Nairobi

So I promised I would come back when I had more news, and now I finally do. I took a week long trip to Nairobi last month. The purpose of the trip was to make some research partnerships with local institutions in Kenya for the think tank that we are trying ever hard to mount from Pamplona. The trip was very fruitful, and I'd love to return to Kenya. That's the bottom line. If you want more than that...

Thursday, November 4th >>> We fly from Madrid at 6.45am in the morning connect in London Heathrow and arrive in Nairobi at 10pm. As we began to land, Nairobi didn't seem to have the allure or the bright lights that other big cities do. When we went through customs, we again noticed that the size of the airport and the quality of its maintenance was something we hadn't seen before. Walking to meet our driver and seeing a seemingly chaotic disorder of cabs scrambling to give people rides made us realize we'd arrived in The Third World.

I was quite tired and happy to get to my hostel. I was greeted by the German Nun of the Precious Blood Order that ran it. She would be my cook for most of the week.

Friday, November 5th >>> I woke up and had to make it for a business meeting at 9.30. I hadn't had a chance to get to the ATM yet so I ask for a ride there. My cab comes and rolls up to an ATM guarded by two army officers with assault rifles (just in case I was worried about theft I assume). I then went to go see Strathmore Secondary School. It is a private high school in Nairobi, and, as you will see from the pictures, quite an awesome one. Next, we had to go to a meeting in at the Institute of Economic Affairs. We showed up nearly 30 minutes late for the meeting because the roads were in poor condition. We literally couldn't move more than 15m on our dirt road before hitting a muddy pot hole. The institute itself was actually in a fairly well-kept building. Once our meeting concluded, we went to Strathmore University to take a tour of its facilities and have lunch. A couple of first impressions still stand out. First, the Kenyans who greeted us were remarkably friendly and the nicest guys in the world. It turns out that they were not exceptionally nice, but rather the norm for the country. Second, I listened to Catholic Mass with Swahili hymns for the first time. If anyone has any doubt Kenya his beautiful, listen to some Swahili music. I doubt you'll find a more peaceful tune. The day concluded with a meeting. We spoke with Terry Ryan who is an economic adviser to Kenyan government. He was brilliant and said many interesting things. The most interesting: "Consider a man who is a tribal chieftain, wears a prestigious cloth, owns 100 cattle, has 30 people who would literally die for him and makes exactly $0 / day. Is he poor? According to the World Bank, he is. But we have to go much deeper into understanding poverties many complexities."

Saturday, November 6th >>> Being a weekend, we took advantage of it to go and tour the centter of downtown Nairobi. For lunch, I had the most amazing fruit of the trip, Passion Fruit. Imagine a pomegranate but so much sweeter and more glorious. That's what it tasted like. I loved it. During the afternoon, we went to go see the Eastlands Project (check out the photos since my words will do injustice). For dinner, we were invited to the Opus Dei Delegation for dinner.

Sunday, November 7th >>> A lazy day. I somehow was able to play basketball with 9 Kneyan guys at the Strathmore School. I am embarassed to talk about how badly I played compared to them. That night, I was also given some yogurt by the nuns that came straight from the cow on the farm that they also work. I was in heaven. That yogurt is so much fresher than anything I've ever tasted.

Monday, November 9th >>> I found my balls this morning, and decided that it was time to walk to work and not just take cab rides. So I walked for about an hour through one of Nairobi's nicer zones. In some ways, today is the most boring day because it is back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings. Enough said.

Tuesday, November 9th >>> We had a meeting in the morning with the five deans of the different faculty at Stratmore University. Afterwards, we presented to the Institute of Development Studies (where Stiglitz won his Nobel). Next, I had to make a presentation in front of 30 lecturers from the School of Accountancy to drum up interest in our project. Was I successful, we'll see with time. One interesting thing is that a student told me that he had developed a project in the slum where he got poor people to band together to save pools of money, and when they had collectivley saved money, a bank would be willing to sponsor them, give them a loan and let people start building houses of their own. It is very creative. That wasn't the coolest part of the day. Just as I was finishing up the last of my cab rides and I reached for my wallet to pay the fare, I heard a squawking sound from the trunk. The driver told me to come to the trunk to see what he had inside. I looked in to find two live chickens. He explained that they were dinner for his family, but if then he offered me the chickens because I had been so nice. I ultimately rejected the offer, but I have never been so surprised before.

Wednesday, November 10th >>> Good news. All of our business meetings were finished so we had the day free before our evening flight. I asked some community outreach people at Strathmore University if they could show me the real Nairobi. They said, "No problem." They got me some jamming boots, and we went to Kibera. This is the name given to Africa's largest slum covering nearly 500 square kilometers (if my math is right, that is more or less the size of Manhattan). I was entering another world.

With internet, you can read about poverty. There are plenty of news stories every day about it. You can also hear about poverty. There are a number of documentaries that attempt to enable poor people to give their testimony about their plight. With the explosion of Youtube, you can also see poverty and the circumstances that these people live in. However, none of these things let you smell poverty. In Kibera, I smelled poverty. From the burning pig hooves that were going to be one man's breakfast to the river of raw sewage that ran through parts of the slum to the collective odor in the air of walking by shacks that house people who use their money to buy water and can't afford to shower everyday or buy clothes, I was overwhelmed by how in the world humanity could let such a thing happen.

But that's when I saw something truly resilient. I went to go see a project where 15 Hiv-Positive mothers had confronted a harsh reality. They would be dead in 5 - 10 years, and it is very likely that their children (72 among them all) would be orphans in one of the worst places in the world to be an orphan. What did they do? They banded together to form a business selling tiny bracelets and necklaces. The profit from any single band is nothing for one mother. However, the profit from 15 mothers working is enough to sustain a school for their children and to provide for medical care as well.

Seeing such resiliency made me realize that the money in my savings account could technically finance that school for quite some time, it would destroy the mothers. Their lives are all about the community that they live in. What can improve their lives is them improving their skills at jewelry-making. My money would be no good. That is the biggest lesson I took away. This poor society was not about competition and invidualism. It was about collaboration and community. I'd like to go back to learn more those things since they are a lot more attractive to me than the former two.

November 10th >>> So I skip the remaining details of my trip (which are few) to talk about being in London Heathrow's Terminal 3 for my connecting flight only 24 hours after walking through Kibera. In Kibera, the streets are lined with garbage. In Terminal 3, the tile floor is so polished that I could see my reflection. At that moment, I did not feel pity for those in Kibera nor contempt for all the businessmen about me who have so many good fortunes in life that they can probably name only a few. What I felt is hard to explain. I was quite humbled by what I saw in Kibera. Western wealth is not a bad thing. Affluency that let's one pursue their dreams is a blessing. The shame is that the people in Kibera are so poor that many of them don't even know what it means to have dreams to pursue. And I can't help but to say that a dream of my own is that we can learn as much from them as they do from us.