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).