Tuesday was a frustrating day. Drumming was frustrating because the teacher doesn’t really teach in slow motion, he just plays something at full speed and expects me to repeat it, which I can usually do, but this time I couldn’t and he just kept playing it over and over. Then for the third week in a row, my Culture and Communication class was cancelled because the professor didn’t show up. Class has become something I look forward to every day because I get to meet new people and see new faces. I sort of feel like I am in middle school again, wanting to do things, but not being able to do them because I have to be home at a certain time or because I am not old enough yet. I have to be home every day by 7, because that’s when it gets dark…which means I have to leave school around 5:30 at the latest in order to walk to the matatu (about a 20 minute walk) and then get a matatu (sometimes takes 3 tries before there’s one that has room on it) and then sit in traffic on the matatu for sometimes up to 35 minutes for what should be a 7 minute ride.
ANYWAY…I am trying to look on the bright side of things all the time : ) Like I try to think of those long matatu rides as a 20 shilling tour of the city…parts that aren’t safe for me to walk through, I can see behind the glass of the windows. All along the streets there are women sitting on the ground with their really young children on their backs or sitting next to them. They sell small candies and boxes of matches and other little things. Some sell vegetables or fruit. I am amazed that these children sit there the entire day with their mothers. They are just babies. I see drunk men swaggering from side to side. I see hundreds, thousands of people walking and wonder where everyone is going or where they are coming from. Sometimes I get to listen to a radio station that plays music from the 90’s, which I love : )
Every time I meet someone at the university, whether it is a professor or a student, and they ask where I live and I tell them Kariokor, they give me these huge wide eyes and sometimes laugh or say “wow”. Apparently everyone knows this is not a “nice” neighborhood. It starts to get to me after a while. I don’t live in a huge house in the rich suburbs of Karen like Jenna, or have my own room separate from the main house at the YWCA like Whitney, I live in an apartment packed in among many other apartments. I feel lucky though, to have been dropped into this little neighborhood in this row of apartments, on this floor, in this flat with Monica and Chipa. I think all the time about how I never would have met these nice, extremely generous, and sometimes very funny people. I wonder what other really great people are in small corners of the world that I will never meet. I feel so lucky to have had the opportunities to travel here to this one part of a huge city and to Honduras, where I met some people I also probably never would have met in a small village in the mountains. It is interesting where life takes you.
You are lucky and so are Monica and Chippa (: It's the kind of lucky that takes a closer look to see. You will all learn so much from each other in these few months.
ReplyDeleteYou are living the life of an ordinary 'mwananchi'side by side with warm people, and you have tons of positive images to show you sides of Nairobi which may never make it to the tourist guides. i too was surprised when you told me about living in Kariakor, a historic part of the city, but one which the politicians have mostly forgotten about.
ReplyDeleteYou are live! This is your chance to really learn another way of life. It gets a time stamp on it, so you can return to this side of the world. Enjoy the simple things, like a Coke at the corner kiosk and the bustle of Nairobians in the city after work.
I cannot wait to see you all when the year is out. Keep up the writing!
What a lovely post. Your closing paragraphs prove the old adage about travel broadening the mind. It makes me all the more certain that part of the lassitude and cultural claustrophobia I feel lately is simply that I haven't gotten out of the country in more than six years.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to say, too, that your post about FGM was remarkable--not least in its emotional restraint. When I got to your marvelous understatement about how watching that poor woman try to give birth was "unpleasant," I went back to reread the whole thing and was amazed at how you managed to present so much horrific information straightforwardly without a lot of judgment or outrage. The facts speak so strongly on their own, and I admire the way you simply provided them, suggested the context for them, and outlined some of the problems associated with them. Bravo.
Your blog beats mine (where I've had nothing to say for almost two weeks) like a tin drum. Maybe I'll blog about your blog on my blog, bloggone it....
that was special.
ReplyDelete