Week Two Adventures

 Here are my journals from the last week. I hope to put pictures up with them soon, but the current blackouts in the Mombasa region due to the rain are complicating my plans a bit. 

Days One and Two:

Following our return from Lamu on Monday, Max and I spent most of the morning at the Academy typing up our journals from the previous week and debriefing our weekend trip to Lamu with our coordinators. Additionally, we spent some time following up with contacts made (and missed) from the trip and sending our thanks to the people who were so helpful during our trip. This included follow up and thank you emails to Hadija and Walid from Lamu Chonja and Lamu Youth Alliance, respectively. They both were incredibly helpful in directing us towards literature and making contacts that will help us further our understanding of the issues facing Lamu and its people, especially with regard to the controversial LAPSSET port project. In our debriefs with Nicole and George, we discussed both what we had learned and how we can apply our understanding of the context of the marginalized population of Lamu to that of other exploited coastal peoples like the thousands of impoverished Swahili in Mombasa, and Old Town especially.  

Around noon, we returned to our apartment to grab the leftover pilau we cooked the previous night at Jihazi and bring it to the academy, where we shared it with our colleagues in the office during the lunch hour. Even the Kenyan staff members with seasoned Swahili cuisine tastes were much impressed with our first attempt at pilau. We spent the remainder of the afternoon at the Academy sorting out our plans for the remainder of the week and bouncing some ideas off Nicole, who was in the office all afternoon tying up loose ends with the some of the upcoming student service trips. I had the opportunity to speak with Somara, whose parents are own and operate the Sun and Sands hotel and resort in Kikambala, whom I hope to visit later next week and learn about their environmentally conscious model and the development-aimed trust they have set up to benefit the local community around the resort.

Day Three:

Wednesday was a public holiday here, so things were mostly pretty slow. Max and I went out with our colleagues from the academy the previous night and had a lovely time mixing with them over dinner and drinks. Over dinner, we had the chance to speak with Naheed, the assistant head of the senior school, who was very excited to hear about the work we are doing with the academy during our time here. He was very welcoming and offered us his assistance if there is anything we think he might be able to help us out with while we are here; as a member of the highly-marginalized Ismaili community here, his perspective and insights may be particularly interesting and telling of the tension that persists in this diverse cultural landscape. Not only is it nice to have his support from an administrative position, but also it is also nice to know that our work here is not going unnoticed and is appreciated by our colleagues.

We spent most of the morning at Jihazi and in Old Town talking to the local vendors and a few of the young guys working here as tour guides. It is interesting how open they are to talking about their business and how much it is affected during this low season. People are very desperate during the low season when business suffers from the lack of tourist visits, and so they make every effort to capitalize on the few tourists who do pass through during this season. Although many of the local curio shops and vendors are in competition with one another, there is somewhat of an understood communal consciousness that helps share the wealth between the many neighboring shops. If one vendor does not have a desired good in stock, they will always point you in the direction of someone who does. That is something that always strikes me as peculiar; although everyone is initially so keen on luring you into their own shop and offering you “a very good price, for you, my friend,” at the end of the day they are often just as happy to see you walk out of a neighboring storefront with something in your hand. At least someone made some money. In a certain subtle way, everyone understands that the wealth must be distributed here. According to this mutual understanding of the need to take advantage of sales opportunities in the low season during which few tourist pass through, prices are often elevated for somewhat naive (mostly European) tourists who are willing and able to pay high prices for the crafts and wares from the local curio shops.

As someone now familiar with the practice of ripping off the tourists, it is remarkable to witness the shop owners making “deals” with the unsuspecting customers. While part of me would like to step in and help the customers being skinned alive at the counter, I now understand how vital these transactions are to the business-starved shopkeepers, especially in this low season. Also, when I consider the elevated prices in context with the quality of craftsmanship and effort that goes into these souvenirs and their sales, I can better rationalize the higher prices they are asking of customers. For example, I know that back home a set of gorgeous hand-carved nesting wooden salad bowls at a specialty shop could run a buyer as much as 40 or 60 dollars, whereas here they are going (with a significant wazungu tax levied) for somewhere in the range of 20-35 dollars. Although I know that the local price for non-tourists would likely be in the range of 10-15 dollars considering the abundance of these materials and craftsman, these elevated prices are fine by me. After all, as the people say here, “Everyone is simply trying to get their daily bread,” and not to rip-off unsuspecting tourists for their personal pleasure or entertainment.

This community day was made even better by our evening activity, which was learning to cook chicken biriani, a quintessential Arab-inspired Swahili dish, with Mwalimu at Jihazi. Max and I had been sent with a list of ingredients to gather earlier on in the day, which was a fantastic challenge in itself because we had to try to find all of these ingredients and barter for them until we reached the “normal” prices, which Mwalimu had kindly included for us on the reverse side of the list. With our tag-team Swahili and cutthroat bargaining skills, we did pretty well for ourselves and rarely spent more than he suggested we should. Perhaps the most friendly and helpful of everyone we interacted with was the local butcher who sold us the whole chicken we needed for the recipe. He was happy and willing to show us the proper way to clean and chop the chicken, and even offered to sharper our dull knives for us after I joked with Max about how we would never be able to execute such precise cuts with our almost useless blades. All said and done, this relatively complicated meal took a couple of hours for us to prepare, but proved to be well worth it in the end. The biggest challenge was staying on top of the several different components cooking simultaneously, a skill that we will surely need to improve on in our future attempts. Upon its completion we were very proud of the success we met and excited to repeat the recipe without so much help from our expert mentor. This community day spent in Old Town was a welcomed break from our more academic field work during the week and also very helpful to us in connecting with the people were are living and working alongside.  

Day Four:

While Max spent the morning across the ferry in Likoni working with a political action youth group one of Nicole’s AKDN contacts, I spent the morning sending emails and making phone calls to arrange a trip up the coast next week to visit Distant Relatives Ecolodge and Backpackers in Kilifi. After a couple hours of frustrating emails bouncing back and playing phone tag with the staff there, I finally arranged for us to go up there next week to spend two days volunteering and learning about their mission and model. In reading reviews and testimonials about the place on trip advisor and elsewhere on the web, I am looking forward to meeting the staff there and learning more about the work they are doing within the local community and ecosystem to ensure their footprint and impact on the local environment and community is sustainable and effective in promoting development and fostering healthy relationships between guests, locals, and the environment. When I finally did get through to someone, it was encouraging to hear that they are keen on the idea of us coming to learn more about their project(s) and how they are (or are not) a positive and effective example of coastal ecotourism.

I ate lunch at the academy with George, Nicole, and had the opportunity to meet several other members of the AKA staff, most of whom were very interested and receptive to the work we are doing through the AKDN and helpful in making other suggestions of other local people that might be helpful to speak with. We spent much of the afternoon in the office with Nicole learning more about how the AKDN works and how it places people to facilitate projects around the world. It truly remarkable the range and scale of the projects the AKDN is involved with. Even in Mombasa alone, the sheer number of projects and programs targeting rural infrastructure development and education is impressive and promising. Through the community action organized and executed by the AKA students under her supervision, such projects have met great success in recent years and show significant potential for the future. Combined with the passion of the students seeking to inspire real change and progress in local communities, the networks’ resources have facilitated many excellent projects that have improved the lives of many local communities and provide hope for many others.

Max and I spent the early evening at our apartment catching up on journals and watching a movie before we headed out to Bella Vista to watch the big football match between Barcelona and Bayern Munich. There we met Mama Judy’s husband, John, who is one of the managers at this local sports bar and restaurant. He sat with us at the bar for the match and in between plays over the deafening roar of the DJ and sound system we briefly discussed our IDS and how we have been cooking with Mama Judy at Jihazi. After the match we headed home for a good nights sleep to prepare for the following day.

Day Five:

After making ourselves iced coffee and a light breakfast of mandazi at Jihazi, we headed to the academy, where we spent much of the morning with George and Nicole, who were busy working on placing their kids for summer internships in Mombasa, Nairobi, and elsewhere around the country. In the afternoon, George asked us to speak to his older students about the work we are doing here and also about St. Lawrence and college life in general. He figured the opportunity to speak with American university students would be both interesting and beneficial to these high-achieving students, many of whom aspire to attend universities in the states, and most of who likely will not have many chances to speak with real college students prior to applying to said schools. Both Max and I were stunned by the questions the students asked about life at St. Lawrence, including questions like “How is the library?” We both agreed that during our college searches the questions we were most likely to ask current students were more along the lines of social life and extracurricular opportunities, and so the academic nature of the majority of their questions came as quite the surprise.

Friday evening Max and I went to dinner and a movie with George and Nicole, which provided us a nice opportunity to evaluate and discuss our work and progress so far in a less formal environment. We all agreed that we are both satisfied and confident that we are making good use of our time and that our experiences have been genuine and helpful to our goals of better understanding coastal tourism development and politics. We also discussed plans for the following week and other potential people and places we could visit, time permitting, to make the most of last week on the coast.

Day Six:

Saturday was an off day for us, and we took the day to relax and let our bodies recover from the busy week. It rained most of the day, which somewhat hampered our plans to make it to one of the local beaches for a swim in the afternoon, but also provided us the opportunity to spend the afternoon relaxing at home and in Jihazi with some of the regulars and lovely staff, there.

Day Seven:

We had been looking forward to this day for almost a week, ever since we made plans with Shakil, one of the AKA parents, to accompany him down to Funzi Bay for a day of kayaking through the mangroves and learning more about the local fishing villages and communities he has been working with through his small-scale ecotourism operation there. Unfortunately, despite waking up at 5:40 to meet some friends of his and head across the ferry and down the south coast to the site where his operation there is based, the trip proved a major disappointment because of the unforgiving downpour that persisted throughout the early, mid, and late morning hours. Although this trip was compromised by the crappy weather and we never made it down the coast to meet with him in person, Shakil offered to meet with us later this week when he is up this way and explain to us his mission and model. The afternoon turned out quite nicely after the ominous rain clouds disappeared and gave way to the humid afternoon and friendly sun we have come to love during our time here in Mombasa.