Catching Up

Note: Second of two (long) updates

I have been writing down a list of things I should blog about, and the list never seems to stop. It’s long, but I know if I don’t cover it all it will just grow longer! I’ll try to be brief.

On the lighter side, I discovered today that playing cards is illegal in Kenya - at least outside the home. This is to prevent people from being lazy and encourage them to work. Similarly, loitering is illegal.

Yesterday I saw the girls again that I met last Sunday. I had told one girl that my hair was very long before I came here. Yesterday she told me she wanted to go to Canada so she could eat out food so that her hair would grow long. Kids have such interesting ideas :P

On Friday I saw the President of Kenya! His motorcade (about 20 vehicles!) passed by as I was downtown with Sylvia. They stopped all the traffic for a long time while the president was coming.

On the darker side, it has been a very dark week in Kenya. For the past few weeks, there has been famine in much of the country. As much as a third of the population is living day to day. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the government has made a huge mess of the food relief. They have huge stores of grain, yet they have been borrowing money from the states to pay for food for starving families. The relief is scant at best and many families have not been helped. In fact, it’s been the corporate sector who has stepped in with a lot of funds to help those who need it. Then, last Wednesday one of the locations of Kenya’s biggest grocery store chain went up in flames due to a faulty generator. Bad enough that the place burnt down, but many people were trapped inside because there weren’t enough emergency exits. They have found 25 bodies already with almost 50 people still reported missing since the incident. Add to that that there wasn’t enough water for the fire services to properly tackle the flames and it took them more than 3 hours to douse the flames. People flocked to the scene in the thousands to watch and the police had to keep them back with tear gas. Another example of Kenyans getting to close to an accident happened last Saturday night, an oil tanker overturned and sprung a leak. Locals gathered by the hundreds to get free gas. Then, one person lit a cigarette. Guess what happened. Over 100 people died in a huge ball of fire. Another hundred or so are being treated in hospital. And what’s worse is this is not the first time this has happened. There have been no less that 7 crashed oil tankers since 2003, and another one also exploded with severe casualties. It’s such a shame and so sad. In a week Kenya has lost almost 200 people to fire with millions on the brink of starvation. The government is being attacked for it’s poor emergency preparedness, both with regards to fire safety and drought.

The whole government here is such a mess. Ben has been telling me about the scandals and the corruption and the messes they always manage to make. It will be a long road before Kenya can have a good, responsible government. They really need a complete overhaul of the system and the people. The people here don’t have any faith in the government. The president has WAY too much power and the ministers all have shares in the companies they give permits to. And if I am exaggerating, it’s not by much.

Back to culture now. Kenyans have very interesting rules when it comes to inviting people. In Canada if a friend said to me “hey lets go for dinner tomorrow” I would expect to pay my half of the meal. Here, if you invite someone it is automatic that you pay for them, no questions asked. The other day I invited the girls to go get some pop because it was a hot day, so I was sure to pay for them. Sometimes this policy makes me feel bad because I want to contribute when people invite me out, but I have started keeping quiet when the bill comes. I’ll just have to invite them out in return sometime…. Once I know some good places to take them 

I was talking to Joyce yesterday and she was saying that she had felt very awkward when someone had asked her whether her parents are still alive. She said she had been offended at the question because the Chinese do not like to talk about deaths. However, in Kenya it is customary to ask about ones family. It is polite and given the average lifespan of Kenyans it would be possible that Joyce’s parents would be deceased. I thought it was an interesting cultural misunderstanding. We also talked for quite a while about the size of families and how in Kenya it would be crazy not to have 4, 5, 6 or more kids. To Joyce, from one child China, and me from Canada, that is quite rare. One teacher at the school was asking me why we have small families and no reason I could give would satisfy him, it just didn’t make sense to him.

One last observation for today, the buses at the terminal downtown just sit there until they are full. It doesn’t matter how long that takes, they won’t go until they have enough people. Sometimes this makes for a long wait!

This last weekend I went for the EB election for AIESEC Daystar. It was nice to hang out with the AIESECers and it was also very interesting to observe the differences in behaviour between the more affluent Kenyans and some of the people I have been working with. But I think that is enough for now.