Muzungus on a mission

Emily: Our first week in Kakunga village has been awesome! We are gradually adjusting to our new environment: we have adopted an almost entirely Kenyan diet (we attempted to cook spaghetti for our family once. They were unimpressed.) and our waking hours are now between 7:30 am and 9:30 pm (if it’s a late night).

Bea: It’s so nice coming back after a long day at school to the family we are staying with. The lady we are staying with, (“Mama” as we obediently and fondly call her), eats with us every evening, and has already decided that “muzungus” (white women) are a lot less sensible than is generally believed. It has taken a week for her to accept that we are able to find the school on our own (its at the end of the one straight road beside the house), and that we can use the gas cooker without burning the house down (Still a bit doubtful in regards to Emily).

Emily: Ridiculous allegations. Our new family is made up of Mama and a number of relatives. There is never a dull moment! The children were shy at first, but Bea won them over with her tennis ball, which has provided hours of entertainment. We attempted to teach them how to play some card games, but we were soon bested by little Kanny’s cheating snap antics.

Bea: We’ve both been really moved by how generous Mama is. She was widowed in 2010, but undertakes to support so many nieces and nephews by putting them through school, and also funded a new classroom at Kakunga school. She never fails to be full of warmth and laughter, and is known by almost everyone we come across. One of her more recent missions has also been to convert us into Kenyan women by eating large and multiple helpings of anything we eat, a challenge which we have both accepted with vigour.

“Mama” with her brother whose children she puts through school

Emily: Mama has really been such a blessing: she has made us feel so welcome and she lifts our spirits every evening if we are feeling even slightly overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do or tired from the long walk home. We are already dreading having to leave her at the end of our project! I think she is also worried about us leaving her care; every morning she feels the need to ring Mildred  just to check that we have made it to the school without getting lost. To be fair, it is a pretty long walk: it takes us about 45 minutes to get to school in the morning, and sometimes over an hour on the way back.

Bea: The school is next to Kakamega Rainforest, so just a few minutes walk from the main road leads to stunning views of lush green countryside. The road we walk on however is very busy and dusty, as there is West Kenya Sugar Factory, a big market and A Technical Training Institute nearby. On the way back every ten seconds we are greeted by workers on motorbikes or walking along shouting out “muzungu, muzungu!” (“white woman, white woman!”), and asking if we want a ride. However, we have made friends with some of the people who sell tomatoes, onions and avocado by the road, who we chat to everyday and buy supper from on the way home.

Emily: At school our day normally begins with chai and bread and butter in Mildred’s office, where we have a quick chat about our plans for the day and say hello to the lovely secretary, Eunice. Our schedule has been pretty packed: the school has been pretty emphatic about their need for more textbooks (currently the average ratio of textbooks to students is 1:4) so we spent the first couple of days trying going through all the handwritten records of books that have been bought in the past couple of years, comparing them to the librarian’s records of books that have been lent out to the girls and compiling a huge inventory spreadsheet.

Sorting through the book records with a much-needed chai

Lovely Eunice bringing us chai

Bea: Many of the text-book numbers in the various records did not line up and the text-books are stored in a tiny room in cupboards. Looking through them we discovered some books with whole chunks missing thanks to rodents. Consequently helping the school set up a library with a clear checking-out system and shelves seems like a priority. We were pleased to learn that a newly constructed building on the grounds is going to become a library, and that the school has plans for shelves to be constructed as soon as the girls’ parents are able to pay their school fees.

Emily: At the moment we think that this will take up most of our resource investment, but we are also exploring ways to improve the girls’ health (malaria seems to be a big problem at the moment) and their general wellbeing. We discovered that many of the girls are not able to afford basic sanitary products, so their periods can be a huge obstacle in terms of getting to school and going about things freely and comfortably. In order to find out more about the girls’ needs and to understand their daily challenges we have tried to devise ways to get to know them and mingle casually in a way that will make them feel free to talk to us frankly. So far this has proved trickier than we thought…

Bea: For the first few days we focussed on getting to know the school management and finding out their views on what can be done to help the school. By Thursday we felt it was high time to mingle more with the students and find out their experience of school. We found ourselves being left for five minutes with each class, who each demanded that we perform various activities. Some of the classes found it fascinating to watch us do a maths question on the board, whilst others derived great amusement in hearing my increasingly desperate announcements of my name, which spiralled from “Bea”, to “Beatrice”, to “Beetriss” to “Bee-trees” which Emily and Mama now (fondly?) refer to me as. The older classes proved more curious to find out if we “abstained”. We found this challenging to answer given the highly conservative attitudes in the area of “boy-girl relationships”.

Emily: One day we decided to have lunch outside with the girls instead of staying in the principal’s office. We queued outside the kitchen along with the students, who somehow all managed to sidestep and sneak their way in front of us so we ended up right at the back of the 200-person queue. When we finally made it to the front, we were served our Githeri (beans) and turned around to find a huge semicircle of girls just staring at us waiting for us to do or say something hilarious. This wasn’t quite the informal mingling session we’d envisioned!

Beetrees: A more informal mingling opportunity happened on Sunday when we attended the church beside the school. It is a Salvation Army church, and we arrived to find a huge procession of people marching around the village in military style with a brass band playing and – to our mutual surprise – some other “muzungus” marching in white uniform. The service lasted for over 4 hours, and involved much singing, dancing and blessing each other. We were welcomed to the front to introduce ourselves to the community, and then watched as the other muzungus performed a tambourine dance for the congregation. The crowd went wild. We ended up having lunch with the other “muzungus” and learnt they were a group of visiting American Salvation Army members, and tried not to appear envious when they described their hostel’s hot showers and internet. We parted with promises to see each other next year in July at a large Salvation Army conference in London…

At the end of this week we are feeling inspired, motivated and exhausted. We can’t wait to see what next week will bring!!