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.)
