Shajara

Hello from Taita!

After a long, six hour mutatu ride, we arrived in the mountains today around 5pm and met our homestay families. For the next week and a half, I’ll be living with Rosemary and her family - her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law, her daughter, and her sisters. 

I’ll try and post photos as I get them (and as my cell connection allows), but, in the mean time, I’ll try and describe this strange living situation to you. The family lives in a average sized home, with a kitchen, a living room, and several bedrooms. They sit around the TV and chat, playing and laughing with the baby while the news plays in the background. Neighbors cycle in and out, greeting me and the rest of the family, and then go about their business. Mobile phones buzz as calls and texts ring in. The girls listen to Usher and Alicia Keys while they get ready for bed. 

Oh, I guess that doesn’t sound very strange at all…

I like to laugh at others when they assume stereotypes are reality, but today, the tables were turned on me. I’ll admit it - all this time, I’d been expecting my rural homestay to be set in some sort of mud hut, my family running around in tribal dress while dancing at a fire. Because, so often, that’s the Western image of rural Africa, right? It’s an image that belongs in the past. 

This family is about as normal and modern as you can get. Sure, they have some cows and chickens in the backyard, but that’s because this is a farming community. Head to rural Tennessee and show me something radically different. 

There is a reason for stereotypes. There are some parts of Africa that are very depressed, very unstable, vert traditional, or all three. But not all parts of Africa are like that. Most get along pretty much the same as you or me. It’s good to have that kind of perspective. 

Tomorrow, we’ll continue our study of Swahili and begin working on a library in town. I’ll post again soon! 

In about an hour, we’ll be leaving for our rural homestay in South-Central Kenya, near the Tsavo National Park. We’ll be there for nine days before we head up the coast to Melindi and Lamu. While we’re out in the country, I’m not exactly sure how much I’ll be posting - I might have an internet connection, I might not; I might be able to post audio clips via telephone, I might not.

So, I will try to post as much as possible, but if this is a static page for the next week or so, please don’t hate me.

OK, I know you won’t hate me, but hang tight either way!

Much love from Kenya.

Today, we had a fun little exercise called the “drop off”. Basically, we were put into pairs, given a location in Mombasa, and told to go there. Simple enough, right?

Wrong. Or, at least that’s what I thought. Here’s what went down.

Public transportation in Mombasa basically consists of “mutatus” (small buses or vans) and tuk tuks (think motorized rickshaws). The tuk tuks are like taxis, in that you tell them a location, work out a price, then you’re on your way. Mutatus basically run back and forth between two locations (usually a central part of town, like the post office, to an outlying area), the names of which are printed on the side of the doors. Tuk tuks go for shorter distances, costing ~50 Kenyan Shillings (KSH) per trip ($1.00 = 80KSH) depending on the distance. Mutatus cost roughly 20-30KSH per trip, and carry usually 12-14 people in each van. 

Inside a mutatu, at a gas station

So, basically, we had to reach an area on the outskirts of Mombasa using tuk tuks, mutatus, and any help we can find from bystanders. No big deal. 

Me and my partner, Cheickna (a student from Pomona in California), left the SIT house in Old Town, walked down the street a bit, and decided to ask a street vendor that we’d joked around with, Mbeza, if he knew how to get to the “Akamba Carvings”, our target location. Mbeza speaks very good English, but in a very soft and at times unintelligibly raspy voice. It took some patience, but eventually he told us exactly what to tell the tuk tuk driver, and what mutatu to take, and where to get off. We flagged down a tuk tuk and were on our way. 

It was shockingly easy. The tuk tuk driver pointed at a mutatu for us to get on, the mutatu conductor (the dude who takes your money) stopped right at Akamba, and half an hour later, we were done. 

Cheickna in the Akamba art market, next to a monkey.

Akamba turned out to be an art depot - basically, all of the wood carvings (which are all pretty beautiful) are made by members of the Akamba tribe, and each worker is paid when one of his/her carvings is sold. It was pretty stunning at what you got for $5-10 - some of these carvings probably could have been sold for 3-4x their price in the US. We snagged a carving of a mask and a giraffe’s head as gifts. 

So, great day - we got to see some of the city, explore a bit, and get a little more settled into our new home. 

P.S. A ton of emails were sent out over the past few days to friends and family linking to this blog, so I just wanted to to say “Hamjambo!” to all those keeping up with me over here! Thanks for reading. 

NAIROBI. boom. #fb