An average Kenyan day...

I lay in bed last night, guessing it was about 11pm, telling my body to wake myself up at 7:00 in the morning. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t late, as Mum Jane wanted to leave at 8 o’clock, but my iPod was dead and it was my alarm clock. My body listened, and I awoke with a youthful excitement at 6:45 (one of the few times in my life I’ve been early for something) to prepare for a day visiting Mum Jane’s home.

The crisp, “wintry” morning air tempted me to try my cornflakes with warm milk poured over them, rather than my usual chilled milk. It was warm, but got a little too soggy too quickly. I downed a cup of coffee, which I find has an odd, almost chemical-like aftertaste—surprising for a country that I would have considered to roast rather good coffee. But maybe Kenyans, themselves, don’t tend to drink that kind—I’m not sure. Either way, it did the trick and I grabbed my jacket, slung the tripod over my shoulder as Lindsey settled herself with the video camera and off we went with Mum Jane at our side.

At the corner of Ngong Road and Kerrarapon Road—the street that leads back to where Hekima Place is situated, we caught a matatu to Ngong market, which is the end of the line going either way for most of the matatus in the area. We stopped here so that Mum Jane could by some fresh vegetables for our visit and for the rest of her days off. We walked past vendors eager to make an early sale, through the rows and rows of women set up with their menagerie laid out on sacks on the dirt ground and through even more rows of displays sheltered by tarp or hay-thatched roofs. We weaved in and out of the stands, brightly decorated with the ripening avocadoes, bananas, tomatoes, skumaweki, spinach, onions, mangoes, carrots, and pea pods. A vendor looked up from sifting through her industrial sacks of beans and lentils and maize kernels freshly plucked off of the cobs to offer us a good price. We politely declined and kept walking to a stand with a young man, probably in his twenties, sitting at a stand not unlike the others we had passed along the way.

Other men and women sat nearby at their respective stands, waiting for customers as they sipped their morning chai. Mum Jane began talking to the young man—in Kikuyu or Swahili, I’m not sure—and spoke to someone on her cell phone, whom I later learned was the young man’s mother and owner of the stand, in the same language. As she explained for us later, Mum Jane always buys from the same stand because by being a regular customer she not only gets a better deal but she can also buy on monthly credit. At the end of every month, she pays for all of the produce she has purchased from that stand. She had to call the young man’s mother because she, and not the son, is the one who knows her as a regular, reliable customer. Mum Jane bought a bag each of potatoes, carrots, and pea pods, as well as some tomatoes and onions. Then we headed on our way again.

As we walked to the market area where all the buses and matatus stop, Mum Jane explained to us that it would be 30ksh (equivalent to about 35 US cents) each to Kiserian, where she lives, as it is a fixed price. On the other hand, our ride from Karen to Ngong Market can vary quite a bit—anywhere from 10ksh to 30ksh (although sometimes they’ll even try to charge 40ksh). I tried to find out if there was some sort of organization that fixed the price, but my impression was that the drivers on that route just don’t ever change the price for different people or different times, and it’s just that simple. Matatu services are privately provided and I doubt there is any organizing body among them.

We rode the matatu into Kiserian and got off on a fairly busy dirt-covered street lined with shops. We walked over a footbridge, about five or six 4-inch planks wide, to cross the two-foot wide open sewer that ran up and down the length of the road, dividing the shops from the travel-way. Mum Jane purchased two bags of chicken feed and placed them in a “paper bag”—which was actually a plastic grocery bag—that she had brought with her and we continued on. Occasionally people rode by on bikes and more rarely in cars, but most made their journeys this morning, as usual, by foot. As we walked down one particular street, we passed donkeys pulling carts of goods up the hill. At the bottom of the hill, where the road elbowed, there was a giant heap of garbage with six or seven donkeys grazing on top and several more scattered at the circumference.

We walked through a government-owned quarry where women and men sat on plots that they rented, chiseling at huge blocks of stone, which others hand-mined from the ground, to make gravel or building bricks. In the distance a woman bent over as she tended to many rows of maize and other crops. Just beyond her were white metal stakes and wire fencing that marked off the government-owned land that in years to come will be covered in water from a dam that has slowly begun to be built. The dam will stop up the water supply from one of the seasonal rivers in the area. Once it is built, though, all of the people who rent quarry or farm land will have to find another means of earning their livelihoods. And goodness knows what the environmental affects will be. I remember learning in Ghana about all of the controversies still surrounding the construction of the Volta Dam in the sixties. Fortunately here, it sounds like all of the land has already been fairly purchased from the people who lived there. But the environmental consequences are yet to be seen. But hopefully the benefits—particularly in the long rum—will outweigh any negative effects.

As we trekked the winding path up the gentle slope, I looked out over the lush, green, rolling hills. Kiserian is truly a beautiful region. This is the Rift Valley. This is, quite literally, where civilization and mankind had its roots. This is where it all began. This is where we all began. Mankind must truly be blessed with a vivid imagination to have imagined a place more beautiful than here, to want to leave this Eden. It’s difficult to imagine how much we, as a species and as a world conscience, have grown since life began in this area. But also, we must remember how much we have not changed, how much we are all still the same people, the same lineages, the same blood, the same beings. We are brothers and sisters—determined not by the color of our skin but by the ancient parents who bore us way back when. This is where we come from. This is who we were. This is who we are. And this who we will forever be. Let us not forget that we are bound to one another in the best possible way, that we are all pieces that make up one being; one entity; one past, present, and future. We began our existence together, and we must continue to walk together as brothers and sisters, as mothers and fathers. Hand in hand.

This scene of Eden quickly vanished as the path narrowed and became lined with cacti. When we emerged we found ourselves walking along a wider path with small houses and plenty of bushes lining the way. Suddenly everywhere we walked we heard whispers and shouts of “Mazungu! MAZUNGU!”—White person! WHITE PERSON! And then little faces appearing, repeating over and over “How are you? How are you?” “How are you?” clearly being the only English phrase these kids had learned yet, our responses of “Fine, thanks, how are you?” were typically met with another high-pitched and outrageously adorable “HOW ARE YOU?!”

We reached Mum Jane’s cottage. Hers was one in a line of about 6 or 7 end-to-end residences. We entered a gate in her fence that protected her dwelling and kitchen garden from intruders. On the right when we entered was the latrine—smaller than a port-a-potty with no toilet furnishings, just a hole in the middle and room for your feet on either side. Toilet paper—optional in many homes—hung on the door.

We entered a single room furnished with a couch, a chair, and a coffee table, all covered in pink fabric, on which she had stitched a small green design. A small charcoal cooker, the same width as the pot that sat upon it, was on the floor, but she took it outside near her garden to continue cooking. The pot of water on top of the beans and corn that were already cooking was steaming—her twenty year old son who recently came from their hometown (near the border of Tanzania) to attend a vocational tech school and find a job as an electrician had started the food for us that morning. There were 5-gallon buckets that had previously held Toss laundry detergent but now held water stacked all along one wall. She had a few sets of dishes that I could see, some pots and pans, her sewing machine (as she is a tailor both at Hekima Place and sometimes for her neighbors), and a black-and-white analog television that receives one channel. Her electricity was working, but it doesn’t always. She explained that the electricity is about to be rationed, so she’ll either have it during the day or during the night, but she doesn’t know which—the electricity companies will decide and it will be different for every village.

Off of this room there was a door, which led to her sleeping room, though we did not see it. On the other side, though with no door access from the living room, was her son’s living room. The living room was about 10feet by 12 feet, and their sleeping rooms were no bigger and probably even a little smaller. The three rooms together were in an L-shape. Outside the rooms just past the latrine was her kitchen garden—about 6’x6’. Here she grew maize and pumpkin—and some mchicha grows wildly. She also had a small chicken coop with a rooster, 2 adult hens, and 4 little chicks. She gathers the eggs they produce and when they mature she either eats them herself or sells them—sometimes to Hekima Place and sometimes to others.

Her home was very modest but very quaint. We didn’t drink the water because we weren’t sure how clean it was. She told us she has to store it in the buckets because she has a tap right outside (right behind the latrine, actually), but it doesn’t always spout water so she has to store up.

For lunch we ate 1-2-3 githeri, which is githeri that is boiled and not “fried” (basically cooked with oil instead of water). The “Kenyan” way to eat—as the girls in Maisha will explain when telling you why it’s better to be a Kenyan than a mazungu at their dinner debate—is with your hands, and that’s exactly how 1-2-3 githeri is eaten. It’s called 1-2-3 for the way you mix the salt in with it before you eat it. After putting the githeri—usually beans, maize, and potatoes, though this time just beans and maize—in a bowl and adding salt, you hold the bowl and gently shake it 1, 2, 3 times and then turn it half-way around in your hands and shake it again 1, 2, 3 times to get the salt mixed in. After she mixed our githeri and served our bowls, we walked outside and she poured water over our hands over top of a plant outside her door so that we could wash up. Then we dug into our lunch with our fingers leading the way. It was very good—and very fun to eat with our hands!

After lunch we walked a little way to see if we could buy some milk for tea. The first place—just a kiosk next to someone’s home—didn’t have any milk. These vendors typically buy their milk from wholesale and then resell it at their respective shops. We weren’t sure if we’d be able to find any, but Mum Jane asked some ladies standing nearby and they told her another place where we could get some. So we went there—another little kiosk—and purchased about a pint and a half of milk, which comes in a clear, thin plastic bag. This milk, like the milk the girls drink at Hekima Place, is neither pasteurized or homogenized, which is fine because it’s just used for tea so it gets boiled before we drink it.

We went back, again amidst bursts of “How are you?!” and the accompanying laughter, and Mum Jane boiled the milk outside on her cooker and added the tea leaves and sugar. We drank our tea in the living room, chatted, and watched a little bit of TV. I noticed that while we sat there the same news show repeated three times before switching to a report on healthy habits that included using a mini trampoline for exercising—which didn’t really seem to be geared at the average Kenyan. But then again, the average Kenyan wouldn’t be sitting at home at this time of day watching TV. Mum Jane explained that it would be rare for her neighbors to be home at this time unless they were out of a job or had an off day like she did. (The resident mums work four days on, two days off.) There was also a show documenting some sort of Maasai celebration--the people on the TV were slaughtering a goat and dancing. The Maasai women are apparently very well known for their jumping abilities--and they did a lot of jumping in their dances.

Around 4:00 we decided we should head back. It’s not safe to ride the matatus afer dark (which happens around 6:45-7) and we had told Gladys we’d be back by 6, which was dinner time. We walked back to town, even though we could have caught a matatu by the road a lot closer to her house. We wanted to walk though and we did some filming of the countryside. When we got back to town, Mum Jane wanted to introduce us to her best friend, Nancy, who was a hairdresser—or, as they say, a saloonist. She was doing someone else’s hair when we came in, so we sat down and talked to her while she finished plaiting (braiding) an older woman’s hair. Then she said she wanted to touch Lindsey’s hair because she’d never touched a mazungu’s hair before. Mum Jane said that Nancy had never even actually talked to a mazungu before. So Lindsey sat in the chair and Nancy brushed her hair and redid her single braid in the back. Then she did the same to my hair and helped me tie my scarf on my head.

Kiserian is a pretty rural area, and now that I think about it I don’t even recall seeing any other wazungu (plural of mazungu) there. At one point, later as we were walking, a car with a couple wazungu in it passed us, and Mum Jane said they looked very surprised to see us. Afterwards Nancy came with us to get some sodas at a little grocery store, and she told me that she grew up and had lived here in this area all her life. She went to school here, though her children go to school a little farther away. But her husband is from this area too. She was very sweet and invited me to come back and visit her and she would make me mokimo, which is mashed potatoes and skuma (or apparently anything green) with corn in it—it’s delicious! : ) She also offered to show me how to make mandazi, which is like a donut only not nearly as sweet and with no icing or fancy toppings. It’s very good, especially at tea time.

It started getting late so Lindsey and I hopped onto a matatu—of course, the same 30ksh rate as what brought us here. Then we grabbed another matatu from Ngong market back to our stop at Shade Hotel, which is right past Kerrarapon road. The sun was starting to go down but it was still light out. We made it back a little after 6, so they’d all started eating, but they had saved us some food. All in all, it was a really great day. I learned so much and got to experience a more average Kenyan day, which was really wonderful.