Ketchup and Christmas plans

It has been a long time, so where should I start? I guess I’ll just start with last night, just when I was about to go to sleep, I looked up and saw the moon shining with a mindboggling brightness. It just looked surreal, as it shone almost as if it were the sun. Really a magnificent sight.

I’m also safe to say that we’ve passed the equator now some 20 times. We cross it every time we’re in one of the matatu busses going to Nanyuki the big town north of where we’re staying. So it not really a special occasion anymore. What I do find astonishing is the resourcefulness and the creativity of the Kenyan people. Resourcefulness in the way how they create a new seat in a matatu; they just place a wooden plank on two seats to bridge the aisle, and poof! another person can be seated. Or the fact that every matatu has a different interior. When you step in one matatu you get the feeling that you’ve stepped into a Bollywood movie, the other has black leather seats and a flat-screen TV and another has leopard print on their seats and Ghetto Radio pounding from the speakers. Another thing I really like is the colourful facades of the shops here. From vibrant red or vivid green to a mix of blue and yellow, every shop’s front has been painted with a bright colour. Apart from the houses made of wood, most are made of large grey bricks. So this really brightens up the streets.

Every time I want to say something about the Kenyan cultural and thus about the Kenyan people themselves, matatus remain the best example. When you sit between some 15 Kenyans, you experience all kinds of aspects of the Kenyan culture. Kids staring at you because you are a Mzungu – which literally means someone who roams around aimlessly, but is used to call white people – but especially babies are king when it comes to staring. Just when they’re dozing off and they open their big brown eyes and the first thing that catches their eye is a Mzungu. You see their eyes widen and their little jaws drop. Another good example of practicality and resourcefulness is that they can transfer small amounts of money using their cell phone. This service is called M-Pesa and works for everybody who has a Kenyan SIM-card. It is just such an easy way of doing business.

Staying at the guesthouse is a very lazy life, you don’t have to cook or do the dishes and in the morning and after dinner there is always hot water to make a cup of coffee or tea. In the morning you have toast and sometimes even a boiled egg or pancakes. For lunch we have a warm meal consisting of rice, pasta or chips with some vegetables. As dinner we get rice or mashed potato with minced meat or chicken and some vegetables. Once a week we’re blessed with chapatti, which are a kind of savoury pancakes which you eat with your hands with spinach and beans. Apart from other days, on Chapati-Day everybody is happy and longing for dinner, because most of the other meals are quite blant. A lot of salt and pepper will get you some flavour, but not really far. So that’s why we made a long-term investment: we’ve bought a 5 liter jerrycan of ketchup! As snacks we have chocolate chip cookies and spicy noodle soups, because the meals are easily digested which means you’re always hungry an hour after dinner.

The other day when we were having spaghetti for lunch, our little friend Charles was sitting with us, looking real cool as he was wearing Anne-Thomas’ sunglasses. He had a chicken in his arms and when we asked what he was going to do, he laughingly said: “We’re going to cut it” whilst making a sawing motion with his hand above the chicken’s neck. Then when we were enjoying our plate of spaghetti outside in the sun, some 5 meters behind us, some guy was busy plucking and degutting the chicken. So we didn’t have to guess what were going to have for dinner that evening.

Whilst Erik is self-sacrificing himself by diving into and getting down and dirty in the data we’ve collected so far, Anne-Thomas and I are testing the individual electrical components in the hot Kenyan sun. We charged the batteries at a neighbouring barber shop and are now able to hook the inverter – which converts the direct current from the batteries into the alternator current on which normal appliances run – to the batteries and we were able to make some sandwiches using the toaster. But after a while the inverter just gave up and stopped functioning, so it has some issues. It’s not really working reliably and this might well be the biggest problem in the whole system. Anne-Thomas is the one who is mostly busy with our wind turbine project, and he’s really diving in the literature and theory on the turbine. With our testing we’ve also cooperated with a local electrician, named Francis. Not only to benefit from his practical experience, but also to be sure that what we do here will be understood by the local community and let the knowledge remain with the locals. An example of his practical handiness is that he used some Coca Cola to wash off the corrosion on the batteries. We’re planning on testing the charge controller today – the device that ensures that the batteries aren’t overloaded – since there is ample wind at the moment. Thus we want to try to charge the batteries on the power delivered by the wind turbine. I’m really anxious.

Last Sunday some of the students here wanted to do some jogging. So at breakfast we decided to all go for a run, and thus 15 minutes later, all but one of us were jogging on the road which leads to Mt. Kenya. There were a lot on people on the road on their way to church and they were very enthusiastic to see this group of Mzungu running, they also cheered for us and the youngsters gave us high-fives. Church is really important here, since almost everybody goes to church in Kenya. A man told me that every time before he got in a matatu he always prayed for a safe trip and when he had arrived safely he would say grace to thank the Lord. On Sundays you can hear the gospel music playing in the nearby church, a mix of joyful tunes and the exclamations of a charismatic priest.

The other aspect of our internship here is the market research and we’re now so far that we’ve gathered most of the data on population and electricity usage. Part of our plan is also to do interviews with local households and small business to investigate their demand for and financial means to buy a wind turbine. We do not have much experience with interviewing so we called in the help of James, a recently graduated Kenyan student doing research on water pollution in a local river. For this research he has done loads of interviews and being a Kenyan, he understands the cultural aspect of these interviews: which question to ask, how to put them and how much of their time people are willing to take for an interview. This has really helped us in improving our questionnaires and we are now confident in starting with the interviews. James has even offered to lend us his car, which can be incredibly practical when doing interviews in somewhat remote villages.

In the meantime, when Erik and I were meeting James about our interview questionnaires, Anne-Thomas was accompanying Dalton – the first Kenyan producer of the small wind turbines – to Nyeri, a large town to the south of where we’re staying. Dalton went to Nyeri to enter in a business plan competition in which you could win a large sum of money to kick-start your enterprise, and had asked if one of us wanted to join him. Having never written a business plan, meant that it was not up to standard. Though, the contest commission give him the chance to correct it and hand in his business plan proposal at another moment. As you might have noticed we’re splitting up if possible, because this enabled us to save a lot of time, since it’s really not necessary for all of us to be present at every meeting or occasion.

A Skype meeting has taken place with Bart, one of the board members of RIWIK. We were able to explain what we had done so far, and gave him the chance to ask questions. We talked about the electronics and discussed some theoretical things.

One day when I was in Nyeri to gather data from the electricity company, I was halted by a wall of bureaucracy. The KPLC, the company that has a monopolistic position when it comes to electricity supply, has two offices in that city. One on one side of the city and one on the other side. I just thought to start at the biggest of the two, and they quickly referred me to the other office, which meant that I had to walk half an hour to the other side of town. Having arrived there I was kindly helped, but they were not in the position to hand over any data without an introduction letter from the main office. So I quickly headed back to the main office, as is was getting late in the afternoon. Upon entering the main office, I saw an enormous row of customers waiting to be helped at a desk. I felt a small twitch in my stomach for I was so easily allowed to go upstairs to talk with some manager and these people had to wait in line, like everyone else, to be helped. Upstairs they told me that for me to get an introduction letter, I had to hand in a printed letter, addressed to the regional manager, requesting to collect data. Though they told me that he was not in office until three days later. The other day, when I had come back to deposit the letter, a secretary told me that they would contact me when they had processed it. Thus getting some data takes a lot more time than expected and waiting is the only option for now, which is quite frustrating. So the idea of trying to speed up our research by splitting up has been crudely washed away by this bureaucracy.

Talking to the local government was a bit more promising. They could give us a list of all SACCOs in the area of Nyeri and a list of associations for small businesses, including contact details. The latter are very useful contacts when we want to do interviews with small-scale entrepreneurs, as these associations can refer us to one of their members. This could for example be a tailor who is currently sewing all the clothes he makes by hand, but who could benefit from buying a wind turbine. This would give him the possibility to use an electrical sewing machine and a light to work during the evening; significantly increasing his production and thus income.

To celebrate Sinterklaas we went to a local restaurant called Trout Tree Restaurant. This is really cool restaurant as it is situated in a treehouse in a colossal tree. You really feel like you in the middle of the jungle, since you see dense greenery everywhere. When you get lucky, and we were lucky, you see a monkey climbing up the tree and jumping on the balustrade of the restaurant. These Colobus monkeys are quite cheeky as they just walk over the chairs and tables. This one even picked up a saltshaker and started licking it! When he was done licking, he just threw it over the edge and ran off. This monkey was responsible for many laughs and photos. But I almost forgot the most important thing about the restaurant. In this restaurant, almost the entire menu consists of dishes with trout, not really coincidental, as the restaurant is in the middle of gigantic trout farm. From the treehouse, you can see all the basins in which the fish are gradually growing until they’re big enough to be sold. It was a real unique experience and loads of fun doing this with all the students, who are staying at the guesthouse. One of the students, Martijn, even had a bag of pepernoten, which completed our Sinterklaas celebration.

We also made plans for Christmas. We’re going to spend our Christmas on the beaches near Mombassa, where the temperature fluctuated around the 35 degrees Celsius. Not a really bad way to spend the holidays I would say.

Erik has visited the SNV in Nanyuki, to talk about our research and some other really interesting things. The SNV gave us the name of a site which has loads of data on Kenya, regarding population and such; a very useful site to gather data from. He also discussed the government’s plans for future Kenya, captured in the Vision 2030 campaign. This is a vision with a set of goals, linked to the mondial Millennium Goals, for Kenya to reach in the coming two decades. They’ve also talked about our interviews and how the SNV could be of any assistance. The SNV has offered us to provide us with a guide/interpreter to accompany us. The importance of getting permission of the local chief was pressed by the SNV, as you will get a lot more done if he – it’s still a very masculine culture, so the position of chief is most of the time fulfilled by a man – gives his blessing. Also the issue of Community Development Trust Fund was discussed. This is a government fund to financially aid sustainable energy alternatives and could really help the company RIWIK for whom we’re doing the research. So it was a really productive visit.

We’re now roughly three week in Kenya and we’re getting used to the life here, I’m already starting to notice the scent of the African soil in my clothes. We’ve also come to terms with the Hakuna Matata lifestyle here of people coming too late or don’t show up at all and the large amounts of time you just have to sit and wait in for the matatu to finally get going. So I guess we’re gradually becoming real Kenyans and I’m sure that when we return in the Netherlands a small part of Kenya will remain inside us.

Tuonane!