Writing Stupor

 This week for me was all about finishing the report. I had some very late nights.

Pestering me while I write

I had to do analysis that were too complicated to me. Thank goodness for AI. It created all the excel formulas for me. I never could have done that. On cleaning days we went to the church so I could just write while the reds worked on their Marvel marathon.

Uber eats lunch at the church

Last night I sent the report to my professor, but I felt no relief...just disappointment in myself. This has been the strangest writing experience for me. Maybe it was because it was in a sleep deprived brain fog, but I felt like I hadn't written it cohesively enough. The end, where I'm supposed to make all the points feels incomplete. I hope my professor isn't disappointed in the work I did.  I sent it off to her and then she told me she will look at it on Wednesday...I could have had 2 more days to work on it. I guess I can go back and read it with rested eyes tomorrow and make any adjustments I need to. I am glad it is done. Now I can focus on other things here. And start on the next report that needs to be done before I leave.

Elizabeth and Malachi went to their movie yesterday. Elizabeth has been excited about it for about a month. Malachi and her barely finished all the movies she made them watch to prepare for it. They had a good time. 

Every day when I cook dinner, I get Elizabeth to come in and help me. Her job is always to wash the vegetables which is a bit tricky because the tap water isn't safe so you can't have a droplet of water on your lettuce or cilantro. She has to use boiled water and a special rinse to wash them, so that is her job. She is also the deejay for my evening cooking. Lately we listen to Natalie's k-drama playlist with some Lewis Capaldi. It is all mellow music. Then when dinner is ready she plays "We don't talk about Bruno," but just the line that says "time for dinner!" which she plays over and over until Malachi gets off the iPad and starts to help set the table. Malachi's job when I'm cooking is to get water if I need it--for cooking rice or noodles. We don't use the tap water for those things. It isn't like what you might imagine since we are in Africa. He just has to fill the pot up at the water cooler.

Another little ritual we have here is getting these ice cream bars to give us a little boost when we don't feel like grocery shopping. It does wonders as a pick-me-up. 

Since I have emerged from the frantic writing fervour, this week we will do something fun. 

Do I look like Santa?

 Wednesday and Saturday are cleaning days, and I always have to find a place to go while our place is cleaned. The cleaning lady is supposed to arrive at 10, but she often comes early and then she is here until after 3. It is nice to have someone do all the cleaning, but also a little inconvenient when I need to be writing.

We've started the routine of going the temple on Wednesday mornings. This last Wednesday I did an endowment session while the kids did baptisms. They were done way before me and rather impatient to leave, but it was soul soothing for me. 

While waiting for the session to begin, I met an expat who invited me to join their Thursday morning scripture study and she turned out to be from Canada. Her husband is working for the church as legal counsel. She said all the senior sister missionaries get together on Thursday mornings at the area office buildings to do a little scripture study. Once a month they go out for lunch to celebrate the birthdays in the last month. Elizabeth vacillated a lot about going with me or not. Finally, when I had to leave in 10 minutes, she decided to come. (I think it was the prospect of going out for lunch).

 

When we arrived, we received a little tour of the office building and then sat down in the conference room for a little discussion based on a conference talk. There were more than 20 ladies there and only one was a typical sister missionary. They went around the room to introduce themselves and everyone basically said I'm so and so and my husband does this. (ie: my husband is in the area presidency or my husband is the CES guy for the area etc).  They were all very nice and welcoming to me and Elizabeth. Elizabeth ended up having a great time socializing and made some connections that may help her with getting her papers completed.

naptime for the younger ones

In Mathare this week, we went back to the nursery school and coloured with the kids. The littlest ones were chanting "wazungu! Wazungu!" over and over. I suggested to Elizabeth that she sit and down and start colouring at one of the kids' desk, which she promptly did. Malachi on the other hand was way more hesitant and shy. I had to take a chair for him and sit it down by some kids before he would do it.

Once he got going he was fine and even said afterwards that we should do this every week. At the request of the school we brought some little candies. Many of the kids licked the wrappers and stuck them onto their faces. I don't know why...When they were all done they crowded around Elizabeth to play more janken. Soon I was surrounded too and they all started to try to sit on my knee. I felt like Santa.

Today was the primary presentation. Malachi and Elizabeth both played without any problem. All the primary kids and even the leaders wore white for the event. It was adorable as usual. Hardly any of the children needed any prompting--in fact many of them had their scriptures memorized. That being said, most of them seemed to be about 7 or older. It all would have been finished on time except that they called on the stake primary presidency to speak and each person spoke. 

My professor has given me a deadline for completing the report I am writing. Writing it is time consuming because she added in these sections that I need to have sources for, so it takes me a few hours to find sources for each section. It needs to be done this Saturday, which means this is going to be an intense week for me. But the good thing will be that it will be done and then I can focus on other things.

Playdates, Planting and Piano

 

We love these purple blossom trees--this is one we see at church

We did a bit of socializing this week. It turns out the founder of the organization that I am working with lives just down the street from us, so he brought his 2 little children and came over for a visit. His kids are still quite young, but it was still fun for Malachi to have someone play the switch with him. He has been asking me to connect so he can play with his new little friend again. I can see he misses being with friends. And we also met up with a girl who has just moved here from Canada (her dad is Kenyan). We will see if anything more comes from these encounters.

flower at church

Our visit to Mathare this time consisted of visiting an older school. We went to help in their little garden they have going, but the children were in class until 6, so we ended up working with the organization there to do all the planting. To maximize space they plant in these terraced structures they call cones.

Apparently you can plant a lot of plants in that space. It was interesting for me to actually work on one of them, because I created a training for this community that includes "cone gardens". The soil was really fine and packed in. So it wasn't easy to plant. They used a machete to soften the soil in really hard places, otherwise we used sticks. I occasionally use a dibber stick at home to create the holes to plant in, but my soil is much softer. I ended up with a blister and a new callous in the palm of my hand. 

We planted "spinach" (I'm pretty sure is was Swiss chard--even in the store Swiss chard is labelled spinach), kale that looked more like cabbage to me, and managu--a plant in the nightshade family that they eat here. If those plants turn out to be cabbage (they weren't labelled and were just donated to the organization to plant), they will probably be too close to grow properly.

A couple of kids did join us and wanted to talk to Malachi. They don't usually see mzugu kids there. Malachi is really treated like a celebrity, but he is too shy. He just does not know what to do with that kind of attention. They want us to come back next week to see their debates.

Things are getting intense here for me. There is so much to do and a paper I am writing and now classes have started. I am taking 2 classes in addition to my internship. It feels like I don't have time for things like sleep. Hopefully I figure out a way to juggle everything. It will be a lot better once I get the report done, but it is slow going for me.

Today Elizabeth played the piano for church. They have asked her to do that while we are here. But they didn't tell her what hymns they wanted her to play until an hour before church, so she was only able to play one. Next week is the primary presentation, so she has been working on those songs. Malachi is also playing a couple of the songs. She practiced with the primary today, but it seemed they weren't told she would and they have a different way of singing the songs--one child stands in front and sings the first line and then all the children join and sing that line again. They aren't used to having an intro...so we'll see how it goes on Sunday.  I am sure I will enjoy it.

Flying toilets don't necessarily make it to the river

We went to Mathare twice this week. The first time was to join in a children's program with the library boys. The library is now run by three boys--the girl who used to run it is about to have a baby and has moved out of Mathare. Whenever we walk through Mathare, we are always accompanied by at least one of them and often all three. They keep anyone away from harassing us. Yesterday, someone approached Malachi but just before he could touch him, one of the library boys grabbed his outstretched arm and stopped him. Last year when I was here, I was always approached and asked for money or food. It hasn't happened once in Mathare this time. And these boys have such good intentions. They love helping the children with their homework in the library or helping an adult that is struggling with literacy.

Anyways, I digress. We walked through Mathare to a 'nursery' school. The building was...rustic. The floor was rough concrete. There were no lights on inside, so I am not sure if they have electricity. It was lit inside by a couple of "skylights" where the corrugated plastic roof wasn't layered and more daylight came through. It was pretty dark. There were about 80 children there sitting at little tables and desks. They all wore dark green uniforms and many also wore touques. (it was 26 degrees that day). We arrived at the start of lunchtime so they all filed past us to wash their hands at a little water dispenser. 

After lunch we accompanied them with one of their teachers to the park (the organization that I am working with built the park a few years ago--I wrote about it last time I was here).  The library boy brought a soccer ball, 2 badminton racquets, and a volleyball. He got Lizzie to teach some kids how to play badminton and Malachi to teach some how to play volleyball.

Can you see the boy with the unraveled sleeve?

These kids were about 4-5 years old, and hadn't yet learned English, so teaching them wasn't easy. They kept crowding in on Malachi. One of the kids sweater was unravelling, but he didn't seem to care. We taught them a janken game where the loser has to lengthen their step until one of them falls over. It was fun.

Afterwards, we walked them back to their school. The younger ones were napping with their heads on the table. The owner of the school came and talked to me. From what I gathered, this is a service she provides to the mothers in Mathare. The kids bring 10 shillings (11 cents) to school everyday and from that she makes their lunch (beans and rice). It seemed to me she does not collect a wage from this. But I never clarified.

I have been working on a report about Mathare so I have learned some of the alarming statistics. It is the 2nd largest informal settlement in Nairobi and one of the most densely populated places in the world. There are 70,000 people per square kilometre. Most people subsist on less than $2 a day which they earn through informal labour. 50 of the 55 participants in our study rated severely food insecure. It makes me feel sad. But it just makes me admire the people volunteering here even more. 

There are no private toilets in Mathare. Several families will share one toilet. It may be 200 metres away from their home and it costs 10 shillings every time they use it. In my research I read that some people instead, make use of  "flying toilets," which means they do their business in a bag, then step outside and throw it--anywhere. I didn't  believe it, so I asked one of the library boys and he confirmed that it happens (mostly at night).

Elizabeth has started a rigorous schedule of marvel movies for her and Malachi to watch before Avengers Endgame--Encore comes out so that Malachi will be caught up and understand everything that is happening. Unfortunately, she can only get Disney plus on her phone. This is how they got comfy->

Saturday we were invited to join in a tree planting event and to watch the Mathare river queens football match. When we arrived, our library boy escorts were waiting for us. They brought us down to the river where there was a big clean up happening. The asked us which side of the road we preferred to work on, and the organizer was about to encourage us to work on the side without trees, but Malachi was adamant he wanted to work on the side with trees (it was hot!) . He soon came to regret this decision when we discovered that we had to carefully watch our steps because they area has been "used as a toilet" by some people and there was all kinds of human feces in various states of decay. Ewww. The task was to move the garbage to the edge of the road into a big pile. We were given shovels to help out.

I don't think pictures can convey the scope or magnitude of how much garbage there was

Eventually people came and took over from us. The reds told me that the library boys kept saying "your mother is very tired"...maybe I was moving too slowly? Once the pile was near the road, they just lit it on fire. 

This fire was left to burn itself out

The people across the river are planting trees.

From there we went and sat in the gazebo which felt nice and cool. Although after sitting there for awhile, Malachi said "my butt keeps falling through the holes." The benches were made of wood slats that had one inch gaps between them.

Eventually the gazebo filled up with all the people that were working to clean up the area. It was very crowded. Some brave children gathered around Elizabeth and were touching her hair and stroking her braid. Some reached across her back to pet Malachi too. My hair was up so they mostly left me alone. We had a brief meeting all in Swahili where a bunch of different leaders were introduced. Lastly, I was asked to say a few words...what? So I just introduced myself. Then the food came out. Everybody was handed a loaf of bread and a bag of milk. We brought our own sandwiches so we were walked back to the office for lunch.

Then we went to watch the football match. It was way on the other end of Mathare. While we were walking, a young boy starting talking to Elizabeth. I thought he was about 9 or 10 years old. As it turned out, 'he' was a 16 year old she--that was on the team. To be fair, I only saw her from behind. The soccer game was played on a red dirt field. It was so hot. Our team lost, but at least they scored a goal--that's always exciting. 

Today was stake conference. The building was so full. My highlight was the choir. Usually  on Sundays it feels like Lizzie and I are doing a duet. We can't hear anyone else. This choir sounded like what I expected the singing to be like in Africa. I loved it. It was a good Sunday.

Click here to listen to a snippet of the Nairobi East Stake choir recording

(It is after the conference is over, so it is a bit noisy)