Kenya Christmas 2009

With Andrew, my brother-in-law, and B, my sister-in-law, both working as doctors in Kenya, we decided to spend Christmas and New Year visiting them.  Frolicking on the beautiful beaches on the coast of Kenya, trawling the warm clear water for sailfish and marlin, and playing animal bingo on safari while trying to get the best wildlife photo on our new camera was certainly fun.  The highlight was how we were so quickly accepted by an entirely different expat circle living abroad in situations so similar, yet so different, to our own.

Kenya Airways fly direct to Nirobi, the overnight flight takes just over nine hours.  Alex, our two year old, was asleep for at least seven of these hours, and seven month old Lucy, who was on my lap for the entire flight, latched on to mummy dummy and slept the whole way.  A good start.

Time for a hot cuppa of Kenya’s finest export (coffee, not ground rhino horn) and a change of terminals, and we were soon up in the air again for the one hour transfer to Mombassa on Kenya’s coast.  Andrew, David’s brother, met us with his grunt of a 4×4 to drive us an hour north, up the coast to their home in Kalifi.

The roads in Kenya make Thai roads seem world class.  Unmarked, massive speed bumps at random intervals and random places had us airborne several times during our fortnight visit.  Imagine foot high speed bumps on the 36 that keep being removed and then replaced in a totally different place every other week, and you start to get the idea.  The potholes large enough to take the entire car might be easier to see, but they are near impossible to avoid.  Handcarts, donkeys, bicycles and motorized-bits-bobs-welded-together dodge chickens, goats, children and each other in a ridiculous game of survival.  Or not.  Accidents, injury and death are common.

Approaching a village, we start to see increasing numbers of people walking along the roadside with yellow water containers on their heads.  At the village there is a tap, one tap, and a snake of over fifty yellow water containers neatly lined up waiting for its owners turn to fill it and walk however many miles it is home.  “Many of them spend half their day collecting water”, Andrew informs us.  It is a scene repeated everywhere we travelled.  Some lucky villagers had bicycles allowing them to carry three or four containers at once.  There were other people with handcarts loaded with up to ten containers of water, and perhaps some mangos, bananas or grain.  But getting clean water into their mud huts was a time consuming burden, dominating huge chunks of many Kenyans lives.  Time that, if clean water was available closer to home, could be spent tending crops or generating a small cottage-industry income.

Andrew’s house looks similar to those around here.  Nice bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchen, a large swimming pool and a huge, well maintained garden.  But there are differences.  The red buttons that look like light switches are panic buttons that call a security company.  Additional grills, known as “rape gates” block the bedrooms from the rest of the house, so if intruders do break in, they don’t have immediate access to the sleeping occupants.  A private guard is on duty from six till six and the gardener doubles as a gate boy during the day.  Electricity is extremely expensive, so very few people have air conditioners, and lights and fans are turned off as people leave the room.  Kenya in December is as hot as Thailand in April.  Expecting aircon at night and fans during the day, I soon realized I’d packed wrong…

The difference between my house here in Thailand, and the Thai’s living in the tin shacks only 200 metres from us are extreme, but Kenya’s extremes make ours look marginal.  We spend Christmas eve waterskiing in the day and at a cliff-top mansion drinking fine South African wine and singing Christmas carols as the sunset.  A wonderful jazz quintet performed at a kid’s birthday party.  A Scottish band played at the New Year’s Party.  Andrew and B’s private cook prepared and served dinner most nights, and cooked up a storm for twenty people on Christmas day.  A private leer jet buzzed us as we drank chilled wine on a deck overlooking the reef near Hemmingway’s famous hangout.  The boatyard has a few million dollars worth of boats parked out front, and small private planes dot the small Kalifi airfield.  The highs in Kenya might be higher, but the lows are lower.

The night before we arrived, B was called out to assist a friend who had been stabbed by an intruder.  She’d woken to a man straddling her chest, holding her down with a knife through her shoulder (in the chest side and out her back – two punctures) screaming “give me your money”.  Disbelieving that the money handed over was all she had, the intruder slit the skin of the friend’s throat and would have killed her had the security company not arrived (lucky for those panic buttons).

Between Christmas and New Year, another friend had intruders trying to smash through the rape gates, and was frantically on her mobile phone calling people for help.  Her neighbor jumped in his car, smashed through her front gate with his 4×4 and raced around her house, actually hitting at least one intruder with his car before the intruders raced off (and before the security company arrived…).

Kenya is tough on those caught stealing.  A man caught pick-pocketing at a market was seized by an angry mob that immobilized him with a stack of car tires (so his arms were pinned to his side), and then set the tires alight and cheered as he burnt to death.  But people are starving and desperate, and the money from theft is obviously worth the risk of punishment for some.

Where most people I meet here are either teachers or associated with car, household appliance, or oil and gas processing and manufacturing, most of those we meet in Kenya were doctors, scientists or missionaries.  My sister-in-law is studying the effects of malnutrition on infants’ hearts – and there are more than enough malnourished children coming into their hospital to keep her busy.  Andrew is studying tropical diseases and working at finding a better, cheaper, more efficient way to treat and avoid these diseases.

Educating people and setting up systems so people are treated promptly is a big focus, as all too often people come to the hospitals too late.  Everyday Andrew and B see children die from things that could have been avoided.  Many of the doctors and scientists are paid their home salaries by Bill Gates’ Welcome Trust charity.  They are a financial world apart from the missionaries, out either self-funding their time in Kenya or earning a meager local salary; one woman I met earns equal to 2000 baht a month…  Even the extremes between the expats in Kenya make our financial differences seem inconsequential.

It was truly wonderful to visit family and be welcome into the lives of those who call Kenya home.  Lovely to see how other expats live.  I’d definitely go back for another visit.  It was the best holiday we’ve had in a couple of years.  But I’d much rather live here.

Karen Brent