well, here i am in kenya.

Well, the food is great. I cook for myself and since they grow tomatoes and greens and onions and ginger and beans, it's pretty much like my food life back in the States, except that out in Kahawa Sukari you can't get dairy products (like cheese) or really much processed food items, which is okay with me for the most part. Although it does mean that I have to bake my own bread. That made me feel pretty darn homey, though, so that's okay. When I was studying Swahili in Nairobi, there were fancy supermarkets all around with things like yogurt and bread, so that was nice. I even bought paneer (that indian cheese) and made a sort of palak paneer. that was a good time.

When I'm out and about for work, etc, I'm eating more "Kenyan" food, which is basically a lot like what I eat, with some differences. Lots of ugali (boiled cornmeal that is stiff), sukuma wiki (greens) cooked with onion and lots of shortening, some irio (like mashed potatoes with greens mixed in and beans and corn = i love it), and then goat stew. I've gone to western Kenya twice now. The first time ate a lot of nyama choma (the official dish of Kenya - a large chunk of meat roasted over a fire with salt water poured on it) and politely drank down this bone marrow soup that was an intense experience. The second time stayed with a family and ate a lot of ugali, beans, potatoes, etc. Also was visiting farmers, so drank chai at a bunch of homes and ate githiri (maize and beans cooked together), chomped on sugar cane, ate small bananas, etc.

Oh, one thing that is different from home is that there is excellent fruit always available. I've had lots of small banana/pineapple/mango/passionfruit. If you want something like apple, you have to pay quite a bit, though. Also, the only baking cocoa powder they have is Cadbury's, meant for drinking, and it has ~flavouring~ in it, which makes me suspicious. cause i'm a snob. when it comes to chocolate. Also, no chocolate chips.

Food! Lately, I've been eating bananas and bread and rice cause I've been a bit sick, but I look forward to getting back into the Food thing. This morning Rose Stutzman made me pancakes that spelled out 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEBBY' - cause it's my birthday! 27. Usually when I'm in a strange place for the summer i don't tell anyone it's my birthday, but i've been telling EVERYONE it's my birthday this year. Birthday!

(preface: I wrote this two weeks ago, and in the past two weeks I've experienced quite a lot of hospitality within Kahawa Sukari. So you can ignore some of the more melodramatic statements...)

So it turns out that Nairobi is drastically different from rural Kenya. I spent the past week in Western Kenya, around Eldoret. It’s in the Rift Valley, where farmers primarily focus on milk production and growing maize. I spent two days visiting small scale farmers (really small. 1 acre, ½ acre, 0.2 acres, etc) and then two days co-facilitating a workshop on the WTO and agriculture with small scale farmers from across the Uasin Gishu district.

Before this past week, I frequently pondered to myself exactly where was the Classic Kenyan Hospitality that people are always talking about? Because I wasn’t sensing it. Not that I blame any Kenyan for not rejoicing about yet another mzungu moving in, but people on the street in Kahawa Sukari tend to look at me with one of three expressions:
- 1. why are you here?
- 2. you don't belong here,
- 3. well, it wouldn’t be a sin to kill you. (different from a "I want to kill you" look - which i have NOT gotten in Kahawa Sukari. Just that to kill a white person wouldn't be a sin against the laws of nature, Christianity, etc.)

So then I went out to Uasin Gishu and spent two days with Hellen and different leaders in the Uasin Gishu Small Scale Farmer group dropping in on small scale farmers, totally unannounced. Okay, so some of the babies cried when I smiled at them. But on the whole every farmer was gracious and welcoming. They showed off their farm and their livestock, invited us into their homes, answered our questions, gave us tea, and were patient with my attempts to communicate in Swahili. At one place we were served tea and Githari, new beans and old maize cooked together. After the meal, the woman asked us our names - because in their culture they serve food to visitors first and ask them their names only after they have eaten. I mean, that’s really intense, eh? At another shamba, a calf was named “Deborah”, at another one the farmers gave us bananas and hacked sugar cane for us.

Back at Hellen’s, where i stayed for the week, there were three women in their late teens / early 20s who live there sometimes, I think. One of them had never been close to a mzungu before, and as the week went on she got more bold and touched my hair on my head, exclaimed over the hair on my arms and skin, got freaked out by my hand veins, touched the skin on my feet, wanted to know why my eyelashes weren’t black, etc. They taught me how to make ghee from boiled cream and how to make ugali (the main food of Kenyans). One of the young men who came through the house thought that Hellen had brought me as a wife for one of them, which led to a few awkward situations.

In short, the trip was the classic Cross-Cultural experience that one reads about in essays and poems written by MCCers. It’s the experience that I guess I was anticipating when I heard that MCC was sending me to Kenya.

So I’m still trying to figure out how to live as an MCCer in Nairobi, where hospitality doesn’t drop on my lap, where it’s possible to live almost as though I’m in the US, where I can be as isolated as I want to be. My experiences before coming to Kenya led me to anticipate that Doing Service Abroad would be entirely like my trip to Eldoret (both the good and the uncomfortable and the sad bits). Not only did I expect those types of experiences, but they were the ones which I understood to have Value.

But now I’m back in Nairobi, and if I’m going to live here for another 2 ½ years, I need to find a way to Do Service Abroad here. At some point I need to be able to identify the Value in my experiences here, even if this is not the mythology of Service that I grew up with.

Friday I took a van from Eldoret to Nairobi (6 hours), threaded my way through the crowds downtown to the Thika Road matatus, tried to convince the matatu conductor not to rip me off, and then plodded down the dusty main street of Kahawa Sukari to my apartment. That night I went with Esther (Kenyan NGO woman) and a bunch of folks from RODI (Resources Oriented Development Initiatives - an NGO that is a partner of FATNEA) to a nyama choma place down the road. We ate hunks of roasted meat, tried to talk over the band playing a stream of congolese influenced music in swahili, and then watched some World Cup football. From the crowds of people packed in to watch Ivory Coast play (they lost), I got some hostile stares, some lewd stares, and some curious stares, but was largely ignored. It’s the first time any RODI folks invited me out on the town.

You may be wondering, what are some cultural highlights of Kenya? Perhaps one of the most widely shared cultural experiences within Kenya, uniting tribes and bringing together men and women alike, is the Spanish language soap opera. There are two: Secrete dia Amor (or something like that) and Cuantos est Mia (or something vaguely resembling that - it’s “When You Were Mine” in English). They both play at 8pm on Saturdays and Sundays, opposite each other on the two main channels (one is owned by the Nation, which also puts out the main daily newspaper and Easy FM; I’m not sure who owns the other one, I think the Standard, which is the other daily newspaper). Secrete is from Venezuala, and Cuantos is from Mexico. They are both dubbed into English, although for some reason some of the Secrete character’s dubbed voices have really strong accents, while others sound US American.

I watch Cuantos because that is the channel that has good reception, but when I was in Eldoret staying with a Kenyan family I got to see Secrete. The plots of the two are remarkably similar (okay, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised). Cuantos centers around a young woman, Paloma, who is from humble origins but has worked her way up to a position in the national Coffee Committee (or something like that) and has had a torrid affair with Diego, who is from the main coffee family of Mexico. Diego broke up with her because he couldn’t psychologically handle loving her SO MUCH and he would occasionally go crazy. This has made Paloma go a little crazy herself. Oh, Diego is married but his wife is having an affair with Diego’s sister’s husband (Miguel), and their baby is actually Miguel’s. I think. Um, lots of other side plots involving all of the women of Diego’s family wanting to DESTROY Paloma, and coffee politic stuff, and Paloma’s boss is in love with her in a whiny sort of way. Whereas Secrete centers around a young woman who is from humble origins but has worked her way up in life as well. She has had a torrid affair with this dude, who is also rich, and i think she had a baby with him, but she is now married to some other dude, and the torrid affair guy is also married to someone else. but they still harbor a deep passion for each other, that she is trying to deny. And her husband was bit by a snake (?) and lots of evil women want to destroy the heroine also. Other side plots involving stuff I really didn’t understand from the one time I saw it.

To say that everyone watches either Cuantos or Secrete is not an exaggeration. I’ve stopped asking whether people watch one and started asking which one they watch. In Eldoret I stayed with Hellen Yego, a wonderful woman who has worked with small scale farmers for many years, doing organizing. Sunday night the two of us, a niece, two adult sons, the 9 year old grandson, the daughter of a cousin, and someone whose relationship to the family I never quite figured out ALL sat down to watch Secrete and declare over the plot advancements. I’ve had a couple experiences of walking down the street and hearing a group of people talking about Diego and Paloma. While studying Swahili I stayed in Nairobi at a place without a TV, so I got a month behind on Cuantos, but Esther Bett (another great Kenyan woman who works with small scale farmers, prisoners, women in Northern Kenya, etc) also watches Cuantos so she could get me up to date on what’s happening. Bethany Ropp (former Kenyan MCCer) told me that out in rural Kenya a 1 ½ year old would pretend to cry when his mother would say “Diego! Diego! Yuko Paloma wapi?” (where is Paloma?).

I don’t have any great explanation for what it is about Mexican and Venezualan soaps that capture the attention and devotion of Kenya. But I’m grateful for it. It gives me an opportunity to share in an experience in which it doesn’t matter that I’m a mzungu (white foreigner). There’s not really anything else that I can participate in with others without a huge gap because I’m American. For example, everyone is watching the World Cup, and I am too. And I’m cheering for the African teams of course (GHANA TOTALLY WON YESTERDAY!!!), but there’s still a big gap between me and the Kenyans watching because I’m white and not African.

So hooray for Spanish language soaps. I, for one, am looking forward to tonight. For a while it looked like Paloma might be Diego’s aunt (!) but now it appears not, and Diego declared his renewed love to Paloma over the phone. They are supposed to meet tonight. I predict Trauma and Horror or Family Obligations will prevent one of them from showing up.

(PS - i wrote this two or three weeks ago. Indeed, Paloma's mother was hit by a car, so she didn't show up, but Diego's psychiatrist didn't tell him that Paloma was in the hospital, so he thought she _just_didn't_care. intense stuff, folks.)