KISUMU!!

November 10

This past week on Monday (Jumatatu) the Kalamazoo program took us all on a week long excursion to Kisumu, the third largest city in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa. Kisumu is northeast of Nairobi right on Lake Victoria in Luoland, near my family’s hometown. This is right in the heart of Raila Odinga’s (one of the presidential candidates) prime constituency so we saw all kinds of parades and demonstrations and yelled ODM!!! out the window of our LandCruiser a lot. Rachel even got a bike taxi back from town one day to lower the price when she showed them her ODM Hexagon pin. Yeah, have I mentioned, elections are heating up and it’s all people can talk about right now? Besides that, the two main candidates are pretty much in a dead heat right now.
ANYWAY, our LandCruiser got in a small accident on the way there in a gas station parking lot. It was kind of funny actually, our driver Isaac backed into a matatu parked in the very middle of the parking lot. It broke the whole back windshield of the matatu and there wasn’t even on a dent on our rock of a vehicle. The only slightly annoying part was just that it took like an extra 1 ½ hours to get it all sorted out with police and such. It’s already a super long trip to drive to Kisumu on a horrible road. We had lots of fun in the car though. We had one of our same drivers from Mombasa, Juma who is really fun and is never without a smile on his face, and Isaac turned out to be pretty cool too and felt awful about holding us up because of the accident. We’re requesting they drive us when we go to Maasai Mara in a few weeks.
We got to Kisumu in the evening just before sunset, staying at the Sunset View hotel and it was decent. It was funny to us that this is definitely one of the top end hotels in all of Kisumu, and yet it was pretty simple. The water wasn’t always on, there was no ventilation, at least in our room so it was kinda sauna-ish (Kisumu’s a lot hotter than Nairobi, it’s like the coast). We opened the window at night a little to get some breeze after we were all safely tucked under our mosquito nets (because screens in Kenya aren’t too common, although considering the heat and lack of air conditioning, I think they could be a wise investment worth considering) and there were mice that scratched in the walls. We did have a pool though, a nice lobby and really yummy food each night (except the first night, the food was horrible for some reason and took like 2 hours to come) The other nights it was a buffet and really good.
Tuesday morning we headed out to see the Kisumu YWCA and the programs they do there. We heard all about the programs and groups and then headed out to Nakumatt (equivalent of Meijers) to get rice, beans, water, ugali, schoolbooks, pens, pencils, etc, to bring to AIDS orphans and widows at one of the YWCA’s places a little way outside Kisumu. It was a fun but also weird day. I knew that we were doing a good thing getting this stuff for them, but kind of the structure of parts of the day felt weird to me, like we were the rich benevolent white people coming to bear gifts, essentially that’s what we were I guess though. When we came the women all came out singing and dancing out to the cars which was really cool. That’s traditional Kenyan greeting. Then we sat down in special chairs for us while they told us more about the programs there and we could ask questions. Then there was entertainment: all the kids performed songs and poems and skits for us, some of them illustrating the peer education program they have to teach people about AIDs and how its contracted, etc. Then we handed out the food. At first it was fine, we were just giving it out, eating bread and biscuits with them and getting to know some of them. I was hanging out with a big group of about 7th grade girls, I really really liked talking with them.
Then it got weird. They started making it so that the kids all had to line up to get their food ration from us and go up to this table and hold out their hands to receive it like they were receiving some kind of gift. It felt so paternalistic and made it so much more apparent basically how rich we were that we could bring them all this food. I know it was a good thing to do, I just hated how it was done. No wonder they think white people are loaded when we make such a big deal just about bringing them some food, like a big show of how nice we are. Then, to make matters worse, the widows who live there had made us this really nice lunch and we had to go inside to this different room away from all the kids to eat a big lunch of ugali, chicken, spinach, rice, etc. The kids were just outside hanging out eating their bread and stuff that we brought them. I didn’t want it to be like that, we should have eaten with them, eating the same food they did. But I learned later, that’s the way guests are treated, especially ones who bring gifts like we did and if they treat you as well as they can manage, it’s like a karma thing, they believe more good things like us will come to them in the future. Still, I had a lot of fun talking with the kids, hanging out.
In the evening we walked out to Lake Victoria and watched the sunset. The lake isn’t swimmable because there are invasive water hyacinth on the surface that cover the entire shoreline and make it look like the lake is a lot smaller than it really is. They’re really beautiful though, even if they’re invasive. Also the water’s kinda polluted. It was a gorgeous sight though, sunset over the lake with Uganda in the distance.
Wednesday we went in the morning to TEMAK, Teenage Mothers and Girls Association of Kenya, an NGO that shelters teenage mothers and teaches them marketable skills to be able to make a living. Right now they house 60 women and children but have a long-term construction project underway so that eventually they can house 700 people. One of the skills they teach women there is craftsmanship skills of all varieties. So we spent quite a bit of money.
Jamie had a scary accident there, during our tour she passed out from heat, fell through a door she’d been leaning on, hit her head and back on a toilet and had a seizure for like 5 seconds. She came right out of it right away and got right up, but it scared the crap out of all of us. She had a CAT scan at the hospital later and everything’s all right.
In the afternoon we went to the market stalls. The vendors were way cool there, so much less hassling than the ones in Nairobi, they were just chill and way more relaxing to bargain with. Then we out to the fishing village to see how the fishermen’s lives go, talked to some people, got a tour from one of the fishermen. We also had a boat trip out in one of the fishing boats!! It was so nice but way too short. Roseanne, one of our Kenyan professors who came with us, had a death grip on Patrick and I the whole time because she thought the boat would tip over. Lake Victoria!!! Birthplace of the Nile!
Evening, we relaxed, swam, ate some din-din and met these US doctors staying at our hotel working with Operation Smile that fixes cleft palates and Jamie got some medical advice about her episode. Also, there was this huge thunderstorm in the evening. It was super windy, pelting rain and the power was out in our room all evening and flickered on and off a lot in the lobby and corridors. The floor of our hotel room kind of flooded because so much rain blew in under the door making it feel a bit like the Titanic with the flickery electricity and everything. It was adventurous though and I had fun.
Thursday we drove out to Bondo about an hour from Kisumu, where Lilian is from, the other professor who came with us. We worked all day with community members on this harambee project finishing a primary school building at this big complex. We plastered walls all day, which is really difficult actually. We were all terrible at it and instead of slapping on the plaster in a nice smooth pack ended up kind of streaking in on and having most of the plaster fall on the floor. I think we were pretty entertaining to the Kenyans though and they were great. I did get my head cut open by some Kenyan guy’s trowel though when he was getting into the plastering and my head somehow got in the way. I shouldn’t say cut open, it was pretty minimal. Then we had a huge feast with everyone, community people, school staff and administration out at Lillian’s mom’s house. Her mom had my host mom’s job as YWCA director before she took over. Lillian actually used to live in my room when she was my age! Ha!
Friday we drove home. Kind of uneventful except the lunch place we stopped at made most all of our group sick the next day…the runs..I think it was the chips (fries). Oh and we also had to stop once and pull off the road with a bunch of other people because a “wide load” was going by. Yeah, wide was an understatement. They were the biggest trucks I’ve ever seen in my life taking up more than the whole road carrying in 3 pieces a giant ferry. Fun, eventful trip.