“And now Keziah will give a vote of thanks . . .”

That’s how the informal discussions we’ve been hosting each Tuesday afternoon at our flat have often ended. The “Philosophy Students’ Tea,” open to any philosophy student at Daystar and not just the 53 in my section, runs from 3:30 to 4:30, according to my poster. In reality, the first students once showed up as early as 3:30 (that was a shock—we weren’t ready), more often 15 or 20 minutes later, usually in small groups that meet on campus and arrive together. Others drop in after other commitments a half-hour or an hour later, and they usually stay till 5:30—any later and they would be traveling home in the dark, which is riskier and more costly. So far as I know we haven’t had participants from the other sections, but some guests interested in philosophy have accompanied their friends.

These discussions have been a highlight of my semester. Invariably the students come with a number of questions already formulated. Numbers have varied from 7 or 8 to 15. They shake my hand and Susan’s if we are standing near the door, then shake everyone else’s. But if we are already sitting, they often take a seat without any formal greeting—rather brash of them by Kenyan standards, but also a sign that they have come to feel at home here. No one takes a cup of tea or a glass of iced tea til invited, but then they help themselves and go back for more. No matter how few are present, two large plates of biscuits disappear rapidly, the men taking them by the fistful.

I still remember the three questions that began our very first session, months ago:

Student #1: “Sir, I received a zero in my first written essay because it was copied from the Internet, but is it true that I will have an opportunity to submit a fifth essay in order to make up for that one?” (This was indeed what I had announced.) I was stunned: I can’t imagine an American student ever owning up to being caught cheating in front of a group of other students, making no excuses, and simply asking for clarification of the penalty imposed.

Plagiarism in assigned essays has been a persistent and perplexing problem for me and for others at Daystar, I’m sorry to say. I’m doing some consulting with the Deputy Vice Chancellor, who gave faculty photocopies of relevant sections of my book, Campus Rules and Moral Community, as a basis for discussion. Its sources are complex: not just laziness but also pressure from parents to perform well, astronomical unemployment levels even for university graduates, and an academic culture in which exams containing rote repetition of dictated lectures often get top marks. (One interesting contrast: I don’t think I’ve ever confronted an American student about cheating without eliciting a string of elaborate explanations and excuses; but each time I’ve personally confronted one of my Kenyan students, he or she has responded either with respectful silence or with an apology.)

Student #2: “Professor, you said that philosophy should not be seen as an enemy of Christian faith but as a means to understand more fully what we believe. But isn’t Gnosticism an example of philosophy leading Christians into error?” I was equally surprised, for quite different reasons: this was a thoughtful and sophisticated response to our first few weeks’ discussion of ancient Greek and early Christian traditions.

Student #3: “Excuse me, but can you tell me your recipe for this iced tea? It’s so much better than the iced tea my mother makes at home.” Not quite what I was expecting either. In fact Susan had spotted a brand-new product on the Kenyan market, a Nestea powdered flavored tea that we find far too sweet but that evidently appeals to the Kenyan palate. Hot tea here is invariably served with hot milk, in the English fashion, and many of our Kenyan friends dump in several teaspoons of sugar as well.

In the first few weeks, many of the questions centered on theological and cultural issues. Homosexuality is much on the minds of my students—I never brought it up, but students had lots of questions. What most of them hear in church and from parents and other authorities is straightforward: this is a scourge on society that Christians must condemn and root out, and all homosexuals must forsake their wickedness and become heterosexual to escape God’s wrath. Students aren’t satisfied with this, however, and were very interested in hearing more about the range of positions taken by Christians in Europe and North America.

Evolution came up repeatedly too. Can a Christian affirm the evolution of new species without rubbishing the message of the Bible (in the vivid Kenyan phrase)? When I asked what they had been taught in their secondary school biology classes, nearly all said, “We never talked about evolution,” whether they had attended government or private Christian schools. (None of the students at that session had taken a biology course at Daystar, so I didn’t get a clear reading on how such matters are handled here.) We tried to press them gently: Doesn’t God work through natural processes, both now and in the past? Why are there several stories of creation in the Bible (in Genesis, the Psalms, the epistles), and what is each intended to tell us?

This would often get us into issues of Biblical hermeneutics. One week several students argued forcefully that, if you buy the secular notion that part of Isaiah is post-exilic, you are treating the Bible as nothing more than a human creation—one containing “prophecies” of events already past in order to trick the reader. Susan and I, and a few students as well, challenged them. Shouldn’t we use all the tools we have—historical and cultural and linguistic—to understand the Bible more fully? If both content and style suggest that some of the pastoral epistles attributed to Paul were written after his death, can they still speak God’s Word to us? (One of the books I brought with me to read and leave behind is Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament, and I had just read his overview of Pauline authorship issues.) The students who raised the issue yielded little ground but engaged in a lively debate.

On another occasion, one student arrived with a whole series of direct challenges to Christian belief, some of them adapted from our Hume and Nietzsche readings, and set them off one after another like firecrackers. The students were so quick to respond, and so eloquent in their testimony to the presence of God in their lives, that Susan and I sat back and listened in admiration. It was never clear whether the critic was speaking for himself or just trying out positions he did not affirm. What was abundantly clear is that, for most of these students, Christian faith is not a matter of superficial affirmation but the energizing core of their lives.

These discussions drew students out into territory that they haven’t been encouraged to explore, it appears. Most of them have grown up in something of a cultural and religious bubble. When I went around the room asking “where do you worship?” about four out of five named a Pentecostal fellowship; one was an Anglican, one a Presbyterian. One admitted, with some embarrassment, “It’s been quite a while since I went to church.” They all value the Christian environment at Daystar, but some chafe at its restrictions: a very strict drinking policy (first offense means suspension), little toleration of challenges by many lecturers, a dress code that imposes a few restrictions on men and lots of rules on women.

There were also interesting questions on other matters, from the practical to the abstract. Do you really have a hundred philosophy majors at your university? What jobs will they find when they graduate? Were all your philosophy teachers Christian? Did we hear you correctly when you said in class that Christian philosophers and Moslem philosophers used to study each other’s writings? How can there be Moslem philosophers—isn’t their religion just a strict set of rules? Do American students really own their own cars? Do you ever have post-election violence like Kenya’s in America? How do you keep from freezing to death when the temperature is below zero (Celsius)? Are there any African-Americans in Michigan? And so forth.

Most of my students are urban Kenyans whose daily lives are now rather distant from the villages of their grandparents. My only non-African student, a Korean, dropped the course early on. I know of a couple of Ugandans and Tanzanians, and one Sudanese refugee, and there may be a few more. There are a few American exchange students out at Athi River, but I’ve never seen any on the Nairobi campus.

One day as we prepared to discuss African philosophy I asked how many are fluent in their grandparents’ mother tongue. Only one hand in ten went up. Then I asked how many had lived for several years of their lives in a village without electricity or piped water, and the number was about the same. But one student asked, “Does it have to be several years continuously?” OK, I said: how many have lived in such a village for a month or more, on several different occasions? This time about one-third said yes.

I’ve heard comments from other visiting faculty that university students in Nairobi have an ambivalent attitude toward their roots. Life in the village was beautiful and harmonious and happy—for grandpa and grandma. But you’ll never find me living in such poverty and filth. There are cars in my future, not cows. I want a salary, not a shamba (a plot for crops). The wisdom and the ways of traditional Africa have nothing of value for me.

But my students didn’t conform to this pattern at all. I had asked them to identify philosophical ideas or insights from their African community that they had learned from family members or others in their assigned essays, then to compare notes in small groups during class and share what they learned. Each designated reporter spoke passionately about how much importance the members of the group place on central elements of their African heritage—its understanding of God, of morality, of fellowship with the ancestors, of initiation and marriage and elderhood, of how we should care for each other. Students who are Luo described their own customs, then those of classmates who are Kikuyu or Pokuot or Kalenjin or Kamba or Luhya. One reporter took a contrarian view: her group decided that African wisdom isn’t at all philosophical, she said, because there’s no tradition of dialogue and critique, only preservation of the past. Her group members agree that they have learned a great deal from their ethnic traditions, but they don’t want to call any of it philosophy.

From time to time a remark would spark a quick response. “Well, you see, the Kamba are rather promiscuous,” said one student, to which another responded immediately: “No, we are not promiscuous! But unlike other tribes we allow couples to live together and have children if they have their families’ permission, then pay the cows and hold the marriage ceremony later. That’s why people say we are promiscuous.”

I had told the students at the beginning of class that this week they would be my teachers, and as they spoke I made lists on the board of common themes, areas of difference, and links to philosophers we had studied. 
Soon I had a list of common elements that approximated the chapter headings of any number of books on traditional African thought. The dissenting group, on the other hand, spoke for some contemporary African philosophers (Paulin Houtondji, Kwasi Wiredu) who draw a sharp line between folk morality and philosophical reflection.

The links that students made to Western philosophers we had studied were often insightful. Some quoted proverbs that, they thought, echoed Hume’s advice to make judgments based on evidence and not on what others say. Others noted the parallel between Augustine’s observation that all human hearts long to know God and the universal African recognition of a supreme God. Several compared their traditions’ standard of morality—not a set of rules, but a sense for what is proper that requires both wisdom and long experience—to Aristotle’s account of practical reason and moral virtue.

After that class I was exhilarated, and I felt as if all my work in the class had borne fruit. I knew I was asking much more of students than they were expecting to do, demanding that they not just learn about philosophy but also think philosophically, but they rose to the challenge. (I won’t get into any details about the other Philosophy 111 sections here, but my students told me they could not believe how different they are from ours.) And the discussion at tea that afternoon offered more of the same, which Susan could enjoy along with me: perceptive and candid explorations of what it means to hold onto one’s African identity while facing new challenges.

From week to week I’ve seen the students becoming more enthusiastic about what they are learning, more active in raising questions and challenges in class, more eager to throw their questions into the afternoon discussions. At our first few “philosophy teas” there were some silences that I filled by asking students leading questions. At the last few, the students were talking constantly—over each other, sometimes, though they are usually very courteous to me and to each other. Often things got so lively that I had to ask students to slow down and speak one at a time.

I’ve learned so much about the challenges they face—the way that their lives, even if more sheltered in some ways than those of my Calvin students, are far more difficult in others. To begin with, nearly all of the students here in Nairobi (unlike those at the remote Athi River campus) live at home with their parents, and possibly grandparents and cousins as well. Travel to campus means catching a bus or matatu, perhaps several in succession, a journey that can take several hours each way. One always cheerful woman student, very faithful in attendance and insightful in her essays, lives on her own with her two young children. (She appears to be the same age as most other students, on either side of 20, but I don’t trust my age estimates very much here.) For each student who catches a bus from a well-appointed Nairobi flat, I suspect, another walks half an hour on a muddy track from a slum dwelling to the nearest tarred road where she can catch a matatu.

One student with a West African and a Kenyan parent told our very last afternoon group this week about her experiences after, at age 13, she moved with her family to escape a simmering civil war back home in West Africa, where her father had an important political appointment. One afternoon two years after the move, while she and her parents and siblings were in their car on Ngong Road (the road that runs past our flat), some men jumped out of a car that was following them and murdered her father in front of his family, settling some sort of political grievance from back home. Five years later, her oldest brother met the very same fate, also at midday, on a nearby road. The first murder, she said, was reported in the newspapers. But the second was never in the news, for fear that any announcement would simply trigger more killings in the civil war that is still being waged thousands of miles from its origin.

I wish I could somehow capture in words the irrepressibly warm and joyful spirit of the young woman who related this horrifying tale. From the start she’s been eager and engaged in class, responsive to others, and fascinated by the unfamiliar ideas we have discussed. And there are so many like her! By no means all, of course: of the 53 students currently enrolled, perhaps a quarter have done consistently mediocre work on essays and tests, and they sat mutely in class and dutifully taking notes when they weren’t slipping out to take (or make) a mobile phone call. They often arrived late, often left early, but always made sure they signed the attendance record (required by Daystar policy). These students are not putting much into the class and not getting much out of it. But unlike their American counterparts, they are invariably respectful and attentive, and if I meet them on the campus or after chapel they smile and extend a hand in greeting. (I’ve managed to learn most of my students’ names, which is a challenge, not only because of the large class but because most students have three or more names and use different ones in different circumstances. Not to mention that there are four Elizabeths and three Lawrences and two Keziahs.)

But the students at the other end of the Bell curve are a delight to teach and to interact with outside class. They evidently talk together in groups before coming to tea, often with questions they have divided up among themselves. And often, as our discussion comes to an end, it becomes clear that one of them has volunteered to give the “vote of thanks” mentioned in my heading. He or she will speak rather formally on behalf of all the students, thanking the professor and Mrs. Hoekema for the tea and biscuits, the conversation, and the hospitality. And then the same student, or another, sometimes volunteers to lead in a closing prayer.

I’ve come to love these students, and after giving my last lecture this week each remaining Tuesday will seem empty. I wish I could take ten or fifteen back with me to Calvin—what fun it would be to teach a 200-level course with half Kenyan and half American students enrolled! And many of them want to take another philosophy course, even though they cannot do so at Daystar. One of them had a solution to suggest: “Professor, you must come back next year and teach a different philosophy course! At the beginning of term I was very afraid of philosophy, and I thought this would be my worst class, but it has turned out to be my best, and I am sorry it is finished!”

On days like that, teaching philosophy is about the best job I can imagine having.

Daily Life in Nairobi

My email was hijacked yesterday and many of you got a scam email asking for money.  I’m sorry for the hassle it caused and also sorry because, while I have my email account back under my control and protected with a new password, I’ve lost all of my contact information.  Please write me if you’d like to get your email back in my system.  David and I are leaving for Mombasa tonight on the overnight bus, and I have sworn off the use of internet cafes (which is probably where the scammer got temporary access to my gmail account) so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me until next week.

Unlike short term visitors, we’ve had to create a daily life for ourselves. We cannot rely on a guesthouse to feed us and provide all of our needs while we focus on sights, travels, or work.  As we started our 5 months in Nairobi, much of my time was spent figuring out how to get groceries, cook, clean up, set up work spaces, and do laundry.  Now that we have less than 2 months remaining here, I find that daily life still takes up a lot of time.

Fortunately, the laundry and house cleaning part came easy.  With the help of a Daystar contact we hired a young woman who is an off-again-on-again student at Daystar.  She is currently trying to raise the money for more classes and could not find an office job.  Loretta is great—efficient, thorough, and lots of fun to have around.  She comes twice a week to wash our clothes by hand, mop the hard surface floors, polish the dark wood floor in the living room and dining room, dust, and clean the kitchen and bathrooms.  I make our lunch and we eat together.  Tiny Loretta puts away almost as much food as David and I between us, and at lunch she is eager to talk and share her thoughts.  At first we talked about food.  She told us that Kenyans consider a sandwich a very light lunch and was quite skeptical of soup.  But she has generally appreciated my cooking, spent quite a bit of time reading over the DeBruyn Family Cookbook that Mom mailed me when I discovered there were no cookbooks in the flat, and she has suggested that she should take cooking lessons from me. 

Recently, the main topic of our lunch conversations has been her idea for a small business she is starting as an event planner. She has been busy organizing her brother’s wedding and is planning to market her skills and experience (this is her third good-sized event) through her church and other networks.  We think she’ll be great at it.  It does not require a lot of capital to start—just a phone and a lot of good, reliable contacts.  And it is the sort of work that would allow her to finish school and graduate with marketable skills as well as a degree.  A persistent problem in Nairobi is that it is extremely difficult for young people to get jobs, even if they are college grads.

Setting up work spaces involved soliciting a desk from Daystar, buying a work table from a furniture maker on the side of Ngong Road, and then moving the desk and the table from room to room until we found the right set-up.  Determining factors included temperature, air flow, and access to internet, which comes to us via two long Ethernet cables running from the neighbor’s flat through our closest upstairs window.  The front bedroom that we thought at first would be best for the study turned out to get very hot every afternoon because it faced west and had no shade.  Moreover, it did not cool down very quickly in the evening.  Now it is serving as our indoor laundry room.  We moved the ironing board (which served as an inadequate excuse for a study table for a short time) from the small bedroom and strung a clothesline that we use when it is raining or when it is cloudy and the clothes hung outside still aren’t dry at nightfall. We moved the Ngong Road table into the small bedroom, which also faces west but is shaded by trees and it has become my study.  The beat-up Daystar desk moved from the front bedroom to our bedroom and then moved downstairs, where David has access to both the internet and the small stereo system we brought along.  A week after we moved the big, heavy desk downstairs, Daystar workers showed up with a much bigger brand new desk.  They were glad to see that the desk they were switching out was on the main floor and we were glad to have a desk that was a handsome addition to the livingroom instead of an eyesore.

We still do not have an easy routine for buying food.  There are four grocery stores within a couple of kilometers of our house.  One of them would give Meijer a run for its money.  But shopping for basics presents challenges.  The biggest grocery store, and the farthest walk, is the Nakumatt at Prestige Plaza on Ngong Road.  It has groceries, cosmetics and stationery on the first floor; appliances, paint, clothing, sports equipment, dry goods, household items, bikes and motorcycles on the second floor; and a huge furniture store on the third level.  But its stock of grocery items is not consistent.  After about a month of trying different brands, I found a plain yogurt that tasted good and was not full of additives.  Two weeks later, that yogurt disappeared from the shelves.  Nakumatt reportedly operates largely on a consignment basis.  It does not buy the stock on its shelves; it pays for items only if they are purchased by customers.  It is hard to imagine that policy extending all the way from motorcycles and sofas to containers of yogurt, but it would help explain the ever changing inventory.

Bonuses of a visit to Prestige Plaza are 1) good lunch place that sells Swahili specialties like whole fish in a coconut milk sauce, and 2) a small craft market on the weekends.  David had sandals custom made for his big feet from a vendor there.  Our favorite vendor is Mama Fatumah (above), who sells baskets and placemats on behalf of a women weavers’ cooperative.  Also, while the walk is long, it is pleasant for the most part because I can walk on a service road and then a path that has a fair amount of shade rather than right along busy Ngong Road.

The next best supermarket, Uchumi Hypermart, is on Ngong road a little closer to Daystar.  It has better prices than Nakumatt, better produce, and the best bakery for chapati and rock buns (like scones, but bigger and cheaper).  But I don’t shop there much since our credit card number was stolen from Uchumi about three weeks ago.  Uchumi prints the entire credit card number on the receipt and stores the receipt in its system, so any one of a number of employees could have lifted the number and created a fake credit card.  I checked the status of that card on the web the day that three transactions totaling over $2,000 in fraudulent charges were posted and reported it immediately.  It’s complicated getting such things sorted out across the ocean but our new cards arrived by mail this past week.

In between Nakumatt and Uchumi is an open air market that sells produce and shoes from rickety bamboo and scrap wood stalls.  I often walk all the way to Nakumatt to get some things only it carries, stop for greens at the open air market (10 shillings--$0.13 for a bunch picked that morning), and then stop at Uchumi for baked goods.

The supermarket at the Yaya Shopping Center has the best name—Chandarana.   It’s almost as far as Nakumatt and is much smaller, but I go there a lot because it is easy to catch a bus home and to stop at the closest shopping area, Hurlingham, if I don’t find everything I need at Chandarana.  As the name suggests, it’s strong on Indian food, but its stock moves fast and it is often out of some of the basics.  Last weekend, it was milk.  I got the second to the last carton of fresh milk and the bins that usually hold heaping piles of bagged milk were empty.   Bonuses of shopping at Yaya:  A great Indian-run fresh produce store, a bank machine that recognizes our ATM card, 3 coffee shops, and a good Indian lunch spot.

The Hurlingham shopping area is a series of small shops—butcher, hardware, at least 3 pharmacies, stationery and books, computer and phone services, housewares, Barclays Bank, barber, small grocery—and open air stands selling fruit, vegetables and flowers a 10 minute walk from our flat.  If this shopping area were located anywhere near our house in Ghana, where choices were limited even in the downtown stores, we would have thought it had everything we needed, and it probably does.  But we use it mainly for backup.  And for buying bouquets of 20 long-stemmed roses for a few dollars.

If any of these shopping centers had been near our house in Ghana in 2004 or 2005, we would have been thrilled.  Here our enthusiasm about the local shopping options is met with skepticism because they are among the older, less up-scale spots in Nairobi.  The US embassy and UN crowd and most wealthy Kenyans in Nairobi live north of the center, not southwest like we do, and have much fancier grocery stores and malls.  But I really like our location.  Not only do we have many choices within walking distance, it is also easy to catch a bus and get downtown.  


(I had hoped to put together a photo album of Nairobi scenes to go with this blog post, but here in Nairobi people are quite negative about having others take photos of buildings, streets, neighborhoods, etc.  A few weeks ago we read about an Iranian visitor detained by the police for taking pictures of a hotel.  This week we read that a gang of youth trashed a photo exhibition of scenes of post-election violence.  I decided to stop lurking around the neighborhood with a camera after being chastised by a guard at the church across the street from our house for taking pictures of the glorious flowering trees in the church parking lot.) 

Happy Easter

Easter is a major holiday in Kenya, and although Kenya’s population is about 80% Christian, the holiday seems to have become as much secular as religious. Here’s a telling example: a newspaper story reported that a court had issued a ruling in the controversy over recognition of Moslem traditional courts as an option in family law matters. The court’s ruling reaffirmed that Kenya favors no religion over another and guarantees equality under law to all. This ruling, noted the newspaper writer without comment, “was handed down on the court’s last sitting before the Easter holiday.” Another sign of the strange ways religious holidays take cultural form is the full page of ads from bars and hotels in today’s Daily Nation announcing a busy weekend of bands and dance competitions on Good Friday and Saturday and Easter Sunday. Some of them add that the Good Friday party will last til dawn, with special beer prices as well as inflatable castles and children’s dance competitions. I suppose we should really go out and observe Kenyan holiday culture at its most exuberant, but I’m not sure we could handle the volume levels. Instead, we will see a performance tonight of a Good Friday/Easter drama that our next-door neighbor is directing at the Baptist church across the street and will celebrate the great paschal feast at the Anglican cathedral in town.

The Easter holiday for most schoolchildren began on Monday and runs until May, and the roads are clogged with traffic heading out of town, as we learned to our dismay yesterday when our 20-25 minute trip to the US Embassy took more than an hour each way. At home we used to find it difficult to cope with a one-week school holiday that didn’t coincide with Calvin’s spring break. A month-long school recess while university classes remain in session would be quite a challenge. Daystar has only a brief Easter recess (Friday and Monday).

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the faculty and students of Daystar’s graduate programs in Communications, which are among its most highly regarded programs. Last week I joined Levi Obonyo for coffee with his MA students and heard about their research projects, and then last night Faith Nguru invited me to be the guest speaker in the seminar she leads for ten students recently admitted to Daystar’s new Ph.D. in Communications. It’s an impressive group of students, especially for a newly created program: highly placed editors and administrators in print and broadcast media, Daystar instructors (in Communications and Community Development), the editor of a Christian magazine, an official of the education ministry responsible for curriculum development and technology use, and a veterinarian now working as a pastor and in media consulting are among them. Faith introduced me—far too generously—as an expert in Christian scholarship and in African philosophy, and then she asked me to describe my own educational journey and some features of American Ph.D. programs. We had a very interesting conversation on the ways in which African culture shapes contemporary life even in a highly urban setting. I kept protesting that, on questions of African culture, I was the least qualified person in the room, but Faith and her students ignored that and kept firing good questions at me, til I began firing them back.

It’s good to get acquainted with some of Daystar’s strongest students, who will surely have a significant impact on Kenyan society in the decades to come. Among my goals while I am here is to encourage Daystar to strengthen its core offerings in the liberal arts and to map out some ways in which this could be done, not just in philosophy but in other areas as well, since that is a real weakness of its programs right now. But interacting with the graduate students in a program like Communications reminds me that, even when the focus is primarily professional, an outstanding program will attract outstanding students.

My colleagues in Communication have been on my case for not having seen a bit of Kenyan television yet. We have a TV set, which at first got no signal at all even though it was connected by cable to a rooftop antenna. After Daystar maintenance staff poked around on the roof and made repairs, we were able just barely to discern some very grainy images on three channels, only one of which got audio. Yesterday a young man came over—dispatched by a colleague—to see what he could to do improve the situation, and we ended up splicing into our neighbor’s antenna cable, with his permission. Now we get six channels, some very clear and some less so: a Nation Group news channel, C-NBC (which looks like a CNN wannabe in content and style), “Citizen TV” with lots of community involvement and public affairs, al-Jazeera news, “Family Channel” with all the worst of American Christian TV, and an MTV-like youth entertainment channel.

So now we have TV available. Whether we will make time in our day to watch it (which we never do at home) remains to be seen.

What we do not have, alas, is reliable water. The mains water supply was just a trickle for more than a week, but then last weekend it seemed to have come back, with enough pressure to keep our attic tank full. Then over the past few days it got worse again: not only was the supply just a slow trickle, but the water that came through the pipes had so much sediment that when you collected a few inches in a pitcher it was burnt umber and nearly opaque.

Fortunately we have a big jug full of water we set aside for such occasions, but it’s now mostly gone. For a while today the water was clearer, but now it’s muddy again, and the pressure has hardly been above zero. The newspaper today mentions a strike by workers at Nairobi’s water utility, and perhaps that’s what’s behind our problems.

This doesn’t seem unusual to our Kenyan friends, however. The prevailing attitude seems to be: be thankful for electricity and water when you have it, and don’t get upset when you don’t.