Work in Progress: Office Life

Remember that giant pile of reports which was unceremoniously thumped onto my desk in Nairobi? It has followed me to Mombasa and on the journey, it has grown and engulfed all sorts of other things. Like the Blob.

The Resource Room, threatening to eat me alive.

Luckily, I know how to fend off the Blob, the heaps of invoices and receipts and contracts and financial reports threatening my very 21st century being. Copious cups of Kenyan mixed tea, bright orange glasses to shine through the dust of the Resource Room and digitization. 

I spent two days locked in the depths of the Coast Water Services Board compound, a muzungo hidden away in "the library," the locals euphemism for the dark, dusty dungeon where years of files line the shelves and warnings against a fall towards the dark-side paper the walls. 

Anti-corruption posters like this one are everywhere: in the office, in the bank, in the post office.
They all show the same message: corruption is really bad. But how effective are they?

For two long days, I worked through lunch and late into the afternoon. I flipped through pages of newspaper advertisements and shipping reports from Germany. I warded off paper cuts and sneezes with the hope that eventually, someday soon, I would flip through my final binder, see sunlight and interact with human kind once more. And on the beginning of the third day, I made it. I typed in the final date and final amount paid, shut the book with a snap, and strode back home to my office in Mombasa Water and Sewerage Company.

Ok, ok, clearly this is a dramatization. As an intern, I am assigned various tasks to give me exposure to all sides of work as a engineering consultant. This particular  task was to document how CWSB, our client, spends all their money from World Bank. CWSB and other water service companies throughout Kenya get large loans from the World Bank and from Agence Francaise de Developpement for WaSSIP (Water and Sanitation Services Improvement Project). Understandably, the World Bank would like to know where their money is going. And, lucky for them, Seureca has deployed their intern (me) to go through all the hard copies of finance reports for CWSB, document everything from hiring a consultant to supervise the improvement of the Tiwi boreholes to buying new chairs for  the office (and extra comfy chairs for the executive office).

Really, though, it was surprisingly interesting. Going through the binders of World Bank-financed projects was like going through giant scrapbooks and trying to piece together a mystery of receipts and bank notices and copies of checks to see when, and if, services and goods had been paid for. 

However, as much fun as I had in the CWSB compound, it was nice to walk down the block and return to my own Seureca office in MOWASCO compound. As you can see, I am very happy in my office.

A Word Document! This is the best! An exciting venture away from the familiar gridwork of Excel.
And Doris is just a pro at locating documents within the confusion of the office network.

Engineering is a lot more playing with data in spreadsheets and less playing with models and fun techy-stuff  than I had expected. I have become very familiar with Excel and such advanced functions as sum() and average(). I've been a little surprised about how little of anything I've learned in school is applicable in the real world. When I first came, I had a project to figure out the head loss through a series of meters in a test bench. I got really excited and tried to use all sorts of equations which I had learned in Introduction to Fluid Mechanics this past semester. Alas, none of them were actually useful in the slightest and really only served to confuse me. Engineering in the real world, or at least with Seureca, requires less of the general technical knowledge I've been learning, more very specific technical knowledge (I know all about domestic water meters now, just wait for my next post to see), and an large amount of intuition, to figure out just the right way to play with data so it shows you the secrets it holds. 

And when I get stuck or my eyes start burning from staring at my computer screen for too long, I can take a break and try to memorize all the roads in Mombasa, thanks to the convenient map above my desk. 

Or better yet, grab a cup of tea and a few biscuits. On my first day, I prepared my own cup of tea, taking a teabag and dunking it in hot water in what I thought was standard tea-making practice. As I went back to my desk to enjoy my beverage, Doris, our matronly office manager, clucked her tongue "No, no, no sweetie. What is that? It is so dark. Don't you use milk? Here, let me make you a cup of tea." Apparently, tea in Kenya is prepared in a different way compared to the rest of the world. Always available in the office is a thermos full of milk, steaming hot. Pour this into a mug along with a heaping spoonful or two of sugar and dunk in a teabag of Kenyan black tea once or twice and you have yourself a cup of good Kenyan tea, pale, milky, sweet and delicious.

 Or sometimes, when my tea gets cold and the map is memorized, I spin my chair around and smile brightly, in true Elizabeth fashion, at whomever looks up.

So excited to be working. Danstone, our driver, was the recipient of this joyful smile.

However, my co-workers haven't quite gotten used to my surprise sunshine smiles. They laugh or mimic me or give me looks and  ask "Why are you smiling at me like that?" My supervisor, Guillaume, even commented something about how threatening my smile was. I have never thought of it that way before, but I am in Africa and it is true that male baboons bar their teeth, in a manner very similar to my quick smiles, to show dominance/be threatening and scary.  So I suppose I should be more wary of grinning "meanly" at people.

We even get wildlife in the office. It may not be a Black Night-esque goat fighting for its life, but we all get excited when we find giant  moths in the office. They are much more welcome than the mosquitoes we Doom every morning.  But the real adventures come when I escape the cozy confines of the office and drive off to the field....

Work In Progress

New blog post coming today. I promise. 

Me, hard at work, trying to figure out a clever way to share my Kenyan work life with you all. 

What Gets Your Goat?

            Now replace the black armor with fur and the dialogue with bleating, and you have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to watch a goat slaughter.

            For the past couple of weeks, a group of the researchers here were working on organizing a big goat roast for the Mpalan researchers, staff, and local villagers. The deal was that the Mpalan researchers would go out to a different village, buy the goats (six total, at 3000 shillings—about $35—a pop), and bring them back to Mpala on Sunday, when the villagers would slaughter, prepare, and cook them for everyone to share. Though I’m normally a pescetarian, I make exceptions for special events, so I chipped in my five hundred shillings and on Sunday afternoon went to go see what my contribution had helped wrought.

            Mike, one of the researchers who helped spearhead the goat campaign, went and picked up the goats (which actually turned out to be five goats and one sheep) around midday on Sunday, returning with them in the back of his big neon green Land Rover, “Kermit,” like so many bags of groceries. Except, of course, that groceries don’t poop all over the back of your car. The goats, bleating placidly, didn’t seem any worse the wear for the ride. On the other hand, considering the state of Kermit’s trunk, the trip left Mike a bit disgruntled.

African groceries

            Around three in the afternoon, Mike and Bob (another researcher) transported the goats up to a patch of grass near the village—a patch of grass that would, in fact, be the goats’ last. It occurred to me as I followed them and the several other people from Mpala interested in watching the butchering process that it was indeed fortuitous that we had two guys with such manly and handy names as Mike and Bob to help facilitate the slaughter (though to be fair, my roommate Alice did help pick out and pick up the goats too. You’re pretty handy yourself, Al).

Mike (left) and Bob. Sunglasses are excellent indicators of handy, manly men.

            Once the goats were delivered, though, the Kenyans took over. It turned out that we couldn’t have even been involved in a hands-on way even if we had wanted to (not that I was that disappointed, but I think manly Bob was), since the goats had to be slaughtered in a specific way in order to make the meat halal for the few Muslims in the village. In halal slaughter (dhabiha), as in kashrut slaughter (shechita) in Judaism, the animal is killed by deeply cutting the throat to sever the jugular vein, cardiod arteries, trachea, and esophagus (but leaving the spinal cord intact). The deep cut is designed both to kill the animal quickly (in about three minutes) and relatively painlessly, and to bleed out the meat, since blood is neither halal nor kosher.

Halal slaughter

            Now that we’re on the topic, let’s talk about blood for a little bit. You know how that blood looks totally fake spurting from the black knight’s severed limbs? It’s actually entirely realistic. Prior to Sunday, I had never had any personal encounters with blood that couldn’t be controlled by a Band-Aid or two, so I was taken aback by the sheer quantity that came out of each goat. All that liquid doesn’t go to waste, though: even though blood is taboo for observant Muslims, Jews, and those with delicate American sensibilities, it is a traditional part of the diets of many Kenyan tribes (most notably, though not exclusively, the Maasai, who drink it mixed with milk). The women assisting with the slaughter were careful to collect as much of the blood as they could in metal bowls, and we watched one guy stick a mug under the stream coming out of the neck of the first goat and knock it back on the spot. 

Not quite a coffee break, but each to his own

            My concessions to pescetarianism didn’t extend that far.

            As the designated slaughterer moved on from each goat, other guys set in to start skinning, opening, and gutting the meat. This was the part where everybody got involved. Yay! The women collected and carried away the skins, intestines, and meat:

            The older kids helped hold the goat steady for the butchers:

              The Americans watched and sort of got in the way:

           

           and the younger Kenyan kids tried to get the Americans to make themselves useful and play with them:

These kids take their playtime seriously.

           One kid came running up to me with a severed goat’s foot that he had been playing with and tried to give it to me, an offer which I regretfully declined. A couple of four-year-olds started a game that involved taking turns high-fiving my hands, and quickly evolved into just smacking me. I decided it was time for me to decide the activity and spent the next hour and a half covered in kids enthusiastically swiping through pictures on my iPhone and identifying all of my Asian friends as “Alice.”

            Dinner began around 7:30, and it was awesome. We were greeted, typically, by a swarm of babbling, smiling kids. Being a white person and walking into a group of Kenyan kids is like being a new class pet introduced to a bunch of American on the day before spring break after a class donut party: you’re perpetually surrounded by small people who want nothing more than to touch you and play with you and who are utterly incapable of being quiet or sitting still. 

This is probably what the world looks like to a class pet.

            The energy is absolutely fantastic.

            Though I’m sure the kids could have kept playing right through dinner, I was thankful when the head of the village stepped up and gave a brief but lovely speech welcoming us to the village, thanking us for the goat, expressing his gladness that we had a chance for all of the Mpalans, villagers, researchers, and staff alike, to eat together, which, after he finished, we did.

The final product.

            Conclusions: roast goat is slightly better than stewed goat. Both taste great with ugali. And if you want to work up an appetite for a goat feast, just find a few Kenyan kids to play with first.

Kenyan OA

     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.

After

     Especially if I get porters.

Let's Learn Swahili!

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. 

Photo Safari

           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!

News Worthy?

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 titled Crisis: 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.

Map from World Concern Humanitarian Aid
detailing the extent of the food crisis in East Africa

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?