AfricaTrip08.com

Hi all,

So we’re finally in Chad..we had an interesting time getting to both here and Ethiopia, but had a fun night in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia with our friend Anna. Colin will write more about Chad, but it’s been an interesting few hours. Needless to say, I’m glad I took high school French. But we’re safe, and glad to be here.

One thing I wanted to blog about in Kenya, but didn’t get the chance, is Obama’s historic nomination. We arrived in Kenya the day that Obama officially received the Democratic nomination, and it certainly allowed us to get an interesting perspective. Obama-mania in Kenya, and largely Africa on the whole, takes the phenomenon to an entirely different level.

The fact that Obama is half-Kenyan is not lost on anyone in the country. Whenever the papers write about him, they talk about his Kenyan father within the first two paragraphs. In fact, after Obama’s victory speech, the media reported he had dedicated the win to his Kenyan grandmother. Clearly, they were a little caught up, as he was talking about his maternal grandmother, in Hawaii.

Literally everybody we talked to knew Obama, and was incredibly excited about him. Taxi-drivers sung his praise, the school headmaster claimed that Obama’s candidacy “was not about Luo or Kikuyu, but about Africa” (Obama’s relatives are Luo, which supposedly provided tense moments during the election strife). As Colin and I got ready to leave at the airport, a guard sternly questioned us about our final destination. Then, he saw our US passports, and immediately beamed, “Obama!”, he exclaimed. The entire Kenyan population is united around their half-native son.

I think there are a number of reasons that Kenyans are so enthusiastic about Obama. First and foremost, he does have strong roots in Kenya, and in the larger African continent. People are proud that one of their own might lead the most powerful country in the world. Along those same lines, he represents a successful African story. If the son of a Kenyan goat farmer can become the Democratic presidential nominee, doesn’t that give hope to all Kenyans? And finally, many think he will demonstrate his roots by providing a pro-Africa strategy upon taking office.

In my opinion, these points show one of the most exciting prospects of an Obama candidacy; he would make Africa, and much of the world, excited about America. It’s an intangible, and one that can’t be argued to the American people, but there’s an awful lot to be said for the literal and figurative new face Obama would provide to the presidency. Literally, having a black President would not only be significant to Africa, but would show the rest of the world the progress of our country, and the great strides in equality we have taken. Additionally, his talk of change could restore our rapidly deteriorating moral credibility in the world. I’m obviously biased, but I think our experience in Kenya showed the rest of the world could get excited about Obama, and because the US is the sole remaining superpower, that is not a point that should be taken lightly.

At the same time, I do fear that Kenyans are a little blindly optimistic about what an Obama presidency would actually mean. A few local op-eds stressed this point; his policies might not be all that different than the past. I think this is relevant domestically as well; Obama’s supporters often carry unrealistically high expectations. I think he can do good, but I also don’t think that all the world’s, and Africa’s, problems will end in his first four years.

Anyways, I know this is thematically off from other posts, but Obama was a very big part of being in Kenya. It will be interesting to keep tabs on how the country follows his pursuit, and what ultimately happens if we have a President Obama. Needless to say, after all Kenya has been through this year, it was pretty exciting to see everybody, from all walks of life, get excited about a common theme.

Kibera is the second largest slum in Africa, located just a short drive from downtown Nairobi. Scott and I, along with another friend from Brown, visited the slum yesterday to try to get a better understanding of living conditions there, and how it fits into the larger political and economic picture.

We found somebody on the outskirts of the settlement who was willing to take us around and introduce us to a few people. He explained that he didn’t feel threatened by violent crime in Kibera, but that we ran the risk of mugging if we wandered around alone.

Conditions are somewhat similar to those that I describe in the village we visited yesterday morning. Sewage pits are uncleaned, trash literally covers the ground, and the water running through hasn’t been clean for years. People rent small plots of land and construct mud/stick/tin dwellings, and they find their food from small vendors around the slum. Water has to be purchased out of large tanks. The biggest difference between the two places we visited is that Kibera is massive. Some people estimate that as many as one million people live there. It wasn’t easy for us to know where we were at any point, so having a guide was a huge help.

Once again, we stood out in a very big way. Although I know about 3 words of Swahili, one word that I constantly picked up on was mzungu or white person, which pretty much everybody said when we walked by them. It was actually really fun to see how children reacted to us, most of them saying mzungu and then running up to touch our hands briefly. Many of them have been to grade school, and one of the few English phrases they know is “how are you?” However, they love to say it over and over again, and they tend to run the words together, so wherever we went there would be a chorus of 10 or so children yelling “HOWAHYOUUU” over and over again… it was pretty adorable.

The politics of Kibera are extremely frustrating. They’re quite well documented as it’s one of the most studied slums in the world, so I’ll just give you a few facts that we picked up from our guide. It seems that the government has the power and resources to resolve many of the problems face in the slum, but choose not to for a variety of reasons. The conditions are used as a selling point for international aid, and frequently outsiders are paraded around (I’ll admit we were guilty of this) to gain sympathy and, more importantly, money. Unfortunately, this money rarely goes towards improving conditions in the slum itself, and often lands in the hands of corrupt politicians (see Scott’s previous post). Some of the political leaders in Kenya have obscenely high salaries, and they sometimes openly divert funds from resettlement programs towards their own pockets. We even heard that some of the MPs own tracts of land in Kibera and make a healthy profit off renting it to the impoverished population.

Kibera is a clear example of how government corruption and mismanaged funds are contributing to the terrible poverty that some Kenyans face. It was surreal for us to see the thousands of make-shift dwellings in the foreground with the booming economy and development downtown in the background. Kenya needs to make improving conditions and basic resources for the lower class a priority, not building million dollar malls and feeding the already prosperous business sector.

Colin

Hey All!

We left Zimbabwe yesterday afternoon after an incredibly interesting trip. We were very fortunate to have the ability to hear so many different perspectives. We’ll try to do the same in Kenya, but we probably won’t be able to have quite as many interviews. I hope that you’ll keep reading and send us any questions or anything you’re wondering while we’re here.

This morning we stopped by a grade school not far from where Scott’s old house was. Scott had briefly helped out there and we were interested in seeing how it had progressed in the last five years. The headmaster was more than happy to take us around the school, and we visited each of the classrooms.

Classrooms were divided by year and they varied greatly in the size. Some had around 30 children, while others had as many as 100. There are nowhere near enough desks for the number of students, and the headmaster cited lack of furniture as one of their biggest problems. In some of the rooms, more than half the class were sitting on mats on the floor.

Many of the teachers are volunteers from the surrounding community, but Scott and I noticed that about half of the classrooms didn’t have a teacher in it when we visited. Surprisingly (I sure as hell didn’t do this in grade school) the kids were working away at their problems without supervision. Many of the children come to school because they serve them two meals, and the headmaster told us that they may not eat at all otherwise. However, they only have the supplies to serve them the same kind of food for each meal, so nutritional value is a major concern.

Interestingly, the school is set in a community that is very wealthy. Most of the houses in the area were quite large with gates surrounding their massive yards. I think Scott will touch on this in his post, but this was a perfect snapshot at the widening gap between the upper and lower class. When Scott and I asked where most of the children came from, the headmaster was kind enough to take us 400m down the road to the very impoverished village that most of the children live in.

In some ways, the village was the “typical” poor African village that many of us read about or see on TV. Houses are made of clay, sticks and tin roofs. There are lambs and goats walking around or penned up in houses. Trash and stagnant water cover the small alleys that run in between all of the houses, and men and women were cleaning their clothes in the river at the bottom of the village. Sadly, we noticed that despite the large school down the street, many of the children were staying at home. We talked to one boy who had to stay home and look after his siblings instead of going to school because his mother could not afford to have a maid stay at the house.

Because I’ve taken a bunch of global health classes, I couldn’t help noticing how dangerous the conditions were for the community, especially the children. Standing water mixed with sewage was prevalent, and the river in which most of the clothes and dishes are washed was far from clean. There is little access to professional care for people like one man who had lost two of his fingers after an incident where he was seizing because of his untreated epilepsy. He also had an open and bleeding wound on his temple that the headmaster thought was from a fall he suffered during an episode. Another child had an open and bleeding rash on the back of their leg, which the headmaster suggested was syphilis, but was clearly undiagnosed.

I’m at an internet cafe right now, so that’s all I’ll write today. It has been especially frustrating for us to be able to walk out of a village like that, and 10 minuets later be in a wealthy market with computer and jewelry shops. The discrepancy between classes is glaring. Scott will touch more on the foundation of this problem.

Colin