Me with four of our peer counselors: Irene, Phylis, Massad, and Nellie
May 25, 2005
Camp GLOW has commenced! It’s been a very long day. We got to the matatu stage around 10 with 4 of our MED girls and weighed down with luggage. We bought an extra ticket for Ann, my secondary school girl who we were picking on the way, so all in all we totaled seven. We got the “lucky” matatu – before anyone had even boarded, several dozen live chickens had been strapped to the roof. The ropes had slipped, and some were hanging down the sides, so my view on the trip to Nairobi was of an upside-down hen, wings spread, staring at me with a look of desperation that said, “Get me out of here!”
The trip took three hours, including several stops to resituate the chickens and a flat tire. Volunteers and their girls congregated at Java House in city center. We thought it would be nice to treat our girls to a nice American style meal. Ann ordered the chicken salad, took one bite and treated it much the way I did those intestines last week. Poor girl. She must have been so happy to have rice and beef tonight!
Allison and I walked to the train station and hired a matatu. We offered to pay double the normal fare to pick everyone at Java House and take us all the way to the camp. Normally, the camp is a 20 minute walk in Kibera past the matatu stop – Kibera being the largest slum in East Africa.
It’s a good group of volunteers here, mainly a mixture of the old and new committee with a few others thrown in. Luke is the only male among 40-50 volunteers and students, but he handles it well.
This evening we had a presentation on deaf culture. Darcy brought two of her students with her, and we wanted to be sure they weren’t alienated from the other girls. A woman named Josephine came to talk. She became deaf when she was 18. She was a great speaker (or signer I should say). Most Kenyans think of deaf people as completely unable to do anything for themselves. In fact, in Kiswahili, people with disabilities are put into a separate noun class. Most people and animals are in the M/WA class like msichana (girl), mzee (old man), or mwalimu (teacher). But people who are deaf (kiziwi) or blind (kipofu) are put into the KI/VI class, which is usually reserved for things like kikombe (cup) or kiatu (shoe). Josephine explained all of this and asked, “Am I a thing? Am I a cup or a shoe?” She also taught some sign language at the end, and it really had an impact on the girls. I’ve seen some of our MED girls walking over to the deaf students and trying finger spelling!
May 27, 2005
I have some time off this morning since the girls are on a field trip at Nairobi Women’s Hospital. Yesterday was not so relaxing. We were woken at 7 for stretching exercises led by the Depot. Then we had an outdoor problem solving activity. We have a lot of those this week, and I wish I’d come prepared. It’s really muddy up here, and I brought mostly skirts assuming we’d be in meetings.
We had a mid-morning hike planned, but it was canceled so Emma, Sara, and I organized some Ultimate Frisbee games. The girls were surprisingly good and really enjoyed it!
After lunch, we had an anti-rape workshop. I was a bit concerned about it at first, because the group launched right into defensive maneuvers without explaining what rape is. Also, they wouldn’t address what a woman should do if she is raped. All they do is prevention. Ros assured us we would talk about the other issues later in the week. But the timing was just bad. Also, the group leader stood up and gave tips for prevention, and he explicitly said that the way you dress may get you raped. That bothered a lot of us, and we tried to address the misconception at the end.
Mainly, I was afraid the group was really scaring the girls. They were saying you could never trust any man – you always had to be alert. And they never talked about date rape at all. I spoke during the Q&A and tried to remind the girls that most men are not rapists.
The session of defense moves was really good though. The girls were shy at first, but eventually I think they all got up and tried it! All of them were surprised by their own strength and seemed more confident afterwards.
In the afternoon, we had more muddy activities. In the first, our group had to solve this problem: A circle was drawn on the ground about 12 feet in diameter and a small cup placed in the center. We were given a rope and told we couldn’t step into the circle or let the rope touch the ground inside the circle. We had to retrieve the cup somehow without touching the ground. To add to that, only one person could actually retrieve the cup and they had to be blindfolded. The solution itself was simple. We anchored the rope on 2 trees and had the girl hang upside down on it and monkey across. But there was a rule that volunteers weren’t allowed to speak, so the girls had to direct everything. Several girls tried to retrieve the cup but weren’t getting good direction from the rest of the group about where it was. Finally, Lucy, one of the deaf girls, asked if she could try. Since she was blindfolded and couldn’t hear us giving her direction, we shook the rope when she got overtop the cup. I don’t think anyone believed she could do it, but on her second attempt she found the cup and got across. It was amazing. Our facilitator was speechless.
In the next activity, Lucy came through again and helped us finish the task. It was a pretty scary one involving a high balance beam and some very inattentive spotters.
Ann and the MED girls seem to be having a great time. I’m amazed at how much bolder all of them have gotten.
Last night I gave my talk on journal writing and poetry. I think it went pretty well. I wasn’t nervous at least. I shared the Shel Silverstein poem “You have a magic carpet”, and I think they liked it. The volunteers did anyway. Then Darcy got up and showed us a little deaf poetry, and the girls really enjoyed that.
During the night, we got more rain than I’ve ever experienced in Africa. Or maybe it just seemed that way under our tin roofs. The girls are much tougher than us. They got up early to take cold bucket baths and dress in their school uniforms for the field trip. I suppose this camp is like most summer camps in America except for the cold baths, cement choos, and the abundance of monkeys looking for a free meal.
May 28, 2005
I probably won’t have much free time to write. We’re in a session right now with Men to Men, an organization of men who promote equal rights. The first hour was valuable, but typical of Kenyan men, they’ve gone on too long when they’re supposed to be wrapping things up.
The hospital field trip went well according to Emma and the girls. They visited the gender violence center where they learned a little more about rape, emergency contraception, and emergency prophylaxis to prevent HIV.
Jennifer C., another PC volunteer, gave the tour. She is working on making these things available in all district hospitals. Jennifer approached Ros after the session and said she noticed a change in the expressions of some of the girls when they talked about rape. Jennifer suspects that many of them have been raped or molested.
In the afternoon, the other Amy Y. led a talk on assertiveness. We broke into groups and played the best response game. Amy gave us a line that a man would use to pressure a girl into sex and each group came up with a response. The MED girls and two other post-secondary girls acted as judges and chose the best response. Our team won two rounds!
At dinnertime, a professional panel of women joined us. We assigned 4-5 girls with similar career interests to join a woman for dinner and ask questions. Then we got everyone together for a Q&A. Mary Onyango came with 2 college age daughters and talked about breast health. We also had a nurse, a lawyer, two teachers, Josephine (the deaf politician), and Susan who does HIV counseling at a deaf VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing Center).
All of the women are so cool. Tina brought her counterpart Redempta with her. I’ve been hearing about her for months, and she is everything Tina described – strong, confident, beautiful. She and Tina are neighbors and have become really good friends. I wish I had been lucky enough to find a Kenyan woman I could identify with more.
At the end, each woman stood up and gave a small bit of advice for the students. I liked Mary’s best. She was the only one to address relationships and men. Men, she said, always put one foot in the pond and one on dry ground. That way, they can pull out when things get rough. Women jump in with both feet. So she advised them to keep one foot on dry ground until they’ve achieved their goals.
May 29, 2005
Yesterday, we started off with a session by Men to Men. First Kennedy introduced himself and talked about the difference between men and women. To break the girls of their shyness, he made them list the body parts that made us different, then wrote them on the board. Apparently in Kenya women have a virgina!
Phillip got up next. He was not so popular among the volunteers, mainly because he said that "kissing is sex" and that if you kiss a man you’re heading down the slippery slope to intercourse. He also said you can get HIV from kissing. Then it went really downhill when Kennedy stood up and said that a good way to see if a man is serious about you is to tell him you’re pregnant. Gai!
A lot of this is cultural, so we didn’t know how to approach it. We don’t want the girls to be afraid of men – they should know that they’re allowed to set their own boundaries and expect the men to respect them. The problem is that many men in Kenya don’t, and if we encourage these girls to experiment, we might actually be setting them up to be raped. It’s a tough position for us. But we want them to know that good men exist.
I approached Redempta and the other teacher Mary Ann and asked them if they could lead a more positive session about men and sex. Mary Ann’s first reaction was, “But most men are bad.” But they did a talk this morning without the volunteers, and I hear it went well.
After Men to Men, we had two female lawyers, Terry from the Federation of Women Lawyers and Ann from the Women’s Rights Awareness Program. Mainly they talked about rape and violence, and it was a pretty heavy session.
Both women have seen the worst of cases, and Ann was pretty candid about her view of men after what she’s witnessed. She said that all men are potential rapists. That bothered me a lot, but again the culture is different here. She did tell us later that she’s married to a good man and that there are exceptions.
When she first stood up, she did an exercise to get the girls comfortable. She called on students from different tribes and asked them to name the tribal words for the male and female body parts and for rape. They were so embarrassed at first and giggled. And many of the girls didn’t know at all. Most of the girls here are Kikuyu, and none of them knew the word for rape. There probably isn’t one. My poor Ann got stuck naming the Maasai words, but the MED girls helped her out. There are no other Maasai at the camp.
After that, we went through the steps to take in case of rape and physical abuse. The girls gave suggestions, and it was interesting that in neither case did they mention going to the police. Ann suggested it but warned the girls that police would harass them and probably blame them.
I think it was a good session but a bit difficult to hear, so I was glad for some lighter activities later. After dinner, Sara and Carla hosted the Dating Game. The two of them were hysterical.
In the first round, volunteers and older girls played the parts of 3 men and a woman. Two of the men had bad stereotypes and one was good. Then the audience voted on the best man. We did 4 more rounds with girls who volunteered. We added a lot of humor to it. Before the last question on each round, Luke would run across the room waving his hands up and down and yelling, “Sparkle fingers! Sparkle fingers!” He also played our last woman.
In between rounds, we did commercial breaks. In the first, Allison, Laura, Tina, and I did a VCT/Condom ad. I painted on a mustache and acted the part of a man trying to talk Tina into sex. We sang the Elvis song Suspicious Minds. We did the first two lines of the verse together: “Caught in a trap…” Then I said, “C’mon, baby. Don’t you trust me?” Tina pulled out a condom, and said, “I’ve got trust right here. Trust condoms.” Laura and Allison were our backup, and Laura leaned in and said, “She comes prepared!” Then I sang the next 2 lines “Why can’t you see…”. Allison leaned in and said, “Maybe they should go to the VCT, guys! What do you think?” Then we stood up together, held hands and walked to the VCT singing, “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds…” The girls really got a kick out of me acting the part of a man.
The next commercial was a serious public service announcement to undo the damage of Men to Men and explain how small the chances of getting HIV from kissing really are.
Finally, Amy played a WWF announcer and Luke and Kumiko played wrestlers and threw chairs at each other. It was hysterical.
May 30, 2005
Yesterday, our first guests were Lilian and Delphine, women living with HIV. Delphine was at Take Our Daughters to Work last year. She tested positive in 1992, and is still fairly healthy. But she was supposed to spend the whole week with us and ended up being sick the first few days.
Delphine has a 3 year old son from a man who refused to wear condoms even though she was positive and he’d never been tested. The man she’s with now refuses to be tested too, and she still doesn’t know the status of her son. She’s so candid about her life, and I think this is so good for the girls. She admits she doesn’t know who infected her, and that she spent six years in denial after being tested. She gave the advice yesterday to forgive yourself for the mistakes you make.
Lilian had a funny way of speaking that seems to be a common denominator in all Kenyans. I’ve never noticed it before, but maybe it’s just how they talk to students. They start a sentence that has an obvious conclusion and expect the audience to finish it. And their tone goes up like a question. For example: “My father was a polygamist. He had four?” And the audience replies “Wives.” I think they do it to make sure people are really listening. Sometimes the answer is not so obvious though, and they have to start the word for you. “At 4:00 we’re going to have cha…?” And every one answers “Chai.”
We talked about how HIV is transmitted and were concerned when one girl stood up and said kissing. Those damn men confused them!
The rain has been pretty much constant all week. But we’d missed our campfire the night before, and the girls were really disappointed. So Sara, Emma, and I volunteered to get one started last night. It was not easy. We spent 90 minutes going through the pile of wet wood to find good kindling and logs. That’s when it started raining. It stopped again after dinner. I did most of the chopping myself with the one dull machete available. Anybody every chopped logs with a dull machete? It ain’t easy. But it all paid off when Darcy complimented my sculpted arms. It took some doing, but we got a beautiful fire started. We were so proud.
Sara is really fun. She attempts to fill the Marcia void in my life with fun activities. Yesterday, for instance, she declared foreign accent day. I did British, she did Kenyan English. We wore people’s patience after 30 minutes, but it was fun while it lasted.
Before the campfire, the students did short plays that were really dramatic and well-acted – even comical at times. But I was most impressed with the song led by Nellie and Irene. I assume they just made it up. They formed a line and marched around in an oval singing “Women are the drivers of this train of equality.” These girls have great voices, and I’m looking forward to the talent show tonight.
While I was working on the campfire, apparently one of the students stood up and performed a poem about how condoms don’t work. It was in Swahili, but it said something about how they were made of rubber and tires can burst. We had the family planning talks today, so I hope they learned something.
At the campfire, we talked about friendships. We each had to get up and name one thing we give to our friends. Then we had to name something we expect from our friends. I said in a British accent that I expected my friends to participate in Foreign Accent Day, so Allison spoke in a French accent and Tina and Sara in Kenyan English. Emma was amazed at all the Kenyan English she heard throughout the week. She’d only heard me speak it before, and I guess she thought I was just an idiot. But we all sound the same. I don’t know where we picked it up, but it works!
May 31, 2005
It was an exhausting week, and I was really starting to fade in the end. Yesterday, we started the morning out with a guest speaker on family planning and contraceptives. Luke sat this talk out, which was probably a wise decision on his part. At one point, the woman asked everyone in the room to raise their hand if they’d seen their own “endude”. [The Maasai word for, well, you can guess.] Most of the volunteers raised their hands. Delphine leaned over to me and said, “I saw it once. I didn’t like it.” We laughed.
Sara gave a condom demonstration for the crowd, and we filled one with water to show how strong they are. Several hours later, the girls were still playing with their water balloon!
In the afternoon, we had a session where we wrote our name on a big piece of paper and passed it around in a circle to everyone else to sign like a yearbook. I made the mistake of sitting right next to the other Amy Y., so she got a lot of messages for me. Some of the ones from the Kenyan students make little sense, since their written English is not always so good. For example: “As every minutes passes u are getting old and so try to hurry up and be careful.”
In the evening was the talent show. The volunteers had so little time to plan. Emma and I were lucky and got invited by our girls to do something with them. And I have to say it was one of the best. First, we did a small skit about miscommunication. I played the father to Phylis, and Massad played a guy who liked her. He tried to get her to have sex by saying “Give me.” – apparently a common male phrase in Kenya. She said no. Later he came to me to ask for a jembe (a hoe). I told him to ask Phylis for it, so Massad went to Phylis and said, “Your father said to give me.” Phylis acted shocked and called to me. And I yelled, “Just give him or I will beat you!” The students really laughed.
After that, we did a Maasai song and dance. Emma and I tied kikoys around us like Maasai shukas. We stood in a line and each person had to come forward and do something individually. Emma and I walked forward together and jumped up and down like Maasai women shouting “Aiiii!”. It was hysterical. At the end, I yelled, “Look at us, we’re dancing crazy!” and we all transformed into our own styles.
There were a lot of great acts. Lucy and Phylis, the deaf students, danced. Volunteers did both the chicken dance and the electric slide. Delphine, Redempta, and Mary Ann stuffed clothing into their trousers to give themselves huge butts and danced. The best volunteer effort, though, was definitely Donna and Darcy. They put on the song “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”, and did a sign dance to it. All of the volunteers sang along, and the students looked at us like we were crazy.
The students mainly did their own poetry or sang songs – traditional and original. They have this funny habit of coming up, doing a little curtsy and saying something like “Welcome. On the stage is Mercy Wambui Waigera here to present a poem entitled AIDS: the Monster” . Laura’s girl was the funniest. She listed her school and PO Box in the introduction, then did a poem about women’s rights that included the line: “You have turned me into a sex satisfactory machine.”
I was really impressed by the four MED girls this week. They were really great as leaders for the girls and they contributed so much knowledge and insight to the sessions.
I asked Ann what she liked most. She said she liked it all but was glad to learn the facts about HIV, because she really didn’t know before. Her dad died of HIV, and she didn’t know anything about it!
One of Allison’s girls said that her friends and family were asking her what she would bring back for them from Nairobi. She had told them she would bring everything in her brain, and that now she had so much to bring back.
