Transitions

After…

• 14 doses of nightmare inducing lariam
• Six and a half novels
• Four safaris with 50+ distinct animal species sightings
• Over 25 trips to the slums
• One bout of traveler’s diarrhea
• One fried hard drive
• One shattered camera screen
• Hundreds of movies/episodes of TV shows including:
• Season 1 of Glee
• Season 1 of 24
• Season 1 of Dexter
• Season 1 of The Wire
• Five seasons of How I Met your Mother
• One slaughtered goat
• One giraffe make-out session
• Two pairs of shoes
• Six step classes/five spin classes
• Meeting several new colleagues and friends

…I’m home!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Over the past three months, I have learned a new culture, met the kindest people, experienced life-changing moments , and had what I would like to believe is a lasting impact on TechnoServe Kenya’s Young Women in Enterprise program. Kenya, you have been good to me and for that I would like to say asante sana. As bitter sweet as my departure from Nairobi was (especially after the send off my fellow volunteers and colleagues gave me), I am now enjoying the luxuries that the first world provides – sidewalks, safe tap water, relatively more efficient traffic, reliable electricity, entertaining basic cable, moist cakes, and dog howling-free nights, just to name a few. It is good to be back, especially after missing my family and friends.

To my friends and family: I hope you enjoyed reading about my travels and work experience and I look forward to catching up with you all soon!

To my new friends in Kenya: I hope to see you once again very soon. Tutaonana!

Love,
Miti

Things to do in Nairobi...

1. Hang out at home (Sibiloi Apartments, Parklands) and watch endless amounts of TV



2. Go to Rolph's Place for some paintball and horseback riding



3. Karaoke and Sushi boats. Yes, the karaoke gets as intense as it looks below...so do the sushi boats for that matter.



4. DP (Diamond Plaza), aka little India: Sari stores, CDs/DVDs, "The Best Unisex Salon" (that's seriously what the name is), and soft-serve kulfi ice cream

5. Visit Karen Blixen Museum and Coffee House. I had no idea who Karen Blixen was before going here but I knew she had to be relatively important because there is a whole suburb of Nairobi named after her. She is most known for her book Out of Africa which was adapted into the Oscar winning movie of the same name.



6. Traveling Masai Market. It is "traveling" because it is in a different place each day of the week. It is the best place to go and buy souvenirs though you have to do quite a bit of haggling to get fair prices. They normally start at 10X what anyone should pay.

7. Take a Matatu into town. A Matatu is arguably the most dangerous vehicle on the planet. They are known to run over people, drive in the opposite direction of traffic, play inappropriately loud music, and have irrelevant decals displayed on their back windows (e.g. "Balanced Equation", "Cease and Desist", "Customer"). Matatus are, however, only a quarter to ride - their only redeeming factor.

8. Go-Karting. Not much of a surprise, but I was really bad. No crashes to report, but I did come in second to last in both races (just beating an eight year old Indian girl who was appeared to be in no hurry to ever finish).




9. Work out at The Arena. With all the eating I have been doing, I started taking step and spin classes to get into shape.

10. Nairobi National Museum. Pretty good museum. Fun for dorky anthropology majors like myself because of the ancient skulls and fossils dating over 2 million years old. Brought me back to the days of Race and Human Evolution class...

Crescent Island/Nakuru

I have officially gone on my last two safaris while in Nairobi. Saturday, I started off the weekend at Crescent Island on a walking safari. Because the island has no predators, you can actually walk around and see the animals up close – or at least as close as you can get before they run off. It's actually pretty fun chasing them around to see them scatter. Giraffes run even more awkwardly than they look, which is hard to imagine, I know. In addition to giraffes, we saw wildebeest, zebra, and impala.

The island is named "Crescent Island" because it's shaped like a crescent. It's actually the protruding rim of a collapsed volcanic crater which you take a boat through Lake Naivasha to get to. There are hippos all around you and even though they look cute, they are really dangerous. They are one of the most aggressive animals in the world. All you can see are their ears and nose sticking up out of the water until they come up for more air, then you can see how huge they are, especially their enormous mouth and teeth. There have been numerous incidents reported of hippos attacking humans without any provocation, but I am happy to report that I, along with the four other friends I went to Crescent Island with, have returned to Nairobi with all limbs in tact and no scary hippo stories to tell.

After Crescent Island we drove a little farther through the Great Rift Valley to Nakuru. We checked into our "camp" for the evening a little after 3PM. I have put the word camp in quotation marks because this was not like the rustic camping experience that most people think of. The Maili Saba Camp is a luxury camp with tents that are elevated on wooden platforms, furnished with queen-sized beds with comfy pillows and heating pads, include three course meals (all ending with a delicious dessert), the friendliest staff in Kenya, and views of the Rift Valley that are hard to imagine. Needless to say, we weren't really roughing it as we lounged by the pool or had sundowners on our porch.

Early in the morning, after a breakfast waffle sandwich, we left camp for Lake Nakuru National Park. I have to admit, it was a great way to end my Kenyan safari experience. The park is known for being surrounded by Lake Nakuru and thousands of flamingos lining its shore. It is also one of the few places where you are pretty much guaranteed to see both black and white rhinos. The park was a completely different landscape than Amboseli or Masai Mara. It has a huge lake in the middle of it for one thing. But besides that, it also had a waterfall, dense green forests, and spectacular views points where you could look down on a full panorama of the park. In addition to flamingos and rhinos, I also added a few other new animals to my safari animal scavenger hunt:

1. Ibis
2. Rock Hyrax
3. Saddle-billed Stork
4. Olive Baboon
5. Waterbuck

I have now seen all but one of the "Big Five" animals that Africa is known for - rhino, lion, elephant, buffalo, and leopard. I guess I will have to wait until my next visit to Africa to see a leopard in the wild.



More dangerous than the hippos at Crescent Island or the sleeping lions we came across at Nakuru, was our drive home. We were almost driven off of the road twice by a large tanker that had "Danger: Caustic Soda" written on the back. After the second time, we pulled over and our driver had some words with the truck driver. The police got involved and the truck driver was in quite a bit of trouble. I'm not sure why I've been involved in multiple safari vehicle disasters (or vehicle disasters in general) but after this weekend I guess I can add another interesting story to the list.

Slum Bizna

Over the past two months I have done a lot of on-the-ground work with TechnoServe. While working with the Young Women in Enterprise (YWE) program, I have made frequent field visits to two of Nairobi’s biggest slums–Mathare and Kawangware. Because of where we are in the project, we have started going to the slums as often as three times a week. Every time is a new experience for me. The first time I went to the slums, I had to take some time to digest what I saw. I have seen poverty before while traveling abroad, and even in the U.S., but never like I have in Nairobi. As a tourist you’re shielded from seeing what everyday life in poverty is like. When you work in the slums, you see the aspects of poverty (and I mean extreme, <$1/day poverty) that you never thought you would.

Since my first visit, I have become much more prepared for our visits to the field; however, the experience is still exhausting--both physically and emotionally. We spend hours walking through narrow alleys between rows of shanties. Every one of your senses is heightened in the slums. You smell a combination of meat, raw sewage, illicit alcohol brewing in the distance, and burning trash. You see kids running on sludge covered rocks in their bare feet; goats, dogs, cats, chickens–all sorts of animals wandering; people wearing donated shirts with NBA sports teams logos or that say “Roosevelt High School Class of 1998”. You hear kids screaming "mzungu, mzungu!" or chanting “How are you? How are you? How are you?” Apparently that’s all the English they know. They love to come up to you and squeeze your hand or hug you. That’s my favorite part.

My work has mostly entailed visiting each of the girls who have started a business ("bizna" in sheng, kiswahili slang) to see how her business is progressing. We go through the girl’s financial records (which most keep very well) and try to determine how to scale up her business. We help the girls with marketing and branding their products so that they can reach more customers. It is strange to use highly technical terms like profit margin, cost driver, credits, debits, etc., with these girls and in such a setting. Most of these girls have not finished high school (nor will they ever likely complete high school) and yet they have a knack for business. They know how to gain a good customer base and build customers’ trust.



We have had a total of ~93 businesses that have started so far and our target is 126 by the end of September. Some examples of the types of businesses I have visited include:
1. Liquid soap maufacturing (e.g., Looking Beyond, Arise and Shine, Jelt Group)
2. Food cafes (e.g., Riziki Café, Norway Café, Namukhula Hotel, Tabitha Hotel)
3. Hair salons (e.g., Pink Lady Saloon, Popsy Salon, Wamboi Salon, Nyambura Salon)
4. Second-hand clothes retail (e.g., Best Wear, Hitech Mitumba, Mn’garo Kids)
5. Embroidery and tailoring (e.g., Plainfield Textiles, Hope & Faith, Lucky Outfitters)




As little as the profits are that these girls are making, they still have more financial independence than they have ever had before. In the two months I have been visiting them and their businesses have been growing, I have seen them gain a lot of confidence. They are more engaged in the counseling sessions we provide and readily offer their opinions and suggestions. In addition to the six month entrepreneurship training they received from TechnoServe, they are also getting free ICT training from The African Center for Women in Information Communications Technology (ACWICT). I have heard the girls' life stories–about hunger, HIV/AIDS, family illness, losing parents/children, domestic abuse, robbery–and it is amazing to see their resilience. They are still motivated enough to seek a better life for themselves and their families. It's good, meaningful work that TechnoServe is doing in Kenya and I'm happy to have played my part in it.

Lamu

Top 10 reasons to move to Lamu:

1. Swahili culture. Lamu is Kenya’s oldest town and is the perfect example of Swahili (or coastal) culture. It is dominated by Islamic tradition as a result of over 300 years of Omani rule. In this sense, it was very similar to Zanzibar, though I would say that Lamu seemed a little more authentic to me. In Zanzibar I felt like I was in a resort town that was Swahili themed. Lamu felt like a true Swahili experience. Maybe that is why it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I enjoyed everything about the culture except the 5AM prayer call from the mosque loudspeaker right next to my window.




2. Shela. The perfect expat haven. There are long stretches of beaches and private homes built so that the warm ocean breeze blows through every inch of them.



3. Mnarani House. Our home for the weekend. Five bedrooms/four bathrooms, plenty of cozy nooks for reading, and an open-air rooftop lounge where we spent the nights listening to music and relaxing.



4. Rooftop massages. I got an hour long massage on the rooftop of our house for KSh 2,000 (~$25 USD). It was the perfect way to end our vacation of pure hedonism.

5. No cars. Lamu is the Venice of East Africa. There are no cars—only sail boats (called dhows) and donkeys. Donkeys are so important here that there is even a sanctuary for sick donkeys so that they can be nursed back to health. It was such a relief to not have to constantly fear getting run over by a speeding matatu or citybus like I do in Nairobi.



6. Sunset dhow rides. The best $6 I have ever spent.



7. Rastafari. The beachboys and dhow sailors are all ganja-smoking rastafari with an incredible outlook on life. One of the rastafari we met took us on his dhow, Hippo, from Lamu Town back to Shela. When we asked him how he was doing, he replied with “This is the best day of my life, mon.” I’m pretty sure he says that every day. He also sang Bob Marley the whole way to Shela.

8. Fresh seafood. Our private chef, Lucas, prepared elaborate meals for us every day. We had lobster, calamari, white snapper, oysters, pilau, chapatti, and all the fresh fruits and fruit juices you could ever ask for.



9. Lamu Airport. I mean…just look at the size of it. It’s teeny. Our boarding passes were laminated cards with absolutely no identifying information on them, and were reused later. Al had a full bottle of gin in his backpack and all security did was ask him if he had another one for them. The thing is, despite the obvious lack of security, I felt safer than I have at any of the other airports I have been to. That’s just how Lamu is…



10. Everything is better in Lamu. That was the theme of the weekend. They even have donkeys that make political statements (the Kenyan referendum vote was to take place the following week).