Kenya part two: site placement

Allow me to begin with a list of adjectives that describe Kericho, just as an introduction to the second part of my blog: My Peace Corps Placement; Wet, beautiful, green, bigger-than-I-expected, Hindi-influenced, fast-paced, electrical, slow, hilly, noisy, friendly, religious, diverse, and wet.  I’ll explain most of these.  It really does rain everyday here, and if the rain gods skip a day, they make up for it with fervor the following day.  We even get hail every few weeks.  I finally bought a big 50 liter jug that I hope to place under my soon-to-be gutter system and catch lots of rain water.  I do have indoor plumbing, but it never hurts to cut down on bills (I don’t have to pay rent, but I do have to pay water and electricity).  Plus with most of the country in severe drought, I feel bad that I have two, yes two sinks in my house (one in the kitchen and one in the hall).

Kericho is also beautiful though.  There are two parks in the city that I frequent on my lunch breaks, and one of them is sometimes full of monkeys.  I have been coming with food in an attempt to get a picture but they have been away for the last few weeks.  Loitokitok, where we were trained was very dusty and very brown.  In comparison, Kericho is very green, but only because of all the rain, which translates to mud.  There is rarely a day when my shoes and pant legs are not caked in a little bit of mud, but mostly because I choose to walk to work instead of take a taxi.

There is a surprising Hindu population in town, maybe because of the tea plantations, but it’s good because there are some decent Indian food restaurants around.  Every once in a while I splurge on a big bowl of curried beans for lunch instead of the plain boiled beans.

The noise and religion parts seem to go hand in hand.  Every morning, at around 5:45 there is a prophet on the hill across the valley that gets on a PA system and starts…prophetizing.  He sounds more like an auctioneer than a preacher, but either way he is loud, consistent, and long winded.  Sometimes he has a competing church with another PA system going head to head.  It’s kind of comical, and you get used to it.  In fact they play the exact same sound clip of a song in the background while he preaches, and the tune is permanently burned in my head, and some days it is almost soothing like a lullaby.  Also since it is Ramadan, the two mosques in town have their calls to prayer 5 times a day, although I usually don’t hear all of them.  The Christians and Pentecostals are louder and far more numerous.

I was kind of disappointed when I came here and saw the three supermarkets in town.  I saw snickers bars and Red Bull and thought, “I am not in Kenya!  They just flashed a movie of clouds in the windows of the airplane and made engine noises behind an elaborate set.  I’m really just in a Kansas City suburb.”  But after I realized that urban life in Kenya has its own unique challenges and that I wasn’t cheated on struggles, I came to appreciate the super markets.  Especially because every time I go to the regular market, they don’t actually see a human being walking around, they just see a walking, talking dollar sign.  I went to buy curtains yesterday, even with three Kenyan friends, and the vendors were charging 5 or 6 times the regular price.  Even when I explained, in Kiswahili, that I was a volunteer and didn’t have money, all they heard was “kaching kaching kaching.”  So I go to the markets first, still, just to try and support local business, and then to the big stores for everything else.  One funny thing happened to me last week at the store, though.  They apparently ran out of coins, so gave me my change in candy they kept in a jar by the register.  At first I was a little frustrated, but then later when I was walking home I realized that the candy was really good, and that I probably would’ve bought them with my change anyway.  So really they just skipped a step.

Also last week I was invited to a dowry negotiation.  As an aspiring cultural anthropologist, I thought this sounded like a great experience.  So the soon to be groom told me he would swing by and pick me up at 5 on Thursday.  Great, I said, I’ll just leave work early to change.  “No, 5 am.”  Oh.  Ummm, ok.  “Oh, and feel free to bring your camera, it’s ok if you take pictures.”  So I got up at 445, waited patiently till 6 when they finally came, and 6 full grown adults piled into a small sedan.  Then we drove about 15 minutes to where there were 2 vans waiting for more people.  We waited there till about 7:45, and then drove about 20 minutes to the main road where they stopped to adorn the cars with ceremonial shrubbery.  After about half an hour of that we drove about one hour and had our first flat tire.  Yes first.  We fixed that pretty quickly and continued about half an hour to one of the passenger’s sister’s houses for breakfast, which took about one hour.  Then we continued to the nearest town so the soon to be groom could bye a present for his soon to be bride, and get a hair cut, and some more snacks for the trip.  I could just keep going, but let me summarize and say that we finally got to the negotiation at about 12:30.  As we pull up, they inform me that what they meant by bring my camera was that I would be the photographer to take all the pictures for the groom, and that I could send them to him when we get back.  So much for personal use.  But as it turns out, I didn’t have a card in my camera and could only take 5 or 6 pictures.  So the ceremony included the two families cramming into a the house, and negotiating how many cows and goats they thought she was worth.  When they came to a consensus, they served “Mursik” otherwise known as Maziwa Lala which translates to sleep-milk.  It is somehow fermented a little, but still pretty tasty.  Then we had a huge meal of beans and rice and potatoes and meat, and there was much cacophony and celebration.  We stuck around for a while and then finally crammed back into the small car and made the long trip back home, on a road that was so riddled with pot holes I thought maybe it was used for mortar aiming exercises in the previous week.  In fact we had to go so slowly, at one point I got out of the car to relieve myself by the side of the road, and then walked back to the car and got in, all without the car even slowing down.  We probably could’ve carried the car just as quickly over that stretch of road.  Finally we got to the paved part, and we got our other flat tire.  It was after midnight by the time I got home, but it was quite the cultural experience.  I’ll post the 5 pictures when I figure out what’s wrong with my computer.

As far as work goes, I have developed a survey to help me get a feel for how I can best help public health in this community.  I have only handed out maybe 10 copies so far, but I plan to get a lot more.  The survey includes questions like what they think is the biggest challenge to a healthy life in Kericho, and whether or not they feel there are adequate resources for diagnosing and treating diseases.  It is really just a baseline survey, to try to get the main ideas, then I can know how to guide my interviews in the future to really get at what this community needs most.  What I have been hearing a lot of is AIDS stigma, and I think I have some ideas on how to combat things like that.  I will post the results of the survey when I stop being lazy and analyze them.

I am loving life here, and everything is new and exciting still.  Every time I think that something sucks or that I am really struggling, I think “this is Africa, and I should be happy since if I am going to struggle a little, it might as well be here.”  Then I drink a liter of the most delicious tea on the planet and hit the snooze button and dream about a prophet with a megaphone.