Friday, April 2, 2010

Mombasa Part II!

So, I am still in Mombasa! I have three more weeks left after this one and I can’t believe that the time has gone so fast here! Three more weeks in Mombasa, one more week in Nairobi and then a week and a few days travelling and I will be headed home! Quick note: I am posting this blog right after another new one about Nairobi, so read that one as well if you’re interested! It should be after this one in order.

It is still hot in Mombasa, but I am getting used to it now. It was 85 degrees here last night (cooler than usual) and I almost put on a sheet to keep me warm! Usually, I sleep only in my pajamas because of the heat- no covers, although I have my mosquito net which hangs over my bed, so that keeps in warmth as well. Most days it is still around 95 degrees during the day, but the rains are starting to come now and it gets a little cooler at least while it rains (although it gets hot and humid after the rain). Another thing about the rains that I find interesting is that it usually only rains at night. If it does rain during the day, it rains lightly- the heavy rains only come at night. I asked my host mom about this and she said that this is how it always is- if any atmospheric scientist wants to explain this to me, it would be much appreciated! I will be interested to see if the trend keeps up while I am here!

Things with my family are going well- for the past week and a half, there were actually two German students staying at my house as well as me! They were here for school also, but left this past Thursday. They worked here in an orphanage and one of them taught German to some of the kids. They were both enjoying themselves, but neither of them had a classroom component to their work, so neither of them know Kiswahili enough to speak in sentences. I am glad that I was taught a little bit of Kiswahili, even if only for six weeks! My Kiswahili is nothing to envy, but I am able to say many things in Kiswahili (including introducing myself to groups when I visit them with work) and I frequently have conversations in Kiswahili with my family, although I have to say “tena” (again) a lot because I have trouble understanding. Funny language anecdote: when I try to tell people I have trouble understanding Kiswahili, I frequently end up saying that I have trouble getting married instead, as the verbs are similar (kuolewa v. kuelewa)- oops! However, my Kenyan friend and co-worker Lorine says that people understand anyway. Hopefully, she’s right, although I guess both are kind of true currently :).

Pic: Here is a picture of my bed. The white thing at the top is the mosquito net; I bring it down so I can sleep under it during the night.

The only other news with my family is that we all went out dancing last weekend. Well, Mama Selina did not come, but my sister, Bomboo, my brother, Albert, and BOTH of the domestic workers here, Pamela and Edwin, ALL went out!! I would never have gone out with the domestic worker at my other house, Métrine, simply because that is not the way things worked there. These differences are interesting to observe! I think part of it might be because of the family structure here- there are a lot of twenty year olds running around that the domestic workers just fit in as children of Mama Selina! I also went to church with Mama Selina and the grandkids the other day; here are some pictures!

Pic: Mama Selina and I before church.

Pic: Here are most of the kids that are in the house a lot; they are grandkids of Mama Selina: from left to right: Selina, Maxwell, Absom, Abasi, Julie.


Internship

I have been doing a lot of learning in my internship here with Coast Women in Development (CWID). Last week Monday, I went to visit a youth group called Hurenet that works in Likoni, Mombasa. Lorine (Communications Director at CWID) and I took the ferry to Likoni, which means we got to ride over the beautiful Indian Ocean! Many people take the ferry carrying bags full of potatoes or charcoal or other things- potato bag people include women who are also carrying babies on their backs! The ferry is free to take, which makes the city more accessible to many people.

Pic: Lorine and I on the ferry. You can see the ocean and the beautiful sky in the background!

Likoni is south of downtown Mombasa and the area includes markets and residential areas. Because selling goods at market is literally one of the only jobs available in Likoni, many youth are left unemployed with no vocational training schools to help them make the transition between school and employment. Many youth are also unable to seek many jobs elsewhere as there are not enough schools in the Likoni area for all of the youth that are there, so not all of them have received primary or secondary education. In the youth group I visited, only about half of the people I heard from had finished high school. The ones who did finish viewed their completion of secondary school as a miracle and something that they struggled to do.

So, Hurenet, the youth group, provides a space for youth to come together to avoid the other most common profession among youth in Likoni- selling drugs. This is the most profitable opportunity for youth with little education or vocational training. Other than providing a space, however, Hurenet trains young people in small business skills and owns about seven computers on which youth can learn how to work with computers. As the youth were talking to me, they emphasized how computer skills are essential in order to be successful. Computer skills are not taught in schools here at all as most schools don’t have anything like a computer classroom as we do in the US. So, Hurenet’s services are indispensable to these youth. There are about 150 students enrolled in Hurenet’s courses; I spoke with about fifteen of them. It was great to talk to these young people, although I think they treated me as a donor more than a student. The fifteen youths had come in just to talk to me that morning and one of them asked if I could fund her in further vocational training. The coordinator of the group also wanted me to stay in touch in hopes that I could work with the group in the future, even if I couldn’t fund them now. It was an awkward moment, but reminds me how much the color of my skin (and its history) has given me immediate privilege in life when others have not been so lucky. While not all white people have money (including myself) or immediate privilege, white people as a group have the ability to access economic prosperity much more than people of color. If anyone has any extra tax return money, I'm sure that Hurenet or other groups I've mentioned could put it to good use!

Pic: Here is a picture of me and some of the youth from Hurenet.

The rest of the week last week, I attended a training by Action Aid International for Women in Leadership in Coast Province (the province in Kenya of which Mombasa is a part. There are nine provinces in Kenya). It is especially interesting for this conference to be in Coast Province as it is one of the more traditional and conservative provinces in Kenya when it comes to women’s rights as we think of them in the West. The influence of Islam as well as many traditional cultures still prohibit the participation of women on all levels of society, in the home as well as in leadership. I thoroughly appreciated the opportunity to be at the training for many reasons. First, I got to meet forty women leaders in Coast Province! Many of the women leaders led groups in their area dealing with gender-based violence and land rights. Rape, as well as land ownership and land inheritance rights are huge issues in Coast Province. Land ownership is a huge issue in Kenya as a whole as women own almost none of the land here. Some of the women had held positions in government agencies or had represented parts of the Coast as Counselors, similar to mayors in the US. The training was mainly in Kiswahili, so this limited my ability to communicate with some of the participants, but many of them used English and Kiswahili in addition to writing in English, so I was able to communicate with them when they used English or if they were willing to help me through a short conversation in Kiswahili. The themes of the conference included leadership, advocacy, self empowerment and a few other things. We covered a lot in three days, so I am unsure of where to start!


Pic: This is a picture of the beach at the conference center . . .

During most of the training, I spent time with my boss, Betty, Programs Director for CWID, Lucy, one of the leaders for Tunaweza, Disabled Women Group, which I think I mentioned in my last blog, and a woman named Celestine. It was a great three days!

Pic: This is my boss, Betty (left) and Lucy (right) from Tunaweza strategizing about the rights of people with disabilities!

Lastly, on Monday, I met with FIDA (Federation of Women Lawyers- Kenya), an organization I’ve been interested in for over two years! This is the organization that I talked about in my last blog that helps women win court cases having to do with gender-based violence, divorce, and other issues facing women who otherwise would not have access to the law to ensure their rights. I am going to go to their office a day next week to observe, so I will report more on that later!

Pic: Here is a picture of me at FIDA. My blouse is from a market here in Mombasa- there are a lot of great clothes with great colors there! I enjoyed shopping downtown a few weeks ago . . . the blouse is a product of this trip . . . :)

Rural Kenya!

This Tuesday, I had the opportunity to do something I haven’t done yet here in Kenya. While I’ve driven past rural Kenya on my way to Uganda and have seen it out the window, I haven’t ever interacted with rural Kenyans! I am so glad that I had this experience as most of Kenya doesn’t have tall buildings and public transportation . . . it has fields and livestock and hand-built houses.

I traveled with Lorine to the Vitengeni District of Coast Province. To get there, we took a matatu one hour north to get to Kilifi, a bigger town North of Mombasa. This drive was BEAUTIFUL. The beautiful part was the endless sisal fields! They became a little less beautiful when I recognized that their perfect spacing and impeccable upkeep was a product of . . . yes, a corporation. But they are still a beautiful sight! When we got out of the hour long matatu ride, we thought the journey was over, only to learn that we had another matatu ride ahead of us! I love car rides, so this was no problem, but the nature of our next ride was something I have never experienced before!

While we were (break: got up to chase chicken out of kitchen!) still in a matatu, most of this hour was spent on ‘rural roads.’ Now, in the US, there are roads that are worse than the interstates and roads with potholes, but there are no roads like rural roads of Kenya. These roads were probably built in the 70s and have not been kept up since then. Part of the ‘roads’ were just pieces of concrete in the road in a splotchy pattern- maybe 40% of the road was covered in concrete and the other 60% was dirt and sand. Now, the other ‘rural’ roads are just sand, no road at all, which is actually a lot better than the partially finished roads. In the roads that still showed signs of having been constructed at some point, the matatu had to weave all over the road to find the areas that would be the least damaging to the vehicle as well as those that would be the least bumpy. Most of the ride felt like we were driving over large pieces of gravel to say the least.


Pic: Here is a picture of the sand/dirt roads. These were the good roads to drive on, in comparison to the half finished roads!

Now, I don’t say this because the roads bothered me. I didn’t mind driving on them for two hours for one day and actually thought of it as kind of an adventure. However, talking to the women at our destination gave me a different realization of what this lack of development meant for people in the area: the women we spoke with, who were using microfinance loans from CWID to jumpstart their small businesses, traveled the distance Lorine and I had traveled on Tuesday (after which we were both exhausted and ended up resting the entire next day to recover from) once per week. The women have to go to Mombasa to get things to sell at the market in their rural location. In addition to the ride being exhausting, it was also expensive. The trip was about $5, which is a lot for someone who lives on a microloan of $133 per six months. And they make this trip once a week, meaning that it costs them $120 every six months. This example shows one of the important parts of microloans. If $5 really is that much for people, if you can’t go to the market that first time and spend more money to buy goods, how will you have a small business selling things? Only with the loans can the women start the businesses, which is really the only employment opportunity in the area, especially for single women. Once the women have access to these microloans, they can support themselves (and their families) and pay back the loans, but this start-up cash is crucial.

Anyway, other than the transportation, the women told us about their lives. One of the women, had eight children to support and another women was supporting her son and his wife and children in addition to her last born who was still living at home! Lorine had to translate for me as the women did not speak English (although they understood it- that would be language number three for these women- ethnic group language, Kiswahili, English, similar to most people in Kenya), so it was hard to communicate, but it was still nice to meet with them! I introduced myself in Kiswahili, which always helps to form a relationship, but understanding is again the issue. After meeting the women, I also met the Counselor for the area who also happens to be one of the founders of CWID! I am still amazed at how many men I’ve met who are involved in women’s issues here- it is great. At the end of the day, Lorine and I were both exhausted! But it was a great day and I am so glad I got a chance to experience even a day in a Kenya that is more rural than where I live now.

Okay, well, there’s an update until today, so thanks again for reading and have a good life until I talk to you next!

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