Back to Baphumelele for a Moment

I have a request from you. Since leaving Cape Town, I have been in touch with Baphumelele and have learned that the vendor which supplies all of Bap’s fruit and vegetables has cut off its donation because of funding problems. The amount of veggies and fruit supplied, as I explained in some of my past postings, was not that great in the first place, but at least it was something. We have figured out that supplying the 80 children of Bap with GOOD fruits and vegetables, on a daily basis, for the year would cost $7,500. I told them I would help raise this money. I already have $500 in. Whatever you can contribute would be fantastic – everything counts! Even if you aren’t a fan of fruits & vegetables (my fast food loving friends), these kids desperately need them!

Here’s how you can donate to Bap, in South Africa, and get a US tax deduction. US donations can be routed to Bap through the South African Development Fund in Boston. They do not take out any money for themselves, other than a small processing fee for credit cards. The money will go straight to Bap. To make a donation to Bap, do the following:

--Go to www.sadevelopmentfund.org. Click on “Donate Now.”

--Using a credit card, click on “Network for Good” and again on “Donate Now.” There will be a 4.75% processing fee, but your full amount is still tax deductible.

--In the designation field, put “For Baphumelele – Fruits & Vegetables Fund”

--In the dedication field, put “On behalf of Ashley Hufft – Baphumelele volunteer” (I feel odd about that, but its necessary so I can try to track what is coming in from my friends and family).

--All else is self-explanatory, but if not, let me know.

I appreciate your support on this a lot. Its for a rather simple thing, I know, and I realize that next year they will be in the same boat, but I think the childrens’ nutritional needs are critical (obviously) and this is one of the best things I can do for them at the moment, is relatively inexpensive from a fundraising point of view, and concrete. Again, thank you!

The Road to Kisumu

I boarded the Easy Coach bus, for a fare of 800 shillings (about $11.50), on Wednesday, January 10, for the trip west to Kisumu, the 3rd largest city in Kenya (behind Nairobi and Mombasa). Even though we had not heard positive reports about the bus ride, I, along with two of the Columbia grad students, Elizabeth (who is a Kenyan national) and Patricia, decided to take the bus in order to see the countryside and, also, to check out first-hand a part of Kenya’s infrastructure. Naturally, an important aspect of any potential investment decision into Kisumu will be the ease and efficiency with which goods and people can be transported to and from there. The road leading from the port town of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean, northwest to Nairobi, and onward to Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria, is Kenya’s main artery. We wanted to see it for ourselves.

Well, improvement should be made, to say the least. The “highway” is merely a two-lane road, with not a single painted line that I noticed, the last portion of which turns into dirt. There are so many potholes that caused the bus to bounce around like a jumping jack and me not to be able to read a single magazine article the whole way there. A drive that, according to the distance, should only take 3 hours, took 7. Our bus driver randomly pulled over on the side of the road at least a dozen times. We did not always know why. A few times it was so he could talk to another Easy Coach driver passing on the way back to Nairobi. Once it was so men could hop on and sell their vegetables, carrots and cabbages. The other times, well, there were a few police pullovers, a few bathroom breaks, but hard to know exactly why each time.

But, at least, on this particular journey the road was passable. In times of heavy rain, like they have been having, unusually so, here in Kenya, parts of this main thoroughfare flood, so traffic must be diverted to other roads, adding even more time to the journey. Also, we had a relatively safe driver. He swerved a lot to avoid the ruts in the road, but maintained a sane speed. A Harvard Kennedy School student took the bus to Kisumu a few days later (she is doing an urban planning study there) and described a death-defying, high speed, roller-coaster of a ride that made even the Kenyans on the bus scream out at the driver!

The scenery made the trip worth it. We passed through the southern portion of the Rift Valley – that great continental fault system that extends 6000 km from Jordan to Mozambique and is considered to be the birthplace of civilization. The valley is spectacular, boarded by rugged escarpments and dormant volcanoes, and dotted with lakes, such as Lake Naivasha and Lake Nakuru. Closer to the road, we watched people who lined it the entire way, whether selling oranges, potatoes and carrots, or walking home from school in neat school uniforms, or lounging under thorn apple trees that seemed illuminated by the midday sun. We also passed many fields for sugar cane, rice and tea, able to grow in the very fertile Rift Valley soil.

We made it to Kisumu at 8:00 p.m. that night and headed straight for the hotel, the Imperial Hotel, where I stayed until the following Tuesday. Most consider the Imperial to be the nicest hotel in Kisumu (with a special MDG rate, my deluxe room cost $50 / night) and its restaurant, the Florence, to be the best (my dinner of avocado and tomato salad, chicken Kiev, a Tusker beer and coffee that night cost $11). It has an old-time, Art Deco, slightly past its prime feel to it, but with great atmosphere and staff. Both the dining room and the Shalimar Lounge on the top (5th) floor buzz with nonprofit, government and UN workers. The Center for Disease Control has a large campus in Kisumu and I met a group of CDC workers from Atlanta staying at the Imperial for 2 months while studying malaria. It will be where I stay when in Kisumu, and by the end of my week there I was on first-name basis with most the staff. I quickly experienced other infrastructure problems that first night in Kisumu: the electricity went out several times during dinner and the toilets do not flush well because of a poor water and sewage system. But, its a nice place nonetheless.

Oh, right, the following Tuesday, I decided to fly back to Nairobi.

(Pictured: Looking out back window of bus, at the main "highway" leading to Kisumu; Men who boarded the bus to sell carrots and cabbages.)

Millennium Development Goals – Sauri, Kenya

I started my work as, what we are now calling, the Millennium Cities Representative for Kenya, on Monday, January 8th. Lucky for me, a group of 4 graduate students from Columbia University’s School of International Public Policy and Affairs (SIPA) arrived about the same time. They are here as part of a workshop at SIPA, conducting research on potential investment opportunities in Kisumu, Kenya, the designated “Millennium City” here, and will present the results of their research to us in April. We have been going to meetings and traveling together since then and they will leave on January 20th.

***
But first, let me give a very brief bit of background of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) work in Africa – but to read a good account, I recommend Jeffrey Sach’s book, The End of Poverty, or look at The Earth Institute’s website (www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu). The Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit and encompass the world’s goals for significantly reducing extreme poverty (people living with an income of under a dollar a day – that’s a billion people today!) by 2015. There are 8 goals – eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.

So how are these goals going to be met? Well, Jeffrey Sachs was asked by, then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan to become his special advisor on the goals and come up with practical solutions for meeting them. The UN Millennium Project was thus formed, in partnership with Columbia’s Earth Institute, to demonstrate in 12 villages (of approximately 5,000 households each) throughout sub-Saharan Africa that, with a little assistance (its hard to expect people that have less than nothing to do anything with that nothing - aid of some form is necessary), and the right tools (you can’t just hand someone fertilizer who has never used it and expect them to know how), achievement of the goals can happen. One of the 12 research villages is in Sauri, Kenya, in the Siaya District, just a 45 minute drive from Kisumu (the Millennium City). There are now also 66 other funded Millennium Villages throughout Africa. I had the opportunity to spend time in Sauri this past Monday, January 15.

Here’s an over-simplified example of what happened, and is happening, in Sauri. It cost $110 per person in Sauri in 2005, all of in-kind contributions, to start the Millennium Village Project there. That funding comes from a mixture of the Millennium Project, the government, and other donors. It reflects the yearly cost to supply each household in the village with high-yield seeds and fertilizer, to provide malaria bed nets to everyone, to operate a health clinic, to provide midday school lunches, to improve the water supply and the roads. Doesn’t sound like much, huh? There is a 5-year plan for each village with the idea being that each year households will produce more food and move away from subsistence to savings. As their incomes increase, the $110 in aid decreases. Once people can save, they can afford to buy their own fertilizer. In addition, the village provides surplus to the school for lunches, they learn to run the health clinic, to repair the roads if the government will not, to drill and maintain their own boreholes for water, and generally, to organize themselves and control their resources. The MDG team works with them to teach them necessary skills, such as how to use their resources efficiently, how to sell their crops at market, and how to take care of their healthcare needs.

Before, the people of Sauri used almost no fertilizer and an acre of maize yielded only approximately 4 bags at harvest. People of Sauri were starving, and dying from malaria and HIV/AIDs. From 2005 to 2006, the output of a maize harvest more than doubled. People learned to start to store their grain and to market and sell it. With the provision of lunches from surplus food production, school attendance increased from 25% to 100%. Malaria rates dropped significantly with the bed nets and the health clinic services. In general, there has been a rise in the standard of living. No one is starving.

The next step is to replicate this model in every village throughout Africa (as simultaneously as possible) and to start to improve the cities. As life gets better in the rural areas, we expect people to move away from agriculture and head for other work opportunities in the cities. Today, those opportunities and the chance of having a decent life in most African cities, with good infrastructure to support them, do not exist. Thus, in January 2006, Jeff Sachs designated 8 Millennium Cities, one being Kisumu, where we will work to increase investment opportunities there through a combination of needs assessments, policy advising, investor roundtables and development strategies.

***

So, back to what I’ve been doing…I spent most of my first day on Monday (January 8th) simply trying to meet people at the MDG Centre here in Nairobi. The MDG Centre is located in the ICRAF facilities (for International Center for Research in Agroforestry) right next door to the UN, part of a large, very green campus with Indonesian-styled buildings that have open central atriums. I had lunch with Margaret the first day, a woman heading up our public sector policy work, at the lunch facility there, an outdoor area with grills where cooks prepare all sorts of traditional Kenyan or Indian / Malaysian dishes.

On Tuesday, with the Columbia students, we began making the rounds in Nairobi, meeting with the Chair of the Urban Planning Dept. of the University of Nairobi, with an official in the Ministry of Local Planning, with an economist and with someone in the Dutch embassy. Driving all over Nairobi that day gave me a great introduction to it, and I find it fascinating, busy, surprisingly very green with lots of hills, woods and flowers, and very colorful.

Then, on Wednesday, I boarded a bus for the trip to Kisumu…

(Pictured: Men in the community resource center at Sauri; People waiting to be seen outside the health clinic in Sauri. Double-click to enlarge)

Settling-in Nairobi, Kenya

I was very nervous, but also excited, as my plane touched down at the Jomo Kenyatta Airport – so named after the first president of Kenya after it achieved independence from the British in 1963 – in Nairobi on Friday, January 5th. As we landed, I saw no modern skyscrapers as in Johannesburg, or mountains and sea as in Cape Town, but open country. Upon my ride from the airport, I immediately felt I had landed in a developing country, but one that seemed beautiful, exotic and chaotic all at once. Giraffes wandered in a field just off the airport highway, the same one that leads to Mombasa on the coast, a two-lane road without painted lines and in bad need of repair. Cars were backed up for miles on this Friday afternoon, which gave hundreds of young men the opportunity to approach my car window and hawk peanuts, belts, even neon road signs (should I have been in need of one). Men on dilapidated bikes weaved in and out of the traffic, which itself formed a snake-like line. Women sold goods in informal shops set up along the roadway. With my windows down, even with all the exhaust, the air seemed fresh and I could smell the smell of wood burning fires – a distinct smell to me that I first identified in Tanzania last summer, and identify with Africa.

After winding our way through the streets of downtown Nairobi, I made it to the guest house where I will stay through February (pictured here), a modern house owned by a very interesting, and somewhat eccentric, couple named Simon and Karen (both of British descent). The house is located in the northwest part of Nairobi, in a very nice, green and quiet neighborhood called Rosslyn, near the United Nations compound and the MDG (for Millennium Development Goals) Centre where I will work this year, and just across the street from a large housing division for American embassy workers. Simon, who was born in Kenya but attended boarding schools and university in England, is an architect and built the home. It has lovely gardens and verandas, 3 dogs, 1 cat, 4 geese, 1 guard, 1 gardener and 2 wonderful domestic workers named Joyce and Wambui, who wash and iron my clothes to perfection. I am the only guest staying there and after I arrived and began finally – after 2 ½ months – to unpack, they asked me to join them for dinner. I felt disoriented that evening: I had been dropped off in, what felt like, the middle of nowhere; I had no idea how to get around and buy my own supper should I have wanted to do so; I had lost the “First World” comforts of Cape Town; and I then sat down for a dinner of sheperd’s pie with two complete strangers, as a guest in their house.

On Saturday, I think Karen felt a bit sorry for me after I went out with a driver to explore Nairobi and arrived back after only a few hours, still a bit disoriented and confused about life in Nairobi. So she immediately invited a few people over for drinks and to meet me. Christophe, a French guy working at UNHabitat, and Christina, an Italian working at the UN Environmental Program, came over and then, also probably feeling sorry for me, invited me to join them for dinner. We had dinner at a very good Asian “fusion” restaurant with other UN and NGO people from all over the world living in Nairobi. That evening – getting out for dinner, meeting very interesting people, and having interesting and, for me, different conversations – made me excited for the coming year.

I also had my first brush with the Kenyan police as, on the way to dinner, Christina, driving a borrowed car, was pulled over randomly by a policeman carrying a very large semi-automatic rifle. He shined a flashlight on me, sitting in the back seat without a seat belt – when there was not one to put on –and started to intimate that some sort of fine would be due to him because of this. Christina handed him her UN identification and he immediately let us go. I am told that if she had been driving her car, with the red license plates of a UN official, we would not have been pulled over in the first place.

The next morning, on Sunday, I went for a run in the neighborhood. Unlike in Cape Town, I now see mostly black Africans when out and about, including, while out for my run, several Masai, the men with large holes in their ear lobes, wearing colorful red and purple robes and carrying clubs. Even though it is summer, the weather is very mild in Nairobi because of the altitude, so running was pleasant. That afternoon, Karen and Simon invited Christophe and Christina back over for lunch, along with two other friends of theirs, a British expat couple, the husband of which, like Simon, is a long-time Kenyan architect. We sat on a veranda, talked, drank wine and nibbled on bread, cheese, paté, fresh vegetables and fruits for hours that afternoon. And we discussed everything – from Kenyan politics (lucky for me to witness, this is now a presidential election year here in Kenya, so there will be plenty to discuss) and government corruption, to Somalia and America’s role, to Kenyan safari parks and Mt. Kenya, to Kenyan literature and development work.

The next morning, Monday, January 8th, after I sat down for the daily breakfast with Simon and Karen – set out each morning by Joyce or Wambui on an outdoor veranda (situated on the left side of house, in the picture): freshly sliced fruit, granola, toast, and an assortment of jams, teas, coffee and newspapers – my driver took me to the MDG Centre, just next door to the U.N. I felt very thrilled to be working in Nairobi for the year!

Good-bye to Cape Town, for Now. On to Kenya.

I have finished my work at Baphumelele, for now, but it, and the children there, will not leave my heart, my thoughts, and my prayers. Tomorrow, Friday, January 5th, I leave for Nairobi and will begin work as the Millennium Cities Representative for Kenya, something for which I am very excited. I have spent since New Years thinking about my last month+ here in Cape Town, and at Baphumelele, and nothing but scattered words come to mind (and, I'm too lazy to write complete sentences right now)…

Mountains against bright blue sky, or blanketed with clouds, in Cape Town. Beautiful sunsets, in Khayelitsha.

Electricity wires. Fires. Trapped. Free.

Tiny hands. Helping hands. Painted hands. Pick-pockets.

Sitting on the beaches of Clifton. Climbing the paths of Table Mountain, and Lions Head. Paragliding, or trying to, if the winds would cooperate. Diving, or trying to, if the sharks would appear.

Nelson Mandela. Rosie Mashale.

Lots of Nescafe. Freshly Ground. Lots of wine. Bottles.

District Six. Batting for a six.

Cool Runnings. Running around University of Cape Town.

Bunk beds. Bed bugs. Flower beds at Kirstenbosch. Beads.

Mice. Cockroaches. Seals. Penguins.

Homesick. Childrens’ Home. Finding home. Holidays.

Adoption. Jayney.

Volunteers. Lynn. Hannah. Marta. Jen. Nicole. Michelle. Duncan. Heather. Katie.

Children. Patience. Jessica. Okuhle. Luthando. Sunshine. Whitey. Ashemale. Shakes. Nenana. Sinazo. So many others…

(Pictured: me, looking a bit haggard and in the same brown outfit I wore every shift, and Sinazo)

--Will be back with a posting as soon as possible from Kenya!

Bathing at a New Hour, for a New Year

My last shift at Baphumelele ended on New Year’s Eve. Just before that, at the suggestion of some of the volunteers, the care workers began to bathe the children in the “evening”…well, almost. The idea was, instead of waking all of the children up at 4:00 a.m. to bathe them each day, why not do it in the evening, just before bedtime, so the children do not go to sleep dirty and also so they, and of course the care workers, can sleep later each morning? Well, as with most things at Baphumelele, changes were implemented, but in a bit of a funny, haphazard, does not completely make sense, sort of way.

It was a tradition among the Aviva volunteers that, at least once during your volunteer period, you would arise and help at the 4:00 a.m. bath time. I prepared do this on my last shift. However, during this last shift, the care workers implemented the new bathing policy and began to bathe all forty children at 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon. So, they took our advice to bathe at the end of the day, but we meant after dinner, not in the middle of the afternoon! Because, what happened was that the children, bathed and dressed in clean clothes or pajamas, would then run outside and/or spill dinner all over themselves, going to bed dirty nonetheless. To make it even crazier, the care workers were still getting up and bathing them again in the morning!

But the bathing process, no matter what time, is something to behold in-and-of-itself! The care workers bring the older toddlers – most are now out of nappies – to the toilet room. About 20 of the children wait in a line there. Not sure why everyone must be in the room at once. With the door shut. The room is steaming hot. Luckily then, the children have their clothes off. Not lucky for those of us helping. I try to open the door once and let some air into the room. “Shut the door” the care workers shout! Like the teethbrushing event each day, you must fight to keep the other curiously frantic children out of the room.

Two care workers and two volunteers are in the room also. I stand by the door and keep getting hit in the back with it as the laundry lady decides to put up the clean clothes at the exact same time. 20 children. Now 5 adults. Steaming hot toilet room.

There is a process. Marta is in charge of medicated cream (applied all over some of their bodies before the bath) and Vaseline (applied all over each of their bodies after the bath). A child steps into the bath tub, others wait in line behind. Hilda bathes them. Marta towels them off. New towel is used for each child. Marta applies the Vaseline and passes the, now very slippery, child to me. I hand them underwear – believe me, these kids know the difference between girls’ and boys’ underpants. I struggle to find appropriate ones for them to wear, and can not always. I sometimes try to pass boys’ underpants off for girls’, or vica versa, but they will have none of that. For the younger ones, I put on their nappies. Because of all the Vaseline, they slide all over the place. I then pass them to Koleke. Koleke puts on the rest of their bedtime outfit. She hands them back to me. I take a big, horse-hair like brush and brush their hair. I kiss their foreheads – can’t resist – and they leave the room. Marta and I then wash our hands with anti-bacterial cream so we do not spread any of one child’s skin infections to another. We wonder about what is being passed to us? Then the process begins again.

Despite the craziness of it all, the foreignness of the process to me, I felt a lot of tenderness and love in that steaming toilet room.

Happy New Years to everyone.

(Pictured: Koleke and children in line for bath; application of medicated cream before the bath; Luthando in the bath tub)

A Merry Christmas at Baphumelele

I worked the Christmas shift at Baphumelele and it ranks as one of the most memorable ones I’ve spent. Actually, in some ways, it seemed that Christmas arrived at Baphumelele about the same time as I did. Since early December, one organization or group of people after another – even tour groups out on various “township tours” – stopped by to donate food, clothes and toys for the children. One humorous moment happened on the Sunday before Christmas. As I headed out the gates of the toddler house with the children to walk down to church that Sunday (held in the dining room, below our volunteer apartment), a van of people from Taiwan pulled up. “CHINA! CHINA!” all the kids screamed. I cannot get them to say my name but here they were screaming out the name of an Asian country (albeit the wrong one)! This group, a youth organization from Taiwan, delivered individual “goodie bags” for all the children.
Christmas activities began in earnest on Christmas Eve night. The Xhosa people do celebrate the Christian holidays, and they attend church every Sunday, but they also follow some of their own Xhosa traditions (such as formal circumcision ceremonies when Xhosa boys turn 18 years old). However, they do not go overboard at Christmas – you won’t see houses decorated with lights, or many Christmas trees, and not a lot of gifts are bought – they simply cannot afford to go overboard. The volunteers, however, spent a lot of time with the children a few weeks before Christmas making Christmas decorations which we hung up, along with some lights and tinsel, in the toddler house and the church (a/k/a dining room) before Christmas Eve.

All of the children, even the very youngest ones who had been bathed and put in their little pajamas, gathered down in the church at sunset on Christmas Eve night. Rosie, dressed as “Mother Christmas” with a fur shawl around her shoulders and what looked like an Easter hat on her head, told a Christmas story to the children. She spoke in Xhosa, so I could not begin to tell you what the story entailed, but she told the story with such great enthusiasm and animation that, despite its length of over 30 minutes, it kept the children entertained. After she finished with her story we, the volunteers, handed out candles to all of the children to use on a candle light walk back down Dabula Street to the toddler house. Most of the toddlers immediately tried to eat their candles, and what should have been a slow walk while singing carols turned into a mad dash down the street. As soon as everyone finally made their way to the toddler house, we did sing a few Christmas carols – well, everyone only new the words to two of them – Silent Night and We Wish You A Merry Christmas, each of which we probably sang 5 times. Then, we put the toddlers to bed and made popcorn covered in melted chocolate for the care workers who spent the Christmas Eve night in the toddler house.

At 4:45 a.m. on Christmas morning, the 4 of us volunteers, plus Jayney (the woman from New York who is trying to adopt) arose and started cooking breakfast for everyone at Baphumelele – 150 people in total – that’s 250 scrambled eggs, 200 buttered rolls, 6 watermelons, 12 cantaloupes, 6 pineapples, 4 vats of orange juice and 2 industrial-sized jars of ketchup! Our healthy breakfast competed with the candy from the small stockings filled with treats that all the children received that morning. After breakfast, each child at Baphumelele received a new clothing outfit and pair of shoes. Everyone was so excited and watching them all put these new clothes on melted my heart!

After everyone was dressed, we headed back to the dining room – now the church – for a Christmas service and the handing out of gifts by Rosie. Each child received a wrapped gift from their wish list, all donated items – there were toy trucks, stuffed bears, games, radios and baby dolls galore! Once all the gifts had been unwrapped, a DJ played music and we all danced. I’ve decided I really like dancing with one kid on the left hip, one kid on the right hip, one hanging on my left leg, one on the right leg and a few jumping on my back! We topped the day off with a huge braii (bbq) of bbq’d chicken, ribs, potato salad and, of course, rice, prepared by the long-term volunteers, the Germans, and ate out on the lawn of the crèche playground. By the end of the day, exhausted and full, all of the children went to sleep immediately, some before we made it back to the toddler house. What a day…Christmas!

(Pictured: Me serving breakfast; Jessica, Asemahle and Lukahlo in their new clothes; Rosie handing a gift to Nenana)