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.