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| MCC 2025 |
Relentless is how our workload is feeling at the moment, so it is even hard to find a few hours to sit quietly and write a blog. When there is free time, I almost just want to do something more catatonic. Playing the banjo is my current drug of choice.
But we are committed to providing updates to friends and families who are keeping up with our lives, so I will try to get something up now.
I think the current workload is seasonal. This is the time of year when we both send off, and receive one-year service volunteers. It is called MCC's Global Service Learning (GSL) program. We sent off 5 of them at the beginning of August. Rebecca was not even back for that. I had them over for dinner, and we played some rounds of Telestrations. I made them Indian food for some cultural exposure. They are heading off to India, Cambodia, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Rwanda. It is honestly quite amazing to be sending Kenyan and Tanzanian young adults to all these places for a year of service.
The group we received came just a day before Rebecca arrived. There was a general orientation for all of them in Nairobi (people coming and going) from all over Africa. I was able to attend some of that orientation and did a session on Anabaptist history. I also taught them the dance Yerusalemu. There were over 100 of them going to different places. The logistics for this gathering were mainly handled by our regional office, but our team was also quite heavily involved in some of the logistics.
When the larger orientation was over, we were left with 6 of the GSLers who were selected to do a year in our Kenya-Tanzania program. They are Lainie--from Canada, Esther and Zoey from the US, Sheila from Ecuador, and Yasou and Selam from Ethiopia. We have planned placements for them in pairs in Nairobi, Arusha, and a place in central western Kenya called Olepolos. But before they are placed, we do 2 weeks of in-country orientation with them. This includes cultural lessons, a Swahili intensive, introduction to the MCC Kenya/TZ program, getting SIM cards, cell phones, computers, meetings with host families, and partner staff where they would work. We also took them to some local church services and other activities in Nairobi.
Rebecca also had them over to dinner to welcome them, and we played Telestrations again. It is a great ice-breaker game, even for those with English as a second language. During all of this 2 members of our staff work furiously to complete the visa application process for all 6 of them--4 for Kenya and 2 for Tanzania. The one-year volunteer visa rules have changed drastically in Kenya, so the process is proving quite difficult. We will likely need an agent to complete it. Getting visas and work permits seems to be getting harder everywhere. But we pray that we will succeed once again.
Speaking of visas and work permits, as an aside, I have had a fair amount of frustration trying to complete the work permit renewal for our Monitoring specialist, Charles. We had completed the application and paid a whopping (around $4500), but the cost was supposed to be ($4500.25). Since we missed the .25 service fee, they said the payment was incomplete. We went to the bank and added it, but then they said it could not be done in 2 installments as they can only show 1 line of payment on the computer, not both. So they could not show the whole amount. They did not have an immediate way to resolve this and have asked us to wait for several weeks to see if they can put the 2 amounts together in their system. I have had to go back to immigration often to check on the progress. They keep telling me they are working on it and that it started with OUR mistake. I asked if anyone had ever made a wrong payment amount before, and they assured me that it happened every day. They really had no answer when I asked why, then, was it so hard to correct? But that is a normal 'day in the life' for me at this point.
But I don't want to sound like life is all frustration. By contrast to the above, we had a nice afternoon with the volunteers walking through Karura forest, and on their last Sunday, we invited them to our church, where they were having an 'International Day'. It was great because we sang songs in many languages, including Spanish and Amharic. It was nice for them to be part of an international congregation. I think the Ethiopians felt most at home, as we have a pretty big Ethiopian community in the church, and they provided a huge amount of homemade Ethiopian food for the potluck luncheon that followed. Rebecca and I also led a French group of singers with banjo and guitar to sing Reçois l'adoration by Exo. People loved that, and we were asked to teach it to the congregation in a service for some future Sunday.
During the 2-week orientation, I had one out-of-town field visit that lasted 4 days. I went to Turkana with 3 other staff--James, William, and Charles. We went to visit 2 projects, and the timing was crucial because one of them was a humanitarian relief project with a food distribution scheduled on a certain day that week. We wanted to make sure we were there for that. William lives in Eldoret, North of Nairobi, and he rode with our partner to a town called Morulem in Turkana, where we planned to meet. James, Charles, and I took a small commercial plane from Nairobi and arrived in a town in Turkana called Lodwar, where they have an airport. We stayed the night there as we got there in the late afternoon and driving to Morulem was about 3 hours.
I should add that Turkana is basically a desert. It is very dry and quite hot. It has a barren look to it, although there is a lot of dried vegetation. It is not densely populated, and during our 3-hour drive on dirt roads, we did not see many people. The people we did see were pastoralists who looked a bit like Maasai, although women would were a stack of beads around their neck that pushed their shoulders down and made them look like they had long necks. Quite striking. I felt like they seemed to have a life similar to the "Fremin" in the book Dune. (Fortunately there were no giant sand worms!) But there were termite mounds that rose 15 to 20 feet in the air, probably hundreds of years old.
We left early in the morning and arrived in Morulem about 9am. We checked into the hotel and then went to visit a food security and water project being run by our partner, NCCK (National Council of Churches Kenya). They have been working on a project to improve crop yields for farmers who work in an irrigation scheme that was built in the early 1980s, using water from a nearby river. NCCK also installed a borehole and ran a water pipe several kilometers to a waterpoint in the center of 'town'. We began our visit with a tour of the recently completed borehole and waterpoint. It was good to see this fully realized, as it was the last deliverable of a 2-year project, where I legitimately doubted they would manage to complete it. When we went to the water point, it was very gratifying to see women lined up to get water in jerry cans for their nearby households.
We had a meeting with local leaders who expressed appreciation for the changes they were seeing. From there, we proceeded to a storage warehouse which was packed with harvested bags of maize and sorghum. The change from the visit a year ago was marked. The huge increase in harvest was attributed to the improved farming techniques they had learned through the project our partner was running. We did provide improved seeds for the previous planting season, but also the use of furrows and other water catchment techniques helped them have an excellent harvest.
From there, we proceeded to a demonstration plot where different water preservation techniques were being tested-- furrows, zai pits, and a tree nursery where indigenous seedlings were sprouting for replantation by members of the community.
We had an odd incident happen during our visit to the demonstration field. While we discussed learnings and challenges with local farmers in a circle near the field, a snake fell out of a tree right into the circle and almost hit Charles. It was sitting on the ground, and with all the farmers with machetes and hoes, I was certain they would make quick work of it. Generally, the rule here is 'kill all snakes' as most of them are deadly. This one was not very venomous, a sand snake. I was stunned because everyone ignored it and just kept talking. We went on for another 15 minutes while the snake just sat there with its head poised. Then a woman came up with a watering can and sprinkled some water on its head.
Even James and William, our Kenyan colleagues, were shocked by the reaction of the Turkana community to the snake. We asked about this later with some of our partner staff, and they said that in Turkana culture, every clan is associated with an animal. There is a clan that is associated with a snake, so everyone regards killing a snake as an attack on that clan, or at least a bad omen. It was one of the most counterintuitive I have seen here. You learn something new every day.
We had lunch with the community, then went out to look at the farm land and see some of the community fields under cultivation. We saw fields full of sorghum, maize, vegetables, etc. But I also need to mention the other most prevalent invasive vegetation that has taken over most of the land. It is called Prosopis Juliflora and it is a good example of doing more harm than good because it was introduced by foresters to decrease land degradation in arid regions of Africa. But it has become the most devastating invasive species in the subcontinent. It completely obliterates biodiversity by competing with all native vegetation, saps the land of water, destroys grazing land, and grows into a large bush with a deep tap root in a matter of months.
Farmers have to clear any fallow fields of this stuff every season. It has completely overwhelmed the entire Turkana region, replacing both forests and biodiverse rangeland. Erradication seems impossible at this point, and farmers have been asking for training on how to manage it.
We spent the night in Morulem, then headed back to Lodwar the next day. Here we planned to see a food distribution by our partner the Kenya Mennonite Church. MCC had provided funds for a humanitarian relief project--3 months of food, to try to cover gaps in food distributions that were the result of cuts to USAID funding (which supported food for WFP). We met our partner the evening before and made a logistics plan to arrive and what the day would be like. Food distributions, without good organization, can be quite chaotic. Beneficiaries had been selected and were on a list and the ration amounts were premeasured in bags, ready to distribute based on a standard measure per person of maize, oil, salt and pulses.
We arrived at the distribution site the next morning. It was a church compound with a wall around it and a front and back gate. We found many people waiting inside already, and much of the food already set out in piles based on rations. There was also a large open tent for govt. officials, and the whole event started with many govt. speeches. I was asked to do an interview for a local television broadcast as well. This delayed the start of the distribution by about an hour but it finally got underway. People were called up by name, then provided a fingerprint for proof of receipt on a piece of paper and were given their ration and sent out the back side of the compound. This went smoothly for several hours but when the list was done and there was still some food left (because of some absences from the list) the crowd started getting rowdy. Their attention became increasingly focused on Charles and I since we were the only foreigners (and maybe perceived to have some authority to give them the food?) When we realized that this was making the situation less secure, we headed out the back gate (Charles, James, and I) and took taxi motorcycles (boda bodas) back to our hotel. Despite the end, the distribution went very well.
We returned to Nairobi on a flight that afternoon and were back in time for dinner.
We spent the following week finishing orienting the GSLers, as well as pursuing Charles's work permit, which remained stuck in limbo. The GSLers ended their orientation, and we had an in-person meeting for all MCC staff that week before sending them off. The gathering was entertaining as we had some fun icebreaking activities like line dancing and some skits, but also covered a number of important topics on reporting on finances. Then, on Thursday, different ones of us took each of the 3 pairs of volunteers to their assignments. Nairobi was the easiest as the host families were in town, about 20 minutes from the MCC office. Both Selam and Yassou will serve a school in an informal settlement called Embakasi, and they were dropped off first.
Nelly and Charles took Lainie and Esther up to Olepolos, where they will serve a school, church, and health center. This is a Masai community. Rebecca and I were left to drive Sheila and Zoey to Arusha, Tanzania to meet their host families and our partner ECHO, a food security partner we are working with. Our trip was the longest and lasted 3 days. I will give the short version as we fortunately had no problem getting there or hassles at the border. We visited the partner, then took each of them to their host families, where we chatted a bit, then left them for their first night.
I was struck by how different Nairobi and Arusha are with regard to language. Everyone in Nairobi speaks great English; in Arusha, we did not speak English with the host families at all. Only Swahili. It gave Rebecca and I a chance to really brush up on our Swahili.
The next day, we picked them back up and gave them a tour of Arusha. That was a lot of fun since we used to live there. We had a good time finding old haunts and interesting places. We ate lunch together at a food court, we also showed them how to catch a shuttle back to Nairobi, and where the good hospitals were. It might have been a bit overwhelming for them, although Arusha is small compared to Nairobi.
We dropped them back at their host families for the last time that evening, and Rebecca and I went to visit our friends the Taylors for dinner before returning to our guesthouse. We left at 6am to return to Nairobi before noon and got back in 4.5 hours. David had a swim meet, and we arrived in time to see one race. David, unfortunately, was feeling quite sick after he inhaled water during a 200 IM and had to go home early.
We had a low-key rest of the weekend and after a round of golf, were somewhat recovered for Monday.
Turkana visit
International Day at church, French singers
With Selam and Yasou at International Day
