I had been thinking about writing about our typical daily life in Nairobi—shopping, teaching, etc.—but suddenly we’ve been swept up in a social whirl. Daily life can wait.
It began last Sunday. Two families from Athi River came in on the early Sunday morning bus and we all went with Jan Korbel (a member of the Daystar US staff who works in Nairobi with long and short-term visitors) to Nairobi Chapel. We had visited Nairobi Chapel in 2001, when it met on the campus of the University of Nairobi and was outgrowing its facilities there. Now it is housed in a vast tent complex off the Ngong Road on the way to Karen. At church we reconnected with Njojo and Katindi, human rights activists who had visited us in Michigan last summer. After church, we went out to lunch with a big gang, which included Diane Stinton, the author of a book on African Christianity David had recently read.
That afternoon, we were invited to tea at the home of Heidi, daughter of our Pasadena friend Faith Sand, who is working in Nairobi and had just returned from a visit to Ethiopia with Faith. To our surprise, we met their Ethiopian driver, with whom they toured ancient monasteries, churches carved out of the rock, and castles. He and Heidi convinced us that we should make a trip to Ethiopia while we have the chance.
On Monday, I went with a group of women connected with Daystar to a workshop called Amani Ya Juu, Swahili for “higher peace.” They have a great website at www.amaniafrica.org. I particularly loved the Unity Quilt hanging in their common room, which you can see if you click on “About Amani” on the left side of the site and then on “Our Unity Quilt.”
On Wednesday, David and I drove to the US embassy for our mail. We gave a ride to Jim Dix, a Fulbright recipient from SUNY Binghamton, who then treated us to lunch at the Chiromo Club at the University of Nairobi and showed us the Chemistry department, where he teaches.
In the afternoon, we went to the CRWRC office in Nairobi and met with Martin Mutuku, the Partners Worldwide partnership manager for Kenya. I won’t say much about the work of Partners because they also have a website that explains what they do. Check particularly the references to Kenya. www.partnersworldwide.org/partnerships/index.html
I had met Martin last October at the Partners conference in Grand Rapids. Then we talked about some issues he was facing with businesses that were seeking bigger loans as they grew. The business growth they were attempting was exactly what Partners wants to encourage but these loan requests were beyond the capacity of the community lending groups and the businesses lacked some of the tools and skills they needed to handle rapid growth. On Wednesday, I learned that Martin was working on a partnership with a Kenyan bank to handle these larger loans and developing a structure of support for the businesses taking this step. I am reviewing a draft of his proposal and will be giving him some feedback.
On Thursday, we went out to lunch at our favorite Ethiopian restaurant, Habesha, where we had seen an ad for roundtrip tickets to Ethiopia for $183. While David and Jan were ordering lunch, I ordered tickets. We will be flying to Addis Ababa on April 29 at 4:30 am and returning on May 7.
On Friday, I prepared lunch for the couple with whom we had stayed in Vipingo when Beverly visited. They were on their way from the coast to England for their daughter’s 21st birthday and were going to stop at Kenya’s immigration offices in the morning, lunch with us, go to a 4:30 meeting, and then head to the airport for an evening flight to England. Then we got a series of text messages: We’re still tied up but will see you at 1; No, it will be 3; Could we come for dinner instead? Fortunately the food I prepared—babootie, green beans, butternut and a fruit salad—held up well. The Nightingales arrived famished (they had missed both breakfast and lunch) but relieved to have succeeded in completing their paperwork. And we all had time to enjoy dinner because their flight to England was cancelled. They flew out Saturday morning instead.
Saturday we did some work in the morning and then took a bus downtown to shop at the outdoor craft market that is set up near the Law Court every Saturday. The market is very crowded, with most of the goods—carved animals, wood and bone spoons, jewelry, banana leaf mats and figures, sisal baskets, cloth, clothing baskets, soapstone bowls and carvings, sandals—spread out on plastic sheets or hanging on makeshift frames. The pathways between the goods are narrow and are filled not only with customers but also with young men carrying things for sale—bracelets, banana-leaf mobiles, frames paintings—and brokers, men who tell tourists “tell me what you want and I will get you a good price” but in fact extort money from vendors and buyers alike. The first time we went to the market, we were sucked in by the brokers, but now we know how to shake them off and deal directly with the vendors, who are mostly women. But it is an exhausting way to shop—watching our feet to avoid stepping on fragile objects, fending off brokers, making our way through bottlenecks, bargaining hard for every purchase (the first price quoted is highly inflated) and doing the currency conversions in our head to be sure we are paying a reasonable price in the end.
After about 40 minutes there, we escaped to the shaded patio of an Italian restaurant for coffee and what turned out to be the best tiramisu we’d eaten in ages. Then I led David to the district where I’ve already purchased several pieces of cloth. On Biashara Street, Indian merchants sell Kenyan, West African, and Indian cloth with the help of polite, helpful young Kenyans. Their posted prices as good as the best bargains we can get at the market, and they give me a discount because they’ve seen me so often in the past couple of weeks.Saturday evening we had a lovely dinner at the home of Fred Witteveen, the CRWRC Country Consultant for Kenya, and his wife Georgina, who we first met in GR just after we learned we were heading to Kenya. To get to their house on the other side of Nairobi and back costs more than $30 by taxi, so we took another big step in our driving adventures. Driving at night in the car Daystar makes available to visiting faculty had been, until now, strictly forbidden. On Friday, David asked the person in charge whether he could use the car on this occasion, since we had traveled the route several times by day on our way to and from the embassy. She agreed that we could, provided we did not go through downtown and drove very fast. We made it home without incident in short order, not because we drove very fast but because the traffic was so light.
We attended a wonderful service at All Saint’s Anglican Cathedral on Sunday morning (one of 10 services every Sunday!). The highlight of the service was a Passion/Easter musical drama performed by an amazingly well-disciplined crew of about 40 kindergarten children, all in school uniform. They all knew their lines and delivered them promptly, clearly, and LOUDLY. They acted out the triumphal entry and the crucifixion and sang most enthusiastically, with exuberant hand motions, of the Resurrection. The service was rich in many ways. We sang from Hymns Ancient and Modern with organ accompaniment; sang the psalms in Anglican chant with the choir; and heard a highly animated and very thoughtful sermon from a young female priest about the story of Zaccheus, punctuated by several songs (she'd sing a line and the whole congregation would join) in English and Swahili. There were perhaps a dozen wazungu (white people) in the congregation of 500 or so, none among the dozen priests and lay readers and musicians who led the service--this is a thoroughly African adaptation of high-church Anglicanism. And the service lasted just short of two hours, which we would hardly have noticed if it weren't for the wooden pews on which we were sitting, which were a lot harder in the second hour than the first. What a wonderful confluence of cultures Nairobi is!
We drove from church to the Oshwal Center, a Jain temple complex, on the north side of Nairobi, where we had agreed to usher for the Nairobi Musical Society orchestra concert at 3 pm Sunday afternoon. Before our duties started, we walked a block over to one of the glitziest malls in Nairobi, had lunch at a café, and felt like we were back in South Africa. This was my first visit to the temple complex, a huge structure, beautifully finished, with lovely gardens, a playing field and a concert hall as well as vast meeting rooms. David rehearses at the Oshwal Center weekly with the Nairobi Chorus, which will perform the St John Passion next month with this orchestra accompanying them. It's a small chamber ensemble of community members, but acquitted itself pretty well in a varied program. Our next door neighbor Bill Rowe is half of the trumpet section. The highlight for me was Vaughan-Williams' delightful tuba concerto, played by a young Brit currently teaching at a secondary school.
Our most recent social event was lunch today with Daniel and Evangeline M'Mutungi, Daystar lecturers who spent 8 years in the States, who invited us to join them for traditional Kenyan nyama choma (grilled meat). They led us to the Shade Hotel in Karen (actually in Ngong town past Karen), which is right next to the home of Kenya’s prime minister. We spent a relaxing afternoon engaged in fascinating conversation about Kenyan and US religious and political life. The menfolk (Jim Dix was with us) sat down in the garden, in the shade of a big tree, as soon as we arrived. Before Evangeline and I joined them, she led me to the kitchen to look over the menu and the meat on offer and to make decisions about kind of meat, quantity, and how it should be cooked. The first question concerned ribs: not available at the moment, but a goat was about to be slaughtered. Did we want to wait for its ribs? We chose the leg of lamb. Then we engaged in an extended discussion with the restaurant staff about which chicken we preferred—Kenyan or imported (we chose a Kenyan free-range chicken)—and how we wanted it cooked. The staff was very concerned that we wazungu would find grilled Kenyan chicken too tough. They tried to discourage us from choosing the Kenyan chicken by pointing out that it cost 100 shillings more ($1.33) and then suggested that we deep-fat fry it instead of grilling it. But we persevered. Evangeline assured me that our teeth would be strong enough to chew it. And they were. The meat was grilled to perfection and accompanied by potatoes and a variety of vegetables. A delicious meal, well worth the time it took to select and prepare it.
This social whirl has encouraged us to extend hospitality. Tuesday afternoon we will be hosting the first weekly Philosophy tea at our flat. We are inviting David’s students and students from other sections of Philosophy 111 to our house for refreshments and conversation. We’re hoping for a good turnout but are a little worried that the crowd may be more than we can handle. David has almost 60 students attending his class and they won’t all fit in our living room. And we have only 15 tea cups.
