KENYA Post 1

Hujambo!  Hello from Nairobi, Kenya.  I can’t imagine a place more beautiful.  The sky is clear blue, the sun is shining, and the altitude is high enough to give us a constant cool breeze bringing the temperature to an average of high 70s.  Living in the city is not exactly what you imagine when you think of Africa.  People wear suits, have jobs in tall buildings, and own cell phones.  Cars, matatus, and buses flood the streets.  But, tropical plants are everywhere.  Monkeys, large birds, and goats have free reign.  Farmers sell mangos, beets, sugar cane, and green oranges on the side of the road for a dozen or so Kenyan shillings.  Most of the flora I have already seen for years living in Florida.  Another surprise is that not everyone speaks fluent English which is what I assumed.  Rather, everyone speaks fluent Swahili and their tribal languages (Kuluo, Kumassai, etc.), while fluency in English ranges from only “Hey and How are you” to masterfully teaching it at the local university.

Day one, I arrived in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (named for the first Kenyan president after independence from British colonization in 1963).  There, I met Jamal and Mama Mary – two of my program directors.  My program consists of 13 students and 4 program directors.  We all have been staying in a hostel this entire time, until we are ready enough to move into our designated homestays with Kenyan families in the city.  Until then, adjustment is quite the stretch!  For me, cold showers, different tasting food, an entirely new language, and mosquito nets are not uncomfortable.  I crave those kind of cross-cultural experiences.  Rather, the biggest stretch has been lacking the support system I had in DC and Tampa of fellow believers/Christians to fellowship with and encourage me.  I think when we go to new places by ourselves, we forget that our loved ones and friends aren’t going with us.  And we will be alone temporarily.  But I know that even without a church or an accountability partner or what have you, the Holy Spirit is my biggest teacher and Jesus is my best friend.  Always.  In this time of being stretched, I have seen that more than ever.  I constantly crave quiet time with God.  I’ll take my guitar and go sit under a tree and sing softly to him with a Bible in my lap.  I’ll look out at the stars at night and pray.  I’ll scribble notes on the bus of what I feel the Holy Spirit telling me even in the midst of others around me.  When I finally go to church on Sunday, I will be home.

The other huge adjustment has been not having a cell phone, and not having wireless Internet.  I have to sit in designated computer rooms/spaces just to send an email or check my Facebook, whereas in America I constantly had unlimited access to the internet/communication.  Tomorrow afternoon when I move in with my homestay mom, Mama Rose, I will finally get a cell phone as well as a wifi bar!

But the anticipation I have towards my increased communication is dwarfed in comparison to the excitement I have in simply becoming Mama Rose’s daughter.  When I walk through that door, I become part of her family, a life-giving family that will love me as their own.  According to my homestay directors and my very dear friend Liz who stayed there last semester, Mama Rose is one of the most compassionate of all the homestay parents and she has been praying for me for months knowing that I’d be in her home soon.  She is a very Spirit-filled woman who loves anything and everything Jesus and loves others with a big big heart.  She has two sons.  They are both away from home, one just got married and one is at the University of Nairobi.  But they will be my older brothers nevertheless, something I have been craving for as long as I can remember.  She will cook me traditional food from her tribal ancestry, as well as speak Swahili with me and take me to her church!   But more than anything, she will be my mama.  Tonight is my last night and my excitement has often brought me to tears and light-headedness!

I also have been choosing to devour everything I can experience and learn from in this beautiful nation.  My Swahili lessons are exciting and fun!  We sit in classes of 3-4 with a native speaking teacher.   We walk around the city and talk to natives as part of lessons too!  What I love about classes here has everything to do with the culture.  First, “Africa” time to me is not simply a slow pace of life.  It is a pace of life that recognizes what is truly important by taking time to invest in relationships and what is in front of you rather than meeting a deadline.   During classes, we take a break called “tea time” at 4 which consists of Kenyan brown tea, hot milk-water, sugar in the raw (but really actually raw…because this is a part of the world that grows sugarcane), and “drinking chocolate” if you want.  We sit around until everyone is satisfiably recuperated.  THEN we are ready to digest another mountain of information.  ALL SCHOOLS in America should do this.  I can’t learn when my brain starts shutting off and I’m bored/tired.  Tea time is a freaking MUST and I never realized it until I came to the country. 

 

Day two, I got to feed and pet giraffes at a local conservation center!  So much fun.

 Today, I walked to the local market and had the best fresh squeezed juice blend of my life - fresh avacado, beet root, mango, strawberry, and pineapple.  Then on the way back to the hostel, me and three other friends split a sugarcane in fourths.  It was only 20 shillings.  When we got back I saw MONKEYS in the back yard.  Forreals.  Monkeys.  Just casually eating the garbage.  Walking back to our rooms, one monkey RAN UP to me and just kind of looked at me in a semi-aggressive playful manner.  I WAS FLIPPING OUT.  Started screaming "HELP!  HELP!  I DON'T HAVE MY RABIES SHOT! HELP!"  The domestic servants watching me were laughing so hard they were ROLLING in the grass.  I just start yelling even louder while in a stand still with this monkey.  "I DO NOT HAVE MY RAAAAAABIIIIIEEEEEESSSSSS SHOT PEOPLE!"  As if these Swahili-speakers have any idea what I'm talking about.  They just laugh and laugh and I eventually laugh along with them once the stupid monkey runs away at my perceived aggression. 

The people here are incredible.  From the clerk at the store to the nun at my hostel's convent, from my compassionate and loving program director Odoch to the chef Patrick, from the guy who sold me sugarcane on the side of the road to my Swahili teacher Josephine, from my SIT family of fellow students/adventure-seekers to the other program directors Jamal and Mama Mary, I am seriously blessed.  

This is only adjustment period.  Can't wait for the real stuff to start.  Driving by some ragged-clothed Kenyans sleeping in the gutters feeling just as helpless as them because I'm staring at them unable to help, that's what drives me to keep learning Swahili and learn from the local people who have been working against poverty, injustice, crime, corruption, health epidemics, and ethnic tensions here for decades.  I didn't come to Kenya to fix Kenya.  I came so Kenya could fix me.  Fix my American pride of what I think people need without ever getting my hands and feet dirty and patiently learn about complicated issues, fix my cultural biases, fix my fears of things I am actually stronger than, and fix the apathy I didn't realize was there.  God bless Kenya and all its people. 

Kwaheri!

Katrina Doyle