September 29, 2007

Surprise surprise! I was called beautiful several times this month. Granted, one was from a 6 year old and one of them from a very old man (yes, even older than me). And yet, it has been so long since anyone called me beautiful, I just smiled all day. I do not get very many personal compliments here. People are always impressed with what the team has accomplished at the factory, but personal comments are few and far between. Gratitude is one feeling I have received from many. Brenda, the tailor, and I are now looking at her selling some pre-made gauchos made from lesos and some wrap around pants made from beautiful silk scarves from India. She is always making me feel good because she gets so excited about the small successes. That’s beautiful!

Not so beautiful in my world is my little laptop. Some of my keys are sticking a lot and I fear the keyboard has finally been overtaken by the blowing sand or ants or I have just plain worn it out. I am betting it is more about the sand and ants. I am considering taking the keys off one by one and seeing if I can clean under them. Does anyone know if that is okay to do? Would it turn an almost beautiful little machine into an ugly little machine?

The town had a clean up day. That was a beautiful sight. Employees from Mabati Rolling Mills, the Town Council, the Village Chief’s office, school children and even some of the LifeWorks team showed up and spent half a day sweeping streets of trash, cutting back overgrowth and burning, burning, burning anything they could find. The town did not smell so beautiful that day, but it looked pretty clean that afternoon.

I have beautiful friends and family in the United States. They are constantly sending me all kinds of treasures. Several people have sent flower and vegetable seeds. Unfortunately, I have no place to plant a garden, but the Village Chief does. She has been the recipient of the vegetable seeds and some of the flower seeds. It is beautiful to watch the faces of the many people I have blessed through each of you with flower seeds. They love them. The Chief is quite the gardener. They have never seen lettuce in the town. So, she planted some it and when it matured she was cooking it like spinach or kale. She let me harvest some of the veggies, so I made her a stack of BLTs (without the bacon – none here in a heavily Muslim area) for her and the several orphans she feeds and cares for at her homestead. There was so much lettuce; I ended up making sandwiches for several others as well. I used avocado spread I made instead of mayo. Beautifully yummy!

We are in the middle of Ramadan here. Muslims can only eat or drink right before evening prayers or before morning prayers. It means they fast from about 6 AM until 6 PM each day. They break their fast with special treats. So, I have gotten to share sandwiches, homemade veggie chili, popcorn and a few other things as special treats for my Muslim friends in the village. They in turn have been bringing me bajias (a Swahili version of a Southern hush puppie), samosas (deep fried meat or vegetable pastries – like fried ravioli) and several other special things. Sharing is a beautiful thing.

Two of our group left this month. One, Gibson, left to go back and finish his secondary education. He entered what is the equivalent of a freshman high school class a few weeks ago. We are all proud of him. Another young woman has been struggling getting to work on time and has been missing some days. When we spoke to her about it, she said she was sick. We knew she was not. She had been lapsing back into her old lifestyle. It was affecting her work and one day she just did not show up. The second day we had one of the students from the Technical School who lived by her go to see what was wrong. She told her she was not coming back. Several days later she called and wanted to know if she could have her job back. When she came in to talk to us, she still pretended like she had been sick and her old lifestyle was not the problem. I asked her to talk to the counselor at the school and be honest with him. I needed a good reason to bend the rule and bring her back. Well, he was able to get her to talk and sure enough, she had picked up 3 or 4 of her old customers and that was interfering with her coming to work. They developed a plan to get her moved to a new location and make some needed changes and we brought her back to work. That is so beautiful; it makes me want to cry.

I have had some not so beautiful scary things happen as well. A friend of mine, a young mother of two got cerebral malaria and almost died. She pulled out of it with extended medical treatment in the community hospital, but had several weeks of recovery. The tsunami scare was not really a big scare for me since I am so far inland, but it does give you pause to think about how vulnerable each of is to the fury of nature. It drives you a little deeper on your knees.

Less than beautiful was our last merry go round meeting. For the first time since the ladies have been together, one of them defaulted on a loan the group made. She had gotten very ill and was in the hospital for two weeks and spent all available cash on her medical bills. They have a strange rule here; no one is released from the hospital until you pay up…… anyway, the ten sisters had some very un-sisterly like behavior. I think it would have been better if she had told people in advance she could not pay, but instead she just skipped the meeting. That gave each of them time to worry and fret over whether or not she would ever pay it back. When she showed up at the next meeting, still without the money, the sisters got rowdy. It was ugly. They did not have any rules around what to do if there was a default so they did not even have a procedure to follow. In the end, a settlement was negotiated. She will have another 3 months to repay the loan and will pay double the interest to the group. That catastrophe taken care of, we are back to being beautiful sisters without malice.

Carl Jung said, “What you resist persists.” Well, once I gave into not having water – letting it go and getting on, guess what? The water came come September 1. It does not work everyday, but it is working more times than not. BEAUTIFUL!

I have attached a photo of two beautiful women cooking in their outdoor kitchen in Central Province. They are blessed. Most women in Mariakani just cook outdoors.

September 2007

G.K. Chesterton says, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” I have certainly had many things that can be considered inconveniences and even hardships. Chesterton has reminded me yet again (I must be one slow learner) it is all in how you perceive it. August has been a busy month for me, lots of adventures and adventures in disguise as inconveniences. I have had a couple of mini-vacations and work at the factory has continued to provide all kinds of stress. Quality is still not where it needs to be and we lost 3 more team members this last month. The weavers in training are doing a great job with quality and yet they have lost 3 team members in 4 weeks. My granddaughter began crawling and walking around furniture and having all kinds of fun with her Mom and Dad. I am sure I shall never get used to missing my sons, their wives, my granddaughter and my good friends. It is the hardest part of being here and I struggle to find the adventure in this inconvenience.

I had the opportunity to visit Central Province which includes Mt. Kenya. My community counterpart. Mwengi, (he is the person who guides me through cultural situations, helps me stay connected to the community and generally keeps me out of relational troubles) and his family are from Thika and Nyeri. I attended a family reunion of sorts at his Mama’s homestead. She has a beautiful farm on a hillside and at 83, she still actively farms. Crops include about 4 different kinds of potatoes, corn, beans, coffee and various other vegetables for her family’s consumption. She sells the coffee to a large coffee exporter. It is her only cash crop. This is a Kukuo tribal area, so I got to taste some new foods and be exposed to cultural norms for that area. They are a happy group and the family embraced me very warmly. We had lots of eating, singing, dancing and praying together.

I did not get to climb Mt. Kenya since I was still recovering from bronchitis and my traveling partners never really intended to do the climb. They had a very different agenda, which turned out to be okay. I met lots of new people and saw beautiful countryside. I plan to go when my family or friends come to visit. It is a 3 day climb if anyone wants to go with me. We can camp in tents or can arrange to stay in some permanent camp sites on the mountain. The entire trail is switchbacks.

I also visited with the grandmother of Mwengi’s wife, who lives at the base of Mt. Kenya. That is her in the photo with me. She is a mother of 14, was a member of the MauMau’s and is very proud of her contribution to Kenya’s independence. She was imprisoned, beaten and raped daily. Her joints are knotted and swollen from being beaten with sticks across her hands, knees, elbows and spine. She is able to walk, but is always in pain. She is living history of the colonial times and the struggle for independence and never gets tired talking about the MauMau experience. In her 90’s she has total recall of her past life, but has trouble remembering what happened a few minutes ago!

A Peace Corps friend and I visited the island of Lamu to celebrate her birthday. It was a great vacation. We read, walked the beaches, shopped like American tourists, ate fresh seafood everyday – twice a day, got pedicures and massages and generally just kicked backed and enjoyed. And, it was pretty cheap – 5 days on the island plus travel to and from was only $300. Lamu is 99% Muslim so there is no nightlife except for one restaurant that serves alcohol and the askari club (for the policemen). They have a disco at the club on the weekends. With 15,000 inhabitants they have 46 mosques – that’s a lot. My town is half Muslim and it has only 4 or 5 mosques.

One of the “inconveniences” of Kenya is the corruption that still exists with government officials. The country has made great strides in trying to overcome this barrier to social and economic growth. However, in a two day period of time, I witnessed it 3 times. My exposure to it is usually around bribing police (askari) to pass through a check point. They grab the licenses and keys of the matatu drivers and will not give them back until they pay them a little something. For most Kenyans, the trouble goes deeper. Sometimes it affects their ability to get birth certificates, national ID cards, passports or other official documents. For truckers it may mean having to bribe weigh station officials to be allowed to pass through. It is a problem the government is working hard to overcome, but after decades of abuse, it is difficult to change the behavior in a few years.

The adventure of LifeWorks continues. We have started the assembly line, produced our first orders for Serena hotels, sent our sample lines off to the New York International Gift Show and have been working on our quality control process. The biggest hurdle is the quality. Something as simple as ironing the fabrics can involve many steps to assure we do not stretch or harm the fabric. It is my living nightmare on a daily basis. Mainly it is because our work team does not see the small imperfections and cannot understand why each quality step is so important. And, from day to day, they lapse back into doing it “their” way rather than the right way. On the upside, I have had the benefit of a Harvard MBA helping out on documentation of production process, quality process and examining cost structures. Jennifer will begin her consulting career in October with Bain and decided to spend her summer helping out an NGO in a developing country.

The Lunganya Women’s Savings and Loan Association is moving along. The women are doing the final review of the by-laws and gaining approval from each of the 100+ merry go rounds. We have developed a draft budget and excitement is pretty high to get the training going. The Weighbridge project is still floundering, but the Orphans and Vulnerable Children’s leadership team is energized around finding ways to sustain their teaching programs for pre-kindergarten children. So, we have been busy identifying needs (salaries for teachers, equipment, etc.) and trying to develop some solutions. This groups services approximately 6,000 orphans in Mariakani subdistrict (like a county). I also had the opportunity to start working with a self help group that makes beaded jewelry and help them begin to visualize how they might improve their business.

Brenda, the tailor I have been helping to grow her business, got her new sewing machine. With a minimal amount of tutoring on saving and budgeting, she was able to buy her own sewing machine, increase her revenue through consignment fabrics and taking on a couple of students to teach tailoring. She is considering finding a larger shop and wants an American pen pal very much. So if any of you are interested please email me.

Shabbon, a young man in the town, has the use of a Hulux pick up truck and has a small business transporting people and stuff around the area. He is my newest “adventure.” Budgeting and saving are the fundamentals that most Kenyans have trouble with since they live hand to mouth, literally. He is father to his own 3 children and has taken on his sister’s two sons as his own. Together we are trying to figure out if selling kerosene to the smaller villages 4 – 10 times a month will substantially increase his revenues after allowing for the cost of the kerosene, higher maintenance costs and a helper.

Samira, my friend, who I have been helping apply to colleges, was accepted at 3 schools in Kenya. She is going to start medical school in a couple of weeks. Her adventure is just beginning! Her Mama hosted a harmabe last Saturday and raised her first year’s tuition and school supplies.

I marvel at the ability of Kenyans to use the expression “it is just there” to identify a location 10 feet away or two miles away. Strangely, most people seem to understand what that means, except for me of course. Several times I have been caught in the “just there” directions and have been on a not so pleasant adventure wondering if I would ever get there. Since I have no sense of direction, I have always navigated based on landmarks and there are not many landmarks in Kenya in the rural areas. Giving directions here hardly ever includes turning left or right or specific distances. With a wave of the arm, a point of the finger and a “just there” is about as much navigation advice as I get. I have had to discipline myself to ask a lot of questions rather than take their word for it being “just there.” Even so, many times I walk around in circles or misjudge the real distance and time to get somewhere. It is an inconvenience, but it does give me time to think and “venture” into new areas.

I have been potea cabisa (completely lost) in Kenya now for one year. It is hard to believe. Life among family and friends has continued on without me, for which I am truly sad. Life here in Kenya has moved along with me, which gives me joy. And, I am pretty close to the half way mark of my service in Kenya, so the adventure is half over!

I certainly would not have been able to sustain this adventure without your continued support through prayer, cards, letters, packages, phone calls and emails. Thank you, from my heart to yours.