October Surprises (Assessing risk in a new context)

Another travel day, and opportunity to catch up on recent happenings in our lives. We are currently on a flight from Nairobi to Johannesburg then on to Livingstone Zambia. There we will join many other Reps. and leaders from the US and Canada for our tri-annual (once every 3 years) All Africa leadership meeting. It is a bit hard to take David out of school for a week, but Reps usually attend this event as families. David brought 2 massively heavy textbooks along with other things to keep up for the week of school he is missing.

Maybe this could be best ordered by level of importance or at least intensity rather than chronologically. I will say by way of starting, that we are getting used to subtle cultural differences between Nairobi life and other similar contexts where we have lived. The culture of driving could be the most shocking despite having lived in at least 4 other cities in Africa. I once wrote a blog about decoding driving culture in Burundi (link is here) for those interested.

One might find it surprising how well informed we are--with our MCC security protocols, and access to a number of intelligence channels—on risks that people often assume we face… riots, terrorism, Al Shabbab, etc. The fact is the biggest risk we face in terms of injury or worse, is driving to work or school in the morning. This is particularly evident in Nairobi where the culture of driving is extremely reckless, led, I think, by a formal and informal transport service sector—matatus, buses, taxis, boda bodas (motorcycles, Uber, etc. that depend on getting a high quantity of fares through very quick completion of their routes. Their naked aggression puts everyone on edge and promotes a generally aggressive driving culture. Despite numerous traffic laws on the books, police are very selective about enforcement, as they ‘benefit’ by receiving bribes from the worst offenders.

I won’t lie. It is scary to drive here. I notice when riding in taxis that the default when someone is cutting into your lane is to speed up rather than slow down and try to get the right of way. I think many of the collisions I see were completely preventable if someone had just slowed down when they saw the problem.

We knew we at risk when we drive, but until last week have avoided an actual collision…until this past week. I will let Rebecca tell her story as she and David were in the car at the time:

I was driving the MCC Toyota LandCruiser back from a refreshing work/personal visit to Arusha, Tanzania (more on that below). It’s a 2001 model, one of those old LandCruiser tanks, and we had just done a bunch of work to make it roadworthy, replacing the transmission, brakes, shocks, etc. David and I had left Paul in Arusha for a second field visit and departed from Arusha by 1 pm, in order to reach Nairobi by dark. However, the border was very crowded – apparently lots of Kenyans had the same idea as us about spending a long weekend in Tanzania. We did not manage to cross until about 5 pm. By the time we reached Nairobi, it was dark, not ideal driving, especially on a holiday weekend.

 

At 7:50 pm, we were driving up a hill on busy Kiambu road, about 300 m from the turn off to our house, when suddenly a large vehicle was in our lane and was driving straight at us. I guess I must have swerved left just enough to avoid a head-on collision. The other vehicle, a Range Rover, struck the right front corner of the car and front wheel hard and scraped along the side of the car, also badly damaging the back right wheel. The driver of the other vehicle then attempted to keep driving, fleeing from the scene. David and I were shaken but apparently unhurt and we were able to exit the vehicle.

 

Fluids were gushing out of the engine onto the pavement, there were parts of the car all over the road, including one spring that had fallen out of the wheel bearing. It was a dangerous situation with cars passing our vehicle on both sides on a busy road. After about 20 minutes the highway staff came to set up traffic cones and give us a bit more safety.

 

Two kind people stopped to help us, one the driver of a tiny Toyota that was right behind us. He stated if the RangeRover had hit him, he would probably not have survived. The other was a woman who was sympathetic and helped to call the police; she had slowed down to ask if we were OK and I was just panicking, not knowing what to do or who to call, so she parked and came back to help. David was more clear-headed and immediately called Paul, who was able to reach out to others and get help. We removed our bags from the car and then were able to put our luggage into the car of our neighbor, Kurt Unger, who had arrived as fast as possible to help us. David was amazing, hunting around in the car in the dark, finding our passports and the vehicle registration papers and everything valuable as fast as possible.

 

John, the driver behind us, and our neighbor Kurt decided to walk down the road to see if they could find the other vehicle. Apparently, John K, the other driver, had tried to continue driving, but his car was severely damaged and was stuck at the bottom of the hill. Mr. K eventually walked up to us to see the situation and was clearly very drunk. He looked around and tried to claim that we had hit him. But our vehicle was at a dead stop on the left side of the left lane, very far from oncoming traffic. The Kenyans who had stopped to help us cautioned me to say nothing and to be aware that he looked rich and might try to throw around money or connections to influence the outcome.

 

Eventually, police arrived, quickly assessed the situation, saw clearly that we had been hit, but then ran down the hill to apprehend Mr. K who appeared to be trying to escape on foot. There was quite a lot of confusion as a tow truck company tried to take our LandCruiser to the police station. We insisted that it be impounded at our property, having heard that cars in police custody are never released without great effort and expense. Wawa, our supervisor, arrived and assisted with talking with the police and Mr. K, along with negotiating with the tow truck to agree to take the vehicle to our house.  We exchanged information with the police and were discussing whether we should all go for BAC testing at the police station. But the police told us that all would go better if we went to the station in the morning to get the police report and then and work towards having Mr. K’s insurance pay. Things went as smoothly as possible at the station the next day, and the police report clearly blamed the other driver, so now we are working on trying to get some compensation from his insurance.

 

My feelings alternate between gratitude and fury. It is truly amazing that neither David nor I were badly injured. I have a bit of a sore neck, but that’s it. I had asked a number of people to pray for us before this trip; I was worried about driving back from Arusha alone. I really felt like we experienced divine protection, but I have no explanation for the circumstances when others are not protected from tragedy. I am deeply grateful for the strangers who stopped to help us and for our neighbors and our supervisor coming out at night. I’m grateful that the police report was accurate. I’m so grateful for David’s maturity and clear thinking in a crisis. At the same time, I’m haunted by the fact that we were just seconds away from turning off that main road when the accident happened. If we’d been a few minutes faster, we could have gotten home and breathed a sigh of relief and still had a working LandCruiser. I just can’t believe that someone would get behind the wheel when so clearly wasted. I know there’s a serious alcohol problem in Kenya and all the billboards advertising whiskey make me want to vomit. Every time we have driven in the past days in hectic traffic, I feel like I’m climbing out of my skin, especially with Uber drivers with questionable driving habits.

 

We are fortunate that MCC has 2 vehicles that still work right now, and we are able to use one of them to get to work. We will be moving towards replacing that LandCruiser with another field car. But I think it will take a while for me to settle down inside.

 

But back to the reason for our travel that weekend: We have a few remaining partners based in Tanzania. While it adds extra travel to monitor their projects, Paul and I are glad for the opportunity to still maintain relationships with those organizations, and the staff we knew well from our time working in MCC Tanzania. Kenya celebrated a public holiday on a Thursday this past week, and then school was also closed Friday, so it seemed like a great time for us to make a visit back to Arusha.

 

We left early on Friday morning and were able to get to the little town of Longido just south of the border in Tanzania. We had a few hours with Paulina and Simon, catching up on the developments in their work with Maasai girls over the past 4 years. They have had great success sponsoring education for about 50 new girls per year. They also work towards stopping harmful traditional practices (FGM) and promoting alternative rites of passage for girls.

 

We continued on down the road towards Arusha and finally ended up at the home of our dear friends the Taylors. We’ve known each other since 2017 when we joined together in a weekly bible study. Our kids all get along so well and we adults deeply appreciate each other. After so much transition in the past 3 years and the heavy emotional effort of working (again) on building a new community in Nairobi, it is hard to express how precious it is to spend time with people with whom we share history. Of course, lots has happened since we moved away in 2021, but we have some idea of what we need to ask each other about. Both families have sent young men off to start University during this time, so our collective numbers are 8 instead of 10, but it still feels like a party when we are together. On Friday night, we just took lots of time to talk. On Saturday morning, we slept in, played a fun new strategy game and then headed off to Kili Golf for the afternoon. While the men and boys played a 9 holes on the course, Katie and I took a good walk around the beautiful grounds. It was World wide bird counting day and we noted a number of special species, along with the typical gazelle and impala that graze on the course. Back at the clubhouse, the kids played games and Paul and Mike finished 18 holes under threatening skies. Every single time, it’s incredible to be there in the evening for dinner and to watch the sunset. We attended church with the Taylors in the morning before David and I headed back to Nairobi. In spite of the accident later, it was still well worth it to have that time to reconnect with old friends.

One of the other challenges we are facing as new Reps is travel. MCC Kenya has at least 12 projects in Kenya and Tanzania. As we recounted above, our trip to Arusha was meant to visit two of them combined with a weekend of R&R. Because of the accident, I ended up coming back before I was able to go on the second field visit to see a food security project in central Tanzania with our partner OWSL. It was a bit disappointing because Chrispin, our friend and former Tanzanis MCC colleague works there now and was leading the trip to visit their project.

But even missing this trip barely diminished the amount of travel I have had to do to visit our partners and projects. I estimated that I would be in the office only one or two days in the month of October. Below is a list of some of the projects I have visited in the past 3 weeks.

MIDI Food Security project in Ngong: I appreciate the diversity of partners we work with in Ethiopia. Most of the major ethnic groups are represented in the different regions we work. MIDI (Maasai Integrated Development Initiative) is a Maasai organization working to improve livelihoods of Maasai pastoralists in the area around the Ngong hills. Fortunately, the project sites are close enough to Nairobi that a field visit can be done in one day, which saves the cost of a hotel.

I went down with James, our FS Program Officer. We left the office about 9am and arrived at the MIDI office at the edge of town about an hour later. I met the staff and we discussed the project and planned activities for the day before proceeding to the field with members of the MIDI team in the car with us. We drove another hour or so down the escarpment into the rift valley and turned off the main road into the ‘bush’. We arrived at a small village with a number of houses. I could see that Maasai in this community had houses that looked more permanent than traditional round Maasai bomas. Although the fencing for livestock was similar. We met some community leaders and the project interventions were explained to us.

Our project is primarily focused on livelihood improvement. The means the partner uses is training in VSLA (Village Savings and Loan Association) which is a microfinance scheme where a group saves together by buying shares and taking loans against the collected amount and paying back with interest. There is a share out once per year where people benefit from interest accrued based on the number of shares they bought. It is a very effective way for resource-poor communities to generate savings and wealth. The partner does not add any funding into the pot.

The group we visited was doing quite impressively well and had about 600,000KES accrued to date. About $4500 from a group of 20 women. They had used the money to collectively buy about 120 stacking chairs for use in events like weddings, funerals, etc. In the village. Renting the chairs was a VERY lucrative enterprise so they were making quite a bit of money.

I also saw that they had improved cattle that they bred with their local herd to produce more milk. I was quite impressed by the business savvy of the Maasai in this community. We were invited over to one of the women’s homes and she had a really nice sofa set! She said she bought it after the last share out. It is a tribute to the work of our partner to help members of the community ‘graduate’ out of poverty (one of the key impacts of development work.)

I appreciated sitting in on one of the savings group meetings. The women met together, bought shares, collected interest on loans, they sat around and chatted, many of them working on beads they sell. (It was amusing because they are fined for doing beadwork during the meetings, but most happily pay the fine—into the community pot—and continue the beadwork anyway.) I think the 3 women who lead the group like undivided attention but they are very comfortable together and do what they want.

James and I drove back in the late afternoon. It was great to meet the MIDI staff and spend some time with James talking about their work.

SD-CDP maternal and child health project: The following week I took a longer trip to Western Kenya to a place called Usenge (Actually very close to the birthplace of Barak Obama’s father). I was supposed to go out on the 9-hour drive with our health programs coordinator Judith, but she was unable to join me. Our partner, the community development program of the KMT Siaya Diocese has been running a maternal and child health project in villages that border Lake Victoria. It is a stark contrast to our other MCH programs that are being implemented in the informal settlements (slums) of Nairobi. There the population is packed together and face quite different challenges with regard to access to MCH services compared to this rural community. I arrived on a Monday evening after a somewhat harrowing 9-hours on the road. There are many trucks on the road and passing them or dodging cars passing them the other direction keeps one on their toes. (Actually, I went with a driver as I have never been there before and needed some guidance.)

We arrived in the evening on Monday after passing through some heavy rainstorms. I stayed at a hotel in Usenge and met the team the next day. It was a pretty big group with the project coordinator and several other project staff and directors present to meet me. We had a good meeting and project overview presentation in the morning then had lunch and went to several villages to visit the groups that were being established. Some were brand new, some older.

What particularly impresses me about this program is the combining of savings groups with the traditional MCH care groups. Women in groups learn about health-seeking behavior around MCH, good ante-natal care, facility delivery, complimentary feeding, etc. as well as participating in savings schemes that allow them to provide diverse diets to their children. (Too often there is a lot of good instruction on providing good child care, but no resources in the household to access it. The savings group component can really empower the women who are participating.

It was quite a different setting than what I am used to. It is clear that the fishing industry is the primary economic activity along the lake and the biggest challenge is the transitory nature of the population. Many people pass through looking for an opportunity to earn some income then leave. Having a stable care group is one of the things the project struggles with.

After a full day in the field, I returned to Usenge and made the trip back to Nairobi, a day before our Arusha trip. (Rebecca talked about that.)

The last thing worth mentioning was the visit of Rebecca’s father David Sack. As a public health professional, he is still quite active in his 80s and has a number of projects related to vaccine development in East Africa. He had meetings in Mombassa a couple weeks ago so passed through Nairobi on the way back from them. He spent a few days with us. One of the highlights of his visit (besides the many things he brought from the US we ordered on Amazon) was a long walk in Karura forest, a forest in the middle of the city of Nairobi that is a kilometer or so from our house. Rebecca, Dave, and I took an 8km walk from the gate near our house and saw some very cool historic caves and a nice waterfall. It is so great to be able to take a walk, relatively alone so close to our house. (This is quite a contrast to Ethiopia.) On the weekend we took a road trip about 2 hours away to Lake Naivasha. There we boarded a boat to Crescent Island. It is a great tourist trap as it was used in a number of movies to film scenes of animals on the savannah (most notably Out of Africa). It was a great trip with many birds and hippos to see on the way out to the island. The animals on the island are quite used to humans and we could get quite close to zebra, giraffe, and ostriches. We ended the day with lunch by the lake and a beverage. It was a fun day.

I think that covers our last month sufficiently well albeit I left out several swim meets, golf games, and a women's retreat Rebecca attended. I will add by way of postscript that I am completing this in the Johannesburg airport. Our flight here was delayed and we missed the connection to Zambia, so I am stuck here overnight. A good chance to get this completed, but the story of our rep. meetings will need to wait for another update.