Halloween In Mombasa

Do Kenyans celebrate Halloween?  For the most part, no.  I did see some halloween party tips in a recent issue of The Daily Nation, but I think there are probably few enough Kenyans who know and actively, “celebrate,” the holiday to be considered a statistical anomally against the entire population.  However, this does not stop a bunch of crafty peace corps volunteers from trying as hard as possible to host a party.  Besides, we all know that technically halloween parties only need three things to survive and be considered halloween parties: costumes, pumpkins and candy (I bet you thought I was going to say some other things…).

One Day

one day all of a sudden people will realize
they will see that forever have we existed

under the power of
what we cannot see, cannot hold, cannot comprehend

for to do so
would be blasphem, would be sacrilege, would be wrong

one day people will realize
all we hold most potent has been hidden
up the mountains, in the forests, under the seas

controlled, manipulated by the a select few who
knew the words, knew the motions, knew the artefacts

yet one day people will realize
the power has not been
up the mountains, in the forests or under the seas
it has been the mountains, it has been the forests, it has been the seas

the select few who controlled the words, the motions, the artefacts
they are we, they are all, they are human
they breathe, they bleed, they eat
they love, they die, they weep

why need there be a supernatural
when nature is super enough

why need the unknown to give us friendship, love, laughter
when we, as people, naturally learned we need these to survive
is that not great enough? is that not amazing enough?

are we secretly ashamed of our world, ourselves?
that we can admire its beauty but claim it not the most beautiful
how dare we be unfit to see the most beautiful!

why must we wait for a heaven when a heaven is around us
why must we wait for eternal friendship when we have had it all our lives
why must we wait for true love, when it’s been there from the beginning

one day humans will realize their true potential
and on that day i shall weep
for we will destroy the mountains, destroy the forests, destroy the seas
and the most beautiful will be gone

we will do it because it was a mockery of that which comes later
so we have thought
but there will be no later
for nature will turn her back on her own
and all that was natural, and all that was supernatural
will finally realize the err of their ways

humans never truly learned from sadness
they thought it only temporary
they thought the end would come and all would be good

but we had missed the point
the end had already come
it was already good
we were already living it

and we destroyed it.

A New Page: Laptop Care

This is not going to be of interest to many of my readers, but I have noticed my readership base is expanding into different groups, so I have decided to add a new permanent page to the blog: Laptop Care.  You can access it from the link above.

The page is organic information regarding many aspects of laptop care in Kenya to hopefully better prepare individuals in taking care of their computers here.  I will add and subtract information as I see fit, hence it being considered an organic document.  It is not a quick read, and may be broken down into other sections later if I find people are finding it useful.

You will also notice that the “How to Contact Me,” and “Sending a Parcel?” page have been removed.  Don’t worry, the information is not gone, it’s simply been shifted under the new “Contact/Parcels” page.  My current WordPress Theme is not playing nice with the links and it would not decrease link font size, thus adding a new row to my links, which I did not like.  Until I can manually shrink the font size of the theme, I will have to dance this little dance of mine.

Hope you find all the information useful.  Comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I am looking to add a page about, “Browsing on minimal bandwidth,” on a future date as well.

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My Job is To Think

Technically, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I am assigned to the National Youth Services Technical College outside of Mombasa.  Here I am a teacher, specifically teaching an Introduction to Computer Literacy course for the Craft 1 students, all 130 some-odd of them.  However, this only occupies about 12 hours of my week, maybe 14 if you include preparation time, but considering I only have to prepare one lesson a week, prep time is minimal.  At first I thought I could do more preparation time, create more engaging lessons, but I am slowly learning that my students only in fact have two hours a week in and out of class to think about computers, and those two hours are actually in class.  If you did the math correctly, you discovered my students have no time to think about computers outside of class, a point which has been verified from many sources at all levels of this school.  It’s sad, and it also means that even if I did extra prep, it would benefit nobody as far as I can tell.

Carnivore

If you are a vegetarian, you may just want to not read this.  If you are a meatatarian, I hope you enjoy!

Two weeks ago, while I was on my medical leave in Nairobi (I am back home in Mombasa now), a fellow Peace Corps volunteer had his birthday and to celebrate we all went out to Carnivore.  Carnivore is rated as one of the top 50 restaurants in the world (used to actually be in the top 10 apparently), and as its name suggests, is a very meat-oriented restaurant.  Being in Kenya, where the national dish is effectively roast meat (nyama choma), the meat served at Carnivore is just that: roasted to roasty, roastacular, deliciousness.

When one thinks of a top 50 restaurant, one might assume such nice things as white table-cloths, black tie waiters and waitresses, and bottles of bubbly water on the table.  How dare you have preconceptions!  This is Kenya (said with a roar)!  Instead, at Carnivore you sit at large wooden tables, with servers walking around in garish zebra-print aprons, and people singing happy birthday songs a la Applebees or TGI Fridays.  Apparently, “mature, quiet atmosphere,” is not one of the top 50 criteria.

Which is fine by me.  Because where Carnivore shines is in the meat, and its wide selection of different meats to be exact.  Back in the old days, before humans cared about animals and simply enjoyed eating them, you could get everything from zebra to giraffe to lion even, all of it roasted to perfection and served in endless quantity.  Sadly not anymore, but still the selection was good.  My meal consisted of: roast beef, turkey, chicken wings, chicken breast, crocodile, pork ribs, roast lamb, lamb chops, ostritch-meat meat-balls (written to be as unambiguous as possible), and pork sausages.  Each was roasted and seasoned or glazed appropriately and each was divine.

The meal is served Brazillian BBQ style (if I understand that style correctly).  You have a little flag that you keep up when you want the carvers to bring you more meat.  You can ask for as much per carving as you like, all for a flat fee (including a dessert and bread and soup, but not drinks).  Once you have your meat, feel free to sauce it with the appropriate sauces provided in a spin-server on every table.  Confused about which sauce to use, ask the carver for his or her recommendation.   Chow down.  Now, in reality we had to bug the carvers for more food towards the end, when normal people would be full.  Us, being far from normal, meat-starved volunteers, kept stuffing our faces and politely but insistently asking for more meat because as  anyone could see, our flag was up.

I left the meal quite happy, albeit with a significantly lighter wallet.  The roasted regulars (beef, chicken, turkey, pork) were far above any choma I could get on the street.  The chicken wing glaze must have been laced with some addictive additive because it was impossible to stop eating them.  The crocodile was… interesting.  It had a slightly fishy taste to it and each piece also seemed to have tough-muscle or tendon pieces or something.  The taste was good, the texture was fine, but these tough bits were a bit off-putting.  The ostritch-meat meat-balls were amazing, slightly spiced, and never enough.  Finally, the lamb chops were just what I needed to put me in a good mood, even served with a homemade mint jelly!

Lesson learned: don’t go to Carnivore for the atmosphere or for a nice, quiet, adult night out.  Go for the meat.

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The Morning Kill

This morning as I was sitting at my computer in my house catching up with people, I started hearing the students outside running around.  In the morning, students are on duty, which basically means keeping the compound nice and clean.  Once a week for one section, duty is cutting the grass of the big field outside my front door.  All of these students were running around and at first I thought they were chasing each other jokingly for some small, “insult,” one made against another (same type of horseplay we have in the States).  But no, they were organized and going after something.

The way they were hacking the ground with their scythes I thought it was a snake.  Snakes here are the devil, and all must be killed, says conventional wisdom.  This includes the little garter snakes that crawl around and couldn’t hurt anything bigger than a mouse even if they tried.  Kenyans take their snake-killing very seriously.  But as I watched, I saw an obviously mammalian head pop up out of the grass.  My students were still chasing it quite energetically, trying their best to kill it.

Which they eventually did.  Just as I got outside, they succeeded in cornering it and killing it.  I asked what it was, and they said a gazelle.  It was too small for the species of gazelle I know, so I asked if it was a baby, and they said yes.  But at the same time the animal had too much fat on it and was too disproportional for a baby gazelle (again, my opinion), so I am putting bets on it being a member of the dik dik species, which are of the same genus as antelope, not of gazelle.

My students will most likely hand it over to the kitchen, who will then properly butcher it and they will eat it for lunch or dinner.  This is a fairly regular occurrence on this compound, and two of these chases have now happened on the field in front of my house.

Nairobi

Being on medical visit means that I get to be spending all my time in Kenya’s largest city, the shining star of East Africa, Nairobi.  I will not bore anybody with the details of this city and its history, but keep this article deliciously subjective as I tear into the bits and pieces of the city as they pertain to me.

The city itself is broken up into neighborhoods which, like many cities, become stratified representations of class and wealth.  Each neighborhood has its history, its list of famous residents, and so forth.  The Peace Corps office is located in the neighborhood Westlands, which, to my understanding, was the first up and coming “wealthy,” neighborhood in the city and as the number of wealthy has steadily increased, the truly wealthy have slowly moved on to other neighborhoods, making Westlands now a middle and upper-middle class neighborhood.  Nice single-family houses built into housing compounds, placed behind heavily-fortified (seriously) walls, guards out front.

The hotel volunteers stay at when brought into Nairobi for, “official business,” is also conveniently located in Nairobi, making it easy for Peace Corps drivers to pick us up on time, avoiding the notorious traffic jams that plague all parts of the city, but particularly routes heading into the central business district.  We are about a 5 minute walk from the main road, and about a 10 minute walk from the shopping district of Westlands, which includes the Sarit Center and Westgate (western-style shopping malls), and plenty of food.

All of this is to our benefit.  But it’s very expensive.  All of it.  We call it ‘mzungu-priced,’ which is fine for the wealthy Kenyans and western-salary development workers who frequent Westlands, but is not ideal for Peace Corps stipends.  This is not a rant against our stipends, and in fact I am quite happy with our stipends to the point where I would rather the office spend extra money on other things before us (don’t tell the other volutneers, shhhh!), but it’s also impossible to deny that our stipends are not Nairobi-friendly.  Stipends are supplemented by a per diem when here on medical, but even then, it is not truly Nairobi friendly.

On top of this, its in our best interest to not travel at night, especially alone, unless in a cab.  That is not inexpensive, with one-way cab rides alone costing our entire per diem.  It creates a true sense of being caged into Westlands, which also significantly reduces options for finding more stipend and per diem friendly prices.  It is also a necessary move however, with the city being so large, and not safely navigable via public transport at night.  The result: I was never a mall-rat at home, but people-watching at the Sarit center has become a favorite past-time of mine.

Then there is the jam itself.  Almost every day, in seemingly 2 hour intervals, the city’s roadways jam up.  This can be due to cows crossing the road (Nairobi was traditional Masaai grazing land), the roundabouts, annoying police checkpoints, push carts or any other myriad of reasons.  10 minute trips easily take 40 minutes or more.  Getting even from Westlands to downtown becomes a stressful endeavor.  Peace Corps drivers refuse to take volunteers into downtown because of the jam and the unpredictable travel conditions that exist outside of Westlands.  I say that it seems everyone in Africa is waiting for Jesus to come, but he’s stuck in the Nairobi jam.

There is fantastic food though, especially for Western-food (read: cheese) starved volutneers.  A future post will be on one of these restaurant alone.  So when it does get worked into a budget (more times than it economically should…), volunteers are in heaven.  Also, with Nairobi being the medevac for many countries in Eastern Africa, we always get to meet volunteers serving around the our corner of the continent, swapping stories, intrigued by the differences of service in other places, and bonding over the similarities.

Other ammenities are also abound.  Java House has free wi-fi (via which this is being posted), and it seems to be speeding up.  The hotel also has nice hot showers (in most rooms).  There are no sidewalks however, with the exception of the downtown region.  This can be hard to conceptualize for those of us accustomed to sidewalks everywhere, especially in cities.  Trust me, it’s not fun.

Also, a note on the language.  Most people will tell you that Nairobians speak english, and that’s true.  Nairobians speak english.  As a result, many [white] people simply speak english. But this is still a class difference.  If you listen to locals speaking to each other, they are speaking kiswahili.  I can count the number of personal conversations I have heard shared in english or even sheng (kiswahili/english mix) on one hand.  Instead, the cityfolk are using kiswahili or their mother tongues.  It is a reminder to me that english is still not the people’s language.  People in this country do not use English, they speak it, but they do not use it, and until everybody admits this, I just feel communication issues will still exist.

Finally, Nairobi is the center of everything in Kenya.  Politics, commerce, culture, transport, all of it is centered in Nairobi.  But it seems to be a very introverted center.  People do not look from here around to other parts of the country.  Instead, “getting here,” has been the goal for many Kenyans, and once achieved, it seems all the problems of the rest of the country vanish.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a horrible generalization, with plenty of holes.  Do people move to Nairobi to get jobs and send money home to the villages? Yes they do.  Do villagers succeed against all odds and get to come here to get a veritable education at some of the best Universities in Africa?  Yes they do.  But we all know how one bad apple spoils the bunch, and there are plenty of bad apples who drive around in million shilling Mercedes-Benz, “serving their fellow countrymen,” while those fellow countrymen are in their drought-stricken, famine-prone regions, starving, and dying, living with no sense of hope or oppurtunity.

Yet we are all here.  It’s the “Little West,” of East Africa.  It’s where there are resources.  It’s where there is some sense of infrastructure.  It’s where there are doctors and dentists.  It’s where there are other NGOs.  It’s where the government is, the Embassy is, the UN is.  And for the next week or so, it’s where I am.

I came to Kenya and all I got was an extra vertebrae…

Don’t anybody panic after reading that subject, nothing is broken that wasn’t already… apparently…

It all started with a crazy notion to run a marathon, specifically the Lewa marathon in June 2010.  I needed to get exercise, but without a clear goal, I could never seem to motivate myself properly.  I had done distance running before in Australia, so I figure, why the heck not, a marathon would be easy, especially with so much time to train.  This was the end of September.

Around two weeks ago I noticed something was wrong however.  Or rather, what was wrong made sure it was noticed.  if i moved in certain ways, I would get sharp pain in my left hip.  Running, walking fast, reaching for my wallet, getting on and off matatus, all of these things soon became off limits.  This wasn’t right, but I also felt that it could just be normal strain.  So i called up my friend who is a runner and asked his opinion, and within five minutes he had already named the cause: running on uneven pavement causes a particular amount of strain on the body and that’s what I was running on.  Bingo.  Simple muscle strain, give it the obligatory week of rest and see where it goes from there.

It never got better, and in fact got worse at some points.  Called up my friend again, and he said to call medical.  I knew what this would mean: trip to Nairobi, intense sessions and frustrations with doctors followed by boring lulls at the hotel, but at least getting to hang out with whichever volunteers were in Nairobi for whatever reason, and there are always some.  I called medical, and within two minutes the decision was made that I would be coming to Nairobi for scans.  I expressed concern about missing time at school, and just my simple dislike of the city (a topic for another post), but my medical officer insisted that there was not a doctor in Mombasa with facilities to handle whichever situation should arrive.  I was off to Nairobi a few days later, giving me enough time to administer my last classes worth of exams.

The next three days (over this past week) included x-rays, visits to the peace corps office and the doctor’s, as well as hanging out in Nairobi with various volunteers coming in and out.  On Friday, I had my final appointment with the doctor where we went over the x-rays together to decide what was wrong and what I would need to do to get better.

Apparently for my entire life I have been a member of 5% (doctor’s statistic, not independently verified yet) of the population that has a lumbarized sacral-1.  In non-medical speak this means that the top part of the lower region of your spine, known as the sacral section or tail bone, does not completely fuse with other parts of the sacral section, and instead becomes more of an extra vertebrae in the lumbar section (lower back) of the spine.

Compound this with my running on uneven pavement and apparently my spine has become aggravated and is aggravating a nerve that coincidentally(?) ends in my hip.  So I don’t actually have a hip pain, I have a back pain.  The doctor also informed me that this would be the reason I would suffer lower back pain during long car drives and the reason I can’t touch my toes! I asked my doctor back home a few times about my lower back pain and he always just chalked it up to a “tight back.” But it’s not a tight back, I am just a mutant, haha!

I now sit in limbo over the weekend as my doctors and peace corps hash out where to go from here.  The only thing to do is Physio-Therapy.  A lumbarized s1 is in no way a major concern (according to my own internet research) but it can sometimes lead to inconveniences like this.  Of course, what are little inconveniences in America very quickly become large inconveniences in Kenya.  Such is life.  Also, have no fear: this will in no way lead to an early termination of my Peace Corps service.  The thought never even crossed my mind, and I am even a pessimist about that sort of thing.  I have a year and a few months to go, and I fully intend on serving them out

One Step Further

What if we continue with the web portal idea for web design, and make it bigger, expand it.  The web design portal serves a very specific purpose: it connects people who need to get their information out (the CBOs and NGOs) to the people who can do that (the local web designers and developers), which subsequently gets the CBOs and NGOs connected to the people with the ability to provide funding or volunteers or whatnot.  The web portal will provide a mass hub to enable an e-commerce explosion in the development-support world.

How about another web portal, this time connecting organizations on the ground with software needs, to developers who can build applications to serve those needs.  The techies out there scream, “Not another collab-site.  We have Sourceforge, we have Launchpad, heck even Microsoft has one starting up!”  My response, “None of them focus on the needs of the developing world.”  One of the angles I use when preaching Open Source is that free tools enable communities to build software to suit their own needs, which is completely true, but in reality the development scene is not as nicely innudated with programmers as would be hoped.  Because we cannot bring the programmers to communities (…easily), let’s bring the communities to the programmers.

Create a hub that allows communities to post speicifcations about their software desires, for example, a database application for manning a library.  But at the same time, let them also post their operating system, their computer hardware specifications, and maybe even their level of confidence in their copmuter skills.  Will all of this information be easy to attain from community members?  Well, I am hoping that if there is a computer, there is also someone who knows how to use it.  I have also spent enough time on the ground to know that some of the “knowing how to use it,” would not be enough for this site’s requirements.  Therefore the site will not work with every single community, but what development practice ever does?

Armed with this information, let the developers get cracking at it.  Emphasize turn-key solutions.  Emphasize pushing out a working product quickly, avoiding feature creep at first.  Emphasize readable code, use of industry best practices, and future-expandability (but not at the sacrifice of finishing the product).  Emphasize an attention to detail and actual usability, something we all know the Open Source world lacks. And of course, open source it so everyone can use it and expand upon it.  Build up a web page of continuing projects and also project portfolios.  Give developers a chance to show their chops while taking home the gold-star for [global-]community service.  Show programmers they can help too.  With an emphasis and expectation on simplicity, hopefully projects would be pushed out quickly.

I want to come back to the attention to detail and design.  This does not simply apply to in-application experience, but also to how well does this app integrate into the existing operating system.  Does it require a bevy of external libraries? Does it crash gracefully?  How hard is it to install.  If you go by the Linux community standards for these questions, the whole project will fail.  When I say turn-key solution, I am not talking Windows-simplicit, let’s strive for Mac simplicity, or better.  Maybe the app developer will need to step on the operating system’s toes once in a while, but if it means the application is easier to use and attains broader acceptance than that’s the goal; not POSIX-compliance.  Consider it the development challenge to make applications 100% user friendly while also adhhering to operating system standards.  Good luck!

It’s just another idea.  If someone already knows this is out there, let’s start advertising it to the development community.  Ultimately the goal is to let ICT workers on the ground and in the communities know this solution is there fore them.  If it’s already there use it, if it’s not, build it.  Make it a one-stop software-solution hub to the developing world’s software needs and get more of the global ICT community in on the feel-good factor of development work.  Software Development for Development, haha. ICT4D using SD4D, I copyright that (under Creative Commons of course

The Developing Web

Below is an idea I posted to the development-ideas website Africa Rural Connect, hosted as part of the Peace Corps Connect program.  If anyone wants to run with it, feel free!  I don’t currently have the time, but would also never want to hinder the development of an idea which I think could help a number of people.  The idea as written here is slightly modified.

The link to the original idea page is here: http://arc.peacecorpsconnect.org/view/960

For the past 10 months that I have lived in Kenya, working in ICT, consulting with individuals and their ICT needs, I have noticed an increasing trend towards the web, something which should be expected and of which this site itself is a product (referring to Africa Rural Connect: http://arc.peacecorpsconnect.org).  However there is still a distinct lack of NGO’s and CBO’s who might benefit from a web presence making proper connections with those who could enable them to have the presence in the first place.

What I propose is a web portal along the lines of Lending Tree (“When banks compete, you win!”).  Freelance Kenyan web designers and studios, of which there are many, would be able to use this portal to pick up contracts, but with a catch.  The portal itself would moderate the pricing and agreement structures to be much more CBO and NGO friendly.  It would also work to simplify the whole process of creating a web presence, such as domain registration, hosting space, etc.

On the other hand, the freelancers and studios would have to agree to accept the lower fees, and agreements would also have to be negotiated with hosting providers to provide less expensive services.  Consider it a corporate-social-responsibility angle to the web development world.

Finally, the portal would also have a preconstructed pack of open source software designed to ease development of e-commerce sites and donation sites.  Both of these can be tricky to implement, especially for new developers, so providing a known and trusted solution available to all contacts on the portal would increase the website’s potential revenue generating abilities.

Admittedly, there is room for expansion in this idea, as with any idea.  Things that come to mind immediately are a sliding pay scale, where let’s say a handicrafts site starts selling really well and making a profit, then the hosting provider might be allowed to slightly increase the rates to compensate for increased traffic.

The desired effects of this idea are many.  First off, I would like to create a single-solution place for fledgling Kenyan web developers to go to sharpen their skills on smaller-scale projects where there will still be some compensation.  Second, NGO’s and CBO’s will finally have a trusted organization easing them into the new and confusing frontier of the world wide web.  Third, a more “development friendly,” pricing system will get more ideas on the web, and if combined with the trusted donations and e-commerce software solutions, potentially become a true income generating activing for a group.