The Life & Times of Beast /  by Cale Ettenberg

Back in the summer of 2016, I made the fateful decision to strike out alone from the warm bosom of Ottawa and head to an uncertain future in Kenya.  In the spirit of excitement and adventure, I told all my friends of my relatively unexpected life choice to relocate to East Africa. Most of them were full of surprise and well wishes, but some had offers of connecting me with people they knew in Kenya.  In particular, my very good friend Honza who hails from Belgium and has travelled a great deal told me about a buddy of his who was living in Kenya.

“He’s great,” Honza told me, “he has this crazy car called Beast that he’s travelled all across Africa with! You should definitely call him!”  In the hustle and bustle of packing and pre-departure training in Toronto, this all slipped my mind until a week after I had arrived in Nairobi, when Honza texted me and pushed me to get in touch with Ian.  So I sent him a message introducing myself, and low and behold, he wrote back and suggested lunch the very next day.  So it was with some excitement that I saw Ian roll up to my work in the mythical Beast.  We chatted over Japanese food, where he told me he’d just flown in from Somalia the day before. 

I asked him what he was doing next, and he said, “Actually, I’m flying out to Thailand tonight!”

“Oh really?” I replied. “For how long?”

“About three months.  Wanna look after Beast?”

Beast and I

Beast and I

And thus, a beautiful three-way friendship between myself and both Ian and Beast was born.  Ian’s plans fortuitously changed while he was gone, leaving Beast and I together for the past 11 months.  Now you need to understand, Beast is no regular car.  He is a 1980 Toyota Landcruiser that Ian found in a barn somewhere in Burundi, and slowly fixed up over time with the help of some local mechanics.  Beyond the sex appeal, Beast has a number of interesting quirks, each of which has led to many stories.

Left Hand Drive

Because he is from Burundi, he is Left Hand Drive, like North American cars.  But Kenya was a British colony, and therefore is full of British-style cars driving on the left side of the road.  Normally this isn’t a big deal when I’m driving around Nairobi, but it becomes a serious factor when travelling outside the city.  Kenyan roads and highways are full of very old trucks ridiculously overloaded with too much weight, and often travel up inclines at a speed roughly equivalent to a small child walking backwards.  In such situations, passing becomes extremely important if you have any hope of arriving at your destination in the same calendar month.  Unsurprisingly, people are often travelling at great speeds the opposite way, and passing a truck on the right when you are sitting on the left gets pretty hairy.  A good co-pilot is required for road trips, someone who can appropriately judge oncoming distance and then yell, “GOGOGOGOGO” when passing becomes an option.

Burundi Licence Plates

Not only is he from Burundi, but Beast also has a Burundi license plate.  This leads to a lot of stops by the traffic police, who never need much of an excuse to pull people over in the hopes of a bribe.  Because Beast was built in 1980, he’s actually too old to get a Kenyan plate put on, even if Ian wanted him to have one.  This leads to one of the other fun things with Beast, getting his foreign vehicle permit renewed.  You’re only supposed to have a foreign vehicle in the country for three months, after which you have three options:

  1. Pay some guy to make the problem go away (because Kenya).  Not the best option, because it’ll probably be very expensive, and you’re never 100% sure that it won’t come back to haunt you.
     
  2. Make a run for the border, and then come back in.  This requires some artful stretching of the truth at said border, as you have to tell them on the way out that you’re not coming back, and then you have to tell them on the way in that you’re not leaving via the same border three months later.  All in all, it’s surprisingly painless, but borders aren’t exactly a short drive from Nairobi.
     
  3. Convince the KRA (Kenya Revenue Authority) to give you an extension on your permit.

So when I first got Beast, I had only 4 or 5 days to figure out what to do, so I went with option 1.  It was very pricey and definitely not sustainable for the long term.  So when three months rolled around and it turned out I was keeping Beast longer, I resolved to find a more palatable way to keep him legal.  After a number of hours on the phone with the National Transport and Safety Authority, I figured out that I needed to physically go to the KRA headquarters in downtown Nairobi and get them to stamp my form.  So after hours and hours wandering around Nairobi getting constantly redirected, I finally end up at the KRA HQ, and get directed to the second floor.  Obviously I have no idea where I’m going, so I just stand around in a cubicle farm looking lost and helpless until someone finally comes over and directs me to a random desk.  Once I explain what I need, the woman at the desk tells me that I can’t get an extension, and that’s that.  Well obviously it’s not, because Kenya, so I start bargaining, trying to find a way to convince her that Beast and I deserve to stay together in Kenya.  After 30 minutes of this, I’m on a “but here are all the reasons why Kenya is awesome now let me stay” monologue, and warming to my subject.  “I even learned how to make chapati…” I am saying, when she interrupts me.

“You. You know how to make chapati?” She asks incredulously.

“Why yes!” I reply.

“And you will bring me chapati next time you come?” She persists.

“Of course I would,” I reply enthusiastically.

With no more words spoken, she stamps my form than turns back to her computer, presumably dismissing me from her presence.  Somewhat confused I slowly backed away from her desk and subsequently fled the KRA headquarters, still unclear as to how the act of making chapati got me what 45 minutes of pleading and cajoling could not.

But the story doesn’t end here. In fact it gets better.

Fast forward three months, and it’s time to renew Beasts’s foreign permit once again.  This time I prepare and take time to cook up some chapati the night before.  Thus armed, I set out to the KRA offices once more, this time with my best buddy Will, who is visiting for a week from the UK.  A salient point, since we arrive at KRA, only for me to realize that I had forgotten my wallet, and they won’t let me inside without ID.  I try absolutely every trick in my arsenal to convince them to let me in the building, but they won’t budge.  I slowly turn to look at Will, and you can see the realization slowly dawn on his face.

“No man. No way.”

“William,” I say, “I know that you just set foot in Africa for the first time, and that you don’t know any of the local language, or any of the context about this, but I’m going to have to ask you to take these chapati, go into that government building, find a random desk on a random floor, and bribe them with these baked goods to stamp this form, or we need to leave the country so my car doesn’t get impounded.”

“Damn it.”

With good grace, Will accepts his quest and sets off with chapati in hand.  He follows my directions and soon finds himself deep in the bowels of a cubicle farm.  Now one more fun twist to the story; we obviously need to find the same woman I spoke to last time, but I don’t know her name or remember what she looks like.  So based on my vague directions, William walks up to what is almost certainly the completely wrong person and says, “Hi! Can you stamp this form?”

The woman looks at him in some confusion and says, “What? No! It has already been renewed!”

To which William uses his ace card and says, “CHAPATI!” while throwing day-old muzungu-cooked chapati on her desk.  Needless to say, this only enhances the poor woman’s confusion.  Despite all this, Will somehow managed to score another three months out of this interaction, and so Beast stayed legal to drive another day.

Break Downs

An obvious side-effect of Beast being 37 years old is the reality that not all parts of him are going to be working all the time.  From inside, the fact that Beast is literally held together partially by duct tape is obvious, and Ian said some wise words to me before he left.

“If you drive Beast for any length of time, I can guarantee you two things. First, he WILL break down. And second, you will be able to fix him with some guy on the side of the road, a rock, and a piece of twine.”

Wise words that proved to be prophetic of my Beastly experience.  Within days of getting Beast the battery failed, which led me to learn the important life skill of the push-start.

I swear I helped to push too...

I swear I helped to push too...

Then there was the time where two photographers from a well-known magazine came to do a piece on FarmDrive.  I excitedly told them all about Beast, who we were taking on our trip into the field to see some farmers.  They were equally excited to get the Beast Experience… up until it started almost falling apart on the highway.  A quick stop at a garage on the highway and we were on our way once more! 

After our forced hour delay, the photographers seemed slightly less keen, but we gamely headed off the highway to find the farms we were supposed to be visiting.  Unfortunately it had rained quite heavily the night before, and there was a significant amount of mud, which resulted in us sliding sideways down a hill and into a ditch.

Luckily, Beast has some great 4-Wheel Drive, and we were out of the mud in a jiffy.  The rest of the farmer visit went smoothly, and with a surprising lack of Beast-Drama.  The photographers came back a few days later to do another field visit, but for some reason rejected my offer of taking them out in Beast again.

THEN there was the time where a group of friends and I took a road trip to an excellent music festival by a lake with Beast in tow.  The theme of the festival was essentially “wear purple stuff” so we tried to get Beast in the spirit…

But it was the trip back which is the focus of this story.  We decided to take a long way home and drive around Lake Naivasha to a restaurant to have lunch.  The drive was beautiful, but the road got bad.  I mean, really bad, to the point that we were probably moving faster up and down due to the bumps than we were moving forward.  Beast was gamely toughing it out, when all of a sudden he just died.  We were only 10km away from the restaurant, and my friends were coming back in their car to try and help.  A random passerby helpfully ferried the rest of Beast’s passengers, and we called a random mechanic to help.  While we were waiting, the three of us guys decided to pool our knowledge and stare at the engine, in the hopes of magically discerning what was wrong.  My friend Amy was scathing in her assessment of the situation. “None of you know anything about cars! Why do you think staring at the engine will help?” Despite her obvious scepticism, we kept with it. 

IMG_20170226_132936216_HDR.jpg

Every once in a while, one of us would say, “is that thing supposed to be like that?” Poking would result until we were satisfied that, yes, that particular thing was probably not the problem.  Then, after 45 minutes of this inspection, one of us said “is that hose supposed to be connected to something?” We all peer into Beast’s innards, then turn to look at each other.  “You know what? I think it is!”  With the help of my Swiss army knife and some elbow grease, we cut off the damaged bit of the hose and get it back on to where it looked like it should have gone.  Beast still wouldn’t start, so we thought we had failed, but then someone realized there was a pump-like device next to the hose. A few pumps, and suddenly we were back in action!  We were very pleased with ourselves.  Amy was less impressed.  The best part is that we got to drive Beast via an alternative route to the restaurant through a game reserve.  There is nothing like fixing a car yourself then driving it through a herd of zebras to lift your spirits.

 

I’m sure by this point you realize that I could go on and on with Beast stories.  There was the time I fixed him with a can of coke, or the time I fixed him with a piece of sugar cane.  Then there is a whole other blog post I could write about the numerous times I have been stopped by the police and the ridiculous lengths I have had to go to in order to not end up in jail.

Soon I head back to Canada for a bit to see family and then to a still-uncertain future.  As I hand Beast off to the next lucky person, I wanted to take a chance to say goodbye properly by sharing some of our stories.  He has been the best of companions during my time here, and I thank Ian for entrusting him to me while he was away.  Ride safe Beast! I will miss you.

IMG_20170402_163625450_HDR.jpg

I'll miss you buddy...

Nairobian Nights - A Selection of Tales /  by Cale Ettenberg

Engineers Without Borders is a great organization to work for.  They provide comprehensive pre-departure training, mostly good medical benefits, and lots of support while you are overseas.  In addition, you get to attend two regional retreats, which are always a highlight of people’s time overseas.  During these retreats, there is an event called the Night of Inspiration.  This is where the fellows gathered from all over East Africa, both Canadians and local East Africans in our Kumvana program, are encouraged to share something with the group.  Could be a song, could be a poem, could be a story, could be a game, could be anything that you feel like sharing.  At the second retreat I attended in July, I decided to share a series of short stories outlining some of the silly or funny things that happened in my first few months in Nairobi.  I decided to write some of them down for here the entertainment of my readers.  So without further ado, I give you an excerpt from my Tales of Nairobian Nights:

1)      The Night of Napkins

When I first moved to Nairobi, people stressed the relatively high risk of getting robbed in this city a great deal.  The reality is that as long as you modify your routine a little bit, and don’t be an idiot, Nairobi is easily navigable without being mugged at every corner.  After 10 months here, I have only been robbed once, and that was by a pickpocket at a very popular concert.  But rewind to my first couple of weeks here, and I was still jumping at shadows in every corner. 

On this particular evening, I was still living at the office before I had found a place to live.  The office is quite near a supermarket, maybe a five minute walk down lighted, major roads.  It was getting dark, possibly about 630pm, and I needed to go to the store for some things.  Still being nervous, I asked my Kenyan bosses whether it would be okay to walk the 275 meters by myself.  “Absolutely not,” they said, “it wouldn’t be safe!”  Feeling discouraged, I gazed out our office windows at the dusky sky and decided to be rebellious.  “Screw it,” I thought, and walked to the store anyway.  Five minutes later, I arrived at the establishment unmolested and went about my business. 

I was feeling pretty proud of myself as I exited the store, even though it was full dark.  I had survived the walk there, and saw no reason why I shouldn’t survive the walk back!  But first, I needed to take out some money from the ATM and put it onto my Mpesa.  (For those unfamiliar, Mpesa is mobile money on your phone.  No need for a bank account, just give cash to an agent and it will magically appear on your phone, where you can use it to pay for anything from an egg on the street, to your rent.) So I go to the ATM and take out 40,000 Kenyan Shillings (400$ USD), since I had to pay for both rent and deposit on the place I had found to live.  Little did I know at that point that there is a limit to how many shillings you can put on your Mpesa, and I had reached that limit in my zeal to have enough money available for first and last month’s rent.  Suddenly I was stranded on the corner of a street in Nairobi, in the dark, with 30,000 shillings of money in 1000 Ksh bills.  Now I suppose I could have ordered an Uber to take me the 275 meters home, but that would have felt like Nairobi had won.  Instead, I investigated the contents of my shopping bag and realized I had a package of napkins that I had purchased for the office.  Therefore I did the completely logical thing: I gently opened the package of napkins and started interleaving bills of Kenyan Shillings between them.  That way if I got mugged on the way back, I could say, “of course sir, take my wallet.  Just leave me my shopping!  Especially these napkins, with which I will wipe away the tears of my shame.”  Seemed like a completely legit route to take, but luckily I never had to test it, arriving back at home with no one trying to steal either my money, or my napkins.

2)      The Night* of Linguistic Confusion

*Didn’t actually happen at night

After I had been here 4 or 5 months, we got a new roommate at my place, a very nice guy from New York who was here for a few short weeks on an internship.  It turned out that the place he was working was quite far from the house, especially in Nairobi traffic, which can be brutal.  After his first commute took him 1.5 hours to travel a few miles, I suggested that he might want to call a boda, ie: a motorcycle taxi.  Motorcycles are kinda exempt from traffic laws here in Nairobi, and therefore can go around all the traffic that plagues normal 4-wheeled vehicles.  I gave him the name of a guy who I had inherited through another roommate, but with a warning.  “If you tell this guy that you are in a hurry, he will get you there.  Fast. Very fast.  So be careful what you tell him.”

Sure enough, the next day my roommate gets home looking a little wild-eyed.  I ask him if he was okay, and he said, “So I called your boda guy, and I was quite late, so I told him that… and he drove like a crazy man! I kept on yelling at him to slow down, and he just kept going faster, even though I was yelling in Swahili!”

“Really?” I asked, surprised.  Martin could be fast if you ask him to, but he wouldn’t ignore you if you asked him to slow down.

“Yes!” my roommate exclaimed.  “I kept on yelling ‘pole! pole!’ but he wouldn’t slow down!”

Cue Cale sitting on the couch literally crying with laughter.  Eventually my tears slowed enough to explain that in Swahili “Pole pole” means slow, whilst just saying “Pole” means sorry.

I saw Martin the Boda Driver a few days later, and asked how the drive with my roommate went.  “Yes, he was very nice,” said Martin.  “A very polite man.  He kept on apologizing to all the people we passed!”

3)      The Night* of the Hawk

*Also not actually at night, but it just sounds better that way…

EWB invests in a number of ventures around Sub Saharan Africa and, at time of writing, four of them are in Nairobi.  My colleagues from Kwangu Kwako are working to build sustainable housing in informal settlements.  They are located a few kilometers away from my office, and sometimes we meet them for lunch.  One of my long standing goals for my time here is trying all the different possible lunch places within walking distance from my office.  There are some that are cheap, like the little shop behind my workplace that sells rice and beans and chapatti for 60 cents American.  There are some that are random, like the woman who makes delicious local food out of her living room, and you just need to somehow know that you can walk into this random house and buy food.  But probably the best bang-for-your-buck is this place near KK’s office, The International Leadership University.  Turns out their cafeteria sells very tasty and very cheap Kenyan food, and I understand fully why they constantly grace that campus with their presence.  On this fateful day, a month or so after arriving in Kenya, we met the KK crew at their office to walk over to the University for lunch.  Cedric, one of the EWB Fellows at KK, had to turn back to get their phone at the office, a fact which his colleagues seemed surprisingly happy about.  The reason became clear as we got to the University.  “Cedric’s not here,” said Chris happily, “that means we can sit outside!”  Myself and my colleague from FarmDrive looked at him in confusion, until he explained that Cedric didn’t like to eat outside, because he was afraid of the hawks.  To be fair, there are a lot of big hawks in Nairobi, but the fear seemed a bit silly, so we all had a good laugh about it, and went to get our food and sit outside on some benches.  A few minutes later, Cedric arrived to see us sitting about eating our lunch in the sunshine.  With an annoyed glare, he fetched his food and joined us outside, flinching every time a shadow passed over the sun.  We joked with him good naturedly, teasing him a bit about his insistence that the hawks were out to get him.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, a giant hawk came down and DIVE BOMBED Cedric.  It ripped a piece of chicken right out of Cedric’s mouth and flew away.  It happened so damn fast that we barely realized what was going on before it was over!  One second Cedric was eating chicken, the next he was just sitting there with a stunned look on his face, asking what the hell happened, with just a single small feather gracing his upper lip as proof that the thievery had happened.  Needless to say, we all thought it was the funniest thing to have ever happened in the history of the world, and it was a LONG time before any of us were able to stop laughing long enough to be capable of physical speech.  Then the REAL miracle became apparent.  Somehow I happened to be taking a picture just as the hawk was coming down, and Google sometimes does this thing where it captures an image right before or after you actually take a picture and offers it up as an alternative.  Usually it’s to grab a picture right before or after someone blinks, but in this case it captured the craziest picture I might have ever taken.  The quality is very bad, because of the lighting, but here it is in all of its beautiful glory:

Cedric_And_the_Hawk_2.jpg

 

Needless to say, despite being completely vindicated in his fear of hawks, Cedric never ate with us again.

I hope you enjoyed these random tales of Nairobian adventures.  I have a lot more where these came from, and maybe I’ll start going through them here when I get a chance.  In the meantime, stay safe and so will I.

On The Eve of Uncertainty /  by Cale Ettenberg

As I sit here on the eve of Kenya’s election, I feel it is an apt time to break my self-imposed silence to reach out to my long-suffering readers abroad.  Tomorrow, Kenyans go to the polls and it’s a pretty big deal.  Some of you might already be well aware of all that has happened in the last ten years that leads up to tomorrow, and some might have no idea that there are even elections happening.  In preparation for whatever might come tomorrow, I thought I would take an opportunity for a basic intro to Kenyan politics.

10 years ago, in 2007, Kenya held a contested election that erupted into violence.  When the dust settled, thousands of people had died (officially 1,200 people, but I have heard of numbers closer to 3,000 as well) and 600,000 people had been internally displaced.  Kenya contains 46 different tribes, and most voting ends up happening along these ethnic lines.  In 2007, the incumbent Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner, sparking massive protests of electoral fraud which were widely confirmed by international observers.  Protesters started killing Kikuyu’s, which was Kibaki’s tribe, including a particularly brutal episode involving the burning of a church filled with women and children.  This incited reprisals in the form of Kikuyu’s going after Luo’s, the tribe to which Kibaki’s challenger belongs. The violence intensified from there, pitting tribe against tribe in crime and murder, until Kofi Annan stepped in a month later to help broker an armistice.

The ethnic-induced violence of 2007 led the International Criminal Court to press charges on both Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, Kenya’s current President and Vice President respectively, for crimes against humanity.  These charges have since been dropped due to lack of evidence (and mysteriously disappearing witnesses) but it underscores the fragile nature of political peace here in Kenya.  The shocking violence of 2007 led to a subdued and sober election in 2013, where a nation still reeling from the effects of the previous election shied away from significant post-election aggression.   That 2013 election contained the same primary players of the tomorrow’s contest, Kenyatta Vs Odinga, and also involved accusations of electoral-rigging.  But with the trauma of 2007 fresh in people’s minds, and a recently re-invigorated judicial system, the challenger Raila Odinga turned to the courts for help.  In what ended up being a stunning blow to the faith the average Kenyan had placed in their new court, the Supreme Court took only 10 minutes to come back with one of the shortest judgments they have ever passed.  In a judgement whose impact is still felt today, the new court summarily dismissed Odinga’s claim of vote-rigging, cementing the Presidency for Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s first president.  Many would argue that the campaign for tomorrow’s election started then and there.

And yet, as 2016 turned into 2017, all indications were that this election would be peaceful and that a return to the post-election violence of the past would be highly unlikely.  Despite the high tensions between the ruling Jubilee coalition and the challenging National Super Alliance (or NASA), shocking memories of the 2007 elections still held significant sway in the minds of most Kenyans.  Then, about five weeks ago, a series of seemingly coincidental events sparked a change to the mood of the country.

First we had the unexpected death of the minister of Internal Security, of “natural causes”.  This emboldened members of Al-Shabaab, who decided that an appropriate response would be the beheading of nine people in Lamu County.  Then the IEBC (Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission – the organization tasked with ensuring a fair election) had an injunction filed against them which could have postponed the election.  The NASA opposition party claimed that the tender to print the ballots for the election was not on the up-and-up, and that therefore the bid had to be redone.  This would have resulted in a postponement of the elections, and so it was clearly a huge deal.  The court originally sided with NASA, but then it was thrown out on appeal, inflaming emotions on both sides.  Meanwhile, tensions continued to increase in Nairobi and contested areas, as Jubilee and NASA supporters continued to clash in ever-more heated confrontations.  Add to this volatile mix a hospitalization of Raila Odinga, the head of NASA and the challenger for the presidency, the collapse of a brand new bridge, and a narrowing of Jubilee’s lead over NASA.   All of these events have contributed to a quickening of the collective heart of the country, making a contested election much less of a hypothetical situation.  Despite all this, people still thought the chances of violence to be low.

Then, a mere 9 days before Kenyans go to the polls, the country received a stark reminder of how high the stakes actually are.  Chris Msando, head of IT for the IEBC and the man in charge of ensuring that Kenya’s new electronic voting system was functional and free of interference, was kidnapped and brutally murdered.  Despite many threats in the preceding weeks, Msando had repeatedly spoken publicly about ensuring a fair and transparent election.  Eleven days before the elections, he went missing.  Two days later, police found his body on the side of the road in Nairobi, clearly the victim of both torture and murder.  No suspects have been named thus far, but no one believes it was a coincidence.  Most importantly, no matter what actually happened, Msando’s murder can be seen as rallying cry for both sides on this election, proof in their eyes of the duplicity of their opponents.

In the face of all this mounting tension, many Kenyans are still hopeful about peace.  In discussions on matatus (the ubiquitous public transportation of Kenya), uber drivers, coworkers, and random people on the street, many Kenyans express the belief that the elections will see a limited amount of tension, and that peace will prevail.  The shock of the 2007 tribal-themed violence still resounds ten years later, as does the collective horror that the rest of the world felt at the time.  Kenyans by and large do not want to be embarrassed once more on the world stage, and would rather a peaceful if not quite honest election than a return to violence.  But there are almost 50 million people living in Kenya, and it would take a tiny fraction of those turning to violence to seriously undermine the social order.  At the end of the day, the people I’ve spoken to are not the ones that are most likely to turn to violence.  Many people I have spoken to know at least one person who has said, “I am prepared to fight and die to ensure my people are no longer marginalized”.

As we head into the election tomorrow, and the results that will come out in the next few days, the country holds its breath.  Will calmer heads prevail, or will the tensions of last month combined with the fact that the once-significant lead of the current president has decreased to only one percentage point in some polls lead to a resurgence of violence?  Odinga has already said that a return to the Supreme Court is not an option, so what options remain to a dissatisfied and angry electorate?  While the area in which I live is under absolutely no threat of violence, the ramifications of a contested election will be felt in ripples across the country, and for some time to come.  It is all balanced on a knife’s edge, and the smallest of actions could cause a chain reaction in either direction.  So as I sit in my apartment with my roommates and colleagues, we will collectively hope and wish for a safe election.  For all my Kenyan friends and colleagues, and for this country itself that I have come to love, I hope for the most anti of climaxes.  For a safe and easy election that will set the country on a continued path for success, and not a return to the violence of the past.  May my own hopes exert a minuscule positive energy in that regard.

 

Are you interested in more information about the elections?  Here are some articles that you might find interesting:

A primer from last May about why this elections is important:
http://africanarguments.org/2017/05/09/tense-kenyas-high-stake-elections-explained/

Toronto man and an American deported this past week from Kenya for helping the opposition party:
http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/08/07/toronto-man-describes-harrowing-detainment-deportation-from-kenya_c1611487

Recent BBC article talking about the electoral tensions:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40843728

Long article on tension from early July by a Nairobi-based blogger:
https://www.theelephant.info/future/2017/07/06/election-2017-a-silent-panic-in-kenya/

A Murder and an Exodus — Another Election in Kenya:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/06/opinion/kenya-election-murder.html

That last article is written by Michela Wrong, aBritish journalist and author of a very good book entitled “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower”.  I would highly encourage anyone interested to get a copy and have a read.

A Very Kenyan Road Trip /  by Cale Ettenberg

My week of In-Country Training went very quickly and, before I knew it, it was my first day of actual work!  Now there are a lot of interesting things going on at FarmDrive, and I look forward to writing a longer post sometime in the future about exactly what it is that I have ended up doing.  But first, I want to tell the story of my first week of work, and the slightly ridiculous road trip that randomly occurred.

I met my new bosses at an EWB dinner the night before my first day of work.  It was very exciting to meet these two awesome women in person, and start discussing what I would be working on.  One of the first things they told me was that there was going to be some training sponsored by USAID on that coming Friday, and I was going along to observe.  
“Oh, it’s in Nairobi?” I asked, with amusing naivety.
“Not… quite,” they responded.


The original plan was to drive down Thursday during the day, do the training all day Friday, then drive back Saturday.  We were contemplating taking matatu’s all the way, but since the actual training was not really walkable from a major town, it was decided that we may as well drive.  Kelvin, my FarmDrive colleague who was accompanying me on this adventure, said he had a friend who could rent us an SUV, so the plan was set!  

However, I was soon to learn that plans are always mutable in this lovely country, and that “set” means nothing.

I awoke that Thursday morning to the normal crowing of roosters and the honking of Nairobian traffic.  Despite the fact that we were supposed to leave that afternoon for an epic trip to the border of Uganda, by mid-morning there still seemed to be no clear indication of when we might leave.  A little prompting on my part made the story somewhat more clear.  Apparently we were waiting for pamphlets to be printed out, and due to some miscommunication, it seems they weren’t going to be ready until very late at night.  

“But… we have to be there at 8 am tomorrow morning… right?” I ask tentatively.

“Yes,” my co-worker replied.

“And… it’s an eight-hour drive?” I continue.

“Oh yes!” 

“So… what’s the plan?” I ask, confused as to how we would manage to ever make it there.

“Well, we can pick up the pamphlets, then leave at midnight.  We will drive through the night, and then make it there for the morning! No problem!”  

He smiles at me with confidence, while I stare with growing horror.  I quickly convince him that driving through the night on a Kenyan highway seemed to be a slightly foolhardy endeavour, so instead we decide to get the pamphlets shipped by matatu to the place we’ll be staying overnight, and leave the office in the early afternoon.  Originally my colleague wanted to leave at 4:30pm, but doing the math, that would place us in the city of Eldorat where we were planning on sleeping at 10:30ish.  I felt that the less night driving the better, and we settled on leaving at 3:00 instead.

So the time comes, and off we go.  I think that we are picking the car up nearby, but it turns out that the car is quite some distance away.  Instead of taking an Uber, it was decided that it would be more cost-effective to take matatu’s instead, a fact I was only aware of after we left.   This obviously would have impacted what time I suggested we leave, and I felt the foreboding that settles in your chest when you sense an impending series of events that will lead to adventure or disaster.

Or sometimes both.

Kelvin and I leave for our trip, unaware of what is to follow

Kelvin and I leave for our trip, unaware of what is to follow

Three matatus later, including one that suddenly stops for no reason and sells our fares to a different matatu, we arrive in a random suburb of Nairobi.  Thirty minutes of wandering around, and we realize we are on the wrong side of the highway.  Finally, we find the car and we are on our way, and it’s only 5:30 pm.

For those of you who have never driven on a highway in sub-sahara Africa, you are missing out on a very special brand of madness. Lanes and traffic signs exist, but they don’t matter.  It is a giant free-for-all where finding cars, trucks, motorcycles or goats heading towards on-coming traffic in the wrong lane is not to be feared, but to be expected.  Faced with these conditions, you might tell yourself that you simply wouldn’t pass any cars, thus avoiding the risk of a head-on collision.  Unfortunately, that is not an option, since some of the ancient eighteen-wheeler trucks won’t travel faster than 30 km/hr.  You are therefore left with only one real option, brave the oncoming traffic, or be resigned to have your ten-hour drive turn into a thirty hour one.

Set against this chaotic backdrop, I began my first experience driving on the highway in Kenya.  Luckily my years driving in the UK prepared me for driving on the other side of the road, and I was able to concentrate solely on, you know, staying alive.  As my colleague sat in the passenger seat frantically making calls about which shade of green was supposed to be on our pamphlets, I dodged trucks, matatus and the occasional cow as we headed across the country.  As darkness fell, the frenzy only increased.  Street lights were non-existent, and everyone had their high beams on all the time.  Oncoming traffic became just a blur of multiple headlights flashing towards you, and more than once we ended up driving on the shoulder of the road to avoid an inevitable collision.  After a brief stop for dinner, Kelvin took over driving and we started really flying.

At around 2330 we arrived in Eldorat, where we were spending the night.  Kelvin locked me in our room (only one set of keys) and went to go find the infamous pamphlets and I went to sleep.  It seemed only hours later that Kelvin was shaking me awake, telling me we had to go.  I realized it was 7:30, and the schedule had us arriving at the training between 7 and 8.  A slight problem when we are still a 1.5 hour drive away.  Also, there is a random third person sleeping in the room, who Kelvin informs me is a friend from the region who will help us get to the training quickly.  Fair enough.  I quickly pack my gear and off we go.  We get breakfast, and my colleagues seem unconcerned that we are pushing 9am, and are still in Eldorat.  Finally, we are off!  Kelvin is driving, with me in the passenger seat and new guy in the back.  Me being who I am, I have already downloaded all the appropriate maps from Google and plotted our course, but I leave Kelvin and his friend with local knowledge to guide us.

We are three quarters of the way there, and we are approaching a large-ish city.  My map tells me that we should be turning left for a straight shot to the training, but we go straight.  I glance over at Kelvin, and tentatively say, “shouldn’t we be turning left here?”  He replies with confidence that they have a better way to go, despite the inevitability of hitting traffic if we go straight.  I could have opined on the unlikelihood that any other road would get us to our destination faster, but my mind flashed back to our training in Toronto.  To the many times it was drilled into us that we had to spend our first weeks and months doing more listening than talking, and not to make presumptions.  So I settle back into my seat and enjoy the gridlock traffic we quickly get ensnarled in.  Thirty minutes later we’ve made it through the town and we are now heading in a direction that is clearly directly AWAY from where we need to be.  I consider all that I was told in pre-departure training, I look at my watch, and I think “screw it.”

“Kelvin,” I say, “I’m very sorry to be a bother, but I can’t help but notice we are now heading away from training, and that there don’t seem to be any roads turning back towards where we are supposed to go for 100km.  Is there anyway you could show me where this route of yours is going to go?”

We pull over.  Kelvin looks at the map.  He talks to his friend in Swahili.  He looks at the map again.

“Okay, we will turn around,” he says.  I resist the urge to smash my head against the dash as we head back into traffic.  Google is now saying that we will be there at 1130, and so Kelvin ups the ante on our driving.  We tear down dirt roads at fast speeds, trying to make up the time lost by errors of mis-navigation.  I think to myself, “this can’t end well.” Sure enough, we veer to avoid a pothole, the back end of the car starts to spin out, Kelvin over-compensates and suddenly we are spinning towards the edge of the road and a cliff.

 “Great,” I think to myself, “I’ve been in Kenya 10 days and I’m already going to die in a car accident.”  Luckily we end up facing back the way we came with no significant damage to passengers OR car.  Somewhat hilariously, I was in the midst of texting with my friend Mireille (currently in Japan, check out her blog here) and our conversation went something like this: 

Isn't technology wonderful?

Isn't technology wonderful?

We eventually arrive at the event, where no one seems to care that technically we are 3.5 hours late, and where we are surprisingly not even the last people to show up.  Fast forward to the afternoon, and we have music, and local dancing… and speeches.  Lots and lots of speeches.  Mostly in Swahili, with just a little bit of English at the beginning for the speechmaker to thank USAID for sponsoring the event, and for their continued support.  The people making the speeches were facing us, and because we arrived late we were seated in a spot that essentially became the front row for the speeches.  Because of that, it was only after two or three speeches, that I made a realization.

“Kelvin,” I whispered quietly, “are they… are they talking to ME?”

“Do you see any other white people?” He asked, looking around.

And that is how I accidentally represented USAID to over a thousand farmers in Bungoma.  It was especially bad when the Governor of the province got up for the “keynote” speech and pointed directly at me while giving a 5 minute talk on the generosity of the American people.  I just waved weakly and tried not to do anything to embarrass “my people”.  Luckily, I escaped without having to give a speech of my own.

With the speeches done, we were on our way back to Eldorat.  I thought we were done with excitement and drama, but not quite yet.  Somehow the person who rented us the car had found out that we had a bit of an accident with it, and was insisting that we drive straight back to Nairobi.  Luckily, we managed to convince her that if she was worried about her car, asking us to drive through the night on the highway with no sleep was not a great way to protect said automobile, and we stuck with the original plan to go back the next morning.

 And so, with a few stops to enjoy some Road Zebras (as shown below), we finally arrived back in Nairobi.  We pulled into a gas station for what I thought would be the end to this epic adventure.  Should have known better then to tempt fate.  As we were pulling away from the station, we got pulled over by police, presumably because they saw the white guy in the passenger seat.  They ignored Kelvin completely, and came to my side demanding to see my passport.  You see, as a foreigner, you are supposed to be able to present your visa at any time.  If you don’t, you can be arrested or fined, with a trend towards the latter, usually with an on-the-spot fine that never makes its way into any official coffers.  Although I was not travelling with my passport, I had cleverly made a photocopy of the passport page and the entrance/visa stamp.  After some time convincing the officer that my copy was valid enough that he probably shouldn’t arrest me, we finally made it back to the office, thus finishing my first week of work in Kenya.


Since then, I have had many other adventures I could relate, but I will save your poor eyes from further reading for now.  Stay tuned for further blog posts involving self-reflection, happenstance, and serendipity, and not necessarily in that order.  Until next time, stay safe and so will I.

Karibu Kenya! /  by Cale Ettenberg

After months of planning, no less than five goodbye parties, and three weeks training in Toronto, I have finally arrived in Nairobi.  To be honest, it was a near thing in the end.  Mel, a fellow EWB Long Term Fellow, and I were travelling together and we arrived at the airport in Toronto with over two hours to spare, only to be told that we weren’t allowed on our flight.  You see, you can only apply for a work visa once you are already in Kenya, so to get into the country we needed to apply for a single-entry tourist visa and lie extensively at the border.  The problem was, our return flights were booked for many months past the validity of our Visa.  When we pointed that out to EWB, we were told that it had never been a problem before.  Unfortunately for us, the airlines had recently changed their policy and we were told at check-in that under no circumstances could we get on the plane with a return ticket past our visa expiry.  We tried to tell them we were travelling by land to other East African countries and we’d apply for another visa to get back into Kenya next year, but they weren’t having it.  So, we called EWB and told them they had 28 minutes to rebook our flights, or we wouldn’t be allowed on the plane.  In yet another fun twist, EWB had booked our flights in different ways, and couldn’t change them simultaneously.  With 13 minutes to spare, Mel’s flight return flight got rebooked.  Since they didn’t know if they could get mine done in time, she waved a sad goodbye and went through security, not knowing if we would be reunited in ten minutes or two days.

Mel sadly waves goodbye with her shiny boarding pass, unaware of when we would meet again

Mel sadly waves goodbye with her shiny boarding pass, unaware of when we would meet again

 

The minutes ticked by as I anxiously looked at my phone every 10-15 seconds.  Finally, with approximately 1 minute to spare, EWB called and said my flight was rebooked.  I rushed to the desk, convinced them to refresh their systems repeatedly until my new booking appeared, then bolted for security and a happy reunion with Mel!  Of course, the flight ended up being delayed, so the mad rush was slightly anti-climactic.

Two flights, one layover and twenty-one hours later, we had arrived.  Karibu Kenya! 

Karibu means “welcome” and is used both for an actual welcoming (ie: when you arrive at someone’s house) or on its own as a response to someone saying “thank you”.  It also quickly became our response when things went a little screwy or when things happened that locals took in stride that confused us.  

Much of that confusion often involves transportation in Nairobi, which is as crazy and ridiculous as any driving I’ve seen in the world.  This city abounds in busy four-way intersections without a stop sign, traffic circle, or traffic light in sight.  Decisions regarding who goes first at these intersections involves complicated instantaneous calculations involving speed, mass, and relative cost of the vehicles involved, weighted by the courage or stupidity of the drivers in question. The fun of Nairobian driving doesn’t stop there.  Many Nairobian roads have “speed cameras” on a large pole across the road, but they only work with visible light.  The apparent solution is to affix very bright strobe lights next to those cameras that repeatedly flash in the eyes of oncoming drivers.  You would think that Nairobi drivers are dangerous enough without trying to repeatedly blind them, but Karibu Kenya.  I am also genuinely confused why anyone would try and enforce traffic laws in this city, since most of the time they so obviously don’t matter.  As our exasperated Uber driver said this past weekend when a bus slammed on the breaks at a red light, “Who follows traffic lights on a SUNDAY????”  Karibu Kenya.

I have been doing my best to learn some Swahili, beyond simply saying “welcome”.  Turns out Disney helped me out with the Lion King.  Appropriately enough, “Simba” is the Swahili word for lion, and “Rafiki” means friend.  Of course “Hakuna Matata” does actually mean “No Worries”, but apparently no one in Kenya uses that anymore because it’s become too cliché. Thanks Disney.  So if you want to try and blend in (or at least go from Tourist Muzungu to Expat Muzungu) then you say Hakuna Shida, which means “No Problem” instead.

Language aside, my first week in Nairobi has been a whirlwind of good and bad hostels, crazy traffic, lots of learning, and delicious but sometimes weird local food.  On the hostel front, we were originally staying at a beauuutiful hostel a little bit out of town, with our own bathroom and balcony.  It was lovely, but when we wanted to take a matatu into town, it took almost 2 hours!  (Matatu’s are the local public transportation, minivans or minibuses that drive along specific routes, but only leave when there are enough people for it to go.  Lots of fun, but also bad for arriving at places on time, and full of lovely pickpockets.)  Due mostly to the fact that the trip into town would take either a large amount of money or time, we moved to a hostel between where myself and the other EWB Fellows would be working.  Unfortunately, that place wasn’t so lovely.  Now I’ve stayed in some sketchy places before, so the tiny two beds in a room barely big enough to fit them didn’t bother me that much, despite the fact that I was sharing it with Cedric and both of our luggage for a year.  No, my issue was the shower.  You see the hostel was laid out in a long hallway, with the rooms on either side.  At the end of the hallway on the right was an open area which was the common, mixed-gender bathroom.  Sinks along one wall, toilets along the other, showers along the third.  Now the showers had to be running for five minutes to get warm enough for you to get in them.  The problem is that the shower doors open INWARDS, and the stalls are… quite small.  That means there is absolutely no way to get in the shower without getting either your towel or your clothes completely soaking wet.  Unfortunately, the space right outside the shower is completely visible to ANYONE who is a) going to the bathroom or using the sinks, b) walking down the hall, c) going in or out of the three rooms with direct line-of-sight to said showers.  So how do you get in the showers without giving any of those people a show?  My conclusion was that either you need an “Entry” and “Exit” towel, or you just say screw it and get naked in front of everyone.  I will leave to your imagination which technique I employed.

Despite the intensive In-Country Training that EWB put together for us, we have found some time to do at least one half-day of pure touristy things, visiting the Giraffe Sanctuary and the Baby Elephant Sanctuary.  See below for pictures of me and Daisy the Giraffe, as well as other photos from the first few weeks here in Nairobi.  Stay tuned for my next update that will involve epic road trips, a car accident, an attempted extortion, and zebras.  Until then, stay safe and so will I.

 

Pre-Departure /  by Cale Ettenberg

Although I’m already in Nairobi, I wrote this post right before I left and didn’t have the chance to post it until now.  First impressions of Kenya coming up soon.

Here we are, only days away from the actual "getting on a plane and leaving Canada" part of this adventure.  The last few weeks have been an intense experience of learning, as well as bonding with complete strangers over the unavailability of showers.  One of the main things I have learned is that it’s a lot less stressful to tell people you are moving to Kenya, as compared with the actual act of moving.

The last three weeks have consisted mostly of a chance for the eleven of us travelling to sub-Saharan Africa to meet and bond.  It's pretty rare as an adult to get one of those experiences where you interact with a group of people that you've never met before, and then over a short but intense period become best friends.  It's also pretty amazing, and one of the many things that I've had the opportunity be thankful for these past few weeks.  Somehow 13 people living in a house with only one shower didn’t lead to any form of mayhem or bloodshed.

The three weeks of pre-departure ran through Thanksgiving, and there was actually a very poignant aspect to spending a final Canadian Thanksgiving in Toronto before heading away for a year.  The snap of the fall air combined with the smells of pumpkin pie wafting from bakeries on Bloor St lend an immediacy to the Turkey-filled holiday that sometimes is missing. 

The long weekend was also a chance to reflect on what I’d learned so far on my training with Engineers Without Borders, and how I’ve managed to reconnect with an organization I’ve been absent from for over 6 years.  Through sessions on power dynamics, gender and the environment, and tackling systems change, I have been forced to re-assess my place in working overseas, and to ensure I’m approaching my departure with humility and an open mind.

That being said, despite all the learning, and all the pie, I return again to the people I’ve met over the last three weeks.  I’ll forever be grateful for the chance to have befriended these awesome folks, both my fellow long term volunteers, and the amazing staff at EWB National Office.  We’ve spent time laughing and drinking, and being ridiculously honest with each other.  We have stayed up until 1am at the house having discussions on race relations or gender in development.  I know the next year is going to be filled with challenges, good and bad, but I know I’ll have an awesome group of people to depend on when I need support in-country, to complement all of you awesome people supporting me from afar.

So next post will be from the streets of Nairobi! Below I have a few pictures of my time in Toronto.  Until next time, everyone keep safe and so will I.

 

Pre-Departure for Pre-Departure /  by Cale Ettenberg

This is not where I thought I would be a few months ago.  This is by no means a bad thing, it’s a simple statement of fact.  Sometimes life takes you in strange and startling directions, and this has been a textbook example.  I write this first blog post as I sit on a train heading to Toronto for three weeks of intensive training with Engineers Without Borders Canada, before I leave to go overseas for what promises to be one of the most interesting and challenging years of my life.

My involvement with Engineers Without Borders goes back a large number of years, almost to its inception as an organization.  Over a decade ago, I lived for a summer in Ghana, West Africa on a short term placement with EWB.  I often say that the one week of pre-departure training for that summer changed my life as much as the subsequent 4 months overseas.  Now here I am about to embark upon three weeks of training, with excellent sounding sessions such as “Intro to Human Centred Design”, “Systems Thinking” and “Environment and Development”.  I have no doubt that the next few weeks will be as equally thought provoking and intense as the last time.

A few months ago I had never heard of a company called FarmDrive, or of an industry called Fintech.  Then I saw a post on Facebook regarding a series of new Long Term Fellowships that had opened up with EWB.  I had a look and saw one that looked incredibly interesting.  I was nervous about applying for the role that was being advertised, but threw caution to the wind and submitted an application anyway.  Less than two months later, here I am about to embark on a crazy adventure in Nairobi.

So first, who is FarmDrive and what will I be doing in Nairobi?  I’m sure my understanding of what FarmDrive does will grow exponentially over the next few months, but let me share what I know as of now.  Picture being a small farmer in rural Kenya.  Like any small business anywhere in the world, you’d like to grow your business, and to do that, you often need a loan.  The banks in Kenya, like banks everywhere else in the world, would love to give loans, it’s how they make money!  Unfortunately, the farmers often do not have any credit history or collateral to secure a loan.  So no loan for the farmers, no money to be made for the banks.  Enter FarmDrive.  It was started by two amazing women who grew up in farming villages in Kenya then went to the University of Nairobi for computer science, and the organization they started has the lofty goal of connecting millions of underserved farmers to credit.  They use lots of different types of data and sophisticated analytics to create models that predict the rate of loan payback for farmers.  Suddenly the banks have data on which they can base loans, and the farmers have access to credit at drastically more favourable rates.  Pretty awesome, and kinda magical.

So what will I be doing?  A great question.  I applied for a “Data Analyst” job, but it turned out they were looking for a data scientist, and it also turns out I’m not one of those.  Instead, I will be a “Product Manager”, which seems to be a very wide open job, a fact that is very exciting to me.  I know I will be getting a much greater understanding of FarmDrive’s services, from the vantage points of the data scientists, the farmers, and the banks.  I will also be helping those three parties communicate effectively and hopefully get access to different types of data to improve FarmDrive’s analytics. 

The thing that excites me so much about the next year, is that I feel FarmDrive is truly on the cutting edge of what is possible for a small company that can access large amounts of data.  People talk all the time about how Google and Facebook are taking all of our datas and selling it to advertisers.  Well this is a chance to use this data ubiquity for the power of good.  I feel that this is a time of great upheaval, where the democratization of large datasets can drive real change for some of the people in the world who need it the most.  I am looking forward to living in East Africa and experience the culture and see the beautiful land, but I would be stoked to work with an organization like FarmDrive if they were based in Ottawa! And that’s pretty amazing.

A few years after I got back from Ghana, I got an EWB ring.  It’s designed to be worn on your pinky, complementing the Iron Ring if you have one, and in the same fashion, it’s designed to remind you of your commitment to making the world a better place.  It’s actually a bar code, which if you unbent the ring and scanned in a grocery store, would read “Human Development”.  I stayed very heavily involved with EWB for a number of years, including two years as the President of the Ottawa Professional Chapter.  Then, as sometimes happens in adulthood, EWB and I drifted away from each other.  I moved out of the country for a bit, and started volunteering my time in other ways, and I lost track of that ring.  I feel It is very fitting that as I was trying to go through many year’s worth of accumulated crap, I somehow found that ring again.  It now sits back on my pinky, a silent reminder of a promise I made a decade ago, and of a year yet to come.