Back from Shirazi part deux, off to Uganda

hello all,

I've just gotten back from my ISP prep in Shirazi and am leaving in two days for my trip to Uganda. During my brief time in Nairobi, I've been working on my ISP proposal and crazily trying to figure out classes and housing before I disappear into the mostly uninterneted world. Check out the flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/10290870@N06/?saved=1) or at the side of the blog for pictures. In addition to the flickr, I'll put the few most hilarious pictures right in here:


This is actually from the first trip to Shirazi, on Eid. You aren't allowed to wear makeup during Ramadan, hence the intensive eye makeup put on me in this picture. Also, I was dressed very classily. I'm working on learning to carry water on my head, but it is EXTREMELY difficult.


This picture is hilarious because it's so indicative of my interactions with babies in Shirazi. She was put on my lap and immediately started screaming.

Check out the other ones on flickr.

Overall, it was an extremely productive trip to Shirazi. My friend Melanie and I had quite an adventure trying to get to this extremely rural location by ourselves, and the whole experience involved a bus, a tuk tuk (tiny motorcycles that are mini cabs), hotel stay, tuk tuk, ferry, matatu, matatu. It was mildly insane, but certainly an excellent adventure. I made a friend on the matatu who helped us to avoid getting scammed, and thus we were able to get real prices rather than wazungu prices.

Over the course of just two and a half days in Shirazi, I walked to and from Bodo (the nearest town and a forty minute walk) twice and make an extremely overcomplicated map that will surely help me get lost when I come back. I learned how to weave and make roof thatch out of coconut palm leaves, and helped to dig a well with a pickaxe with my hilarious host grandfather (a large man wearing a Muslim keepah and a cut off muscle Garth Brooks tour t-shirt). I was also promised to learn how to fish with a spear gun, which I'm now even more excited about then actually doing my study on traditional medicine in the area.

I also had the opportunity to go to a funeral. The local councilwomen's mother died, so me, Melanie, and our 17 and 20 year old mamas trecked back to Bodo for the event. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there and it was gorgeous because all the women were sitting together with different brightly colored khangas. I wanted so badly to take a picture, but it didn't quite seem appropriate. The women sat while the men prayed, and our mamas dared us to go in and see the body even though they were too afraid to see it themselves. That was interesting experience, as there's no body viewing in Jewish funerals. As they removed the body for burial, the women inside screamed and wailed like I had never heard before. It was a very educational experience. We also visited the nearest hospital, Msambweni (pronounced mm-sahm-bway-nee), to visit a very distantly related relative who is going through breast cancer.

That's pretty much it. Sunday I head for Uganda and Rwanda on an educational tour, and after that I'm just three days until I disappear for my ISP! I miss you all.

Alix

Off I go again

Sorry for the lack of posting, my dear readers, but this has been a really uneventful few weeks. Last week we had the entirety of our in-class development, health, and society lectures all squeezed into 3.5 days and the end of our intensive Swahili classes. This week we had our Swahili test and a bunch of written assignments due, thus reminding me that I'm here for real classes and not just the experiential learning. Of course, now it's over. I would say the best summing up of my Health lectures is that there are a lot of health problems here and although the government has tried to do a lot of reforms, they basically haven't worked for various reasons including corruption and extreme miscommunication.

Tomorrow I'm headed back to Shirazi in order to prepare for my month there in November. Part of my program is a month long Independent Study Project (ISP) where we take all of our in-class and experiential learning out into the field to study something and use our Swahili. I've decided to head back to Shirazi, the little village I fell in love with, to study the interaction between traditional medicine and Western medicine. When I was there before, we were split into groups to study different aspects of the village and I was in the traditional medicine group. When I was there, I found that the local traditional medicine consisted a lot of herb manipulation, but more interestingly, the idea of the djinn. Most of the coast of Kenya is Muslim, and in the Qu'ran there is the idea of the djinn. Allah made three types of beings: the people of the earth (us), the people of the air (angels), and the people of the fire (the djinn). According to the Qu'ran and Shirazi culture, there are good djinn and bad djinn and the bad djinn are the cause of a lot of diseases. For some reason they decide you have done them wrong and they sort of take over and cause these illnesses. Much of the traditional medicine in Shirazi and the surrounding area involves certain spiritual people using the good djinn to fight off the bad djinn and cure you.

For my month in Shirazi, I'm going to study the interaction of traditional medicine and Western medicine by going around and talking to the villagers of Shirazi and Bodo, the next town over, to get an idea where their faith and confidence lies. There is a Western clinic in Bodo, and I'm going to spend some time volunteering there as well. I'll be doing a lot of sorting of drugs and doing blood pressures. Very exciting!

So anyways, tomorrow I head back to Shirazi to figure out my living arrangements, translator information, transport, etc. Plus I'm going to get to see a wedding! Very exciting. When I come back, I'll be back in Nairobi for just a few days and then I head to Uganda and Rwanda for an educational tour.

Miss you all!

Alix

My Heart Remains in Shirazi

Right now I am sitting in an internet cafe in Mombasa, the oldest city in East Africa. We're been in Mombasa for about five days now after spending 9 days in the tiny coastal village of Shirazi, and unfortunately we leave tomorrow. Mombasa is a beautiful city, much nicer and cleaner than Nairobi. It is right on the ocean, so I get swimming time almost every day, and the people are even friendlier than they are in Nairobi (which is both a positive and negative).

I'll try to upload my pictures in Nairobi, as I'm not sure that my words can fully describe my experience in Shirazi. The village consists of about 200 people, and is what many of the people here in Mombasa have described as "bush." That description isn't a compliment, but I completely fell in love with the place. The houses are made of sticks and mud and thatched with palm leaves. There are palm trees and mango trees everywhere (fortunately for me mangos are out of season right now) and so everything we ate in Shirazi was bathed in coconut milk. We had coconut rice, coconut rice bread, coconut chicken, and more, but the coconut was also used for cleaning and candle making and oils and pretty much anything else you could think of. The kitchen was outside, as was the bathroom and the shower, which gave me full view of the palm trees, monkeys, and stars whenever I wanted. Our classroom was outside as well, so I was lucky enough to spend my entire 9 days outside.

To chose our homestay parents, the village got together and nominated families that had the means and warmth to let in college students. I had an interesting family who I was really apprehensive about at first but soon fell completely in love with. I lived with my baba (father), 24 years old and worked at the sugar cane fields nearby, my mama, 17 years old, and Halima, my two year old little sister. Most children under the age of 2.5 here are terrified of Wazungu, and my little sister was no exception. For the first 6 days we lived together, she would cry every time she was put near me. We have a few theories as to why that fear exists, and it's either because the only Wazungu they've seen have been doctors so they think we're going to give them shots or they think we're skinless.

At first, I was really weirded out by the fact that my parents were so young, especially that my mom was younger than me, but it ended up forming a really unique relationship. I was basically a child in Shirazi, as I couldn't do anything that qualifies me as a woman like cook or clean, so my mama was still my mama, even though she was born in 1992. My parents were adults in Shirazi society, but they were still sooo young. It was interesting to watch them straddle the child/adult boundary by cooking dinner for the family or coming home from work and playing around with the other kids who were so close to their age.

Even though I wasn't married (according to their cultural age laws I should have 2 or 3 kids already), I was still of marrying age and so I had to keep my head covered whenever I left the house. In the tiny Muslim village, the standards of dress were different than anything I've ever experienced. Every day we wore khangas or mumus, which are basically big rectangle fabric sheets that are used for all forms of clothing: dresses, skirts, tops, baby slings, head scarves, and more. We bought some khangas before we went to Shirazi, but every day the women of Shirazi dressed us students like dolls. After showering (bucket showers and boiled water), mama would knock on my door and pass me a new khanga set and scarf or mumu or dress. All of the SIT students would get together and laugh about our ridiculous outfits, but we never complained, mostly because we don't know enough Swahili to do so.

I completely fell in love with the village, and especially my family (which actually included about half of the village). They took me in with such open arms, especially the women of the village. My mama and two grandmas and aunts and cousins took me in as one of them without any questions. I've never felt so much a part of a community of women like that. I met them and immediately I was a part of their family, and I really felt at home there. I think I'll be going back for my Independent Study Project (ISP) in November, so fortunately I will be able to be a part of that community again. I'm really interested in studying traditional medicine and working in the nearby clinic.

Part of the reason that I fell in love with Shirazi was because of the simplicity of it all. I could spend all of my time outside with people who loved me, and that was all I needed. I've grown up in the west and known choices and extravagance, something these people have never known. I wondered why anyone would need more than this incredible place, these simple lives. I struggled with why the other SIT students talked about development and building up the village, as the villagers seemed so content with their lives. I wanted to give my little sister a gift, so I asked one of the directors who was coming from Mombasa to bring a doll. He brought this bizarre bird in a cage that moves and sings when you clap. I thought it was stupid and my little sister would like it, but she was completely fascinated by it. Even more than my sister, my mama and baba loved it, and I realized that they were so interested because it used batteries and moved on its own, but also because it was completely useless. They didn't own anything that was useless.

Spending the high holy days in Kenya was really wonderful too. In Shirazi, I got to share Rosh Hashanah with my family, explaining the significance of the apples and honey in very broken Swahili to 20 the kids and adults who crowded around. In Mombasa, me and a fellow SITer magically found challah at a small bakery and did Tashlikh, a tradition where you throw bread into the water as you cast away your sins. Rosh Hashanah was on the same day as Eid, which was a huge celebration in Shirazi. Eid marks the end of Ramadan, and so the villagers were thrilled to slighter a cow and a chicken for a full village feast. We all get specially ridiculous clothes and feasted on fried treats for days.

This was a really long post and kind of fragmented because there were so many incredible things I experienced there, but hopefully the upcoming pictures will help smooth things out a bit.