So what the heck am I doing here!

To date you haven't seen me post about my internship, which is the main reason I came to Kenya. Well there was a reason for it. Originally FSD assigned me to work at an organization called Ujamaa. This organization is involved in community activism and human rights work. However they are undergoing a lot of personnel changes and upheavel so I felt it was not an ideal place to work given the turmoil. I asked FSD to change my assignment and started on Monday at an organization called Eco Ethics International Kenya. Their URL is www.ecoethics-kenya.org. Their mission is to help the coastal communities become more environmentally aware and to develop new sustainable ways of making their livelihoods. There are 5 major programs they are currently running:

Environmental Education and Outreach

Chemicals and Toxic Waste Management Education and Reduction

Fisheries and Marine Resource Management

Sustainable Community Capacity Building

Green Economics

I'm on day three and I feel confident that I am going to be able to make positive contributions to their work. Given the lack of environmental controls and the state of the land, air and water here there is a ton of work to be done. Right now I'm in learn mode but I have already come up with a short list of projects to help them be more productive internally.

On Tuesday I went out into the field to visit two projects Eco Ethics has sponsored located in the very rural villages of Mueje and Mwakambe about an hour south of Mombasa on the coast. Our day's adventure was supposed to begin bright and early at 7am which meant I had to leave my house at 6am (this NGO is a bit of a commute and traffic here is as bad as the Bay Area). Now I should have known 7am really meant 8:30am since everyone works on African time! Part of the problem was that our Jeep's starter did not work so the guys had to push it down the road to get it going. I asked what we would do if the car wouldn't start when we got to these rural communities and was assured all would be okay. So we crammed 6 people into a vehicle that at best should hold 4 and off we went. Now a word about Kenyan roads-DO NOT COMPLAIN ABOUT US HIGHWAYS EVER AGAIN! I think there are more pot holes than asphalt, if paved at all. Plus remember from my last post one spends a great deal of time dodging cows and goats to keep one alert. Given I was in the back of a very old Jeep with very bad shocks I may have done permanent damage to my insides with all the jostling around.

However the drive was worth it when we arrived at the village of Mueje. Though quite poor and extremely rustic the women and children were beautiful. Mueje is a Muslim village and the women wear beautiful fabric to cover themselves called bui bui (see pictures) The purpose of the trip was to follow up on a project Eco Ethics did to help them build a greenhouse to grow fresh vegetables as part of their Sustainable Community Capacity Building. Though they spoke in Swahili, so I could follow very little of the actual meeting, I still found the trip quite rewarding. However when it was time to leave the Jeep would not start and this time it took almost 30 minutes to get the engine to turn over. I had visions of walking a very long way back to civilization.

Later in the afternoon I attended a ceremony at St Charles Lwanga, a Catholic secondary school located in a very poor industrial area of Mombasa. Eco Ethics helps schools organize what they call Eco Clubs and annually gives out a grant to the Eco Club that has the best proposal to start an eco friendly initiative. St Charles came up with a proposal to sell a form of charcoal made from recycled materials within their community. Many of the poor families here burn charcoal made from hardwood trees as a fuel source to cook thus causing deforestation. I had the honor of presenting them with their 50,000 KSH-about $625 check (see pictures). Though the school itself is very rundown with none of the modern ammenities we see in US high schools the students were so well behaved and attentive. It felt completely different then what one sees at the everyday US high school. I think children and parents value education much more here since the government does not pay for it past the 8th grade and everyone recognizes this is the way out of poverty in the future.