One year in the 254

Well, it has been a full year since we arrived in Nairobi.  Truly, the days are long but the years are short.  When we arrived, we remember being dumbstruck by the casual beauty of our surroundings – in particular, the blossoming of the lavender-coloured jacaranda flowers. Right on time, a year later, here they are again, covering your car and house in a sweet smelling carpet.  We are innured to the beauty around us, but far from entirely!

Above: View of the Jacaranda tree outside our house.

Anyway, the point of this blog entry is capture, for ourselves and for our distant loved ones, the sense of living here for a prolonged period of time, and the slow accretion of a sense of a nucleus here.

Despite the move, the new hemisphere, the new job, the new house(s) etc. – the single biggest change in our lives in the last twelve months has definitely been the safe and joyous arrival of our baby F.  What a guy!  Being a parent does to your flow of love what a good internet connection does to your flow of information.  For my part, I’ve definitely got baby fever, and hope to be able to convince A. to perhaps spawn/adopt another.

 

The art of the side-step

The year with S. has been so rich/frustrating, that I have finally (with much high-volume coaching from A.) become adept at the art of the side-step.  Which is, of course, the way to avoid taking her (or indeed any parenting activity) on head-on. 

Is S. shinging (i.e. singing at a shouting volume) a song which consists solely of the word ‘Poopie-pie’ looped over the loose tune of Yellow Submarine?  No problem, in fact, sing along because this will establish that this is not something which will elicit a bonkers reaction from you.  This doesn’t sound very value-added in black and white, but has been for me a costly lesson to learn.  I hope to reap the benefits with baby F. (who still seems incapable of a naughty thought or act!)

Compromise in manners

Being an expat, it is very easy to slide into sloppy thinking and just plain bad manners.  As I sit in this restaurant, for instance, I have seen a little blonde kid studiously emptying the pepper mill onto the table top, while his mother stares into the middle distance, drawing absent-mindedly on her cigarette.  The mother has not made eye contact with the waitress once since she and her child have been in the restaurant.  Is this a pedestrian example – yes?  But is it emblematic of the creeping sense of entitlement which can accompany living in a place where you are completely unmoored from the local socio-economic realities – also an emphatic yes.  

I can’t pretend that we have come up with a perfect solution.  For now, our family motto is ‘Course Correction’ – in that we try to regularly take the pulse of what makes us feel uncomfortable and then take actions (however subtle or infrequent) to address this.  S. will sometimes, and entirely unwittingly, say things which provide a dizzying insight into the stuff she must hear at her school – most recent example, “You know X, she only had 2 nannies. Haha!” (Which, as a taunt, makes no sense because we just have the one, but I guess she is just parroting what she had heard.)

The Missing of the Loved Ones

With F. and S. around, it is very easy to get a sense of how rich a period this is in our lives, and yet we are so far from our family and friends.  As nice as people are here (and a very few friends we had from before we came here, and who happen to live here, notwithstanding), it is disorienting to be amongst people who have only known us a year.  Happily, most people on the expat circuit are experts at glossing this over by bonding over kid things and extravagant holidays, all of which accelerate the hell out of the bonding process. This said, one year into our tour here, we already have a first batch of friends talking of new postings and moves away from Nairobi.  There are times when we worry at the sense of rootlessness. 

 

Too Paranoid  vs. Not Paranoid Enough

The security aspect of living in Nairobi remains baffling.  One minute you will be reading a newspaper in a leafy café, and the very next you will read in said newspaper about a violent act committed not ten minutes from where you are sitting.  This said, neither we nor any of the people who have visited us have had any sort of unpleasant or disturbing experience whatsoever while living here.  Alert fatigue quickly sets in, but then the whiff of constant and avoidable human suffering remains in your nostrils at all times, in a way that (even in Brooklyn) was just not there before we moved.  This said, the poster below (located in my Karate dojo), really took my mind off the training session:

 Above: Hmm, maybe we should go elsewhere...

Things we've seen in the last year

 

 Above: S. the experienced traveler!

Above: S.'s fave buddy - Ivanis the security guard.  Little-known fact: all expat kids think being a security guard is just about the coolest, most glamorous job in the world!

 

Above: Obligatory shot of Maasai bush-walk guide on safari

 

 

  Above: Hornbill munching on the flame cactus outside our bedroom window (No, I did not use a zoom!)

 

 Above: S. swims her first full length of a pool!

  Above: Getting the hair done...

Above: Yours truly hosts a very well received play-date!

On Working (and living) in Africa (Anno)

One year into my first tour on the continent, I’m moved and excited by my job.  Every assignment presents the prospect of learning about a new country, a new political issue and at heart, a distinct culture. I work with toilets, and more specifically, the task of making the 123 million people who don’t use one in the region, use one. That may seem no more than an issue of building toilets but my job has nothing to do with that really.   Toilets need maintenance and the buy-in of the people using them (think about your own cleaning rituals etc.) so merely setting up 123 million porta-johns is wrong-headed in the extreme.

Recently, for instance, I facilitated a workshop with 20 Somalis on the issue of introducing a shock and awe method of behavior change for open defecation which has been particularly effective (CLTS). The issues we tackled ranged from NGO personnel being cursed to inciting inter-community violence, to the more practical issues of how do we do this with no government health agency in place to support? In Kenya, where the country has a national target to reach Open Defecation Free (i.e. every member of the national population has sustainable access to a working toilet, and, moreover, is using it) status in 2 years, the work has focused on helping the country get a handle on the numbers, how to keep people from reverting to their old habits and looking at ways to stimulate the private sector to meet the demand of all the newly converted toilet users.

I also work on water but the work on sanitation is imbued with a sense of challenge, humour, pioneering spirit and taboo, all of which make it particularly exciting and interesting to work on.  Shit calculations, shit mapping and shit thesauruses are part of my daily lexicon. Upcoming trips involve work in South Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burundi, and I can honestly say I’m looking forward to this shit!

Apart from work, the year here has been filled with joys and tribulations. The biggest and most undiluted joys of course are S. and F.  Spending more time with them, having the balance that we had been seeking (aided of course by living 5min from work, a generous breastfeeding policy, and plenty of domestic help), and being able to see them thrive in this very stimulating environment. S. is empathetic and confident, and is loving the school here – all the while developing a seriously Kenyan accent!  F., for his part is soaking up all the attention and love from everyone and is just a wonderful baby – one of my Somali colleagues said ‘he’s the hero!’, referring to his name in Arabic, and he’s definitely our hero, being the unbelievable kid he is. 

The tribulations have included the distance and malaise with expat living. We are far from family and it is a major investment to go on an overseas trip. We accordingly worry about our kids being so far from family. On the other hand, we’ve had more visitors so far than we’ve had in any other location so that’s a bonus.  The expat scene can quickly become house-of-mirrorish, and we’re consciously aware that our expectations of normalcy may never be met and so in some sense we have tried to evolve ourselves and cultivate our own family’s culture and rituals.  We’ve never friendship dated so much in our lives -  i.e. having dates for the purpose of possibly befriending other couples, etc.  It’s very normal here, but as with normal dating, it’s exhausting and emotionally taxing.  Nonetheless, we definitely have friends and peers with whom we vacation and hang out.  

The other thing which has taken some getting used to is the whittling away of the sphere of privacy.  The concept of personal affairs no longer exists, having three people working in the house and friends and staff that are interwoven in the social fabric (i.e. my nanny today, yours tomorrow).  Additionally, Nairobi is a big tiny city where you are guaranteed to meet someone you know everywhere you go – the lines between home/work/vacation are very blurred and this can at times be disorienting.

Of course the best part of living in Kenya has been the opportunity to see the country, experience the outdoors and be in the most beautiful climate/geography on the planet. We plan to do more of that in the coming year. I hope to have mastered horse-riding and to have done a few more ambitious trips with the kids now being older.