Another few days in Kenya

Hello everyone!

Osaore! (Good afternoon), idhi nadi? (how are you doing?)

Sorry again for the delay in posting, it has somehow managed to get even busier both in terms of our project and with 3 more of the girls having arrived (finally) on Monday. The gender imbalance is getting worse! 6:1 is a large difference, but I hope to be more than up to the task of representing my gender. The dinner topics have been both funny and interesting but there have been a few times where our discussion has tended towards a few topics which I otherwise rarely talk about (such as polygamy and abortion).

On Sunday we got up early again in anticipation of the 3 girls from the education team arriving, only to get a text later in the afternoon that their bags had not made it to Nairobi! So they decided to spend the night in Nairobi after touring around with a friend of theirs. When I say friend, it was a guy Simon whom has taken a number of GIVE travellers on safaris in the past and had offered to show them around Nairobi. Apparently he is very nice and fun to be around so we may try to organise a safari for Katie and I with him if the timing works out.

In the morning we prepared for the nominee meeting that afternoon and went over the member list one last time to make sure it was accurate. At the nominee meeting we had good turnout, Maurice had told people that it started at 1 (actually started at 3) so some people got there around 1 and were a little unhappy with Maurice for the meeting being so late. A number of the nominees were playing in a netball tournament just down the road and has to leave early for their games. Out of the 25 remaining nominees, 22 showed up (a couple were later than others) and we were able to run them through everything we wanted to say. They had a lot of questions about the election process, but thankfully we were fairly well prepared. The process of deciding a tie came up and we needed to confirm what we had been planning more or less on the spot but now (a few days later) we are happy with what we have come up with. We also managed to get pictures of all the nominees so that the community members would be able to better recognise everyone which was a fun experience: smiling in a picture must not be the norm here, there were a lot of very serious faces!

No serious faces here though!

Lisa (L) and Victoria (R) as taken by Bridget

 Following the meeting we headed home for dinner, where I joined Victoria and Lisa in spending some quality time with the local children (see pictures below). Them being nutritionists it was very enlightening (and sad) to see the impact poor nutrition was having on a couple of the children. One of the babies was very swollen, weak and small for his age, which they believe has been caused by not receiving enough milk from his mother. Nutrition issues are tough though as it is difficult to directly approach the mother around that issue as it is pretty personal and would not immediately solve the problem. We believe that the mother works all day away from the house which has led to the baby not receiving enough milk from her. Pamela and Syprose have agreed to do some more research for us though and hopefully point the mother in the right direction.

The baby suffering from the swelling. He is 8 months old I think?

My new best friends

After dinner (complemented by a glass of beer or wine) we called Liz to hear her feedback on all 17 pages of the advanced board training document we had created for the first session. As usual her advice was very useful and we managed to work through a variety of issues around how to present the results, continue engagement with the non-elected nominees and determine Maurice’s role within the board, in addition to the training document itself. The reception was really bad, we didn’t have any power (at the house, in our laptops nor our phones) so the meeting got broken up a lot with our phones dropping the call or from us adding minutes borrowed from Victoria / Lisa. We ended up waking early on Monday to finish our meeting. Well worth all the work though.

On Monday the 3 girls: Allie, Chaviva and Sarah, finally arrived! The 4 of us who were already here headed out towards town to pick up groceries and supplies, although I got off early at the airport to help retrieve our lost travellers. They had a lot of bags, wow. To be fair to them though two big hockey bags they had were full of soccer balls and jerseys for the soccer tournament, and they brought over a lot of other supplies for their project such as posters and craft supplies. We somehow managed to fit into a mutatu after some shuffling around of everyone, and off we headed back to Kaguya. They get to occupy the other house by themselves for now, until more travellers arrive during the second week of June.

Once Victoria, Lisa and Katie returned from their town visit (all loaded up with more supplies) we took the new girls into Obambo to meet Maurice and to pick up some mandazi. We were however surprised by Syprose and Pamela with some mandazi as a welcome to Kenya present for Chaviva, Allie and Sarah. Thankfully we managed to hide the mandazi we had purchased just in time! The ones they made were much tastier...still warm from being cooked. They were amazed at how quickly we polished off two big bowls of them. At this point the new girls started to fade having only had a few hours of sleep the previous night:

Group power nap

 That night, as mentioned we had some enjoyable conversation as the power went out again for an extended period of time. However, none of us were opposed to having a candlelit dinner with everyone together, before Katie and I powered through some more board training prep and I finished preparing all the stuff we would need for the elections the next day.

Tuesday morning I got up early for a run and some yoga. I had been getting lazy about running so it felt a lot better, especially for my digestion which seems to appreciate me going for a run (keeps my appetite high). Once Katie got up we did some final prep for the elections that day and had a big communal breakfast with everyone. I reiterate that I don’t think I have ever drunk so much tea as I have while here! (No complaints there) before heading to the bank. We set up our election system with the ballot box, ballots, laptop with nominee pictures and a flip chart with all the criteria people had brought up in the focus groups. We got a large swarm of people at once at the start though, so we had some minor hicups in making sure that the voting was well run (people all crowded around while the first couple people voted, and we found out after a few voters that Maurice didn’t actually understand how the ballots worked. Thankfully only a couple voters were affected and they still filled in valid ballots. Once we cleared up all the confusion and got the hang of things everything ran smoothly enough to let us watch some Lion King with a few of the children again (they now know who Simba and Nyala are) We managed to get 33 votes cast in the first day (out of roughly 270 members), which is pretty good considering that there was a big market on in one of the other villages and it was the first day. Hopefully the next day will be even better.

Time for some Lion King (singing along more than welcome)

 Although we have been working hard to publicly remain completely impartial, we are secretly pretty happy with the voting so far too (in that Pamela has been getting tons of votes!). Once the voting was complete we picked up some more of the bikes that are getting repaired and headed home for some dinner (again in the candlelight since the power went out again. Katie and I finished off rough drafts of the board training for two more of the sessions. We are getting closer to being complete (if we ever do really finish them!).

Okay that should be enough rambling for now. I am writing this Wednesday morning as we are about to have some lunch and head out for day 2 of the elections. Very excited! I don’t think I missed anything too major in my story...except from being woken up at 5ish this morning by frightened versions of Lisa and Victoria. They were convinced that there was some mad bat or animal (that probably had rabies) lose in their room and had moved out to the living room. I somehow managed to incorporate all the commotion into my own dream and thus didn’t wake up until Katie started asking them what was happening. (turns out it was just a massive moth that had a damaged wing).

Until next time,

Graham