Meeting Etiquette

Kenyans love meetings. As a result I go to a lot of them. You can have a meeting for pretty much anything. Sometimes it's a regularly scheduled meeting for a community group or staff meeting, other times there may be a guest coming to talk to people, outreach by a health clinic etc. Regardless of the reason meetings provide people with a chance to see friends and community members. Sometimes I genuinely enjoy meetings, but there are some key differences from meetings in Kenya, some of which drive me crazy. My biggest issue with Kenyan meetings is time. People will generally tell you a time a meeting is going to start. I have yet to see a meeting start on time. If a meeting starts within an hour of the proposed time I'm impressed. Now I tend to show up about an hour after the "start time" and still tend to be the first or second person to arrive. I am concerned about what this will result in when I get back to America and people intentionally show up early. A few days ago I was waiting for a meeting to start. When it was over 3 hours late starting I had to leave as I had a prior obligation. I feel like 3 hours is excessive. By that point I've usually run out of tasks to occupy myself and have become hungry, not unlike a small child. Meetings once they start take a long time. Several hours (2-3) is pretty standard. Part of the reason is that not only is there some sot of agenda, but the meetings tend to be more social and everyone must be properly greeted. Another reason meetings can seem never ending are the speeches that people give. If at any point a government official, community leader, special visitor, shows up a meeting the meeting will come to a halt as people expect that person, who is viewed as as honoured guest, to give a speech. The speech is almost never tailored to the group or subject of the meeting and can go on for a long amount of time. Thankfully the groups I work with no longer have me give introductory speeches. If there is a visitor however, I am expected to introduce myself through a speech to that person. It can be awkward. All visitors are expected to introduce themselves, which is typically a sentence or two, something that I think is fairly universal. When I specifically am dragged up to the front of the church to introduce myself, instead of being able to do so from the pew like everyone else, it can feel a bit uncomfortable. The most awkward was when I went to a pre-wedding (kind of like an engagement party but more formal) and my Canadian room mate and I were made to sit in the front of the church, in place of the bride's parents. Then we had to give a speech. My language skills were not sufficient, I had been at my site for less than a month and Magan (my room mate) refused to stand up. Afterwards the parents of the bride thanked us for coming and supporting their daughter, they were not upset about giving up their seats. That brings me to another quirk of Kenyan meetings---seating. Where you sit is important, as is what you sit upon as it shows your status. People are thrown off by the fact that I generally don't care where I'm sitting as long as there is shade. I am not a fan of the sun's ability to fry me. Most times I end up giving up and sitting wherever people tell me to, usually at the front near the chairman. I feel terrible when someone gives up their chair for me, but typically the refuse to keep it in spite of my insistence. The "committee" is usually seated in the best places. The committee is usually made up of the chairperson, secretary and treasurer of a group. Any guests or village leaders are given good seats as well. Next come men and then women, usually young women are the ones standing if there aren't enough chairs. Seating in such a way gives respect to important people and also can help direct a meeting as those leading it are clustered together. During meetings there are often several interruptions made by phone calls. Sometimes the person receiving the call will step a few feet away to take the call or even ignore it, but more often they will carry on a conversation. There is a group I work with whose chairlady has yet to take less than 3 calls during a meeting. I think it wouldn't bother me so much if she wasn't answering the phone while she was in the middle of a sentence. We all wait patiently until she finishes her calls and completes what she was saying. People don't think taking a call is rude. It may have something to do with the importance of greeting people, the newness of cell phones and the fact that placing a call costs money, but receiving one doesn't. Women who are breastfeeding bring their babies to meetings. There is no formula in the village, so until a child is old enough for porridge, the baby is entirely dependant on breast milk. Often other women want to hold the baby, much the in America. It's very different once the baby starts crying. The easiest solution is to feed the child, so the woman will begin breast feeding, sometimes in the middle of a speech, and that is totally normal. Breast feeding happens more often here likely due to the fact that n one in my village owns a pacifier. It is not scandalous to breast feed in public, unlike in America. Personally I don't understand why people freak out so much about it, maybe my view has been influenced by my time in Kenya. Meetings are generally fairly solemn affairs, sometimes there's soda, but otherwise not all that much happens. For that reason I will never forget the time a fight broke out during a dispensary staff meeting over how much money people should contribute for food. On that note, I think that's all I have to say about meetings in Kenya.

The Weight of Water

One of the most common sights in rural Kenya is a woman or girl carrying water on her head. People here will tell you that "water is life" and it is for that reason that women will walk for miles if needed to keep their families alive. In America water comes out of a tap in your kitchen, bathroom or a hose you hooked up to water your lawn. If you're lucky your water comes chilled out of a tap on your refrigerator door along with several kinds of ice. As an added benefit the water coming out of the tap and into your glass has been treated, meaning you won't be exposed to water borne diseases such as dysentery (I can tell you from experience you should count yourself lucky if you can avoid that one). Americans tend to use a lot of water. We use it to cook, wash clothes and bathe like people do here but in larger quantities. In Kenya you might use 10 liters of water for a bucket bath. I don't know how much is used in the average shower, but it's more than 10 liters, as is the capacity of your standard bathtub. Perhaps if Americans had to carry their bath water on their heads even just 1 or 2 blocks, they too would use less. I know I would because water is heavy. A liter of water has a mass of 1 kilogram, or roughly 2.2 lbs. Typically I never carried more than a 1 liter water bottle with me in America, but I did notice that it made my purse heavier. In Kenya I carry considerably more than 1 liter and I'm only an amateur. To get the water I use I have to options. I can leave buckets and basins out when it rains (which I do) or I can use one of the wells near my house. If the well outside my house has relatively clear water I can carry my water using my hands in small (10 liter) quantities making multiple trips if needed, which would only happen if I was doing laundry (I use 10 liters when washing my clothes by hand). So when I haul water out of the well by my house I am hauling roughly 22 lbs of water. 10 liters is also the smallest amount of water carried on one's head here, and typically it would be carried by a child. If I have to get water from another compound, like almost everyone in my community, then I carry it on my head. Carrying 10 liters is not too much of a problem, the hardest part for me at least is getting the bucket on my head because my arms can barely reach the top of the bucket once it has been lifted onto my head. I generally don't have to walk very far and there are no hills in my way so it's not too complicated. The more standard amounts of water to carry are 15 and 20 liters. If you're using a bucket it's more likely you would be carrying 15 as many don't hold 20 liters and you are less likely to fill it to the brim as you wouldn't want any of the precious commodity to spill. I can carry 15 liters on my head, which I think is acceptable considering that the water weighs roughly 33 lbs and is about 1/3 of my body weight (I was 105 lbs at our Close of Service medical). There are girls here though that must be 15 lbs lighter than me carrying 20 liters (44 lbs) which is insane because that's half of their body weight. When I was preparing to climb Mt. Kenya I read that it's not good to carry more than 25% of your body weight when hiking, which is what women and girls here are doing when carrying water. They are going up and down hills, though fields, down roads etc. balancing large quantities of weight on their heads and making it look effortless. Between carrying water, working in the fields, hauling and chopping firewood and all of the other tasks that make up their daily routine the women are hard working and strong yet friendly and eager to help out. Water isn't the only thing carried on heads here. I have carried firewood, baskets of dried corn kernels, brush etc. but here's a list of some of the common and/or strange things I've seen: food to be sold at the market, bundles of clothes, gas tanks, giant clay pots, a desk, tin sheets for roofing--I'll let you know if I see/remember anything else!

A Dollar A Day

I know it has been months since my last post but I'm aiming to make up for the lack of activity today. Let's just say I've been having technical difficulties. My time in Kenya is coming to an end. We had our Close of Service Conference a few weeks ago and ever since I've found myself reflecting on my time here when I'm not freaking out about what remains to be done. I have been taking pictures, something I had long been avoiding due to the riot caused by a camera in my village, which I hope to post once I am in an area with decent internet (realistically that may not happen until I get back to America in the first week of September). I had considered myself integrated into my community and thought that I was doing a better job of living like a local than the majority of Peace Corps Volunteers. I was however living off a larger budget than most of my community. To try and better understand the lives of people in my village I have been living off a dollar a day for a week and will continue to do so until I live my village in July. In the past week I have already made changes to my lifestyle, trips to town have been reduced, phone use has become virtually nonexistent, store-bought food has been reduced to a bare minimum of staples. I am primarily eating fruit, vegetables, corn flour and beans like most of my neighbors. Because I don't eat a lot I am able to purchase a wider variety of produce, provided it's available. I have not been having huge problems with keeping to my daily budget so far, 85ksh is plenty for me to eat, buy soap etc. but I am having to plan for my next trip to town. The cost for the journey is 100ksh round trip, so more than my daily allotment and as a result I have to save up for a week in advance, just like my neighbors who also have to save up for school fees, clothing, fuel etc. Many of them have small farms where they can grow some corn and beans, which helps, but recently there has been a sharp rise in school dropouts in my area because it has been months since the last harvest. Until we harvest again the food prices will remain high, some items will be unavailable, and many people will deplete their food stocks to dangerously low levels. Here's an example of what I spent/used yesterday: Oatmeal (5ksh), coffee (10ksh), sugar (2.5ksh), bananas (6ksh), beans (10ksh), kale (5ksh), onion (2.5ksh), garlic (2ksh), tomatoes (10ksh), soap (5ksh), oil (5ksh), other toiletries (5ksh), phone use (10ksh) money saved for next trip to town: 2ksh. Clearly I need to do a better job today. It adds up quickly. I doubt I'll buy another soda in my village, at 25ksh they're pretty steep! The fact that I can't buy a soda only helps me to understand the frustration of women in my community who can't send their children to school, or even feed them, because their husbands spend too much money on alcohol (a beer costs around 100ksh, local brews are cheaper but extremely dangerous). I'll keep you updated on how well I do keeping to the budget.