Hello All! Sorry for the looong delay on this first post. Peace Corps kept us absurdly busy throughout training and what little time I had on the internet I used to keep myself somewhat connected to the larger world. And to get frustrated by staying on top my losing fantasy football efforts.
I'll give a quick rundown on what as happened so far:
Me and my fellow trainees arrived in Nairobi on a Thursday night, almost 10 weeks ago today. They broke us in to Kenya gently by putting us up in a swank little resort just outside of the capital city, Nairobi. The property was immaculate, the rooms were pleasant and the food tasted just like the food available at any decent place in America. Since all of us had been mentally preparing for a rugged, raw experience this threw us off a bit. It felt more like a Hawaiian vacation than a face first dive into the developing world.
Next morning we got a little more of what we were expecting. After hours of filling out paper work, we loaded up a few small buses and prepared for our long journey to the town of Loitoktok, where we would be spending our entire 9 weeks of training. Well one thing that you notice very quickly about an underdeveloped country is that the "underdeveloped" especially applies to the roads. Few are marked by signs, fewer yet are paved and most don't even really look like roads at all. That made our trip from Nairobi to Loitoktok interesting. First of all the entire 8 hours was like being on a massage chair in warp drive, which is only fun for about 15 minutes. And how the driver knew when to turn is a complete mystery to me. Somehow there is a system because people do manage to get from A to B.
Eventually we pulled up to Amboseli National Park - a Wildlife refuge. We were told not to get our hopes up, but that we might get to see some safari animals. We made it about two thirds of the way through without seeing a thing ...until we finally pulled up to two lions sitting about 50-75 feet away from the "road" we were on. Now I'm not going to lie, the lions didn't seem any different or more energetic than the lions I've seen in the zoo many times before. They were just minding their own business, laying around relaxing as passive as can be. We stopped for about 10 minutes and the big highlight was when the male lion got up, walked about 5 feet then laid down again. But the fact that these were honest-to-goodness wild lions made the whole experience pretty cool. Our good fortune continued because we didn't have to wait long for our next siting. After driving again for a short while we pulled up to an elephant family (mama, papa and baby) strolling around. This was actually much cooler than the lions. For a while they were walking right beside our bus at a distance that seemed barely more than an arm's length away. Then we had to come to a stop because the mama weaved between two vans (we were only rolling at that point, and I didn't get a good view being in the last van in the pack). Making the whole experience more exciting was the fact that our driver and another native Kenyan who was with us were getting noticeably uncomfortable because apparently elephants can very easily do some serious (usually unintentional) damage to vehicles and the passengers within. Those were are most interesting encounters with fun animals. In the distance we saw a herd of zebras and a few giraffes and some other interesting deer looking creatures. After the elephants everything else was anticlimactic.
Life as a trainee...where to begin. It was an interesting, often frustrating, experience, but completely necessary to get acclimated with Kenyans and their way of life.
Loitoktok is a small farming town of 40,000 people nestled in the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The "city" part of it consists of about two and half roads sprinkled with shops, restaurants, hotels and small businesses (carpenters, cooperative offices, mechanics and other essential types of services). It is a nice little town with incredibly nice people, gorgeous scenery and all the bare essentials a Westerner could ask for when living in rural Kenya. The gorgeous scenery part really can't be emphasized enough. Every morning I woke up to the twin peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro on one side and on the other a landscape of rolling hills sprinkled with farms and open plains. The whole thing looked and felt like it was ripped right out of Lion King.
The day to day...slightly different than what it was back in the states. First of all Peace Corps always places you with a local family during training to help you integrate with the community and understand the local culture in a personal way. I stayed in the home of a force of nature of a woman named Alice Wanjiku. As a whole, Kenya has a very patriarchal, male dominated society that has traditionally left women out of any and all positions of authority. My Kenyan mama never got that memo. She's smart, ambitious, outspoken and runs a handful of successful business interests. Almost all the families that volunteered to host a Peace Corps family for two months were full of kind and generous people that provided their guests with an extremely warm welcome to Kenya, but I feel especially lucky. My Mama made sure that I was always completely taken care of in every way but at the same time realized that I'm 25 and gave me my space (as much as is possible in a relatively small home) when it was clear that I was feeling a little cramped. Also, because she was such a respected commodity around town when I told a shop keeper that I was staying with Alice Wanjiku I often got preferential treatment. Nice additional perk. She had a son, Brian, who's in the fourth grade and a daughter, Paris, who's in her first year of university. Brian and his best friend Kevin (who stayed with the family the vast majority of the time) are great kids and were invaluable in my efforts to get a grasp on Swahili. Paris is like a calmer version of her mother. Very strong willed and straight forward (the latter is a rare commodity in Kenyan, and a valuable one from a Westerner's perspective). Altogether they provided a really amazing home stay experience and I'm incredibly grateful for the fact that they treated me like blood from the day I moved in. I'm sure I will go and visit them at least a few times while I'm in Kenya.
Every morning I woke up around 5:40 to bathe (not shower...I use a mug to dump heated water from a basin on my body. You get used to it quickly...). After getting ready I studied Swahili or I scrambled to do whatever assignment I should have done the night before until breakfast is ready. Like every meal with mama Alice, breakfast was almost always massive. Eggs, bread, peanut butter, jam, butter, arrow roots and a gigantic fruit plate consisting of mangoes, papayas, oranges, bananas was pretty standard fare. Sometimes there would even be avocados or passion fruits or some other random exotic little thing that I may or may not have seen before. I never ever started the day wanting another bite to eat.
Around 7 I would begin my journey to my first training session of the day. And when I say journey I do mean journey. I would have to walk anywhere from 3-6 KM (1.6 KM= 1 mile) uphill (this is not an exaggeration!) to get to the place where my class/meeting was taking place. Travel time varied anywhere from 40 minutes to over an hour and a half! Luckily for my fellow trainees I did live farther away from town than anyone else. Luckily for me there was a group of six that all lived in the same distant location, and all six ended up being pretty good folk. Our long walks to and from training sessions allowed for us to become good friends pretty quickly.
Most mornings started with 2-3 hours of Swahili. Swahili is a simple, well-structured language that assembles as logically as a language can. It also sounds nothing at all like English. That has made the vocabulary very slow to stick with me. Either way, after a little more than 2 months I am able to get by in areas that speak little to no English. I understand enough Swahili that I can usually understand what is being said to me, and I'm able to speak enough that I can usually express whatever meaning I'm trying to get across (this of course happens at the level of the most basic of human exchanges - purchasing goods, ordering at a restaurant, asking where something is located, etc.).
After the morning class me and a group of trainees would go for lunch at a local restaurant. 90% of the time lunch would consist of beans, a tasty pita bread type dish called chapati, and some type of steamed vegetable. Put enough salt and hot sauce on that meal and it never gets old. After lunch we would usually have a "technical" training session. These would attempt to teach us how to engage a Kenyan community, what pitfalls to look out for, how to identify and execute viable projects and other types of skills you would think a development worker should possess. Now to give Peace Corps credit, their training challenge is pretty absurdly insurmountable. My training group consisted of around 20 people, from the ages of 20-64, with backgrounds as diverse as recent college grads to ex-teachers to experienced executives. And we are all going to do different things. And the trainers don't know who is going to do what until at least three quarters of the way through training. With that being said, the following statement isn't too critical or damning, technical training was very close to worthless. Building from un an uneven base to an uncertain point is nearly impossible to plan for. The only times I got upset about it was when it just seemed to be unnecessarily adding stress to the trainees lives. Either way, I'll post links to other volunteers blogs. I know others have gone into more detail on their blogs about how they feel about the technical training. Feel free to peruse through those.
After technical ended, usually around 4-4:30, my training group would go grab tea or coffee. After relaxing for about an hour me and whoever was left from my group of six would begin our 5-6KM trek, uphill again! (ok, that's a lie), back to our homes. At home I would do whatever little chore I could to help mama prepare the house for dinner. Mama always gave me the most menial mindless tasks (cutting vegetables, stirring some pot, etc.) to reduce the chances of me ruining her hard work in the kitchen. After my day I was always more than OK with this. Dinner, again, was always more than ample and was followed by another massive plate of fruits. Kenyan food is actually really good, but slightly limited in variety. Dinners were a rotation of a steamed vegetable next to the main course of stew, beans/legumes, rice, maize, potatoes or some type of bread.
After dinner I would study Swahili or work on some assignment while mama cleaned up. After she cleaned the whole family would sit and take tea and talk. Between 9:30 and 10:30 everyone would be exhausted and call it a night. 5:40 next morning it would begin again.
That was my life during training (for the most part). I have now been placed to where I will live for my two years, but I'll talk about that on my next post (which I PROMISE won't be another two and a half months from now). Today I'm running out of internet time so check again in a week or two to read all about where I'm living, what I'll be doing and possibly other random thoughts I have about life in general.
Pictures...I'll do my best to post those as soon as I can but uploading pics takes a long time and is costly with most of the slow computers that I have access to. I know my fellow PC Kenya bloggers have pics up so until I post my own I'll try and link with a bunch of those.
