Report by Bruin Maufe - Edinburgh
Africa Asia Venture is a gap year organisation allowing school leavers to live and teach in a country of their choice. The possibilities are endless in countries that include Mexico, Tanzania and Nepal, amongst others.
I never realised what I had got myself into until I was standing at the check-in desk for Kenya Airways at Heathrow Airport. Twenty-one new faces all looking as apprehensive as I felt. After quick introductions everyone plugged themselves into the in-flight movie as we made the nine-hour flight to the Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi.
I was disappointed to see an overcast Nairobi and not the scorching sun that I had expected. Nairobi, it runs out, means ‘cold place’ in one of the tribal languages of Kenya!
Our first meeting in Kenya was with Nigel Warren, the co-founder of AV and our supervisor for the next four months. As was needed, he was up-beat and enthusiastic and quickly hustled us into a bus, before we were taken to Lake Naivasha for the orientation course. The lake, which was the setting for the popular film Out of Africa, is vast and the country around it is one of the most important agricultural areas in Africa.
After settling in we started our lessons in Swahili and general Kenyan culture. After repeating ‘Jambo’ and ‘Habari’ a thousand times to our Kenyan teacher we were free to do as we wished. This was the set-up for the three days in Naivasha with the evenings spent round the campfire drinking the lovely Tusker beer, singing and just generally getting to know each other. I think I must have laughed non-stop for three days and I remember those days as being some of my best in Kenya, the perfect way to ‘break the ice’. Sunday soon came by when we had to be transported to our separate schools. Even after only three days I didn’t want to say goodbye to my fellow teachers. It had to happen sooner or later though and so seven of us were dropped off at a hotel in the city of Nakaru where we were to meet our headmaster/headmistress.
However, after seeing others leave until just Andrew (a friend from school) and I were left standing in the dusty car park, we realised we were alone in Kenya to fend for ourselves and somehow reach our school about 100 km north-east of where we were standing. After a night at the hotel and negotiating the Matatu park (public transport station), we found ourselves on a matatu heading for Kabarnet, the nearest sizeable town to our school, where we were to meet the headmaster. A matatu in the words of ‘The Lonely Planet’ is a “minibus with mega-decibel sound system, seemingly unlimited carrying capacity and two speeds – stationary and flat out.” We had a baptism of fire with near-misses the entire journey and numerous stops where money would exchange hands between the policemen and driver. I was now starting to realise what I had let myself in for. Nothing can fully prepare you for being left in a foreign society, isolated from all you knew before.
On reaching Kabarnet, situated in a spectacular position on the Tugen Hills overlooking the Rift Valley to the east and Keiro Valley to the west, it was dusk and locating the Headmaster was impossible, leading us both to near despair. However, the Kenyans came to our aid, putting us on the right matatu for a half-hour drive along the ridge top to our village of Kabartonjo. We arrived to find the Moi Primary School gates closed, beyond which there was impenetrable darkness and nobody present. Just as we had resigned ourselves to the fact that the roadside was our bed for the night, a torchlight appeared out of the darkness; it was the school cook who in turn fetched the second master who introduced us to our new home.
The first week was chaos. The teachers and most of the pupils did not arrive until Wednesday and I taught my first lesson on the Thursday: Aids Education. The lesson went without any major incident, although walking into a classroom looking like a bombsite to be confronted by 35 blank, staring faces was slightly unnerving. I tried to remember the Kiswahili I had been taught in the initial orientation week only to find their English was exceptionally good. Making a connection with the children in class was very difficult. They seemed scared to answer one’s questions in case of being ridiculed by classmates, thus initial lessons were awkward. I did not, however, have this problems on the sports field. All the children, including the girls, are in love with football; hence some good matches were played using the bibs and whistle I had brought from England. They all played in bare feet despite the hardness of the football we had brought them and the extremely sharp acacia thorns. Their excitement at scoring a goal could be comparable to scoring the winner in a World Cup final – fairly overwhelming and it took some minutes for the game to restart.
Our house was in the school grounds and could be described as a detached, stone-built shack. It consisted of five rooms; bedroom, living room, washroom, storage room and kitchen. However, there was no running water and sporadic electricity. Water had to be collected from a tank about five minutes’ walk away and cooking was on a paraffin stove. The house was infested with rats, bats and tarantulas as well as the occasional snake. We were always kept from depression by the view of the utter squalor the villagers had to endure – in comparison we were living in luxury. Although meals were a rotation of rice, carrots, potatoes with curry powder and egg with spaghetti, we were spoilt in the fruit department. The bustling village market provided every fruit imaginable at offensively low prices. We hence stocked up on mangoes, bananas and pineapples regularly. Lunch was an eating out affair at the ‘Kabartonjo Hotel’. The ‘hotel’ offered no accommodation but was a wooden shack with earth floors serving simple meals such as ‘ugali and stew’; ugali, the Kenyans’ staple food, is dried maize boiled in water.
When exploring the area on foot during the first week, we realised how remote we were. A couple of hours walk down the ridge side through dense forest filled with tropical birds and monkeys brought us to another school in a spectacular position overlooking the arid valley floor. So rarely had the children seen wazungu (white people) that, ignoring the teachers, they ran out of class and followed us for the next two miles.
Every weekend we would escape from our isolation in the depths of Kenya to meet with others of our own age working in different schools. We had to arrange the next weekend’s meeting point a week in advance due to lack of communications. In this way we managed to explore much of Kenya and come back to the school with new and exciting stories to tell the children, most of whom had not travelled more than fifty miles from Kabartonjo. The weekends were times of much contrast, seeing children of six or seven living on the streets with just glue to keep them company, compared to the wonderful sight of Lakes Baringo and Bogoria at sunrise with the back drop of the stunning Rift Valley.
However, there is nothing worse, in my view, than when a little girl of about six with a grubby, innocent, tear-stained face walks beside you, holds your hand and pleads for food or money. You then have to look into her eyes and tell her you have nothing to give, crushing any hope she has at that moment. There is little consolation in knowing that if you did give her something she would have spent it on glue or be beaten up by other desperate street children.
Weekends included a trip to the isolate virgin tropical rainforest known as Kakamega, an area cut off from the vast expanses of the Congo forest due to logging fuelled by farming demands. We also visited tea plantations in the Nandy Hills area and looked around the factories; Kenya, being the third largest tea producer in the world, exports most of it to Britain. A trip to Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, on the shores of Lake Victoria meant we saw the Kenyan businessmen driving their Mercedes and had a stark view of the polarisation of wealth in the country.
Life in our village was a unique experience. We were living and gaining acceptance in a totally foreign community, building relationships with the locals and making progress with the children in class. I was teaching twelve forty-minute lessons per week including the subjects Math, English, PE, Aids Education, Business Education, Geography and History. This kept us busy throughout the day, what with marking work and preparing lessons. After a while the children became much more confident with us and we found, other than football, their greatest interest in life was life in other countries of the world. Their parents’ average wage was about 250 KSH (£2.25) per day, so their incomprehension when, in answering their questions, we told them our education cost 14,000,000 KSH per year, was understandable.
We soon found to our amazement that there was another ‘westerner’ living in Kabartonjo. He was called Neil, from San Francisco, working in the American Peace Corps. He was organising aids projects in the area from the Kabartonjo Health centre, trying to increase awareness amongst locals and offer support to those who were HIV positive. He told us a horrible story of how two men who had recently contracted the virus were, in anger, sleeping with as many women in the village as possible to create ‘justice’!
Our lifestyle changed on the morning of 23 rd September when we woke to find the teachers had gone on strike and the pupils had been sent home. The government had not delivered the extra pay packet they had promised. The teachers, who will use any excuse for political demonstrations (mostly just), walked out of the schools. We were therefore left wondering what was to become of us. We started a project drawing and paining a large map of Africa on a wall outside the Headmaster’s office to consume time. It became something of a marathon job and we did not finish for another six weeks, although we were very happy with the finished product and pleased that the children also appreciated it.
The strike lasted a month, forcing us to leave Kabartonjo for periods to visit others working in different schools. However, our main activity was to climb Mount Kenya. It was a spur of the moment decision on the weekend before which had included some ‘training’. First a day’s walk in the Cherangani Hills. Luckily for us a girl companion decided to join us for the climb forcing us to buy hats and sufficient food. It meant a long journey to the Central Highlands where there are extensive coffee plantations. Hannah, our companion, had a porter while we carried our equipment on our backs. The first day was a 5 km walk to the Mount Kenya National Park gate through Shambas (scattered subsistence farms) then 10 km through rain forest. We were soaked with 3 inches of rain and we were sliding uncontrollably in our unsuitable trainers. Thanks to my watch, we saw the temperature at the beginning of the day was 25C and be the end, at 2.30 pm it was 7C, causing us to be extremely cold having lived in an equatorial climate for over a month. We slept at 3,050 m at the Meteorological Station. The next day was a 14 km walk, past the tree line and through moorland up to Mackinder’s Camp at an altitude of 4,300 m and a temperature of 3C at 3.00 pm! Then came one of the most physically demanding days of my life. We were up at 2.00 am to commence at 3.00 am for the ‘summit push’. The stars, with the backdrop of the peaks, and no light pollution, were the most magnificent I have ever seen and probably will ever see. We scaled a massive scree slope covered in two feet of snow and eventually followed a ridge up to the summit for sunrise. The altitude was just below 5,000 m and the temperature was –10 degrees C but it was an unforgettable moment. We walked all the way back down the same day causing severe muscle ache.
On 23 rd October, in typical Kenyan style, the teachers’ strike ended as suddenly as it had begun, resulting in the teachers gaining nothing and we at last resumed our teaching. It was very strange being back in the classrooms again, although the pupils acted as if nothing had happened. I soon got back into the groove and started revising with the children for their end of year exams. The strike had not helped their chances of succeeding and those who fail are forced to stay down a year, hence explaining why there are so many 15 year-olds in classes meant for 12 year-olds.
We were soon off to the nearby village of Kituro where two of our companions were teaching at the high school. However, we were there to help organise a party for the small children who lived nearby. The girls (our companions) had recently been to Nairobi and there bought many sweets and chocolates which we then added to the pancakes and mandazis (sweet bread) we had made. The children were extremely excited and ate obscene amounts of food for their size. We organised party games that they had never played before, such as pass the parcel and treasure hunt. It was a rewarding sight to see the children so happy and to have their mothers come and thank us.
The next major adventure took place in Uganda. All twenty-three of us working at schools in Kenya with Africa Asia Venture caught a bus from the western highland town of Eldoret to the border town of Malaba and then on into Uganda. We eventually arrived at Jinja where we were picked up by the Adrift Company and taken to Bujigali Falls on the source of the White Nile, where we were to white water raft for two days. They are some of the fiercest commercially rafted rapids in the world, described in guidebooks as a “monster” and “eating people for breakfast”. There were four grade five rapids on the first day (grade six is the maximum but companies are not allowed to raft them). My raft managed to survive the first three; however, I was tossed out and given a rude awakening as to the power of the rapids in a grade three. We all took lunch on an island and would jump off into the pools to escape the sizzling heat. The first day’s climax was known as “bad place”, a grade five and the biggest commercially rafted hole in the world, meaning we could be sucked under for the longest period of time. We had to pick up our raft and walk around the devastating grade six rapid that precedes it; some of it had never been and probably never will be rafted, while one section called the “other place” has a three storey deep sink-hole capable of sucking a canoeist under for 45 seconds! The raft flipped in the rapid and for a horrible moment I thought I was never going to come up, until eventually I broke the surface. The night was spent on another island before rafting the less intense second day. However, the boys (four of us) had agreed to bodyboard the first day's rapids again. I was absolutely terrified but the buzz of approaching a rapid and seeing the person in front become enveloped in water is second to none.
By November emotions in our village were running high as the buildup to the national elections really took hold. There were volatile political rallies and handouts by MPs, which, to our concern, even the children became involved in. We had grown to love Kabartonjo, its close-knit community, the friendly and generous Kenyans and our friendship with the schoolchildren.
By Thursday November 21" it was time to leave the village. There were so many goodbyes to say: to the children, the teachers, the market stallholders, the matatu touts, the 'hotel' staff and many residents whom we had come to know and like. As a leaving present we gave £150 towards the further construction of the new pre-school so they would have more space and better teaching conditions. We were off for two and a half week’s travel, giving us the opportunity to spend some time in a totally different area and meet the Kenyans in other situations. Our first destination was Nairobi, the capital and largest city in Kenya. The centre does not differ from many western cities; however, the slum known as Kiberia, the largest in Africa, gives a constant reminder of the squalor most people have to endure.
Our major destination was the coast, dazzling white sands fringed with coconut palms on the warm clear Indian Ocean. Lamu, the oldest town in Kenya, is situated on an island in the northern reaches of the coast towards Somalia and it originated as an old Arab trading port. It has an almost exclusive Muslim population rather than Christians such as that found in the interior of Kenya. There are no motor-powered vehicles and the men still wear the full-length white robes known as Khanzus and kofia caps, while the women cover themselves with the black wrap-around bui-bui. It could not have been more different from the places we had come to know. However, we could not help feeling that the Kenyans here had a higher standard of living due to the abundance of fish and generally relaxed lifestyle. While we were there a bomb traced to Al Quaeda exploded in a hotel outside Mombassa, showing even a rather removed country such as Kenya is not free from terrorism and we were prevented from entering Nairobi for a few days owing to a specific threat to the British Consul.
After the travel period, there was an eight-day safari; however, it was not the usual route around the Masai Mara, but up to the far north of the country around Lake Turkana where the temperature can reach 50C and the people live in extreme isolation and poverty. It was an eye-opening experience seeing a ten year-old girl who had only a week or so to live because the nearest doctor was over 100 miles away.
Back in Nairobi I could not believe it was time to leave. There were so many things to miss but most of all the children, their zest for life, sense of humour and their genuineness compared to the UK children who have been corrupted by the consumerist world. I left knowing Kenya had given me the greatest gift I could wish for; lasting memories and friends, while taking me out of my protected cocoon and exposing me to the real world.
If you want an experience of a lifetime that will change you forever I fully recommend AV.