Lizards and turtles and bugs, oh my!

Hi everyone!

My last post ended up being more deeply introspective than I had anticipated (and a bit of a downer!), so I wanted this post to revert back towards providing glimpses into what has been happening in the Village lately. However, I first want to express my gratitude to those of you who took the time to reach out following my last update. The words of encouragement, personal anecdotes about coping with the challenges of new environments, and expressions of love and support that I received meant more than I can say!

A couple of weeks after my last update, the rainy season arrived at last. It got off to a bit of a rocky start, with 2 days of intense rain followed by over a week of clear skies. This presented a major problem for all of the clusters, each of which has a large patch of cultivated land used to plant staple crops like maize, beans, and pigeon peas (Fun Fact: known as toor dal in India, it’s a perennial legume grown all over Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America). As soon as the first rains of the season fall, the children and susus (grandmothers) from each cluster go into full gear planting that year’s crops. The ground is tilled, the holes for the seeds are dug, and the seeds are planted. However, in these first few days it is crucial for there to be enough rain to cause the seeds to germinate. This year, after a 48-hour frenzy of torrential rain and scrambling to plant the crops, the rains stopped. Over the next several days without rain, it became clear that nearly all of the seeds planted weren’t going to grow; even worse, they would all have to be replanted when (or if) the rains returned. That’s exactly what ended up happening, and all of the clusters had to redo their planting efforts when the rains came back the following week. Fortunately, this time the rains stuck around continuously for about 10 days, before becoming more sporadic for the following weeks. I think we’re just about done with the rainy season, but we had a bit of rain this past weekend and the crop fields are all filled with seedlings. Then again, it started raining out of nowhere halfway through writing this update, so what do I know.

The rain was warmly welcomed, but with the rain came a not-so-pleasant arrival: the bugs. Oh sweet Jesus, the bugs. More than I’ve ever seen in my life. At dusk, about 48 hours after a good rain, some come streaming up out of holes in the ground like some sort of perverse geyser, others come from branches making the whole tree sound like it’s an electrical plant, and still more form plumes of winged termites that stretch up a good 10 feet before they dissipate across the Village. My personal favorites have been the spider/tarantula the size of my palm, and the centipede that was, no exaggeration, 10 inches long and about an inch in diameter. The real fun comes at night, when the bugs seek out the only source of light they can find: the Guest House. We have one light bulb directly over the dining table, and another directly over the table where the food is served. And when the most abundant bugs are small, brown, bean-sized beetles, and your dinner is maize and beans, this poses a problem. This led to an even greater dilemma: Is it better to keep the lights on, attract the bugs, but still be able to see when your beans aren’t all beans? Or is it better to keep the lights off, which attracts significantly fewer bugs, but have to trust your night-vision to make sure none of your beans are moving? It’s a high-stakes game.

These bugs are just some of the fun flora and fauna that lives in the Village. In my room for instance, I counted not one, not two, but 48 spiders living around the perimeter of the ceiling. I didn’t bother counting the ones in the bathroom. But then again, I don’t have many mosquitos, so that’s about par for the course. In the dry season there was a family of vervet monkeys that frequented the big fig tree by the river, and I frequently see big families of mongoose (mongooses? mongeese??) while out on my runs. There are lizards absolutely everywhere, from tiny geckos to big blue-and orange lizards called rainbow agamas. There’s also a mouse that lives in a pile of arts and crafts supplies in my office who I hear daily, have seen twice, and has eaten a volunteer’s birthday cake left in my office overnight once.  Some of the less-frequently sighted critters are dik-diks (little deer about 15in tall at their shoulders), baboons (seen once robbing a papaya tree of its fruit), leopard tortoises, and even a lone hedgehog I saw wandering around the other night.  Some of the farmers say that hyenas will move into the area during the rainy season, but I haven’t seen any signs of them. The bird life is pretty rich here, with cool species like red-cheeked cordon-bleus (picture Smurf-blue canary-sized birds with ruby red cheeks), all sorts of weavers, bee-eaters, the occasional raptor, and even a few hornbills. Certainly nothing like other parts of Kenya in terms of wildlife, but there’s enough wandering around to keep you hopeful that you might glimpse something cool!

Over the past month, while I’ve been working with our contractor to manage the maintenance and repairs of the rainwater harvesting program, a lot of my time has been spent working on projects for donors and for other outside people and organizations who are involved with the Village. Over the past few months, I have helped facilitate correspondence between Form 1 and Form 2 students at Lawson High School and their sponsors in the UK, and this month was a frenzy to complete the task before the students all left for the holidays. I was also assisting in a project being led by the Make a Mark Foundation, which has been a supporter of Nyumbani since even before Nyumbani Village was officially established. Every year, Make a Mark produces a small booklet filled with photos and quotations that are based around a certain topic. This year, Make a Mark wants the booklet to feature children from Nyumbani Village, and focus on the word “Hope”. As such, I spent a couple of weeks going around and taking photos of children and grandparents around the Village and, with the help of a translator, gathering their personal definitions of hope. It was interesting to note the clear difference between the grandparents’ definitions, nearly all of which directly focused on their faith and God, and the children’s definitions, which were all much more abstract. Some of my favorites: “Hope is an inner feeling of the heart that something better may happen to you”, and “Hope is your target”.

This past month we have had 5 volunteers from a Kenyan program sponsored by the Ministry of Education. These 5 volunteers are high-achieving recent college graduates who decided to take a full year to volunteer in a community very different from their own. Because of the strength of tribal lines around Kenya, especially in rural areas, the program aims to send its volunteers to a county in which their home tribe is not present. Our volunteers have spent 3 months volunteering in primary schools in nearby Machakos County which, like Kitui, is almost entirely Kamba. They have spent the last month volunteering in different departments around the Village, but have also helped me with conducting a survey that is gathering data on the effectiveness and the use of the new high-efficiency clay stoves that were designed by the Italian engineers and built by the Spanish volunteers who were here when I first arrived. With the volunteers’ help, we now have data from 50 houses that the engineers will be able to use to see what needs to be changed about the stoves or the education of how to use the stoves in the Village.

On November 28^th, the Village celebrated the 10^th anniversary of the first families to arrive in the village in 2006. This day was celebrated with a mass, performances from groups of children in the Village, and speeches from our Executive Director, Sister Mary Owens, the Vice-Chair of the Kenyan board. My favorite part of the ceremony was one of the final segments, when Sister Mary called up the 5 children in the Village who were part of those first families to move in 10 years ago. They did not speak at the event, but it made me think about how much they had seen this project grow since it was just a handful of buildings in the middle of nowhere. The youngest of these 5 children couldn’t have been much older than 10, meaning that nearly every memory of his life would have come from life here in the Village. I’ve certainly found myself looking at life here in a new light. I am only here for a year, and some of the children come when they are older so they only spend a few years in the Village. Some of the youngest of Nyumbani’s children, however, could spend upwards of 18-20 years here. Given the recent emphasis that is being placed on finding ways for Nyumbani to become donor independent (which, following the events of November 8^th in the U.S., and considering that our main source of funding is USAID, is looking a little more urgent), it’s ever more important to think of the fact that there are children that are hoping to call this place home for decades to come.

The end of the year is fast approaching, and that means that the Village is ready to go into its holiday break mode. The primary school students have been out of school for about month already; Lawson High School Form 2s and Form 4s finished their exams last week, and the Polytechnic students are finishing their final practical exams today. On Friday of this week, about 75% of the students will be picked up by their relatives, extended families, or legal guardians and will spend the remainder of the holiday season away from the Village, returning just after New Years.

Staying in the Village day-in and day-out can end up making time feel like a bit of a blur, so I’ve come to realize the importance of finding opportunities to get out of the Village a couple of times each month and explore new parts of the country. Nairobi is still the easiest place to get to, but it never fails to satisfy the need for a slice of pizza or a hot shower. This past weekend, I went up to Nanyuki to visit some friends who were hosting a holiday party for the PiAf fellows and other groups of their friends in Nanyuki and Nairobi. Nanyuki is situated right at the base of Mount Kenya, so in the evening we were rewarded with an (almost) unobscured view of the peak. I’m hoping to have time to climb the mountain while I’m here, but my wishful to-do list is growing fast! Nanyuki is also home to a lot of conservation work due to its proximity to the Laikipia highlands, a diverse and abundant wildlife hotspot, so my fingers are crossed that I’ll someday have the chance to spend some more time in the region!

In the coming weeks, I will be spending a good deal of time outside of the Village travelling over the holidays, and I couldn’t be more excited! This weekend is a 3-day weekend in Kenya to celebrate Jamhuri Day, which is Kenya’s independence day. I’ll be heading up to climb Mount Longonot and revisit Lake Naivasha and Hell’s Gate National Park with Javier and Celia, two volunteers at Nyumbani, along with several PiAf Fellows. The following weekend I’ll be heading off to Tanzania for 2 weeks, travelling with my friend Brennan from my study abroad semester in Tanzania in 2014. We’ll start at his bush camp outside of Ruaha National Park where he is working with an organization that mitigates human/elephant conflict. We’ll then head off to Mafia Island (named, apparently, after an ancient Arabic word and not, as you might imagine, by the large Italian population who have settled on the island) where we hope to snorkel with whale sharks(!!!!!), before heading up to Zanzibar for New Years. I can’t wait to share stories and photos once I get back!

Happy Holidays to all, and Happy New Year!

Love,

Shan

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi! 100% as cute as it sounds

Giraffe Sanctuary, also in Nairobi

Myself, my friend Emma, and my coworker Mueni after finishing the 10k at the Nairobi Marathon!

Passion fruit found on an evening walk in the Village

Some of the 500 chicks born in the livestock unit this past month

Try not to imagine this thing crawling across your foot. Enjoy.

This guy wasn't ready for his close-up.

Hedgehog!

Update #4 - Finding Normal

Hello all!

I think I’m starting to resign myself (as I imagine many of you are as well) to the fact that all of these updates will be a bit on the longer side. Between sending less frequent, longer emails and flooding your inboxes and news feeds with constant posts, I think I will choose the lesser of two evils and send the longer monthly-ish updates!

Monday was my first day back in Nyumbani Village after an incredible 4-day weekend spent in Jinja, Uganda, along with most of the other Princeton in Africa Fellows who are working in the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda. Jinja is a town located on the northwestern shore of Lake Victoria, and is also the location of the source of the Nile River. We stayed at the Nile River Explorers Camp, which is where I stayed two years ago the first time I visited Uganda, and is unbelievably gorgeous. If I had to give my impression of Uganda in a single word, it would be “green”. I have never seen any other place that has such lush plant life, and endless expanses of bananas, pineapples, sugar cane, bananas, tea leaves, mangoes, and more bananas. Coming from a semi-arid climate in a country facing a drought (more on that later), I was blown away by the lushness of the environment.

The Fellows who work in Kenya were lucky enough to have last Thursday off for a national holiday, which made it possible to extend the weekend by a couple days. We arrived early on Thursday, and I spent the day kayaking before meeting up with the rest of the Fellows who had arrived that day. The following day was spent relaxing, and included getting caught in a massive downpour and thunderstorm while out on the water on stand-up paddle-boards. While the lightning was a little disconcerting, there was something truly awesome about being in the middle of the second-longest river in the world, surrounded by a beautiful landscape, and seeing the water around us completely pock-marked with the splashes of the incredibly dense rain that was pouring down. By the evening, all 25-odd Fellows had arrived at the camp, and the weather had cleared to a beautiful evening. We set out on a double-decker pontoon boat and enjoyed a 2-hour booze cruise while the sun set over the Nile. It was a beautiful night!

The following day was what we had all really come for, which was the all-day trip down the enormous Class IV/Class V whitewater section of the Nile. While the rest of the group were in rafts, I opted to kayak next to the rafts along with the 7 other local Ugandan kayakers who were on “safety boat” duty. These guys have grown up paddling this section of river for much of their lives, and all day I thought about how cool it was to share that experience with a group who had such a deep love for their home river. This thought struck me as especially poignant considering the fate that this part of the Nile is facing. In March of 2018, the Isimba Dam project will officially be completed, and parts of the whitewater section of the Nile will be submerged and lost forever. Depending on the final decision for the size of the dam (which is apparently still under discussion), either the bottom set of rapids or the entire second half of the whitewater section will be lost forever. From talking with some of the PiAf Fellows who are based in Uganda, it sounds like the Ugandan government is in a bit of a hydro-electricity frenzy, with new dam projects getting approved all the time with minimal impact assessments being conducted. As you paddle down the river, you are constantly passing local fisherman and people collecting sand from the riverbank that is essential in local construction, as well as the multitude of local kayakers and river guides that make a living off of the tourism industry. If this dam does indeed come to completion, one can only hope that the energy and economic benefits of the hydroelectricity outweigh what might be lost or damaged by the rising water.

Until this point, I’ve written a majority of my posts about daily life and stories about the goings-on in the Village. If you’ll indulge me though, I wanted to share a bit more this time about some of my personal thoughts and experiences of my time here in the Village lately. I started this blog and email update list with the hope of conveying my experience to my friends and family as realistically as possible, and I think it’s important to cover all aspects of what it means to spend a year in this kind of a setting.

About a week ago, Princeton in Africa sent out the third installment of their “Alumni Advice Email Series” to the current PiAf Fellows, which includes essays from PiAf alums about facing difficulties or obstacles during the fellowship year. The title: “Surviving the Three-Month Slump”. Today, October 25^th, marks three months to the day since I arrived in Nyumbani Village. And without wanting to put it too melodramatically, the past few weeks have been noticeably more mentally and emotionally difficult for me on a day-to-day basis. Over this past weekend with the other Fellows, I was reminded once more about the vast diversity in the types of posts that we each have, from rural to big-city, from small community organizations to multi-national NGOs, and the resulting uniqueness of the difficulties that we each may or may not face throughout the year. This reminder helped me realize the importance of acknowledging the parts of my daily life here that I’m finding to be especially taxing, and what it means to take steps to help myself feel better.

For instance, Nyumbani Village is pretty far on the “rural and isolated” spectrum compared to most of the PiAf posts. Above just about anything else, I’ve found that this setting makes the concepts of “ease” and “comfort” more difficult to come by, at least by the standards that I have grown accustomed to while growing up in a Western setting. Daily routines and headaches like bathing, accessing the Internet, worrying about if we will have water on any given day, or even finding a comfortable chair to sit in, while completely normal for people who have grown up in this area, have started to weigh more heavily on my mental and emotional energy. For many PiAf positions that are in larger towns or big cities like Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala, or Kigali, there are undoubtedly huge parts of daily life that are vastly difficult, such as safety, noisiness, pollution, or dealing with crowds and traffic, that I don’t have to worry about in my daily rural life. However, the access to amenities, a more robust social life, or food that I find myself missing from life in the States is certainly easier to access in these big cities. While Nairobi is fortunately not too geographically far from me, it requires 4-5 hours of public transport each way, making it realistically doable only every 2 or 3 weeks.

In a way, I think the real struggle I am having is where the ideas of ease and comfort are combined to “ease of comfort”. Most of the small things that I feel help put me in a happy and comfortable place are indeed possible to find, but in many cases, accessing them takes about 200% more effort than it does in the States. Of course, this is really all just a lesson in how fortunate we are to grow up in a setting where above-average comfort is expected, or at least always readily available, but in the here and the now I find myself growing weary of some of the difficulty.

I’ve also been thinking lately about the idea of what is “normal”, because I think that the notion of comfort is closely tied to doing what feels normal. However, I think it also depends on what the people around you see as normal. Two of my favorite pastimes that I have picked up while living in the Village are exercising and reading. Exercise helps me feel healthy at the end of the day, and reading for pleasure is a hobby that I have not been able to enjoy for several years. I also do both of these things because, to me, they are normal ways to pass the time or establish some sort of structure to my day. The problem, though, is that neither of these things are common or normal here in the Village. I’m maybe the only person in the Village who goes on runs with any regularity so I attract many stares (also a byproduct of being a mzungu (foreigner) running through the Village), and I frequently get lighthearted teasing remarks from fellow staff members or children about how I read too much. None of these interactions carry any malice whatsoever, but they can convey a feeling of “otherness” that can make it difficult to feel total comfort from either of these activities.

In terms of what it takes to get past these difficulties, it is still a work in progress. It’s important to keep in mind that this is all part of the process of learning to live in a place like this for a whole year, especially considering how much I have come to care for the mission of the organization and the people I am lucky enough to work with. What has helped me the most lately, and thank you to those of you who have read this far, has been verbalizing these feelings. It is therapeutic to write it all out, as it was to talk with other Fellows this past weekend and share experiences and difficulties, especially with those who are in similarly rural settings. Having two close friends from Bowdoin who are also PiAf Fellows in East Africa, Emma and Alex, was also an incredible gift over this past weekend when we were able to catch up and spend time together. Emma is working in a similarly rural setting in Tanzania with many similar obstacles, but it quickly became apparent that Alex, who started talking about his daily routines of “brunch” and “CrossFit”, is living in a slightly different world. It’s a good thing he tells funny jokes.

I’ll wrap up with some quick Village updates: it’s hot and dry. At this time last year, the rains had been here for a week already. Parts of Kenya are bordering on a state of emergency in terms of drought, with aid workers preparing to deploy to the northern regions where the lack of water is starting to become life-threatening. Today brought a glimpse of hope, with some thin dark clouds starting to form overhead, but no precipitation yet. We all hope that in the next week, the rains will be here at last. Tomorrow, I am meeting with the high school Environmental Club to brainstorm our action plan for the group for the upcoming school year. I am hoping to focus on conservation on a Village level, a regional level, and then expanding to looking at conservation in all of Kenya. The new Guest House greenhouse, which was just starting to be prepared at my last update, is doing incredibly well! When I came back from Uganda this week, I found that some of the tomatoes were nearly chest-high with their first flowers. The acting Head of Sustainability said that these tomatoes are growing faster than any of the other tomatoes that were planted in the Village at the same time, which I’m honestly shocked about. I’ve never had much of a green thumb; in high school AP Biology my lab partner and I had to grow pea plants for a genetics experiment, but we ended up with a patch of dirt that we described as “like Mars, but with fewer signs of life”. It’s nice to see that my gardening abilities are not totally nonexistent, but I frequently ask the Sustainability department for help and tips for keeping these plants alive and well. I can’t wait to be able to harvest and eat the veggies that will hopefully be ready soon!

Volunteer activity continues to dwindle; there are just two volunteers currently in the Village. Brian, a retired school principle from Ireland who has been coming to the Village for 6 years, is spending a month teaching communication and social studies classes to the Polytechnic students in preparation for their exams in late November. Celia, a recent college graduate from Madrid, just received her nursing degree and will be volunteering until January working on various projects around the Village. It looks like we might have one or two more volunteers in December and January, but it looks like it may be a quiet few months.

Phew, I guess that’s what happens when I don’t write for 6 weeks! I’ll try to make these into more regular monthly installments to keep them a bit more manageable to read. In the meantime, thanks to everyone for reading, and I miss you all! As always, some photos are included below.

Sunset on the Nile on the first day there. On the water is the boat that we took out on the booze cruise the following night.

Learning how to string up the tomato plants so the vines can be supported as they grow. They're now up past waist height!

Game of football being played with the indestructible soccer balls from One World Play Project.

Helping to distribute 1 metric tonne of shoes to the primary school children. You could bake cookies in that metal shipping container on a hot afternoon.

When my parents were in Dubai a couple weeks ago, my dad sent a selfie he took with someone's pet goat that had just gotten out of its owner's Bently (only in Dubai). It was a slow Sunday afternoon in the Village, so naturally I walked around and took selfies with every animal I could find in our livestock area.