A reminder: You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them, just hit the”back” arrow to return.

Last Wednesday I rode with Maxwell up to Kitui, About two hours due east of here, through Machakos and up into the hills. We were headed for Nyumbani Village, the large project headed by Fr. D’Agostino and Sister Mary. In the last journal entry. I showed you some photos from Nyumbani, their home for HIV+ orphans in Karin, just outside Nairobi.

This is the second time I have visited the village. It is a very innovative and wonderful project. They were given one thousand acres just outside Kitui, and have had title transfer difficulties that dwarf our own, but it seems they are nearing the end of it. They are building a village to house one thousand HIV+ orphans, and three hundred elderly people, who will live together in small houses with one or two elderly people and eight or ten children. Both of these generations have, in effect, been made orphans by the AIDS epidemic. The adults, who would normally raise the children and help care for their elderly have died, and so the grandparents not only are left without the support they generally need in their old age, they are also left with the young children to care for. The village model is to reunite these two groups in a familial living situation.

The unique goal of this project is to make the village completely self-sustaining, and to make it an integral part of the surrounding community. Using very innovative and sustainable agricultural techniques, and creative land use practices, they plan to make Nyumbani Village financially and practically self-sustaining. Each house has a designated one half acre chamba (garden) attached to it, which will produce a good deal of the family’s food throughout the year, and it is all done organically.

Here’’s an example of the creative land use practices being used. The area is semiarid. The expected rains fail regularly. The deforestation of the entire area over the last decades has contributed to the problem. The trees have been harvested for lumber, firewood and to make charcoal, the primary cooking fuel. They want to reforest the area, a very big task. So, in a one acre perimeter around the property, they are planting trees, thousands of them, and allowing the people who live locally and have no land or no water or both, to plant vegetables and other food crops among the seedling trees. The Village provides water from their well, and in cultivating the crops which will help sustain them, the local people are, at the same time, providing water and care for the trees which will in time reforest the area.

There are dozens of creative practices like this in place and more planned in order to create a real perma-culture system, which adds to rather than degrades the land, and therefore the ability of the land to sustain viable village life for decades to come. The village is more than half complete, and people will start living there as soon as the title transfer is complete.

I am learning a great deal from being around Fr. D’Agostino, Sister Mary, Maxwell, who oversees the “perma-cultural” aspects of land use and agriculture, Aldo, the current project manager and designer of the very elaborate water pumping, storage and delivery system, Nora, a volunteer from California who is working on the organic gardening techniques, and so many others. Quite a few of the ideas and practices are finding their way into the vision for our orphanage and five acre plot.

Here’s Maxwell, offering a little advice at one of the growing plots.

The bricks used to make the houses were made on site of dirt and a little cement. They are called hydroform bricks.

Theses are the houses in which eight or ten kids will live with one or two “grandparents.”

This is the nearly completed community center/church which will serve the whole village.

This building is going to be the hospital.

This is the entrance to the village, made of the same bricks as the houses and the other structures.

The traffic jam leaving the village.

After driving out to Jomo Kenyatta airport too meet with Mr. Chemwada, the seller of our parcel, in the pouring rain–five second exposure equals complete saturation–we had a quick lunch of sukuma wiki and ugali and headed for Kinani, where the Lukenya Farming and Cooperative Society office is located. If anyone ever asks you how to get there, tell them: Head southeast out of Nairobi on the Mombassa Road. At Athi River, take the left by the red, Sportsman bus stop, proceed on the dirt road until all of your molars are shaken loose, and you are covered in the powder fine light tan dust. When you come to the burned-down tree and the group of about eight bicycles parked, turn left, a hundred meters or so to the Joy Land Center, and you are in Kinani.

It’s a little bit of a happening when a muzungu arrives and folks are unselfconscious about staring. By a great stroke of good fortune, the official of the society that we needed to see, but had almost no hope of finding there, was in a meeting with about a dozen very old members of the society. Bernice, the secretary, told us so. We thought we would just be dropping off the letter from Mr. Chemwada okaying the changes in the title transfer.

The office of the Lukenya Farming and Cooperative Society.

We waited about an hour and a half, maybe longer, so we had a little time to socialize. Directly across the dirt road from the office was the Joy Land Centre, a bicycle shop, a water selling shop and Hollyhood, a Barber Shop.

Things warmed up pretty quickly down at this end of Kinani, and very soon we were all having a high time. That’s Joseph in the middle, the barber to the right and a couple of women who thought the whole matter pretty hilarious.

You remember the Executive Barber Shop and Mini Pub in Machakos, where I was shorn. Well, this is the Kwnozi (Barber ) and Battery Charging Shop. A little more creative business paring than you usually see.

This poster is very much like the one in Machakos, so it’s easy enough to see why I had difficulty picking out the style that was “me.” The entire inside of the barber shop was papered with news print. It was a little busy, but I thought it worked.

This pretty secret half-door led the stooping way to the battery charging part of the operation. I checked it out. A small battery charger and three or four batteries. A modest enterprise, but a source of real pride for the barber/owner, whose name, for the life of me, I can’t recall.

This is Joseph, pretending to get a haircut. Pretending is the key here. Joseph hasn’t cut his hair in eight years, and has very long, very uniform coiled locks. He does this in honor of his father, whom Joseph saw a picture of as a fighter in the Mau Mau rebellion, just after World War II, when the British, fresh off their victory over Fascism in Europe, engaged in a bit of their own in Kenya.

This little African Eskimo, endured the freezing 85 degree weather to come by and have a quick glance at the goings on before returning to the safety of her igloo.

These two look here like they may have been ready to serve up a whipping to Joseph and I for disturbing their peace, but they caved in and became part of the hootenany.

Fresh, pure spring water, bottled at the source.

The two reformed tough guys got what they came for, and a good look at me, and were headed back home with the goods.

Last Sunday, Wilson and I went to Kitengela to meet Maxwell and go with him to his ten acre plot with the solar powered bore hole (well) where he is using and inventing techiques and sustainable farming practices that are being utilized at Nyumbani Village. We learned a good deal from seeing things first hand.

On the way there and back, I took my first matatu rides. Fourteen passengers in a barely medium sized van, careening down the road like Neal Cassady on a seven day crank bender was at the wheel. Kenyans are so uniformly polite and decorous in public that it was a big surprise to me to find myself seated next to/on top of a middle aged man stuffing miraa leaves (a stimulant that packs a decent wallop) into his mouth and talking loudly, incessantly. I took my que from everyone else and just ignored him, which wasn’’t that easy because my entire right side was in contact with his entire left side. He sprinkled in a few English phrases meant for me into the Kiswahili verbal flashflood, but I adopted the first monkey’s posture of hearing no-thing.

The cruel irony is that for all my fascination and reporting on the magnificent names of these white knucklers, neither of the ones I took that day had a name, just the route painted on the side. No Hot Stepper, Exodus, The Stomp, Ever Blazin’, Roanhead, South Pole, Rapid Fire, Magic Moment or Forest Gump Int. for me, just Athi River/Machakos, in plain yellow letters.
This is the thing itself.

For the next leg of the trip home, we piled four of us and some baggage into the back seat of a thirty year old, very small Datsun. Only the right side of my none-too-large backside found its way to the seat. The unhappy left side was trying to find a little piece of mind wedged between the door handle and the window crank on the rear passenger’’s door. At least it was Wilson I was Siamezed to this time. I was half way through the trip from Athi River to Lukenya before I realized that the guy in the front seat had a small child riding on his lap.

They dropped us at the junction. Only five kilometers of rough dirt road to go. We rendezvoused with the Tuk-Tuk, a three wheeled, meter maid-like contraption with a slightly enlarged area for seating. We were again four in the back seat. This was a clown-car-in-the-circus trick. The upside was that for the fifteen minute, bone jarring, head banging trip up the road, I was bandaged to the side of a young Kenyan woman, and so temporarily, was relieved of my “failure to thrive from lack of physical contact” syndrome and may now make it a little longer before I succumb.

This is the only picture I have of the Tuk-Tuk, and I barely managed to get this one as it barrelled by.

Tony and I went downtown to buy a wheelbarrow (a Reliance), a spade, a pick-axe, a couple of handles, some nails, some fence staples, and a pair of wire cutters. This is a section of town where you have to keep your wits about you. There are no outsiders here, and the edge in the air is palpable. I managed to sneak this picture, standing in the doorway of the hardware store before Tony caught me. It wasn’t safe to take any more, but I wish I could show you the energy and buzz of this scene more fully. We had been stopped in this street in the picture for fifteen minutes or so behind a big bus while people cleared a wreck that had just happened.

An update on the bug report. This large moth laid these beautiful eggs on the counter directly behind where I most often work, and stayed in the same spot on the curtain for several days. Not sure what became of mother or lovely ova.

Sometimes it helps to try to see things through other people’s eyes, don’t you think?

And if you ever feel the need to speak to the person responsible for the stuff you read here, no need to stop at my desk, might as well go straight to the source.

No more complaints about “life in general”… It’s baseball season. I met a Giant’s fan in Nairobi when I was there last.

Let’s all hit for the cycle.

David

Posted on April 4th, 2006 by david
Filed under: David's Journal