Kenya -- A Trip Last February

Through the years, I have noticed with experiences that I seem to have a “nose” for things. This is not, by any means, always a good thing. Walking by a Laundromat and getting a quick whiff of synthetic detergent can send my brain on a tailspin of memories of sweating through an industrially-washed set of uniform pants while getting screamed at in the halls of the Naval Academy as an 18 year-old…and don’t even get me started on the smell of tobacco drying in a barn.
With this strong smell-related memory and the blessing of being able to visit a few interesting countries over the last couple of years, I have worked on making a habit of noticing the scent of a country that I experience the moment I walk off a plane. In this moment, I have noticed things like spices, human perspiration, insecticide, jasmine, salt water, ghanga, detritus, and whiskey. Sometimes the smells are overwhelming, and often they are simply unpleasant.
I had low expectations for the smell of Nairobi, a teeming African city of almost three million people built on a swamp over a hundred years ago by a trading company and subsequently abandoned by said company. I was pleasantly surprised. Nairobi smelled not-overwhelmingly like burning oak, the breeze was calm and pleasant, the air traffic was slight enough that the noise level was low, and the air, though humid, was not arrestingly hot.
I had met my colleague, Don, the development director for Nuru International, in London. He and I had managed to sit together on the 8.5-hour flight from Heathrow and become acquainted.
Jake, my friend and the founder and CEO of Nuru, had given us eerily explicit directions for our activities upon arrival at the Nairobi airport. We were to go straight to an ATM and take out precisely 7,500 Kenyan schillings, to purchase a phone from a specific vendor for a specific price, to call Mama Chacha (a Nuru employee in Nairobi who would pick us up from the airport and take us to her home for the evening) immediately from said phone, to phone Jake from said phone to announce our arrival, to get in line for our Visas and procure them with five crisp, new American ten-dollar bills, to get our bags from baggage claim, and then to wait patiently for Mama Chacha in a specific spot and to speak to no one!
Things in the airport did not work out quite that way.
Don and I had to make a stop at the WC immediately, of course. We went to the nearest one, which was small and crowded, but clean. There were some Africans, some Americans, and some Europeans in the ladies’ room, and they were all friendly and accommodating as I bumped into them with my bags.
After our pit stop, we tried to locate an ATM and a phone vendor, and could find neither, so got into the Visa line. There we met a British couple on their first trip to Nairobi. I was chatting with them about Indonesia, from where they had just moved, and marriage, which they had just done as well, and they asked us what we were doing in Nairobi. I gave the answer I always give: “We work for a start-up organization called Nuru. Our mission is to end extreme poverty in our lifetime.” My tone reflected what I expected from most people to whom I explain Nuru: MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over). Instead, this couple’s faces reflected a deep comprehension of what it was I was saying, and with wry grins they looked at each other, then looked at me, and said, “We’re trying to do the same thing.” They were in town for an NGO conference.
Don and I got through the Visa line within twenty minutes or so, then went down some stairs to get our bags. The bags were waiting for us, safe and sound, and we walked through customs and out into the main lobby of the airport. There was a crowd of taxi drivers who approached us looking to take us wherever it was we needed to go, but none was too pushy. They responded quickly to our shaking heads. We found an ATM, and Don got in line to take out some cash. I was doing my best to exercise my New York city-developed security practices, so when Don asked me what the amount was that Jake had directed us to extract, I reached in my laptop case, took out Jake’s instructions, and pointed to the number on the paper for him. Don looked at the page, and said loudly, “Oh, 7,500 schillings. Ok!” I nodded and quickly left him to go find a phone vendor.
I found a little shop that sold me a phone for much cheaper than Jake had anticipated. The men at the store were very friendly and got me all set with what I needed. Don and I met back up in the lobby, found an empty vendor-stand, and set our bags down to call Mama Chacha and wait for a bit. Don got out some cookies that his wife had made for the team here and we enjoyed a couple. As we were reacting to the cookies’ extraordinary deliciousness, a guy sitting at a rental car desk started laughing at us, and Don ran over to him with a cookie in hand for sharing. Everyone around the scene was laughing. Don is a great travel partner.
Once we had been in the compound in Kuria for not quite 24 hours, those cookies were long gone.
Don and I moved to the taxi-stand area outside the airport, as Mama Chacha got closer. As we stood outside, we encountered a few more enterprising cabbies looking to take us on a trip. When we told them we didn’t need a ride, they lingered a bit and asked us where we were from. We told them the U.S., and smiles lit up their faces and they shook our hands again and proclaimed that they are our brothers now because of Obama. Don asked them what they thought about Obama, and they said they were, you guessed it, hopeful. They thought that Kenyans, along with people from many other foreign countries, hoped that Obama would evolve America’s role in the world community to a benevolent and powerful one. I hope for the same thing.
Mama Chacha arrived, and we got into her car for the ride to her home. After some laughter at Don’s and my efforts to get into the driver’s seat, having forgotten that the steering wheel is on the right side, we got in the car and locked the doors at her bidding.
The drive was about five or six kilometers, and took about 20 minutes. Of the limited number of international cities I’ve visited, Nairobi reminded me mostly of Bombay. The streets were teeming with people, even at 10:30 PM (we noticed this was still the case when we left her house at 5:00 AM), and they were lined with markets and small homes of various types. There were many buildings made of sheet metal, and stands made from bamboo. As we pulled into the development of apartment buildings and homes that Mama Chacha called the “estate” where she lived, the road got much worse, and the number of pedestrians increased. As we drove along, Mama Chacha made a phone call and told someone in Swahili to open the gate. As we pulled up to her home, which was a two-story block concrete building, a young man was opening a large metal gate to let us in. There was a ten-foot tall concrete wall around the home. The young man was her 21-year old son.

As we unpacked the car, I noticed a couple of five- or six-story apartment buildings across the street. Both buildings had lights dimly shining through just one or two of the many windows to be seen. Something occurred to me of which we’d seen very little on our drive from the airport: light. The people on the streets were walking in almost blackness, and very few of the warungs, apartments, nor homes were lit in any way. Kenya and India might not be so similar after all.
In Mama Chacha’s home, Don and I were treated with friendly hospitability. We got into the place and, after fielding a slightly concerned call from Jake (we had neglected to call him), sat in a well-appointed living room with her son watching a dubbed version of Diehard with a Vengeance on a 15-inch color TV while Mama Chacha made a meal for us. The rooms were sparsely furnished with simple couches, chairs, beds in the bedrooms on the second floor, and a table in the dining room. Photographs of all of Mama Chacha’s five children lined the walls of the living room, and she told us where they all were and what they were doing: living in Nairobi or another African city and working or going to school. They were aged 21 to 29. She exuded love and pride like any mother.
Don and I were shown our rooms, and each of us took sponge baths in the downstairs bathroom. While Don took his, I had a brief conversation with Mama Chacha and her son about spirituality. Her son asked me some of the most pointed questions about my meditation practice that I have ever had to answer, and Mama Chacha made some of the most insightful comments I’ve ever heard about it.
After we were both cleaned up, the four of us had an amazing meal of ugali and beef stew with lively conversation about love, marriage, divine intervention, and relationships.
Don and I slept, in our own separate rooms, in comfortable twin beds under mosquito nets. We each had fitful nights of sleep though, because of the time change, dog packs barking all night, cats fighting viciously but intermittently throughout the evening right out the window, the rooster crowing starting around 4:30 AM, and finally the general excitement of the experience.
At 5:15 AM, Mama Chacha and her son took us to the bus station. I had thought the town was teeming the evening prior to this trip, but the bus station was truly crowded. Out in front of it, there was a marketplace forming with piles of leafy vegetables and various other sundries for sale on the muddy road. Mama Chacha gave us a quick and quiet reminder to beware pickpockets as she helped us unload our bags from the car. Her son walked us to the bus we needed to take.
Like the Chinatown bus stops in New York and DC, there were salesmen with signs in front of every bus working on getting passengers. We got to our bus, and Mama Chacha’s son helped us buy tickets and get settled. I whispered in his ear the question of whether I should tip the guy that loaded our bags on the bus and he laughed and said, “No, there’s nothing like tips.” We said goodbye and thank-you, and loaded ourselves onto the crowded bus.
Don and I sat in a row of three seats. The man sitting at the window was well dressed, and after I introduced myself to him we found out that he was friendly too. His name was Phillip, and he thought I was making fun of him when I reacted to his news that he was an airport employee with a remark about what a great time we had had at the airport. He had a sense of humor.
Phillip was a great guide throughout the trip. He pointed out herds of antelope and zebras, areas where the road was being moved from a slippery eroded slope to a new location, satellite dishes, borders between regions, and places where poverty was having a significant impact on the country. When he left us one stop prior to ours, he shook our hands in the typically enthusiastic Kenyan way and asked us if we were sure we’d be OK without him. We said yes.
On the ride, I gazed at the cirrus clouds covering the expansive Kenyan sky, the vast and lush rolling countryside, the families of people plowing their fields and carrying huge loads of food, and the men sitting idly on the side of crowded roads in a couple of the towns. I listened to Kenyan pop tunes played on the bus sound-system and watched ridiculous un-funny comedy skits pantomiming President Obama’s inauguration ceremony. I was overcome with tears at more than one moment as I felt my presence in an evolving world community. I was pleased to be where I was.
As our bus slowed down to drive around a couple of tire spike devices I stood from my seat and looked out the front window of the car. In the near distance I saw two gates with guards with machine guns flanking the road: the Tanzanian border. In the even nearer distance, I saw a big white man with messy hair and a determined but gentle walk moving quickly across the road with a crowd of children surrounding him: Jake.

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The people in this community look each other, and us, right in the eye at every potential interaction. They look into our eyes and smile broad smiles and say habari, bibi (hello, madam), or salama (peace) or shikamoo (hello). They swing their hands out in a broad gesture for a handshake that consists of a smack on the hand and a triple motion grasp. They pound us on the shoulder with their free hands. They laugh. The children do all the same things with even more gusto.
I saw these things as I got off the bus when I arrived, and I felt so happy. Even though I was exhausted from the long and uncomfortable trip and I was sleep-deprived, I was excited to have arrived at the place we would call our home for the week, and I felt so immediately welcomed by the community.
We were right in the center of the small border town of Isibania. There were crowds of men hanging around near the bus, and women were on the side of the road selling at little stands or carrying loads on their heads. Jake quickly ushered us over to a taxi, and we got in for the ride to the Nuru compound.
We drove down the paved road, the main thoroughfare, for just about ¾ of a kilometer and then pulled onto a dirt road to the left. We had driven by two schools on the way to the compound and small children in uniforms waved to us. We had also driven by small one-room homes where families, including, again, small children, sat on the dirt in the entryways, swatted away flies, and watched cows and chickens scrounging for food in piles of garbage.
When we pulled onto the dirt road, we got our bags out of the car, Jake paid Isaac, our taxi driver, and we walked about 150 meters down a dirt path to what Jake had called the “compound.” On the road, we met the Nuru team’s next-door neighbor, Peter, a very tall and very thin man with a broad snaggle-toothed smile. He told Don and me that we were neighbors, and he welcomed us enthusiastically.
As we walked down the path, Jake explained to us why we were where we were. Amongst the countless unique and thoughtful aspects of Nuru’s philosophy is the idea that Nuru comes to a community and partners with its members to affect change. So in deciding upon a first community in which to work, Jake was faced with the challenge of developing an established relationship with a local person who could take on a leadership role in the community. Jake found that through a Swahili professor at his graduate school. The professor had a brother named Philip Masero Mohochi whom Jake hired as the Chairman of what Nuru has dubbed the Community Development Committee (CDC). The CDC consists of Phillip and 5 other local Kenyans who have taken on leadership roles in Nuru’s target areas, which, at the time of my trip, were water and sanitation, health care, and agriculture. Nuru has since expanded its efforts to small business development/microfinance and education.
The compound consists of two concrete-block homes with corrugated metal roofs, a guardhouse, a choo (an outhouse with a hole in the ground) in the back, and a small bit of land. In one corner of the land there is a shallow garbage pit (about one foot deep), a well that is not in use, and a septic tank.
The Nuru ex-pat team lives a simple, Spartan life. The floors in the home they inhabit are concrete and covered in trod-in dirt most of the time. There is electricity in the home, but it goes out sporadically. There is rudimentary plumbing in the house, but drinking water is fetched from a spring every morning and continually boiled and filtered before it can be used throughout the day. There is no refrigeration in the home. There are well-constructed tables, chairs, beds and couches throughout the building, but the mattresses are very thin and made of foam. Each bed is covered by a large mosquito net that is tucked around all edges of the mattress.
Food, which is procured almost daily from the local market, sits on plastic shelving in the kitchen. The inhabitants’ daily diet consists typically of a couple of slices of toasted brown bread with jam or peanut butter in the morning and at lunch, and a prepared-from-scratch and shared meal of typical Kenyan food in the evening.
Because Nuru is a small start-up non-profit, a satellite providing wireless Internet access in the home is a must. The connection is slow and has a low data capacity, but it is a welcomed and needed very modern amenity for the team. The foundation team is very busy doing research, evaluation, measurement of progress, data collection, communication with investors, and communication with the outside world in general.
When Jake walked Don and me through the large solid metal gate into the compound, we were immediately greeted with warm, calm, broad, and loving smiles from the three other foundation team members. They all walked out of the house with long strides across the ground in front of the house to greet us. Doug, the team storyteller and Nuru chief marketing officer, is a one-man production and publishing company. He writes scripts for, films, produces, writes music for, and publishes wonderful videos. He also takes photographs and writes for photographic journals, fliers, handouts, and Nuru’s annual report. Doug’s wife, Nicole, is an engineer who heads up Nuru’s water and sanitation program. She has spent the last four months establishing relationships and becoming a member of the Kuria community and visiting, assessing, and chemically analyzing all water sources throughout the Kuria District of Kenya. The youngest member of the team, Janine, is the healthcare program manager. An MPH, Janine has spent the last four months becoming an active member of the community, gathering data from the health centers in the area, and conducting home visits that entail long and detailed interviews.
Don and I were greeted with hugs from everyone. We walked into the home and were given friendly and simple instructions on how the place worked.
In an effort to do our best with the jetlag from which we both suffered, we spent the afternoon drinking lovely local Kenyan coffee, catching up on emails, and talking with our team members on foam couches in the living room. As the conversation came to a slight break, Doug and Nicole glanced at each other, looked at me and Don, and announced with regret that they spend Sunday afternoons together and away from the compound. We said we completely understood, having observed not only the isolation of the compound with its barbed wire fence, day and night guards, and metal gate, but the paper-thin walls and gaps beneath the doors. I understood what the couple must feel as they sprinted out the front door with quick goodbyes.
Janine and Jake took Don and me on a walk back into town for dinner. We went to a restaurant (most of which are mis-named “hotels” there) that was in the last building on the main road before the border of Tanzania. Janine had me in stitches so frequently throughout the walk that I had a very difficult time maintaining the vigilance required to keep me from stumbling onto the road into dangerous traffic.
When we got to the restaurant, the waiter, David, greeted Janine and Jake like old friends. It was about a 12 square meter room with a bar and as many tables and chairs as could fit in the room. The menu was written on a chalkboard, and there were two or three men having chai at a couple of the tables. There were tiny non-operational ceiling fans, and two posters of Barack and Michelle Obama on the walls.
As we sat at a back table, the power went out in the room. No reaction from the patrons occurred; the power came back on in five minutes. Janine introduced me to the deliciousness that is Kenyan samosas (meat- or bean-filled triangular fried pastries). As I was savoring mine, she pointed to a two foot by two foot square metal door against which my chair was tightly wedged, and said, “I’m not gonna lie, a little kid came into the room through that door once when we were here.” Again, the laughter made eating the samosas difficult.
We enjoyed a great meal and walked back to the compound as the sun was setting.
I slept very deeply that evening on my thin foam mattress.
Jake had kept our schedules open for the following day, which was Monday. I spent the morning online and doing some writing. In the afternoon, I asked Jake to take me for a walk. Jake walks to the field as frequently as he can, as it is not a tremendous risk for him to do so (as a male and as a trained force reconnaissance U.S. Marine), and as it is the means of transportation most often used by members of the community.
We walked about 2 kilometers to the Nyametaburo School. This would be the first of the many viscerally affecting experiences I would have over the next couple of days of my life.
The school consisted of four long, thin buildings on top of a hill overlooking the breathtaking Tanzania countryside. The buildings were mud huts with thatched roofs. There were doorways and holes for windows, but no glass nor doors. Jake led me to a small room where a young man was teaching children about HIV. As we walked into the room, about thirty uniformed children who looked to range in age between five and ten years stood sharply up from rudimentary wooden benches and greeted us. Jake asked the teacher if he minded if we observed the class. He obliged with a polite smile, and we took seats in the back of the room. The children looked weary, and none were individually able to answer questions posed to them by the teacher. They were wide-eyed, though, and when a group answer was required of them, each and every student in the room made some sort of verbal response to the teacher.
It was clear that we had thrown the classroom dynamic off, and Jake nudged me as distracted glances at us from the students increased in frequency.
As we thanked the teacher and walked out, I noticed that the hardened interior mud walls of the schoolroom were deeply imbedded with hundreds of child-size handprints. The place had been constructed by children for children.
As we left the grounds of the school, we bumped into the headmaster, a sharply dressed woman in her thirties carrying a clipboard. We introduced ourselves, and she reacted with some excitement, asked us why we were leaving, and said she wished we would stay.
Jake again politely nudged me away as I tried to quickly explain what Nuru does and that we would have an education program manager there in a month. As we walked away, Jake reminded me of the tenuous but vital hold Nuru had on the philosophy of empowerment in the community, and the contrast between it and the practice of giving handouts.
At home that evening I acted as a questionably helpful souse-chef for Jake, we had a lovely dinner, recounted some of our day with each other, and slept.

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On Tuesday morning Jake, Don, and I had plans to go to Nyametaburo town center to meet James and Andrew, local Kenyans and CDC members who work with Jake on the agriculture program.
Nuru has conducted week-long training and made loans of fertilizer and maize seeds to 450 farmers in the Kuria district. These program participants are armed with planting techniques to which they have never been exposed and fertilizer to enrich their soil, which has been decimated by years of planting harmful tobacco seeds. Foreign companies control the tobacco market, and farmers who are encouraged to produce tobacco unknowingly ruin their soil, make their families sick with the treatment of the leaves, and operate at a long-term loss.
We ended our scenic but challenging 3-kilometer walk along rolling hills at Nyametaburo town center. This town center would be the starting or ending point for our activities over the coming days in Kuria. It consists of two rows of one- or two-room mud buildings with corrugated metal roofs facing one another across a 50-foot space. The space between the buildings consists of a dirt road and just a couple of benches. There is a small wooden frame with a rag hanging from it that serves as an improvised swing for children. This little swing was occupied each time we visited Nyametaburo.
On the northern end of the town center, there is a relatively large brick-built home, which is where one of the town elders lives. The Nuru team told us that he considers himself “enlightened” as he has only taken one wife. Close to that building is the Health Center. The Center consists of two sturdy-looking whitewashed concrete buildings with blue trim perpendicular to one-another. There are four secure, lock-able rooms in each building.
Jake, Don, and I walked into the courtyard of the Health Center and were heartily greeted by Eunice, James, and Andrew, all Nuru employees. Eunice guided us to a small storeroom on one end of the Health Center that was heavily padlocked. She unlocked the room with a smile, and the six of us crowded into the small room. It was about twelve square meters in area, and there were about twenty-five four-and-a-half-foot high stacks of bags of fertilizer and seed for Nuru’s farm loan program.
Eunice’s job is to manage the storeroom and distribute seed and fertilizer to certified Nuru farmers. Certification entails attending a week-long training session hosted by Jake. Each farmer who attends a session gets a card to bring to the storeroom and show Eunice to get supplies. Eunice verifies certification with a list she keeps on hand and distributes a set amount of seed and fertilizer to farmers for planting.
These distributions are loans, and they are to be repaid by the farmers in the form of maize at the end of growing season.
The six of us sat down in the storeroom for a short water break and exchange of pleasantries. Jake asked Eunice, James, and Andrew how things were going in their respective areas of work. Eunice reported that almost all the farmers had come by to get their seeds and fertilizer. James and Andrew, who were charged with helping the Nuru farmers put the planting techniques Jake had taught them into practice, said that things were going well. They said that the farmers were excited about their anticipated crop yields, and the community expected twice as many farmers to show up at Nuru training for the next season, making an expected attendance of close to 1,000 farmers.
Once we had caught our breath and hydrated, five of us said goodbye to Eunice and started the short walk to a local shamba (a field for planting).
The shamba we visited was a rectangular plot of tilled soil, about 250 square meters in area. When our swift walk brought us to the edge of the shamba, we saw two women and three young children engaged in the arduous task of planting seeds with fertilizer.
As we neared the field, the women and children left and four adult men of varying ages showed up to take over the work. One man dug 1/4 meter deep holes with a large hoe, another followed behind him and placed a single maize seed in each hole, a third kicked a small amount of dirt over the seed and place a bottle-cap full of fertilizer in the hole, and a fourth packed a bit of dirt over the fertilizer.
Everyone at the shamba greeted Jake happily, and Jake introduced us to each person. He asked Don and me if we wanted to help with the task of planting, and we both enthusiastically said yes. So as Jake caught up more with Andrew, James, and a gentleman who had introduced himself as the “chairman” (a leader of a group of farmers), Don and I dropped seed and fertilizer into holes.
Our team storyteller, Doug, showed up with a camera and took a few pictures as the day progressed. Planting activities wan in the community at mid-day as the equatorial sun reaches its peak. As this time approached, Jake called Don and me out of the field. We passed our maize and fertilizer on to the local farmers and walked to the road to start the journey home.
As we were leaving, the chairman addressed Jake in Swahili. Jake responded to him in Swahili, and everyone but Don and me erupted in laughter. Jake said goodbye to them and turned to join us. I saw a subtle look of weariness in his eyes.
I was smiling at the occurrence because of the laughter of the locals, and I was also satisfied with the slightly active experiences of the morning. I mustered some empathy, looked closely at my friend as he neared us, and quietly asked him what the chairman had said.
Jake said that he had said, “Mr. Jake, you need to get me some shoes. Don’t worry about anyone else; you just need to get shoes for me!”
Jake had responded quickly and firmly by reminding the chairman that he was a leader, and leaders must look out for the people in their charge before they worry about themselves. Jake said that every person in the group should have shoes before the chairman does.
This response is what had caused the laughter.
Jake said he had been frustrated by the backwards idea of leadership that existed in Kuria, partly a deeply ingrained philosophical relic of colonial influence.

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On Don’s and my second official day in the field, we traveled with Nicole, the team’s water and sanitation program manager.
The women on the Nuru team travel on boda bikes (dirt bikes) for safety. Charles and James, our boda bike drivers, were waiting for us at the compound gate when Don, Nicole, Doug, and I were ready to go. The four of us loaded up on two bikes and started the trip to Nyametaburo town center. We had to stop twice along the way to walk the bikes around hazardous sections of the road.
Nicole showed us a variety of water sources in the Kuria community as we toured the area. We stopped at a new and beautiful pump appropriately situated in front of an elementary school. We stood there long enough for Nicole to tell us that the last pump to be found at this location had been stolen by some unknown thieves one evening. A night guard was employed to protect this new pump. Noticing the steady and constant growth of the crowd of children watching with broad smiles from the windows of the school, Nicole suggested that we move along.
We saw a spring that had been the beneficiary of a Nuru-incited water clean-up day. Community members had cleared away debris and shored up the muddy ground around the spring with wood and stones.
As we made our way along the road to Kuria’s most central spring, a tall, thin, and beautiful woman carrying a load on her head that was five times the size of her head itself flagged us down on the road. Her name was Counselata, and she insisted that we come and see her area water source.
After some animated discussion amongst Nicole, Doug and Counselata, we alighted from our bikes, paid our drivers, and left the main road on foot. We followed Counselata down a hill, and edged our way between a couple of shambas. As we made our way, four other women and twelve small children joined the procession.
These children, like the other children we had seen in schools or walking to and from market as we drove or walked on the main road, stared at us wide-eyed and unabashedly. They were calm, and they were not shy. Unlike the children we'd seen in public, though, these little ones did not have smiles on their faces. They were dirty, dressed in swaths of material that barely qualified as clothes, and they were sick. As I had so often seen in photographs and on infomercials, there were flies buzzing around the faces and heads of these children. In seeing them in person, though, I realized that the flies were there because the children were sick. They had runny noses, noticeably clogged ears, and deeply rumbling, hacking, and persistent coughs.
Counselata brought us to the community spring, which had collapsed as a result of lack of maintenance. As we stood at the edge of what had become a muddy pit, Nicole discussed the collapse with Counselata, and several men joined the crowd.
The adult discussion was in Swahili, so Don and I focused our attention on the children. Most of them were staying close to their mothers and glancing furtively amongst the adults engaged in the discussion and us. As Don and I pulled out our cameras, two or three children focused more intently on us. One boy in a bright red shirt made a quick and deliberate move away from his mother, looked at me, posed with his hand on his hip, and smiled. It was disarming and hilarious.
The discussion on the spring came to a close. Nicole effectively communicated sympathy to the community members for their frustration with the collapsed spring, made clear that Nuru would not supply the labor required to repair it, but suggested that a day be set aside for the community members to do it.
We said goodbye and started our walk to the final spring of the day. We trudged up a hill, and one of the men in the group, Brahman, joined us. Jake later told me that Brahman had been a teacher at one of the secondary schools in the area for many years. Brahman was wearing a blazer with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, dress pants with the hems rolled up to his knees, and a white oxford shirt. His feet were bare and covered with dirt, as were all his clothes.
Brahman spoke excellent English. He asked Don and me how we found Kenya. We told him we thought it was beautiful, and he smiled with calm surprise and asked us why. We told him it was so green and lush, and that was different from where we lived. There was a pause in the conversation as we neared the peak of the hill where Brahman’s shamba was. He had been working there when we arrived.
Brahman looked at the surrounding vista of his home country and said, “I wonder if all this green has kept us from reaching our potential here in Africa.”
We said goodbye to Brahman, wished him well with his planting, walked over one last hill, and arrived at the main spring for the community. It was a beautiful stream at the bottom of a very steep and worn-away path. When we arrived, there were three women collecting water in yellow plastic five-gallon buckets. I asked Nicole later in the day where the buckets came from, and she said that vegetable oil was delivered to the town center in these large buckets for sale in smaller quantities.
The women we saw reacted with shy smiles as we approached their task. Doug was taking still and video images to send back to the States, and he asked if they minded and they said no. They filled the buckets swiftly and deftly placed them on their heads, and stood still in the water for Doug to film them. They looked at his camera, used one hand to steady the bucket and another to hold up the edges of their skirts from the water. Their expressions were honest and pleasant.
Doug thanked them for their time, and they started the climb up the hill away from the spring. Two middle-aged women edged away from the third, much older woman. Though she made no indication of it, the pain that the movement up the hill caused was clear with the way her legs responded to the ground.
Don and I observed as young girls came and went from the spring throughout the afternoon. Nicole interacted with them, and Doug filmed. Boys showed up sporadically. They laid on the ground listening to portable radios or engaged in mock swordfights with sticks while their sisters trudged up and down the worn path with gallons and gallons of water.
I experienced a subtle personal shift in that lush little valley. All week I had been trying to reconcile the joyful and friendly demeanors of the people I had been meeting with the physical suffering I knew they were experiencing. They knew hunger, illness, fatigue, and physical pain in ways that I did not. But, as I have noted, they knew joy, and they were happy, friendly, and confident people. When I saw a little girl (probably seven or eight), walk down the path to the spring with her little sister (probably six months) strapped to her back with a rag, I touched her arm as she walked by. Her skin was cold. She was hungry. The joy on her face, I realized, was in defiance of this hunger.
I realized that human suffering, as it existed here in rural Kenya, was easily preventable. I thought of the fact that human suffering is a commodity that exists everywhere in the world: suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, LA, London, farms in Russia, beaches in the South Pacific. People suffer with depression, self-loathing, and sadness. The people here, though, were experiencing preventable physical suffering. Because the suffering is easily preventable, it is unjust that people are experiencing it.
The work I am doing, I realized, is for justice. It is to the end of a decrease in human suffering in the name of justice.
I remember Wednesday night being a difficult one for me. The trip was taking its toll.

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On Thursday morning, Janine accompanied Don and me on our last boda bike ride to Nyametaburo town center. We went straight to the Health Center.
We said hello to Alice (a nurse), Andrew, James, and Eunice as we walked into the courtyard of the Center. Janine gave us a tour of the building in the health care context. We saw the room for inpatients, which consisted of four cot-like beds crowded into a room barely large enough to hold them. We saw the doctor’s exam room, a small room with a desk and two folding chairs. Janine showed us the record-keeping tools the community used – large ledger books with detailed handwritten notes on all visits. We saw a room where the nurses did their work: a crowded space with supplies like syringes, gauze, and iodine. Janine opened a door and showed us a closet-sized room where she had seen a woman quietly give birth a few weeks prior to this visit. We saw the maternity ward: a large padlocked room containing the most massive beehive any of us had ever seen. It was unusable until the hive could be removed.
The “doctor” on hand (actually a nurse by training), and Alice (actually a physician’s assistant) had joined us at this point. We got a view of the medical storeroom with some help from the doctor. It was a neat and tidy closet-sized space. Alice told us that they were fully stocked with everything other than the most commonly prescribed drug they carried: an antibiotic called amoxicillin. They were out of it and did not know when it would be replenished.
After our tour, Don and I shadowed the doctor and Nelly, Nuru’s local Kenyan healthcare representative, respectively. Nelly is a nurse, so Don and I each got to see all the patients on-hand, as each one went to the doctor first for diagnosis, then the nurse for treatment.
I spent about two hours in the nurse’s office. I laughed and smiled, and held back tears during that time. The solid majority of the patients consisted of infants there for vaccinations. Janine, as she had shown us the room where she’d seen a birth, had warned us that patient privacy wasn’t something that was considered in this Health Center. There were typically ten people in this little office at any given time during my visit. Together, we all witnessed each other’s treatments for maladies. One young mother saw me staring at her little daughter, arose from her seat, and pushed her baby into my arms. Everyone in the room laughed. The baby had light skin, and an older women said, “This one, she could be yours!” I laughed, and she looked at me more intently and said, “This one…you can have!” I laughed again and looked at the baby’s mother, and her expression told me that she pleasantly disagreed with her elder. I told them I did not know what my husband would think if I came home with a baby. Nelly said, “Well, he would think that you had stolen an African baby!” Everyone laughed.
A young boy, maybe eight years old, came into the room with his father. He had a flushed and swollen face, and he moved slowly. His father sat him down in front of the nurse’s desk and described his problem. Alice shook her head and sat down in front of the boy. She grabbed his foot and began to remove a dirt-covered and tattered bandage from his toe. The boy had been hit by a dirt bike while he was walking home from school, and he had sustained a wide, but not deep, scratch on his toe. The injury had occurred two weeks prior to this visit, and the boy’s father had brought him into the Center for treatment. The wound had been cleaned and dressed, and the boy had been sent home with instructions to keep it clean and return for a dressing change in a couple of weeks.
The boy and his family, as does everyone in the Kuria District of Kenya, lived on a small plot of land that was used as a farm. No roads or paths in the area are paved. No one in the boy’s family wore shoes more substantial than well-worn thongs.
The boy had contracted a fever-inducing infection in his two weeks at home after the injury. Alice changed the dressing on his toe and kindly advised him to keep his foot as clean as possible. I watched her explain to his father that the Health Center could prescribe no amoxicillin, as it had none on hand. The father helped his dazed son stand and they walked slowly out of the room.
I do not know what has happened to the boy since my trip.
Janine collected Don and me from our rooms and we left the Health Center with her and Nelly. Our next task was to conduct a home visit. We walked about ½ a kilometer down one of the back roads in the area, and came to a home that consisted of a two-building compound. Each building was about four meters by three meters in area, and there was a small fenced-in space between the buildings.
Both buildings were mud huts with thatched roofs.
Nelly and Janine negotiated with the inhabitants of the home, and they agreed that a home-visit would be okay.
Don and I observed as Janine asked a long series of questions, Nelly translated, and the family answered. We had been hospitably treated with the three stools that were available in the home. Each room had dirt floors, and there was no electricity and no plumbing. The room in which we sat contained a dish rack and three shelves for dishes. A bed with a worn mosquito net sat in the corner. As we talked, a ten-year-old girl came and left the room holding her six-month-old brother. An eighteen month old sat in his mother’s lap as she answered questions.
At the end of our time with the family, they said goodbye to us and we left the farm. We made the short walk to the road and Don and I caught two boda bikes back to the Nuru compound.

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This little ride was our last ride along this main road through the Kuria District, where Nuru had been doing its work. Don and I, both aware of that, relished the friendly greetings from school children and walkers that we got on this ride. I remember having a huge smile on my face and both arms outstretched for waving for most of this ride. School was just letting out, so we passed throngs of jumping, waving, and smiling children in uniforms on the road. They shouted greetings to us and we responded. What a joyful ride! The sun was shining and wind was whipping through my hair. We passed by the newly built pump and saw a group of schoolgirls collecting water, and we passed by several shambas where planting with the Nuru method was occurring.
As we neared the very end of the ride, we passed by one of the smallest homes in the area, situated very close to the road. We were moving slowly as the road was particularly worn away in this patch. Two tiny smiling boys walked from the home to the edge of the road to greet us. They were thin and dressed in rags, and shoeless. The older one looked right into my eyes, broadened his smile, lifted both arms and said something none of us had heard exclaimed as a greeting. “Africa!” he shouted. His younger brother mimicked him enthusiastically. As my bike moved past them, we neared our home, and I knew it would be the last greeting from the road I would hear on this trip. I thought about what the boy meant by using that single word that stood for so much and so many complexities to which I had been exposed for the first time over this past week.
I realized what he meant. It was a message to me: “Do not forget.”