Greetings all!

Before proceeding with my usual ramblings, I would like to give a "shout out" to some very important people. It just came to my attention last night that my grandpa and grandma in Fort Wayne, Indiana have been following my travels every day right here on this very blog. This is especially meaningful to me because neither of them are particularly computer literate, and in addition, my grandfather has pretty significant vision problems. So the fact that he has been asking someone to come to his home to read him the stories every day is pretty incredible. I’d like to use this moment to wish them both all the congratulations in the world on their recent 60^th wedding anniversary. I’m sorry that I was all the way in Kenya for such a special occasion, but I want them to know that I was (and still am) thinking of them.

In other family-related news, last night marked another special occasion. It was the first time that my host mother and my real mother (Hi mom!) spoke on the phone. It was pretty amusing from my end. The phone connection tenuous at best, and because of the pretty significant difference in accents and/or dialects, I’m not sure that a whole lot of information was actually exchanged. But I could tell that they were both happy to hear the voice of the person who takes care of me on the other side of the globe. There was a lot of “Hello?”-ing and “Thank you”-ing and “You’re welcome”-ing. They also briefly touched on the time zone difference, the weather difference, and my mother (my real mother’s) distaste for air travel. It might not have been high drama, but all the same I was pretty entertained just listening to the Kenyan side of the conversation. They’re both wonderful people, and they both ended up happy, so it was a win-win-win.

In loosely-related news, that same conversation with my mother also yielded an insight into the difficulties in posting comments on blogger.com. I have had several people tell me that they are unable to leave comments here, and apparently that stems from a requirement that you be logged in to an active gmail.com email account. While I certainly wouldn’t want to be accused of biased webmail-company campaigning, I will just take a moment to point out that gmail accounts are pretty nifty. In addition to having practically unlimited storage space, it also has pretty good spam filters, list-serve capabilities, and a ton of really interesting features. One of which is being able to post comments on my blog, which I love. Anyway, enough about that.

It's becoming pretty clear that the biggest challenge for an mzungu here in Kenya is the issue of money. In one sense, it is really easy: There are roughly 67 Kenyan Shillings to the US dollar, meaning that everything is very, very inexpensive. A good breakfast or lunch can easily be as cheap as 30 or 40 cents. With a little bargaining, tshirts and other tourist things usually fall in the 4-8 dollar range. Intra-city transportation is 30-60 cents, and inter-city transportation is no more than S3-10. Add in the fact that the average Kenyan probably doesn't make more than 2 or 3 dollars a day (I met a taxi driver who was thrilled to be averaging 6 bucks a day, but most people are considerably less well-off), and it's pretty clear that the visiting American has a pretty good amount of purchasing power. The downside is that everyone and their mother knows this. Therefore, Safaris, upscale hotels, and nice restaurants often charge tremendously high prices, prices that would even approach the point of being prohibitive in the United States. And without the protection of fixed prices, it's very common for wazungu to pay many times more than their Kenyan counterparts, even for public transportation or food. This is one reason that many lower-scale restaurants don't offer menus - so they can tell the customer whatever they want.

This is a country where corruption plagues even the highest-level offices. Although president Kibaki is thought to be relatively clean, his government is nevertheless characteristically riddled with scandals and embezzlement schemes. And these don't only take place in private back rooms like Buddy's Plunderdome fiasco (my apologies to those who don't call RI home), they are often right out in the open. In Kenya the parliament has the power to set their own salaries, and the session that just ended is often bashed for having established new heights for their own compensation and benefits. Each of the 200+ MPs (Member of Parliament) receives a higher yearly salary than President Bush himself. No wonder the roads are in terrible shape.

That being said, it should come as no surprise that I struggle every day with small monetary issues. People, especially salespeople, are always trying to take me for the extra shilling. In many cases this isn't a problem at all, because a little arguing almost always results in a fair transaction. But peddlers, beggars, and street children easily spot "the color of money" (white) in a crowd, and it is hard to go anywhere in the city without at least one or two following you around. Of course, they can't really be blamed. This is a city where many people are utterly without opportunities for employment or self-gain, and I am certain that many guilt-ridden tourists have given a few handouts or at least knowingly over-payed for some small goods. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the destitute have learned to identify potentially generous foreigners, who are invariably better off than they. Even I, a struggling college student if there ever was one (thank you mom and dad for helping subsidize parts of this trip), am never without at least a few hundred shillings as I walk up and down the street.

The question then, is what should be done? The street children are the easiest to address. If it's a school day, "shule ni ya bure" ("school is free" - mercifully and recently true thanks to the Kibaki regime) gets the job done. I don't want to give them the idea that it is more profitable to pester tourists than to get an education, even if sometimes it probably is. Sundays you tell them to go to church. When neither of those is possible, it isn't too expensive to buy a loaf of bread and hand it out. (Although it's important to do the dividing first, I once had this misfortune to give three boys a whole loaf and then watch the oldest tear off down the street with it all alone.)

With beggars, it's tougher. Health care is improving in Kenya, but impoverished polio victims, blind people, lepers, and the handicapped are still a common sight in the streets. It's hard to justify not giving them anything, but at the same time, it's hard to share with them all, especially every day. It still makes me feel bad every time I walk by, but I'm not sure what else to do. As for the hawkers who over charge, my opinion varies from day to day. If I've just had a particularly expensive day, my own personal greed takes over and I fight for every shilling. If I'm feeling more generous, I sometimes don't argue as hard as I could. But Dennis once told me that it isn't good for these people to become dependent on the generosity of others. Selling their goods is a sustainable way to make a living, but becoming accustomed to absurdly high prices will only set them up for problems in the future. Although the theory of sustainable incomes is absolutely one that I support, I'm not sure I believe in the logic of this particular instance. If generous tourists (or at the very least, unsuspecting ones) continue to come along, perhaps this scheme is sustainable after all. But he also raised the point that it makes prices higher for other Kenyans, which is bad for the local economy. Additionally, what happens if another American Embassy bombing takes place and the tourists stop coming all together? The dependency on tourism could be devastating. This, of course, would be true with or without inflated prices. I'm pretty unclear on what to think.

Anyway, this might have been my most disjointed and un-readable entry yet, so I think I'm going to wrap it up here. Tomorrow I'll have news about an exciting change of plans, and hopefully Thursday I'll be able to tell you about our performance of Amezidi. So you know, keep reading.

Thanks for your time,
Chris