I have now been in Kenya for about a week and just as I foresaw, not much of what I’m experiencing here could have been foreseen. I am staying with Catherine’s parents, Karen and Simon, who have a beautiful house in Nairobi and are giving me all the help I need and more. The staff in the house is wonderful, and there is always a helping and guiding hand around.
Hudson, Karen and Simon’s driver, has not only picked me up from the airport, but the next day, Saturday, also took me around Nairobi, showing me the main places and explaining me the small practicalities of getting around the city. Later on that day I met up with my three volunteer colleagues from the organisation I volunteer for “Maji Mazuri”, and Hudson took us to Mathare Valley, where a lot of the organisation’s work is being done.
Mathare Valley is one of several slum areas in Nairobi. Approximately half a million people live there in terrible poverty. None of the structures I have seen there so far deserves to be called a building. The Valley is covered with shacks of cardboard and bits of metal sheeting, tied on to unstable wooden structures. The paths between the shacks are not even covered with gravel. In some places the paths are bare soil and in others there is only a fine distinction between paths and sewer.
Our meeting place was somewhere inside Mathare. We had to take some invisible turns between the shacks with our feet on both sides of the open sewer, walking carefully not to tread on the merchandise of fruit and vegetables exhibited on the ground on both sides of our narrow path. The meeting place was a small shack with a few benches in it and children’s drawings on the walls. We spent two hours with our teen group, which consists of about fifteen or twenty members between the ages of seven and fifteen. Those meetings are often about HIV and drug awareness, and about strengthening the social bonds and skills of the members.
On Sunday I got to see more of the Valley. Our youth group conducted an outreach project to attract more Mathare residents to Maji Mazuri. They started with a long procession through the paths of Mathare where goats, hens, dogs and humans live side by side on the ground besides the open sewer. All Maji Mazuri members wore shirts with the organisation’s logo on them and sang and danced through the slums, attracting more and more curious followers. It ended with a long theatre piece in the street, which seemed to satisfy the audience who laughed and cheered there for hours in the baking sun. The treat for our members was a football match against no others than the Kenyan Air Force football team. The match took place in the air force base, and when all was ready we realised that there was no referee. Who could be better for the role of referee than the two wazungu? Alex, another volunteer for Maji Mazuri, and I, became the referees, but not for long. Soon we started getting complaints that neither one of the teams were satisfied with our performance and we were happily replaced by other, surely more qualified, football enthusiasts.
Most of the time I use matatus to get around. A matatu is a van used for public transport. It has room for fifteen people, though during rush hour it can accommodate much more. Matatus can be recognised by the loud decorations painted on them, the loud music the play, and the loud conductors that lean out of the windows trying to hunt passengers. To get around the chaotic traffic of Nairobi (usually caused by the matatus themselves) the drivers show driving skills of rare quality, and give the impression that they have started their career by driving rollercoasters before finding their vocation as suicide drivers.
As for Kenyan food – it is beautiful and colourful and those who can afford it serve an abundance of dishes that are very pleasant to the eye. Most of those dishes share the odd trait of being outstandingly bland, though not in a way that can not be remedied by lots of salt.
This is all for now. I hope that you are all well and I would like to hear how you are doing, so please mail me. After all, in a good net-café in the city centre it doesn’t take me more than ten minutes to log on to the net.
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