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.