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.