Visiting Keko

I have so much to write about from the past few days! It’s going to take me a couple of days to get caught up, but I’ll start with my visit to Keko.

On Tuesday, Christiane and I went to a seminar on hygiene promotion in Keko, one of the most centrally-located informal settlements. The seminar was conducted entirely in Swahili, so even though Christiane translated some of it for me, I was pretty bored (and let’s face it, “seminar on hygiene promotion” sounds pretty boring anyways). So I took pictures and wrote notes to myself about what I had seen on my way there and what was happening in class. I’ll share some of them here:

Walking through Keko: dirty streets with trampled garbage and roosters picking their way through the mud; tiny shops line the streets; we stopped for water at a place whose window shelves were littered with cheap plastic toys that recall McDonald’s happy meals: “mchina, mchina, mchina,” says Hemedi, our guide. As the wind blows dust from the streets into our eyes and mouths, he laughs to me, “Squatter street!” At least two men have asked to marry us already.

In class, participants are asked to write what they want from the seminar, what they don’t want, and their doubts about the project. A good twenty minutes is spent reading each person’s response out loud and writing each one on a sheet of paper taped to the chalkboard – a boring and time-consuming process. Attentions begin to wander (mine, especially). A man reads the newspaper, people whisper to each other – feels just like home!

At the same time, it’s funny how different education is here compared with the US. It gets me every time. Like right now they’ve written most of the lecture on a paper and people are copying it word-for-word. Ah, now the organizers have moved one of the posters to the back, and people complain that they were still writing. They’re told “if you want to write every word, you should come tomorrow morning because now we want to talk.” I’m seriously impressed. Of course, now that the leaders are just talking, no one writes a word.

We stand up and I’m suddenly aware of how sore my butt is already from ten minutes on the uncomfortable bench. Oh dear. The leader asks if there are different kinds of trees (yes). We’re told to stand a certain distance from each other: far enough to put hands on hips—a huge luxury in Tanzania! We’re led in miming fruit-picking from the branches of a tree, a motion which apparently includes twisting the foot opposite the reaching arm and shaking the butt in a way that looks playful and cute on the more callipygian and painfully awkward on us sore mzungus.

Suddenly, everyone is clapping and singing a song about not sleeping in class! It boggles me that every single person joins in enthusiastically and with no sense of irony or resentment. It reminds me of some of the difficulties we had with teachers in Gulu, Uganda, who thought that we should know an arsenal of games and songs to keep classes lively. I noticed at the group meeting I went to in Tandale last week that sometimes people would all start flapping their hands in the direction of the person speaking. Christiane explains that this is called “giving someone electricity.” I’m not totally sure if it means they agree with the speaker, or like what they are saying, or what. The class applauds when someone gives a correct answer (and by “applauds” I mean “rubs their hands together for a minute and then claps them together loudly once, pushing the top hand in the direction of the person they’re applauding”)

The wind blows strongly in the trees outside the classroom. This bench is really uncomfortable. Children run around outside, yelling. A few stare silently at us from their position under the tree a few yards from where Christiane and I are sitting. Then the more rambunctious gather and yell to each other about the mzungus. It occurs to me for the millionth time that school would be a lot more interesting if I could amuse myself with taking pictures in my real classes, too!

Christiane, Hemedi and I snuck out during the class soda break, and walked through part of the settlement. I stared at the shacks and marveled that they manage to stay standing. There are people everywhere, but not like in Kariakoo, where most people bustle around like it’s Times Square. Here they stroll casually, or sit outside their shops, or play with other children or try to sell stuff. We stop at one of the water taps, where a woman tells us that the water pressure wasn’t strong enough for the tap to come out of the ground, so they had to dig a hole around it and stick in a bucket to collect the water. From there, she scoops the water out by pitcher into her bucket. As the water trickled out from the tap, we could see that it was going to take her a while. We could also see the stacks of buckets lined up around the tap: about 40 people were waiting for their turn.

Hemedi took us to his mother’s home, and I took pictures of the adorable children who stared at us with wonder as we waited for our host to finish her midday prayers. She welcomed us warmly into her one-room home (about 3m by 3m). Inside, the standing room was about 1m by 1m and the rest of the space was taken up by two short beds, a couch for visitors, and a stack of cooking utensils and plastic buckets. I couldn’t communicate, but her sincerity in offering us six of her hen’s eggs couldn’t be anything but heartwarming.

The settlement is slowly recovering from the rainy season. We saw a house that had been completely washed away—all that was left was the crumbling stone jetting out from the wall of the house next to it. Christiane tells me that during the rains, water ran through the settlement like a river, and the houses in the valley were flooded chest-high. Now the trash that people just dumped into the flowing water rests wherever the water left it… I can only imagine that this must be what New Orleans looked like after Hurricane Katrina.