Ciao, Mizungo!

  Last night I finally installed my mobile broadband modem, so I now have internet anywhere I can get a phone signal. That means I should have good internet the rest of my time here. Cell phones are extremely widespread in Africa, and even tiny shops in remote villages have Safaricom products for sale. Some of the people we have interviewed are in extreme poverty but still possess cell phones. It seems that they have become a necessity. At any rate, I should be keeping the blog much more up to date in the future.
   On Thursday we interviewed our pilot village, Ngecha (I spelled it wrong in the first blog), which is about a half hour drive from Nairobi. This village is populated almost exclusively by members of the Kikuyu tribe, and is much more affluent than the rest of the areas we will be going. It is an agricultural community, and would still be considered primitive in the United States. There is some running water and some electricity, but the houses are small (one or two rooms) and the roads in the village are not paved. The village center is comprised of ramshackle shops made of an assortment of materials, and there is at least one church, a primary school and a secondary school. The homes are surrounded by small plots of maize and other crops, and there were chickens and goats in most of the backyards. The interview that I observed was with a lady who runs a hairstyling business on her front porch.
   The Kikuyu tribe is largely concentrated in Central Kenya, and its members are known for their productivity and business skill. The recent history of this tribe is fascinating and troubled. The Kenyan fight for independence from British rule was carried out almost exclusively by the Kikuyu. This fight was extraordinarily violent, and it sharply divided the Kikuyu people. The British relied heavily on Kikuyu loyalists to counter the rebellion, which continued all the way until the late 1950s. Thus Kenyan independence arose from a sort of civil war which came to be known for terrible atrocities on both sides. This history is chronicled by David Anderson in Histories of the Hanged, a book which I found very insightful and would highly recommend to anyone interested in learning about Kenya's fight for independence. I think it also reveals a lot about the end of the British Empire.
   The next day we flew to Malindi, which is a sleepy town on the Indian ocean. Malindi is not predominantly Muslim as I had mistakenly mentioned in the previous blog, but there is a signficant Muslim minority. Malindi is also a popular destination for Italian tourists and investors. Thus many locals have greeted us with "Ciao," which explains the title of this post. Mizungo is a pan-African word meaning "white person." Both these words have come up many times in the past few days, although as of yet not together (at least not in earshot).
  It is getting late here so I am going to wrap up this post, but first let me apologize for the delay in putting up pictures. The internet has been too poor for me to upload them, but I think I should be able to do it now that I have the mobile modem. So we'll see. We have an early morning tomorrow so I'm going to try uploading a few pictures now and then I'll try to do a post tomorrow about Malindi and tell you about the pictures then. Salama!

Jambo!

  It has now been one week since I left the U.S., and what a week it has been! I arrived with Katie Thursday night and we went straight to the Hotel Jacaranda in the Westlands district of Nairobi. The hotel is very nice, I put up a couple of pictures but really it is just like any nice hotel you would stay in anywhere in the world. They have a free breakfast which has a mix of Western and local food (including passion fruit, and arrow root which is like a very dry potato), and a gym, spa, etc. One difference is that the water is not potable so I have been using my UV lamp to purify water every day, and so far I have not gotten sick. So I assume it works.
  The first day was spent in meetings going over the project we are studying  crs.org/publications/showpdf.cfm?pdf_id=79. The groups that are formed using the Saving and Internal Lending Community (SILC) model require technical support from trained agents, who have previously been funded by Catholic Relief Services (who I am working for). CRS is hoping to extend SILC's impact by training agents who will be paid by the groups instead of by CRS. The purpose of our study is to determine whether this is a desirable model based on group satisfaction, agent satisfaction, and economic / social impacts on communities with SILC groups. In order to do this, we are conducting a survey of both SILC and non-SILC members in villages throughout Kenya and Tanzania.
   After reviewing the project and going over logistical details on Friday, we had the weekend off. During our free time we went to the Nairobi National Museum, which is about a 10 minute drive from our hotel (unfortunately we were advised not to walk even that short of a distance due to safety concerns). The museum had interesting exhibits on the history of Kenya, a large collection of stuffed indigenous birds, and several art galleries with both traditional and contemporary art. My favorite section, however, was devoted to human evolution. We saw the famous skeleton of Lucy, as well as numerous other skeletons of precursors to Homo Sapiens. I posted some pictures I took at the museum, but the lighting was poor and most of them didn't turn out well.
   Monday through Wednesday was spent going over the details of the survey and helping to train the enumerators who will actually be giving people the survey (I will be involved in quality control: accompanying enumerators on a random basis, "backchecking" to verify that interviews actually took place and were accurate, etc). Tomorrow we head to Ngeisha, a community near Nairobi where we will do a test run of the survey. Then on Friday we fly to Malindi for a week of surveys of villages in the surrounding area. Malindi is a predominantly Muslim area on the coast of Kenya. Unlike Nairobi it is hot and humid, as well as being full of mosquitos. But I am very excited for the training to be over and the real survey to begin.
   That's about all I have for now. I will finish by trying to describe Nairobi, which is going to be very difficult. The parts I have seen (a very small portion) are in some ways quite modern and in some ways quite underdeveloped. Business men and women wearing nice suits walk on dirt paths through the city to work, and workers cutting grass by hand take breaks to text. The roads are paved one minute and then abruptly turn to a dangerous mix of dirt and boulders before being paved again. Everyone I have met has been extremely friendly, but every place we have gone (including a small Indian restaurant we went to last night) is surrounded by a wall and protected by security guards. The woman at the survey company we are working with mentioned that if we needed a false vaccination record before we head to Tanzania, it can easily be obtained at... city hall. Beatiful trees and other plants are present throughout the city, the weather is mild, and everyone speaks perfect English. Based on what I have seen of Nairobi, I think it is a really cool place.
   Hopefully that wasn't too long of a post. Alamsiki, asante sana! (If you can't figure out what that means, watch The Lion King).