Good Times at Lenana Palace

We are now three weeks into our internship working with Maji na Ufanisi and Vision Sisters. The job has been exciting, boring, frustrating, and rewarding depending on the moment. It has been consistently instructive though, and has given me a great glimpse into development work. I'm sure it will be very influential in directing my future education and career paths.

My days at work usually consist of attending meetings with other women's organizations so that the Vision Sisters can develop partnerships, establish good working relationships, and avoid replicating services for women in Kibera. This has been very useful, I think, and I've really enjoyed attending these business meetings with great organizations. We also attend the Vision Sisters' weekly meetings and contribute to them. We have visited the site of the WICC a few times for ceremonies like the groundbreaking and the official handing over of power to the contractor. In the upcoming weeks I will be at the site a lot and occasionally doing some construction work, if necessary.

Some kids at the site of the WICC

The amazing Vincenza at the
groundbreaking for the WICC

Maji is so well-organized and well established that the work I’m doing with them is mostly for my own learning experience. I probably haven’t done anything earth-shattering for Maji but it has been an excellent and instructive experience for me. It’s so interesting to see how development organizations work in practice. My work for Vision Sisters, on the other hand, has had some tangible outcomes. Vision Sisters, you may recall, is a women’s group based in the slum Kibera (2^nd biggest slum in Africa) that has reached a critical point in establishing a Women in Crisis Centre to serve the women of Kibera. Some construction has started although we’ve run into some issues with what I suspect is corruption and severe pocket-lining on the part of the contractor that we’re working with. I wish I knew a reputable Kenyan version of the McKenna Bros. who could come and do this simple construction job for the Vision Sisters for a fair price. The problem too, is that land tenure in Kibera is non-existant. You cannot own a plot of land there but rather you own the structure that you construct on the land. This means that until we construct the centre, we could lose the plot of land. Overall, these three weeks have been excellent and I look forward to the next three.

Besides work, we’ve done a lot in our free time too. My favourite thing about having this swanky apartment in Nairobi is that everyone from the program who is still travelling/working in East Africa has dropped by for a sleepover or two. We’ve had 12 people from the program dropping by for different durations of stays and it’s been great! We’ve spent some time getting to know Nairobi, going to the parks, walking around the downtown and spending an unfortunate amount of time at the malls. The mall visits have subsided rapidly since the first week where we visited them regularly stocking the apartment with a variety of necessities, and yet the nightmare of malls haunts me to this day. We’ve also gone out and experienced a bit of Nairobi nightlife, which was awesome! Montreal has nothing on Nairobi.

Biking in Hell's Gate!

The Gorge

For Easter, six of us packed up an overnight bag, went to the Nakumatt (think African Wal-Mart) and bought some $15 tents and some food, and hitched a ride to Hell’s Gate National Park, about two hours southwest of Nairobi. Hell’s Gate (supposedly) doesn’t have any predators, a.k.a. dangerous, lethal animals in it, so it is the only park in Kenya where you can walk or bike inside it as opposed to being in a truck or car. We elected to rent some bikes at the gate and biked around the park for the next two days. It was stunning!! Hell’s Gate had some of the most beautiful landscapes that I’ve seen during this entire trip. Our campsite, for example, was on the top of an escarpment wall, which made for a difficult ride home after a day of biking but paid off in a breathtaking view of the valley. One of the highlights of the park was a two-hour tour of “The Gorge”- basically a small river at the bottom of a steep rock crevice. The gorge is difficult to describe- it was so beautiful and had such dramatic features that my words wouldn’t do it justice. I have a video of us walking through it, which is pretty funny given that some of the paths we’re nearly impossible to traverse. I will try to upload it but if not I will show it to you when I’m back in Canada. I mentioned before that Hell’s Gate is supposed to have no dangerous animals in it. This ended up being false because besides all of the many zebras, giraffes, gazelles, and warthogs we saw, we also came across a massive herd of African buffalo. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this already, but as part of the program I had to do a project on the buffalo. Because of this I was fully aware of how exceedingly dangerous they are! They rival lions in terms of most dangerous animals in Africa. They’ve been known to be intentionally vicious to humans. Needless to say we were totally freaked out but luckily we got a car to escort us past the herd.

We worked yesterday, on Saturday (last minute meeting with the contractor) and so today we went to Karen, a swanky ex-pat suburb of Nairobi. It’s an absolutely beautiful community with gorgeous colonial-era manors and lovely, manicured green landscapes. It’s beautiful in Karen but also a striking example of the inequality in Nairobi, and in Kenya. The white population continues to live in the most beautiful and safe areas. While in Karen we visited the Giraffe Orphanage where they breed and care for Rothschild giraffes (the most endangered type of giraffe) before setting them out into the wild.  We also visited the Karen Blixen museum (Karen Blixen wrote Out of Africa), which is housed in her lovely stone house at the bottom of the breathtaking Ngong Hills.

Myself, Kelly, Brianna and Andrew
at the Giraffe Centre

Look at that tongue!!

That’s all for now! Looking forward to hearing about the Canadian election tomorrow! Tomorrow is Labour Day in Kenya so hopefully that is a good omen for the most Labour-minded party in Canada. We’re all crossing our fingers for change here at Lenana Palace.