Pictures! Kenyan markets, and a few other things

9 February 2010

Hello everyone! Apologies for the short hiatus from my blog for those of you who check in regularly. This week has gone quickly; instead of writing this week, I’ve started loading pictures onto my previous blogs! If you look at my previous entries, most of them should have pictures! I am going to try to keep this up when I can. I have taken some pictures of my daily life/room/walk to school, but taking pictures is not always a smart thing to do wherever you are. Because 40% of Kenyans are unemployed (It ranks 187 in employment out of 200 countries- both facts from the CIA World Fact Book) (!!), crime, particularly theft, is a MAJOR problem for people who have no other source of income. If I take a picture in the nearby slum (Kibara- it is the first or second largest slum in all of Africa), there is a chance that my camera could be taken, or that I will get more attention from street children or other people if they see me take a picture. I will try to be intelligently daring, if at all possible, so that I can share with you all, but some pictures may come slower than others for the above reasons.

A week of shopping, starting with Adam’s market!

This past Wednesday we got out of school at 12:30pm, as opposed to our regular 3:30pm time. I went to have lunch at Java, a popular location for many students on the program as it has Western style coffee and free wireless internet (not very common in Kenya). Behind the mall of which Java is a part, there is a street market called Adam’s market where first and second hand goods along with pirated dvds are sold inexpensively. Some of the market is on the street and some of it is enclosed in an area where the shops are shoved together so that there is about a 3 foot walking space between sellers, with a ceiling of about 12 feet high. I can’t remember what the ceiling is, but I think it is something like hard plastic or a tarp, which lets some light in, but by no means is a permanent construction. At the market, I was able to get a pair of Birkenstock sandals there- they looked new - for 450 ksh (Kenya shillings), the equivalent of exactly $6! I was very excited about this as the sandals I brought from the US are beach flip flops and not sustainable for the amount of walking I am doing here. This was my first time buying something at a Kenyan market, so I was proud of my purchase, although I have to give partial credit to my two friends who helped me bargain, one of them who has lived in Kenya for an extended period of time before this trip. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon off!

Quick further word on ‘house help’ and doing laundry

In Kenyan homes, many people, unless you are very, very poor, (one of my friend’s families has no kitchen table- they eat on the floor- and still employ a domestic worker part time) employ house help (I will say domestic worker or Métrine, my family’s domestic worker) part time or full time to do household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, childcare and laundry. Laundry is particularly time consuming as most people don’t have washing machines here, even if you are middle class, like my family is. This may be because water here is in short supply or because there is no point in investing in a washing machine if you have a person to wash your clothing for you (domestic workers). In order to do laundry by hand, one must fill large plastic containers with water (usually three at a time), put soap in the first two, and rinse clothing in the last bucket. Unlike simply pressing a button on a washing machine as we do in the US, you must wash each piece of clothing (sheets/towels included) by rubbing the clothing against itself with both of your hands (scrubbing) until all dirt/stains are removed. Métrine usually washes all clothing, but every individual washes our own underwear. I washed only my underwear, bras, and socks today and this process took me an hour. It is also time consuming when the water gets dirty as you have to change the water. I sit while doing the laundry, but Métrine stands the entire time. She commonly does the equivalent of a load and a half of laundry three or four days per week. My underwear (which took me an hour) is about an eighth of a load (a week’s worth of underwear). She also irons all of the clothes (sheets included) after they have dried on the clothesline outside. Métrine lives with us and is part of the family, although she also has a family in a different part of Kenya who she sees a few times per year.

Kibera market

Friday afternoon, Métrine took me to the market where she shops, which is in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slumps if not the largest, as she has many cute clothes which I’ve commented on many times. The market has many nice things, similar to Adam’s Market, but since it had rained on Wednesday and Thursday, the market was filled with mud. There was also a lot of standing water in the mud along with some garbage, which is the perfect place for malaria infected mosquitoes to breed (standing water). Further into the slums, which I have not been but heard about, garbage disposal is a major problem and sanitation in general. Some of my friends who live near the slums have gone for a week or more without running water. Yes, this means no washing your hands, no showering, and no flushing the toilets. I am lucky to live in an area where water shortage is not a problem and to live in the US where I don’t know anyone with this problem. I will talk more about the slums in another blog sometime.

At the market, I got a shirt for 50 bob or 50 shillings, which is less than a dollar (1USD = 75 Kenyan shillings) and some material which I will have made into something probably while I am here. Many people buy material and then have it made into dresses, skirts, bags or other things at very reasonable prices (nothing like what it costs in the US to have clothes custom made).

Maasai Market

If you have heard of any social group in Kenya it is probably the Maasai. The Maasai are a very well-known tribe/group in Kenya for many reasons, a few of which include their initiation rituals, their relationship with the wild in Africa, and their crafts (mostly beading, but many other things). I learned today that the Maasai actually may have come from Egypt and defected on a military mission afterwhich they ended up in Kenya’s Rift Valley. People also know of the Maasai warriors. I learned in class the other day that one of the ways to prove bravery in the Maasai community is to kill a lion. (Vegans skip this part) According to one of my professors, if you chop the lion tales, it is painful for a lion to turn its head as its vertebrae are very interconnected and you’ve basically won the battle from there by making it impossible for the lion to turn. A similar strategy can be used with a rhino as they cannot turn easily in general. However, the Maasai are mainly known for living with and in harmony with the natural world, despite these rituals. (Vegans start reading again.)

On Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, Maasai people (mostly women) bring their crafts to Nairobi to sell mainly to foreigners. Some Kenyans also buy from this market, but the Maasai get the best prices for things from foreigners who don’t know what things normally cost Kenyans. My mom and I went to the market and she was kind enough to help me bargain. The beading is beautiful and much of the jewelry is large and brightly colored. There are also pieces of clothing, paintings, figurines and commemorative Africa/Kenya pieces of art. My mom was very kind and conversed with one woman ‘as a mother’ asking the woman, ‘what would you want your daughter to be charged if she were in a foreign country?’ and telling her that mom in the US was counting on her to take care of me, so she should give me a fair price. This was in Swahili at the time, so I didn’t understand it; my mom told me later. The wonderful thing is, my mom wasn’t just trying to get me a deal; she was actually being honest! She is very kind.

Kenyan Art/Literature

Today we learned some about African Art. We learned that some African art focuses on contradiction, which inherently creates grey area within any proposed objective truth, on which the art also focuses. Our lecturer for the hour also sang us a folktale song from his tribe (he is from the Acholi people in Northern Uganda) about a beautiful woman and her not as beautiful mother. The young woman ends up marrying a turtle because her husbands divorce her after seeing her mother. The moral of the story is that there are always two sides to life.

I recently finished a book by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (also James Ngugi), Kenya’s most classic literary author. He has written many books about the emergence of Kenya from colonialism and other issues. I read The River Between, which is about a young man trying to figure out what his identity is between tribal loyalty and Christianity among other things- I loved it! If anyone is looking for a good, quick read (very short book), pick this one up!

Update on the Constitution:

The Constitution is being reviewed by a special committee before it goes to debate in Parliament. The special committee review is not public, as far as I know, or is not in the news anyway, but the Constitution is still in the news as this is the time when many advocacy groups are coming forward to make known their opinions on the Constitution draft. The Islamic court issue that I mentioned previously is one of these issues. Another contentious issue with the new draft concerns the abortion debate. Church groups (mainly Catholic) believe that life should be defined as beginning at conception, but many women’s groups argue that this endangers the lives of women. Already, about 70,000 women die each year from botched abortions in Sub-Saharan Africa (www.change.org). Also, advocacy groups for disabled people are trying to get special seats in parliament reserved for disabled people, similar to the way that a few seats are set aside for women in Parliament, similar to many African countries, many of which have many more women in government than we do in the US. Lastly, members of the Party of National Unity, President Kibaki’s political party, are trying to claim that if there is a new Constitution, Kibaki can run again under the new rules as he will not have served two full terms (his last term will be interrupted by the new Constitution if it passes), which is the term limit in the old and I think new Constitution. If you think that party politics are bad in the US, try coming to Kenya where most political decisions are made based on party loyalty and at times, tribal/ethnic group loyalty. The President recently addressed Kenya in the Kikuyu language, which is not a national language of Kenya and which only Kikuyu people speak. I will talk more about corruption later, I am sure. My host parents are so ready to give to a united Kenya. They don’t even mind the high taxes that they pay- they just want their money to be spent for Kenya and not go into the pockets of members of parliament. It seems a far off hope when both of them normally laugh throughout the news report at the ridiculousness of many government officials.