"Madam, may I assist you?"

Friends that come out to play as soon as the lights go out

Unlike my last few posts, I am in a solidly good mood as I write this.  I have just come back from buying a few groceries for the first time on my own and—as far as I can tell—the women did not even attempt to cheat me on the price.  Peter had warned me about buying food myself and told me to make sure that, until I was familiar with the prices, I either texted him or had someone with me so I could be sure I got a fair deal.  So, on Tuesday I flagged down Centrine, our librarian, on her way out of the school compound and asked if she would accompany me as I shopped.  We walked about 100 yards outside of the gate to the nearest street corner (I use the term “street” very loosely), where I can see around 2-5 women sitting in the grass selling produce on any given afternoon.  Centrine did most of the talking as I smiled at the group of primary school students hanging around staring at me while they chewed on sugar cane.  I purchased about 2 pounds of sweet potatoes for 20 shillings (somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 cents) and 2 small mangoes for 10 shillings (12 cents).  They also convinced me to try some sugar cane, so for 1 shilling a woman took a machete and hacked off a piece about 5 inches long for me.  They started to explain to me how to chew it, but Centrine seemed inexplicably offended when the children began to giggle at me and she ordered me to keep walking.  She seemed equally perturbed at another small group of boys who giggled as we walked by and spoke to them in some very aggressive-sounding Kiswahili.  A little farther down the road I was able to buy tomatoes (3 small ones for 10 shillings) from a tiny store that looked like it carried some candy and probably Safaricom top-up cards.  Dinner—and then some—for under a dollar?  I’ll take it.  Celestine then showed me how to chew the sugarcane. It looks like bamboo on the outside, except a little thicker and solid in the middle.  The inside is white and you basically rip off strips with your teeth and suck out the juice before spitting the leftover strip onto the ground.  It was definitely more pleasant than I expected—much juicier than you would think.  The first couple “bites” were very refreshing in the hot sun, but I soon tired of using my teeth and the sticky juice covering my fingers.  I waited until I got home then chucked the rest of it behind the house.

            This week at school has been great.  I’m beginning to learn more names and I’m more comfortable with the schedule.  Discipline in class has not been much of a problem so far, but as the students grow more comfortable with me I can tell this will become a more significant issue in the near future.  This morning a boy wanted to leave class a few minutes before the lesson was over and I had to physically place my hand on his chest before he would sit down.  Yesterday was the only day so far that I’ve truly lost it—I still haven’t the faintest clue what the problem was, but I was asking for their homework and getting blank stares in response.  I don’t know how to say, “Give. Me. Your. Exercise. Books. So. That. I. Can. Grade. Your. Homework… NOW!” any more clearly.  After a few minutes of this (and, ok, a lot of waving a book in the air and yelling) I simply walked out of the room with the small pile of books I had been given and gave the students who did not turn theirs in zeros. 

Football and Piki-pikis

Shikokho Girls Football Team

       On Friday I attended a girls soccer game at a nearby school.  I noticed the girls getting their uniforms together as I was leaving the staff room for the afternoon, and they seemed excited when I asked if I could go with them.  I had talked with a few of them before, and a couple are in my 2W class.  They are all so sweet and I feel more comfortable around them than any of the other students at the school.  As we walked the 3-ish kilometers to the school the girls taught me some new Kiswahili words (mto: river, maji: water, mtoto: child, watoto: children) and asked me questions about America.  They were all very concerned that I was getting tired on the journey—I had to assure them that while I cannot run as far as they can (yet), I can handle walking long distances.  A few tried to get me to allow them to carry my backpack for me, and I was told I was a “good mzungu” for insisting on carrying it myself.

            We took a path through the countryside instead of the main road, and it was beautiful (I am kicking myself for not taking pictures on the way—we ended up taking the much less interesting main road home).  We passed many small clusters of houses, cows, sheep, maize fields, etc. We also crossed the river where most people in the village get their water.  I had been warned several times that just because I am a good swimmer does not mean I should try to swim in the river.  The section we crossed kind of just looked like a mud hole to me, so there must be a more dangerous section people are referring to. (Side note: speaking of swimming, the other day Joann was asking me about swimming and whether or not I miss it.  She says, “I used to swim, but I quit after I found a dead body in the pool.” Um, what??  One day in college there were only a few people in the pool and no one noticed a boy had drowned until she found him at the bottom.  I guess he had been practicing holding his breath so people had stopped paying close attention to him.  Yeah, I would quit swimming too.)

            The village we visited is called Shivagala, and the Primary and Secondary school seem more or less exactly like Shikokho.  They get much fewer visitors from the West than Shikokho does, however, so I quickly attracted a mob of about 50 primary school children.  At first it was cute but it got old (and overwhelming!) in a hurry.  They didn’t know any english beyond “hello-how-are-you” and “what are you called?” so they just kind of stood there and giggled.  They were very interested in my watch and then my water bottle, which they asked if they could have.  Um, no.

Fun and Frustrations

Hi everyone,

            Apologies for taking so long to update.  It's been getting busy here!  

            I have very mixed emotions as I write this post—some aspects of the past two weeks have been terrible, while others have been pretty great.

One of the school's 7 cows

            The living situation: still yet to be rectified.  Up until last Friday, I was sleeping in the living room of the girls’ side of the house and it was driving me completely insane.  First of all, there were four girls crammed into a house with only two bedrooms: me, Sarah, Murebi, and Johanna*. 

Sarah: Sarah also teaches English (been at Shikokho for a couple years), is a few years older than I am, and is very nice.  She is not overly friendly or talkative, but when I have a question she is helpful.

Murebi: Murebi might be a nice person, but I wouldn’t know.  She regularly acts like I do not exist.  She tends to play her radio very loudly and during normal sleeping hours, which, frankly, is infuriating.  I think Murebi is recently out of college and this is her second year teaching Kiswahili at Shikokho.

            Johanna: Johanna is my favorite.  Sometimes she has trouble with my English, but she is the only one who will strike up conversations with me and frequently helps me out (for instance, when she saw me hanging my laundry on the line the other day she brought me her bucket of clothespins to borrow).  She is also always sharing her food with me.  She’ll cook something and say, “Do you take porridge?” or, “Do you take boiled maize?” (people here say “take” instead of “eat”), and then give me a little taste.  Johanna has been teaching for a few years and is from the area, but this is her first year teaching (Biology and Agriculture) at Shikokho. 

Turkeys and Geese and Baboons, Oh My!

Hi everyone,

       This weekend has been rather uneventful, so I thought I would take the time to fill you in on my visit to the principal’s house last weekend.  Thomas lives on the other side of this house during the week, but his family lives in his hometown about an hour and a half from Shikokho (in the direction of Uganda).  We had a little trouble getting past Kakamega because only one of the handful of gas stations in town had any fuel.  Gas shortages have become more of a problem recently in Africa.  After waiting in line (or “queuing up,” as they say here) for about half an hour, we were on our way.  Like on the trip from Nairobi, the road was paved the whole way and had some really pretty scenery.  We drove through a peripheral section of the Kakamega Forest, which is a tiny, isolated section of the Guineo-Congolan rainforest—a massive belt of jungle that used to stretch from coast to coast across sub-Saharan Africa.  Due to large-scale deforestation (mainly for the purposes of establishing tea plantations, grazing land, and collecting firewood), Kakamega Forest is now a solitary patch of around 230 square kilometers.  According to the Rough Guide to Kenya, the forest is “famous among zoologists and botanists around the world as an example of how an isolated environment can survive cut off from its larger body.”  I can’t wait to visit it for real!

            Thomas’s home is in Bungoma, and luckily I did not find it “unremittingly dull,” as Rough Guide so affectionately puts it.  I was greeted by Thomas’s wife, daughter, and about 100 different birds scattered about the yard—chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, guinea fowl (normally wild), and a very unfriendly-looking turkey tom that Thomas was quick to warn me about.  Thomas and his wife have four sons and three daughters; the sons are all college-aged or older, one of the daughters just finished secondary school, and two of the daughters are in primary school.  At the house was Lillian, 18, and Paul, who I’m not sure about because we were never introduced.  Lillian is at home for the next couple months waiting to find out if her exam scores are high enough to get into university (she wants to be a doctor) and was an excellent companion.  We sat outside in the shade of the house all afternoon and chatted—mostly about the US and its comparisons to Kenya.  We talked a lot about all their birds and how much I like eggs, so at one point she ran inside and scrambled some for me.

            The family also recently adopted a young, mentally disabled girl named Purity.  She was practically blind and deaf (and is still mute) before Thomas and his wife took her to a doctor, but now can see and hear, although poorly.  Due to her condition, Purity's mother never let her outside of the house for the first 10 to 12 years of her life.  When they discovered her situation, Thomas and his wife brought Purity to live with them, took her to a doctor, and put her in a special school for the disabled.  She can now write her name, but not much else.  Right now Thomas's family cannot afford her school fees, so she has to stay at home.  She can handle all domestic chores and answers when called; later when I took a picture of her and Lillian, she looked at the screen and then pointed to Lillian and herself.

So... When do we start teaching?

            Well, it took the better part of two weeks, but I finally have a better grasp on what goes on at Shikokho Secondary.  I arrived in the village last Tuesday, and on Wednesday the principal walked me over to the school to meet the staff.  As we approached the school we were met by a group of about 40 students walking in the opposite direction.  Thomas murmured: “They are being sent home because they do not have their school fees.”  In Kenya, even a public school like Shikokho Secondary is not free.  Fees for the year are only 10,000 shillings (roughly $100), but even this small amount can be very difficult to come up with.  Walking past them, knowing that I had spent over twice the cost of their year’s education in town the previous day, was an awful feeling.  I quickly sympathized with the principal’s predicament, however.  Many of the parents have the money, but are reluctant to give it up.  It appears that paying school fees can sometimes turn into a game of who-can-pull-one-over-on-the-principal, which will only come back to bite Thomas when government auditors inspect the books.  So Thomas has to be tough, but he is fair; if a parent can come up with at least 1,000 shillings by the beginning of school the child is allowed to start classes.

            Thomas then introduced me to the Director of Studies, Mr. Mwimani, who is also an English teacher.  After a brief discussion of my college studies (Thomas: “Maybe you can start an environmental club.” Hey, now there’s an idea…), we agreed that I will be teaching English, and Mr. Mwimani showed me into the staff room, where I met a few of the other teachers, including his wife and fellow English teacher.  I didn’t make the connection until later, but Thomas had warned me about the Mwimanis.  They were appointed to Shikokho by the government and therefore are not directly employed by the school.  “They are very lazy,” Thomas had said. “You will see the wife playing games on her phone all day long.”  I was officially introduced to only one or two other teachers, as most of them did not arrive until later in the morning (if at all).  To my slight irritation, it does not seem to be Kenyan culture to tell someone your name when you first meet them.  I shook hands with over a dozen people that day and came out with zero names to show for it (apart from the Mwimanis).  It was a fitting start to a week and a half of confusion and frustration.

House in Shikokho / New Pics

 ***NOTE: I have added pictures to previous entries (elephants, giraffes, etc.), so be sure to check them out!***

Hi everyone,

Just finished my second week in Shikokho--expect posts covering that time later this weekend (I was so irritated that I couldn't get my internet working that I haven't typed anything out yet). It took me a while to figure out what the heck was going on with the school schedule, because the first week is not very well organized. The schools opened last Tuesday, but the majority of the students did not have their school fees until a week later... meaning, the first week the teachers can't really do anything and I was SO BORED. Monday-Thursday of this week was testing, and today I taught my first official class! I taught one last Friday, but only about 1/3 of the students were present. It has been very frustrating at school because practically nothing was explained to me and I spent 8 hours a day sitting in the staff room wondering why in the WORLD aren't I in a classroom right now? I'm feeling much better now, however, because we finally sat down as a department and figured out my schedule (although it may still change slightly).

I promise to update more this weekend, but for now here are a few photos from the house I am staying in.

The house: the left side is ours

Right now I am living in the common room, as this side of the house has 2 bedrooms. Later we will move to the other side, which has 3, and I will have my own room.

Kitchen. It has running water and lights, but nothing else electric. I cook on a gas stove

Tuesday, January 3rd

Hello everyone, I finally have internet on my computer! Here are two updates from last week (note that I have posted two separate posts). Expect more tomorrow, including pictures!

       Tuesday morning I had been told to be ready for the Headmaster to pick me up from Kakamega at 10 am. Per Kenyan Time, he arrived at 11:30, accompanied by the school’s counselor, Everlyne. They took me to one of the three Wal-Mart type stores in the town, and I stocked up on the rest of the things I’ll need in the village. Poor Everlyne had volunteered to take charge of my cart so she had to follow me as I criss-crossed the store a billion times looking for the items on my list. We then crammed my luggage, my groceries (including two large basins for bathing and laundry), the Headmaster, Everlyne, me, and another school employee that needed a ride home into the Headmaster’s tiny car. After running a few errands in town we finally headed in the direction of Shikokho! I can’t remember what the distance is from Kakamega (people keep answering me in kilometers so it goes over my head), but the drive took us around 25 minutes. Thankfully, Everlyne had picked up a nice, cold Coke for me to have on the drive. The group was not as impressed as I thought they would be when I told them that I lived in the city where Coke was invented, but I was impressed when the Headmaster, Thomas, took the cap of the (glass) bottle off for me with his teeth.

       After some driving down bumpy dirt roads, which for the most part are impassable in the rainy season, we arrived in Shikokho! We went straight to the school, where I will be living in a house with two other teachers (both young Kenyan women). The house is a duplex, with a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms on each side. It is roughly the same size and shape as the apartment I lived in at Davidson. The living room is about the size of a dorm room, and then the kitchen is half that size. Right now I am staying in the living room (there is a bed) because this side of the house, where the two other women live, only has two bedrooms. The other side has three bedrooms and the Headmaster lives there alone right now. Sometime next week we will switch sides so all of us girls can have our own bedroom. The other two have been out of town, so I have not met them yet. It is just as well that they are gone, as I don’t have to feel bad about cluttering up the living room with all my stuff.