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.