The purpose of the mid-term retreat was to get away from our work in Kakamega and give us the chance to come together, debrief and brainstorm ways that we can finish up our internships on a strong note. We spent some time talking about important development topics – the place and time for sustainable work vs. aid work, corruption, etc – as they pertained to our work on the ground. The weekend included a bit of R&R, a lot of stimulating converstaions, a thrilling day of adventure and outdoor activity, a pathetic excuse for a rowing a boat in Lake Naivasha (however, we did get up close and personal with a flock of flamingos. Did you know they RUN on the water to take off into flight and during landing?), and complete over-indulgance in much-missed Western food (those bottles of balsamic vinaigrette did not stand a chance against 5 half starved, Western-spiced deprived wazungus!).

We all decided to bike to Hells Gate (3km), do a 7 km ride through the park to the gorge, canyon the gorge, then ride the 10km back to camp. Let me tell you, my beach cruiser rides much differently than a run-down gears-don’t-work-half-the-time Kenyan bike. To make matters worse, the seats slanted upwards. Ouch. Other than the overwhelming pain in my general croch region, the bike ride was unbelievable. Upon entering Hells Gate, my jaws dropped. I literally felt like I was in The Land Before Time. All around us was a blanket of green grass set against rocky cliffs that had been formed from volcanic activity. The bike path winds all the way through the middle of the park, so everywhere we turned, we were enveloped by the scenery. Did I mention that we were biking in a National Park full of ANIMALS? Mind the warthog crossing! Look over to your right, there’s a family of zebras! Bike quietly as you approach the clan of giraffes! At one point we ditched the bikes and wandered into the bush on foot to observe the giraffes feeding on trees right in front of us. I got up close and personal to a giraffe peeing. You’re jealous.
 
The best part of Hells Gate was when we canyoned through the gorges. Basically, the park is named after a narrow break in the cliffs, once a tributary of a prehistoric lake that fed early humans in the Rift Valley (ugh, you caught me, that was straight from wiki). The gorges are staggering in height and SO fun to traverse. Since the whole valley is expereincing a drought, there wasn’t much water in the gorges, but we were still able to hike through a creek, scale mini boulders, frolick under naturally forming hot springs, shower ourselves in waterfalls, climb some more rocks, get my face painted as a traditional female Masai with the red dirt used by the Masai, then hike up to a lookout point that overlooked the whole park. Unreal guys. Every time I think I’ve seen one the most beautiful places on Earth, I am so blessed to have my breath taken away again.

I spent the entire next day reading and lounging on the camp-grounds on a bright orange mattress stolen from one of our beds in the middle of the lawn. I just wrapped up reading, “Eat, Pray, Love” – ironically about a woman who takes a year off her life to travel to the world in search of finding balance and harmony in her life. To a lesser extent (or is it the same?) I am on a similar mission. Let’s see. I quit my job – check, I packed up and put all my belongings in storage - check, I have been traveling the world for three months and have no immediate plans to come home - check. Ok, so I guess Liz Gilbert copied me. But the main difference is that she is now being paid handsomely for documenting her travels, and I, on the other hand, am slowly depleting my life’s savings. I always joke that I have RLS – Restless Life Syndrome, which explains why I tend to swing from one extreme to the other (landing a competitive job in the rat race that is Corporate America vs. living in a rural village doing grassroots community development). What I am proud to say is that I am acting on my heart’s calling. I am in search for the sanctity of solitude, finding the balance between my professional and personal passions and answering my insatiable desire to fill my life with one breathtaking, jaw-dropping moment after another. After my year of traveling, the balance and harmony I would like to achieve is to live a purposeful life that blends two very distinct halves of me, and I won’t stop searching until I am made completely whole.

The Africa I work in starts and ends all meetings with a prayer. Every morning when I arrive to work, it is customary to shake every fellow employee’s hand and say hello, and is considered rude if you neglect to do so. The Africa I live in has an average annual salary per person around 5,000 shillings, the equivalent of $66. The average meal is about 200 shillings ($2.50), the same price as two yards of beautiful African fabric (any takers?). The rate of HIV/AIDS prevalence in Kenya is 7.1%, while in Western Kenya, the rate is considerably lower, estimated at 5.4%. The Africa I work in stops working when the electricity goes out – for rationing, during heavy rains, and for reasons I still have yet to understand. Sometimes, the electricity is out all day. During these days, I pretty much just sit around and do nothing, thinking of all the reasons why I am addicted to and utterly dependent on electricity.

The Africa that inspires me is a society that values education and provides free primary and secondary education (parents only have to pay for the school books and uniforms) for their children. Even in the most rural of villages you will find several schools and hear children’s voices out in the fields and coming from the classrooms. I see children in school uniforms of every imaginable color everywhere, something about this makes me very happy (and their smiles, their smiles! They are so beautiful!). The Africa that saddens me comes from the realization that the rate of girls dropping out of schools before they graduate is staggering due to several preventable reasons. Either the girls are getting pregnant by the boys who are curious and don’t know any better or they are having to stay at home to take care of the house because the mama is ill or otherwise not able to handle the chores. The biggest reason is that they have to skip school for a week when they get their period because they can’t afford disposable pads. After skipping a week a month for the school year, they are not able to keep up with the school work and perform poorly on the tests. After a while, they are not able to move up to the next grade level and eventually drop out. To me, this is completely unacceptable. FSD is working on a sustainable project called Pads for Progress that will make and sell cheap reusable cloth pads in the village stores as an alternative to having to continue buying disposable pads.

The Africa I am puzzled by runs on a completely different notion of time. Nobody is ever on time and people come and go as they please. You can count on it. One day, my friend, Eric, told us to meet at 8 am mzungu (westerner) time for a day of mudding. When we called our Kenyan friends, Faith and Redeemer, at 8:30 to ask them where they were, they replied, “tunakuja”! “We’re coming” in Kenya does not imply relatively close proximity, it simply means, quite literally, that they are coming, even if they have just left and they are two hours away. 45 minutes later they arrived. The Africa that confuses me burns their trash in heaps down alleys and in their front yards, wafting a smell around town that has imprinted a permanent sensory memory in my mind. Certainly landfills are a better option? Or maybe not …maybe we are missing out on something. The Africa that scares me engages in mob violence – the collective public beating to death of a thief that has been called out as a means to set an example via public justice. I have yet to witness this horrific event and if I know there is something happening nearby I will surely walk the other way. Don’t worry.

The Africa I love takes chai breaks at least twice during the work day – once at around 9am and again at 4pm. These chai breaks can be a chance to relax, have personal conversations with your co-workers and mostly to take a break from work. The chai is usually served piping hot as a pre-mixed chai tea with milk, sometimes spiced with masala, and most certainly topped off with several spoonfuls of sugar. I never fail to receive the skeptical eye when I ask for my tea and coffee black – no milk, no sugar. Just the other day, my co-worker commented, “Usually, when people don’t take sugar with their chai and coffee, they are very, very skinny!” So, I guess that’s one way of saying that I’m fat. The Africa I love attends church every Sunday. There are countless different denominations of Christians, Catholics and Muslims co-existing in harmony in this small town. On Sundays, everyone is dressed to the nines (when I asked a Kenyan friend what I should wear to church she said, “something you would wear to, what is it called … prom?”), crowding the streets, walking to and from church, the sounds of the gospel choir ringing all around. The Africa I love believes in the spirit of community. If a child is acting up out of sight of his mama, it is not uncommon for another mama nearby to discipline that child. Communal child rearing here is encouraged. I was able to benefit from this culture last week when we were picking up a mama and her son in a matatu (public transportation vans). As the mama was trying to climb in the already overcrowded matatu, she handed her baby to me to hold without a moment’s hesitation. I mean, I’m not complaining – I held on tight to that baby until the mama got off at her stop. I handed the baby over and that was that – no thank you, no goodbye … just the transfer of the baby. The Africa I love is full of school children passing by me asking the same question as one word spilling out of their sweet, little mouths, “Howareyou?” (just to make sure you get the full effect, the you is spoken in a tone that is about an octave higher than the rest).

I see an Africa that is full of adventure, bursting with promise and longing for opportunities. I see a new generation that is determined to empower themselves and create a way to live a meaningful life. Out in the field and at client trainings, I see people with bright eyes and an alertness for change. I see myself here, working patiently to affect that change, even if it is pole, pole (slowly, slowly) and kidogo kidogo (little by little). I would very much love for you to experience Africa for yourself so that one day you can have an Africa of your own.

1) Herd cows into the stable by running after them and intimidating them with hoots and hollers. (I did not partake in this part of the activity, maybe next time)

2) Select two cows for milking (we milk twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening). Note: Two cow’s worth of milk fills a PAIL!!! It’s crazy!

3) Lead one cow to special milking stall. Entice them to stay with yummy food. Once they are in, tie their back legs to the stall. HA! Gotcha now silly cow.

4) Wash udders with warm water and washcloth. There are four udders.

5) Apply milking lotion in small amounts on udder to make for comfortable milking (for the cow).

6) PULL on the UDDER. Pull from the BASE and apply a firm and steady amount of pressure throughout the whole yank. Key here is not to make an “O” with your hand and pull, but to slip your thumb under your index finger and slip the udder in this opening.

7) Funny fact: Rhonda, the cow, started peeing while I was milking her. Also, my head is inches away from the side of her belly, which is caked with dry cow dung.

8 )After being told I was not milking fast enough, I was relieved of my duties by our house worker, Alcana.

9) We sell a liter of milk for 40 shillings, a little more than $0.50, to people who appear at our gate with empty water bottles. It’s pretty awesome. We also harness the energy in the cow manure  in the form of biogas for our kitchen stove. BRILLIANT!

P.S. The geese are for guarding. They are really actually very frightening and make a lot of noise whenever anyone approaches. If you don’t approach with confidence they will start coming after you with their eerily long necks and beaks and they WILL bite.

Coming on this trip, I was aware of how much I still have yet to learn. What I was not prepared for was that I would also have to relearn how to see. Turns out, I had been looking at things backwards – instead of looking for the opportunities and assets that I could leverage and build from, I was looking for mistakes and deficiencies. This seems like common sense until I realized that coming here to do development work, my natural inclination was to take inventory of all the problems that I could fix versus thinking about what kind of resources and assets were already around that could be an opportunity to harness positive transformation. Those in the field of development need to think of ways to mobilize, enhance and leverage the existing skills and capacities of the impacted people, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. This will ensure that the community members will become involved and integrated as an essential part of the organization. After all, who do we expect to carry on the project after we leave?

 The Foundation for Sustainable Development, the non-profit that I am interning with in Kenya, has challenged us with a sizable mission: to develop projects during our time in country that address the root causes impeding developmental growth at our host organizations via the enhancement of the abilities and assets of those involved in order to create lasting and sustainable solutions that the community is bought-in on and will actively maintain after we have left.

Sustainable development is holistic and most problems come from a major root cause which is driven by an underlying systemic problem. Understanding and coming to terms with this has been integral for helping me focus my work during my time here. In thinking about my goals, I have to make sure that I am addressing the core issue versus an ancillary objective that will not ultimately cultivate a movement towards making a lasting impact. The systemic problem in Kenya is that corruption is so thoroughly engrained that it has bred a culture of acceptance. One of the interns put it this way, “Put a frog in a hot pan and he will jump out. Put a frog in a cold pan and slowly turn up the heat and he will stay in there until he dies.” The Kenyan people have slowly been exposed to every possible type of corruption over a long period of time that they have built up a level of tolerance to it that is killing them – literally and figuratively.

The idea of sustainability has really got me thinking about how I should responsibility give my resources. If I offer straight aid (helping to purchase a computer) without thinking about its sustainability (cost of computer upkeep and maintenance – does it financially make sense for an organization that is already low on funding?), is this the best way to ensure the organization’s future success? Unfortunately, the way a lot of non-profits operate has cultivated a culture of handouts. A recipient of straight aid that has been given without regard for sustainability becomes addicted and dependent on the benefits handed to them that they become too afraid to venture out and see if they can make it on their own. Why would they if the risks are too high and the returns are not guaranteed? The only way to undo this culture is show people a different kind of support other than charity.

I was moved by the frankness with which Yunus addressed the issue of charity. He said, “When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding a solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences”.

 K-Rep is not in the business of charity. We are in the business of enabling traditionally marginalized members of this society that most microfinance institutions choose to exclude and help them become active participants of the economy and society. Our goal is to empower them to become self-sustainable and financially responsible, to restore their dignity and their self-worth and to ultimately reduce the negative stigma associated with those living with HIV/AIDS.

1) Blue bucket of water contains scalding hot water.  Pour sufficient amount in larger yellow or white shallow bucket and add cold water from faucet (yes- running cold water!) until I have reached desired temperature.

2) Stand in bathtub (watching my head, clotheslines hangs low – gives new insight to the expression ‘getting clothslined!’) Options:  a) face forward with bucket in front of me b) sideways c) forward with bucket behind me. Solution thus far, option a.

3) Using smaller cup, fetch water from bucket, bend down, put head down so that hair falls in front of me and rinse hair. Let water drip back into bucket (limited water supply here guys, cut me some slack). Repeat until hair is reasonably wet (meaning, wet enough). I’m also experimenting with crouching and dipping my whole head in the bucket of water. This is proving to be a delicate manuveur which requires flexibility and balance (Robin and Tiff, we should have taken more yoga classes!)

4) Apply shampoo in small quantity (most of my shampoo burst in transit to Africa. Shout out to Anna who recommended separate zip log bags for everything which minimized shampoo disaster) and rub throughout hair.

5) Rinse hair with small cup and water. Careful not to have soapy water drip back into original water supply.  Tip here is to pivot, pivot, and rinse away from bucket.

6) Apply conditioner in small quantity. As water is limited, ability to rinse out all of conditioner is questionable. Better err on the side of caution as not to attract  flies and dust to stick to scented and not fully rinsed hair.

7) Repeat step 5.

8) As body is “wet enough” after steps 3-7, apply soap generously. I refuse to skimp here – you have to draw the line somewhere. (Shout out to Shannon for buying me L’occitane lavender soap as my one luxury item for the trip.) If motivated, shave armpits and legs (ha!).

9) Rinse soap off body. Here, I use the hand scoop and rinse method as it has proven too difficult to occupy 1/2 of rinsing capacity (one hand) with a cup scooper. Better just hunch over, grab water from bucket with hands and splatter over body.

10) Every 10 days (that’s how many underwear I brought), I must also couple showering with laundering of said underwear. In this instance, I will refill bucket with hot and cold water, add laundry detergent and launder until clean ( I hope). Rinse with cold water until no longer soapy. Wring dry and hang dry on clothesline in safety of own room to avoid Benedict from acquiring pink Victoria Secret thongs.

11) On normal showering / non-laundering days, skip step 10, dry myself, change into clothes and proceed to room.

Note: Entire process takes about 20 minutes, 30 if laundering. I am open to suggestions on how to improve my bucket shower. Please leave comments below.

I have been in Kakamega, Kenya, for a week now, as a micro finance intern with the Foundation for Sustainable Development. Kakamega is a small town situated at the base of the Kakamega National Rainforest. It is a lively town that boasts moderate commerce and economic activity – there is a large outdoor market selling fruits / beans / produce, a few petrol stations, a couple large supermarkets and several bakeries, retail shops and restaurants. You can walk the whole town on foot in about 15 minutes, after which, the shops become farther and farther apart and the lush, green foliage settles in. It rains at least once a day here, without fail, mostly in the afternoon, in a “God just opened up the heavens and turned on the water faucet” kind of way. At first I was a bit dubious of said thunderstorms, thinking, “Ugh, this mud is going to be such a hassle for me trying to keep clean”. Only after three days , I became accustomed to this daily ritual and now look forward to the rainfall .

I just moved into my homestay this afternoon after a weeklong orientation. I will be living just outside of town (a 10 minute walk to the cybercafe) with Mama Linety, her 22 year old daughter who is completing her third year at the local university, her 5 year old terror of a son who I’m playing “I’m the boss here buddy, back away from my things and knock before you barge into the room” with, the 20 year old house girl, a unknown man, about six cows (one who I thought was really fat only to ask my mama who told me she was pregnant and due this week and one whose name is little brown cow), a dozen or so chicken and half a dozen geese (?). My family is pretty well off – mama works for the government in the Ministry of Agriculture and my baba works about 8 hours away in Nairobi as an architect. I have running water, a refrigerator, a toaster and a microwave in the house, all considered luxuries in these parts so I know that my accommodations are fairly cushy.

I am anxious and sooo excited to start work on Monday. It is about a 15 minute walk from home, but will probably take me 30 minutes since I offered to walk Benedict to school everyday before work (something I almost instantly regretted after seeing how hard it is to round him up and make him do anything – I feel like Super Nanny, Africa edition). I will be working at K-Rep Development Agency in town, a not-for-profit that receives its funding from USAID and provides micro credit to local community members who are infected / affected with HIV/AIDS and looking to start up local enterprises but lack financial means to otherwise start these businesses with their own assets. I have been informed that I will be spending a lot of time “in the field”, visiting the existing / potential clients during their required group meetings and evaluating their business plans, appraising their assets (home, savings, electronics and cows, of course) and host training sessions on business management, leadership and accountability. The idea during my time here is value enhancement – adding value to existing programs and fine-tuning the process / policies, not completely reinventing the wheel. In the end, I have to make realistic goals for myself during my short time here and work on something that the community members are bought into, will support and help develop and a project that will be a sustainable model for future growth and improvement.