Fight for your right to Chapati

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Fight: difference in opinions.

Tonight our group had their first massive fight. It was fairly intense and involved raised voices and flared tempers….and it was all over a game of UNO!
The girls…“No you can’t put a draw four on a draw four”
Nick…. “But we could last week…so why can’t we tonight?”
The girls…” no we couldn’t, these are the rules we have always played you idiot”
Nick.. “Bullshit…when Leah and I played last week you could do it”
It went on like this for at least 10 minutes. I just sat and laughed. Hilarious!

I feel so lucky that these are the only kinds of fights we are having, even after spending 24 hours a day together for the last 8 weeks. Surely there has to be some kind of statistics saying that it’s almost impossible that fights won’t occur when you put 7 strangers together in a share house for that long. I mean that’s what the whole Big Brother reality show made their millions on right? But nope, this is really as close as it comes for us. And well this particular fight ended with the girls telling Nick he was outvoted and to “shut the &*$# up and stop his winging”… which he did eventually. Classic!

So going on the theme of fighting, my mind has been fighting a few different things this week. For me, one of the hardest things about living and working in a developing country is the amount of contrasts you are constantly processing. It’s a constant fight between the positives and negatives you see and experience.

For example last Friday I had one of those “Man I love Kenya” days. The whole day I was just continuously amazed by the beauty of the people and their culture. It all started when I travelled out to the district hospital to meet with the HIV/STI District Coordinator Jerimiah. We are having a ‘Family Fair Day’ next weekend and want to be able to provide free voluntary HIV testing and counselling for people who attend. I explained what we wanted to Jeremiah and he was over the moon! He was so excited by what we were doing he almost fell out of his chair, and then went on to help me organise 5 counsellors to attend and told me everything else that we would need. Easy as 1, 2, 3!

On the way home, I caught a lift with a really lovely piki piki (motor bike) driver who almost died of shock when I paid him extra for waiting for me during my meeting. He was so grateful and looked as if he had just won the lottery. Also whilst on the piki piki, I was flying along a dirt road with the wind in my hair (yeh sounds corney but seriously it’s the best feeling) when he stopped to introduce me to all the people he knew along the way, how cute! Then whilst waiting for a matatu on the highway, I got into a heated but very interesting debate with a random local about who works harder in Kenya, the men or the women. Stuff like that just doesn’t happen at home. I mean you can barely say hi to a stranger on a bus in the western world let alone get into a heated debate on a meaningful topic. TIA… “this is Africa”!

So then once I got back to the worksite I had to go with Walter (our coordinator) on his motorbike to the hardware store to get some supplies. After we had got what we needed Walter refused to let me carry 25kgs of steel back home on the bike and was insisting to hire separate transport to take it back for us. He was so worried that it was going to be too heavy for me and that I would hurt myself that we stood fighting for a few minutes before I proved to him I could carry it by lifting it over my head (I am not stubborn at all, haha)! He finally let me get on the bike with it but not before insisting I put my gloves on to protect my hands. Extremely sweet!

So it’s on these kinds of days that you really learn to appreciate your surroundings and how lucky you are to be here! Everyone seems to have a genuine care and concern for each other which is really uplifting. However sometimes this is not always the case…

It was then on Sunday that I had one of those “Agh this country frustrates me so much” days. We started building another house on Saturday but had a completely free day on Sunday so I thought I would organise a fun day out for the team in the local area. We asked a local where would be good to go and see he suggested a ferry ride across Lake Victoria to a particular resort for lunch… PERFECTO! We got told the ferry left at 10am which meant we had to get up at 8 to leave by 9 but when we got there we realised we were an hour early as the ferry didn’t actually leave until 11am. No worries, simple mix-up…instead of waiting an hour we thought we would be creative and decided to catch a local motorboat across instead. After being told it was leaving right away we sat in the boat (in the glaring hot Kenyan sun getting burnt) for 45 minutes before it left the dock, only to then argue with the driver for 10 minutes over the price we had already agreed on. We were white and rich so we deserved to pay twice the price apparently.

Once we got to the resort for lunch, we asked our piki piki drivers to come back at 1:30pm to pick us up. It was 11:30am so we predicted 2 hours for lunch would be plenty…. WRONG! 2 hours later we were still waiting on our lunch order of rather simple salads and toasted sandwiches. When the salads finally arrived, the waiter told us that indeed we didn’t order any toasted sandwiches at all (even though we distinctly remember him asking us particular info like what fillings we wanted, and him writing it all down), so we ended up with about 5 salads to share with 7 people. Then when the bill came, and they had charged us for 3 toasted sandwiches… WHAT THE?

By this point it was after 1:30pm and our drivers hadn’t arrived so we rang them and they assured us they were not far away. They arrived and got us back down to the dock at 2:05pm, just in time for us to see the wash water of the ferry leaving the doc…we had missed it and the next one didn’t come for another 3 hours. My driver kindly turned around to me and said “see I told you it left at 2pm” instead of “sorry we were late picking you up” or anything along those lines. So back onto the motor boat we went where the driver again tried to charge us double the going rate… and this time succeeded (there is only so much fighting over money you can handle in one day). When we got back to the other side, the matatu we had organised to take us home just decided it couldn’t be bothered coming to pick us up again and that we could just catch another one. So we were shoved onto a JAM PACKED one, which meant I ended up sitting on the lap of a fairly large, kinda creepy Kenyan man for the next 20 minutes, oh and once again forced to argue for an eternity over the price as we were white and consequently once again getting completely ripped off.

So on days like these, its extremely hard not to get frustrated. The difference between what is acceptable in our culture and over here can some times be hard to handle and for myself, and many others in the past I am sure, there is a constant fight to not let the frustrating get to you. On a bigger scale however, our day trip on Sunday upset me not because we had to wait two hours for our food, but because of things on a much deeper level. The fact that being here as white people, we are constantly being seen as someone who is going to hand out money to anyone who asks for it is disappointing on so many levels. The reasons why this is the reality goes so deep and has so many layers, you can trace it back to colonisation of Kenya and then independence, that its almost impossible to process at times.

The other day a man walked up to me, pointed at my sunglasses and said “give me those spectacles” as if I had them on my head purely for his taking. After being in Africa for three months, this was a fairly usual occurrence. This time though, I thought I would have a bit of fun with him so instead of getting frustrated I looked at his shoes and said…“how about u give me your shoes” (and then proceeded to chase him down the road asking for his shoes). I think he almost died of shock.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

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