Saturday, March 24, 2007

Night watchman and the laziness of Kenyans

Well, there's a lot that happened in the week that past and not a whole lot at the same time, I know I need to be institutionalized but I will explain. For starters, I haven't gone to the Bush, just chilled at the base, ate, worked out a lot, did proposal reading and report writing so in that sense nothing really happened but I also heard from Georgia, found out that I got into their Public Policy program so i'll be starting my grad school in september, meaning that I have my life planned for the next 5-6 years till my Phd is completed.

And then there was Pakistan's unceremonious exit from the world cup! huh! That was one of the most sad days of my entire almost 26 year old life. I was truely devasted, and I mean devasted, this was way worse than the last time i got dumped even, there are no words to explain the sickening feeling and then the news of Coach Woolmer's murder. At first I was just angry at the whole situation but now I sympathize when everyone involved with cricket in Pakistan. I pray Bob Woolmer's soul rests in peace.

I'm usually up till 3 or 4 in the morning as the internet starts working after 9 pm and my best buddies at that time are my favorite 5 people, 4 of whom are in the picture, a.k.a the guardians of the ICROSS Base. From Left to Right, Pili Pili - Maasai for 'spicy', the youngest of them all, Old Lion, Mrs Mama the mother of Pili Pili and Mr. Eyes Eyes sitting in the front (pronounced yes yes - doesn't mean yes yes though; Eyes means fast and agile in Maasai)


Eyes Eyes is the man, he's the skinniest of the them all but by far the ballziest, that dog's not afraid of nobody. You come at him with a stick and he'll attack right back, but I think he really loves me and as long as I have his trust none of the dogs dare to do anything. Pili Pili is just a huge little kid, just wants to play all the time and the Old Lion well, he like 15 years old but refuses to die, I'm told he was the shit back in the day, a hell of a guard dog and a playaa as well, it is said that he would dig under the fence and go out to party whenever he could, if you know what i'm saying. One of my favorite guys at the base though is my 3 am smoke break buddy, Charles. Charles is the night watchman at the base. He's a nice man with a very kind heart, has a wife and 3 kids and one on the way and makes only 6000 Shillings a month.
Now to put that in perspective, I spend around 500 - 600 shillings every day here, a decent meal is 200 -300 shillings and thats not at a Mzungu (white man) restuarant, cause Karen the city which is 10 km from here has a lot of Wzungus living there and a Salmon at the restuarant there is about 800 - 1000. This means that if my dear Charles were to go to Karen he could only have 7 meals with his whole months salary, don't know how he'd feed his family of 5 with that much money. But Charles survives and is happy, at least most of the days. Every night he tells me how he has pressure from everyone in his family to somehow make more money but he can't, he's been stuck making the same for the past 6 years, during which I'm pretty sure Gas prices along with everything must have doubled.

This brings to the hot topic amongst some people who I work with, the outsiders, the white people. What I get from them is that Kenyans are very lazy by nature. They are where they are because they don't like to work. Coming from the West where everything needs to be done ASAP, I can understand where they come from but I feel that they have got it absolutely wrong. I'll give you guys an example. Danny from ICROSS got shot in the leg a month or so ago and I went with him to the hospital to get his bandage changed. I think the time the nurse took to do the bandage was more than the time a 6 year child would take to do the same and during it she kept on having a conversation with a collegue, about what, I don't know but I can bet anything it wasn't about the complexity of the bandage. Coming out of there I was starting to feel the same way as westeners who come to this part of the world feel that KENYANS are soo lazy and they deserve to be poor bla bla bla. When i got back i mentioned this whole thing to Mike and Mike as he always does had a wonderful take on the whole thing. He was off the opinion that we in the West are unsettled and are trying to get somewhere, trying to establish our identity where as the people here have already reached their destination, their identity, they have a culture that can be traced back to thousands of years and thats just the way things are done here, slow and steady. I on the other hand think that for the price that these guys are being paid here they should work half as fast as they do presently. Lets take Charles for example; he make lest than $100 a month. Now please think about this a little, if you were paid $100 a month for a nightwatchman job, enough for 7 meals at a good restuarant in Kenya, would you being doing your job diligently, I thought not.

The talk about integrity and hard work all seems like bullshit doesn't it, hell, if I were in his position I would probably be the first to rob ICROSS. So the problem is not that these people are lazy, its that we would be lazier if we were doing these jobs at the pay that they are getting.

Well, any who, I'm heading to the field this week so i'll have a lot of pics and a lot to write, till then good night and good luck.

Monday, March 12, 2007

The EURO NEWS team

I was very excited about this post. It was my most eventful few days, I got a chance to spend 3 days with two very exciting people, one, a free lance journalist and camera person, Terry Winn with an illustrious past and exciting future and a very calm and serene Julian Gomez producer from Euro News, and like icing on a cheese cake fantasy, I spent Saturday night with 28 very courageous and beautiful college students from 3 Universities in the US who are in Kenya for 4 months, studying and experiencing first hand life in urban and rural Kenya.Terry and Julian were here to film a documentary for the World Water Day, march 23, for which they were going to film the Maasai using the Solar Disinfectant Water Project to get cleaner water for their daily living.

Terry and Julian arrived late Thursday night and on Friday morning the Bush Team (Saruni, Joe and I) with its latest members, Terry and Julian left for Longausua - Masaai Land. On the way I learned about the fabulous stuff these guys had been involved with over the years. Terry I must say is 'DA MAN', a war journalist, worked in Russia for years, been in over 100 countries and also has a Non-Profit with a very unique philosophy behind it (www.pix-aid.org),a must view. On the way Terry shares his war time and Russian stories as we all enjoy the wonderful scenery on both sides of the Great North Road.

Finally we get to Longausua and I'm very excited to meet the kids in the school next to the ICROSS clinic. I had made a promise to them last week after seeing them kicking around what seemed like a paper football. I told them that I would get a real football for them next time I came. As I approached the school I saw the kids gathering behind me with huge smiles on their faces. I handed the ball to a teacher who was very grateful as he said that the football came when it was desperately needed. I wish you guys would have been there to witness the joy a small thing like a football can bring to life of dozens of kids. It seemed like a scene out of the movies, it was drizzling and dozens of kids were chasing after and kicking the new football that they were so excited to have. It was an image that could bring tears in eyes of anyone. But the tears I had in my eyes were tears of joy, tears that were thanking God for giving me the opportunity to witness this (http://picasaweb.google.com/alirzaidi).

Next we headed for the Maasai Mantyata (kind of masai village - a collection of masai huts) where Terry was going to film how the Maasai use the Solar water purification technique. The Maasai are very adamant about having their particular way of doing things. They for centuries are used to drinking water right from small lakes and water puddles in the forest. The same water that their animals also drink which has led the numerous water born diseases being very prevalent in the region. The Maasai do not like to boil the water as they say that the taste of the water changes, so what ICROSS has convinced them to do is pour the dirty water in plastic bottles and put them under the sun for 6-8 hours, during this time the UV rays from the sun through the plastic inactivate a lot of the bacteria in the water for up to 48 hours, during which they can have the water to drink and to wash their utensils in. Pretty neat right, well they say the Egyptians invented this 2000 years ago. This method has reduced the water born diseases cases by 30 percent in the area in the last 11 years.One of the scenes that the guys had to capture was the women going down to the water source and getting the water, so we all followed a few women and little girls only 8 or 9 years old down to the water source. Please do go to pics to see how filthy the water that they previously drank without boiling looks like, it’s the same water that the dogs were having when Terry was filming the women pouring the water in the 4 gallon water bottles. Well after the water was collected we witnessed something very incredible, those 8, 9 year old girls strapping the water on their foreheads while it hung on their backs and walking 30 mins with it back to the village. Well, I thought I'd give it a try and trust me, I who thinks that he is pretty athletic would have barely been able to make it back and wouldn't ever try it again whereas these girls were carrying these bottles without breaking a sweat or having a frown on their face. They were just doing something they did every day. Makes you wonder what the hell we complain about in our lives; waiting an extra 15 mins for the meal at a restaurant, the traffic jam due to an accident, not getting our H1-B visas on time. Just thinking about the things that I felt were troubles in my makes be sick and ashamed now.

After the Euro News team got their footage we headed back to the base. It had been a very tiring day and the next day turned out to be the same where we went to a different location to shoot the Masai girls getting water and the Euro News crew filming it. We had a addition to the team though, Jesse Goldfarb, an American boy who is a junior at St.Louis University and will be working for ICROSS in a month's time. Hopefully Jesse and I will be involved with a lot of development projects in the months and years to come.After we got back Saturday evening, Mike sat down with Jesse and I to go over what he had in mind for us for the next few weeks as he is heading out to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to develop the maternity health programs in those countries; which brings me to the part that I am most excited about. Mike has been talking to the director of CARE international for East Asia including Pakistan about a project dealing with women’s' rights issues in Pakistan, and as the whole ICROSS philosophy is getting the project done without the bull shit involved in the middle, which means not paying the outsiders to come and use up most of the money of the projects for things like staying at the Holiday Inn for a month, but to train from within the affected community as no one knows how their problems can be fixed better than the community itself. If the solution comes from within the society rather than from a outsider, that’s what makes it credible, that’s what makes it work. Anyways, so guess who is going to setup the project, Yes!! it will be me. When Mike told me that I’ll be flying to Pakistan in a couple of weeks to talk to the leading social justice activists there and try to figure out all the logistics, for that moment, I was the happiest man on the planet. I thought I wouldn't be able to do something like that for years in Pakistan. Maybe after my PhD. and that also was a maybe! but here was my chance, within my first 2 months of Developmental work. It is more than a dream to be able to serve my own people, even before the start of my grad school. I have a million and a half ideas already in my mind on how to write the proposal, how to get to all the people, Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis all over the globe to contribute to this. To reach out to all who think that changing the lives of hundreds or thousands requires some sort of a miracle; one that certainly they are not capable of. But if a guy like me can be a part of something like this in 2 months then I think each and everyone who has the desire to do this can be part of making that change.

I would greatly appreciate any help that you guys could give me in identifying who to meet or ideas for where there the greatest need lies for such a project, or any other advice that you guys want to give me.

Badae.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

The past 2 days I spent with Joe and Saruni among the Masai removed all the doubts I had about staying in Kenya or with ICROSS. I had the oppertunity first hand to see what no tourists get to see and it was truly a life changing experience.

On Tuesday the 6th of March Joe and Saruni were heading out to Nyonyori which had one of the first ICROSS outpatient centers built in 1986. For that we whould have to travel 1.5 hours South of Ngong passing Kiseria, (safe land - in Masai language) a town where the Masai women walk tens of miles to come and shop, and the men sell their goats.
The Masai are the warrior tribe of East Africa, they are fearlous people who live is extreme harsh conditions, consider the entire land to be their home, they are sheep and cow herders and will travel tens of miles each day with their animals. They can stay without food and water for a couple of days and just keep walking with little rest. I'm not talking about 200 pound grown men doing this, I'm talking about 70 year old women. They used to be expert hunters and you will hear countless tales on how the Masai Warrior would kill a lion with one spear and a shield. The Masai have been researched to have less than ordinary amounts of adrenaline in their system, a low than normal heart beat and muscle mass.(PICS ONLINE: http://picasaweb.google.com/alirzaidi)

At the Outpatient center in Nyonyori I was greeted by Mr. Johnson who is the nurses assistant at the place. The nurse was off for the day. Like all the Masai he had a big smile on his face when he shook my hand. A tall man about 6 feet, slim like all the Masai, opened up the center for me to view. Inside were 2 rooms one for the patients to wait in and the other for the nurse's examination. Johnson explained to me that the common diseases that were treated at the center were diarrhea, typhoid and malaria. They see an average of 10 - 20 patients a day and also provide vaccinations for polio and tetanus. There's probably a lot more he told me that I am forgetting cause of the my remarkable IQ of 55. This was the only Clinic within an hour driving distance in any direction. The Masai people walked 30 km to get to the clinic to be seen by a nurse, mind you this is not a hospital, there is one small room where the meds were stored and meds are supplied by the Kenyan Govt on a quarterly basis. If there is a shortage of supplies ICROSS chips in. Mr. Johnson is a trained health professional from ICROSS while the nurse is an employee of the GOVT. Just like in Nyonyori, ICROSS partners with the Kenyan Govt in most of these Clinics.

Johnson told me that he has seen tremendous progress over the years where training and treatment has led to the number of diarrhea and malaria patients decreasing greatly over the years.

ICROSS like hundreds of Organizations may not be running perfectly there maybe holes here and there but the work that I see them doing first hand in the remotest areas on Kenya where there is no REDCROSS, no UN or other major Non-Profit presence is tremendous. Even if I do believe some of the stuff thats posted in the comments for the earlier blog, how do I discredit the information, the joy that is displayed to me by a Masai who tells me how ICROSS has changed his life for the better.

It doens't matter if Mike Meegan lied about where he did his Phd from in a grant proposal, what matters is that he has been here for 27 years setting up a community health system, remember COMMUNITY in there, where trained locals are treating and improving the lives of other locals. The bigger picture is not what Meegan or ICROSS are doing, its the fact that there are thousands of locals who are helping themselves out and ICROSS is just aiding them in doing that. I will write about meegan and what he's done, again not just what i've seen but what hundreds literally hundreds of Intellectual minds have said about him, remember non of us are perfect, but this post is not about that, its about the incredible Masai.

We left Nyonyori at about 6 pm to head back for our 1.5 hour journey back to the base and on the way Saruni the wise Masai, sang Masai songs and explained to be what the background for each one was. He enlightened me with Masai war tales, on how they used to hunt lions and the songs that the women would sing when the men took the animals to higher pastures during the drought which hits every 10 years.
The next morning Joe, Saruni and I were planning on leaving for the Dr. Joe Barns Clinic in Longasua which is Masai land, about a 3 hours drive south, very close to the Kenyan - Tansanian border. Joe had advised me to take my camera as we would be seeing a lot of wildlife along the way. We left at around 11 am, picked up nurse Sylvia from Kesayria (the masai town from yesterday an hour away from the base) and a long sanitation pipe as a new bathroom was being built at the clinic. We got on the Great North Road which I was told runs all the way down to South Africa. On the way I took pics of the animals I saw on the sides of the road (pics online). We got to a town called Sibili which was about 15 km away from Longausua where the clinic was - here we had Nyama Choma (goat meat), the best roasted goat meat I ever had, tender enough to melt in your mouth. The diner was in a small hut where there were several Masai's eating. There were broken wooden benches, raggy curtains but there was also George Michael being blasted on a small color cable TV. We washed our hands with what was boiling water to me and then according to Masai tradition dried it with paper (thats what they told me but I think they were just trying to save on their TP budget). Then came the cook with the meat on a wooden platter, he cut the meat off the leg of the goat in front of us and we had the raw meat dabbled in salt which was placed on the four corners of the platter. I can't say this enough, but that was the best goat meat I have ever had in my life. After the meal we were now off to Longausua, another 15 km, shouldn't be too long I thought, wrong, it was all on a dirt road that was not fit for a bull to walk on, let alone a truck, but God Bless the Toyota company for getting us there. On the way we saw ostriches, antelopes, hiennas and the Masai, some of them dressed tradionally and others wearing uniforms. Sylvia told me that these are all kids who go to school situated right besides the clinic. This mean't that there were kids walking up to 30 km a day to go to school. Here is where you truely see the thirst for knowledge, we think we like to learn, we think we deserve things, tell me, is it us who deserves a college education or these first and second graders who walk 30 km a day to learn? It reminded me of how glad and blessed I was to be here and strenghened my resolve for spending the rest of my life trying to make things better for kids like these in the world. Their only fault was that they were born to a Masai family instead of the Hilton family, but then again who's to say that they want to be born to a Hilton family. Come to think of it they would hate it, the Masai's are said to be one of the most serene people on the planet with no depression what so ever, so maybe the Paris Hilton or Brittany Spears should have been Masai, maybe there'd be a lot less craziness in their lives.

To us who have lived most of our lives in the West or like the West even in third world countries, the end matters. It's always about the result, the score, the conclusion and never about the journey. To the Africans its about the journey to get to destination and not the destination itself, a concept that if we learn to appreciate or even understand we'll be looking at things from a whole new perspective.

Badae (later)

Sunday, March 4, 2007

NGANDO and the ICROSS meeting

Yesterday was by far the most eventful day of my journey so far. Cherie and her Girlfriend, no it wasn't a typo, I really did say girlfriend - kate who's here from London for 2 weeks needed to be dropped off to the Wilson's local airport as they were going to Mombasa, the costal city of Kenya for a 2 week lying in the the sun on the beach trip.
Elle and I were the unlucky one's to drop them off. On the way to the airport I saw a huge mosque (Fatima - tuz - Zahra). It was a very inspiring feeling, can't really explain why but made me feel very proud. Got back, started working on the Annual Report for ICROSS, about an hour later different field officers started showing up and we all were called into a monthly ICROSS meeting. Now before I go into what happened next, I would like to tell everyone what ICROSS is. ICROSS was started about 30 years ago by Dr. Mike Elmore Meegan a very famous anthropologist from Ireland, and Dr. Joe Barns (www.icross.ie); it has created numourous rural health programs in Western and Southern Kenya to reduce the rate of preventable deseases, malnuitrition among the locals (including the very famous Masaai people), improving community water and taking care of the terminally ill, ones mainly infected with HIV aids. There's a lot more to what they do but if anyone wants to know I will be glad to send out their annual report for 2006.
Now back to the meeting. None of the field members were Mzungo's (white people), everyone was local, everyone one who was incharge of their respective areas was from that area, Slyvia was a nurse who worked in the South was from there, Saroni worked with the Masai and was a Masai himself. The only 2 people who were not Africans by birth were Dr Meegan and myself.
The first thing that struck me about these people was that they were more genuine and true to their cause than anyone I have ever seen in my life. They really believe in what they do and it is not about the money, cause there is no money. These people get paid barely enough to support their families, an amount so insignificant that we might spend that much on our groceries or on laundry in a month. For me it was a great experience as I heard stories from everyone on how they are touching the lives of people everyday, Habeseeba, a nurse and local health worker for ICROSS was works in KISII in western Kenya was telling us an incident in which there was a guy from that area who had HIV aids and other STD's that had infected the entire area around his groin, he couldn't move, couldn't go to the bathroom, couldn't eat and was left alone in a secluded part away from his house to die. That according to Habeeseba is very common in Kenya where everyone will abandon the sick and leave them to die. When ICROSS got to the patient he couldn't move, couldn't talk, even his mother had stopped cleaning and trying to help him out. Habeeseba and her team cleaned the guy, got him on nuitriants and antibiotics, they kept coming back and doing that and in 2 weeks time miraculously the guy walked several kilometers to the ICROSS office is KISII one day to meet the team himself. He was healthier, talking and could walk, someone who was left to die by his own family. To the people who ask me why I'm here; tell me, would anyone be at a place other than in the company of these great people. If I could become a fraction of the human beings that they are, I will feel that I have succeeded in life. We all read about Mother Teressa and Nelson Mendela and the work they did and you feel that the world needs a lot more people like them, but I witnessed 10 mother Teressa's today and have no doubt in my mind that I will see hundreds of them in the coming months.
These people have suffered most of their lives but are HAPPY, a lesson that all of us need to learn sitting in our airconditioned homes watching Grey's Anatomy and feeling depressed. Shame on all of us. Saroni taught me something this morning that I hope I never forget for the rest of my life. I saw him and said "Habarigani - hello" and he like always replied "Mzuri sana", Mzuri meaning fine and sana meaning 'very', I asked him why does he say he is "very fine", rather than just "fine" and he told me that as long as you are not ill - sick, everything is very fine isn't it? So my dear friends these people have nothing that we feel is important in life but have everything that they feel is important for being 'Mzuri Sana'
After the meetings that lasted most of the day, Elle - who was given birth by Dr. Meegan and is considered his son, took me to his birth parent's house. Its was about 10 km from the ICROSS base, a shanty town by the name of NGANDO. Elle wouldn't consider them slums as he said that houses are not entirely made of mud but the closest reference that I have in my mind to where his parents lived are the French Colony's in Islamabad where the poorest Christian community lives. He took me to all of his relative's houses and then to see his grand parents who where in a traditional Kikuyu kitchen where a pot of water was boiling on a wood fire and there was smoke all over. I sat with them for a while, like everyone they shook my hand, they were very old but their spirit was very young, you could see through to their heart with the way they smiled at you.
After that we walked on the main street or downtown Ngando where they were no street lights, kids running all over the place, seemed like a carnival and when I asked Elle if that happened only on the weekends as it were a friday, he told me that this was what happened every night.
Elle then took me to a local diner, where we choose what type of meat we would have downstairs with the buther and then went upstairs to wait for our lamb feast to be cooked. It was an unbelievable sight upstairs, everyone was dancing whether they were eating or not, music was playing so loud that you couldn't hear the person next to you even if you yelled. It was all Kenyan music with bad sound quality so I wouldn't say I was enjoying it but I loved watching everyone dance. I think dancing is in the blood of all Africans, everyone had a sense of the beat and was dancing with rythm. Finally an hour later, i'm not kidding an hour later the meal arrived, it was in a big platter, only MEAT, the lamb meat we choose, I loved it cause I love lamb but only meat! no bread, no rice.
By the time I got back from there I was too tired to even think. Set my alarm for fajar which I again did not wake up too, being the mushriq muslim that I am and called it a night.

Friday, March 2, 2007

Pics Online

Okay I finally figured out a way to get the pics online, it takes me 1400 hours to get them online, but hey what else do I have to do other than playing with the monkeys.

http://picasaweb.google.com/alirzaidi

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Buush Team

Woke at 8 this morning, made breakfast, seems like i'm back in college, waking up making sure you eat something before going out. Had left over parathas from last night's dinner with my desi eggs ka ommlette. They call parathas chapitiz here. The tea here is wonderful and being a big Chai guy I love my cup of tea, full of flavor and the milk is soo rich.
Came into the office this morning started working on formatting the ICROSS annual report when I met the BUSH MEN; Gatiba (joe) and Saroni, the field warriors. They work in the field offices all over kenya. They call themselves the BUSH men and soon i'll be part of the Bush Team as well. I got my first lesson on the Masaai people from Saroni; about their 9 major clans and the 9 sub clans. As I was getting my lesson a Masaai mother that ICROSS works with, came to the offices and I had my first encounter with a masaai which extremely enjoyable. The woman looked way older than she really was. She had a big smile, extended her hand towards me and said "Sava", being the dumb foreigner I said "Sava" back only to be corrected by Saroni to say "Aeva" back.
My first impression of the Masaai was that they are wonderfully kind people that lead a life of extreme hardship.
Well I'm going to go back to formatting my Annual report now. I wish I could upload my pictures but this internet is killing me, well iI'll keep trying and hopefully get them uploaded this century.

So it begins

The trip from Heathrow to Nairobi wasn't bad at all, watched Babel on the way, really sad movie;had a really nice conversation with a Norwegian gal who was going to work at the Embassy in Nairobi. Landed in Nairobi at 9:30 PM local time. Cherie, who is from the UK and has been working with ICROSS for 2 months now and Danny who is going to be my mentor and is the Manager at the base came to pick me up. It was a 45 minute drive to the base in Ngong, which lies on the southern outskirts of Nairobi. The drive back reminded me a lot of my country of origin, Pakistan. The same crazy driving on the pot hole filled roads. The same amazing smell of polutants in the air, the same gas stations (CALTEX) that I forgot existed since I've been in the US. Danny told me how just beyond the sides of the road was the safari where during the day time I would have seen Girraffes and Zebras. After getting back I was shown my room by Cherie who is extremely warm and loving. I like the room, its small, reminds me of a guest house room in the hilltop city of Murree in Pakistan. I finally got a chance to meet Mike Meegan, the guy who had started ICROSS almost 30 years ago. As expected Mike turned out to be a very very smart man, the kind of person you would gladly pay to listen too and never get bored. I had dinner during my conversation with mike and cherie and got in bed early so that I could start early the next day. The next morning I couldn't wake up till about 9:30, the jet lag had got to me, although I don't really believe in jet lags but still I was really tired. Took a hot shower, made an omelette and went over to the office with is right next door. Got a briefing from Cherie as to what she needed help with. Then she took me on the mini-bus to Karren which was a 10 min ride; the buses here are just like the "Hiace" in Pakistan. Karren's a place where all the white people live so there was a huge grocery store, kinda like Cub Foods where you could find anything and everything from the West. Went to the money exchange place to get some cash and took a bigger bus back to the base in Ngong.I have a meeting with Mike in a bit where he'll go over what i'm supposed to be doing here.