The Common Tour Route

Today I spent a nice long day in Kibera which was a fascinating time. It was the start of my research into the types of data that communities find the most useful, so I spent all day talking to different people in the slum about things they would want to know about their community.

I started out by meeting Ken O. in the morning. We then walked from where we were meeting into the slum which was only about 10 minutes away. We entered through a different side of it then I’ve seen before. There was a large open dirt field which looked like it served as a place for big events to happen in the area. There were a lot of kids playing soccer, and there was a stage set up where there would later be some performers hip hop dancing. As we got into the slum, I saw one of the sights that Kibera is well known for. The train tracks. There is a railroad line that runs straight through the slum. There was no train coming so people were walking up and down it, and children were playing on them. Shops lined the side of them only about 5 feet from the edge of the tracks. One point along them, you could look too the right, and see all of Kibera spreading out into the distance. The slum really is quite massive. To the left of the tracks in an oddly surreal way was the green of a golf course where I saw some wealthy looking foreigners playing a game. It was just kind of weird to see such poverty to my right, a railroad beneath me, and affluence to the left.

As I was walking along the tracks, Ken saw another Kenyan who he knew who was guiding an American couple. The woman turned to me and said: “Oh, I guess this is the popular tourist route”. I just sort of nodded and continued on with Ken, but that comment bothered me a little bit. My first reaction was that of revulsion that she considered such a thing as tourism. I think it is vile to view other people’s poverty and suffering as something fascinating to look at. My second reaction though was that as I was looking out at the reaches of the slum from the railroad, wasn’t I in a way a tourist? I’m still not really sure where I sit on this. I think I justify it in my mind that I am here doing work with the community, rather than just staring at them. It enables me to do what I do without feel bad about it, but there is definitely some grey area.

The first place we went was a school complex run by the Kibera YMCA. That was where I realized that Ken was kind of a big deal as he turns out to be the director of the whole organization. We stopped in a parent meeting the school was having, and I had the opportunity to speak to the parents about the project and ask them a few questions. It went pretty well, though they were reluctant to speak at first. Most of what they mentioned dealt with the health and safety of the children in Kibera, which makes sense as they are parents.

After the meeting I went and sat in the headmaster’s office while Ken had some work to attend to. I think I dozed off for a little while, before waking up and chatting with one of the teachers for a while about the history of New York City, and the geography of the United States. After that was lunch before I met with all the staff of the school. I chatted with them about the project and data for a little over the hour. They were incredibly interested, and offered a ton of great insight. After that we left the school, and caught a matatu deeper into the slum.

The last place that we stopped to gather information was at a fundraising event that was taking place in a community center. Ken was invited as a guest of honor. It was a fundraiser to help send a student to University next year because the family could not afford it by themselves. It was an interesting event. You had to pay some money when you first came in. Then, the MC would introduce different people who would go up to the front of the room and badger people for more money. Whoever had the mic would walk around demanding more money from people for quite random reasons. One man handed another guy a box to hold. He then charged him 200 schillings for holding it and he had to pay up. It was a really interesting time, similar to fundraising events that you would see back in the US, but also very distinctly Kenyan.

I just returned back to the apartment now after a long day. We ate dinner at a place in prestige called “Books First, Sherlock’s Grill and Sports Pub”. I had some quesadillas which were not bad. I’m meeting Ken at 11am tomorrow morning to head back into Kibera, so let’s home it is as good a time as today was.

Oh, also, today we decided and set into motion the plans to go on a Safari next weekend. More to come on that later...

1 Week Later

I’ve been a little slow in writing blog posts, so I will try to use this one to catch up a bit. I’m going to use this one to describe things, rather than provide too in depth commentary and thought on what I’ve been doing. After I’ve caught up, I will transition to something more like that. Anyway…

I’ve been in Kenya for about a week. Things have been going well so far, and I’m enjoying my time here thus far. I’m going to break everything down by subject and try and include as much as I can.

Places to go nearby: So, our apartment is located in the Kilimani part of Nairobi. It is the home of most of the expat community, as well as Nairobi’s considerably large upper middle class. As such, the area is filled with a number of stores and locations that are not too different from what you would find in America. Adam’s Arcade is about a 7 minute walk away. It is a little outdoor plaza mall. We’ve gone there a few times to eat and meet at a place called Java. Java which we believe was first founded by an American a few years, back is a really awesome coffee shop type place. They have good coffee and tea, as well as great breakfast food. I had some banana walnut pancakes there that were fantastic.

Another location about 7 minutes away is called Prestige. It is a larger outdoor mall type place that we go to fairly often. It has an ATM is I want to take out more money, a food court, a lot of stores and a movie theatre playing recent movies. The night that I arrived, the rest of my team went to see Harry Potter at the theater. One of the stores in Prestige is called Nakumat which is a chain as I went to one last summer while in Kampala. On the first floor it is a pretty basic supermarket with really any type of food, Kenyan or Western that you can find. It has two more floors that can be described as a mix between a Target and a Sears with a whole variety of different items, electronics, and furniture. It is a really neat place that we can go to if we ever need really anything.

The third location that we frequent is another mall, about 8 minutes away called YaYa. It is a rather large 4 story mall that is probably the most affluent out of each location. It has a number of stores where you can buy just about anything you can want. It has a super market on the first floor, as well as another Java. Our collective favorite place there is definitely a coffee/pastry shop called Alexandro. They have seats in YaYa’s main lobby as well as in this outdoor, yet contained tree house like space that has Monet prints on the wall, as well as a lovely banner depicting a snowy evening. The pasty’s they serve are fantastic, and we usually end up going there at least once each day.

The Food: The food is something I have been asked about frequently back home. It has been fantastic so far. A couple nights we have cooked pasta in our apartment, but otherwise most nights we have eaten out. There are food courts in both Prestige and YaYa that have a number of different restaurants ranging from Swahili and Ethiopian, to Indian, Chinese, and Italian. Most of it so far has been very good, and I have not yet gotten the same meal twice. Another place we have eaten is a nice restaurant called Smart Village. It is Ethiopian food so it consists of mashed up vegetables, and legumes and such, and sometimes meat. You eat it using this sponge break that you tear pieces of, and use it to scoop up the veggies. It was kind of amusing the other day when we were eating there; we ordered one full chicken which can feed the table of 9 of us. Unfortunately, there was a miscommunication and they thought we asked for four chickens. Big difference! We ended up eating a lot of it, but we worked it out with them that we did not have to pay for it all as it was a miscommunication.

What we’ve been doing: In the week that I’ve been here, we have had busy days as well as uneventful. The first couple days I was here we just traveled around and I tried to get used to my surroundings. We went into the center of Nairobi to walk around. We happened upon a bar called Samba that was notable for its padded walls and neon lights guiding the stairs up to it. It turned out to be a really nice place with a lot of people watching football (soccer) games. There we met a Kenyan man named Robert who I will talk about more in a later blog post. Long story short, we went to his house for dinner last night and it was great. A couple days ago I went into the city again with Roy. He is doing a project on Matatus, so we walked from Matatu station to Matatu station. Matatus are basically minibuses/large vans that serve as the primary form of transit around the city. They don’t drive until they are full and they follow different routes, but if business is slow they will change them at any time. They are not expensive to use, less than 50 cents most of the time, but are definitely an experience due to their aggressive driving style. There are also buses you can take around the city that are a little bit more comfortable for an equivalent price.

As for my project it is just getting started. I had a meeting yesterday and another one tomorrow to put together the research methods. Today I am going to take data and translate it into a few different forms so that we can see which ways of representing data are the best for people in communities to understand. I will try to put what I create up on this blog after I write it.

I’ve been to Kibera once already with a man named Ken O. and Joshua who is one of the people from group shot. Ken grew up in Kibera and now works with a number of groups in the community. He works with mSurvey, the YMCA in Kibera, as well as his own NGO. He is going to be my main contact when working on this project. He took us on a tour of one small part of Kibera near where he grew up. Kibera is certainly an interesting place. It was a lot more similar to Shilongo, the village in Uganda where I was last summer in terms of the poverty in the area. It was different in other respects and more similar to my trip to the Dominican Republic in January because of the tight slum living conditions. I will describe it more in detail sometime later after I have been there more.

When I haven’t been working I’ve been reading a lot. I think I’ve gotten through around 4 books since getting here, and I have a while left to go and to continue reading before I get caught up in school as soon as I get home.

That’s it for now, and I will try to write a bit more regularly moving forward.

The Trip and What I'm Doing

Note: This is the first time my internet connection has been fast enough to post anything, so I meant to put this up a couple days ago. I'm also not sure if I will be able to get the pictures up for a couple more days. I will see if I can post something about what I've been doing since this post was written in a day or two.

I’m currently writing this from Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul, Turkey. I probably won’t be able to publish it until I am in Nairobi, but I figured that I might as well start writing something more introductory now before starting to actually talk about Kenya once I get there later tonday/tonight/tomorrow (whatever time it happens to be).

My flight to get here was nice enough. The Turkish airline flight I took was for the most part pleasant. The food was pretty good, and they had a wide variety of on-demand movies to watch. I killed some time watching the movie The Town which was pretty good. It was neat to see locations all around Boston that I see on a regular basis. The only hiccup in the trip was a toddler sitting in the seat directly behind me who threw several temper tantrums throughout the flight. He would just start screaming for around 20 minutes before his mother was able to calm him down both times. To top it off, as we were getting off the plane, he threw up all over a young girl that was sitting a couple rows away. Real nice.

Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to explain exactly why I am going to Kenya. This past semester I took a seminar that was taught by a consulting group called Groupshot who specialize in technology in development in context. The culmination of the course was this trip to Kenya, partially sponsored by the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts. 4 other students and I are going to be in Kenya each doing research on our own respective projects, though there will be a substantial amount of overlap and we will likely work together frequently.

My project is in regards to data access and usability. It is often a problem all around the world that data collected does not get back to the people that the data came from. Oftentimes groups go into developing countries with the intention of performing a project. They will collect data from communities, and then leave with it. Sometimes the communities see the data again, but much of the time they do not. In the cases that they do see the data, it is often not in a form that is usable for the actual community members to use. As a result, this data which could be a great resource is ultimately wasted. The research question I am going to try and work on has two parts. The first of which is how can we get all this data that is collected back to the community itself. The second part is how then can this data become usable for community members to empower themselves with. I’m going to be doing this research through surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc… to try and get as complete a picture of the situation as possible.

With that, I need to board my flight to Kenya. I will try and update this blog regularly. Also, if you ever have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.

I’ve arrived safely in Kenya and so far things are really nice. My second flight was pretty manageable. It went for the most part without a hitch. I was sitting next to a mother, her father, and her 1 month year old baby girl. She was really young to be traveling all the way to Kenya from wherever they started (they sounded Dutch to me). When I arrived in the airport it took little trouble to acquire a visa. There was a long line to purchase one, but it only took around 20 minutes. The whole process of getting the visa, and then changing money took longer as there was a massive group of volunteers from I believe Ireland that were clogging everything up. They appeared to be doing some volunteer work from a church. I wish I had had the chance to ask them more specifically what they were working on. I’m skeptical of such trips as they were only staying a week from the conversations I heard. The one bothersome part of getting through the airport was that the customs official who gave me the visa asked if I could break a $100 US bill for her. I saw no problem with it as I was just going to exchange it to Kenyan Schillings anyway. Unfortunately, as it turns out, it was an older $100 bill. While it is still legal tender, the first exchange place in the airport didn’t want it. I was finally able to get it exchanged at a second place, but the exchange rate was 1 schilling less (The rate was about 1$US=95 Schillings).

After leaving the airport, I was greeted by John who had a piece of paper with my name on it. He told me “Karibou Kenya, Kakuna Matata!” which means “Welcome to Kenya, no worries!” (If you recognize that second phrase from the Lion King it is because the movie is peppered with Swahili. Simba I believe actually means lion. The movie was supposed to take place in either Kenya or Tanzania). The drive to get to the apartment only took around 20 minutes though apparently if done in the middle of the day rather than 3 in the morning; it could take over an hour due to all of the congestion. Although he pointed out some landmarks along the way, I don’t feel that I yet have a good feel of the city. I will need to go around it in the daytime to see what’s what. One landmark that was pretty neat that he pointed out was Nairobi National Park. I could not see into it, only the fence that surrounds it, but apparently it is full of a whole number of elephants, giraffes, buffalo, monkeys, baboons, etc… The interesting part of it all was that it directly bordered the airport and the outskirts of the city. He pointed out a few hotels along side it that during the day, you can look out your window and see all the animals. I’d like to go on a real safari while on this trip, but at the very least I know I will get to see this park at one point or another.

After the nice drive through the city, we arrived at the apartment complex and I was greeted by my fellow Tufts students who had arrived a few days earlier. The whole complex is surrounded by a barbed electric fence with 24 hour security so it is pretty safe. Apparently there is also a pool and a 24 hour gym, but I have yet to see them yet. The apartment itself is very nice. It is very spacious and clean. It is a three bedroom apartment with a living room, dining room, kitchen and 2 and a half bathrooms for just 5 people. I have some pictures of it below.

I’m not yet sure what I’m going to be doing today, most likely getting acclimated with the parts of the city around the apartment. I am going to try and pickup a cheap phone to use as well as a local sym card that is much more affordable than using a phone from home. In the apartment we have an android phone working as a wifi hotspot, so I should have the internet regularly, but not for long stretches of time, so I will try and post something either later tonight, or sometime tomorrow.

Living Room

Dining Room

View Outside Window (looks the same as what our apartment looks like from the outside)

Kitchen

My bedroom 

Bathroom (and me taking the picture)

Main Hallway

Other angle of the Kitchen

New Travel Blog

Welcome to my new blog devoted to whatever travels I am doing around the globe. I wanted this to be separate from my standard blog as the audience might be a little different for either. This blog is mostly meant for family and friends. If you are not one of my friends or a family member, this blog is going to be a pretty typical travel blog. I will try to keep this as interesting as I can though.

My first trip that I will talk about here will be my trip to Kenya that I leave for in 2 days. Sometime soon I will put up an introduction post for that trip describing what it is that I am doing. I will then try update it every few days while I am traveling.