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I'm catching up on the last three months of blog posts that I have stored on my computer. If you're still checking this space, you're quite the hopeless optimist, but it finally paid off! Keep checking back for updates and thanks for reading. I'm slowly posting my way to July...

It’s my last day in Stonetown, and on Zanzibar. It’s been raining for the last 13 hours straight, which makes me think we got lucky for most of the trip, where we’d get the standard 2 hours of monsoon rains each day, usually in the afternoon. Today, though, it’s pouring buckets. I know this to be a fact because last night the ceiling in my hotel room was leaking, so I set out a bucket and went to sleep. In the morning the bucket was full and my room was flooded.

Today was supposed to be a curio-shopping day, but now it’s a test-out-the-cool-Arabic-style-cushions-in-the-hotel-lobby day. More notes on Zanzibar:

Coffee. Excellent Kenyan coffee is world famous and impossible to get in Kenya. Coffee in general is not very popular in Kenya except among wazungu, and most of the coffee sold in supermarkets is of the instant Nescafe variety. On Zanzibar, coffee is sold on the street in small teacups, for a few cents. Locals drink it black, unlike in Kenya where every hot caffeinated drink is drowning in milk and sugar. (My tribe, the Nandis, like to brew tea leaves in whole milk, and skip the water altogether.) Tanzanian coffee is thick and robust, without that thin taste of tree branches, and every morning you’ll see coffee vendors shuffling kettles and teacups around as fast as they can to keep up with the crowds of thirsty men gathered around their stand. Coffee drinking is apparently not a very womanly thing to do on Zanzibar.

Mosquitoes on Zanzibar are the worst in the world. I have a mosquito scale that goes like this:

Houston, TX – rabid, responsive to Deep Woods Off (30% DEET).

California Sierras – very rabid, move in black clouds, responsive to Jungle Juice (100% DEET).

Malaysia – very rabid, responsive to Jungle Juice.

Kisumu and Lake Victoria – extremely rabid, will find a way into your net, responsive to Jungle Juice.

Zanzibar – extremely rabid, cross-eyed and drooling; will find a way into your net even if you tuck it into your mattress; especially fond of knuckles, toes, bottoms of the feet, and bum; unresponsive to Jungle Juice.

Seafood. Zanzibar has the best seafood in East Africa!! We stayed in a guesthouse* next to the big fish market in Stonetown. Being in the same neighborhood as the fish market was interesting, to say the least. In the mornings, from the rooftop café of our hotel, we could watch fishing boats unload their catch, but afternoons were more interesting. Loud arguments would break out in the street over fish, and a crowd would gather that sometimes included someone waving a fish around.

There’s a seemingly endless variety of sea creatures to whet your non-vegetarian appetite, most of which would make up-country Kenyans shiver and gag: octopus, squid, barracuda, red and white snappers, kingfish, lobster, crab, mussels, clams, tuna, shark, rays.

You can try many of these (grilled on a stick) at Forodhani Gardens, a grassy plaza along the waterfront with no actual gardens, where a modest row of food stands – and their annoying vendors – pop up each night at sunset.

The fresh-off-the-boat seafood, fresh-pressed sugar cane juice (served ice cold with a generous hint of lemon and ginger), Zanzibari pizzas, local dishes like urojo (potatoes, bajias and fried cassava in a cold coconut-lemon-chili soup), and relatively cheap prices make this popular eating destination worth a trip – or several.

But it’s not exactly “a good place to soak up the local atmosphere,” as Lonely Planet inexplicably describes it, unless your idea of soaking up the local atmosphere means being constantly harassed by drunks whose English vocabulary consists of, “Why didn’t you buy me the beer you promised?” and, “Fuck you!”; “artists” hawking ugly paintings that they didn’t paint; vendors trying to sell you the exact same stuff on a stick that the guy at the next table just sold you; and lots of tourists just like you being harassed for stuff because they’re tourists.

We also made friends with one of the cooks at our guesthouse, Salma. We bought a large snapper and squid at the fish market, some oil and lemons, and asked her to prepare a Swahili-style meal for us. For a 5,000 Tsh tip, she deep-fried the fish, and served it with a simple lemon-coconut-chili sauce, which is found in a lot of the local food here. It was one of the best meals we’ve had on Zanzibar.

Today I’ve commissioned Salma to teach me how to make urojo. It’s usually eaten for breakfast or dinner, the light meals of the day.

Vegetables. Leafy green vegetables aren’t very common on Zanzibar, but it seems like the Zanzibari equivalent of Kenya’s sukumawiki (a type of kale not so dear to my heart) is closer to spinach, which is quite palatable.

Swahili. Our guide for the spice tour, Abdul, told me this joke about the prevalence of Swahili in East Africa:

The Swahili language was born in Zanzibar, lived in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, died in Uganda, and was buried in the Congo.

So I told him a joke that Kenyans love to tell:

In order for East Africa to develop, Ugandans need to learn Swahili, Tanzanians need to learn English, and Kenyans need to learn manners.

Supposedly Zanzibar Swahili is the most proper Swahili. I definitely had to clean up all the village Swahili I’ve been using (which I apparently contaminated Brady with). So instead of speaking like a caveman: “Chakula iko?” – Food, it’s there?

I have to say, “Kuna chakula?’ – Is there food?

And instead of using the imperative Swahili that makes Kenyans so famously rude:

“Nipe chai” – Give me tea

Or, “Letee chai” – Bring tea

I’ve learned to say,

“Nisaidia na chai” – Help me with some tea

Or, “Naomba chai” – I request tea

As much as Swahili is widely and properly spoken in Tanzania and especially Zanzibar, English by contrast is almost non-existent. Which has been great for me, as my Swahili has improved by leaps and bounds in the last ten days. Unfortunately, being a nerd and knowing I’d be traveling in Swahili-land for over a week, I brought all my language notes from my lessons with Nick, and promptly left them in a tour van that I was never able to track down again.

Okay, Fish Market. I just went down to the beach where they sell fish straight off the boats. I was looking for a nice white fish for Salma to fry up for my last meal here. It was raining so I wrapped up my head with a scarf like a local woman, which didn’t fool anyone, judging from everyone’s eagerness to repeatedly announce to each other that I am from “Cheena, Cheena.”

There were all kinds of crazy fish whose names I’ll never know because the vendors only knew the Swahili names for them. Cats of every size, shape, and disease prowled for fish parts and licked at puddles of fish juices. I came up on two men enthusiastically hacking away at large white rays the size of endtables. I stared for awhile, watching them make fillets, until another guy slapped a three-foot shark onto the table in front of me. I left the market with two fillets - a shark and a ray.

Yard Sale On Zanzibar! It’s like becoming a human snowball on the slopes of Tahoe, then face planting several hundred meters downhill. Or maybe it’s more like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail of crumbs so that I can find my way back here one day. Either way, this was a vacation of losing stuff all over the island. I lost my Swahili notes, a bandana, a pair of sunglasses, my leftover kachori from lunch, and a $100 bill.

Well, I didn’t lose the $100 in the sense that I left it somewhere and forgot where. It was actually stolen from me by one of the staff at the guesthouse where we stayed. First I feel compelled to explain why I was even carrying a hundred dollar note. Before this trip I went to get USD at my bank in Nairobi, but they were reluctant to give me anything smaller than a hundred. In the States, a hundred dollar note is pretty obscene. I don't think I've ever carried one before. In Africa, it's unthinkably obscene, which is why it seems like people (or at least bank tellers) can't comprehend exactly what it means to be carrying that much money in a single bill. So the teller grudgingly changed one of the hundred dollar notes she gave me, and I was stuck walking around Nairobi with three one hundred dollar notes, quite a security concern in Africa's most crime-ridden city.

Anyway, before the money was stolen, I had really wanted to write a glowing review of the guesthouse, because it was a great place to stay. But after this betrayal, which really felt like a betrayal after I thought I’d made friends with all the staff, I now really want to use this forum to trash that guesthouse into the deep blue Indian Ocean. I will, however, do neither.

8:49pm. After seething about it all the way back to Nairobi, I came to the conclusion that this is East Africa. Duh. Even if I were staying at a five-star hotel, there would be people working there who would happily and without hesitation steal my money, even if I was exceedingly kind and generous to them. That’s how things work much of the time.

I'd let my guard down. I was tired of being cynical of people’s motivations all the time, and knowing that it’s the only prudent way to be. I was being naïve and I knew it, in wanting to trust people who were so friendly to me, and wanting to prove wrong all the assumptions about Africans that wazungu and Africans both embrace. I’ve stored up two years of negative perceptions about East Africans, but it’s exhausting to constantly see the world around me this way. At some point I just wanted to assume that people are essentially honest, good and caring. But in Africa, things don’t work according to a mzungu’s assumptions.

(Photos by Brady Zieman)

Zanzibar was one of the major spice islands back in the day. A lot of spices arrived here from India, South America and Indonesia, and many of them are still used in local foods, especially in pilau and curries, which explains why Zanzibari food is so much more flavorful than up-country cuisine.

Scores of tour operators on the island offer tours of spice plantations for the low, low price of $10. Tours are generally very similar, and usually include not only the plantation, but a pilau lunch, a poke around an old slave cave, a tour of crumbling sultan baths, and a dip in the ocean.

There was a French couple and a German family – an MSF volunteer working in Chad and his visiting parents – in my tour group, who all, by nature of being European, made me envious of their multilingual skills. How often do you meet someone from Europe who only speaks one language, except Brits? It always makes me want to dedicate the rest of my life to learning as many languages as possible, starting with a few months in Provence…or Tuscany…or Nepal.

Anyway, today’s tour was probably the only tour I’ve taken in Africa where our guide actually guided without constant prompting. Not only did Abdul know what he was talking about, he actually pointed things out to us as we went along.

We went to a spice plantation owned by the Tanzanian government that’s now used mainly for research rather than income generation. Abdul walked us around to different plants and explained what parts are used for spices and how they’re harvested.

Here’s some interesting information if you’ve ever wondered what’s in your Indian food (and for future reference for those of you who will receive Zanzibari spices as gifts when I get home):

pilau masala = cinnamon, cumin and whole cardamoms.

tandoori masala = cumin, cinnamon and annatto (gives it the red color)

Other fascinating spice facts, according to Abdul:

Nutmeg is taken from the seed of the fruit of the, uh, nutmeg tree. To get nutmeg spice, remove the seed and dry it (if the seed rattles when shaken, it’s dry), then remove the mace (a waxy outer covering that looks like wilted flower petals), crack it open and grind the stuff inside. This is the only part that’s used; the fruit itself isn’t used for anything.

Nutmeg has a lot of cultural significance among the Swahili people. In large quantities, it can be quite intoxicating, so women drink nutmeg tea during special ceremonies, which “puts a welcoming look in their eyes,” as Abdul describes it. “All women on the coast of Tanzania and Kenya know how to use nutmeg.”

Cloves are considered THE Zanzibari spice, even though it’s not a native plant. It was brought to the island by traders and flourished in the warm, rainy climate. Cloves are not quite the big export they used to be on Zanzibar, but locals are still very proud of “their” cash crop.

Turmeric is used only for its deep yellow coloring, not for its flavor, which is bland. You harvest the root of the plant and grind them up. Turmeric is used mainly in curries and stews, and sometimes as a substitute for saffron to color rice.

Annatto is the red coloring used in tandoori masala. It is made by crushing the seeds of the annatto fruit, which looks like a larger, flatter version of rambutan, with its long, fuzzy red hairs. Like turmeric it doesn’t have a flavor. Annatto is also used by women as makeup.

Durian is ready to be harvested when it falls off the tree. Since durian is rather sizeable and spiky, people have to wear helmets and stand under the tree ten hours a day retrieving fallen fruit like tennis ball boys.

Durian (or, according to my eavesdropping on the Germans, “schtinke frute”) are forbidden on boats, buses and trains in Tanzania (and in most other countries where they’re grown.) Illegal smuggling of durian has never really taken off; somehow the contraband is always discovered.

Jackfruit is the biggest fruit in the world. Fortunately it doesn’t fall when it’s ripe; you have to pick it off the tree. Therefore, no helmets required.

On the same spice plantation there were some dilapidated bath houses used by various sultans of Zanzibar, but mainly by the first and most powerful sultan from Oman. Despite the cobwebs and mildew of today, you could imagine that it was quite the luxurious spa treatment centuries ago. There were massage tables, a sauna room, and the bathtub itself (now home to leaves and algae.)

The slave trade was also big business for centuries on Zanzibar, where slaves fetched the highest prices in East Africa. Men from the Congo were especially valued for their strength, and women from Ethiopia for their beauty. Today women from some tribes in Tanzania still practice facial mutilation – piercing their upper lip and threading a bone through – which arose out of the slave trade, when women would do this to make themselves “ugly” and therefore be useless as slaves. Slave masters were not only Europeans and Arabs, but also Indians and Africans – basically anyone with a lot of money.

We saw a cave that was used as a holding cell during the sultanate, where slaves were kept until they were ready to be sold. Today the cave has a steep stairway that allows tourists to descend the 50 meters or so to the bottom, but the slaves were lowered down using ropes. There’s a natural spring inside, and an underground tunnel leading to the ocean through which slaves were smuggled to awaiting boats. Only a third of slaves survived the journey across the ocean.

Kids are everywhere in Africa, and the spice plantation was no exception. What was different, however, was that some of these kids spoke German, which quickly endeared them to the German family, and was much cuter than any English- or Swahili-speaking kids I’ve ever come across in East Africa, for the mere fact that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

Unfortunately some types of communication are universal, and since Brady’s gone and I’m no longer accompanied by a man, I’m apparently required to be treated as a prostitute in this Muslim culture. When I got back to Stonetown this afternoon, 14-year-old boys decided that the proper way to address me was to follow me around making kissy sounds and pretending to swoon at the daring impossibility of a respectable woman walking around alone. I pictured each of them purple, cross-eyed and strangled in my bare hands, and that had to suffice. This may be vacation, but not every day ends as a carefree paradise.

Brady flew back to Nairobi early this morning, so I’m on my own for the rest of the trip. I was sad to send my partner in laziness back to the fast-paced rat race of his dust-covered village in Ukambani, where a tall pile of work awaited him. Uh…wait. I was sad to send my partner in laziness back to a land where, like Zanzibar, nothing is ever an emergency. Ever.

A van came to pick me up this morning to go to Kizimkazi, on the southern tip of Zanzibar, where we would take a boat out to try to see some dolphins. The “dolphin tour” has been talked down in several travel guides and magazines including the Lonely Planet for being rather unfriendly towards the dolphins themselves. Apparently a lot of boats aggressively chase down dolphins and generally disturb them in their natural habitat just so tourists can get a glimpse of them. Despite all the shortcomings of the boat we took, I have to say that at least our operator wasn’t of the “hunt and chase” variety.

The British couple turned up on the same tour (the male half of whom, incidentally, resembled Gael Garcia Bernal), as well as a Swedish expat living in Zambia, her 4-year-old granddaughter, and an Indian couple from Dar es Salaam. The van dumped us at a beach, where we were greeted by two different vendors renting out the exact same snorkeling gear. The rental fee was included in the cost of the tour, so we didn’t really care whose snorkeling gear we used, but obviously the two vendors did, because they raced each other to our van as we pulled up so that they could abduct as many of us as possible and lead us to their shop.

After we selected our snorkels, a third guy came up and said he was renting life jackets. The couple from Dar had already paid for theirs, but the rest of us nearly started a riot.

“We’re not paying for life jackets. They’re required in the boats and they should be provided for free,” British Gael said.

“I’m certainly not paying for a life jacket for her,” the Swedish woman said, pointing to her granddaughter. “She’s four years old and they’ve got to give her a life jacket. She can’t go out there without a life jacket.”

“Where’s our captain? We demand to talk to him.”

“It’s illegal in this country to operate a passenger boat without life jackets,” we said, not actually sure if it was true. “If anything they should be included in the cost of the tour, but we’re certainly not paying extra for them.”

In typical fashion, the life jacket scam man refused to acknowledge what we were saying, and presented a bunch of lame excuses instead, hoping we would get confused about the real issue and just shell out the money.

“This is my shop,” he said. “I sell life jackets. You must pay for them. Only 2000 shillings, I give you good price.”

The boat captain came over and tried to further explain the incompetence we were currently witnessing. “I have life jackets on my boat,” he said. “But they are broken. So you must pay this man.”

“Can’t you swim?” the captain asked us, as an afterthought.

“Yes, we can all swim, but it doesn’t matter. If the boat capsizes we’ll need life jackets,” we all said in various impatient tones. “And the girl can’t swim.”

“So you pay for a life jacket for her.”

“Do you understand that without providing life jackets you’re running an illegal operation?” British Gael said. “Are you even licensed? Show us your license.”

“Ah, my friend,” the captain said. “I have left it at home.”

“So what you’re saying is, you’re not even licensed to operate a motorized boat, and you want us to pay for life jackets because you’re breaking the law.”

“This is my shop,” the life jacket man said again. “If you want life jackets you must pay.”

“That’s wrong and illegal, and if you don’t provide life jackets for free we will all get back into the van and go home,” British Gael said, looking at the rest of us to make sure we’d back him up.

We all nodded, looking back at the van to make sure it was still there. It suddenly dawned on us that we hadn’t been given receipts for the tour. The van could have driven away and if we ever found them they could have denied that we ever paid for anything.

The captain finally offered to let us try the broken life jackets in his boat. If we could get them to work, we could use them for free. So, um, how exactly do you break a life jacket? And even if you manage to break one, how do you end up breaking several, all in the same boat?

All of us, except for the couple from Dar, were ex-pats living in Africa. We were all too familiar with how things work, and more often, don’t work. So we should have known better.

In fact, I think we did know better, but we were hoping that since there was a group of us that our demands might have some weight, as opposed to, for example, when I’m the only person complaining on a matatu stuffed with 25 people, even though everyone else is thinking the same thing but not willing to do anything about it.

It was low tide, and the beach was really long and flat, so it took us ten minutes to walk out to the boat. The water was knee-deep in some places and full of sea urchins. The Swedish girl had taken a liking to me in the van, and waded next to me, chatting away.

I’ve developed a reflex where if I see a young kid it means I have to speak to them in Swahili. So when this girl starting talking to me, I couldn’t stop marveling about the not-so-remarkable fact that a four-year-old was speaking to me in English.

“My Mum took me on a safari. There were a lot of zebras. We saw lions, and giraffes, and then we went to the zoo and saw monkeys,” she said. “Do you like elephants? Elephants are my favorite.”

“See those black spiky things in the water, under all the rocks?” I said, excited that I could use adjectives and adverbs.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Don’t step on them,” I said. “They’ll sting you and it’ll hurt.”

“Are they alive? Are they animals?” she asked. God, this girl was brilliant!

“Yes, they’re sea urchins,” I said.

There were several guides who were escorting us out to the boat. As we got to one area with a lot of sea urchins, one of them asked me, “Do you want me to carry your baby for you?”

This is one of the great mysteries of East Africa. It’s easily assumed that this blond, curly-haired, blue-eyed girl must be my daughter. If I travel with a male colleague who is white, I’m often asked if he’s my brother. And the lady at my bakery thinks Neetha and I are sisters.

“You think we resemble?” I’d ask, thinking maybe she was using the term “sister” loosely, like when touts at the stage say, “Eh, sister, why can’t you buy some sunglass?”

“Yes, you are so similar,” she’d say.

“But she is tall and dark brown, and I’m short and light brown,” I’d say.

“It is true,” she’d say. “But the face is the same.” Apparently the way Harold looks like Kumar.

Anyway, we finally arrived at our boat, a motorized wooden dhow covered with a makeshift tarp which, we surmised from the large UNHCR logo stamped on it, used to be a tent from a refugee camp. We climbed inside the dhow, and guess what? No life jackets. I know that deep down none of us were surprised, but we were indignant nonetheless.

“You lied to us,” we said. “You said you had life jackets in the boat. You’ve been sailing around without life jackets. That’s illegal.”

British Gael got out of the boat. “I’m going back to the beach. I won’t go without life jackets,” he announced to the captain. To us he whispered, “I’ll go rent the damn things.”

The captain and some of the guides scrambled to a neighboring boat and found some life jackets. “Here! We have some! We will bring them.”

This seemed to appease British Gael enough that he got back into the boat. We left the captain to collect life jackets and settled into our seats. We inspected two of the life jackets, which were indeed broken – all the buckles were missing. They were also archaic models that were counter-intuitive to put on and possessed questionable flotation properties, but we practiced putting them on until we thought we might be able to do it in an emergency.

“Hey, they only brought us two life jackets,” someone observed. There were five of us. “Hey, where are the other life jackets?”

It was too late. Our captain had already sped us out to sea.

“You know,” British Gael’s girlfriend said, “I’m actually licensed to operate this type of motorboat.”

“Well, you’re more qualified than anyone else here,” I said.

“That’s worrying,” British Gael said, as we turned to look at the captain, who had passed the duty of operating the boat to a boy who had inexplicably joined our trip.

“It can’t be more worrying than the fact that a 12-year-old is now driving our boat.”

We motored around for a long time, and the beach kept getting farther and farther away, until it was just a thin white strip in the distance. Occasionally we’d pass other dhows carrying tourists hoping to see dolphins, and our captain would ask if they’d seen any. Almost an hour passed and we hadn’t seen a thing, except for a few snorkelers we mistook for dolphins. Disappointment was starting to set in. After the life jacket fiasco it would have been nice to at least see some dolphins, even though we knew that dolphin sightings weren’t guaranteed on these trips.

“This is not a dolphin tour at all,” the Swedish girl sighed, verbalizing sentiments the rest of us were reluctant to say out loud, the way only a four-year-old can get away with.

A few minutes later, we finally spotted them. There were several groups swimming together, in threes.

“Jump in!” our captain said. We looked at each other hesitantly. They had explained that this was what we were supposed to do, but it didn’t feel very natural to jump into the deep blue sea with a bunch of very large dolphins whose size could have easily rendered us dismembered if they so chose.

One by one we lowered ourselves into the water. The dolphins barely noticed, and with our fins and snorkels we were able to keep up with them with a leisurely kick. Despite their size, they are incredibly docile. I think it helps that their mouth is shaped into a perma-smile.

Dolphins are more amazing and beautiful up close than anything you’ve ever seen on National Geographic. It was breathtaking to watch them frolick in the sapphire water. We could almost touch them, but they were obviously acclimated to random snorkel-wearing people wanting to do just that because they stayed just beyond arm’s reach. I followed one group for awhile. It was a calf and two adults, and they would dive deep, then swim in an upward spiral with the calf in the middle. Dolphins are apparently rather fond of log-rolling underwater. Another group let me follow them for a short distance, then the trailing dolphin decided to take a crap in my face. Nature wins again.

It was one of those experiences that could never last long enough. I see why this tour gets mixed reviews. The experience of swimming with dolphins is unmatched by anything else, but after awhile I did feel like my “following” became “chasing.” As with any opportunity to see wild animals in their natural habitat, there is obviously some human encroachment on their territory and habits. But like any experience that exposes us to new things – people, animals, art – we gain an appreciation that we wouldn’t otherwise have. People who have the rare opportunity to swim with dolphins, I think, inevitably walk away with an appreciation for the beauty of dolphins and of nature itself that few people will ever have. It’s a tradeoff.

This same dilemma exists for tourism in general. A lot of people mourn the disappearance of traditional cultures, especially as modern cultures have more access to vacation destinations in developing countries. But contact and exchange between different cultures has happened throughout history, and cultures are constantly evolving because of it.

With animals – and natural destinations like forests, mountains and oceans – no matter how lightly we tread, there will always be environmental degradation as a result of tourism. But without tourism, and opportunities to experience places different from our own, we couldn’t develop the compassion and understanding that bridges ignorance, hatred and indifference – some of our planet’s most abundant natural resources.

British People Talk Funny. After the dolphin adventure our guides prepared a very meager lunch of fish and rice for us on the beach. I didn’t quite understand the dearth of portions considering how all of my African friends are not shy about piling several pounds of food onto my plate and insisting on seconds. But I figured it was our guides’ way of skimming as much of our tour fees into his own pocket as possible, because really, wazungu have plenty of money. Why not steal what they’ve paid in good faith?

Anyway, most of our clothes were at least a little wet from wading from the boat, so as we were waiting for our one-minnow meal, I hung my jeans on a post next to British Gael’s towel and said, “Remind me to take my pants down after lunch.”

There was a confused pause, and then he said with a tiny, withering grin, “You mean your trousers.”

(Photo by Brady Zieman)

April 26, Thursday. We headed north to Nungwi and the white sand clear blue cliche that so many people flock here for. Really, there’s not much to say that’s not already revealed on postcards of every beach paradise destination in the world. What I can say is that I’ve needed a vacation like this for a long time. No more backpacking across a country with clown-caliber infrastructure and crap buses while people constantly try to steal your stuff and rip you off, in the name of feeling like a hard-core independent traveler. That’s been everyday life for almost two years now, and I’ve stopped trying to be a hero because after awhile, being a hero starts to feel a lot like suffering.

For the next few days I did nothing productive and was harassed almost zero times, except for when Brady harassed me because I went back to our bungalow and took a nap after breakfast. Oh, wait. He didn’t do that, because he was taking a nap on the beach. WE ARE SO LAZY AND PROUD OF IT!!

The beaches are distinctly, if not lawfully, segregated on this part of the island. They’re the one part of Zanzibar that a mzungu can go and never really interact with locals beyond hotel staff and tour operators. Clean, silky white beaches are reserved for wazungu and anyone else who looks like they can afford to stay in one of the airy bungalows on stilts overlooking the ocean. Dirty beaches are open to anyone, meaning Zanzibaris, who don’t mind trudging barefoot through rotting seaweed and large carpets of crushed seashells cutting your feet and black, possibly-once-alive-goo and discarded timber from dhow builders and dead fish and rusty nails and glass bottles and impromptu choos created by kids.

April 27, Friday. Brady and I decided to take a break from napping and drinking cocktails, and managed to get ourselves onto a boat to go snorkeling off the coast of the neighboring island of Mnemba. On our tour was a group of animated Mennonite missionaries from the U.S. and a British couple whom we would continue to run into as we (and they) made our way around the island.

I wouldn’t rank the reef here among the world’s best, but if you can appreciate coral reef ecosystems for what they are instead of for how they don’t live up to the Great Barrier Reef, then it’s still an underwater wonderland with at least a hundred species of fish and other sea creatures, including the school of tiny stinging jellyfish and that inexplicably makes you realize that yesterday’s dinner is knocking to go out.

“Excuse me,” I yelled to our boat captain while I treaded water and let jellyfish feed on me. “I need to help myself.”

“Big or small?”

“Um, big.” I was speaking Swahili so the other tourists wouldn’t know that I had to poo. “Can you take me up to the beach?”

[Laughter.] “It’s a private beach, you can’t go there. Just wait.”

“Until when? I can’t wait.”

[More laughter and no sympathy.]

April 28, Saturday. We spent a day wandering through some of the villages around Nungwi, collecting shells on the beach, and following the sound of drums and boys reciting Islamic prayers. Late in the afternoon we found ourselves at an aquarium next to Mnarani Lighthouse, just east of Nungwi. The aquarium is actually a sea turtle conservation project. It’s small; just a man-made pond fed by the tide, where sea turtles are bred and raised until they’re old enough to be released. The babies are kept in plastic basins labeled with the batch’s date of birth, and there is a row of basins and small pools with young turtles of varying ages, from a few weeks old to three or four years. The pond is home to at least 20 adult turtles as well as several species of excitable fish. Included in the ticket price is as much fresh seaweed as you want, which you can feed to the turtles as you sit in a small alcove where they like to gather.

Adult sea turtles are rather large, with shells as big as 3 feet long. Brady has this ability to find wonder and beauty in things that would begin to bore people (well, me) after a short time, so he was totally geeking out on the turtles, repeatedly circling the pond with his camera, mesmerized by their deliberate, unruffled industriousness.

In contrast, this one here (me) decided that it would be entertaining to try to touch one in the eyeball. Needless to say, don’t try to poke a sea turtle in the eye. They may not move very fast and it may not hurt, but they’ll still snap at you with their toothless mouths, and for some reason this act of aggression makes you feel like a bigger jackass than, say, having to make the following phone call:

“Hi, Medical? Can you get rabies from a sea turtle?”

April 29, today. Well, three days of white sand laziness was enough for us. Brady wanted to see some monkeys on his last day of vacation, so we headed to Jozani Rainforest, home of the rare red colobus monkey. Rare indeed, but not shy. One minute into our hike, a troupe migrated right in front of us, leaping on low branches from tree to tree. It was pretty clear that they weren’t actually migrating, they were just checking us out, hoping to have their pictures taken. Our guide said that during the week when there are fewer tourists, the monkeys even make their way into the forest service offices, looking for company.

Our guide also took us into a mangrove forest at low tide, which is much less impressive and much more smelly than at high tide. There was a crumbling, half-renovated boardwalk winding through dark, stinky stands of red and black mangroves and their ground-dwelling crab and spider companions. I’m going to be one of those annoying comparative tourists now, and say that Jozani Forest is not the place to see a really cool mangrove forest if you’re a mangrove layperson. Try Bako National Park in Sarawak, Borneo.

What did impress us, though, was our guide’s ability to engage us in a lively conversation about witchcraft and other black magic practiced by local tribes, and then as soon as we started asking too many questions, becoming silent and ushering us quickly out of the forest. Was it for our own good? Was it to cover his own arse? This island has been plundered and exploited by foreigners for centuries now, but some mysteries will always remain deep in the African rainforest, carefully guarded against the prying eyes and moral judgments of outsiders.

(Photos by Brady Zieman, except for red colobus)

It’s just sweltering hot. I may have grown up in Houston, the world’s best and most miserable sauna, but at least there they have air conditioning. Also, for the last 15 years I’ve lived in: Chicago, San Francisco, and at 2,000 meters in Kenya. I don’t know hot anymore. It’s been years since I’ve smelled myself, and hopefully will be years before I do again.

Brady suggested that we go in search of spices to buy in bulk. We had contemplated the spice tour, which is standard on most people’s Zanzibar itineraries, but decided against it when we were told we wouldn’t be able to buy bulk spices. I personally get a little lost with a handful of whole cardamoms or a pod of vanilla beans, but it sounded like I would get a culinary education, so we set off for the market.

Man, trying to buy spices in bulk is like trying to buy illegal drugs. The first few people we talked to just shook their heads mysteriously and told us it wasn’t possible. A few spice vendors began referring us to one particular guy, who they had to track down. Our “dealer” finally showed up and led us to an unmarked, unassuming closet squeezed between some stalls of fruit.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“What do you have?” we said.

He unlocked the thin, creaky wooden door to reveal a dark, dusty room full of large gunny sacks. The sweet scent of cloves, cardamom and a potpourri of other spices wafted out, along with a charming musty smell that would become all too familiar on this island pounded constantly by monsoon rains.

“Karibu, karibu,” he said, welcoming us inside the closet that didn’t appear to have room for us to stand in. “I have cinnamon. You want cinnamon? I have cloves. You want cloves? Cardamoms, good price for you cardamoms. Ginger, good price for you.”

An hour later, after explaining repeatedly that we don’t actually want a whole kilo of cinnamon, maybe just a quarter kilo, and being told repeatedly that “bulk” meant we had to buy at least half a kilo, or enough to make French toast for five generations of offspring, we walked off with a respectable stash of spices, all for less than $30. Our booty included three packets of saffron the size of my palm for about $5, not exactly shabby; a handful of whole nutmeg, although neither of us know how to get the spice from the nutmeg; whole green cardamoms; way too many black peppercorns; cloves; cinnamon; whole mustard seeds; white peppercorns; a bag of curry leaves and a bundle of vanilla pods.

So, um, if you come over to my house anytime in the next 75 years, I’ll make you pilau.

Urojo! As we were walking back from the market with our spices we passed a small crowd of people sitting inside a shop eating something out of bowls. Neither of us really noticed until Brady said, “Hey, do you smell that?”

I did, and it was beautiful. We backtracked until we found a couple of old mamas deep frying balls of unidentified starch-like substances.

“What is it?” I asked in Swahili.

“Five hundred shillings,” the mama said.

“No, I’m asking what it is,” I said.

“You tell her how much you want, for one hundred, two hundred, three hundred shillings, and she’ll give you,” one of the customers said.

“It has potatoes?” I suggested, trying to get an actual answer.

“Yes,” the mama said.

“And what are these balls?”

“How much do you want?” the mama demanded.

So much for improving communication by knowing the local language. “I’d like three hundred.”

Whatever it was, was delicious. It had potatoes, bajias made of chickpeas and fried cassava chips in a cold soup made of coconut, lemon juice and chili sauce. It was so good that we bought another bowl, and agreed to come back later.

And after a lot of asking around, I finally found my answer: It’s called urojo.

(Photos by Brady Zieman)

I had eleven leave days to use before May 3, due to a Peace Corps policy restricting us from taking vacation during our last three months of service. So I’m off to Zanzibar Island, off the coast of Tanzania, with Brady in tow.

First of all, this has to be one of the coolest flights I’ve been on – Nairobi to Zanzibar. We flew right by the snows of Kilimanjaro, and the book title doesn’t lie. There’s lots of snow up there.

Tanzanian shillings are a bit shocking after Kenya. The exchange rate is about 1250 Tsh to 1 USD, and about 18 Tsh to 1 Ksh. So when the taxi driver wanted 10,000 shillings to take us to Stonetown, we were a bit stunned, until we realized it was less than 600 Kenyan shillings. (Later we would be at the market waiting for 250 Tsh (14 Ksh) in change, while all the vendors laughed at us for bothering with such a small amount. Hey, you can almost buy a soda for 14 Ksh in Kenya.)

Stonetown. It’s the main town on Zanzibar Island, where you’ll find most tourist accommodations and services, including internet and supermarkets. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, renowned for its old architecture, historical buildings and winding alleyways reminiscent of the various peoples who have inhabited the island throughout history.

Although it’s similar in feel to Lamu - waterfronts dotted with languid dhows bobbing on a gentle tide, whitewashed buildings, ornately carved wooden doorways, mosques, skull-numbing calls to prayer around the clock, and a distinctly Arabic feel – it’s also a typical African town with a chaotic bus stage (featuring the Tanzanian equivalent of matatus, dalla-dallas, which are basically glorified pickup trucks with two benches in the pickup bed for the comfort of the passengers who are packed in like sardines), random and alarmingly large piles of garbage everywhere, random and alarmingly large piles of not-so-mysterious brown stuff in places that are not the choo, vehicles spewing black clouds of toxic smoke into the air, and lots of people in various states of employment and/or sobriety harassing you for things, or for being foreign.

There’s a decent market in Stonetown, next to the stage, with decent local fruits and vegetables, and lots of spice vendors hoping for gullible tourists willing to pay mzungu prices. There’s also a pretty impressive chicken market with the equally impressive smell of live chickens, and conveniently located chicken-slaughterers and their vat of boiling water for people like me who prefer not to slaughter chickens ourselves. And of course, on the other side of town on the waterfront, a sizeable fish market with a sizeable fish market smell.

Quick Historical Geography, or Geographic History. For centuries Zanzibar has been a preferred destination for explorers, merchants and rulers from places as diverse as Portugal, Persia, Oman, India and Britain. Like many areas of the East African coast (Lamu comes to mind), there is an Italian ex-pat community on Zanzibar, whom I’d like to thank for bringing gelato to the non-Italian world.

The Zanzibar archipelago used to be made up of Zanzibar Island (called Unguja by locals), Pemba Island and Mombasa, all of which were part of the British Protectorate in the late 19th century. After independence from the British in the 1960s, Mombasa became part of Kenya while the remaining islands became part of Tanzania.

Interestingly, Tanzania was called Tanganyika until Zanzibar was incorporated into it. Mathematically: Tanganyika + Zanzibar = Tan-Zan-ia.

Today there is still a lot of political tension and resentment between mainland Tanzanians and Zanzibaris.

Also, Freddie Mercury Lived Here. The guy from the band Queen was apparently born and raised on Zanzibar, and someone was keen enough to exploit this bit of trivia to rake in tourist bucks. Such is the story of Mercury’s, a mostly mzungu joint overlooking the beach with spectacular sunset views, tasty seafood, half-decent cocktails (it’s still Africa, after all), cold beer and a selection of t-shirts that say, “Mzungu.” Prices are also “mzungu.” Despite this, Brady and I spent a good portion of our time in Stonetown keeping ourselves hydrated at Mercury’s, watching the pickup football (futbol) game on the beach, and the cast of characters that came with it, like the kid wearing a life vest ostensibly fashioned out of discarded foam padding from an shipment of TVs.

Speaking of TVs, there is a giant banyan tree in town that has, inexplicably, a broken and rather large-screened TV jabbed into the trunk at eye level.

(Photos by Brady Zieman, except Mt. Kilimanjaro)

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Sunset Over Lake Victoria, From the Aptly Named Sunset Hotel in Kisumu

I’m teaching another of my apparently very popular HIV workshops, this time to members of Neetha’s organization, which provides support and care to orphans. Neetha herself is out of town for a different workshop, so I’m staying at her house for three days while I teach. Observation #1 about her house, which I’d never noticed because I’d never lived in it: Neetha owns exactly four dishes. One of these belongs to the cat.

Not that I’m complaining (too much); she’s letting me use her cooking gas, sleep in her bed, bathe with her self-fetched water, and drink the milk her neighbor brings her twice a day. Observation #2 about her house: Her cat looks like an evil Anime cat, complete with big pointy ears, giant Siamese eyes with black slits for pupils, and a tiny nose and mouth for expressing disapproval. It’s hilarious.

I also brought Fatso along, because I leaving her alone with three days worth of food usually results in lines of enthusiastic ants marching all over my house. So this morning I stuffed her into a pillowcase, and boarded a matatu to Neetha’s village. Fatso hates the pillowcase and was meowing loudly, which was immensely entertaining to all the other passengers, who couldn’t stop laughing.

“It’s a pussy?” they would ask.

“Yes,” I’d say, as if there was any doubt.

“It’s your pussy?”

“Yes,” I’d sigh, mentally noting the innuendo that would have existed if this conversation had happened in the States, but that was un-ironically absent because we were in Kenya. “It’s my pussy.”

After a few minutes I let Fatso out and held her in my lap for awhile, which seemed to calm her down a bit and make everyone giggle.

“Oh, you have such a beautiful pussy,” said the man in the front seat, as people behind me continued to laugh inexplicably. I knew they weren’t laughing about the word “pussy,” which is what I would’ve been laughing about, if I’d been laughing.

Fatso put her front paws on my chest, which sent the entire matatu into fresh gales of laughter.

“It wants juju!” the women howled.

Juju, I decided, must have something to do with breastfeeding or breastmilk, which didn’t make it any funnier to me. I let them enjoy themselves, thinking resigned thoughts about how juvenile their sense of humor was.

Apparently they took my non-involvement to mean that I hadn’t understood them. And apparently this joke was so good that they had to share it with me.

“Juju,” the matatu conductor tried to explain, looking at my boobs.

“I know,” I nodded vigorously, indicating that I understood and no further explanation was needed, especially not one using my boobs as a visual.

“Juju,” he said again. “Here.”

He put his finger an inch away from my nipple.

“I GOT IT,” I said, sending everyone into hysterics again.

Side Note On Ants, From My Aunt. Here’s a trick I learned from my relatives in Taiwan. Instead of spraying toxic Doom – aka Raid – all over your kitchen when you have an ant invasion, swab all the cracks in the counters, walls, floors, etc with that Chinese herbal stuff that’s made from camphor oil and menthol. I don’t know what it’s called but it’s basically liquid Tiger Balm, and it’s available in Kenya. It’ll keep the ants away until you get around to cleaning, and you won’t coat all your food with a tasty layer of poison. Plus your kitchen will smell just like a Chinese grandmother.

Oh Yeah, The Workshop. The workshop is based on a Training of Trainers (TOT) model, which emphasizes discussion and analysis of issues surrounding HIV/AIDS like cultural practices, gender inequality and communication skills, rather than rote memorization of acronyms and biology. So inevitably, the conversation turns to all sorts of interesting cultural insights and quotable quotes that sometimes end up on my blog.

For example, I always get stumped by the belief among adult Kenyans that if you talk with children about sex, they will immediately run out and try it. I tried to explain that studies comparing young people who attend sex education classes and those who attend abstinence-only classes show that there is no difference in the age at which these kids first have sex. Other studies show that kids who know more about sex tend to delay their sexual debut slightly longer than kids who don’t. Talking frankly about sex creates healthy attitudes, and empowers kids to make informed choices.

The response is always the same. “America is a very open society,” they say. “It’s okay to speak openly about sex and boyfriends and girlfriends. But here, we cannot.”

I never know what to say at this point, without sounding judgmental and inappropriate. Especially after someone said today, “If a girl brings her boyfriend home for lunch with her parents, she will be killed.”

Killed?

I wasn’t sure if they meant that literally, but the point was made.

Then there’s the insistence that condoms have holes, and the corresponding resistance to all my assurances to the contrary. I’ve decided that the “condoms have holes” myth has been so completely drilled into people’s heads that I’m fighting a losing battle trying to convince people otherwise. No matter what kinds of demonstrations I do – blowing up condoms and tying the end, submerging them in water to show there are no air bubbles escaping – or what kinds of numbers I present about diameters of HIV and oxygen and pores in latex – the “condoms have holes” damage is done, and thousands of PCVs all around the world can’t undo it.

The argument is seemingly convincing: Latex has microscopic pores in it. So HIV can sometimes pass through, rendering condoms effective only 75% of the time.

First of all it amazes me that someone went to the trouble to cook up something like this. My response is always to point out the math.

“The truth is that condoms are effective 99% of the time when used correctly. I know you may not believe me, and I can’t force you to. But let’s assume that your number is right, that they are only effective 75% of the time. So if you use a condom, chances are 25% that you could get HIV. But if you don’t, chances are much closer to 100% that you could get HIV. Which are better odds?”

People always state the obvious answer. They would choose to use condoms. But the truth is that the “condoms have holes” myth isn’t the biggest problem. It strikes me more as an elaborate stunt pulled by churches to further their own social agendas, and it distracts from other factors.

People don’t avoid condoms because they think they have holes. They avoid them because there’s so much social taboo against using them. With your wife, because you’re both supposed to be faithful. With your girlfriend, because only prostitutes use condoms. In general, because they don’t feel as good and it’s not manly. And ultimately, because you could go to all this effort to make sure you use condoms to protect yourself, and tomorrow you die in a matatu accident, not of AIDS.

How do you respond to such a complex litany of excuses? At this point, I’ve almost come full circle. It’s embarrassing to say this, but George W. would be proud.

Now, I just say, “Well, then, abstain.”

And then I think in my head, “It’ll save the world from irresponsible people spawning their irresponsibility into the already fetid gene pool, and their genital ulcers into other un-ulcerated genitals, and their HIV-positive dependency into the deep pockets of international aid ear-marked for this immense social, political and economic scourge that may or may not be out-smarted by worldwide intervention anytime soon.”

And it’s about as effective as saying, “Use condoms.”

The whole ABC (Abstain, Be Faithful, Use Condoms) prevention campaign is deceptively simple on the surface, and a hugely controversial teaching aid pitting abstinence-only finger-waggers against freedom-of-choice liberals. And in Kenya, it just seems useless for anyone who teaches about AIDS.

This is why I’ve latched onto this TOT curriculum. It’s focus is on talking about things that are hard to talk about. It teaches people about the one thing that has historically proven itself to resolve almost every conflict and problem in life, at the individual and universal level: communication.

Well that, and death.

Warning: This is an actual rant. Vitriolic bile included.

Dry Season Is Back, Give Me Money. Well, I don’t know if the sudden spike in people asking me for money actually has to do with dry season, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s just one of those things that will never change, just as all those brain-dead idiots all across the country will never stop ching-chonging me.

(Incredibly, it is easier to get people to understand why it’s rude to beg me for money, or my laptop, or my chickens, than it is to get them to understand that “ching-chong” is not an actual Chinese word. And forget trying to explain why it’s mortally offensive to have it screamed at you by a grown-up, yet questionably intelligent, human being.)

The standard once-a-day beg from the regulars – the glue kids in my town, the crazy old lady with no teeth, the poor old gangrene man with stubs for legs who sits along the Nairobi-Uganda highway in Eldoret, the random drunk guy staggering down the road at nine in the morning – is something I’ve learned to tolerate, and laugh about.

It’s now funny to me that the same three glue kids always say the same thing everytime they see me:

“Chinese! Chakula! Nipe tano!” Chinese! Food! Give me five bob!

…even though I’ve never given them anything in the two years I’ve walked down that street, except for the 17 explanations about how my name isn’t “Chinese.” Apparently sniffing glue significantly reduces one’s short term memory, as well as one’s overall brain function.

But there’s something about experiencing the same pattern of so-called friendship literally dozens of times, with invariably the same result each time, that sucks out every last drop of trust and compassion for anyone but my closest friends.

The pattern goes like this:

1. Random stranger approaches me, acts all friendly, learns my name, what work I’m doing here, where I come from.

2. Random stranger, who now refers to him/herself as my friend, proceeds to suggest that we work together in the future.

3. Guaranteed, within the next two times we meet, I get hit up for money, or a job, or both.

4. I explain that I don’t have whatever it is that is being requested.

5. My new fake friend calls me a liar. “But you must have a job for me. You are a mzungu.”

If my new fake friend is really optimistic, he or she will ask again, the next time, or the time after that. “Hallo, Justina, my friend. Can you help me with one thousand shillings? I will return it straight away tomorrow.”

I mean, let me count all the different ways that statement is insulting, rude, and dishonest.

No, let me not waste my time.

Yes, let me waste my time. It will make me feel better.

1. I am not your friend. Friends don’t act all friendly towards anyone with white skin (I have argued and argued that I am brown, but my Kenyan friends – the real ones – insist I am white), and snub this same white skin the moment they realize there’s no money flying out of attached white hands.

2. Do you think that because my skin is “white” (light brownish) that a thousand shillings is nothing to me? That I have endless supplies of crispy thousand bob notes to pass out to all my fake friends? Did you miss class they day they taught the word “mjitoleaji”? Well, here’s the makeup lesson: IT MEANS VOLUTEER. I WORK FOR FREE.

3. You will not return it ever. Even if you won the lottery, you would not return it. Why do I say this? First, because I know you don’t actually consider me your friend (see #1). Second, because the following actual quote from a former – and might I add, corrupt – co-worker sums up a common sentiment among my fake friends: “Why do you care what I did with the money? It came from a mzungu. It is not our money, so why should we take care of it?”

Anyway, these are my fake friends. The ones who “borrowed” 200 shillings with the clear intention of never paying it back. The ones who borrowed my phone from 7pm every night until 8am the next morning to send idiotic love messages to their 15-year-old girlfriend, who was basically trading sex for money to travel home during school breaks. The ones who “borrowed” 1000 shillings to pay hospital bills for their sick wife, who was never really sick, and who never had a baby who supposedly died, which spurred another request for money to pay for funeral expenses. The ones who learned my name so that they could ask me for a job, any job, I’ll do anything, I don’t care, because I don’t have any skills but my family is starving because my husband is a good-for-nothing drunk. The ones who hung out with me so that they could ask me to set them up with one of my “white gal friends,” one who is just bursting with eagerness to find a Kenyan husband to bring back to America.

My fake friends are the ones who taught me the hard way that nothing productive comes out of indulging a request for money, or a job, or a visa to America.

And my real friends are the ones who suffer the consequences.

Because being asked for money by a real friend, someone whose sincerity and friendship I trust, is profoundly upsetting. It feels like a betrayal, and my first reaction is to want to end the friendship.

I got an sms last week from Nick saying that he had been promised a job and that he wanted me to give him 1600 shillings for documentation fees (driver’s license, etc.) I was in Kisumu for a meeting at the time, so I just ignored him. I was angry that he was asking me for money because it suddenly made our friendship seem like a lie, something he had cultivated just so he could milk me for money some day.

All this time I thought he knew better than to become the cliché that everyone else is. But just like all the people he regularly bad-mouths and looks down on for their ignorance towards white skin, when the time came and he needed money, who was the first person he turned to? Not his friend Justina. No, he turned to his mzungu, Justina.

When I got back to site, he called me. I was still fuming and didn’t want to talk to him, so I ignored his calls. I knew I would only explode at him if I talked to him at that point. Sixteen hundred shillings is a sizeable chunk of money for a freaking MJITOLEAJI, but it seemed as if my white (light brownish) skin had blinded my friend to this fact. I locked my gate, drew the curtains and bolted my door so it would look like I wasn’t home, in case Nick dropped by. Four hours later, I decided I was being an idiot, and went to the market to shop for dinner. Nick found me there.

I was calmer, but still annoyed. He made friendly small talk for a few minutes before saying what he had really come there to say, as if it were a mystery to either of us.

“Did you get my sms last week?” he began.

“I’m not going to give you money,” I blurted out. “Sixteen hundred is a lot of money, and I can’t give it to you. I’ve had too many people asking me for money, and they cheat me, and they lie, and I just can’t give anyone money anymore. Sorry. I’d like to help you but I can’t.”

Nick’s usually cheery face fell ever so slightly, only noticeable to me. “Okay,” he said bravely. “I understand. It’s okay.”

It was a devastating blow to him. I felt a huge sense of relief, and a deep sense of guilt that I hadn’t helped my friend when he needed help. And I felt livid anger towards all my fake friends who taught me what happens when I help people who ask for help. Nick wasn’t lying about what he needed the money for, or how much he needed. But I was tired – I am tired – of feeling a sense of obligation to help someone simply because I have more than they do.

I would rather sit with the immense guilt, and the uncomfortable tension that will hang between us for the next few weeks, than internalize the resentment and anger that always comes with “loaning” money that I know will never be repaid, and more importantly will never reap the returns that the borrower is hoping for, whether it’s a job, an income-generating project, or a visa to America.

Money doesn’t buy as much as people think in Kenya, where so many hopes are precariously buoyed, and dashed, by false promises.

There Is, Of Course, A Rational Explanation. Rich told me this story recently: Once upon a time there was a PCV who wrote a proposal for a project she wanted to start at her site. When the funding came through, she asked her supervisor, a Kenyan, to manage the funds for the project. He was an honest man, and she trusted him implicitly.

The supervisor told her, “If you give me the funds, I’m obligated to give the money away to anyone who asks for it. That’s the way it is in our culture. Please, ask someone else to handle the funds because I will not use them properly.”

It kind of makes you want to trust him even more, doesn’t it?

I think this story explains a lot about why Kenyans are constantly asking me to give them things. This is a collectivist culture. People are obligated to help others when asked, especially if it is obvious that they have something to give. If a neighbor sees that you have more than enough food in your shamba to feed your family today, he will assume that the excess is available for his own consumption.

Even today, Matthew (my chicken caretaker) saw my flourishing onion plants and said, “I will come and take some.” He didn’t say, “You have so many onions, is it okay if I take a few?”

He also told me that he had been helping himself to my onions while I was away last week, which was a bit irritating because he hadn’t asked if it was okay. Instead, there was this implied expectation that of course it was okay, because I have so many, and I wasn’t even around last week to eat my onions, so he might as well.

I think this is the same logic that makes it culturally acceptable to walk into anyone’s house and expect to be fed. It’s why people always make extra food in case they have visitors, and why it’s not considered rude when someone – or some five people – show up for dinner unannounced.

It’s also the logic behind the publicly-extolled, privately-despised practice immortalized in the Kenyan national motto, “Harambee.” A harambee is basically a fundraiser that you hold when you need a large sum of money for something big, like school fees or a wedding. You invite everyone you know, especially people who have money, designate a “Guest of Honor” (a euphemism for the person who is expected to give the most money), and throw a big party with food and sodas. In exchange, everyone who attends is expected to donate to the cause. It’s a good concept in theory, and goes back to this collectivist idea that you are never alone. Your family, your friends, your tribe, and your community will never abandon you in a time of need. People who are bound together, stick together.

But in this second most corrupt country in Africa, some people also use harambees to exploit the system. There is immense social pressure to attend a harambee and contribute money. If you don’t, the logic goes, no one will be there for you when you need help. So some people throw harambees just to make free money, and lie about a cause. That’s what the good pastor and con-artist Nelson tried to do, a few months before he made his great escape from my village with tens of thousands of shillings of his neighbors’ money. Fortunately for the harambee, he was a poor organizer, and attempted to throw it together two days before. No one showed up, because most people hadn’t even received their invitations yet.

Anyway, I do get worked up when people ask me for things. Even if I live here for 15 more years (please shoot me if I do) I will still get worked up every time someone begins a sentence with, “You give me…” And I will still blow steam out of my ears every time my real friends ask for money, and spend a day or two contemplating the best way to dump them as coldly and harshly as possible.

But having the understanding that the distinction between “mine” and “yours” is much more blurred here than it is in my own culture helps soften all those initial reactions. My real friends here have given me so much more than I could ever give them – things that are immeasurable because they’re intangible. Sometimes it feels unfair that I refuse, on principle, to give them money when they ask for it.

There’s no good answer to this conflict I have with myself, but it’s comforting to know that because they’re my real friends, they’re not keeping score.

April 16, 2007. I just got a letter from my beloved homestay family in Kitui asking for 28,000 shillings to install electricity.

They’re not keeping score.

They’re not keeping score.

They’re not keeping score.

My Cat Is Not A Vegetarian. I just watched Fatso hunt down, torture and eat a gecko. Part of me felt like I should have done something to rescue it, but two years in rural Kenya does something to a person’s sense of Darwinian intervention. The cycle of life is the cycle of life. Cats hunt, geckos run. Plus, it was kind of like watching a train wreck. I really wanted to see every gory detail, from start to finish.

Fatso’s quite the hunter. My house is more free of creepy crawlies than it has ever been. My spider problem is now my former spider problem. Mice don’t bother coming inside. A line of ants is to Fatso what cereal dust is to a little kid. You know, tongues dabbing at stuff.

This gecko was…crunchy. I watched her bat it around for a few minutes, the gecko flopped on its back playing dead hoping she would go away. It looked miserable, and you could see the life slowing seeping out of its beady black eyes. Fatso kept batting it against my mattress and pushing it under my sheets, trying to get it to twitch so she could bat it around some more. I made a note to myself to remember where she left the body so I wouldn’t have any surprise gifts in the morning. But I didn’t have to. Fatso batted the gecko under my desk and ate it. And it sounded like this:

Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Then she went over to where she had left the tail (which had broken off early in the hunt) and polished that off, too.

Crunch crunch crunch.

I Have Internet At Home! I’ve finally joined the modern world in Kenya. The newest group of volunteers, who arrived in September, all bought internet-enabled phones. It was something that I’d only vaguely heard about through the Peace Corps grapevine and one of my blog readers, and just recently I realized it would be a great thing to have. I mean, internet access in my very own house! So I spent three months thinking about it, and talking myself out of it, and then finally bought the phone last week. The best part is that the phone works in the States, too, so it’s 7,000 shillings unwasted.

The phone accesses the internet through the cell network, so I can theoretically get internet anywhere there’s cell phone coverage. It’s really cheap, something like 1 shilling per 70K of data downloaded. I usually spend about half a shilling to check my email. As if that weren’t enough, Opera makes software for mobile phones (Opera Mini, go to http://mini.opera.com) that basically compresses web pages into a few basic elements (mostly text) so a 50K page might end up being only 3K or so. I’m now working on getting software for my laptop so I can browse from my computer, instead of from the tiny screen on my phone.

I’m usually the last to discover new technology, so I won’t be surprised if I get a bunch of comments on this post telling me that this has been around for a couple of years now.

I heard on the BBC last week that temperatures around the world have been 2-3 degrees higher this year than ever before. Apparently this is a very significant rise, and has caused a lot of countries’ dry seasons to be longer and dryer than usual. That would explain why it’s almost the end of March and the rains just started today. Hopefully they’ve started for good. My washcloth is a disturbing color of brown.

We’ve been getting one day of rain every 7-10 days for the last couple of months, but today feels like rainy season rain. Long, cold and really wet. I finally planted a few seeds in my tiny little plot that vaguely resembles a shamba. I’ve planted eight rows of vegetables, because that’s as much room as I have. And I had to buy KukuNet (chicken wire) to fence it off from my chickens. The maize that I’ve been throwing in the yard for them has sprouted into, surprise, maize plants! I got a tomato plant after I tossed them a rotten tomato, too. Nature is pretty amazing.

Godi Strikes Again. I don’t see him much because he is often in the field for weeks at a time conducting mobile VCTs. But he always has something culturally significant (to me) and blog-worthy (to you) to say, so when he’s in the office I try to chat him up a bit.

Recently I’ve been campaigning for my organization to provide more support for career development of its counselors. I got the idea after one of our counselors told me she discourages clients from using condoms.

“Uhhhhh…you do whuhhhht?” I said.

“Well, condoms can sometimes be unreliable so I tell them not to use them,” she said.

“They’re unreliable 1 percent of the time, usually because people use them incorrectly,” I said. “As a VCT counselor, shouldn’t you be telling people how to avoid getting AIDS? How are people supposed to protect themselves if you’re telling them not to use condoms?”

“I tell them to abstain,” she said.

“If a client comes for an HIV test, you can safely assume they’re not abstaining,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, starting to backpeddle. “I only tell them to abstain if they’re not married. Youth should not be having sex.”

“Do you really think a 19-year-old boy who is already having sex is going to start abstaining because you told him to?” I said.

“Oh,” she said again. Peddle peddle peddle. “I tell them about condoms. And I tell them about abstaining and being faithful. I give them all the information, and let them choose.”

The conversation bugged me. In order to become a VCT counselor, you’re supposed to attend a month-long training that includes how to give accurate and unbiased information. Once they start practicing, the counselors are supposed to be supervised so that this type of thing doesn’t happen.

“We have a problem with some counselors imposing their own morals on clients,” Godi said.

Great.

The PCV who was here before me had put together a small library of books on HIV, ARVs, STIs, health and other relevant topics for anyone on staff to access. The problem is that the management team all nodded enthusiastically and told the PCV that she’d done a great job, then promptly did nothing. Oh, except that they put all the materials in a locked cabinet and gave the only key to one of the counselors, who is rarely in the office because she goes out for mobile VCTs.

I suggested to Godi that counselors be encouraged to review the materials in this library, especially in their copious free time. Or that they simply be reminded at staff meetings that whenever they get a question from clients that they can’t answer, that the library is there to help them find answers. Godi told me he didn’t even know the resource center existed.

“Also you just can’t tell people,” he said, switching into embarrassed vague mode, which drives me crazy.

“You can’t tell people what?” I said.

“You can’t tell people things,” he said.

“I know, you just said that,” I said impatiently. “What can’t you tell them and why not?”

He just stared at me, his grin and his embarrassment growing. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

“Yes, you do!” I said. “You know. Why do you say you can’t tell people things?”

He paused for a long time, and I could tell the cogs were turning in his head trying to figure out how to explain something to a mzungu that a mzungu can’t understand.

“You sometimes want to tell someone some things, but it’s not good, so you just keep quiet,” he said.

AAAARGGHHH!!! I just stared at him across the table, slack-jawed, my cheekbone cupped in my hand.

“We don’t have a learning culture,” he said finally. “If you tell someone to improve, maybe they can never talk to you again. People don’t want to admit they don’t know something. They don’t want to admit they’ve made a mistake. So to tell people to use the resource center is very hard.”

“Ah,” I said. “So asking someone to research a question that they couldn’t answer during a counseling session wouldn’t work.”

“No, they can even give the client any answer, even a wrong one, just so they don’t look as if they don’t know the answer,” he said. “So it is very hard to have a learning culture.”

Great.

Well, I’m still waiting for the lady with the key to get back, so I can rummage around the library and see what we can do to encourage a learning culture among our staff. The good news is that there are people in my organization who are always eager to add to their technical knowledge, who ask for advice when they don’t know the answers, and who believe that there’s always an opportunity to improve their skills. Is it possible to spread this mentality to other staff members? We’ll see.

OWLS=Old Growth Forest in the U.S., Death in Kenya. I’m designing this year’s t-shirt for Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), the annual leadership camp that Peace Corps hosts for secondary school girls in Kenya. I racked my brain for design ideas that fit the following criteria:

Meaningful to Kenyan girls

Not offensive to Kenyan girls

Not offensive to any other Kenyan

Attractive and fun to Kenyan girls

I was worried because my knowledge of Kenyan symbols is limited. I didn’t want to inadvertently use something that is widely regarded in Kenya as bad luck or just unappealing (chameleons, slugs, snakes, rats), and I didn’t want to create something that I thought was profoundly clever, but that the girls wouldn’t get.

For example, one of my favorite lines from the poem A Woman’s Creed is, “We are the women men warned us about.” Well, Kenyan girls don’t find it especially amusing, even after I explain it.

Earlier that day Nick had told me that owls are regarded as bad luck. If you see an owl land in a tree, he said, it means someone will die. He says it has happened several times to people he knows. There is even a special way to chase the owl away to break the curse (light a tree branch on fire and throw it at the owl).

So, no owls, no snakes, no chameleons, no slugs. I finally decided on sunflowers in various stages of growth. The girls who attend Camp GLOW grow so much in the course of the week, and what girl doesn’t like sunflowers? Even I like sunflowers, and I hate clothes with flowers on them. As far as I know there are no negative associations with sunflowers here. I mean, they have farms for them up near Kitale.

P.S. OWLS is the mnemonic that kids in California learn for identifying an old growth forest. You know a forest is old growth because it:

is Old

has Woody debris

has a Layered canopy

has Snags

Neat, huh?

Food Is the Most Important Meal of the Day. I’ve never been much of a Thai chef, because there’s always a good Thai restaurant around the corner…in San Francisco. So I’d pretty much written off the possibility of Thai food in Kenya, until Brady introduced me to lemongrass and fish sauce, which are both available at Nakumatt. I can now make a stripped-down tom yum soup base! It’s ginger, lemongrass, fish sauce, chili paste (the Thai stuff that uses shrimp), coconut milk, vinegar and lemon juice. For the food part I add beef, shitake mushrooms, green onions and (gasp!) Ramen noodles. Hey, you gotta improvise. Kaffir lime is also a key ingredient, and one that’s not so easily found in Kenya. I don’t even know what it is. Is it a fruit? Is it an herb?

Dr. Patti, the Peace Corps doctor, came by my town today for a site visit. The visit was for basic assessments – what’s my water situation, what’s my safety and security situation, do I have electricity, are my pets clean and immunized, do I have a hole-free mosquito net, any potential health hazards at my site, how’s my mental condition, am I diarrhea free, etc.

She saw a list on my wall called “USA, So Far Away,” listing things I miss from home, and saw that one of the items was asparagus.

“You know, we get lovely asparagus in Nairobi,” she said. “You should look for it at Sarit Center next time you’re in town.”

Suddenly she seemed to change her mind, and picked up her phone. “Honey,” she said to her husband on the other end. “Could you add asparagus to the shopping list? I’m with a volunteer who wrote it on a list of things she misses from home. She’ll pick it up when she comes to Nairobi.”

Eeeeeeeeee!!! It’s small acts of kindness like this that makes her so amazing, in addition to her competence as a doctor. She also brought me a jar of Nutella, not easily found in Kenya. There are a few people on the medical staff who have similar hearts of kindness. One of the nurses sent a large plate of cheese and crackers to our in-service training in Kitui, knowing that a lot of PCVs miss this staple hors d’oeuvre in cheese-deficient Kenya. Another nurse gave me the leftovers from her lunch, the exact contents of which I now forget, but it was something American, had meat, and included a salad. And most importantly, she let me heat it up in the microwave. The microwave!!! I’d forgotten those things exist.

SMS I received today: “I

I can’t believe I’ve lived an hour’s bike ride away from the forest for almost two years, and haven’t really spent a lot of time there. It’s a minor tourist destination for people who actually make it out to Western Kenya, or who are working their way towards Kisumu or Uganda, but it takes a few days and some exploring to find its best-kept secrets. There are scores of trails winding through the forest, but only one is helpfully marked with a destination and estimated hiking time (River Yala, 3 Hours). Even that one has a confusing hairpin turn with a few side trails branching off in different directions, all of which I’m sure end up at the foot of a mass grave full of decomposing tourists still clutching their Nalgene bottles.

A few weeks ago we saw a troupe of blue monkeys migrating past one of the campsites. A research assistant was jotting down notes and watching them through binoculars. She explained that this troupe was invading another troupe’s territory, and if the other troupe came along and discovered this, a massive fight would ensue. This particular troupe had about 40 members, including youth, and like all blue monkey troupes it was dominated by a single alpha male. The rest were all females, and they each had a particular ranking in the group. The research assistant was trying to establish which females were dominant over others based on their behavior during inter-group fights. At one point the monkeys dropped down from the trees one by one, crossed the lawn, and ran under the stilted guesthouse, where they began eating dirt. “Calcium,” the research assistant explained.

They’ve also renovated the bandas at the KEEP (Kakamega Environmental Education Program) center, which is a nice place to crash for the night. Each banda has beds and mosquito nets, and is constructed like traditional Luo (or Luhya?) homes with thatched roofs and a covered veranda with simple furniture to lounge in. There’s running water, solar electricity, newly constructed choos and bafus, a party banda, and friendly staff who will heat your bath water to scalding temperatures and cook local meals upon request. You want chicken? They’ll find you a chicken. All this under the forest canopy, for 500/= a night (extra for the cook). Fall asleep to the 24/7 tooting bird, strange insect noises, monkey calls and that creepy clicking jungle sound that you hear on Lost. Wake up to the 24/7 tooting bird, the Christmas bird (whose song sounds like the beginning of Silver Bells), and all sorts of other songbirds, including roosters.

Alternatively there is what I like to call the Rooms-On-Stilts. KEEP calls it their guesthouse, an aqua blue wooden structure raised one and a half stories up on stilts as if the area were prone to flooding. There are only four rooms available here, but each one has two beds with nets, a flushing toilet, and a bathtub with running water. An added bonus is that you can see the ground below through the floorboards, which sometimes bend under your weight. The Rooms-On-Stilts has a balcony that is eye-level with the forest canopy, and we were able to wake up one morning and watch blue monkeys and black-and-white colobuses over breakfast. And the best part is that each room, which sleeps two people, is only 770/=, or 385/= per person.

The only problem with the forest, especially if you’re exploring the areas around KEEP and Rondo Retreat, is that its business model involves KEEP members, who are from the local community, trained to constantly hit up tourists for guiding fees. You’ll be offered walking tours to the river, to the lookout, to the bat cave, night walks, bird-watching tours, monkey-watching tours, and lectures on local butterflies and snakes that include peeks at their meager collection of both. All of these tours are expensive (for the Peace Corps budget), starting from 400/= per person per hour. The first time I went to the forest I was tricked into a couple of these tours, which add up when you’re talking three or four hours of guided instruction on how to walk through the forest. It was informative as long as we kept asking questions. To our guide’s credit, she was knowledgeable. To her discredit, she wasn’t too keen on talking.

The forest is a great place to escape Kenyan village life. There are, of course, plenty of villages surrounding it, but once you get into the protected areas, it’s just you, monkeys, butterflies in every color imaginable, and crazy tooting birds. (Here’s a question: Is it true that someone came up with a mathematical formula for the flight pattern of a butterfly? Or did I just imagine it?) There’s almost nowhere else in Kenya so peaceful and relatively undamaged by people. I thought that with so many parks and reserves it would be easy for me to find wilderness in Kenya, but ironically those kinds of spaces are much more accessible in the U.S. Any unprotected land of any value in Kenya has been claimed for some purpose already – farming, firewood, grazing.

The Kakamega Forest is only a fraction of what it was just a few decades ago. Apparently it used to extend all the way down to Kisii. And before that, I’m told, it was part of the equatorial rainforest that stretched all the way to West Africa.

When I talk to locals living around the forest I realize that they place no value on conservation of forest lands. To them it’s firewood. Life is about survival, not lifestyle. When I stop to watch monkeys, they shake their heads and laugh.

“Don’t you think monkeys are neat?” I ask.

“No,” they say. “They are monkeys.”

“The trees and flowers in the forest are beautiful,” I say.

“No,” they reply. “It’s just trees.”

KEEP has done a lot to educate people from the surrounding villages about the importance of conserving the forest and its ecosystem, and it sounds like they’ve made some progress. Women are only allowed to gather firewood from certain areas of the forest where cypress farms have been planted, and they are being taught how to plant eucalyptus and other fast-growing trees on their own property for firewood. There are even community-based organizations that breed butterflies to sell to museums and zoos around the world as income-generating activities.

You visit me, I’ll take you to the forest. You can even pick your own chicken.

Isn't she cute?? Goo goo ga ga ga goo goo yes you are you are so cute yes you are awww who's a good girl who's a good kitty want some omena and ugali drool drool slobber

More Fun With High Context Speech. The mama who comes to wash my clothes said to me this morning, “Wewe ni huko.” You are over there. I was thinking, well, no, I’m right here. But I let her make her seemingly irrelevant and inaccurate observation undisturbed.

She repeated herself several times, until I started to suspect that she was asking me a question. “Wewe ni huko?” You are over there?

What a strange question, I thought. Can’t she see that I’m standing right here giving her blank looks because I don’t know what she’s talking about? And even if I weren’t right here, exactly where is this “over there” place that she thinks I am?

“Wewe huko?” she said, as if this clarified. You over there? “Wewe ni kazi?” You are work?

At this point, any Kenyan would have figured out what she was asking. I was only getting more confused by the minute. This lady has maybe an 8th grade education, but she’s not crazy. “Kazini,” she said. At work. “Wewe kazini.” You at work.

“Yes!” I said excitedly, finally getting her. “Yes! I’m going to work today!”

Whew. I will never master this language.

Fun With SMS. Yes, this is how many volunteers spend a significant portion of their living allowances. I stopped writing down brilliant smses after about three months, but I wish I had kept a log. Some good ones:

“Hmmm… Jst saw a barefoot guy in a parka preachn 2 a flaming garbage pile. I

Preparations for International Womens Day, which is this Thursday, are in full swing. After watching community leaders and boda-boda operators running around like chickens with their heads cut off (I’ve seen plenty of chickens doing it, and it looks ridiculous) in an attempt to “prepare” for World AIDS Day last December, Adrienne and I both vowed never to facilitate a community-wide event like that in my town again, especially one involving district officials.

Carren and I have been teaching an empowerment workshop at a girls’ high school outside of town, and I was perfectly content to restrict my IWD activities to this one project. I also distributed a few copies of an IWD flyer to some of my co-workers and encouraged them to talk to people about women’s rights and contributions, but beyond that I planned to be laissez-faire.

Well, somehow within 24 hours the flyer landed on the desk of the District Social Services office, which is in charge of events like this. The officer in charge quickly assembled an IWD committee that includes women from a local gender development NGO, and me. We have a week to mobilize people – to tell them about International Women’s Day, to get them interested in its themes, and to sell purple ribbons to raise money for the event.

Trying to talk to people about International Women’s Day has been interesting. Men always shrug it off as a day “for women only.” They don’t take it seriously for that exact reason. When I asked my supervisor if he wanted to buy a purple ribbon to show his support, he said, “I’ll ask my wife if she’s interested.”

I said, “March 8th is not just for women. It’s for everyone who supports equality and empowerment for women.”

“Women are already empowered,” he said.

“Oh, come on, they are not,” I laughed, fully expecting to see a big, sarcastic grin on his face. There wasn’t one. He was completely serious.

“Yes,” he said. “Women are empowered already. They do not need to be empowered again.”

I had no idea what he meant. I couldn’t put aside everything I’ve seen and heard in Kenya to the contrary, and simply ask why he thought that. Instead I said, “If women are so empowered, how come they’re the ones getting HIV? How come they’re having fifteen kids when they only want four?”

“Children are a blessing that God provides,” he said, as if I’d never heard that argument against family planning. “You get kids if it is God’s will.”

“Children are not a blessing when you can’t feed them all,” I said.

“You can feed them if you pray,” he said. “God will provide if you pray.”

“If prayer is the answer, why are there so many kids starving?” I asked, alluding to the fact that there is no shortage of prayer in Kenya.

“They are starving because their parents don’t pray,” he said.

Ah. Silly me.

This conversation was all the more frustrating because my supervisor is an educated man. He has lived all over Kenya. He runs a VCT, knows all the statistics about women and HIV, understands the social factors, including gender inequalities, that help spread HIV. He knows his community. He sees women and girls lose their futures, or their lives, to teen pregnancy, early marriages, lack of school fees, STDs, HIV, and the inability to decide what’s best for themselves.

It was disheartening because I know that my supervisor’s attitude represents the majority of men in my community. I kept emphasizing to the women on the IWD committee that when they go into their villages to talk about empowering women, they need to involve men, too. Women can only be empowered with the support of their brothers, fathers, pastors, neighbors and other men who care about them. As long as gender development activities are seen as “for women only,” a polarizing rather than uniting force, it will remain a struggle against the tide.

Later this afternoon I was at the chemist, wearing a purple ribbon. One of the pharmacists said, “This International Women’s Day, what will women buy for men on that day? You will buy us sodas.”

This prompted a female customer to begin ranting, “Women don’t have any rights. We ask for a Women’s Right Office at the district, and there is none. We are asking for rights, but there is no office to support us. So what can we do? We just have to go home to the same old husband.”

[Laughter all around.]

It’s still a long road ahead, but at least we’re stimulating discussion. I also discovered today that at first no one on the IWD committee was even clear about what the day is about. They all complained that when they went to talk to people about it, they didn’t know what to say. I was really glad and encouraged that these women had the self-awareness and initiative to ask for help.

When they saw the box of purple ribbons and quotes about women that I’d made, they wanted to help me make more. “They are so nice, it is not enough. People will want to buy many,” they insisted.

The most pleasant surprise of all, though, has been the support that we’ve received from the Social Services office. They are the ones that took the initiative to organize local women to plan the day’s activities. They began organizing a week in advance, which is extremely competent planning by Kenyan standards. The officer in charge even lectured the women for being three hours late to the first meeting. “We Africans cannot develop because we cannot keep time,” he said.

That morning I was in my house, debating whether it would be naïve to show up for the 9:00 meeting at 9:00. There was a series on the BBC about the significance of rice in Asian cultures, which I’d been looking forward to for a week (because the teaser sound bite featured a Chinese woman saying that her mom used to tell her that if she didn’t eat all her rice she’d marry a man with spots on his face, and I thought, hey, my mom told me the same thing!) The BBC report started at 9, and I knew the meeting wouldn’t start at exactly 9, but I decided to play it safe just in case government offices kept time better than regular Kenyans. I caught five minutes of the BBC series, and showed up at 9:20. The receptionist stared at me as if she wasn’t expecting any visitors for another few hours. I went to see the officer in charge, who told me to come back at 10:30.

“The others will probably be here by then,” he said. “We are poor here in Africa because we cannot keep time.”

I was upset that I had missed the BBC report for nothing, so in retaliation I didn’t go back to the office until 11. And I was still the only person who had shown up so far. The officer in charge began making phone calls. “If everyone is not here by 11:15 I will call off the meeting. It is you people who called for the meeting in the first place,” he barked into his cell phone.

Yeah. The meeting finally started at noon. Three hours late.

The Miracle of Washcloths. Dry season has finally arrived, two months late. (Even the weather is on Kenyan time.) But dry season means dust, and dust means I have to work harder to stay clean. The bath I used to take every three or four days now happens almost daily. And involves a washcloth. The standard splashing just doesn’t get things clean anymore. African dust clings fast. Washcloths are essential for people like me who are disturbed when their own face turns their pillowcase brown after three days. Ew.

Other essential hygiene habits for dry season: Daily hair brushing (to remove dust), daily q-tipping of ears (to remove dust), weekly cleaning and polishing of shoes (to remove dust), and weekly laundry (to remove dust).

Actually I don’t know why they’re called wet season and dry season. They should be called cold season and dusty season.

I Got A Cat! I wasn’t planning to. My friend mentioned that he had two kittens that he couldn’t keep, and he was planning to drown them in the river that weekend. I told him that if that was going to be their fate, then I would take them. I’d recently seen a mouse running around my house anyway.

Well, two weeks later, I still didn’t have any kittens, so I assumed that they had been taken for an impromptu swimming lesson and failed. It turns out, of course, that my friend and the kittens were just on Kenyan time. The next day he brought one over. I was afraid to ask what happened to the other one. (I later found out he had given it to his brother...whew!)

So I named her Fatso. She has a fat tummy, probably from worms. I’m still trying to think of another name because I’m not entirely happy with Fatso. It’s fitting, but not perfectly fitting. Amber suggested naming her AIDS. To reduce stigma, she said. What better way to show my friends and neighbors that AIDS is not a death sentence?

“Yes, I just got AIDS last month. And I’m very happy. In fact, I think I can live a long time with AIDS.”

International Women’s Day Is March 8. My co-worker Carren and I are doing a workshop at a local girls’ high school to get the students interested and involved in girls’ empowerment activities. Today was the first day, and it was relatively successful, considering that I haven’t taught high school kids in almost a year, and we were addressing 600 girls at once, most of whom couldn’t understand an American accent. It’s interesting to realize that sometimes English still needs to be translated into English, and humbling to realize that I really should learn to teach in Kiswahili.

This year’s IWD theme is “Ending Impunity for Violence Against Women and Girls.” I think it should also include ending impunity for violence against people who advocate ending violence against women and girls. Empowering women and girls to speak out for respect and equal rights is still not very popular in some crowds.

As much as I would love to see high school girls engaged in loud, outspoken protests and high-profile activism, the reality of getting these girls involved in a culturally-appropriate IWD is a lot more practical, and a lot less dramatic. Every community plans its own events for IWD; we will probably have the usual suspects: guest speakers who talk way too long, skits and poetry readings. Our workshop teaches basic skills like communication, self-esteem and assertiveness through interactive games and exercises. Today they played Fox Across the River, drew pictures of themselves in the career they want to have in ten years, and pondered the possibility of being sidelined by pregnancy. And they loved the fact that it didn’t resemble trigonometry class in any way.

Note to self: Six hundred high school girls is a lot. Bring more crayons.

http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/iwd/index.html

Hee Hee Hee Anus Hee Hee Hee. I asked Nicholas to start teaching me more Kiswahili proverbs. I think they are an extremely powerful form of communication in Kenya, and they usually make more sense to me than regular conversation. After almost two years here, I still don’t understand what people are talking about, even when I understand what they’re saying. Here’s an example:

I was checking out of a hotel and asked one of the staff where I should leave the key. I was coming out of my room, and he was mopping the hallway floor.

“Is it okay if I leave the key in the door?” I asked.

“Ingia ndani,” he said.

This literally means “enter inside.” The problem is that, with my not-so-finely-tuned interpretation skills, I decided that it could have three possible meanings: 1. Go back into the room, 2. Put the key inside the room, or 3. Leave the key in the door.

I learned, after much gesturing and pointing, that he was saying it was okay to leave the key in the door. It seemed to me that he should have said, “Wacha kifungu kwa kifuli.” Leave the key in the lock. Or, less specifically, but still clear, “Weka kwa mlango.” Put it in the door. But I think Kenyans have a much keener ability to infer from context than I do.

Anyway, I learned what is quite possibly the most useful proverb to date, which I’m told politicians regularly recite at political rallies:

Nyani haoni kundule, huliona la mwenzake.

A monkey cannot see his own anus, only that of others. In other words, people are hypocrites. The fact that politicians recite this proverb is absurdly and hilariously ironic.

Of course my favorite part of the whole thing is the word anus. Hee hee hee. I’m 12 years old again and I know the word for anus in Kiswahili.

More fun with proverbs:

Fahali wawili hawakai zizi moja. Two bulls cannot stay in the same yard.

Wapandapo ngazi watu wawili hawashikani mikono. When two people climb a ladder they do not hold hands.

Wapiganapo fahali wawili nyazi huumia. When two bulls are fighting, it is the grass that gets hurt.

Pilipili usioila iyakuwashia nini? How does chili burn you if you have not eaten any? (In other words, mind your own business.)

The Ministry of Health (MOH) recently started including little paper inserts with the boxes of 100 condoms that they distribute to hospitals, dispensaries and VCTs. The inserts contain instructions on how to use and dispose of condoms. If you cut out the shape printed on the inserts, fold along the dotted lines, and glue the sides together, you end up with a little envelope-like pocket that holds three condoms, with the instructions appearing on the outside.

Neetha and I first noticed these paper inserts a few months ago. One day, while trying to stay awake during a speech by some unidentified MOH officer, we tried to fold one into a condom pocket. It took about ten minutes to make one pocket (we didn’t have any scissors so we resorted to tearing carefully), and we decided that we frankly didn’t have the patience or manual dexterity to make another one.

It didn’t make any sense why the MOH thought anyone would take the time to make themselves a condom pocket. Wouldn’t a person who was taking condoms want to spend that time taking more condoms, instead of folding a flimsy piece of paper that could only hold three? Many branded condoms sold in Kenya come in similar pockets made of cardboard, so they’re sturdy. But these do-it-yourself pockets from the MOH were made of newsprint, and were too time-consuming to be practical. We wrote it off as a well-intentioned but pointless idea.

Side note: The thought occurred to me later that maybe the inserts weren’t the MOH’s idea, but the condom manufacturer’s idea. MOH condoms are manufactured by a company in China, which always makes me laugh since all my life my Taiwanese parents have insisted that nothing made in China should be trusted. Therefore, something that could mean the difference between a long, healthy life or genital ulcer disease should especially not be trusted. But I digress. The AIDS prevalence rate in Kenya has been cut in half in the last five years, so go Chinese condoms! Either way, there’s no explanation anywhere about exactly what these inserts are for or how to fold them into a condom pocket. Perhaps the assumption was that it would be obvious. After all, Neetha and I figured it out.

Today I was in the office with Godi, who was compiling month-end reports. He had a stack of these inserts on the table and was using the backs as scratch paper. It seemed a little inappropriate for a VCT counselor to be doing this, but since I’ve never seen a single person take an insert, I couldn’t fault him for recycling. As he told me about his day, I absent-mindedly started folding one of them into a condom pocket. Ten minutes later, when I finally finished, he looked confused.

“What have you made?” he asked.

“You can put three condoms inside and take them with you,” I explained, showing him how the instructions appeared on the outside of the pocket. “It takes forever, though. I don’t know who would actually spend time making them.”

He was impressed. “How did you know you can cut it and fold it like that? I thought it was just instructions for using condoms.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “There’s a shape that looked like it should be cut and folded into a pocket.”

“You know, people don’t like to take condoms,” he said. “They won’t go and take them from a big box like you have. They fear to be seen. So it is good that you have made this.”

He told me that the MOH is phasing out the current “Box-O-One-Hundred” packaging and coming out with smaller, more discreet condom pockets like the one I had just made, that holds three condoms. Except that fortunately, the new pockets will be made of cardboard, not newsprint.

“Do you think people prefer the smaller pocket?” I asked. “I thought people liked to take many condoms at a time.”

“Most people will only take condoms if they are given, for example during a VCT session,” Godi said. “But if they see these small pockets with three condoms inside, they might take them, because they don’t look like condoms.”

I didn’t really agree with the last statement, since the pockets have instructions on the outside with pictures of someone putting on a condom. But he had a point.

We keep hundreds of boxes of condoms (100 condoms per box) in the reception area for people to take as they please, but I’ve never seen anyone take one. It’s perhaps too intimidating to be seen taking condoms from a tall pyramid of Box-O’-One-Hundred-Condoms, despite the fact that people are here for an HIV test, which presumably means they’re having sex and could benefit from condoms. But as is often the case in Kenya, what is most obvious cannot be talked about or acknowledged publicly.

Two more counselors came into the office and saw me stuffing condoms into these little gossamer envelopes. They were amused, despite the fact that they talk about and handle condoms everyday. “Unafanya nini, Justina?” What are you doing?

I showed them how to cut and fold the insert into a condom pocket, and they got excited.

“I never knew what these papers were for,” one said as she started cutting and folding more pockets for me to stuff.

“It looks so smart,” the other said. “People will like these because they can hide condoms inside.”

“We’ll start putting condoms in these pockets and putting them out in the reception area for people to take.”

“And we can put together more in our free time, so people can be taking them.”

They started passing out Packet-O-Three-Condoms to other staff members. “We have a gift for you,” they said, reveling in the opportunity to make their colleagues uncomfortable.

“Oh, no, I don’t use these things,” my co-workers would protest in horror.

I was surprised that so many of my colleagues became awkward when they were offered condoms, and were quick to distance themselves from the notion. Despite years working for an organization that deals with HIV, STDs, and sex on a daily basis, they still had so much internalized stigma about condoms.

I felt a sense of accomplishment today, accidental though it was. The counselors are excited about this new way of packaging condoms that will make people less shy to take them, and learned that the MOH didn’t just provide a stack of free scratch paper with every box of condoms.

Uvula Update. Nicholas didn’t have his uvula cut off after all. The guy who was supposed to chop it off for him ended up using a syringe to shoot his uvula full of an herbal concoction that shrank it to a manageable size. His throat is feeling much better, and his uvula is, he claims, much smaller.

The Indian Staring Project. I heard on the BBC this morning about a woman in India who organized 35 women to sit together along a busy street, where men usually go to stare at women. These women spent the day staring at men as they walked by, to make a statement about the cultural practice of men in India staring and harassing women on the street. Men who were “caught” in the project were interviewed and said that being stared at by 35 women was upsetting and made them feel self-conscious. They agreed that it was an effective way to get them to understand how it makes women feel to be stared at like objects everywhere we go.

I wonder how well a Wazungu Staring Project would work. Somehow I imagine that 35 wazungu sitting at my market attempting to stare down locals would only draw more intense staring from everyone around. Hats off to the women in India, though. I admire their courage and creativity, and look forward to returning to the land where staring is so taboo that, when I was eight, my mom chewed me a new hole for staring at a woman sitting behind us at church whose singing was as amazing as the fat lady’s at the opera. I’ve never stared again. God bless America.

What Did You Bring Me? This morning Godi came into the office to greet me. We hadn’t seen each other in awhile because either he’d been in the field with the mobile VCT unit or I’d been out of town.

“Nairobi ilikuwaje?” he asked, testing my Swahili. How was Nairobi?

“Ilikuwa nzuri,” I said. It was fine.

“Umenileta nini?” he asked. What did you bring me?

I instantly switched into English crankypants mode. “Why do you expect me to bring you something everytime I go somewhere? Even people who don’t even know my name ask me this, like they’re entitled to a gift.”

Godi just laughed. “Oh, your Swahili is so good. I didn’t expect you to understand me.” No matter how long I’m here I’ll never get used to Kenyans laughing at times that I consider completely inappropriate, mostly when I’m already annoyed. I think my greatest contribution to this country has been my prodigious ability to amuse Kenyans with my irritation over cultural misunderstandings.

“Nevermind my Swahili,” I said. “Why did you ask me what I brought you? It’s rude to ask for gifts.”

“It’s just a greeting,” he said, still grinning and patient as ever, true evidence of the superiority of the Kenyan temperament. “It’s what we say when we see people. Like when a man returns to his house at night, all the kids come running and ask, what did you bring us?”

“But it’s like begging. If you want something from Nairobi, give me the money and ask me to buy it for you while I’m there,” I said.

“We don’t actually mean it when we ask what you’ve brought. We can go into someone’s house and say, what can you cook for me, because it’s just a way to greet and talk. But if we’re actually hungry we won’t ask,” he explained.

“Ah,” I said. “That makes sense. It’s like when my parents greet their Taiwanese friends by asking, have you eaten yet? All my life I’ve always wondered, what’s this infatuation with whether people have eaten or not? And if you say you haven’t eaten, are they supposed to take you to lunch? But really, it’s not about food at all. It’s just greetings.”

“Yes, that is it,” he said.

Perhaps It Can Maybe Not Be Possible. Americans are legendary for being direct and literal communicators, for better or for worse. So it’s a constant source of frustration for me when people can’t tell me No, and will lie and say Yes, then assume I knew they meant No. But most of the time when someone is being indirect, I don’t even realize it.

“Justina, you’ve forgotten about the HIV workshop you promised to teach for the boda-bodas,” my co-worker said to me today.

I bristled. “What do you mean? We’ve been working on it all week. We just finished the proposal today and we’re mailing it tomorrow.”

And on top of that, where have YOU been this whole time? I haven’t exactly seen your face around the office all week, eager to offer ideas and help out with proposal writing. What kind of obnoxious assertion is that, that I’ve somehow dropped the ball when you’re the one who’s been MIA while everyone else around you has had their noses to the grindstone on this project?

I didn’t say any of that. I just said, “But I don’t understand what you mean when you say I’ve forgotten. Why do you think that?”

“So you are now looking for funds,” she replied, dodging my question. “That is good.”

“We talked about this in last week’s meeting,” I said, my irritation growing more thinly disguised by the minute. “I said that we were going to write a proposal this week. Remember?”

“Yes, I was at the meeting,” she replied. Then why are we having this conversation??

Instead I said, “Okay, then I still don’t understand why you thought I had forgotten about this project.”

I never got an answer. I was still irritated when I ran into Hillary later, so I recounted the story to him. I rarely see him anymore; months can go by without crossing paths with him, but when I do I’m always reminded how well he knows me.

“Justina,” he sighed. It was one of his you-impatient-Americans-need-to-be-more-understanding sighs. “All I know is that Africans use very indirect ways of communicating. They don’t say exactly what they mean. They like to beat around the bush.”

I didn’t see how this was relevant to my story, so he continued. “When she said you had forgotten, she was translating directly from the Nandi language. It’s just a way to ask how things are faring on. She wanted to know if the project was continuing on well. And she probably got shy when you started getting annoyed.”

It was starting to make a little sense, and I was starting to feel like a jerk. I still don’t know why she felt she had to be indirect about it, but I do know that with most things I don’t understand about Kenya, if I try to make sense of it, I’ll only start passing judgment, and it will drive me crazy. All I need to know is that this is how things are, whether I like it or not.

And at least now I know that she wasn’t accusing me of being a slacker.

On the other hand… Sometimes Kenyans can be so direct as to be intrusive. The minute I came back from the States in January, people were already counting down the days until I would give them my things.

“When are you returning to America?”

“In August.”

“When you leave, you will give me your laptop.”

Her audacity was too infuriating for words. I somehow managed to respond with a fake plastic smile, “No, I will not. Ni yangu.” It’s mine.

As much as I know that the true meaning of these “requests” is mostly lost in translation, that they’re probably not the presumptuous imperatives that I take them to be, and that I’ll never understand them for what they really mean, it doesn’t make it any less easier to tolerate when I’m asked over and over, “You are going home to America in August?”

“Don’t worry, it’s still a long time,” I’d say, anticipating their sadness to see me go. “I’m still around.”

“I am booking your mattress and all your furniture when you leave.”

“Um, I don’t know. It’s still far away.”

“Your shoes are very smart.”

“Thank you.”

“I am booking them. When you leave, you will give them to me.”

So much for forging meaningful friendships that last a lifetime.

It'll Behoove Ya, To Care For Your Uvula. I’ve been meeting with my Swahili tutor, Nicholas, twice a week. Some sessions are more productive than others. Last week he came over with a bad sore throat. He’s been working as a day laborer at a gas station in town, and the dust and diesel fumes finally got to him.

“I have something in my throat that I need to remove,” he said. “I want to look for someone to cut it for me.”

“Uh. What?” I said.

“It is this thing in my throat. You know it? It is giving me a bad problem.”

“Tonsils?”

“No, it is hanging down in my throat and I’m choking,” he said. “It is very long. People like to remove it.”

“The uvula?” I said.

“Yes, in Swahili we call it the small tongue,” he said. “Some people cut it off when they are very young. It avoids these problems of the throat.”

I’m always skeptical but fascinated by Kenyan interpretations of common maladies and their home remedies, so I egged him on.

“But you say it’s choking you?”

“Yes, when I swallow. It chokes me at the back of my tongue.”

“Come on,” I said. “The uvula doesn’t hang down that low. I think you should take some medicine and wait a few days. Don’t cut off your uvula.”

“Do you have one?” he asked.

“Everyone has a uvula,” I said. “You want to see mine?”

I let him peer into my mouth and then realized that it felt like an encroachment on my personal space.

“Yours is very short,” he observed. “Did you cut it?”

“We don’t cut uvulas,” I sighed. “It’s not normal to do that.”

“Mine is very long,” he said again. Then he opened his mouth and pointed.

He was right. It was very long. I couldn’t see the tip of it because it hung down into his throat. But somehow I doubted that it was the source of the infection, nor did I think it was exacerbating the problem.

“So what happens when you cut it?” I asked. “Does it bleed? Do you have to swallow the part you just cut?”

“There is no blood in that part of the body,” he said. “And people used to say that if you swallow it, you’ll die, but I don’t believe it.”

“I have a pair of scissors. You could cut it yourself and see if it’s true.”

“Oh, no, I fear it so much. I want to look for someone else to cut it.”

“Well, good luck with that.”

This is what makes the 8-hour bus ride from my site to Nairobi not merely miserable, but seething, writhing, tortuous pain: The hours-long stretches of chewed up "road" where there's really nothing to do but ponder the hard questions about the human condition, mainly, why is the only thoroughfare between Nairobi and Western Kenya such a shameless mess?

Kenyan passengers next to me are always apologizing to me for their roads, as if I'll return to the West and reassure everyone that ordinary Kenyans don't approve. Actually there's another road connecting Nairobi to the western parts of the country, through Narok, and it's arguably even worse than this one. Worse than Nairobi-Nakuru, which I'm churning along right now, a road audacious in its assumption that it in any way resembles a singular noun, what with being 5 bazillion distinct chunks of eroded asphalt pockmarked as if someone drove by 50 years ago and fired an automatic weapon at it, starting at the Ugandan border and not letting go of the trigger until Mombasa. Except for the smooth stretches right before and after some large cities like Nairobi and Eldoret, where the gunmen were distracted by thoughts of stopping for cold beer and beautiful ladies of easy virtue.

Some stretches make no pretenses about trying to fit the "road" definition. Between Nakuru and Naivasha there's not a pebble of tarmac to be found, just a white ribbon of dust, which becomes the land of 1,000 matatu-swallowing lakes during rainy season, lined with sighing acacis trees resigned to being ghostly, dust-covered white from trucks rumbling by.

The trip is 8 hours of vibrating, neck-snapping monotony, because for 2 to 3 hour stretches it's too bumpy to read, too bumpy to sleep (from a chiropractor's perspective), and too noisy, due to bumpiness, to listen to music unless you care to drown out the deafening explosions of bus hitting pothole after pothole with deafening strains of Radiohead. I kid you not, at one point I thought someone had fired a gun from the back row, while at the same time someone else had whacked me on the head with a book.

It's also too bumpy to drink water, which is always a problem because of my unfortunate bladder-bus schedule relationship. The only rest stop is in Nakuru, which isn't for 3 or 4 hours from any point of departure, and even though I've perfected the art of emptying my bladder right before I board the bus, postponing taking my daily anti-malarial meds (makes me pee), and not drinking anything before Nakuru, inevitably, one bumpy hour into the trip, the jolting road conditions have drained everything into my apparently very small bladder, and it becomes a dilemma between enduring several more hours of turgid discomfort or announcing to the whole amused bus in Swahili that I need to go for a short call in that stand of whitethorn bushes and blackjack.

Anyway, because of this, I'm usually parched (albeit empty-bladdered) by the time we descend from Nakuru into the semi-arid Rift Valley floor towards Nairobi. But by this time the road has become a post-earthquake zone again, so I can only stare longingly at my light blue bottle of cool, clean water while I roast inside a bus whose windows have been snapped tight to keep out the clouds, thick as morning fog over San Francisco Bay, being kicked up by the other 40 vehicles bobbling over each pothole like they're cruising along the ridge of a dragon's spine, while the equatorial sun beats down on the lovely savannah landscape of zebras and baboons indifferent to my suffering. One baboon holds a discarded blue water bottle in his hand. In my self-pity I assume he drank the water himself.

I had a moment of clarity a few days ago where I decided I could benefit from incorporating a ritual of relaxing and unwinding into each day. At first my idea was to meditate, but meditation is always one part relaxation and fifty parts frustration for me. I’m told it gets easier and more beneficial the more I practice it, but observing the rants in my head and the hysteria around me and then letting them go doesn’t really create much closure for most of the inane stressors around me. Primal screaming would be much more satisfying, and less time-consuming.

Anyway, I finally decided to take a tea break at the end of the day as a way to just put stuff on hold, and create distance, chronologically and emotionally, between me and the rest of the world trying to invade my sanity. So I everyday come home, fix myself a hot drink, munch on a snack, and imagine that I’m English.

Basically I’m trying to be a little more grounded, a lot less tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-KABOOM! Being in Kenya for 19 straight months made me forget how much I have back home. Everything had kind of faded into a distant reality that seemed like the past, without a present and future. Going home last month, and then coming back to Kenya having been reminded of what makes my home home, makes everything here seem less isolated from the people and places that are familiar and comforting and important, and the old habits and haunts that reassure me that I’m the person I think I am.

We haven’t had running water in ages on my compound. I’ve been fetching from my organization’s storage tank, which will soon run dry. Today a neighbor told me she had gone to see everyone who might be in charge of water, and was told that we all have to pay a bribe so that they can restore our water. I launched into a loud rant about selfish, opportunistic and corrupt officials to no one in particular. It’s a good thing I was on my way to my new tea break, although I’d prefer it if primal screaming were culturally acceptable here.

My language teacher, Nicholas, came over for a session and excused the fact that I was so irate I could only speak Swahili in simple present tense. I finally gave up and told him the story in English.

“We’ve been living this way for all this time,” he said. “Justina, I tell you Kenya is so bad. If I could go away from this place I would.”

He told me about an old boss who told him to pay 500 Ksh out of his 900 Ksh monthly salary as “thanks” for being given the job. If Nicholas didn’t pay this each month, the boss told him, he would be fired. “I have a wife and kids,” Nicholas told him. “How am I supposed to support them on 400 shillings a month?” So the boss fired him.

400 shillings is about $5.50.

The poverty line is defined as less than a dollar a day.

I’ve heard Nicholas’s story a hundred times. It’s everyone’s story. Unemployment is ubiquitous. Jobs are hard to come by unless you know someone. There’s never enough money for anything. And yet those who have the power to help their poorer neighbors or their community instead add to their hardship by asking for bribes.

I think it's easy for me to forget exactly how poor some of my friends are, especially if I've never been to their house, only to find out it's made of mud and dung. I hired another friend's wife to wash my clothes for me, which used to go against my principle of doing things myself simply because I can. But over time I realized that it provides income for someone in the community who needs it more than I need the validation of being able to say I can wash clothes almost as well as a Kenyan woman. Anyway, this woman came over with her baby tied to her back, and I offered to let her put him down on my bed while she worked (often Kenyan women do housework, dig in the shamba, or fetch water and firewood with their babies tied to their backs). She asked if I had a large plastic bag. All sorts of disturbing images came to my mind, but she explained that the baby was still young and it would be prudent to put something under him to protect my bedding. It still seemed weird, but I obliged. She put the baby down, and suddenly my room was filled with the odor of ripe diapers. I was extremely grateful for the plastic bag. Later I noticed the woman had the same odor about her. I've always known that her husband struggles to earn enough money to support their family of three young kids, but it upset me that for whatever reason they couldn't practice basic hygiene, especially for the baby.

I stopped feeling obligated to save anyone a long time ago. It’s unrealistic. And I’ve stopped feeling sorry when I hear the 5,000th stranger telling me the same sob story, which I know will be followed by a request for money. But when it’s a friend’s story, I want to do something. Americans always think there’s a neat solution to every problem. But the only thing I seem to be able to do is get angry every time I hear about people knowingly perpetrating injustices against each other without remorse. That’s why I’m so tired, and have taken up tea-guzzling and biscuit-dipping.

In the end, the only remotely meaningful thing I’ve gained is a much more profound understanding of how lucky I am. I stand here and call a place outside these borders home. (DELETE FLAG-WAVING ANIMATED GIF.) I can, and am expected to, leave Kenya one day. There is a story that New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof tells in his book, China Wakes, that I now relate to more than ever. Kristof is commiserating with a Chinese friend about how deeply saddened they are by the political and social ills of modern China, a country that Kristof has lived and worked in for awhile and feels a connection to despite its flaws.

This friend observes, “There are two brands of bicycles in China, Flying Pigeon and Forever. You foreigners, you are like Flying Pigeons. But we Chinese, we are Forever.”

Maybe it’s no coincidence that the bicycles here are copies of Chinese brands.

Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor…Oh, Wait. The Kenyan Postal Corporation just broke their own worst record. I just received a package that was mailed to me last March. Ten months! As they love to say here, better late than never. It was a large package with five boxes of Girl Scout cookies from Nandita, and we were both convinced that it had been intercepted and devoured by mailroom workers. I guess this explains why Kenyans sometimes seem to hold onto hope beyond all hope…because occasionally it’s not totally naïve to do so. Nandita tells me it’s already Girl Scout cookie time again back in the States, but I think I’m good for now.

My Own World Map Project. The World Map Project is a tool that some PCVs have used in their schools to teach students geography. Basically you help kids paint a mural of the world on the side of a school building, and they learn where different countries are.

I’ve started my own World Map Project, with a less altruistic purpose. Basically I’ve been amusing myself by gluing a map of the world, postcards and stamps to the top of my coffee table, then shellacking it. Fumes are fun. But I decided that it might be interesting to get readers of my blog involved. If you want, please mail me postcards or stamps (which might mean that you have to write me a letter), and I will try to add them to my coffee table mural.

The Kenyan postal service seems to handle letters and postcards more reliably than packages, so anything you send should theoretically arrive before my close of service in August. Just don’t enclose any cookies.

P.O. Box 30518

Village Market, Nairobi

KENYA

Unrelated side note: If you want to send a package, use the address that goes directly to my town. Drop me an email if you need it again. And use padded envelopes rather than boxes as they tend to arrive within a month, as opposed to ten.

Disputes Over Snoring Chickens. Well, I’ve been back in Kenya for a week now, and in case anyone was wondering, everything in Kenya is still intact. Miraculously, the screaming baby Idi Amins next door moved away over the holidays, but now another neighbor is trying to manipulate me into giving her one of my chickens, or money, or both. The saga never ends, but how many of you out there can say you’ve ever argued over live chickens? Chicken salad sandwiches, yes.

Wanna hear something that’s fascinating only to me? My chicken passed a worm today. About two inches long, white, with a triangular head. Eeewww. I’ve also decided to re-evaluate my chicken-farming strategy. I have four roosters who now spend all their time fighting over two hens, plus they’re ridiculous in the morning. COCKLE-DOODLE-DOO x 4 x (5:00am until 9:00am). So I’m downsizing my rooster department. I’ve already given one to a co-worker, on the condition that he cannot eat it until I leave Kenya. Another rooster has a chest cold right now (not bird flu), which makes him snore at night, but as soon as he gets better, he’s also getting a new home.

Cleaning Up After the US Army. One of the first things I did when I got in was I had my whole house cleaned. Normally I’d clean my own house, but what needed cleaning was all the poo. The Ubiquitous Slug Army (US Army) has been going to town on my walls, window sills, ceilings and doors for the last seven months, but it took a few weeks in a poo-free country to lower my tolerance enough to do anything about it. Now my house is 99 percent poo free.

So the minutiae of life in Kenya plods on, sometimes driving me to absurd rants in my head, other times lulling me into a mid-afternoon nap. I arrived at work last week expecting, for some reason, to be greeted with a pile of work to do. Old mentalities die hard. Instead I came into the office and sat around for two hours reading Newsweek. It was only after I had asked, “What’s new?” five times, and been told, “Nothing,” five times, that someone happened to mention a complex misunderstanding that my organization has been having with other groups in our district. Which has been going on for a month. Which I was never told about. “We were waiting for you to come back from America so we could ask for your input on what to do.” Apparently this was what they meant by, “Nothing.” I’m glad I clarified.

Well, it's not exactly heaven here in the U.S., but it's not exactly Kenya, either. I've spent an alarming amount of time using wi-fi all over Northern California, which led me to an upsetting discovery on the Blogger Buzz page: There is a link to another Peace Corps volunteer's blog on there. Excuse me? Why doesn't that link point to my blog? The guy gets like 149 comments on a single post. Does he really need more traffic? On a good day I get 3 comments and 2 of them are nasty bitter bile about some inadvertently insensitive cultural comment I've made about my lovely host country. Sorry about that, Kenya. You really are a wonderful place, really.

Anyway, the problem with having unlimited access to everything in the world here in America is that you can easily find out how people have outdone you in ways that never crossed your mind. Like getting a link on Blogger Buzz. I am NOT jealous.

Well I've been on a whirlwind tour of friends and family in Texas and California, which will come to a sad end in a few days. People keep asking if it feels surreal to be back in a place that's so different from the world I've known the last 20 months, and if the abundance and waste depress me.

Surprisingly, it feels really normal to be back, and more importantly, really good. When I think about Kenya, about the way I live there, and especially the way most Kenyans live, it strikes me as absurd, and slightly heartbreaking. It doesn't make sense why anything is the way it is there, and as many PCVs will tell their friends and family back home, if you try to figure out the answer, it will only drive you crazy.

I don't regret everything I've seen and done, and what I still have to do, but it's Kenya that feels surreal, not the U.S. America is my home, and I've missed it in ways that I never thought possible. In weird ways. I've missed the things that were essentially invisible to me before, because I took them for granted. MapQuest, for example. The overabundance, especially around Christmas, has always disturbed me, and this year was no different. And I couldn't stop staring at that woman in the restroom at the Frankfurt airport, who let perfectly clean, drinkable tap water run on full blast while she scrubbed her face with soap.

But all my time here has been spent appreciating what we have in the U.S. It was easy before I went to Kenya to focus on everything I hated about our culture - the mindless consumerism, my shame and embarrassment over the current administration, the irreconciliable conflict between some elusive notion of spiritual happiness and the realities of bill paying, oversimplified mainstream answers to existential questions, and people who have too much useless crap in their houses, including me.

But despite all it's flaws, the predictability of living in a culture I know is immensely comforting.

You know if you go to a restaurant and ask them to replace pita bread with toast, they'll do it. They won't insist it's not possible, without being able to give a reason.

"It's not possible."

"Why not?"

"It's not possible."

"What's the reason?"

"It's not possible."

You know that if you ask someone for directions, they will use distinct landmarks and street names.

"How do I get to Nakumatt Lifestyle?"

"It's just there."

"Where?"

"Up there."

"Up where?"

"You see that tree? The green one?"

You know that the electricity won't go out. Ever. Unless there's a hurricane, or an earthquake, and then there'll be hell to pay at PG&E, and their stock price will go down. You know that all your friends have flushing toilets that you don't have to wait for 15 minutes to refill between half-hearted flushes. You know that if someone wants to say No, they'll say it to your face, and life goes on. You know that if you ask someone their name, they'll say it in an audible voice. You know that if you ask someone the price of something, they'll tell you the real price, and there's no bargaining allowed (except on cars and mattresses). You know that no one cares whether or not you're in church on Sunday, or whether or not you're really sleeping with your male "roommate." You know that gay people exist, and so does underwear, and it's okay to talk about both, but it's not okay to talk about your diarrhea. You know that someone who gets caught stealing money from their organization will be fired and have a hell of a time getting another job. You know that no one will end an assertion with "God willing."

I know what I'm feeling is different from what I'll be feeling after my close of service in August. Right now I know I'm going back to Kenya soon. I know I'll see all my friends there again. I'll go back to all the things that infuriate me, and all the beautiful invisible things I take for granted that will make me realize, someday, how much Kenya has become another home for me, for better or for worse. Or at least that's my prediction. Returned volunteers tell me they miss Kenya in ways they never imagined. They say the U.S. becomes this empty, unreal place that doesn't understand them or care what they've been through, and they long for their life in Kenya that seems so normal compared to America.

I have no idea what the hell they're talking about. Maybe one day I will.