Star Party

On Saturday, Father Jim, a Jesuit priest and good friend to Kate, had invited Kate to bring some of the girls to a ‘star party’ at his telescope. What he does, I would describe as construction engineering and currently lives at a Jesuit retreat center about 45 minutes away from Hekima Place. He planned and built the place about 7 or 8 years ago. I visited the place last Sunday, and it is lovely, especially the two chapels. He spends much of his time in Uganda seeing to construction of schools there. In any case, Father Jim is an amateur astronomer and has even built his own telescope as well as a building on the Jesuit property to house it. The little observatory is cunning – it just looks like a storage shed, but houses a telescope, a computer, projector and screen. The roof is designed to roll away so that the telescope has a full view of the night sky.  The steel beams that support the roof extend double the length of the roof so that it can be rolled out to the front of the building using a pulley system. I should have taken a photo of the building but didn’t – maybe next time.  The telescope we used last night is not the one he made – it is a computerized one as a gift to celebrate 25 years of priesthood by his family. Speaking of family, his sister, Julie joined us last night. She must be Jim’s biggest supporter – you can see what is almost worship in her eyes when she talks about him and what he has achieved.

So Kate invited me and the 7^th and 8^th graders to go for the ‘star party’. On the way, we picked up chicken and chips (a favorite of all the girls) to take for a picnic supper. Father Jim had planned to show us all sunspots, but we got there just a little too late – the sun was already down below the wall of the observatory. So we settled down to eat chicken and wait for dark. At dusk, we went back into the observatory and Father Jim gave us a little introduction to astronomy, the formation of stars, and the solar system. By then, it was dark enough for us to see the new moon in the western sky and, more importantly, through the telescope. The girls were very enthusiastic about getting to see celestial bodies so magnified. In turn, Father Jim turned the scope on Venus (like a tiny quarter moon), Jupiter (we could see the giant red spot!) and then Mars off to southeast. He pointed out some of the more prominent stars and constellations, with Serius, the ‘dog star’, prominent overhead. By then it had clouded up, so it was back to the computer presentation about constellations that could be seen in the night sky over Nairobi. He even had a photo of the big telescope in Chile in the Atacama. You might think a group of 7^th and 8^th grade girls would not be too interested, but they paid rapt attention throughout and were disappointed when the evening was over. The adults had a great time, too!

By the way, Father Jim’s old telescope is gathering dust in his basement. He offered it to Hekima Place if Kate would have a building built for it. She was VERY enthusiastic about that idea.

Friday Computer Iissues

Friday was my day for a crisis. I have much of what I’ve done for Hekima  Place on my Mac computer and Friday it died.  Well, the computer didn’t actually die, but either the power supply died or the battery died. Kate was gone when it happened, so I had panicky thoughts that there wasn’t a Mac store in all of Kenya and I’d be without all my files until Rick could bring me what I need. But when Kate got back, she told me that, amazingly enough, there’s a Mac store in the new shopping mall in Karen, the Galleria. Karen is one of the seriously upscale districts of Nairobi – lots of wealthy western foreigners and government officials live there.  Lucky for me, it’s only 35-45 minutes away, depending on traffic. I hope I’ll be back in business by the end of the day tomorrow. In the interim, I’m using a spare computer from the office. Not much RAM, but it got me on the internet – at least until I ran out of minutes on my modem.  

So with no computer, I had to find something else useful to do. All employees around here have multiple jobs, and one of my responsibilities is watering the orchard of young fruit trees as well as the flowers and shrubs around Karibu House where I’m staying.  So I spent the afternoon hooking up hose pieces (with some help from Stephen, the animal handler) to make the water reach to the far end of the orchard. The first time I watered, I carried buckets to about 25 trees, all a goodly walk from the spigot so being able to use a hose was WONDERFUL! None of the hose pieces have screw fittings on them. There are just a series of smaller and smaller hoses that fit tightly inside the next larger ones. When you really need to hold them together tightly, the ‘uncles’ (that’s what the guys who work around here are called) bind them together with strips of rubber cut from old inner tubes. It took me about an hour and a quarter to give everything a good dose of water.

Thursday night I worked on math homework with the 8^tth graders until 11:15. And that was having started at 7:15 pm. They had 40 problems to do, some simple, but at least half not so simple. I don’t know what their teacher is thinking! They have other homework to do as well. I don’t know how much sleep they get, but it’s not enough – don’t see how they can function in school. They get up at 6 am everyday at the latest and the older girls go to school half a day on Saturday as well!

Thursday, Mar. 22

The photo is of Kate Fletcher and one of the older girls holding the new 7 mo. old member of the Hekima family.



My brother asked me this morning via Skype (for him it was last night) what I spend my time doing here besides tutoring math. It’s not very exciting to describe because what I’ve been doing is working on revising employee contracts and job descriptions. All these documents are in English, and English is usually the Kenyan’s third language after their tribal language (there are 50+ tribes in Kenya) and kiswahili. The contracts are written like a legal document done up by a non-native English speaker. So we are trying to simplify the language so the employees can understand what they’re signing. All the employees work under one-year contracts that are renewed annually (assuming it is decided they should stay on).  The job descriptions have been written by hand on the last page of the contract, so I reduced all those to electronic form so we can attach printouts to the contracts - hopefully easier to read. Now I need to work on the Staff Guidelines, which is written about as opaquely as the contracts and includes policies and procedures that don’t necessarily agree with what the contracts say. Now isn’t that exciting?

Kate and I went to a Rotary dinner meeting in Karen last night (yummy tandori chicken!) and talked about Kenyan marriage practices on the way home. Here in Kenya, women still seem to be considered property - either of their parents or husbands. Parents demand a ‘bride price’ from any suitor before a girl can marry. In rural areas the price is in cows or goats, but in the cities it is more often money. I sort of thought this practice was mainly a Maasai one of cows for wives but apparently it is common among all tribes. Of course, Kenya is a poor country, and few young men have the resources to ‘buy’ their bride outright. So they pay their bride’s parents off over time - and it may take years. Kate told me that one of the men who works here still hasn’t paid off his ‘bride price’ and he has an 8th grade son! Until the bride price is paid, the husband can’t stay on the parents compound when the couple goes to visit her parents and I guess the marriage is not considered official. There is a major ceremony when the bride price is finally paid off.

According to one blog I read (written by a man), this bridal dowry is not an evil thing. He says, “The purpose of dowry is not money or sale of a bride. You cannot sell human beings. Slave trade was banned in 1884 and cannot happen in this era and time. Dowry payment is essentially a manifestation of commitment and agreement. It has no commercial value but social satisfaction. Among the southern Luos the word is not price but, agreeing.
The payment which is a token symbolizes that the bridegroom accepts to take the bride to his home as wife permanently and for good. Dowry payment and agreement is a ghost contract and the payer receives the bride. It is done publicly, in the day time, and in presence of close relatives and in-laws from both sides of the divide.” Hmmm.

Water and Weather

Today was much less eventful than yesterday. And the math tutoring only lasted an hour after dinner so I was done by 8 pm - unlike last night when we were at it until 10 pm! About 11 pm Rick Skyped me, and we had a lengthy visit, so I didn’t get to sleep until midnight. I did sleep in until 7 this morning, but the girls have to get up by 5 am or earlier!

It’s been very hot and dry since I got here. Corner Baridi means ‘Cold Place’, so it’s been cooler than Nairobi, thank goodness. The high temperatures have been in the 90’s in Nairobi for the past several days. Normal temperatures for this time of year are low to mid 80’s. In addition to the fact that it’s a bit cooler here in the Ngong Hills area, there is generally a cooling breeze and, at least since I’ve been here, the humidity is very low so that even when it’s quite warm, the breeze is effective at cooling you off. We are only a few degrees south of the equator here, but south we are. So the cooler wetter weather that passes for ‘winter’ is supposed to be coming. Of course it never gets really cold, and  the shamba can be cultivated year round. I just looked at the forecast and there were showers predicted today - did not happen. And thunderstorms predicted tomorrow. That would be great because we’ve been having to water the lawn areas and the shamba like crazy. As much as I like blue skies and sunshine, we really do need rain.

Fortunately, there’s no problem with drinking water at Hekima. We have a bore hole (well) that provides water for the facility. When they first moved out here, there was no treatment other than a little chlorine, but they soon found that the plumbing was plugging up with deposits because the water was so heavy with minerals that deposited in the pipes. So they had to install a reverse osmosis system to treat the water and save the plumbing. The abundance of good water means that, in addition to selling veggies from the shamba, Hekima Place sells water to the neighbors. When we come and go through the main gate, we see folks lined up with containers waiting to buy water, often bringing their cows and goats along so they can water them.

Gray water from showers, clothes and dish washing, etc. is used for watering the shamba. And sewage is treated on site with a bio-box. All the toilet water runs down hill to a series of four treatment tanks where the solids are removed and pathogens are eliminated. I just told you everything I know about that so clearly I need to learn more about how this process works! When the water comes out the other end, it is safe to use on the shamba and even apparently has some good fertilizing qualities.

Arrival of Blessing

Today the new baby, Blessing, arrived. She is 7 months old and weighs only about 9 pounds - the almost 3 month old who’s been here 2 months is considerably bigger! It sounds like the 7 month old has been losing weight rather than gaining for the past two months. Everything I said yesterday about AIDS in Africa is true - the only thing we found out different today is that the very thin little mother wasn’t raped (the original story we got) but had sex with her boyfriend and had no idea she could get pregnant from doing that. She didn’t even realize she was pregnant until they told her she had to go home from school because the teachers could tell she was. I suspect with her parents dead and her HIV positive widowed aunt being overwhelmed by trying to take care of 10 kids including the little mom and her baby, 5 of her own and 3 of her brother’s orphaned children, nobody had bothered to tell little mother how babies are made. Little mother got pregnant when she was 14. Now she’s in the 5th grade, having missed a few years of schooling for lack of school fees. Such a tragedy!

Kate called the 12 year old and older girls together this evening to tell them Blessing’s story and talk them about the importance of not letting the boys talk them into anything that would result in their ending up in Blessing’s mother’s situation - and bringing a baby into the world that they are not prepared to take care of.

I didn’t write anything on Saturday, but I should tell you about Kate’s day. One weekend a month she supposedly takes two days off. This past weekend was the one. However, she had three secondary school girls home from St. Martins, their boarding school, because each had medical or dental issues. One had to have a root canal and one had a toothache that is apparently due to gum problems so they both had to spend time at the dentist. The third has had ongoing stomach pain issues and needed to go to the hospital for blood tests. We had to go by the home of one of the Kenyan trustees to take her the papers that had to be delivered to an employee who had been let go. One of the girls with dental issues is also suffering headaches and needed to go to the eye doctor for an exam. We also needed to pick up mail from the post office and go to the bank. Kate had planned to spend the day and the night at a retreat center, but ended not getting away from Hekima Place until 4 PM. That lady really needs for us to get an assistant director hired!

Five new babies

I have attached a photo of little Maya Angelou, one of four girls who have come to Hekima Place in the past two weeks. And tomorrow we get another one, 7 months old. Her mother is a 15 year old girl child who was raped. Men here like virgins because they know they can't get AIDS from them - also there is some belief that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. The mother has been living with her aunt, a widow, who is caring for 10 other children, some her own and some her deceased sister's. The little mother has a sponsor who is paying for her schooling and wants her to return to her boarding school, but she can't take the baby. Her aunt can't manage another child, so the Ministry of Children asked Kate if Hekima would take her. This is what AIDS is doing to Africa.