Well, Sid and I made it safely to Bungoma, our home for the next year! We ended up spending a few unexpected days in Nairobi because the airline lost our luggage and we had to wait for it. This was fine for me because I had packed a lot of back up clothes and toiletries in my carry on bag, because this is not the first time the airline has lost my luggage. For Sid, this was a bit more of a challenge because all he had in his carry-on was…books. Luckily, you can get just about anything you need in Nairobi, so we were able to buy him an extra shirt! We found a grocery store on the first day and were happy to discover it to be almost as well stocked as “Giant Eagle” at home. I was especially thrilled to find an entire wine section and a couple of different types of cheese available.
After a fairly uneventful bus ride to Bungoma we arrived on Wednesday night and were welcomed with dinner by our new co-workers and roommates. The next morning we got up at 5:30 so we could go out to the field and see what a typical day at the farms is like. One Acre Fund farmers’ primary crop is maize (corn) and the maize harvest just ended a few weeks ago. The farmers had dried the maize, removed it from the cobs and bagged it in 90kg bags. For every 1/2 acre of maize they plant as a One Acre Fund farmer, they are expected to pay the organization back with 3 bags of maize. OAF then sells the maize to make back the money that they invested. The farmers can sell the rest of the maize for profit, or choose to keep it to feed their families. On the day we were out at the farms, the Kenyan staff was doing “quality checks”. Essentially, they take a few samples from each bag and check them to make sure the maize isn’t rotted, discolored or otherwise unable to be sold.
We walked around to about 8 different farms, chatting with the farmers and tasting guava picked from a farmer’s tree while the staff checked the maize. The farmers that OAF works with are all very poor and many of the homes that we were invited into were no more than a few small, dark rooms with concrete or dirt floors. In contrast, the land around the farms was amazingly beautiful. We are in the short rain season so everything is green and lush, with fruit trees and flowers growing everywhere. The farms were built on a slight slope, so the views of the hills and valleys around us went on for miles.
After about half a day in the field, we went into Kakamega, the nearby town, and had a typical Kenyan lunch of beans, greens and ugali (a kind of tasteless cornmeal patty that the Kenyans eat everyday because they say it makes them strong!). Lunch for Sid and I was about 60 Kenyan shillings, which is a little less that a US dollar.
On Friday we had meetings all day about the projects that we’ll be taking over at OAF (which I’ll write about another time because I’ve been working on them nonstop for the past few days and need a break!)
On Saturday, Sid and I finally had a chance to explore the town where we live and check out the grocery store-slash-hardware store-slash-clothing and shoe shop-slash-office supply store-slash-kitchen supplier-slash-bike shop (all in one store, of course…) and buy some things for our house. A few words about our house:
The good news is that we share it with two really lovely women who I have already bonded with. The other good news is that we have lights, a very nice refrigerator and even a toaster…
The slightly less good news is that we don’t actually have any electricity to power these things…
It’s not as big of a deal as it sounds because we live on a compound that has about 3 other houses with other expat OAF staff living in them and they all have electricity. So we mainly spend our time there during the day and are able to power all of our stuff – computers, lanterns, cell phones, etc – when we are there. We can even shower there, as they have hot water most of the time and actual water pressure. Our house, on the other hand, has cold water that barely trickles. So depending on the time of day and how hot and sweaty I am, I will either choose to trek up the hill (we are also a little farther down the path from the other houses…) carrying my things for a hot shower (in the morning, when it’s still cold out) or I will stay in my own house, fill a bucket with cold water and dump cups of it over my head (after I’ve been out in the field and am really hot and sweaty and can stand the cold water).
The compound is nice – there is a giant garden that I’m looking forward to planting in, as soon as I can find Cosmos, the night guard-slash-gardener (he didn’t have enough to do as a night guard – it’s very safe here – so he needed a hobby) to ask him where I can plant. Besides the expats, there are a few other people living here as well, including Mary, the housekeeper who also cooks 3 times per week, and her two children Manu (age 4) and Delvin (age 10) who are going to become computer experts from watching over our shoulders all the time while we are working (Also, Sid plans to spend some time teaching Delvin some computer skills.) There is also Mama Rebecca, who is maybe related to the landlord (I haven’t quite worked this out yet), who is very sweet, speaks great English and invited me over to practice Swahili whenever I can.
The bad news is that many of the people on the compound have a lot of chickens…and more importantly roosters…that crow outside of our window (literally, right outside – there is a big pile of concrete that for the first 3 days I thought was chicken feed because they all seem to congregate around it) every morning at 5 am. And there are two dogs that howl every night so dramatically and mournfully that it’s completely over the top and makes us laugh every time we hear it.
We also have a cat, which is nice, whose name is unfortunately Rabies. But apparently Rabies has been given a rabies shot and therefore doesn’t actually have rabies. And for about 2 days we had a new kitten who wandered in and we very prematurely named Mama Watoto, but then wandered out again and we fear she’s been eaten, probably either by Rabies or the mournful dogs (but probably not by the chickens).
And in other good news, there aren’t that many bugs. Hard to believe, this being Africa (and considering the multiple ant incidents in India) but I have not seen any ants outside of the garden, only a few spiders, no cockroaches yet (thankfully!), and have been bitten maybe 6 times total by mosquitoes. We do sleep under a mosquito net, but (perhaps because we have no lights to attract them) there is usually only one straggler mosquito flying around the room. After killing it (and being told I have bad karma by Sid) things are usually fine (except, of course, for my karma).
