Me with 23 students, 7 peer counselors, and our patron, Ledama Olekina

August 10, 2005

Lord, I’m exhausted, and it’s only day one of the camp. As expected, it was chaos. I was trying to organize last minute things all morning.

Massad and Phylis went to the hostel and started making Welcome signs. The first students arrived a little after 3, just as we’d finished arranging the chairs and tables. The last came around 6, along with Linda and Elizabeth who had to travel from Kajiado this morning.

Kakenya was working at the internet café and didn’t come home until late, and Sylvia was at the wedding. Nelly never came back at all after graduation – not to help us plan and not for the camp. I don’t know what happened.

About 6 students never came either, though they accepted money for transport last week. Two called to let me know, and I think 3 are at Ole Tipis for tuition. Tuition is optional additional instruction during the breaks. But I called the school today, and they said they would release the girls for the camp.

The cook here is good at least, and dinner was right on time despite the fact that he found out he was cooking for 45 people around 4 this afternoon. After that, we did friendship bracelets which turned into friendship necklaces because we had so many beads. Then I gave my talk on journal writing. The girls looked bored to tears, but hopefully they’re just tired. I don’t have to speak again for the rest of the camp, so at least that’s out of the way!

August 12, 2005

It’s after 11, and I’m beyond exhaustion. I want to catch up on this though, because I don’t anticipate another break before I leave for the coast. We’re supposed to go on an internet field trip in the morning, so maybe I can send this out then.

It was a good day. I broke down into tears three times in the first 3 hours, but still it was good. Let me go back to yesterday.

In the morning, we did a session on peer pressure and then went up to the field for outdoor games. The outdoor games were really fun. Most of the girls seem to be loving the camp, but I guess I’m sensitive about the ones who look bored because I worked so hard to make this happen. There’s one girl who participates in almost nothing. She says she has a chest problem, and maybe she does, but it always seems to arise at convenient times.

We haven’t been able to keep time very well at the camp. Partly, this is because the hostel arrangements were poorly planned, and my girls have had to do a lot of work themselves. Yesterday they were helping to cook breakfast and cut up fruit. I had a talk with Loise about it, and she promised she wouldn’t make them do anything else. Then when I wasn’t around last night, she told them to get up at 5:30 this morning and make chapatis. Making chapatis is an extremely tedious process, and I was so mad after the promise she’d made. I had to spend 30 minutes myself rolling out the dough so my girls could get dressed.

We’ve really been treated like second-class citizens this whole event, and considering it’s a camp on empowerment, that’s pretty disappointing.

Vision 18 never came yesterday as promised, so we did our backup session on Gender Roles instead. I think it went pretty well. We did an exercise where we asked the girls to think about what their mothers lives were like – were they educated, did they marry young, did they have any control over household decisions. We listed everything they said, then asked them to think about how things are different for them. We listed those as well and finally had them list what they want for their daughters. They contributed a lot.

In the evening we had the Dating Game. It was really fun, and I got to play a woman competing for a bachelor. I decided to play it slutty. Hellene was just before me, and I swear she kept stealing my answers. When he asked what we enjoyed doing in our spare time, she said going to the beach. So I said, “She stole my answer again. And believe me honey, I fill out a bikini better than her!” The girls loved it, and I won!

This morning we had 2 field trips and were supposed to be back by 1:00 to meet Ledama’s guests. Thanks to the chapati-making and other disasters, we started 40 minutes late. My group went to MED first to learn about the internet. I also had pictures developed in town. I took one of each girl, and we’re going to frame it and give it to her as a gift when she leaves.

We got to the hospital about 90 minutes late, and I was stressing out. But the visit was good, and I didn’t want to stop it just so we could meet Ledama’s people. The education coordinator showed us around. He took us to the VCT first and talked about testing and also about what services are offered to women who are raped. Even here in Narok, a woman has free access to counseling, HIV testing, post-exposure prophylaxis, and emergency contraceptives. Who would have guessed?

He also took us to the family planning clinic and gave us a condom demonstration on a wooden model. Linda’s so funny. She said afterward, “I hope the model size was exaggerated!”

We were supposed to do a service project too in the manyattas they keep for TB patients. Apparently, if they think a person won’t be responsible enough to stay on the drugs for the required 8 months, they put him and his family in these tiny one-room concrete buildings to live. We were supposed to help clean some of the places, but by the time we arrived the patients had given up on us and done it themselves. Thank god, since by then it was after 2:00. The earlier group did get to help out, and Elizabeth took some nice pictures.

We finally got back to the hostel close to 3:00. Fortunately, Ledama and his guest had just arrived. Shortly after that, Elizabeth Muli arrived, the one and only Kenyan Ledama had managed to get for the career panel. Fortunately, she was awesome. She talked about women’s rights a bit, but actually wasn’t as knowledgeable as I’d hoped. But then she talked about herself, and the girls were really interested. She has a PhD from Standford and actually moved away from her husband for three years to go. She brought her newborn son with her, and she tried taking care of him and getting her PhD at the same time. Finally, though, she sent him back to her husband and finished her degree.

Elizabeth spoke for about 2 hours. After that, Ledama made me invite up the American woman. I found the whole thing highly annoying. I had warned him a week ago that if we were going to have her speak, I wanted it to focus on careers. Students can sometimes get distracted with a white person in the room and start asking a lot of questions about America. Ledama agreed whole-heartedly and said she should stick to talking about her work. But after 10 minutes of describing her rather uninteresting background, she said, “So does anyone have any questions about America?” I couldn’t keep quiet. I said, “Well, I’ve been with them for the last three days, and I’ve been living here for 2 years, so probably not.”

Still, she invited up her two college-aged sons to talk about their university experience in America. Again I say, who cares??? Still more annoying was that after an hour of talking, she invited them to come look at pictures of her wedding on their laptop, completely ignoring the fact that I had two more guests waiting to speak. Mrs. Njau, the teacher from St. Mary’s had been waiting for 3 hours at that point.

They also talked about entirely irrelevant things, like how the girls should apply for colleges in America or should do internet learning. Do they really think those things are in reach of these girls – who are all sponsored because they’re so poor? Don’t get me wrong; some could do it. In fact, one of the girls is sister to Eunice who got the scholarship to Chicago State. But I guess I was offended by them perpetuating the idea that the only way to improve their lives is to leave Kenya.

Anyway, the VIPs finally left, and we got back to basics. Mrs. Njau gave a really nice talk to them about achieving their goals. She seemed so happy to be participating and much more at ease once the people with the “long CVs” left. I gave both her and Elizabeth certificates, and you should have seen how excited the girls were.

The last event of the night was a talk on HIV/AIDS. This was a bad thing to do so late in the evening, because the girls were exhausted. But we’d had to switch the career panel so I had no choice. It went ok, but it was the first time I really missed the presence of Nelly. She was supposed to be facilitating this camp with us, but she never showed up, and her expertise on the immune system was much needed. Hellene tried taking over, but didn’t know much, and it deteriorated into an argument between the facilitators about how each type of blood cell works.

I feel bad for Hellene, because she really wants to shine more I think. She’s taken on extra talks and volunteered lots of help and ideas. For some reason, I seem to keep rejecting the ideas. They’re often not practical given the time we have.

OK, it’s 12:30, and we have what the girls call “morning stress” at 6:30am. Good night!

August 20, 2005

I'm writing this several days after the camp ended, so hopefully I won't forget too much. Despite the stress, it was very successful. Saturday afternoon, we were running short of time so we did our outdoor games in front of the hostel and next to the gas station. We were doing a game in which we hold hands in a circle and have to pass two hoops all the way around without letting go. An elderly Japanese woman walked over from her safari vehicle and stood there fascinated. Finally, she joined in and had a ball. She was so cute; I wish I'd gotten a picture!

We had the talent show in the evening, and maybe I was cranky but it was just awful. There were several music and dance solos, and they were eerily bad for a race of people who are purported to have so many natural gifts in these areas. I think it's because they chose to perform hip-hop instead of traditional tribal music. My girls did a funny skit, and Massad did a poem that really made me laugh. I helped out with two acts. Massad and Santa ended with an apparently hilarious skit; it was all in Swahili, so I didn't understand a word of it! The show went until midnight.

In the morning, we did an appreciation exercise and basically killed time until Ledama arrived at 11. Ledama gave a nice speech to the girls and we presented certificates to each one along with a framed picture of herself.