Down the Red Dirt Road…Week 1 in Kenya

Week 1 in Kenya has been a blur of emotions and experiences. Monday morning, June 11 we were picked up from our hotel at 9 am, and drove the 4 hours to Nyeri, watching the beautiful countryside pass by and witnessing the different settings that each town offered. We stopped at a roadside shop for bathrooms and to browse the handcrafted items, before arriving at our villas (yes villas) at around 1230. At our first look we could not believe that these would be our homes for the next 6 months. They are wonderful, and much more than we expected!

After a whirlwind of a first day, we met the landlord who arranged lunch and dinner for us, the house maid, a door and grounds keeper and driver, went for groceries and settled in. It was an interesting day as we were all overtired, and acting pretty stupid at this point, but have a good feeling we might just all get along. We all went to sleep at around 830 pm, under our mosquito nets, and thick blankets (it was COLD, yes even in Africa) ,when we could no longer hold our eyes open any longer. Before crawling in, I found my first spider of the trip…ugh. My bed was HARD, so hard I woke up every hour to turn and had bruised hips in the morning. OUCH.
We started work the next day bright and early, meeting at the international office for 830 am (this was a bit of a struggle as we were still trying to adapt to time change and deal with jet lag). We couldn’t figure out the stove top, so had a cold breakfast of yogurt and granola, and rushed off to the university. We had a tour of the lovely campus, seeing the different buildings, engineering, coffee, nursing, tourism, lecture halls, cafeteria etc. The Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (DeKUT) campus is beautiful with a stunning view of Mt. Kenya in the distance which we were lucky to have a good and rare view of even the peak.!

We met numerous amounts of students and professors all which welcomed us with open arms and very enthusiastically “Karibu Kenya”. We started learning some small phrases and words of Swahili, Karibu Kenya means welcome, jambo means hello, Assanti means thank you, etc. We have enjoyed local foods for lunch at the cafeteria(canteen) which mainly consisted of rice, beans, chicken, vegetables and lots of tea! For the first day we enjoyed Pilau, a common dish also in Grenada so it was nice having something familiar! The tea here is also a little different and made with hot milk, similar to India, and is much more popular than coffee! Coffee and tea are both popularly grown here.

We then split into our respective departments to start our individual internships. Cait B and I headed to the Nursing department, met the chair and faculty and met with our supervisor, the reproductive health nurse specialist who was also a lecturer. After reviewing our schedule and getting some objectives for our time at the university we accompanied her to her reproductive health lecture for 2nd year BScN students. It was lovely to meet the nursing students here and experience what their classes are like. It was different with small class sizes and the classroom environment being in an open air classroom, but learning familiar topics and discussions.

For the rest of the week we were in bed by 9pm, just trying to stay awake till then, was difficult enough for us. Our landlord switched my mattress, brought some logs over for us to make fires at night, and showed us how to use our shower, stove top and other items that we were not familiar with.

On Wednesday we had a tour of the Universities coffee farm, learning about their process, and different kinds of coffees which was very interesting, met a couple other interns from Germany, Sweden and Ghana, and continued to decipher what our plan would be for the next 6 months of this internship.

We met an outdoor instructor at the university which plans trips on weekends, hikes, excursions etc and also does organized climbs of Mt. kenya, with training 3 times a week. We got to see a training/obstacle course that he has built in a open field at the university and tested some of his courses.

Cait B and I had the opportunity to visit a primary school and talk with a headmaster of this school, in line with our internship plan. We will be working with the nursing department and reproductive health and DeKUT to promote health, wellbeing and nutrition in children, build programs, teaching materials, mentorships etc for the first part of our time here.

We enjoyed participating also in a staff sports day which was held on Thursday for all the staff at the university and included volleyball, football(soccer), running, cycling, chess, dancing etc. IT was a fun day to mingle with people from different department and enjoy the university culture.

We also have slowly become more familiar with the landscape and community of Nyeri. We have experienced a matatu, which is the public transportation here, essentially a large van with rows of seats. It costs 20kenyan shillings to ride, which is the equivalent to 26 cents Canadian. The exchange rate is 72 shillings to one Canadian dollar, which also takes some getting used to especially when our first grocery bill came to 9,000 shillings! We have learned where to shop for groceries and explored some of the town, bartering at markets and finding the largest avocados ever! I have tasted the local beer, tusker and experienced the lovely squatters toilet 😉

So far it has been a wonderful time in Kenya, It is a long weekend now with Friday being a holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Interestingly the majority of the population is Christian, however, still a strong presence of muslim faith as well. We are thoroughly enjoying our accommodations and after speaking with other interns that are staying at the university dorms and describe their rooms as “jail cells”, we are grateful for the privilege we have here in our villas. We decided to share the wealth and invite them over for a night and dinner at our place to give them a small taste of comfort, as they have shared toilets, no place to cook, and far from homely living quarters. It was a fun night. For now we are still adjusting to the time difference and culture of kenya, but so far loving every moment of it! 🙂

“Travelling is a humbling experience. It aways leaves you with one thought: my life may not be perfect, but I am blessed”.

Enjoy- Caitlin, The Happier Traveler