Nairobi!!!

We left Montreal after a two hour delay in which our plane had to be de-iced, and travelled for nearly one day. We landed in Nairobi and were brought to our home for the next five days: ICIPE (International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology). This is a very innovative research facility that has been partnered with my program for many years. Our accommodations are much swankier than I expected- I shared a nice hotel-style room with one other girl. The food at ICIPE is excellent and very healthy which has helped the transition. My favourite dishes are a salad that was exactly like a salad-version of pico de gallo with fantastically spicy green chilies, sautéed kale, and a dish that we have taken to affectionately calling “pea mash”. We also eat tons of sautéed cabbage which takes me back to the days of living with the lovely Sheth family. And of course, the Tuskers are delicious.  

Monday: On our first day the organizers of the program wanted to give us an easy day to recover from our jetlag so they took us to beautiful Nairobi National Park. We had a safari ride through the park and saw rhinos, lions, a bunch of beautiful birds- my favourite being the Grey Crowned Crane(the national bird of Uganda), buffalo, warthogs, gazelles, zebras, and giraffes. Apparently we are a pretty lucky group because it’s very rare to see lions and we saw two! We also had a lecture sitting under an acacia tree by the park warden, who is also a top notch scientist, about the future of the park and the challenges the management is faced with. It was very interesting. In the park near our lunch spot was a monument commemorating the historic burning of the tusks. Kenya’s president lead a well-publicized group to gather a mound of tusks and set it on fire to demonstrate Kenya’s commitment to ending elephant poaching and the sale of ivory. The overwhelming feeling I left the Nairobi National Park with was a sense of admiration. I admire how much importance Kenyans place on the environment as evidenced in their intense pride of the Park and their commitment to protecting biodiversity even at a short term economic cost to them, and also on human rights as shown in their new constitution which many Kenyans have been quick to tell me has the best bill of rights in the world.

Tuesday: We went to the University of Nairobi for lectures from U of N profs as well as meet a group of students and get a tour of downtown Nairobi by these students. My favorite part of the day was walking around downtown Nairobi and talking to these students. We talked about school, our families, our friends, and our futures. The most memorable comment of the day for me was one made by Ken, one of our guides. He asked me how many children the average Canadian family had. I told him two to three was probably average. Ken was utterly shocked and said, “and people are SATISFIED with this??” Ken is one of ten children and he is the only one to have gone to university. His father has two wives.



Walking into the UN



Wednesday: In the morning we packed into our awesome safari/armoured vehicle trucks and headed to the swanky area of Nairobi to visit the United Nations Habitat Headquarters. Habitat is the sector of the UN concerned with dealing with human urban settlement, most notably urban slums.   Nairobi is the third most important city in terms of UN offices, after New York and Geneva which is important since making it by far the most important UN centre in the developing world. We were given lectures by three very accomplished, very intelligent people involved in the “informal settlements” project. In all, the UN was interesting but sometimes, in true UN form, the presentations were hyper-organized with a few too many flow charts for my liking. The highlight of my visit was when my favourite speaker of the day was behind me in the line for lunch. (Culinary side note: absolutely fantastic food at the UN, lots of selection. I got barbecued chicken with a mango salsa and a delicious side of mixed vegetables that had been sliced thinly and sautéed lightly with some garlic.) He gave me some great advice that, although my mom has been saying it to me for years, was reassuring and instructive to hear from a man in such a high-profile position. 

In the afternoon we visited the Canadian High Commission, also in the very posh part of town. The building and grounds were beautiful at the High Commission and the speakers were great. My favourite speakers of the day were the director of CIDA for East Africa, the director of the IDRC for the area, and the chief political officer. It was somewhat depressing to hear what they had to say though, since a recurrent theme of the day was Canada’s current dismal record in terms of International relations and aid. An interesting point made by the director of CIDA was that the budget of CIDA for operations in Africa was first cut not by our current government but by the previous Liberal government.  

The most striking thing about Nairobi, to me, is how full of contrasts it is. The area that we were in was incredibly beautiful and lush with houses that were as big and beautiful as the neighbourhood around 24 Sussex. But only moments away, there are obvious displays of incredible, crushing poverty. The contrast was especially stark when considering where we visited on Thursday.



Kids at a primary school in Mathare



Thursday: On this day we visited the two largest slums in Nairobi- Mathare and Kibera. We went into our tours of these communities with ideas from our debrief from the night before in which someone astutely brought up the dreaded slum tourism.  We went in trying to distinguish what we were doing from the idea of slum as tourist attraction. We first visited Kibera slum- the “trendy” slum. This is the community that politicians go to visit- Obama, Ban Ki-Moon and Kofi Annan have all made appearances. We were greeted in the UN Habitat building that is near the entrance of the slum and then escorted by members of the Settlement Executive Community and we were shown their new sanitation facilities, and the new access road, among many other things. We then hoped on the trucks and headed across town to Mathare. The main stops on this tour were a couple of primary schools. We were shown around by members of Roots, a youth organization for kids from Mathare and the directors of CME (Canadian Mathare Education) Trust, a organization that gives scholarships to secondary schools to children from Mathare.



I’m still not quite sure about what to say about this experience or how I feel about it. As I write this, I am battling over what to describe, which ideas to express. It’s hard to explain things fully so as to adequately capture the complexity of what you saw. I don’t want to give you a World Vision commercial-style description of what we experienced because it’s not all so bad, but I don’t want to being naively optimistic either. What I can say for certain is that the visits were incredibly overwhelming and emotional.

Friday: After Thursday, the staff wanted to give us a break so we spent the day in a few short lectures about the work they do at ICIPE, packing, and visiting a mall to get anything we wanted before leaving Nairobi. We ended the day with a few Tuskers and tried to get some sleep before our 4 A.M. wake-up call to ensure we would miss the indescribable traffic (an example of the challenges of urban planning in the rapidly expanding cities of the developing world) on the road to the airport the next morning.