Into Out of Africa

It’s early morning here, the sky is dark with brush strokes of gray as the Winter sun emerges. We crossed the equator traveling from Turkey on Summer Solstice and landed in Kenya on Winter Solstice. People here are wearing hats and down jackets as it’s the coldest time of the year for them. We’re sitting at a small airport, awaiting our plane to take us from Nairobi into Amboseli National Park to begin our safari.

The last few days exploring Nairobi have been quite enjoyable and eye opening. When we first began researching coming to Kenya- we were repeatedly warned not to spend a lot of time in Nairobi. Not always the safest place, the city has been nicknamed Nai-robbery as it can be a pretty dangerous place to hang out and walk around. At the behest of our hotel, we’ve had a wonderful driver named James (Jemo to his friends) to aid us in our city exploration.

Over the last few days, we’ve done and seen a lot- Kenya’s people may be the happiest and most jolly people I’ve ever met. There is a warmth in the people here, a calm, a trusting of one another that we’ve loved.

Nairobi is a land of contrasts between vast lush estates, surrounded by razor wire and high security gates and the very, very poor living in cardboard and tin houses next door. We’ve driven past slums seeing the most extreme poverty we’ve ever encountered. Up to 1/3 of the people here in Nairobi live on less than $1 a day and the middle class is making $7 a day. Yes, things are cheaper here but still very expensive if you’re making $365 to $2555 per year. Needless to say, there are many organizations doing their best to help and create better lives for the people.

Everywhere you look you see lush vegetation and colorful flowers. Kenya is the #3 supplier of cut-flowers in the world.. Small stands line most roads selling everything from bananas, to clothes, to furniture, to anything else you might need. If you want to enter a hotel, mall or many other places, you’ll have to walk through metal detectors. The UN has their largest African offices here in Nairobi and the largest US Embassy within Africa is also here.

Some of the city roads are made of dirt and there are huge speed bumps all over the place that scratch the bottoms of any vehicle other than SUV 4x4s. Apparently, if you don’t like the way people are driving on your road, many people just install speed bumps without any regulation or standards, so they vary and there are a LOT of them.

At one point driving around the city, we got caught on the road in a road rally- the police had shut down the road and we had to speed ahead, crowds of people on each side of the closed city street,  as we hoped to get out of the racers’ way before they reached us. Ah! Josh and Luna were waving to the bystanders as we sped by yelling, “We won, we won!”

When we weren’t busy drag racing, we visited several non-profits which were very cool. Kobe Tough is a jewelry organization which employs single mothers and women to give them another route to financial freedom besides prostitution by teaching them how to make beads and become artists. Gender roles are still very set here in Kenya, but women are making strides to become more empowered and finding alternate paths to the traditional ways of doing things.

Ocean Sole is a non-profit which uses flip-flops collected by the local people from the beaches and landfills and creates beautiful works of art now commissioned by Disney and other big companies around the world. Flip-flops are the most common shoes in Africa as they are cheap and easily replaceable. Since flip-flops float in everything from drainage pipes to the ocean, they are easily collected and then sold back to the non-profit by the locals. Kenya is the only place I’ve ever been where non-profits have informational booths set up outside of stores so that foreigners can learn about the issues the people are facing and give money. We donated to an organization helping to create local gardens for children because there is great food scarcity here as well as Greenpeace Africa.

Our favorite area of Nairobi is Karen, named after Karen Blixen, a Danish woman who ran a coffee plantation before going home to Denmark where she wrote Out of Africa about her experiences living and working in Kenya. Coffee is big business in Kenya, with 90% of the coffee grown being exported. With this in mind, we visited a coffee plantation one morning about 45 minutes north of Nairobi and learned all about the process of growing and processing coffee. It was fascinating to see the plants- Arabica grown at higher elevation- from berry to cherry, then harvested, washed, fermented, processed, husked and roasted. Fairview Farm has 600 acres and they sell their beans to companies which include Starbucks. They have a school on their property for the families of their 80 employees so that parents can ensure their children are getting educated and not have to worry about them each day.

One of the biggest issues in Kenya is finding affordable period products like pads and tampons. Many girls can’t go to school when they have their periods because their families simply can’t afford pads and tampons. This issue is so big and so wide spread that it’s been deemed “period poverty”. It is astonishing that the act of having one’s period can put you at such a huge disadvantage within society. While at a pharmacy we looked at prices and found that tampons and pads were up to 50 cents a piece. When you’re making $1-7/ day it’s not surprising that period products would be cost prohibitive. We even saw politicians with huge billboards within the city running on the slogan with free pads for all girls. When families can’t afford feminine products for their daughters, when the costs are so prohibitive, suddenly it seems like a waste to send girls to school at all. The number one thing keeping girls out of school in Africa is access to both sanitary items and school uniforms (which cost about $8 in Africa). Can you imagine you, your daughter or your mother having been kept out of school due to something so simple? Here is a link to Zana Africa zanaafrica.org to donate to a non-profit that is helping fix that problem. All over the world, when girls are educated, they lift their societies up, help one another, invest in the society around them and make things better for all.

Sending love your way! xo,

Carly, Josh and Luna