Last week, for my spring break, my classmates and I spent a week in rural Ukambani (Land of the Kamba) living, working, and eating with out host family. While the focus of our program is to study urban planning and development, we went to live in a rural village to give us a more diverse perspective on life and culture in Kenya. For one week we used pit latrines located outside of the house often crawling with cockroaches, lizards, and centipedes, awkwardly bathed using a bucket bath, walked long distances with donkeys to fetch water, and wore khangas (pieces of fabric that you use almost as a skirt but also serves as a towel, blanket, pillow, and band aid for when you cut your hand open with a scythe). In addition, we received many stares as most of the inhabitants has seen very few white people and even less blondes.
I stayed with a woman named Jacinta and she had seven children, three of whom worked in Nairobi, and her husband who was in the military but came home at the and of the week for the party. Of the four children that were still at home, one daughter had a slight deformity with her foot making it hard for her to walk long distances, one son had a mental illness that prevented him from speaking, writing, talking, or understanding most of what was being said, and a young son and daughter who had way too much energy for the small house we lived in. Only the eldest daughter spoke enough English to have somewhat whole sentences with me and the rest of the family preferred Kikamba to Kiswahili so it was an interesting week of me mixing English, Swahili, Kamba, and hand gestures to explain what I needed or wanted. The layout of the house itself was a living room where one of the girls slept, a side room where I and the eldest daughter shared a bed that doubled as a storage room, a room for the boys, and a room for the parents. Outside of the house there was another building that was used for the chickens, turkeys, and cooking and another one farthest away from the house that served as the choo. My family had an extensive amount of animals influding turkeys, chickens, goats, sheep, cows, and a donkey that all roamed freely around the compound during the day and expansive farmland.
In terms of the work I did…it was never more apparent how absolutely useless I am than during this week. I don’t think my host mom understood that life in America is not congruent to life in rural Kenya because she was shocked every time I did not know how to carry out the tasks that she gave me (which was every single time). One of my chores including finding twigs from around the compound to turn into a broom to then sweep the compound. Their compound was quite large and the broom I had very short so I was bent over for at least an hour trying to sweep up the stray mango pits, animal dung, and random pieces of trash that had been blown all over the compound. To dispose of the trash, I had to shovel it onto a feedbag and throw it into the cow pens bringing me way to close to their horns. Another chore involved me going down to the shamba and cutting long grass with a scythe for hours. Anyone who knows me knows that me and sharp objects do not necessarily mesh and the cuts on my hand and foot will testify that I have not much changed over the past two months. To cut the grass, you had to grab the base of the grass (often the grass was dried and tough or intermingled with plants that had thorns or briars) and then cut with the scythe using the jagged edge along blade making almost a sawing motion. From there I had to bundle large amount of grass, tie it, and then create a harness so I could carry it back up the shamba tied around my head… I was quite a sight in my skirt, khanga, and head wrap tottering as I attempted to carry bales of grass up a hill. In addition, I gathered dried corn husks and bundled those and threw them into our storage bin for the cows and donkey to eat during times of drought. While doing this I got a bit too close to a cow’s mouth and it tried to take my foot instead of the corn husk. One of my most memorable chores including going to the family well along the dried up river bed to collect water with the donkey. The well was a giant hole with some boards thrown on top of it and to get water I had to stand on the rickety boards, lower the bucket into the water (that had almost died up by this time) and then pull it back up. Unfortunately, the rope got caught on the wood and when I went to pull up, the rope caught and I was almost flung headlong into well. The old women who were around me definitely got a kick out of my skinny self flailing helplessly with a bucket of water…
Eating was also a very different from what I am used to and I left Ukambani gaining at least a ton because of it. Every morning we would take chai (cups of tea ladled with milk and way too much sugar) with Blue Band and honey sandwiches or left over chapatti and fried egg. This is much heavier than the yogurt and piece of toast I generally have and my host mother was not satisfied until I had at least three servings of everything. In between breakfast and lunch my host family would give me three or four mangoes which I absolutely loved. To eat them we bit into the skin and peeled it with out teeth and flung all of the scraps to our dogs and turkeys. For lunch we made either gytheri (a mixture of beans and corn) or sikumu wiki (the Kenyan version of collard greens) and ugali (a mound of flour basically). Again, the food was good, but my host mother was not satisfied unless I took two or three giant portions of it with at least two cups of chai. After lunch we had more mangoes and for dinner we had cabbage, rice, and either chicken, or goat. Goat is a very popular meat here but very fatty and chewing it is like chewing bubble gum and because I was the guest I was given the most and the fattiest pieces- something that I I could have done without. On my last night there, they killed a chicken in my honor and I watched as they strangled it, defeathered it, and took out and sorted all of the internal organs for us to eat. Never before have I had so many strange and indecipherable pieces of meat and it took all of my will power to swallow it and not feed it to the dogs under the table. On the very last day, I and my friend Emily were lucky enough to watch them slaughter the goat for our going away party (sarcasm: it was one of the most traumatizing experiences ever). We watched as they led the poor goat to the tree, hung it, and then cut the goats neck with a knife, stepping back as the blood spurted. We were also there to receive a lesson on the internal organs of a goat and how to tell if it is sick or healthy and how to clean out a goat’s intestines with water in order to make blood sausages. I do no think I will be able to eat goat again…Besides eating the food, I also learned how to cook most of it with sanitation practices that would shock anyone (like rolling the chapatti on the same spot where the chicken was killed without washing it with boiling water) and using instruments that gave me several burns and cuts. I would sit there over an open flame with some sort of cooking plate on top trying to stop the rickety device from falling, while awkwardly cutting the ingredients needed with a knife that had no handle, feeding the flames twigs and moving the sticks around with my hand when the fire got low, and taking the food of the boiling hot plate with my hand rather than any sort of oven mitt. In the space of a week, I do not think I have ever received so many cuts and burns but it was fascinating to learn how to cook in a traditional fashion.
Living in a rural village is interesting. It is an experience that I will remember for the rest of my life but for as amazing as it was, it is sobering to remember that for me it was some sort of adventure while for the people of Kuya (where I lived) it was reality. I got severe food poisoning one night and all I could think of was in two days I will be back with running water and a flushing toilet inside the house and I can eat what I want to eat whereas to my family this was what they experienced every day and there was no escape from it. What was most interesting was trying to explain to my family what they didn’t have. They would ask me what I did instead of hand washing my clothes or sweeping the floor of the house, and they couldn’t understand the concept of machines that did the work for you. They barely understood when I told them about running water and showers. There are so many things in Washington DC that I took for granted that I realized I could live without when I came to Nairobi- like electricity, hot water, Netflix. After last week, I learned there were so many things that I took for granted in Nairobi that I could, not happily, live without when I went to Kuya- like running water, toilets, and English speakers. Rural week was an amazing spring break and I know that in no other setting could I have learned so much- either about myself or the culture of the people I lived with.
