This Is Africa

Starving kids, their skeletal ribs pressing against dry brown skin, taut as a drum’s. Orange dust blows off a parched landscape in swirling ribbons while flat-topped thorn-bushes cast jagged shadows on the ground. Stands of withered maize droop. Women in technicolour batik wraps queue with emaciated infants hanging from their hips as aid workers in cargo pants disembark from white Toyota Land Cruisers and distribute food parcels. Gangster-warlords in hipster berets and Oakley shades sport AK-47s. Rape. Conflict diamonds. Sprawling slums with rusted tin sheeting. A never ending spiral of corruption, tribal infighting and resource wars.

Not so long ago, Africa’s image was more benign. Round mud-huts with thatched roofs. Tall Maasai warriors complete with assegai spears, rainbow beads about their necks and hair stained rust with ochre. Lions and zebras. The snowy heights of Mt. Kilimanjaro. White-smiled, ebony-skinned children beneath a searing tropical sun. The grassy expanse of the savannah. Dusk at the watering hole. A simpler time.

*

I love Kenya. I’ve been coming to the African continent on and off for more than ten years, and have spent a cumulative total of more than two of those years among sixteen-or-so African nations I’ve visited. But Kenya was the first, and I’ve always felt a certain closeness to the place. The East Africans in Kenya are some of the warmest, most exuberant people I’ve engaged with anywhere on earth, and the landscape is by parts gentle and rugged, but rarely dull. Nairobi is a city with an ugly facade but a vibrant heart, both a gateway and a hub.

I’m here now.

In Kenya, every man- however high or low his station- is a politician. I’m not in the cab from the airport more than ten minutes before my banter with the cab driver (“How is Nairobi at the moment?” “Nairobi is very fine!”) turns to a discussion on the merits of Mwai Kibaki’s rule and the changes that have come about since Moi’s regime was dismantled. Corruption is down. The police are more reliable- and out on the streets- and the crime rate has fallen. The economy is churning.

The biggest complaint I hear- and I hear it everywhere- is the traffic. I remember the road network in 2001. It was shoddy, potholed and governed by the maxim ‘might is right’. Vibrantly-hued minibuses with sound-systems so powerful you felt them before you heard them plowed up and down the laneways. Today the matatus are regulated, their colours bleached and replaced with a dull yellow stripe, but while the road network has been little changed, the volume of traffic has increased exponentially. Where a trip between Westlands and the city centre- three or four k’s- might once have taken fifteen or twenty minutes, it can now take over two hours in rush hour. Traffic snarls. The grid is locked. Exhaust belches, leaving the nostrils coated with grime, and drivers sit resigned, sending text messages while they wait. The new and somewhat perplexing 8-lane superhighway linking Nairobi with Thika and built by the Chinese does little to ease congestion in the city itself.

“In Kenya,” another taxi driver tells me, “They don’t like motorcycles. Everybody wants a car.”

It’s worse when it rains. I meet an old friend, C, and some of her mates outside the Java House Cafe at the Junction, a vast shopping mall that wouldn’t be out of place in a small US city. We’re joined a while later by K, who tells us he just spent forty-five minutes trying to navigate the 200 yards or so of the Ngong Road-Naivasha Road intersection to get into the place. We sit and chat. Around us is a cosmopolitan blend of Kenyans and expats- European, African and Asian. There are laptops and iPads making use of the free wifi. Groups are of varied ethnicities and backgrounds. Eclectic. Ours is no different. C, a Tanzanian, is part of the crew on a TV series in Dar-es-Salaam, and bemoans the impact that NGO-sponsored community messaging is destroying creativity in the East African film industry. K works as a political activist and campaigner, savvy and eloquent, and even in his youth expresses an awareness of the need to keep a low profile in his business; when his uncle passes by on his way to a meeting with the Prime Minister, K obligingly shakes his hand and shows the mzee due respect, but not before he’s quietly rolled his eyes at us. S, softly spoken and self-depricating, works as an administrator in the cut-flower industry- one of Kenya’s biggest. B, a white American who grew up out here, is back from the States for a few months and trying to get her small-aircraft pilot’s license.

My cab is forty-five minutes late as the rain pours down and the potholes fill. On the way back to the hotel, the driver echoes what I’ve heard before about domestic politics. He’s optimistic about Kibaki’s impact- nobody has a good thing to say about Moi, who pillaged the country and left a legacy of rampant crime and corruption- but there’s concern for the upcoming election season. The new County political system that’s recently been put in place was envisaged to try and avoid a repeat of the 2008 election upheaval that saw more than 2,000 people killed in community violence, but my driver says there’s still growing tension. He tells me he’s looking for a time when politics in Kenya is based on issues, not just ethnicity, and recounts candidly the time he and his daughter- then eight- had watched a Luo neighbour run down by a Kikuyu mob and beheaded. His daughter still goes to counselling. Still, he tells me after a pause, he is optimistic. The economy is strong, and there is good reason to hope. Like many Kenyans he expresses a belief in hard work. His family live in Thika, and he only sees them on the weekends, while during the week he drives his cab in Nairobi. When he dropped me off he still had the rest of the night to work.

*

The drive to the office takes us through Dagoretti Corner. The road is brimming with activity. Shacks house workshops producing wares that mound up at the side of the road like a Wal-Mart turned inside-out. Wrought-iron bedframes, mahogany furniture, tall slender statues of grassland animals, and pottery emblazoned with raucous colours. The avenue bustles. In the rain, umbrellas unfurl everywhere like a host of eager mushrooms. Out in an open field, there are always kids playing football, whatever time of day we pass.

Our office is well-lit and open-plan, far more pleasant a working environment than my home-base in Australia. There’s a staff of hundreds, and most are dressed far better than I. I only see one other white face my entire stay, but I feel at home. I talk operations, I talk finance, I talk strategy. My main counterpart here, M, is passionate about the concept of innovation.

“How do we innovate?” he asks me. “What are cutting edge ideas we can present to donors?”

At short notice I’m ushered into a meeting to present to a group who are working on a major submission. There’s a mix of our staff and some national government representatives. I’m only briefed on the composition as I’m being led to the room, and I’m quietly horrified. Ad hoc presentations to a couple of staff on operational issues is one thing, but suddenly I’m being asked to brief this team on how to write a cutting-edge design, on a sector I’ve never worked on, to a donor I don’t generally engage with. Somehow, there’s an unspoken assumption that as the token westerner in the building, I have pearls of wisdom to impart.

I don’t buy this, and I suspect they don’t either, but it’s something deeply engrained in the post-colonial mindset.

I fumble my way through a project tree analysis and state, in as many ways as I can, that the real experts in the room are the people I’m talking to. They listen politely. A young Kenyan on the far side of the room gently critiques my approach, and a few minutes later presents a wonderfully elegant alternative as part of his own presentation to the group.

Tonee Ndungu is slender and well spoken, with a rich intonation and vocabulary that would put most Australians of our generation to shame. He opens his talk with a TED presentation on changing educational paradigms, pausing it periodically to emphasise points before launching into the meat of his pitch. A born innovator and salesmen, he has us transfixed for the half hour he’s before us. His slideshow is textbook, infographical and trim, but it’s his ideas that have us locked on, and he’s caged them in such a simple yet comprehensive framework that it’s clear the level of thought and research that have gone into it.

Girl children are missing out on education, he says, but we assume that therefore we have to work harder to get them into schools. It’s a flawed assumption. Why not bring the schools to them?

He argues for the digitization of Kenya’s library of school textbooks, which can then be loaded onto cheap (<$100) solar-powered tablet computers, with access to books, chapters or pages paid for by the hour or day. His vision is to see these tablets (market models already exist) in the hands of every Kenyan schoolchild, right out to the furthest villages. The model is more profitable for the textbook companies (cutting out printing costs), cheaper for families (who can rent access to school material as and when needed), and most important of all, increases education penetration, allowing children (particularly girls) to access material when it’s convenient for them, not just in a school classroom.

The model is incredibly attractive, and not only that but has clearly been thought through to offer a win to all the stakeholders invovled- something that leaves many innovations falling flat when it’s not done. Whether or not it’s flawed- and I’m sure there are challenges in the mix, as there are with any idea- is in many ways irrelevant. I’m blown away by Tonee himself, and what he represents: a generation of out-of-the-box entrepreneurs, lateral- and critical- thinkers who are driving innovation in the Kenyan marketplace. Tonee’s presentation is as slick, confident and inspiring as any I’ve seen, anywhere.

*

We head out to the field. I watch the sun rise as we leave Nairobi, casting hordes of workers in dusty silhouette as they walk into town. Skeletal towers rise above the roadside waiting for giant billboards to be affixed. Traffic grinds, clogged by heavy trucks that power commerce and industry alike but make commuting miserable. I watch the sun turn mist silver behind strands of silhouetted acacia trees. We see giraffes and zebras off to the side of the road.

An hour out of town, M points to a vast fenced-off expanse to the right. It’s a new planned city, he explains. He and T, our driver, refer to it as Africa’s Silicon Valley. It’ll be a new development to help ease the pressure on Nairobi and provide an expansion for the growth that’s currently taking place. On the one hand it’s a shame to think of the waving grasses of the savannah being bulldozed into tech workshops and new housing. But this is the future, and as long as it’s regulated, nurtured, encouraged, there’s a lot of good that can be drawn from it.

After midday we’re halfway through the field visits. We’ve stopped at a school to visit some water installations. We’re forty-five minutes down a dirt track, somewhere not far off Tsavo National Park. The school is a collection of single-storey concrete blocks with holes for windows and kids in haggard uniforms. None the less I can get a cell-phone signal, and because in Australia it’s 7.30pm and therefore Magic’s bedtime back home, I call to say goodnight, while the kids eye me suspiciously as they eat their lunch.

The cell phone revolution in Africa is well attested to, but it’s none the less dramatic to see the change in such a short period of time. When I came in 2001, cell phones were just being introduced and were still limited in coverage and uptake. I can remember sitting at an internet cafe in Nairobi for 45 minutes to get a single HTML email to load on the web. This week I downloaded 8GB of an Anime series over my hotels’ free wifi network, and had I wanted to, could have checked my email in that school’s courtyard.

I chat with T and M in the car on the way back to Nairobi. The late afternoon light is full of drama, silver shafts cutting down past restless clouds and painting the landscape in mottled greens. M is voicing an interest in deploying to our emergency response in West Africa, and I learn he’s trying to pick up French. T, behind the wheel, periodically drops in phrases in French, and occasionally, Spanish. Both men are in their early thirties, and both go to night school after work, chasing more degrees. Their linguistic endeavours, while entertaining, don’t surprise me. Almost everyone in Kenya speak at least two languages- Kiswahili, and their tribal language. Those who have had a few years’ schooling will add English to that, and it’s not unusual to find those who speak one or two tribal languages other than their own, especially if they have worked multiple places in Kenya, and among those who’ve studied abroad, one, two or more colonial languages.

Kind of puts those of us in the UK, Australia and the US to shame, doesn’t it?

*

Compared to the overhauled Westgate Shopping Centre, the Sarit Centre’s now looking quite dowdy, with its bare concrete floors and dim lighting, and here the changes are subtle, but still evident. Flatscreen TVs now replace static billboards to advertise in shop windows. Outside the entrance to the Uchumi supermarket, the stall where you used to have to check your bags to ensure nobody was shoplifting has now disappeared. In its place is a Sony store selling top-end home electronics. A large billboard below the ceiling advertises Samsung’s latest foam washing machine, “Made for Africa”. Evidence of the power of this market is everywhere to be seen.

On Monday an explosion hits downtown Nairobi. A small shopping mall filled with stalls blows up. Local TV shows a small building emitting black smoke between glass-fronted high-rise towers. 35 people are injured, many of them seriously burned, and while initial reports blamed an electrical fault, the FBI are now investigating whether or not it was a low-yield fertilizer bomb. For the rest of the afternoon, Twitter is abuzz with local tweeps sharing their stories, punting their theories, and circulating links and photos about the #MoiAvenueBlast. One commentator wrily notes that a large crowd had immediately gathered at the scene of the explosion- highly inadvisable- and everybody had their cell phones out, recording the aftermath.

*

This isn’t Africa. It’s Kenya. It’s not even Kenya- just little snippets of Kenya, as seen by one white guy travelling through for a few weeks. I don’t want to be patronizing. I have no desire to set up a new stereotype. No desire to imply, either, that everything in Kenya is rosy, or high tech, or successful. Far from it. Poverty is deep here. The slums in Nairobi are some of the direst in the world. Last year’s food emergency in the north was devastating, and has been replaced this year by patchy rains that have helped out some communities and flooded others, while skipping out others entirely so that they continue to spiral into crisis. Grenade and IED attacks happen in various parts of the country on a weekly basis. While I enjoy meals with friends in cool stone manses in Karen, lush and green, I am painfully aware that I am exposed to the very privileged of this nation.

I’m not trying to give you a new stereotype. But I am trying to break down the old ones, add a little depth and complexity, another angle.

I’m not naive. Our perception of any place we’ve never seen is only ever going to be an amalgamation of the things we’ve read and heard. Our memory of a place we’ve been to will be a simplification of the sum of those memories, ordered subconciously into some image or recollection we can make sense of. Stereotypes and simplifications are simply the inevitable outworking of that process, and to some extent this is unavoidable in any perception we hold of a place, person or event.

But if our instinctive perception of a place is informed by what we’re shown of that place, then our perception of Africa will certainly be dominated by those narratives given us by mainstream media- of drought, fragility, violence and poverty. Or perhaps of wild animals and the natural beauty of the continent. Either one is a drastic and lazy oversimplification, and does no credit at all to the rich heritage of this vast and diverse place.

I hope this little piece offers a little more depth to the stereotype, a little colour to the narrative. It is partial, incomplete. It is just one tiny corner of this continent called Africa. But I hope it gives a little window to the fact that here in Nairobi, life goes on. Just like it does where you live.

Note: All photos my own. Photos 1 & 4- Niger. Photos 2 & 3- Kenya.

Note 2: You can find out more on Tonee Ndungu and his Kytabu project here, or follow him at @ToneeNdungu.

Handwashing, and other Epiphanies

The things of your daily existence inure you to the meaning behind them, becoming mundane and unremarkable, until they have little value beyond the objective. I think this is true for all of us, and why for many of us, we crave things like change, travel, newness- a job, a holiday, a relationship- to stay enthralled by life.

From an outside perspective, we often perceive something to be more attractive than it might feel from within. I suspect there are probably people who feel that about my life as an aid worker (although possibly not if they follow this blog for long…). I get to travel, I get to see interesting things the world over. But even for me, the things I experience, after a time, grow commonplace. So commonplace that I often fail to really see what they’re about.

Sometimes, though, you reconnect with something you’ve interacted with many times before and it strikes you in a new way. This happened to me a couple of days ago on a field visit in southern Kenya.

I’m no stranger to field visits. I’ve been variously taking part in them or hosting them for the better part of a decade. There’s a general formula to them, and while they can be stimulating and a real improvement over sitting at my laptop screen, sometimes they can be downright tedious. Courtesy visits, social obligations and awkward conversations where you try to avoid coming across as patronizing, all the while wondering whether these community groups actually want you showing up at all, and whether you’re doing anything useful in the first place.

So too you see the same old stuff. Ask the same old questions. Field the same old queries.

School buildings. Farmers’ associations. Community empowerment groups. Water management committees. Boreholes.

Not to say that some of these aren’t worthwhile interventions, that they don’t produce really positive results for communities, or to forget that they’re employed time and again because, in the right circumstances, they actually work.

Not to say also that you don’t sometimes come across something innovative and inspiring that makes you think again about the cynicism that often plagues this career after some time.

But when I was told that as part of a field trip we were visiting a school to see where we’d installed a water tank, some latrines and a couple of handwashing stations, I have to say my heart didn’t tumble in somersaults of glee. We’re going to get to drive 45 minutes along dirt trails (actually I don’t mind the driving bit, there’s stuff to look at) just to see a couple of concrete structures and some kids washing their hands. Awesome.

I’ve seen this stuff before. Ten bucks says I’ll see it again before very long.

And sure enough, we get to the school. A primary school in the middle of the bush, five hundred kids and change, milling about between classes, staring at the weird white guy and his entourage dismounting from the four-by-four to go look at a big concrete water tank.

It’s a big concrete water tank. And it’s got our logo on it.

Yup, there goes the white guy and his entourage. Looking at the water tank. Now crossing the school ground. Now going to check out the toilets.

Yeah. I don’t feel at all creepy. Checking out kids’ latrine blocks. They’ve got our logo on them too.

And look, they’re pretty nice latrine blocks. Well constructed. Our logo again. Much nicer than the old latrines. And clean inside. Doesn’t mean they don’t stink. They do stink. Pit latrines tend to stink, any way you build ‘em. And five hundred kids using a dozen dry-drop latrines, well, just be glad I can only use words to share my experience.

Outside the toilet blocks, the little portable handwashing stations. A blue plastic tub on a metal frame with a tap at the bottom. Not too different to something you’d take camping. Only the handwashing station has no water in it. It fits sixty litres, but right now it’s empty. On the ground, a damp patch where the sand has soaked up the runoff. Butterflies are flitting above the mud, sipping at the moisture like shimmering strips of windblown tin foil.

Not much use, handwashing stations with no water in them.

Not to worry, the teacher said, that was normal. It was lunch time, middle of the day. They usually run out of water by lunch time. And sure enough, along came a couple of the older girls with a jerry can filled up from the water-tank, to fill the hand-washing station back up again.

And I guess that’s when it all started to click for me.

You see, I know all this stuff. I write it in proposals, I see it reflected in purchase requisition forms, I approve the tender bids or I read about it in reports. Of course, hand washing stops disease from spreading. Sure, schools are nicer to go to when there’re decent latrines to use.

But no, really, stop and think about it for a moment. Five hundred kids, in a semi-arid, water-scarce landscape, spending eight hours of their day crammed together on this one property. That’s a lot of toilet breaks. That’s a lot of poo. That’s a lot of germs.

Maybe it’s because I’ve got a seven-year-old at primary school now. I found myself imagining her in that location. How would I feel if these were her facilities? Okay, I guess. They’re not the nicest, but they serve the purpose. They’re safe, they’re kept clean (by the kids themselves, no less), they work. Not as comfortable as the sit-down flush commodes we’re used to in Australia, for sure. It’d take some getting used to. But okay.

But how would I feel if she didn’t have these facilities? How would I feel if I was sending her off to school for the day, knowing that she had to use a dirty, stinking drop latrine or, worse, had to scurry off into the bush to go to the toilet? How would I feel if she couldn’t wash her hands when she’d finished going to the toilet- especially in a part of the world where toilet paper may not be used? And knowing that she was in that environment with five hundred other kids, all doing the same thing, none of them able to wash their hands, heading off to eat their lunch, sharing all those germs?

I’m not a germ freak. I’m not the kind of guy who has to use antiseptic wipes every time I shake someone’s hand. In fact I’m a big believer in letting kids get exposed to germs from the get-go. Build a good immune system. Don’t polish every surface in the house with disinfectant just so your child doesn’t get a sniffle, or you’re going to be buying hypoallergenic pets for the next twenty years. I believe one of the reasons I have a pretty rock-solid constitution when I travel is because my parents didn’t freak out if I put dirt in my mouth.

But we’re talking real germs here. Cholera. Escherichia Coli. Acute Watery Diarrhoea. Typhoid.

Stuff that kills kids. By the hundreds of thousands. Stuff that, in a water scarce environment, is even harder to treat and to avoid.

How would I feel sending my child into that environment?

And I figured it out. I mean, not just connected the dots in an analytical fashion. I mean, the work we’re doing here actually hit me, emotionally, in a way that meant something.

This is important.

We’re making a difference.

Something so simple: a little blue watertight container with a tap at the bottom. A few simple messages. Wash your hands. And kids can come to school without the threat of becoming infected. Parents can know that their childrens’ practical, physical needs of the most basic kind, are being met.

Health. Dignity. Simple stuff like that.

If I had to, I could send my child here and not be frightened for them.

It’s funny how you forget this stuff. Take it for granted. I guess I’m so used to seeing it in project designs, walking around villages and seeing these activities in place, they’re almost invisible now. So normal.

We take for granted the ability to turn on a tap and get clean water out of it. That doesn’t make it any less a blessing. So too I take for granted that we do things like put water tanks and latrine blocks in schools. Shrug it off.

Yawn. It’s just what we do.

Walking back down to the Land Cruisers, I was still the weird white guy with an entourage, checking out the kids as they queued up at the little blue wash stations to rinse their hands before lunch. But it made sense in a different kind of way. I was actually glad I came. Glad I came to see a concrete water tank with our logo on it, and a little blue bucket on a stand, and a bunch of kids staring at me wondering what I was doing in their school. I’ve seen it dozens of times before. But this time it actually meant something. Refreshing. Like a nice cool glass of water.

I wonder what else we’re doing every day that we’re not seeing, that’s hiding something precious.

Field Visit Bingo

I was in the field again this week. You know, on the one hand, field visits beat the heck out of being in the office. Driving south across Kenya’s savannah is a real treat and, traffic notwithstanding, I really enjoyed the journey. South of Nairobi we saw wildlife, and better still, Mt. Kilimanjaro, capped with snow, rising above the plains- my first view of that beautiful mountain.

It’s nice, too, meeting with community members and seeing the work your organization does in more detail. However, it has to be said, after a while field visits can get a little, well, samey.

So for those of you caught in that awkward space between loving being out of the office, and dreading the next time your four-by-four stops because you know it means having to give another painful, unplanned and patronizing speech to a bunch of villagers who are probably just as over it as you are, here’s a little game to take your mind off things.

I call it “Field Visit Bingo”. How many can you tick off?

Hint: You may need to click on the image to read them all.

Have I missed any? Add ‘em below in the comments…