a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, who, at 4’10”, will become the shortest woman to ever scale the highest mountain on each continent if she successfully completes here planned trek up Everest this coming May. Lillian also gets a new tattoo every time she completes one of the Seven Summits, which she gladly showed to us upon request…including the one on her butt. We were big fans of Lillian).
Though I had a good enough time climbing Mount Kenya that, even if it’s crowded, I’d consider doing Kilimanjaro if and when I come back to Africa.
Although
English is widely spoken in Kenya and is taught along with Kiswahili in all
schools, communicating in Kenya is not nearly as easy as having a grasp of one
of these two national languages. To begin with, kids often learn their tribal
language, or “mother tongue,” at home. There are 42 different tribes, which
means 42 different languages.
Okay, forty-two languages may be a bit of an exaggeration. Although there are 42 different tribes, as you can see, there are only a handful of main tribes in Kenya. And the languages are broken down by area. So even if there are several different tribes on the coast, their languages will all be somewhat similar due to similar influences.
So the real language of Kenya is a fusion, a
regionally-based mixture of Kiswahili, English, various tribal languages and even
sheng, a sort of slang which is often just Kiswahili words said backwards. With all these complications, knowing Kiswahili (or having friends who can
translate for you) is really key to having any chance of understanding Kenyan life and culture. This is especially true on the coast, where Kiswahili originated and, according to friends in other parts of Kenya,where it is spoken more consistently, more like Kiswahili with some English tossed in than the other way around.
So if you were in Mombasa, and if you didn't know Kiswahili, how would you know that those songs
you are dancing to in the clubs are actually gospel music, to remind
you to dance “in God’s way,” as one friendly Kenyan man told me? Or how would you know to respond when your co-workers call "Msichana"? Or how
would you know when to laugh while watching Churchill Live, a comedic talk
show which East Africans love? You
wouldn’t. You would just have to dance "sinfully" while (unbeknownst to you)
listening to God’s music and stand there dumbly while your co-works are trying to get your attention and have to follow cues from the studio audience for when to laugh. Clearly,
you would always be out of the loop and playing catch up. This is no way to
live. Which is why I have decided to try to teach myself Swahili.
Brief Interlude: Gospel Music
Let's compare, shall we?
American Gospel Music at its finest
Kenyan Gospel Music
Kenyan Gospel Music in English
So it is understandable that I wouldn't recognize all the gospel music being played in clubs. Even in English, it doesn't sound like church music. But don't worry, Mom, I always leave room for Jesus on the dance floor.
Back to the blog post...
Luckily, I have help in my Swahili-learning goal. Radio broadcasters, randos in matatus and even
actors on primetime shows help out by either speaking exclusively swahiili, or,
more fun, switching back ad forth between English and Swahili. It is really an
adventure for your ears. Everything will sound like gobbledegook, and then an
English word will be thrown in and your ears perk up but the words switch back
to Swahili and you tune in to catch another English word, or maybe a new Swahili
word which you have just learned.
My
co-workers are helping me the most to learn Swahili and seem to also
benefit from the fun of making me their
language monkey, or parrot, telling me “go say this to Bulla. He’ll laugh.”
Their favourite way of “teaching me” is to repeatedly ask me questions in
Kiswahili which I don’t understand. When
I tell them “sielewi” (I don’t understand), they sometimes are so kind
as to rephrase the question. In Kiswahili. Usually, this persists until I
meekly respond “mzuri” or “poa” (which is my go-to response and means “fine,”
as in "I’m fine"). At this point, they laugh and move on, leaving me to wonder if
my response was at all appropriate and with more hazy, if anything, understanding
of Swahili.
In all
seriousness, they are super helpful and encouraging and patient as I struggle
to learn a language which they speak with such rapidity and fluidity. They
consistently provide me with new words and never seem to get tired of my random
requests for translation. William often goes into an entire break down of the
grammatical structure or word origin, explaining simple phrases piece by piece in
great detail. And, better yet, they tell me they are very impressed with my
progress, despite how slow it seems to me. But I will share some of my
knowledge with you so you too can try and eek by on a my supply of Kenyan
words.
So when I first came to Kenya, I heard "caribou" everywhere I went. And naturally, I wondered why the wild cousin of Prancer and Vixen were so popular in Kenya.
Karibu Caribou!
However, before I could express this concern, I luckily learned that karibu means welcome. As in you are welcome, or welcome to eat, or go ahead. Or me saying I really like Kenya and people responding karibu. Basically throw it down and see if it sticks. It usually will.
The flip-side of karibu is asante, or asante sana, thank you/thank you very much. I sometimes feel like a broken record because, even if I can't express much in swahili, I can always express my gratitude and asante is probably the most common word I say.
Greetings:
There are so many ways to say How are you?/what's up?, which I suppose is true in any language. However, as my co-workers shake my hand, they like to just throw greeting after greeting at me as I wonder if they are still saying the same thing and if I should still respond the same way or if they are actually saying something completely different. Here are just a few. Mzuri sana is pretty much always the appropriate response.
Habari gani? Habari yako? Habari ya asubuhi? Habari mrembo
(how are you, how are you this morning, how are you, beautiful?)
Or if you want to seem hip, you can try out one of the following (answer with poa): Vipi? Mambo? Iko fiti?
And recently, my co-workers have started throwing in greetings in their mother tongues. So I don't even know what is Swahili and what isn't. I'm pretty sure ithenade is how are you in Luo (from near Lake Victoria) and washere may be Kikuyo (from central Kenya) and may also mean how are you, but I'm not sure. I always just mumble washere mnona in response to that one, which I'm pretty sure doesn't mean anything.
A few more fun things to know:
najifunza kiswahili pole pole (I'm learning swahili slowly)- This is my favorite phrase/the first sentence I learned on my own. So I throw it around a lot to look like I know Kiswahili. Even though I really don't.
pesa ngapi (How much does it cost?)- Useful. However, don't get confused and say ngapi pesa. Apparently, that sounds really dumb.
msichana (young lady/me to all my co-workers)
mzee (old man, but in the sense of wise old man. They call my boss Mzee)
ndege (bird. and airplane. I thought that was a pretty cool double meaning)
ndiyo (yes) sawe (okay) apana (no)
iko wapi (where is it?) apa (here!)
natoka wapi (where did you come from?) nyumbani (home!)
sema (speak, used in the sense of "say something!")
Eleeza (my name. People don't like saying Elizabeth, too long and the th is a hassel. So I am now Eleeza, or Leez. Hallo Eleeza is a common greeting for me. Which is confusing because it sounds just like sikiliza (listen) or eleza (explain).)
Congratulations, you have now reached the level of a 2-month-Kenyan-Elizabeth. So with that random list, you will be able to have no functional conversations in Swahili! Feel free to enjoy the benefits of catching an occasional word while mostly feeling confused and promising yourself that Kiswahili classes will somehow work into your schedule next year at school.
Yes, I took this photo. And yes, it is a photo of a year-old leopard in a tree. And yes, you wish you were here right now.
Always in search of another adventure, my trusty fellow ecohydrology interns and I jumped at the opportunity to tag along with a group of researchers from Mpala heading down to spend this past weekend at the Maasai Mara National Reserve, near the southwestern border of Kenya.
Maasai Mara (colloquially known as “the Mara”) is a protected area and major tourist destination thanks to its large populations of big cats, antelope, and other game. It is particularly spectacular from July through October, during the Great Migration. During the Great Migration grazing animals like zebra, antelope, and wildebeest follow rains (and therefore grasses) north out of Tanzania into Kenya: the Mara is essentially the Kenyan continuation of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. In fact, you can illegally cross the Kenyan-Tanzanian border while in the Mara. And you can take pictures at a stone thingy marking the border to prove it!
I'm on the right in Tanzania; Kathleen's on the left in Kenya, and Alice has dual citizenship.
Our trip was scheduled to begin with a 6 AM departure from Mpala on Thursday morning, so we all woke up at five, packed frantically, and then waited around for two hours until our mutatu (taxi), operating on Kenya time, arrived promptly at 7:30 to drive us the five hours from Mpala, through Nanyuki, across the equator, and into the heart of Nairobi, where we were to meet the van taking us to the Mara.
These people are also on the equator.
Upon arriving and unloading in Nairobi, our group lost little time in forgetting our pledge to stick together for a speedy and efficient transfer, instead becoming hopelessly fragmented as some people stopped at the ATM, some headed to the bank to find out why their ATM cards weren’t working, and some ducked inside the supermarket to browse the impressive selection of biscuits. We all ultimately regrouped inside the next van an additional hour behind schedule, an hour that our driver, Chris, made up by speeding in an alarmingly determined fashion. We arrived at the Mara at 6 PM, just as the park was closing.
Chris, our fabulous driver.
As we waited inside our van near the park gates while Chris was busy paying our park fees, we had our first encounter with the “Maasai” part of Maasai. Numbering approximately 1.3 million in Kenya (1.5% of the national population), the Maasai people are not one of the largest tribes in Kenya (the largest is the Kikuyu tribe at 22% of the national population), but, because many Maasai villages continue to retain their traditional culture and lifestyle, they are one of the most well-known. Historically pastoralists, hunters, and warriors, the Maasai tend to live in small huts on open grasslands, where they raise large herds of cattle and goats for their meat, milk, and blood. As a result, Maasai populations are especially significant near national parks, where the land is better and less overgrazed. Some herders even have special permission from the government to graze their flocks inside the parks (and some of course illegally graze their herds inside the parks without securing permission).
Now that tourism has become so big in Kenya, however, the Maasai supplement their pastoral livelihoods by relentlessly hawking crafts and souvenirs to tourists. No sooner had Chris firmly shut all the windows of our van and walked over to the park gates than three elaborately dressed Maasai women came over and opened all of them, thrusting handfuls of colorful beaded bracelets, necklaces, and earrings forward for us to buy.
“Look at this, look, look, all for 500, 500,” said one of the women to me, holding out a string of bracelets.
“No, I’m not buying today, thank you.”
Clearly this meant I hadn’t seen the bracelets well enough.
“Ah, look, look, see? Very nice, good price, 500, 500 all,” insisted the woman, pushing the bracelets closer.
“No thank you, I’m not buying anything today.”
Which meant that though I was holding off on bracelets, I would certainly be interested in a wood carving.
“Giraffes, very nice, look, look? 700, good price!” By this time the woman’s head and shoulders were in the van too.
“No, not today. I don’t need anything today!”
I had changed my mind and would like to see the bracelets again.
“Yes, see, all for 500. Look, look, all, 500, you buy!” The bracelets were now in my lap.
“Very good, look, look, all!”
Kathleen gets mobbed by Maasai.
I bought the bracelets.
By the time we finally made it to the guesthouse we were staying at, it was almost dark, so I didn’t have the opportunity to fully appreciate the scenery until the following morning. Now, Mpala and most of the other parts of Kenya that I’ve seen in my time here are beautiful, but Maasai Mara beats them all. Everywhere you turn you see herds of wildebeest, zebra, and/or buffalo, epic landscapes, and vast, breathtaking stretches of open grassland and sky. This is a place where desktop wallpapers and Facebook profile pictures are born.
If the leopard picture wasn’t proof enough, here’s more:
Maasai giraffe (a different species from the more common reticulated giraffe--the type I see at Mpala)
Mara River, home to (literally) tons of hippos and crocodiles
Lilac-breasted roller
Female lion
Vervet monkey
Mother zebra with nursing foal
Jackal
Male ostrich
Elephants
Hannah
There’s nearly 500 more where those came from. I also understand that the Mara is even more spectacular in August and early September, when the Great Migration is in full swing, so I can’t wait to see the photos Elizabeth takes when she’s there then!
Postscript: Significant credit for almost all of these pictures needs to go to Alex Kasdin, who was gracious enough to lend me her awesome camera for the weekend. Alex, who will be completing her internship at Mpala and leaving for home on Thursday, also deserves an additional shout-out here for her outstanding service as a member of the Mpala Princeton Army as well as her staunch support of this blog. I’ll miss you for the next month, Alex!
Remember when you were
little and didn’t want to finish your broccoli? And your parents told you to
eat up because there were starving children in Africa?
Calvin is a very good example of the non-broccoli-eating child
I remember one
evening, this happened to my older brother, Danny (who was probably about 8 at
the time), and he cheekily replied “Well then, we should put this in a box and
mail it to them, because I don’t want it.”
Now that I’m in
Africa, I am surprised to find that my friends use the same logic to make me
finish the greens or ugali. They pull out the “There are starving children…”
phrase, except now, instead of being all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, the
starving children are here.
So even though I am
now here in Africa, where those starving children who would have loved to eat
my broccoli live, it is still a sort of farce, a pretense to get your child, or
your college-aged co-worker, to clean her plate. All those starving children
still seem far away and in the corner of the mind, even in the minds of many
Kenyans.
Take a recent copy of
the Daily Nation as an example. This newspaper, along with The Standard, are
the top news sources in Kenya and very widely read. The front page had the
following headlines: TSC Chiefs Losing
Jobs in a Huge School Shake-Up, The US Won’t Release Dossier on Mwau, and Borrowers to Pay More as Rates Shoot Up.
I had to flip all the
way to page 10 to find a quarter-page article titledCrisis: 10million Face Hunger in East Africa’s Worst Drought.
Ten million people. That is 1428 Princeton
Universities worth of people. Grad and undergrad. Imagine fourteen thousand twenty-eight Princeton Universities where students which don't have Forbes Brunch or Mathey barbeques or Wawa or even clean water to drink. We complain about the dining hall serving waffles and chicken again while ten million people in East Africa go to
sleep with empty stomachs.
Eastern Africa is
facing the driest period since 1950-1951. Successive rains have failed, which
has resulting in failed harvests, dying livestock and dying livelihoods. Large
parts of Northern Kenya and Somalia are in the “emergency category,” one phase
before famine. In some parts of Northern Kenya, one in three children is
malnourished. Families who can eat one meal per day are the lucky ones. And even with all the hunger in the Northern
country, thousands of people are fleeing into Kenya from Somalia for hunger-related reasons. The population of Dadaab refugee camp on the border of Kenya and
Somali rose by 18,000 people in just two weeks and now has a population over 380,000, even though it was intended to have a capacity of just 90,000, less
than a quarter of its current capacity.
It is not just the
farmers and pastoralists in drought-stricken areas who are feeling the hunger
pangs. In the past twelve months, food prices have risen 22.5%. Just a few
weeks ago, there were unga (flour) demonstrations, as people took to the streets to demand this staple food be subsidized. Families can only afford enough unga for one meal per day and
children go to hungry, scrounging around for mangos on the way school to fill
their stomachs. Teachers have commented that hunger is negatively affecting
their students’ performance and they worry over what will happen when mangos go
out of season.
Yet here in the
business class of Mombasa, this suffering seems far away. Sure, my co-worker,
Jane, will click her tongue and mutter “so sad” as pictures of cattle which
have starved to death and hungry children flicker across the screen, but the
topic quickly passes as the news switches to MPs not paying their taxes.
If I had been in the
US, it is unlikely I would have heard anything about these terrible droughts
and starvation conditions. Though this may partly be due to my lack of any
proper news source when I am away from my news-devouring roommate, Tara (who is
amazingly writing for
Times Magazine this summer), it is also a sad result of the regularity of
this story. Even here in Kenya, or perhaps, especially here in Kenya, hunger
and starvation don’t make the front page because they are so habitual. It is not
news or a breaking story; it is life. And it is a part of life which seems to
be is out of the control of the everyday Kenyan. Articles reporting on the
hunger crisis mention the UN and foreign NGOs, like UK-based Save the Children,
as sources of foreign aid which need to step up their act and save people. The
problem of feeding their people may be beyond the scope of Kenyan government’s
ability. Yet if they do not seem to make the effort to save their people and to put this news on the front page, how will the rest
of the world respond? When starvation doesn’t make the headlines or make
citizens take action when it is just kilometers away, how will we ever attain
what is beginning to seem like an impossible dream of ending world hunger?
So, as some of you may
know, my family is coming out to visit me in Kenya in less than a month. Well,
they are more coming to visit Kenya than visit me. Or maybe they are coming to
pick me up. Because they know that I might not come back to the United States
unless they come to take me away. Either way, I am excited to have my family
come join me in Africa. When they come, we will go on safari to all the major
Kenyan National Parks, including Masaii Mara, Tsavo and Amboseli. Their arrival
will be accompanied by a transformation of my own. I will transform from the
savvy practically-Kenyan working girl I’ve been for the past month and a half,
proudly saying “Mimi si mtalii,” (I’m not a tourist) “I work here. With Mombasa
Water Company” to the clearly-a-tourist-riding-around-in-a-safari-van-wearing-a-big-floppy-safari-hat
mzungu. So it goes.
My whole family is
coming out, which means a Sajewski-clan family trip the likes of which we haven’t
had in a year or two. It is hard when we start growing up. Our summers and
school breaks used to be filled with road trips across the United States (taken
eight or ten at a time), exploring the wild, wild West, or flying away to find
food and fine art in Italy. Now, with my older brother working and my college breaks
that don’t coincide with anyone else’s breaks and the “little kids,” as I have
always called them, growing up, it gets more tricky to find all six super Sajewskis
together. I guess that’s life. But it will make me appreciate our safari this
summer even more.
I’m sure that they are
excited to come and see me too. In fact, my older brother, Danny, even asked me
for packing advice. So here it is, although, warning, this might not apply to
non-interning-in-Mombasa-with-Seureca college girls.
Do bring:
A good knife. Your apartment will have a very nice kitchen, but the knives will be
terribly dull. And you need something sharp to cut your not-quite-ripe mangos.
Sunglasses, even though most of the times when you are squinting in the bright
sunlight and really need sunglasses, you will have left them in your room.
Nutella. Sure, they sell Nutella and peanut butter and all other sorts of
wonderful bread spreads in the Nakumatt, but it is nice to arrive late on a
Tuesday night and gleefully pull out that jar of Nutella for a bedtime snack.
Multiple notebooks. Because, knowing you, you will want to take
notes about everything. And Luisa from IIP will tell you to keep a journal,
which you will faithfully keep for about 2 weeks and then sporadically write
that you should be writing more. And you will need a notebook for writing all
the Swahili you are learning. And another notebook to take into the field and
take notes with.
Lots and Lots of Pens. Every day, when you go to the office, you will
lose pens. They seem to walk off to your co-workers’ desks or simply disappear.
And eventually, you will be down to only two pens, which you will desperately
hold on to because, without them, you would be stranded in a sea of
inkless-ness with a strong urge to write in all those notebooks you brought and
an inability to do so.
A Sewing Kit. Not because you will sew on buttons, because that would be too
practical. But because you will accidentally stumble into the Old Town fashion
district and find beautiful sequined medallions and want to sew them onto that
simple, boring black dress you bought at the market for 350 Kshs (about $3.75).
And then, when it is complete, you will feel like a fashion designer and be really
proud of yourself, even proud of the needle pricks in several of your fingers.
Vitamins, of the chewy gummy variety. You will be cooking for yourself. At the
beginning of the week, after your weekend shopping, you will eat very well,
with all sorts of fruits and vegetables and milk and healthy things to balance
your meals. But by the end of the week, you will always run out of anything
fresh and be left with just flour and rice. And you will eat ugali and rice and
be very happy that you brought along a tub of vitamins to keep you healthy.
Fun Going-Out Clothes. Even if you don’t go searching for Mombasa
nightlife, it will come and find you. And you should be prepared in a fun dress
and sparkly shoes when it does.
Friends’ Phone Numbers. Because you will discover that it is almost
as cheap to call home to the United States as to call other Safaricom numbers
in Kenya. And you will want to talk to your parents sometimes. And your
friends. And you will lose all the addresses they gave you to send them
postcards, so you will have to call them or write in your blog post that you need
their addresses again (hint: Give me your addresses. Even if you already did, I
can’t find any of them I want to send you postcards.)
Do Not Bring:
Shoes you cannot walk around on dirt roads with. Otherwise, on your first day at the office,
when you choose to wear your tortoise-shell pumps to look classy, you will have
to walk a few kilometers over bumpy, rough, muddy dirt roads to go to lunch and
get terrible blisters and have to smile through your teeth when your co-worker
asks you if you are okay in those shoes, because you know she thinks you are
ridiculous. And then you will never wear those shoes again.
That floppy hat which your mom stole from your
little brother so you could wear it out in the field. You will never wear it because it is a little
too small and makes you feel silly. Plus, it doesn’t match your business
clothes which are what you happen to wear into the field. And your co-workers
will ask you “Where is your kip?” which you will eventually realize means “hat”
and you will just reply that you didn’t bring a kip because you don’t want to
break out the floppy safari hat.
Clothes that get wrinkled. Because, even though you were advised to hang
up your business clothes as soon as you get back from work, you will inevitably
fall back on your old ways and end up with a bed covered with a heap of
clothes. And they will all get wrinkled. And your wearable-wardrobe will
gradually decrease as clothes get too wrinkly for even you to wear, despite the
fact you always promise to iron your clothes tomorrow.
Take Caution When Bringing:
A Ukulele. You will really enjoy having your ukulele with you. You will learn all
sorts of new songs and finally get down the whole strumming-pattern-changing-chords-humming/singing-a-melody
thing. But everyone who sees you carrying around your ukulele case will assume
that you are a “musician.” And despite your protests that you are just learning
and you can’t really sing, they will make you take it out and play them a song.
And you will have no choice but to comply with their demands. And your face
will turn bright red as you pick out the notes to “Here Comes the Sun” and then
sheepishly put away your ukulele and run away.
So that is my packing
advice. I warned you it may not be very useful to everyone. But if you ever find
yourself in my dusty (and wisely not high-heeled) shoes, this advice will come
in very handy.
It is nice being in a country where orange and black don't automatically mean Halloween. When I go out in my school-inspired favourite combination of colours, I get no odd stares or children coming up to me asking "Trick or Treat," confused by my choice of clothing and thinking gleefully that somehow their favourite holiday for consuming mass amounts of candy has come early. Today, I am wearing all orange and black and no one has batted an eye. Indeed, orange and black is very popular here. Just on the way to work this morning, I spotted at least five people wearing completely Princeton Pride (orange and black) outfits. It was wonderful. Now, of course, they may not realize that they are repping for Princeton, but I acknowledge it for them.
In general, people dress very colourfully here. Even the women selling mangos on the street wear brightly coloured kangas, which are patterned lengths of fabric in all sorts of colours, from purple and yellow to electric green and orange and are tied around the waist and worn as long skirts. (I will put up pictures soon!) Every morning, driving to work, I go kanga shopping. I look out the window at all the women walking by, some with babies slung across their back with a kanga, some carrying baskets upon their heads, and I choose which kangas I like best. This weekend, I'm going to Kongawea, a open-air market in Mombasa which sells everything from watermelon to used shoes from America, to buy a kanga or two of my own.
P.S. Some of you may be wondering why I have adopted British spelling. My boss here is British and has ensured that all the computers, including my new laptop, are programmed to use British English spelling, rather than American English spelling. I've had letters I've written handed back to me to correct because I wrote "program" instead of "programme." So it seems I have more than just Swahili to learn; I have to learn English too.
One of the upshots to living and working here for several months is that I find out a lot about the cultural differences between Kenyan and American culture that I wouldn’t if I was just passing through. You can experience foreign foods, languages, fashions, and living arrangements from the background familiarity of your home by going out to eat, taking a language class, or surfing pictures online. But the more time I spend here the more I’m coming to realize that there’s a whole other set of less obvious cultural differences that you only begin to recognize when they manifest unexpectedly as you go about your regular errands, or pop up over the course of otherwise unremarkable conversations. In no particularly logical sequence, here’s a few anecdotes from the past five weeks that might help you see what I mean.
#1) I was out in the field with Kathleen and the Kenyan research assistant from our lab, waiting for the clouds to go away so that we could measure the photosynthetic capacity of sunlight passing though acacia trees of different heights. (Predictably, they never did leave and I was blessed with the opportunity to spend a bonus make-up day among my favorite plants). The topic of conversation was dating. Now, I’m far from an expert on Kenyan dating and marriage customs, and my understanding is that customs vary widely between different Kenyan tribes and between different geographic locations. I do know, though, that polygamy is legal in Kenya, and that while arranged marriages are less common now than they used to be, they still exist, and dowries are not uncommon in some areas.
Even knowing these things, though, it was still startling when our research assistant couldn’t seem to understand why Americans consider it “cheating” to date more than one person at a time. He thought that it was quite reasonable to have three girlfriends at once, and told us openly that he had personally had 35 girlfriends over the course of his 40-some years—though his wife, he admitted, only knew about 15 of them. He was neither boasting nor confessing. In his community, his behavior was quite normal…for men, that is. The double standard came into sharp relief when we asked him how, given his opinions on relationships, he would feel if he came home to find his wife with another man. Chuckling, he matter-of-factly responded, “I’d kill him.”
#2) In Nanyuki (the largest town within reasonable driving distance of Mpala) fellow Princetern Alex Kasdin, one of her supervisors, Nancy, and I found ourselves being tailed by a teenager asking for food or money.
Part of my Princeton crew, being tailed by a beggar in Nanyuki
The kid stuck with us even after we shouted at him to go away, so we ducked into a local produce store to try and lose him. As Nancy headed through the door, though, I yelled as I saw the kid grab her Nalgene out of the side of her backpack. The kid tried to take off, but didn’t get more than a few meters before at least five local passers-by grabbed and began to beat him. One of the locals retrieved the water bottle and gave it back to Nancy, while many others gathered around and told us how sorry they were for the whole incident.
I heard from several people that these examples of “mob justice” are common in Kenya. In a country that counts tourism as its second-largest foreign export (after tea), locals want foreigners to feel safe in their towns and cities. One person told me that mobs have even been known to beat thieves to death. I’m not sure that that really makes me feel safer, but I won’t deny that it felt nice to have so many strangers on our side.
#3) A short one, relayed to me by Princeton senior thesis student Bianca Reo (who, you might recall, is capable of doing pull-ups with African children on her back). Bianca was driving around Mpala with her research assistant, who is in his early twenties, when, she told me, “he asked whether blacks and whites go to the same schools and live in the same states in America.”
#4) Neither of the research assistants I’ve mentioned in this post have gone to college, so while I wasn’t expecting them, I could at least understand how each of them came to develop their worldviews. Our lab tech, John, though, is a university-educated ecologist considering a long-term career in academia, so the conversation I had with him a few days ago was particularly unanticipated for me. While we were both puttering around the lab, John idly asked me whether I thought I would get married in a church or in a civil ceremony. “Well,” I replied, “since I’m Jewish, I figure I’ll probably get married in a synagogue.” At first, John didn’t understand what I was saying—he thought I was saying something about being Israeli, which he knows I’m not. After I explained the difference between being an Israeli citizen and practicing Judaism (a word which John was unfamiliar with), John, a Christian, asked me to explain the difference between Judaism and Christianity. He was surprised when I told him that Jews don’t consider Jesus to be part of their religion, and was totally unfamiliar with the terms Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. In fact, John told me, he thought that Judaism was basically extinct—having never before met a Jewish person, he figured that Jews had all converted to Christianity. After I assured him that this was not the case, he observed, “I learned something new today.” So, I suppose, did I.
I don’t mean to portray Kenyans as ignorant or naïve, or to portray their culture in a negative light. Almost all of the Kenyans I’ve met so far are wonderfully friendly and caring people, and even those research assistants and staff members who never even graduated from high school are far more knowledgeable about the local history and environment than the majority of college graduates in the United States. Furthermore, there are plenty of Kenyans both here and in the rest of the country who are perfectly knowledgeable about world affairs, cultures, and customs. I simply intend to try to illustrate how much we assume that people from other cultures know about ours. After all, if we were as familiar with rural Kenyan culture as we would expect Kenyans to be with American, no part of this blog post would seem remarkable at all.
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.
After spending a while learning our way around the Caylor lab and bouncing between miscellaneous short-term tasks, my two fellow Princeton interns (Princeterns?) and I were each assigned an individual project to focus on for the rest of the summer. As I have possibly mentioned before, the Caylor lab group is working on modeling the hydrologic cycle of the dry savannah ecosystem, an endeavor that requires collecting data on several different subsets of the ecosystem. So for the next two months, Alice will be collecting data on vegetation, Kathleen will be collecting data on rainfall, and I will be collecting data on soil.
Alice (left) and Kathleen
One of the major components of my project involves a lab experiment designed to investigate the way water percolates through sandy savannah soil. The plan is to fill six big plastic buckets with the savannah sand, pour water into the buckets, and then use a bunch of devices and sensors to track the water as it moves through the sand and out the drainage hole.
Sophisticated science in action
I, with help from Kathleen and Alice, had a grand old time preparing buckets for the experiment. For a couple of weeks, our lab was alive with the busy and faintly dangerous sounds of three interns enthusiastically power drilling ports for probes, Exacto-knifing chunks of rubber to appropriate sizes for drain hole plugs, and hacking away at beams of old wood to make bucket stands. Remarkably and despite my best efforts, the first-aid kit was only required twice.
For the past ten days or so, though, there’s been an activity lull as I’ve been waiting for all of the sand for my buckets to oven-dry. Since our oven capacity is limited, since all of the sand must spend at least 24 hours oven-drying, and since I have a crapload of sand to dry, this is taking a while.
In the interim, I’ve been trying to understand devices. Professor Caylor seems to have a bit of a penchant for devices: soil moisture probes, infiltrometers, temperature sensors, isotope analyzers, water potential sensors, and so on.
A sampling of devices. Clockwise from top left: a datalogger, a Mini Disk Infiltrometer, the WP4 Water Potential Sensor, and an EnviroSense Soil Moisture Probe
Where he gets them all, I don’t know. I like to imagine that somewhere there exists a device-buying bazaar where scores of tenured professors congregate, wending their ways among bubbling distillation columns, piles of gleaming glassware, and the flicker of a thousand Bunsen burners to haggle with small, crafty-eyed men over the prices of Dewpoint PotentiaMeters and Ground Penetrating Radar units.
Kind of like this
Whatever their origins, a significant number of these devices get shipped to Mpala, and many of them have never been used. My job is to follow the step-by-step instructions to put them together, Ikea-style, and figure out what the heck they do. This is where the engineering classes I’ve taken so far at Princeton are paying off. Nearly every time I open a manual for a new device, I am astounded by how complicated, tedious, and confusing the material inside appears. “This is ridiculous,” I announce to myself. “I absolutely refuse to spend hours and hours rereading the same three paragraphs to try and decipher the impossibly obtuse scratchings of this clearly illiterate engineer.” But then my Princeton engineering conditioning kicks in and I find a way to Google and Wikipedia my way through it.
Case Study: My current device, the HYPROP
The HYPROP in action. Don't be fooled by its deceptively simple appearance.
“The intended use of the HYPROP system is the measurement and determination of water retention characteristics and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity as a function of water tension or water content in a soil sample. “
Answer: Use this device to find out how tightly different kinds of dirt hold on to water.
To set up the HYPROP, you first have to remove the dissolved gas from several different water samples using a system of hand-operated vacuum syringes and tubes. The water must be left to degas for a minimum of two hours, but preferably longer. The manufacturers recommend a full day. Then you have to screw the two Tensiometer shafts into the base, but do NOT touch the ceramic tips with your fingers. Or let them dry out. Or let them come into contact with non-distilled water. Also, when you’re screwing in the Tensiometers, be aware of the pressure sensor inside the base: “It is very sensitive and must never be touched! It can be destroyed even by slightest contact.” Now saturate your soil sample for a minimum of 24 hours. And then put the whole thing on a digital balance connected to a computer by a cable, but be careful, because “even a breeze can move a dangling cable causing variance in the measurement.” Finally, let the HYPROP sit for a week to take measurements until it is fully air-dried, but make sure to check the data-logging software constantly, because it tends to go buggy and suddenly stop collecting measurements.
And then you know what you get from this whole process? One sample.
I’m plugging through on my own, but I miss my Princeton engineering team. You know who you are.
SIDE NOTE: The secretary bird is a large, mostly terrestrial raptor endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. It is the only raptor to hunt prey on foot, which it kills either by striking with its beak or trampling with its feet. It is by far my favorite African animal, and I wanted to share the great picture I got of one a little while back:
