The Last Post: This Is Africa

The other night we were out in Cape Town looking for somewhere we could have dinner and watch the Spain vs Chile World Cup match. We had out eye on a place that served Cape Malay cuisine, which is a South African version of Indian food. The waitress (or waitron as they say here) greeted us with a big smile and told us, yes, no problem, we could go and sit in the pub next door with the big screen and she would come and serve us there. But then when we went to buy a beer at the pub, the barman (bar-on? no) told us we weren’t allowed to eat outside food there because they had their own kitchen. So we had to take our beers back to the restaurant and sit in a corner so we could just see the tv in the pub. Halfway through our meal, the manager of the pub comes up and says sorry, we can’t take their beers outside the pub area – the police were there and he didn’t want to get in trouble. The upshot was that we had our food on one table, our beers on the table next to it, and when we wanted a drink we’d have to get up, walk two steps, take a drink, then walk back and sit down with our food.



(look closely - the beer's on the right and the food on the left)





As for the cops, they couldn’t have cared less – they were only there to take advantage of the big screen!

I’m told the expression ‘This Is Africa’, or ‘T.I.A.’ for short, comes from the movie Blood Diamond. I’ll have to check it out. It’s become a common refrain and sanity-preserving mechanism these last few weeks as we’ve wound our way along the World Cup trail. I only learned it when I got to South Africa – but boy it would have come in handy in Kenya a few times. Like the time I went to the chemist to buy headache pills. There are no display shelves in Kenyan chemists, just a counter where you tell them what you need and (theoretically) they go out back and get it for you. The lady grabbed brought a box out for me and said “these ones are 12 shillings”. Less than five cents – that’s cheap, I thought. “Ok I’ll take them”, and I hand over 12 shillings. She stares at me. “I thought you wanted the whole box?” She was giving me the price per tablet. 120 for a box of ten. I walked out with my whole box of pain killers, both of us shaking our heads at the other’s strange ways.

Sitting at Joburg airport once more, waiting to board my flight home, I find I can’t really summarise my experience here in any meaningful way – so I want these little stories to stand in place of that. I’m hopeful a few seeds have been planted that will bear fruit down the track, but I’ll only know that when it happens. Besides, I think you can spend too much time looking for something profound and missing the little things that are right in front of you. So I’ll just say this is Africa – the good and the bad, the joyous and the miserable, the infuriating and the inspiring.

T.I.A. baby, T.I.A.

The Fourteenth Post

Another thing I was doing briefly was working as a teaching assistant at North Gem Community Centre. Only a few hours a week for the first few weeks I was there, but a it was good fun and a I got a couple of good stories out of it. My favourite is the day I tried to play 20 Questions with the class. They had just been learning about reptiles so I decided I would be a turtle and get them to guess it. I can describe how the game went in two words – lead balloon. The teaching style in Kenya is very uni-directional, with the teacher talking and kids writing. The concept of teacher-student interaction is almost completely foreign to them, as was made painfully clear in the 20 Questions game. The first five minutes were characterised by completely stunned silence, punctuated every so often by me saying “now remember, you just need to ask me questions about the thing that I’m thinking of, to help you guess what it is.” Finally one of them summoned up the courage: “is your mother alive?”. Despite repeated attempts to explain that they weren’t asking me about myself, the same stuff kept coming: “have you ever driven a Nissan?”, and most bizarrely “do you hate black people?” (this delivered and received with much hilarity, so I guess it was supposed to be a joke). Eventually I ran out of ideas as to how to explain the concept. Needless to say, they used up their 20 questions without even getting close to guessing the poor old turtle, nor even to figuring out whether its mother was alive or whether it had driven a Nissan. That was the only time I tried the 20 Questions game with them. They loved Hangman though – go figure.

And here’s another little one. My friend Kat is a teacher and is working at one of the local schools. She told me sometimes her kids do their homework exercises twice – with a different set of answers for the second version!

The Thirteenth Post

Regular readers will recall that a month or so ago I was doing some fundraising to help a guy called Michel meet the cost of his college fees for this semester. Many of the smarter and more attractive of my friends and family agreed to make a donation (sorry, couldn’t resist that – you know I kid). We ended up raising quite a bit more than the amount needed for the college fees, so I promised to find another worthy cause or causes to which to donate the leftover cash.

I thought you might like an update on what’s happened since then and where that money went. In Michel’s case first, it was revealed that he actually spells his name Mitchell, although he pronounces it Michel. My bad. And, thanks to the amazingly generous support of a certain anonymous rich aunt who lives in New York, and who shall be granted eternal good karma from this day forth, young Mitchell’s college fees for the entirety of his course are now covered also. He promises to work hard and one day become a high-flying New York executive himself.

As for the leftover cash – $901 at last count – $200 went to the school where one of my fellow volunteers, Katrina, is teaching, to buy books, pens etc (Kat tells me they operate at a text book to student ratio of about 1:40 at the moment). The rest of it I managed to turn into a little microfinance project of my own, the story of which I will now regale you with while, I hope, simultaneously satisfying the curiosity of at least my sister, and possibly some unknown others, as to what exactly I’ve been doing with myself these past two months.

I wanted to use this trip as a chance to try something different, and I settled on microfinance because it’s something I’ve had an interest in for a while. I was told before coming that there were two microfinance programs in the area where I’d be living – a small pilot program at a place called North Gem Community Resource Centre, and a more established one at a place called Ugunja Community Resource Centre. It sounded to me then like I’d be better off spending my time at the more established one rather than the pilot – since what did I know about building a new microfinance program? – and this was reinforced when I got to Kenya and visited the two Centres. I set up my timetable so that I was spending two days per week at North Gem, and three days at Ugunja – and still wondered whether I’d have enough work to even fill two days at North Gem.

As it’s turned out, by far the more interesting – and I hope useful – work has been at North Gem. I learned that the difficulty with working in an established program like Ugunja is that all its systems and structures are pretty much in place and running, it has its own staff to do the work that’s generated by those systems and structures, and there’s not all that much for a blow-in Australian volunteer with no background in microfinance to do. It was still a good experience at Ugunja because I got to learn how a microfinance program can work – and that was enhanced by spending two days in a proper microfinance bank called K-Rep – but I can’t say they benefited much from me being there. Also it was much like work at home, sitting at a computer and writing reports all day (albeit with roosters crowing outside, which doesn’t happen much at Governor Macquarie Tower).

North Gem by contrast was a much more novel experience. I spent a lot more time out of the office, tramping around farms that were being funded through the microfinance program, and even did some seeding and hoeing myself. I got to play a role in setting up the program to shift from a pilot to a permanent operation, including by writing a new constitution for the organisation. Most significantly, it gave me the opportunity to create a little microfinance program of my own.

Kevin is 23 years old and an orphan. His dad died when he was 16, and his mum when he was 20. He has a brother and sister, both still at school, for whom he is the sole carer. He’s a resourceful guy but has no qualifications as he was forced to leave school after his father died to go out and make money for the family driving a bicycle taxi. When his mum died also, he had to give up that job and come back home to look after his siblings. Since that time he’s been scraping by however he can. Kevin talked about setting up a car wash to pick up all the passing traffic on the main highway to Uganda, which runs through the village. Of course, he didn’t have the money to do it.

Kevin needed money for his car wash. The women in the North Gem microfinance program needed money to expand the program beyond a pilot. This gave me an idea: I would loan Kevin the money to set up the car wash, but do it through the North Gem program and require him to pay the money back directly to that program, at which point it would belong to the program and be available to lend out to new members. This way, the program coordinator and members had an incentive to recover the money from Kevin, creating a mechanism to encourage repayment without me needing to be there to monitor things. Kevin would get his car wash, the North Gem women would get the funds they needed to expand their program, and everyone would live happily ever after. I ran this by the microfinance program coordinator and then Kevin, and they were both all for it. So I set about designing my own microloan.

Most of my last few weeks in Kenya were taken up with organising the loan. I worked with Kevin to develop a realistic budget, measure projected income against expenses, establish a repayment schedule and agree the terms and conditions for the loan. I went out with him to buy the equipment – high pressure hose, water tank, pipes, fittings etc. When the hose proved too powerful for the electricity supply in the village and shorted out four fuses, I went out again with him to exchange it for another one with its own generator. And happily, the week before I left Kenya (I’m now sitting on a beach in Zanzibar – be jealous) Kevin had set up his new business and was washing his first vehicles.












Of course, there’s a risk to this. As with any loan, there’s a chance the money won’t be repaid. If that happens, I’m afraid I’ll have blown your dough and I’ll hope you’ll forgive me. But I figure, even if the loan falls over, if it means that a 23 year-old orphan with no qualifications and two younger siblings now has the skills and the means to properly care for his family, it’s still a success. And if it doesn’t fall over – if it is fully repaid and the North Gem microfinance program can permanently establish itself with the new funds – well then high fives all round.

The Twelfth Post

The opening of a commercial overheard on FM radio the other day (the minibus drivers tend to blast it):

(Sound of a couple saying their wedding vows; “I do.” “I do.”)
Voiceover: Getting married is the happiest day of your life. On this day, you would never even think about how cement products are all around you.

Best. Non-sequitur. EVER. Come back zinc!

Brilliant ads like that aside, FM radio in Kenya is identical in every way to FM radio in Australia – apart from the fact that the announcers are African, you could be listening to 2Day FM. It’s a good example of the sort of mix of tradition and modernity that you see quite often here. On another occasion, I was sitting in a mudhut in a tiny village a 45-minute motorbike ride down narrow dirt tracks, attending a microfinance meeting of a group of women, as rural as you can get – when suddenly a mobile phone starts ringing with a Kylie Minogue ringtone, and one of these old African mamas picks it up and starts talking away, and nobody (bar me) bats an eyelid.

In many ways it’s a very different place to what I’m used to, but at the same time the marks of a globalised world are everywhere. Mobile phones are the most obvious thing – it almost seems like a phone has become one of the bare essentials: the fourth thing you spend your money on after food, water and shelter. The English Premier League is another. It’s strange how certain aspects of Western society are embraced wholeheartedly, but ways of thinking tend to remain very African.

To return to Trevor, star of one of the previous posts – the guy who’s trying to introduce new agricultural techniques to shift local farmers from subsistence operations to profitable businesses. One of the things he’s trying to do is to stop farmers growing so much maize, which is the absolute staple crop here. One of the national dishes is a flavourless paste called ugali which is made from maize and water, and they eat it with everything. Trevor’s trying to convince people to grow cash crops like bananas, tomatoes, sweet potatoes etc instead of maize. His attempts to explain that if you sell enough cash crops, you can buy all the food you need and you don’t need to worry about living on a paste made of maize and water are just too much for most people – they think if they don’t grow maize, they’ll starve. What would people say of a farmer that couldn’t provide enough maize for his family? The social sanction is too much to bear.

And another thing. Cows, sheep and goats are everywhere, and they’re all strange-looking. The cows are skinny and have horns; the sheep are furry and have long fat tails. Thing is, they don’t seem to do anything. They’re not used for milk, and they’re seldom eaten. So why do people have them, we wanted to know? Much of it relates to status – if you have a cow it means you’re well-off, even if that cow produces nothing. If you have two cows… woah.

We met an English doctor called Ailsa on safari. She’d been spending her time doing medical camps in various villages. The way a medical camp works is, they advertise in an area that a doctor will be in town on a particular day, and then on the day hundreds of people show up to get medical care they can never usually access. Many of them have conditions that really, really need treatment – in fact should have been treated some time ago. Ailsa told us that, for the most part, she could prescribe something and send people on their way, but on occasion she’d have someone who was really sick. She was blown away when she first said to someone “You need to go to hospital right away or you could die” and was told “Oh, no… I can’t go to hospital today”. Even when she offered to pay.

It seems to me (and I’m sure many have pondered this before me) that while the trappings of modernity may be creeping in, it’s a change in the way of thinking that would really make the difference for African development. Investment in health, education, more effective agricultural practices, entrepreneurship… these are the things that made us rich and could do the same for Africa – if only they’d think and act like us. The paradox is, if you think like a Westerner, you can be rich like a Westerner, but you might be giving up a lot in the process. A lot of positives come from Africa not being like the West – strong community support networks and family ties, a spirit of togetherness, a willingness to share virtually everything one has – is forsaking those qualities the price of development? Or is it that we think they need to be like us in order to develop, simply because that’s how we are and we can’t imagine a different way? You can be poor and communal, or you can be rich and individualistic, but does the choice have to be as stark as that? Or can you mix the best of the two?

The Eleventh Post

I really like reading the comments that people leave on this thing. For those who aren’t looking at them, I highly recommend Cameron Murray’s piece in response to The Fifth Post. It’s about doing things to sacred cows. Trust me, you’ll love it.

On the subject of comments from the punters, my darling sister wrote the following in response to The Eleventh Post:

“Benny, aside from various wacky adventures, what are you actually doing??”

Naturally, I gave her a gobful for being so impertinent. But after I’d put Lozzie firmly back in her place, it did get me to thinking that I haven’t really said much about the work I’m doing over here. That’s not really going to change much in this post, so bad news for anyone who’s hanging to hear about that. I am intending to write a post specifically about work, just not right now. Right now, the reason I bring up work is because I want to talk about health issues. Read on – you’ll see the connection.

For those who don’t have the slightest idea what I’m doing here, primarily I’m working on a couple of microfinance programs being run out of two community centres near where I’m living. As they’re both quite small programs, I decided it would be good to spend some time at a larger microfinance organisation as well so I could get a broader picture of the field. Microfinance is a big deal over here (and I assume in plenty of other developing countries now as well) and there are some pretty largeish organisations running around with hundreds of branches and millions of clients. So I worked a few contacts and managed to line up a couple of days at a bank called K-Rep.

K-Rep’s big thing at the moment is a project called FAHIDA which targets financial services at victims of HIV/AIDS, their families and carers. I spent much of my time with them visiting borrowing groups who were part of this project. The first time I’ve ever knowingly met an HIV sufferer actually. It looked like a pretty impressive operation, with people clearly benefiting from the loans being extended to them. The one thing I couldn’t figure out was, why do HIV/AIDS sufferers need specific financial services? Why can’t they just use mainstream services as regular (albeit micro-) borrowers?

I asked the incredibly helpful K-Rep Regional Manager this when I got a chance. I think it really showed my ignorance of the situation. The reason, he said, is because infected people experience so much discrimination in day-to-day life in Kenya. Apart from the stigma attached to the disease, lending institutions don’t want to know them because they’re marked for death. That sounds blunt but that seems to be the way it’s seen here. Why would you lend money to someone if you were worried they’d die before they paid it back? This just exacerbates the social isolation that sufferers can face in every aspect of their lives.

The same day, we visited a group that was running a sort of refuge for AIDS orphans from their local area. The manager told me that there were 3400 orphans involved in their programs – all orphaned by AIDS, and all within an area maybe the size of Bankstown. The prevalence of HIV in Kenya is around 7%, compared to nought point something in Australia.

The very idea of an orphanage seems Dickensian to us. Here there are orphanages all over the place. People are always going to funerals – sometimes several in a week. Of course it’s not all due to AIDS – there are plenty of other things in Kenya that can lead to untimely death – but every time you’re talking to someone and they tell you “yes, my parents both died” or “my sister died earlier this year” that’s always the first question in your mind.

There are some things you can just never know about the struggles of living in a developing country until you actually spend some time in one. The devastating effect of HIV certainly becomes much more real when you see it up close, but at least we do hear about it and talk about it (a bit) in the West. Not so jiggers. Have you heard of jiggers? No, I thought not.

Jiggers are little fleas that live in dusty soil and like to burrow into human flesh and lay eggs. People living in dusty rural areas who don’t wear shoes are at high risk of being visited by them. That means a significant minority of the population of rural Kenya (in a crowd of children walking home from school, it’s not unusual that half of them will have no shoes). When you get lots of jiggers, your feet look like this:











… and you literally can’t walk anymore. This is an old guy that one of the other volunteers has been treating, but the worst affected are often kids. Kids who are crippled because of jiggers take to crawling around – until they get them in their hands and knees and can’t do that anymore either. In extreme cases, the sores can turn septic and you can die from them. Removing jiggers is a slow and painful process involving a scalpel and an agricultural chemical called Lysol. In some areas of Kenya the problem is so bad it’s considered a national crisis, with TV fundraising appeals and celebrity spokespeople and everything. All because of little critter you’d probably never even heard of before you read this.

In a country with an HIV/AIDS prevalence of 7% and 40-something percent of people below the poverty line, why do there also have to be little bugs that crawl under your skin and lay eggs there, and keep doing it until you’re crippled or dead? That’s life here.

The Tenth Post

The other day I met a man called Trevor. Trevor is another Australian who first came to Kenya last year with the same organisation as me.

Trevor is also an excellent talker, and we've had a number of long chats. That’s been really handy for me because I think I can learn a lot from his experience. I can see parallels between the two of us in that he came here, like I did, with a general interest in development but without much idea of what to do when he got here. As he puts it, he had to spend some time “finding my niche”.

He was initially supposed to be here for a three-month stint (I’m here for two). He spent the first part of that time visiting different projects that were happening around the community, helping out here and there, then trying something else. In this way he got involved in promoting an agricultural technique called ‘push-pull agriculture’ – an organic way of protecting crops against pests that can increase yield sizes significantly. Flash forward 15 months and he’s now the ‘push-pull’ guru in the region, with about 70 demonstration sites plus a whole range of other projects in the works such as dairy goat breeding and plantation timber. He’s back in the country for the fourth time, having spent 11 of the past 15 months here.

He sees opportunities everywhere, but he’s not one of those hyperactive save-the-world types who are always so full of ideas and who wear their passion on their sleeve that I’ve come across previously, and who I assumed the development world would be full of. I know that comes across as a criticism of those types of people and I know I’m being unfair because a lot of them do great stuff, but my negative tone comes from a feeling of frustration – and, I admit, a little bit of envy – that I’m just not that sort of person. It’s always worried me that not having that sort of personality would prevent me from… well… achieving things. And by that I guess I mean achievements that have an importance beyond my own life.

Rather than a hyperactive save-the-world type, Trevor is methodical, patient and level-headed. He looks at problems dispassionately, and comes up with solutions in the same manner. Actually he’s more someone I’d expect to meet in the NSW public service than in a community centre in rural Kenya. Which, as you might expect, I find heartening, because Trevor’s is an example I’d like to be able to follow, and it feels much closer to my reach.

So naturally I was very keen to learn how Trevor had gone from ‘Trevor with no particular knowledge of agriculture besides a small vegetable garden in the backyard’ to ‘Trevor the push-pull agriculture guru’ in the space of 15 months. How did he know this was a problem that needed fixing? And how did he know how to fix it?

His answer: by listening. Just by asking people questions and listening to what they had to say. People who live here know what the problems are here, he said, because they live them every day. And often they have the solutions as well – sometimes they just need an outsider to coax them out of the old way of doing things and see the possibilities that are there. A lot of things are holding countries like Kenya back – debt, poor infrastructure, corruption – but (according to Trevor) one of the most significant ones is simply an attachment to existing practice and an aversion to trying new things. I guess when you’ve got literally everything to lose, even a small risk seems too daunting. So, the logic goes, one of the most helpful things we outsiders can do is nudge along this vital process of attitudinal change. That really hit home for me and it’s made me look at my role here in a new – and I think more constructive – way. It's less about "what can I achieve in two months?" and more "how can I contribute to this gradual process of change?"

I said before that this sort of approach feels closer to my reach, but that doesn’t mean it comes naturally to me the way it seems to do for Trevor. Nonetheless, it’s something I feel I can realistically aim for – if I want to. Of course Trevor has a few other advantages over me, especially those 25-odd years’ more life experience – he’s run his own business for many years, worked in a bank and in factories (he also left school at 14, so maybe we don’t need to be spending all this money on extending the school leaving age in NSW after all?). But I reckon if I can get to that age, look back on my life and tell the sorts of stories that he can, I’ll be pretty pleased with myself.

At the moment I’m reading the story of Muhammad Yunus, father of microcredit, founder of Grameen Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Not that I have pretensions of winning the Nobel Peace Prize (I mean, what’s it worth these days anyway? I like Obama but honestly…), but speaking of looking back on your life, wouldn’t it be nice to do that and be able to say “hey, I founded the Grameen Bank!” I certainly would allow myself a little pat on the back if I could say something like that. Reading that book, I find myself looking for clues as to how one comes to be a person like Muhammad Yunus. He seems a little out of my league, but the Trevor philosophy might get me a bit closer than I would have got otherwise. And hey, aim high right? Professor Yunus didn’t found Grameen Bank till he was 37, so I’ve still got a few years. Hmm... maybe I should take back what I said about the Nobel Peace Prize...

The Ninth Post

First let me say that, despite all of what is to follow here, this trip to Nairobi has been lots of fun and I dig the city. It's much more than the most dangerous city in Africa (perhaps not counting Mogadishu).

I came here to the national capital to do the safari that we get as an add-on to our volunteer program. We needed to spend a night in Nairobi at the start and the end of the safari. Before coming to Kenya I had heard horror stories about Nairobi, and we had also been warned away from it by our organisation, so I had resolved to spend as little time here as possible. When my flight arrived my first day in Kenya, I was most displeased to learn that I had to walk across a carpark between the international and domestic terminals so I could catch my domestic flight. I was on the lookout for muggers/hoodlums/international terrorists all the way across. Mercifully, they spared me on that occasion. After a month in Kenya that attitude now seems ridiculous to me (as I suppose it does to anyone reading this, even if you haven't been to Nairobi at all - it was a little over-the-top I admit).

Having had a bit of experience of the country now, Kenya no longer holds any real demons. So when it came time to book the safari, it seemed like a great opportunity to check out the Nairobi. We extended our stay here for a couple of nights so we could do that. Timing was good because one of our fellow volunteers was finishing up her program and was coming in to Nairobi at the same time to catch her flight home. So we decided to set up a massive farewell dinner at Nairobi's famous meat-themed restaurant Carnivore, where all kinds of delicious meat is barbecued over hot coals and served up on swords (man grunt).

So yeah, safari was great (although we only saw three of the big five - stupid rhinos and stupid cheetahs were hiding from us), hostel is possibly (no shiz) the best I have ever stayed in, we've had some really good nights and met some great people.

Now, let me tell you all the things that have gone wrong. Even for me, I feel this is quite an impressive list.

Problem 1: We fly to Nairobi. I leave the book I was reading on the plane.

Problems 2 and 3: My camera's memory card had suddenly stopped working the week before we left for Nairobi, and I couldn't find a shop that sold ones that fit my camera. So I was looking at going on safari without a camera. Great. Also, I've been having major dramas trying to get a SIM card that works properly. I've now bought four SIM cards, all of which have had some kind of flaw. The latest one was giving me a message 'SIM not active.' But there were no instructions on how to activate it. So the plan was to spend the first afternoon in Nairobi looking for the right camera memory card and either getting the SIM activated or buying a fifth one.

When we arrived in Nairobi, things got really eerie - we got off the bus in town, walked about five metres and found a camera shop. We gave them a try and they had the right card! AND it was in stock AND when I tested it in my camera, it worked! Amazing. We walked out of the camera shop and, lo and behold, there is a phone shop almost next door. They fix the SIM in a couple of minutes! Walking out of the phone shop, I start to feel that things have gone just a little too well. A sense of foreboding comes over me - are we going to get mugged now or something?

No, although we do get scammed shortly after (see problem 4 below). We head off on safari and the memory card continues to work fine.

Ah. But.

Day two of the safari, life gives me a little tap on the shoulder to remind me that modern cameras need two essential accessories in order to work: a memory card; and a battery. The battery, of course, goes flat - and who's forgotten to bring his charger with him? So I succeed in going on safari without a camera in the end. I knew it was too good to be true.

Problem 4: The scam. Walking in central Nairobi, a nice guy starts chatting to us about where we're from, etc. He's a medical student at the university just up the road. They're having a day of action to improve access for disabled students. We're looking for an adapter so we can charge our phones and cameras, so he takes us to a few electronics shops until he finds one that has what we need, bargains the price down for us and everything. Then, would we like to see the uni? It's very nice. Sure we say. Making conversation, I ask him if he's doing anything for the day of action. Why, yes, as a matter of fact he is. He's collecting donations. Out comes a donation sheet where people have been putting their names and amounts down. He's been so nice, we feel like we have to give something. A lot of people have already donated - I fail to notice the significance of the fact that all the donors (suckers) are from Western countries - and, awkwardly, they have donated quite large amounts by Kenyan standards - 500 to 1000 shillings. Well, I don't want to donate a thousand (13 bucks or so), but I don't want to look like a tight arse either... I decide on 500. I know I have a 500 note somewhere, but it's buried in my money belt and I don't want to go digging around in there in front of this guy, so I'm blindly pulling notes out of my pants. They are all 1000 notes. Eventually he says, "Ah, just give a thousand - it's for the disabled!" Oh fine, I say, and hand it over. Kelly has done the same. That's when it becomes clear what's happening because as soon as he gets the money he says "Thanks bye!". Maybe he forgot he was going to show us the uni...

Problem 5: After the safari, we meet up with our fellow volunteers back in Nairobi. I call Carnivore to book our glorious farewell feast for that night. It's a Monday night but we have already confirmed that Carnivore is open 7 days a week, and virtually every night of the year.

Virtually every night. But not tonight. Tonight it's closed for a private function.

So what can we do? Everyone had their hearts set on this. I suggest plan B - we could go for lunch? People are up for it. It's about 11am and two of us have just eaten a full English breakfast, so it will need to be a late lunch, but ok. We ask for a reservation for the latest possible lunch sitting. Unfortunately for us, because they're closing early today that is 1.30pm. So we will just need to find some room between the bacon and sausage. And hey, we manage to have a good time in the end even though we perhaps eat a bit less meat than we might have at dinner. Still, that's probably a good thing.

Problem 6: We have an early flight back home the day after Carnivore. We get up on time, the hostel has booked us a cab, the cab comes on time, and off we go to the airport.

But it turns out they haven't allowed enough time to get through the Nairobi traffic. We miss the plane.


Life might be trying to tell me something, I don't know. But I don't care - I still like Nairobi.

The Eighth Post

Remember that old game show Family Feud? With Rob Brough? Do you know he became a newsreader in Queensland after that show ended? And do you also know that his brother was former Federal Minister for Families, Communities and Indigenous Affairs and former future Prime Minister of Australia (he was aiming for it, mark my words) Mal Brough?

Come with me on a journey for a moment and imagine you are back on Family Feud circa 1992. Your loved ones are beside you on the panel. Rob, beaming at you with his million dollar smile and white guy curl-fro, has given you the topic: African wildlife.

What do you say? Lions, I bet. Tigers? No – hopefully one of your family members is clued-in enough to divert you from this folly. Tigers are found in Asia, my friend. Elephants, certainly. Giraffe, rhino, hippo, wildebeest even, if you’re really getting on a roll.

If you said insects, what would the survey say? I think it would say ‘BA-BAOW’ (for those who don’t remember Family Feud, that’s my attempted transcription of the sound effect they played when a team guessed something that didn’t appear on the survey. I have no idea how you would represent the sound effect they played when a team got something right – suggestions welcome from those who recall the sound). That is, unless a significant number of the survey cohort had actually spent time living in Africa.
I’m going on safari next week so hopefully these stats will change, but so far, a month into my stay in Kenya, my wildlife spotting tally reads thus:

lions – 0
zebras – 0
cheetahs – 0
elephants – 0
Kirk’s Dikdiks (a type of antelope, included here because a) it has an hilarious name and b) I don’t want to discriminate against the lesser known animals) - 0
previously unknown species of insect – 5342
of which gigantic, scary and/or man-eating – 5300

I freely admit that I was not entirely prepared for this. I did expect swarms of mosquitos, and came armed with tropical strength Aeroguard, but actually the mozzies have paled into insignificance against the multitudes of other flying, buzzing and crawling things that invade my room every evening.

Everything seems to be bigger, scarier, and meaner than its Australian brethren. For example. fireants are the size of your little finger (well, the nail anyway), and love love LOVE to bite the soft fleshy bits of any humans that happen to be in the vicinity. Actually, Wikipedia tells us that these ants do not in fact bite; rather they use their mandibles to grab on to the unfortunate victim while curling their abdomen around to hit the victim repeatedly with the sting that is located there. Wiki describes this as “a stinging frenzy” in which the ant may sting 8-10 times, and continue stinging even when its poison gland is empty. Insane. Two of our number have been hit by these hard-arses in the past week.

Then there are the cockroaches. We were warned before arrival that they can get pretty big over here, and that’s certainly true. So far the smallest one I’ve seen is comparable to the biggest ones in Sydney. I reckon I hit a new size record with one I saw the other night, but some of the volunteers who’ve been here longer than me tell me that bad boy was a runt compared to the real big daddies running around. I can only wait with a vague sense of dread until the morning I wake up with one snuggling up and trying to spoon me.

Besides that, there are massive black beetles, dragonfly-type things with fluffy wings that look like something out of Avatar, a huge hornet that makes a noise like a twin-engine Cessna when it’s flying around, kamikaze flying ants that dive-bomb you – and the half-prepared food – when you’re cooking dinner… the list goes on. Mozzies come well down the list, although they have started to appear in greater numbers in recent days. This has coincided with me changing the mosquito net that hangs over my bed.

When I first arrived here there were nine volunteers in the compound, and all the best mozzie nets were taken. The one I got had an odour which I will charitably describe as interesting, and four or five quite large holes in it. I have to big up Victoria Coorey here for giving me the benefit of her experience in the Amazon last year, with a tip to bring along Sellotape to patch up any holes in nets. While the patch job seemed to work, I looked on with envy at my roommate Luke’s shiny, sleek new net – a net which he didn’t even use because being from the country he’s tough as nails. He cared not a jot for even the largest insect, although they never came near him anyway – they came for me because they can smell fear.

When Luke headed back to Oz at the end of last week, I happily switched to his net. Unfortunately, all was not as it seemed. The first night I woke up at about 3am with mozzie bites all over my feet – I’d managed to kick my way through the net and both feet were sticking out into the kill zone. Macgyver-style, I solved this problem by weighing down the net at the end of the bed with a couple of shoes and settled back to sleep, only to wake again a couple of hours later with more bites – this time on my hand – and a buzzing mosquito sound coming from inside the net! Horrified, I switched the light back on, made short work of the little bastard and then did a scan for holes. Sure enough, there were several. Out came the tape and I patched everything I could find.

Unfortunately, these turned out to be merely the first shots of a three-night battle between man and net, in which each night I would be woken by new bites or by mozzies buzzing next to my ear. This would necessitate further scans and further patching of holes, a few more hours’ sleep and then the cycle would start again. On the third and climactic night, I woke up three times, each time finding a new mozzies inside the net. In my searching and patching I noticed a larger flying thing buzzing around outside the net. At first I paid it little heed – the holes on that side appeared all to be patched. However, this particular creature possessed an evolutionary advantage relative to mosquitos – it could crawl as well as fly. It stealthily made its way to where the net met the ground, moved to the underside and, like a ninja, climbed its way up the inside of the net. When it got above the bed level, BAM! It launched itself at my poor unsuspecting person.

I’m ashamed to say I did not react well to this. Anyone who’s seen me when a cockroach has crawled over my hand will know what I’m talking about. Basically, I squealed like a little girl, tangled myself up in the net as I tried to get away from the creature, and fell out gasping on to the floor. I grabbed a thong, swivelled around and swung blindly as the thing came round for another pass. With a thwack! I made contact and saw the two paper-thin wings, now separated from their owner, fluttering to the ground. I never found the body.

After that rollercoaster ride and three interrupted nights’ sleep, last night passed without incident. I’m hopeful that this means all the holes have now been found, but maybe it’s just the calm before the storm…


BK

p.s. while we’re celebrating the wonders of African wildlife, I highly recommend this: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Holding-your-cat-above-your-head-when-singing-The-Circle-of-Life/111284848887066?v=photos


Check out the third photo in particular. As one of the comments reads, “I think this might just be the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

The Seventh Post

So I put up a post on the Book of Faces this morning to see if I could guilt anyone into donating money to help one of the local guys I’ve been working with here afford his accounting course fees for this coming semester. As I mentioned in that post (I wonder if anyone has read it because as yet I’ve had precisely zero replies… hmm…), quite a few situations like that have been coming up recently – a few have slid by already and I can see a few more on the horizon heading in my direction.

I wrote previously about perceptions of Westerners here and the instinctive demands for money that you get from little kids as you walk down the street. But this is different – more subtle and much trickier to find the right path through. As I’ve started to develop closer relationships with people, got to know a bit more about their lives and the issues that they deal with every day, I’ve started to realise just how many genuinely worthy causes there are – and just how money really can help if it’s used in the right way. It’s an uncomfortable truth because it makes that line between “I’m here to help” and “I’m not here to give you money” all the blurrier. Someone needs to buy a storage tank for his water shop so he can still sell on the frequent days when the deliveries simply don’t arrive. Someone else wants to re-start a business delivering meals to schools that she had had to abandon after her sister died. A fantastic school and home for HIV/AIDS orphans can’t pay their electricity bills. They want to install solar panels so they won’t have the problem in future – but that costs $1200 and they can’t afford it. And of course there’s young Michel, who might have to stop his accounting studies because he can’t afford the fees – and then what will he do?

As much as we say “I’m not here to give money”, the fact is these are instances where pretty much the most useful thing we can do IS give money. The hardest thing is it’s often not all that much. In Michel’s case, he needs $700. Now, that’s not nothing, but when it comes down to it, I could pay for that myself if I had to. Does that mean I should? Obviously I chose not to and that’s why I put the thing on Facebook – somehow I feel if it’s a lot of people giving money, it’s fundraising, but if it’s one person, it’s a handout. It’s a slippery slope too – if I help this guy out, how can I say no to the next guy?

The Sixth Post

Classic Kite story: on Fridays I’m helping out as a teacher’s assistant at the local community centre. It’s only a ten minute walk so I have a bit more time in the mornings than I do the rest of the week when I have a 20-40 minute minibus ride to work. The variation in journey time is not due to traffic, which is generally very light; it’s some Kenyan thing I don’t understand where some days we will wait at various points for ten minutes or so, occasionally reversing ten metres and then rolling forward again, followed by much discussion in Luo. On other occasions, time will be taken up by three guys trying to strap a hundred kilo bag of grain to the roof or some such. And another thing: why do they wait until the minibus is full before driving the 50 metres back to the petrol station to fill up? Why can’t they do that before taking on passengers??

But I digress. I was telling a Kite story. So I’m up at my usual time of 7…ish this morning, and like a ninja I roll straight into my much-refined-and-now-almost-perfected morning routine whereby I go to the kitchen and put some coffee on the stove, and then, having already had my full bucket shower the night before (an innovation for me), I fill the bucket again with a smaller amount of water, give my face a good wash, get dressed and then head back to the kitchen where the coffee will now just be ready (actually this part is where the routine still needs a bit more refinement – at the moment I’m still getting back to the kitchen about 3 minutes after the coffee starts boiling. And you don’t want boiled coffee, believe me). Then I tuck in to my Weetabix and banana and my slightly burnt coffee, read a few pages of my book and I’m ready to go.

This morning I get all this done by about 8am – less than a one hour preparation time (if you don’t count the 10-20 minutes after 7am that I’m lying in bed thinking about getting up) which is pretty much a miracle by my standards at home. So I have this luxurious 50 minute stretch before I have to leave – unheard of! I settle in to check my emails. Predictably, this is where the wheels start to fall off because of course it takes me longer than 50 minutes to check my emails (internet is very slow here plus I haven’t checked for a few days so there are quite a few. Plus I’m just generally very slow at everything). It gets to 8:45, 8:50, 8:55 and I still haven’t quite finished. I start to be selective and just read the ones that look like they might be particularly interesting. Finally at about 8:57 I finish up, grab my bag and run out the door. I’ll just have to be seven minutes late, ah well.

I get about 50 metres down the road and remember that the class actually starts at 10am, not 9am.

Having magically transformed seven minutes late into 53 minutes early, I head back inside and decide I will use my bonus 43 minutes (plus the 10 minute walk) to write a new blog post.

Then I think “well, that’s an amusing story, why don’t I open the post with that?” Continuing in the classic Kite vein however, my introductory story has turned out to be as long as a whole post in itself. It’s also 9:42am now and this time I really will be late if I don’t finish up in the next few minutes. So instead I’ll try to give this post at least a bit of substantive content by closing with a few miscellaneous tidbits about things I’ve done and seen that won’t fit into a full post themselves. Here goes:

* A couple of days ago, I used a hoe for the first time (careful - that’s hoe with an e on the end – look it up). I sucked at it (remember – ‘e’ on the end) – the head kept spinning around every time I tried to hit the ground with it. The local women who were showing me how to do it killed themselves laughing.

* I was prepared for lots of dust here, but not for the mud (although if I’d thought about it I could have figured it out – it’s the rainy season and what happens to dust when it gets wet? Duh). After a big rain it doesn’t take too long walking around before you are a good couple of inches taller from the mud stuck to the bottom of your shoes. As a result, I am now the proud owner of a wicked pair of gumboots. Weather here has generally been surprising – for example, it’s baking hot during the day but gets quite cold at night. And I’ve seen real tropical rain for the first time.

* A few weekends ago I refereed a soccer game between the village kids and some kids from one of the nearby schools. I allowed a controversial goal which decided the game. Oops. I also watched Manchester Utd beat Manchester City in the last minute of injury time in a tin shed full of about 80 Kenyan men, on a small tv run off a generator whose petrol fumes were filling the room. Awesome.

* I’ve never lived in a rural area before. I was surprised to learn that roosters actually crow all day, not just first thing in the morning. I guess they start crowing first thing, which is where they get their reputation from.

Ok that will do for now, I have to get to the class. And guess what – it’s 9:54am. Late again!

The Fifth Post

“Hey, white man!” a random guy said to me as I got off a minibus one day in Kisumu. He didn’t mean it rudely; in fact he seemed quite happy to see me. It’s unusual to see white people walking around and the locals tend to remark on it freely. I reflected that this was the first time in my life that someone had referred to me as ‘white man’. I’ve never really thought of myself as a white man either – never really needed any adjective before. In Kenya, though, I’m very definitely a white man – I stick out like the dog's proverbials and there’s no way you can avoid it. I’ve never been part of a minority before and I think that, while at times it can be uncomfortable, it’s a really valuable learning experience. I’d recommend it to everyone (well, to all white people anyway). Of course, it only goes part the way toward replicating the situation of, say, a refugee in Australia, because the power dynamic is totally different. While I certainly stand out here, I also have the freedom that comes from having money. I’m not a PhD who’s forced to work as a cleaner or a taxi driver, either. Most importantly, I can go back to my own country when I want to.

Mzungu is the Swahili word for a white person (spelling courtesy of the Lonely Planet, but it sounds like ‘moozoongu’) and you come to learn this word very quickly upon arrival in Kenya. A simple walk down the road is always an experience – every ten metres someone is calling this word out, or just saying hello or waving. The kids are the most enthusiastic. It’s always the same thing: either “mzunguuuuuuu” or “how are yoooooooooou?”, to which the only answer they understand is ‘I’m fine’ (I learnt this quite quickly too, after noticing all the blank stares I was getting when I answered ‘good’ or said ‘hello’ back). Interestingly, the local language, Luo, does not have a word for ‘hello’ – the greeting amosi means ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ at the same time. Even when speaking English the following exchange is quite common:

Mzungu: Hello.
Kenyan: Fine.

The kids will call at you no matter how far away. Often you just hear these disembodied little voices emanating from bushes and corn fields, and you end up blindly waving and calling out “Fine! Fine! I’m fine!” in all directions. Now I know how Brad Pitt must feel when he walks down the street (except he probably doesn’t walk through too many corn fields).

Unfortunately quite a few of the kids have learnt a follow-up line, ‘give me money’, which kinda takes away from the fun of the exchange. It’s illuminating in what it says about how white people are perceived here, that even very young children will instinctively make this demand. In Luo culture visitors are treated with great respect, and a lot of emphasis is placed on making visitors feel welcome. So we certainly get plenty of that (at times to embarrassing levels – like when an old lady tries to give up her seat for you on the minibus), but at the same time some people seem to have this expectation that white people should just hand out money to everyone they meet. It’s not that people are lazy or that they aren’t working to provide better lives for themselves and their families, because they certainly are doing that, but there is sometimes a sense of “I’m poor, you’re rich, so you should give me what you have”. People don’t think of that as a demand or even a request; it’s simply a statement of fact, as logical as night follows day. It’s a strange mix.

In some ways it’s a difficult thing to respond to, because we are here to help, we are here because we’re rich and they’re poor. The question is, what is it that we’re doing to help? It’s not even as simple as saying “I’m here to help you make your own money, not to give you my money”, because for the most part giving money is the way people in rich countries help those in poor countries. Make your monthly donation and you’ve done your bit. Of course there is a line somewhere – we generally expect those donations to be more than just cash grants. We expect that those donations will in some way help countries ‘develop’. Finding that line is the challenge – both for us and for the locals.

The Fourth Post

Kenyans don’t wear sunglasses. While you can buy very cheap sunnies here by Western standards, they are still beyond the reach of most Kenyans (because the shops put them up on the highest shelves ha ha. No I’m kidding I was talking about the price).

(Sorry. I’m truly sorry for that. Please keep reading.)

We were warned before coming to avoid overt displays of wealth as far as possible, so as not to attract any more attention than we already do (I’ll write in the next post about my first experience of being a minority), so one of the things I did in preparation was go and buy a $30 pair of Cancer Council sunnies from the chemist to bring along instead of my fancy Ray Bans. I still feel like a millionaire walking around in them, they’re so unusual here (on top of already looking like a mega-rich tourist simply because I’m white – and despite the fact that I’m wearing $10 shirts from Tarjay). But it actually seems like as much of a cultural thing as a price thing that you never see locals in them.

On weekends here the volunteers often go to the nearest big town, Kisumu, which is about an hour and a half away from the village of Mutumbu where we live. My first weekend here turned out to be a Kisumu weekend for most of the group, so I tagged along. As a result, on the Saturday afternoon I found myself in a park watching a Kenyan rugby match. One of the girls, Kat, had a Kenyan connection through mutual friends back home and he had invited her along to this game – the mighty Kisumu RFC against a Nairobi team, Harlequins, in a semi-final. I asked whether it was the national league and the Kenyan guy said “Yah, something of the sort.” So I’m not exactly sure what that means, but in any case everyone was very happy when Kisumu won through to the final.


At the end of the game, all of a sudden all this beer appeared, served out of the boots of people’s cars all parked on the grass next to the field, dance music started blaring (very cool house mix actually) and the party got started. We met a whole bunch of young funky Kenyans and, lo and behold, I saw someone wearing sunnies! Excited, I pointed out to Kat that this was the first sunglass-wearing Kenyan I’d seen. “What do you mean?” she said, “ that guy there’s wearing them too… and that guy… and that girl… and him… and her…” My unparalleled powers of observation had prior to this failed to notice that, in contrast to what seemed the entire rest of the population of Kenya, the majority of this crowd were wearing sunnies.

Very slowly the penny began to drop as we were introduced to more and more people – this guy’s a professor, this guy’s a magistrate, this guy’s a major in the Kenyan army… we were hanging with the Kisumu elite! It took me so long to realise this because my idea of the African upper class had been something akin to the British royal family or the Packers – polo and Oxbridge degrees and private jets. But these guys were… well, normal. Just like us really. We sat in the park enjoying some beers for the rest of the afternoon, then went on to this cool outdoor bar for some food and more drinks, danced to reggae (yes, I did – I was in the zone) and watched the football on the big screen. Could have been any evening at home – apart from the reggae of course. It’s an obvious thing to say that we are incredibly lucky having been born in the time and place that we were, and I guess I was aware of that before coming, and even more so since arriving here and seeing the way average Kenyans live, but it was only this experience – meeting the rich kids of Kisumu and realising that we are pretty much the same – that turned this from an idea into reality.

The Third Post

There are eight other volunteers here with me at the moment. We are all living in the same compound, which is called The White House even though it’s bright pink. Apparently it was white when it was built, but at some point the three main mobile phone companies here went around the district and painted all the shops for free – so the district has a lovely variety of pink and black, orange and white, and green and red buildings.

One of the girls at the White House is a nurse and has been helping out at the local medical centre. Yesterday afternoon we were at a loose end and so she went down there to see if there was anything that needed doing – it was unlikely because apparently there is a local belief that if you go to the doctor in the afternoon you won’t come home. They also don’t go at all on Fridays. Go figure. Anyway we expected to see Kelly back again pretty shortly, but at 6pm she was still there, because a woman had arrived late that afternoon in labour. I say woman – actually it was a 16 year-old girl. It was her first baby at least.

Word of the delivery created a fair bit of excitement back at the compound, and when Kelly eventually showed up everyone was eager for news. Was it a boy or a girl? What was the name? No – she was still in labour. They had thought it was twins, because the mother was so big, but as the labour progressed they realised it was actually just one big baby – a really big baby in a tiny girl. There are no pre-natal screening facilities in the area, so they hadn’t known earlier. They sent Kelly home because it was looking like the birth might take all night.

The next day we finally got the news – the baby had died. It was just too big, and probably suffocated in the birth canal. Again, there were no facilities to do a caesarean in the village. If she’d been at hospital in the nearest city, an hour and a half away, the baby probably would have survived. As for the mother, there is no post-natal counselling or support here – she wasn’t injured, so they just let her sleep it off and then sent her home. Apparently it’s quite common for women to lose their first baby.

There is so far to go for Kenya to get to anywhere near a standard of living where the loss of a first baby is considered anything more than just one of those things. Everywhere you look, there is just so much to do – it’s overwhelming. Where do you even start? Even if parents can afford to send their kids to school, there are no books or stationery. In a crowd of kids walking home from school, those wearing shoes will be in the minority. When I arrived here I was miffed to learn that I’d be sharing a room with another volunteer – I hadn’t had to share a room since I was about eight years old. But in the house next door to us, a family might have four or five or even more people in the same space that we have two. Everywhere you look, buildings, roads and everything else are in a state of disrepair. We’re all over here trying to do our bit to fix it, and plenty of Kenyans are trying too. But how can it ever be more than a drop in the ocean? It’s okay to say, be patient, these things take time – but that would be a lot easier to say if there were clear signs of progress to make you feel the patience was worthwhile. Of course I’m not equipped to answer whether there has been progress here, having been in the country only a week, but the feeling you get is not one of confidence. It’s a bit like Aboriginal disadvantage in Australia – so much effort going towards fixing the problem, but apart from the odd success here and there how far can we say we’ve really come?

I wonder about my own contribution here. I’m certainly learning a lot – the pace and quantity of learning has been so great I can almost see it happening, like watching time lapse photography. The other day I went to talk to the manager of the microfinance program I’m hoping to work on while I’m here. She told me all about the program and I had heaps of questions and she was incredibly generous with her time in answering them all, and I came out knowing much more about microfinance than I did before. Which is great – but aren’t I supposed to be helping them? When I leave here I think I’ll be happy if I can just say that one good thing happened because I was here, that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t. I actually think if I can do that it will be a real achievement. Baby steps, baby steps…

The Second Post

The Second Post

Amongst it, as Jim would say (hi Jim!). Three days into my Kenya experience, it seems like a good time to come back to the blog.

I feel… incongruous. Sitting in a dusty building in the village where I’ll be living for the next two months, with goats grazing in the courtyard outside, typing away on a laptop. One of these things is not like the other…

This is one of those awkward moments that you get when settling in to a new place/job etc, before you get a routine going, when you’re not really sure what you should be doing and no-one else is either. I spent my first two days in Kenya staying in a hotel in the city of Kisumu, which is about an hour and a half away from here, doing some orientation and sorting out a few basics like getting a SIM card (which I can’t get to work) and discovering where the bank is (which I have already visited three times – even in Kenya I have a talent for spending money). Then this morning we drove out to the village, Mutumbu. We got here around 1pm, so all the volunteers that are living here are out at their work placements. No-one who is here knows which room is supposed to be mine, so I’m sitting in the back of the shop that makes up the front of the house, waiting. Hence the laptop and blog post – though I’m actually not sure I can even post this thing at the moment anyway. I bought a usb modem but the connection is really slow and I have no way of telling how much credit I’ve used. The thing stopped working about 20 minutes ago while I was checking my emails – this may be because it lost the connection, or it may be because the credit has run out, it doesn’t tell me. Oh – and I’m sitting in the dark too. The lights went off just before the modem did. Everyone in the shop took it in their stride.

I find myself making a lot of comparisons to Vietnam, that being the only other developing country I’ve visited. There are quite a few similarities – rundown buildings and roads, and footpaths filled with people selling their wares. Also, while people are clearly not wealthy, there are very few who look completely destitute – in fact it seems there might even be as many of those types in Sydney as there are here, strangely enough. On the differences side of the ledger, Kenya seems (and probably is, statistically) poorer than Vietnam – probably the poorest looking places in Vietnam are sort of the average here. But mercifully Kenya is much, much quieter – the Kenyans are far less fond of the car horn and blasting tacky music than the Vietnamese are. That is truly something to be thankful about.

The First Post

So somebody suggested to me that, if I wasn't into the group email thing (which I'm really not) I should do a travel blog instead. I can't remember who it was, but I remember they told me it was difficult to set up (or I may have misheard). But then Anna Needs told me it was in fact hella easy to set up, and that I should just google 'free blogs' and go from there. So I did. And long story short here I am, in Johannesburg airport with about 30 mins till my flight leaves for Nairobi, and 1 hour 10 mins battery power left on my laptop (I appear to have stuffed up with my international adaptors and so can't charge it), giving it a red hot go.

It being only a day and a half since I left Sydney, not much interesting has happened yet. I arrived in Joburg yesterday afternoon, with an overnight stay before getting my connecting flight on to Kenya. Got through immigration and customs without attracting the rubber glove treatment (still the proud owner of a 100 % record on that front) and got off to my airport hotel without too much difficulty - except that a lot of people kept doing small favours for me (like showing me where the shuttle bus left, driving the shuttle bus, opening the door of the shuttle bus at the other end, etc) in expectation of receiving tips in return. I had to keep saying "I'm sorry, I don't have any cash", which was not 100% literally true because I do have A$70 and $US150 emergency money, but was true in the narrower sense that I didn't have any South African money. People were ok about it, although one guy did say he'd accept foreign currency also - I weighed it up but the smallest denomination I had was US$5 and that felt like a bit too much for walking 20 metres with me to the shuttle bus stop. Note to self: upon return to South Africa, obtain South African currency as a priority.

That will do for the scene setting: here is one little story before I dash off to my flight. The organisation I've come to Kenya with, World Youth International, encouraged me to bring over any old clothes, toys etc that I had, to donate to the community where I'll be volunteering. They have an orphanage there with lots of little kiddies who have very little by way of possessions. Now, I don't have any kids' toys (and they're not getting my ipod); nor do I have any old clothing that would suit the Kenyan climate - even if I could carry it with me. So I did nothing about this request until my second last day in Sydney, when I grabbed a couple of things in KMart - a bucket of playdoh, some crayons and balloons. Still had a bit of an inferiority complex imagining a hundred desperate little kids with a couple of handfuls of playdoh to share between them, but hey, I'm just one man. Anyway the stuff wouldn't fit in my bags so, ingeniously, I threw them into a plastic bag to carry on to the plane with me. If quizzed about bringing on two carry-on bags I could say I had just bought the stuff in the airport.

Fail. The playdoh didn't even make it through the security check - when you think about it, it does bear an uncanny resemblance to plastic explosive, doesn't it? The now diminished bag of crayons and balloons (even less to go round) did leave Sydney with me, but didn't come off at the other end - I left it in the overhead compartment along with all the liquids I'd brought in my carry-on luggage (eye drops and stuff). Those poor kids - maybe they'd be better off WITHOUT me trying to help them?