Founder’s Day

Scouting Trivia:  Baden Powell is buried in Kenya.

This past weekend there was a camp out a few kilometers from his grave.  I went with 12 of the scouts from my school.  We camped together, cooked together, hiked, and did community service together.  It was the first time that they had ever been on a scout camp out – and probably the furthest that most of them have ever been from their homes.  It rained and they got wet and cold, but they survived and they did not even complain once!

In Kenya, the principal activity of scouts is marching and raising the flag at school assemblies.  Most scouts and scout leaders do not know about all of the other components of scouting.  While at the camp out I met a few Kenyan scout leaders that are trying to teach them.  They are sponsored by an NGO from Denmark to train scout troops.  They told me how to get a Kenyan Scouting Association handbook for the scouts, where to buy merit badges, and how to encourage the scouts to continue on their own.

I met a lot of inspired Kenyans on the trip, to which I am grateful.  For instance, on Sunday we were planning on remaining at our camp site and then going the next morning. At noon I was informed that we had to leave that day.  My scouts mobilized quickly and were able to take down our camp, making it cleaner than the surrounding camp sites, in about half of an hour.  Then, as they were finishing, I went to figure out how to get back to school.  The public bus that we took to the camp left town at around 12:30, and it was the only direct bus from Maua to the camp, a journey which took us around 6 hours.  As I was trying to find a private school bus that could squeeze us and take us I came across a scout by the name of Jean (the first French name that I have seen in Kenya).  He spent over half of an hour with me helping me to track down a bus.  After all that help I offered him a soda and he told me to buy my own scouts a soda before I considered buying him one.  This might well have been the first time in Kenya when someone helped me so much and refused compensation. 

Jean’s actions radiated the image of Baden Powell that is ingrained into scouts.  My own scouts had never heard the story of the young scout that inspired Baden Powell to spread the scouting movement.  I wonder if Jean had, or if even without hearing it, his involvement in scouts helped to shape the same ideology.  Either way, I hope that through scouting, and outside of scouting, Jean, myself, and every other citizen can help to mold the younger generation into such enlightened beings. 

The bus that we found was for a private boarding primary school.  The primary students were trained in all sorts of scouting cheers and songs, and my students loved it.  Once we finally arrived back at our school I was exhausted, but the scouts continued to sing the new songs that they had learned.

And some pictures:

The first one shows the scouts’ tent.  It is made out of maize bags that have been cut and sewn together into a plastic sheet.  There was a lot of rain, and they were soaked.  This is scouting in Kenya though.  You also notice that they do not have uniforms, which is because a uniform costs almost as much as school fees for a term. 

As you can tell, they were super excited about all my nifty American camping gear.  Here they are showing us how to use my water filter and MSR dromedary.

On the last day of the camp out all of the scouts go to Baden Powell’s grave, which is located at he outskirts of Nyeri. 

Pizza Party

I held a pizza party for the students that scored above a 50% on the end of term exam for any of my classes. 

I will give an overview of the process for those of you that have not cooked in a wood-fired pizza oven before.

First, you make the dough, sauce, and toppings.  I use normal bread dough for my pizza, although I do not use a recipe, so it may not actually be so normal given the number of iterations that I have gone through.

While one person is making the dough, another person can light the fire in the oven.  The fire stays for about an hour and a half.  Then, you have to remove the coals.  I have had all sorts of accessories made for the oven, including my most recent addition, which is a metal pizza paddle.  The pizza paddle was well worth the $4 I paid for it, because it keeps me from burning all of the hair off of my arms each time I reach into the 600 degree Farenheit oven to add or remove a pizza.  The way that I used to do it was not good at all.

Then the coals are removed using another locally made tool.  I put the coals in a box in order to save them for later use and keep them from smoking all over the place.

Then the pizza is put into the oven.  Most people do not use pizza pans, and I may try this one day, but so far I have used aluminum pans that I bought at the local super-store.

The pizza is put into the oven and the first batch only takes about 5 minutes to cook due to the extreme heat.  My oven uses locally available materials and does not retain heat very well, but if I wanted to I could cook 3 or 4 rounds of pizza and bread.  Although so far I have only made enough dough for 2 rounds.

Then you cut the pizza, let it cool, and enjoy.  This pizza is topped with homemade sauce (fresh tomatoes, rosemary, oregano, basil, garlic, ground pepper, hot peppers, salt, a little sugar, etc), onions, squash, potatoes, carrots, and cheese.

Book Report

In part due to having stayed here for over a year life feels normal and it requires more focus to find the aspects that might be interesting to share with people in America.

Classes have started, and apart from getting malaria, I have been doing well.

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I have also been continuing to read, and the latest two books, The Invisible Cure and Imperial Reckoning, have been particularly good. The Invisible Cure is about HIV/AIDS in Africa. 

In the book the author gives her perspective on the progression of international aid given to Africa to combat HIV/AIDS.  What is dis-heartening about the system she portrays is that there seems to be a very low correlation between amount of money given and successful programs.  Yet, western countries continue to give billions of dollars a year.  PEPFAR, for instance, gives around $500 million per year to Kenya alone and is widely praised at home in America.

The “Invisible Cure” that the author alludes to is, collectively, the mass of locally born programs, which often times do not receive western aid.  The directors of these programs usually volunteer and struggle financially to serve their communities, yet they continue to serve despite the challenges.  This is in contrast to aid funded programs which have larger budgets, but also have goals designed with as much interest for receiving funding as for serving communities.

Certainly, international aid has improved many peoples lives.  For instance, aid, to my knowledge, has been effective at distributing ARVs and, in Kenya, setting up counseling and testing centers.  The short-coming of these programs is that they do not feed the many hungry Africans that are receiving the ARVS, nor do they address, in terms that the local population internalizes, the root causes behind the wide spread of HIV in Africa compared to other regions of the world.

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The other book, which I am currently reading, is Imperial Reckoning.  This book makes me seriously wonder why Kenyans trust any programs that come from the west.  The author of the book began investigating the final days of the British occupation of Kenya for a PhD history thesis at Harvard.  Through her research she uncovered the story of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans that were tortured – some being castrated or excruciatingly electrocuted.  Almost the entire Kikuyu population was put into detention camps or barbed wire villages, where they had no food and no land to farm.  Even those that were not in the camps were put onto overcrowded reserves and not allowed to sell produce or cereals in the open market.

This happened here.  It happened in the 1950’s.  Many of the stories in the book come from interviews with the author.  Many Kenyans lives are clearly worse due to the past occupation by the British and yet the many white people here today are not kicked out.  This seems fairly phenomenal to me.

An interesting factoid that I learned from the book is that chiefs did not exist, at least in Kenya, before the British.  This shocked me because all of my life I have imagined chiefs as being an integral component of tribal society.  In reality, chiefs were Kenyans loyal to the British, who were willing to abuse their own people for a share of the profit. 

There is so much talk about corruption in Kenya today, but people usually forget the circumstances that led the country to where it is today.  For instance, people complain that the courts are not good and that if you want to get your case heard it is likely that you will have to pay a bribe, but most people in my circles do not mention the case of Jomo Kenyatta. The governor of Kenya came up with the idea that incarcerating Kenyatta would stop the spread of the Mau Mau movement.  Unfortunately, he did not have enough evidence to convict Kenyatta, so he charged Kenyatta with the ambiguous crime of “managing an unlawful society” and paid a British judge to convict him.

Although most of these atrocities were committed against the Kikuyu, Meru are quick to add that they are closely related to the kikuyu and that generally the bantus were lumped together.  Regardless of who was most attacked, the racial fight was ultimately between the white settlers and the legitimate Kenyans.

Knowing the history helps to put this society into context.  It also helps to put into context the people who are now purporting to help Africans.  With this context it is not surprising that some Africans believe AIDS is a weapon created by white people to destroy Africans.