The return

Yesterday I spent the day in Gatanga where I did my Peace Corps service from 2003-2005. It’s not the first time I’ve been back – I traveled to Kenya in the winter of 2008 and again in the summer of 2009 and visited Gatanga both times.  The main focus of each visit is to spend time with Sebastian Maina Wambugu, founder and program manager of Youth Action for Rural Development (YARD), a community based organization that does a range of grassroots community development work ranging from training on sustainable agriculture to supporting AIDS orphans to providing computer training to youth.  Each time I leave impressed by how much progress YARD has made, without losing its focus on grassroots community development (more on this in a future post). 

It was a whirlwind tour – since I only had a few hours it made for a lot of short visits with friends I spent many many hours back then.  By a somewhat amazing coincidence the Peace Corps that followed me at YARD, Johnny Finity, was visiting at the same time.  For him it had been even longer since being back in Gatanga – 7 years!  He started something called the GoBe Foundation, which aims to help young pursue their passions, and improve their storytelling ability to help them communicate their passions to those who can help support them.   He had just finished spending a month in Gatanga running a program for 40 Kenyan teens.

Of course Sebastian, his wife Esther, and their children are more than colleagues - they're close friends, so my visit was mostly a social one.  One thing I’m always struck by when visiting is how critical the social component of community development work is.  I often felt like I spent an incredible amount of what seemed like wasted time drinking chai, chatting with farmers, waiting around for people to show up for meetings.  When I visit now of course socializing is all that I do. 

Sebastian, Esther, their daughters (Big) Nancy and (Small) Nancy, me, and Johnny.

But the reality is that socializing is how you build trust, and without trust you can’t communicate important information to members of the community, nor get information from them.  You could argue that information sharing is the most critical part of development work. 

That said, it’s unlikely my visit yesterday had any development impact, but it sure was fun to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances, temporarily re-immerse myself in this community (with all its unique quirks) and be back in this beautiful physical environment.  

#ibmcsc Kenya

The Nancys horsing around with their dad

YARD's new office - a big step up!

YARD's weekly work schedule

A few old friends from the community. 

A stroll down memory lane with Mama John, one of the community leaders.  She had some pictures of the going away party she and a few other community members threw me when I was about to leave.

A new addition to the YARD portfolio - a small community food bank.  Farmers sell their grain here, and reserve a portion for the most needy

A selfie with Grace, a long time dedicated YARD staffer now concentrating on AIDS counseling.  She's living in the apartment I lived in when I lived there.

A sample of the beautiful Gatanga landscape.  It's on the foothills of the Aberdares, a highly underrated, under-visited part of Kenya.

 She's actually a sweet little girl, I promise...

 

Brooklyn cool has reached Nairobi.

Brooklyn cool has reached Nairobi! Although I'm not familiar with any springs in Brooklyn...

What's changed?

It's been five years since I was in Kenya.  My #ibmcsc #kenya colleagues are asking me - what’s changed?

Right off the bat, I notice a few things in the plus column, a few in the minus, and a lot in the grey zone…

Plus column:

·      Real growth and development in the tech sector (see previous post)

·      Tangible sense of optimism about economic growth and opportunity

Minus column:

·      The traffic is much worse.  So much so that it now has a real impact on the kind of plans you can make (e.g. it may no longer be feasible to travel to work, then go home, then go to another neighborhood for dinner). 

·      Security is on another level altogether.  It seems like entering any public building now requires at least a pat-down, if not a full metal detector, empty your pockets, sign in and out kind of affair

Grey zone

·      New road construction.  Grey zone because it might provide temporary traffic relief but only temporary…if the past history of other cities is any indication the new roads will fill up just as soon as they’re opened.  Nairobi might be at the point of no return with regard to cars – there will only be more and more cars and no amount of road building will alleviate the traffic much. 

·      Lots of new building construction.  Nice sign of growth and prosperity, but how are all these people going to get around? Where will the water come from?

·      Fewer street hawkers.  It probably does keep things a bit safer and more orderly, but I miss those guys! What if I DO want to buy a pink elephant balloon on the street while sitting in traffic? I'm reminded of my probably best ever Kenyan street purchase.  It was in 2009 when Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn to Eat – a book about corruption in Kenya – had just come out.  It was hard to find in bookstores (they were afraid to carry it) but where did I find it? From a hawker on the street when I was sitting in traffic in a matatu. Another great street purchase was finding a hawker selling the exact political map of Africa I’d been hunting all over town for for days. 

It’s easy to lament some of the changes, and no doubt some could be better managed, but on the other hand any fast growing place is going to have challenges and growing pains.  Kenya is no exception.

That's traffic on a road that I don't think used to have traffic on it

A visit to the iLab

The new Strathmore University campus - I'm told it's the greenest university campus building in Africa

Now that I understand Tumblr requires users to register to read blog posts, switching over to Blogger.  Alas.   #ibmcsc Kenya

I'll try to keep up both, for those Tumblr lovers out there.  http://luke-dport.tumblr.com/

One of the trends I've been following from a distance with great interest lo these last five Kenya-less years has been the continuing growth in size and maturity of the tech scene here.  And in fact not just in Kenya - Bongohive ran a crowd sourcing project to count how many incubators there were across the continent and found there were 90 of them.  At least two tech incubators have sprung up in Kenya since I last visited in 2009. One is iHub, which grew out of Ushahidi, the Kenyan-born non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. I hope to visit iHub while I'm here.  The other is iLab, at Strathmore University, which is an incubator and research center under the faculty of Information Technology at Strathmore.  We were lucky enough to visit iLab today at Strathmore's swanky (relatively) new campus in town.

We had a chance to hear from a couple of students about projects they are working on.  Two young women (rookie blogger mistake - not getting the names and contacts of the people you want to mention in your blog!) are developing an app to enable entrepreneurs to conduct name searches via mobile phone as part of the process of registering their business - a process that typically takes a number of time-wasting trips to a government agency downtown.  Another is building an app that lets you purchase digital versions of locally published magazines. 

Another young woman described an app she's working on to provide fish farmers with data on fish prices and information on fish farm management.  What was extra impressive about her was how much she understood about fish farming, and perhaps most importantly, specifics on why fish farmers have not on the whole successful up until now (this will the topic of a future blog here).  Among the factors she called out: fish farmers try to save money by feeding their fish food that's recommended for later in the fishes' lives because it's cheaper, when in fact you need to feed the fish a very particular type of food for the first few weeks/months of their lives -  and failing to do that means your fish will never grow to a marketable size.   While I still think she has a few things to work out how to turn her app idea into a real business, the fact that she understands her end user so well - not just the technology - is encouraging, and a rare combination especially in such a young person.

All this reminds me of the boom years of the Web in the mid and late 90s.  Practically overnight, every business under the sun it seemed had to move onto the Web.  Here in Kenya now it feels like nearly any transaction that would have previously required a face to face interaction is moving to mobile.  With mPesa of course enabling digital payments so many possibilities are opened. The possibilities seem limitless.

On my way! Dispatch from a global crossroads

There are some destinations on here I've never heard of...which is saying something because I've heard of a lot of places...Nador anyone?

On my way to my IBM Corporate Service Corps #ibmcsc Kenya assignment! I’m on layover in Amsterdam.  I love European airports.  Being in a European airport (I mean a big one like Amsterdam, London, or Paris) is when I most feel like a citizen of a globalized world.  People are passing through from practically everywhere.  I love imagining where they came from and where they’re going and why.  That guy over there is on business trip from Amsterdam to Paris.  That family is coming from Saudi Arabia on their way to New York.  That woman over there is coming from Ghana on her way to college in London.  Etc. Etc. If I was making this trip 30 years ago what would it feel like?

For one thing I can only imagine traveling to Kenya would feel like a much more exotic experience.  Today traveling to Nairobi feel like traveling to just another connected global hub - a place with modern shopping malls, ubiquitous mobile phones and high speed internet, a steady flow of tourist and business people coming and going.  Fourteen years ago when I took my first trip to Africa – to Zimbabwe for a college semester abroad – I felt (mostly out of ignorance) like was traveling to the end of the earth.  While learning that Zimbabwe, in fact, wasn’t the end of the earth was the big reveal from that experience, finding a connected computer lab at the University of Zimbabwe felt like stumbling into a time machine.  Sending an email to my college friends back home via telnet on a black and white screen felt like a touch of magic.  There’s no doubt that Kenya today is incomparably more globally interconnected than Zimbabwe was in 1998.  What a difference fourteen years makes.

Six days and counting

In September 2003 I sat eating dinner with my parents around their kitchen table when I broke down in tears.   The next day I’d ship off to DC for three days of pre-service training before heading to Kenya for over two years as a US Peace Corps volunteer.  Two years seemed impossibly long, and I was terrified.

Eleven years later I’m now days away from boarding a plane, again for Kenya, for my IBM Corporate Service Corps #ibmcsc Kenya assignment.   This time I’ll be gone for only a month, I’ll be staying in relatively swanky conditions in Nairobi, where I’ll be part of a team consulting for a Kenyan government agency working in microfinance.  I think I’ll make it without any tears, this time.

What was I worried about then? All sorts of things: getting sick, being away from everything I know for two years, being all alone in a strange land.  What am I worried about now?  Will my day job project keep running smoothly in my absence?  Who will water my plants?  Will be two business suits be enough?

This time my challenge will be less the scary and unfamiliar, and more checking my pre-conceptions and biases at the door, keeping an open and creative mind while using my experience as a sanity check.   After all, I expect to find a country much changed.

If there’s anything I observed in my two years in Kenya, it’s incredible pace of change.  Here’s a list of things that happened while I was there:

• A new constitution was ratified
• Matatus, the white minivans that are the ubiquitous form of public transportation Kenya, went from carrying anywhere from 23 to 36 people and driving recklessly at high speeds, to carrying 18 people with seatbelts, speed governors limiting speed to 80k/hr, and uniformed staff…literally overnight.
• The price of internet access dropped from 3-5Ksh/minute to 1Ksh or less per minute.
• Mobile phones dropped in price nearly in half

What will I find now? Stay tuned….

That’s me, back row middle…day 2 in Kenya, 2003.