Cultural shocks

Dear friends,

As our day today wasn’t overly exciting, we would like to give you a deeper insight into Kenyan culture.

On Sunday afternoon we visited the father of Reverent Wasike who lives a quick 20 minutes walk outside Kimilili.

Walking towards the cultural shock...

His life represents the “old generation”, lucky enough the culture is changing (slowly).

Reverent Wasike’s dad lives here:

These are the toilets

The old man is called Ndubi Ndala (now try to remember his name!) and he is around 80 years old. In Kenya it is quite common to not knowing your birth date. If you are lucky, your mum will remember your year of birth (no birthday presents ever!). Most kids are born at home, not in a hospital and you don’t have to register your kid until it passes national exam (with around 12 years of age).

But let’s go back to the old man (do you remember his name???).  He married 33 women during his life. Not all at the same time of course, some died or went on to marry someone else. At the moment, he is living with two wifes. The (biological) mum of Reverent Wasike and a much younger girl (also called “mum” by the reverent). All wifes are called “mother”, so it might happen that your “mother” is younger than yourself.

As a husband, you are supposed to build a house for every wife, but if you don’t manage it’s absolutely fine (and practiced!) to live with several women in the same house (and even in the same bedroom). So the first wife might be put down on the floor to sleep while the husband sleeps on the bed. Yes, we were quite shocked as well.

Lucky enough for reverent Wasike, one of his older brothers shows interest in inheriting the young wife, so he doesn’t have to step in…

Men try to build a “home” for their wifes. “Home” looks like this:

The "house" is this hut (about 2 sqare meters)

We asked the old man how many children he has. He couldn’t tell. And of course, when counting kids girls don’t count. You only count your boys. Girls are not your own children but “somebody’s future wife”.

Ndubi Ndala never went to school (too focused on marrying…) so his picture of the world is sometimes a bit “confused”. He told us about the tribes he knew of and mentioned “the Africans, the Asians, the Americans and the UK tribe”. The questions followed were: “Do you know whether the UK tribe is bigger or smaller than the African tribe?” And (even better): “What tribe are you from?”. So now he knows about an additional tribe called “Swiss”.  :)

He didn’t greet us (not even touched us) because during the civil war he fought against the white people colonizing his country (but as reverent Wasike told us, he is making progress as for the first time in his life he was willing to come close to white people and talk to them). However, his hospitality was great. His wifes brought tons of food that we “really” enjoyed:

Banana mousse and warm milk... Würg...

Today we took over the roles as 5th and 6th grade teachers, because the main teacher was trying to build up the class schedule...We honestly were shocked that a few of the kids (even in grade 6) couldn`t read properly. We suggested a “reading” club after school hours to improve on this ability.

However, it was quite fun to see Alex teaching “male and female reproduction system”.

Alex teaching about the male reproduction system

Here a few impressions of the school:

School kids in their class room

Class room (with repaired furniture!)

One of the class rooms with broken mud wall

After school, we held our first computer lessons for the people who received the donated laptops. “Here is where you turn on the computer …”. Really basic stuff, but hopefully by the end of our daily trainings they will be able to use it properly…

Agnes giving computer lessons (after waiting for 20 minutes due to lack of electricity...)

Ohh, by the way: Alex is in love!

And this is what we did yesterday, when electricity was off for over two hours:

Romantic playing with the kids (sharing our bedroom)

Lala salama to all of you! Big hug!
Alex & Agnes

PS: Just discovered, we are sharing the room with a mouse too... Poor Alex, didn't leave her bed since I saw it...At least, that's stopping her from smoking... :)