Facilitation, Family, and Faith

A picture with my Kenyan family. From left to right, my host brother James, myself, my sister Susan, father John, and mother Jen.

I am now going on six weeks in Kenya, my fifth week with my host family. Homestay and training here in Loitokitok has certainly been a much different experience than in Mali.

During the week, we are generally in language class, learning Kiswahili, each morning. The afternoons are reserved for technical, medical, or safety and security training.

The center of Loitokitok town on an average, non-market day morning.

Dave, my fellow Mali evacuee, and I have been able to skip out on some of the afternoon sessions, either for additional language classes or to prepare to lead water and sanitation-related training sessions with the trainees.

A Dramatic Turn...

On Wednesday, June 27th, all of the 31 members of our Peace Corps Kenya training class received our site announcements. We received a packet in a brown envelope, with the region and our name written in marker. Going into the day, Dave, my fellow Mali evacuee, and I fully expected our sites to be the most inaccessible, water deficient sites. But we soon found that this would not be the case.

My packet said ‘WESTERN.’ I opened it to find that I will be attached with an organization working in Bunyala and Samia districts in Western Kenya. A Peace Corps Kenya staff member helped me to locate my new home of Bunyala Port on the map. It is very close to the Uganda border, right on, or seemingly in, Lake Victoria. The strip of land upon which the port town is situated is apparently so thin that it entirely falls within the blue area of the map.

At the moment we all quickly glazed over our respective documents, more anxious to compare sites and see where our colleagues were placed. The organizational description was fairly vague, and the item that most caught my eye was under ‘cultural norms/practices to be noted,’ it said ‘Sports (Boat Racing, Tug of War, Wrestling, and Traditional Dances).’ That sounds kinda awesome.

As for Dave, well he was placed at a site to the East along the largest wildlife preserve in the country where he will work with ecotourism, conservation, and tree nurseries. So our expectations of placement turned out to be very wrong.

But it wasn’t until later that I read my packet in full, and found this:

Views from a Sunday Stroll with 'Baba Yangu' (My Host-Father)

A view of Mount Kilimanjaro from the town of Loitokitok as seen with clear skies early in the morning.

Acacia trees line farmland in Loitokitok.

John, my host-father, is the construction supervisor for a three-story supermarket currently being constructed within the town.

And my Kenyan adventure begins...

On Monday, June 4th I flew into Philadelphia for staging. There, I met the 30 other men and women headed down to Kenya for Peace Corps service. 29 of them are embarking on their first service, while one other volunteer, Dave, joins me in transferring from service in Mali.

After a day of orientation, we took a bus up to New York City and flew out of JFK Airport Tuesday evening. After transferring in Zurich, we arrived at the Nairobi airport the evening of Wednesday, June 6th.

Right from the start, I could tell that this would be a completely different experience. For one, Nairobi is very developed. Skyscrapers line the streets downtown, and amongst many large office and retail buildings are several full-scale malls! The roads are just as crowded and cumbersome as those in Bamako. But instead of cheap motorcycles and ragged bush-taxis, cars and newer, relatively spacious mini-buses fill the streets.

We stayed at a hostel just outside of Nairobi until Saturday morning. There, we attended several general classes and began our Kiswahili language training. The training facility was fully equipped with electricity and plumbing, and we each even had our own rooms with full bathrooms!

It didn’t take long for our first African wildlife sighting! Pictured above are a couple of giraffes seen feeding on the side of the road from our bus as we traveled from Nairobi to Loitokitok.

The Packing List (Round 2)

It's not often you have the opportunity for a redo. Well, thanks to being evacuated from Mali and accepting a transfer position to another post, I now have the opportunity to repack for a Peace Corps service. Generally, I think I did pretty well on the first go-around. But there were certainly some things that I took the first time which I had soon realized were unnecessary. And the differing environments of Mali and Kenya also merit some variation. So here is my packing list on the second go-around. Hopefully this will help those who come after me...

Clothing

• 2 - Lightweight Pants
• 6 - T-Shirts (3 - Cotton, 3 - Lightweight)
• 1 - Cotton Undershirts
• 8 - Socks (6 - Athletic, 2 - Hiking)
• 1 - Sweatshirt
• 1 - Lightweight Rain Jacket
• 3 - Syracuse Baseball Caps
• 1 - Swimsuit
• 1 - Long-Sleeve Button-Up Shirt
• 1 - Short-Sleeve Polo Shirt
• 3 - Short-Sleeve Button-Up Shirts
• 1 - Jeans
• 14 - Boxers
• 1 - Dress Pants
• 3 - Shorts (2 - Basketball Shorts, 1 - Lightweight Khaki)
• 1 - Belt
• 2 - Sunglasses (1 - Prescription, 1 - Cheap, Biking Glasses)
• 1 - Fleece Sweatshirt

My service in Mali has ended, but 'Allah sɔnna,' our work won't.

My abrupt evacuation was difficult to accept for several reasons. Makili, my village, had become home to me. Its villagers had become some of my closest friends, my family. Emotionally, it was very hard.

Evacuation tore me away not only from those people, but also from the projects that I had put all of my energy behind over the past year and a half. As I told my village, 'I had planned on being here to help with this work until at least September. But 'Allah ma son' (God didn't allow it). I have to leave, it is out of my hands.'

But I also told them, 'my work here has always been to teach you all the skills you need to work on your own to better yourselves and your community. Therefore, if we have done good work together while I was here, it shouldn't matter moving forward whether I am present or not. The projects we had planned can continue.'

During our emotional final committee meetings together, the villagers all assured me that our projects will not end. They will see them through to completion.

Since leaving Mali, I have been in regular communication with my friends and work partners back in Makili. Besides catching up on each other's personal lives, I have continued to advise them on our projects and receive updates on their work.

Makili is still in the throes of hot season, but the villagers are enjoying themselves greatly in spite of the heat. I have frequently documented my love of the culture found in Malian weddings, and the fun involved in these gatherings. And most people are currently attending one to three weddings every week.

With all of the fun, work can be difficult to accomplish. This is the building season, where men work to build/rebuild their mud houses, walls, and latrines as needed. But since people are frequently traveling for weddings, meetings and village projects prove especially difficult.

The Start of the Next Adventure: Training Logistics

I have just arrived at my sister's new house in Charlotte after taking a couple of weeks to travel along the eastern seaboard, hitting up friends and family in DC, Boston, Northern Massachusetts, New York City, and Northern Virginia. The remainder of my time in the states will be spent with friends and family in North Carolina, before heading up to Michigan for my cousin Jill's wedding on June 2nd.

On June 4th, I'll fly out of Detroit for staging in Philadelphia. The following day, June 5th, I will take a bus with my fellow Peace Corps Kenya trainees up to JFK Airport in New York for our flight to Kenya, connecting through Zurich. We will arrive in Nairobi the evening of June 6th, thus beginning the next chapter of my Peace Corps experience.

The prospect of going through the entire Peace Corps process from scratch is a little daunting. Once you arrive in-country, each trainee is required to go through a long series of basic informational sessions covering such enticing subjects ranging from administration, security, and medical. Important stuff, no doubt. But after having received this training before, I was less than enthused to learn that I would be subjected to pre-service training again.

Which is why I was thrilled to receive an email from John, the Director of Programming and Training in Kenya, which set out an alternative timeline for the training of us Mali transfers.

Instead of going through all of the basic introductory Peace Corps training sessions, we will first work with the Water and Sanitation technical trainer on tailoring the skills we had learned in Mali to Kenya, and how to best integrate these skills into pre-service training for the entire group.

We will also immediately be placed into an 'intensified' Swahili language class, with the goal of achieving an 'intermediate low' level of speaking proficiency within 5 weeks. As was the case in Mali, we will be staying with a homestay family throughout training.

Later on in training, Peace Corps Kenya Trainees will be sent out to a current volunteer's site to shadow them and get a feel for their normal routines. We, however, will instead be sent directly to our new sites, allowing us to get an early start in our new villages.