At the end of April, a colleague and I packed our bags and
drove to the airport. Then came 2 long-haul overnight flights and 1 short-haul
flight interspersed with lengthy layovers- 42 hours travel time in total, but who’s
counting? We landed on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya’s third-biggest
city, Kisumu. Right on the equator- zero degrees latitude.
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| Sunrise on Lake Victoria |
It was my first visit to Kenya, indeed my first trip to the
African continent, but it felt like home right away. Maybe that’s because
the project that I’ve worked on for over two years is based in Kenya, and so I work with
Kenyans and for Kenya even when I’m in the States. As soon as I met my colleagues in person for the first time, it was like having an instant family
there.
Kenya and India have many things in common- both are former
British colonies. In Kenya, people commonly speak Kiswahili and the dialect of
their tribe, but most people I met also spoke fluent English so it was easy to
communicate. The country is home to a tiny minority of Kenyan Indians,
and there are enough people of South Asian ethnicity residing in Kisumu that at
least in the city I blended in and was often mistaken for a local. (It was
different while doing field work in rural Kenya- there the school kids
immediately called me out as a mzungu-
foreigner.)
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| Sipping tea on the terrace |
For a few weeks in May, I did get to live and work in Kenya
as a local. We rented an apartment in town- a huge, lovely furnished terrace
flat with a dozen large windows for the lake breezes to come right
in. The weather was a total (and very pleasant) surprise to me. I expected to
sweat it out on the equator, and instead, the temperature hovered between 68
and 78 degrees Fahrenheit the whole time I was there- basically my idea of
paradise. I’m told that this has to do with the altitude, lake effect and the season
of “long rains”, a season when thunderstorms come through almost every
afternoon and leave everything lush and green and cool.
I chose a good time to visit. At other times of the year,
the weather apparently gets much more sweltering and equatorial. After weeks of
perfect temperatures, I landed in Atlanta on a 90-degree afternoon and said to
myself, boy, do I have to go back to Africa for some cooler weather?
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| Breakfast: Spanish roll and white coffee |
From Monday to Friday, we commuted to work, a forty-minute
car or bus ride, half of it over dirt roads. I worked long hours, trying to
make the best of the relatively little time I had there. Breakfast and lunch
were served at the staff canteen, and the menu was the same every single day.
Breakfast: White coffee (milk and water boiled together, with brown
sugar and good old instant coffee stirred in) and Spanish roll- an omelet with peppers,
onions and tomatoes rolled up in a chapatti. The other option for breakfast was
mandazi- a huge donut like fried fritter but I never did try one.
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| Lunch |
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| Fruit salad |
Lunch was ndengu
(green gram/lentils stew), cabbage and sukuma
wiki- sautéed greens. For meat eaters, there would be a meat stew and
fried fish or chicken. Fruit salad came with chunks of watermelon and tropical fruits- pineapple, mango and avocado.
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| Spaghetti night |
After work, we would often stop by the supermarket and pick
up groceries, then cook a meal at home. We made spaghetti a couple of times,
with cheese from Amsterdam, pasta from Italy (another colleague had just vacationed
there), sauce with local ingredients, all washed down with South African wine. Another time I made chana masala and cabbage, and one weekend morning we made an elaborate brunch- pancakes with jam and omelets.
It is so much fun shopping in a foreign supermarket, where
things are familiar yet different. I liked Kenyan tea- it is milder than the Assam tea that I’m used to, and in these weeks, I got used to drinking black tea- no milk, no sugar. And of course I had to check out the snack aisle and try Kenyan chivda and
chilli-lemon flavored potato chips.
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| Samosas |
Occasionally, we went out for dinner at
different restaurants in town, for Ethiopian food, Chinese food and Indian food
(they had the best paneer I’ve ever tasted). Indian food isn’t just found in
Indian restaurants, it has a large influence on Kenyan food in general. Pilau
(pulao) and chapatti and samosas can be found everywhere. I ate my weight in
samosas, starting at the airport café at Nairobi! And one menu item I noticed
in all bars and restaurants was chips, not the crisp packaged potato chips but what in India is called potato chips and in the US, French fries.
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| Ugali making in action |
My favorite dinner, without a doubt, was when my Kenyan
colleague had a bunch of us over to his bachelor pad for a typical Kenyan meal. If there’s a kitchen around, that
is where you will find me, and it was no different in his home. I jammed myself
into the tiny kitchen and tried to help. We made 4 dishes one after the other
on a single burner- a meat stew, a vegetarian stew for me (soy
chunks, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots and onions). The third course was the
must-have side dish in a Kenyan meal, the
sukuma wiki (greens). Finally, he made the staple Kenyan starch- ugali, cornmeal cooked in water into a
thick solid pudding. Chunks of ugali are broken off and dipped into sauces and
side dishes and eaten.
Friday evenings after work we would go to a
lakeside bar and watch the sunset over a Tusker and or Nile Special
beer, or a spicy Stoney tangawizi ginger beer. Sunsets over Lake Victoria are spectacular and left me
quite speechless.
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| Sunset on Lake Victoria |
On the weekend, I went on a hike in the equatorial
rainforest- we saw birds and monkeys, including a troop of baboons. Then we visited the family home of another colleague and
his wife (a high school English teacher) who laid out a hearty Sunday
lunch. She made a stew with soy chunks, carrots and onions and tomatoes,
lentils, pilau (pulao cooked in stock), chapatti and cabbage. It was a pleasure to
sit down to this big meal right after we’d been hiking all morning.
Lake Victoria is the second-largest freshwater lake in the
world and dominates the landscape in this part of Kenya. I went out on a long
boat ride at 6 AM to see the sunrise- again, a spectacular and memorable sight.
There were beautiful water birds all around. But my favorite part was spotting
the hippos. There is a herd of about 16 wild hippos in Kisumu bay and they are
most adorable- those cute little ears! I saw a baby hippo and some adults. They
snort and spout water and laze around in the lake. Hippos are also huge and
territorial and they can move very fast and attack humans if they are annoyed,
so it is best to coo at them from a safe distance, which is what I did.
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| Can you spot the hippos? |
Kiswahili is a sweet language, the lingua franca of much of East Africa. During my time in Kenya, I learned a few phrases, apart from
the all-important “food words” that I’ve mentioned before in the post. Asante sana (thank you very much), habari (what’s the news), karibu (welcome), hodi (knock knock), sawa (OK) and some Kiswahili slang thanks to one of my younger colleagues-
I say mambo, you say poa. Oh, and kiboko (hippo)!
1. It is OK to eat the same thing again and again. What I saw of everyday Kenyan food was simple and humble with meals being much the same from day to day. And that is OK. Food is sustenance and not necessarily a big production in much of the world. I think I should stop worrying too much about serving something new and different every day. Lentils and sautéed veggies as the default meal works just fine.
2. Simple ingredients can make flavorful food all by themselves. The home cooking and canteen food I tasted in Kenya was very minimally spiced. Even the local Peptang brand hot sauce tasted absolutely bland to me. Dishes got their flavor from basic ingredients like onions, tomatoes and carrots. At some point, I wished I’d thought to pack a small bottle of sriracha sauce and lime pickle, but honestly, eating this way was a revelation. I'm going to try going easy on spices some of the time and let simple flavors shine.
3. Greens are good eats. In Kiswahili, the phrase sukuma wiki literally means to stretch the week, as in, cheap greens to stretch the more expensive ingredients of the meal. Sukuma wiki was my favorite thing about the food in Kenya. In the bazaar-type open markets, you can buy greens that are already finely shredded and ready to cook- 50 Ksh (50 Kenya shillings- approximately 50 cents) worth can feed a crowd easily. I loved seeing how easy it was to sauté them up and eat a big pile of greens at almost every meal. With the CSA
boxes, I already have been eating more greens than ever this year, and this trip solidified my love for it.
I feel so lucky to be able to spend some time in Kenya- a beautiful land, home to beautiful, kind and friendly people. A lot of the people I know who work on African projects find themselves falling in love with the countries and the people in spite of the challenges of living and working there, and I can see why. Life is tough but people are tougher. I was very sad to fly out of Kenya and equally happy to land in Atlanta- which I guess is the mark of a successful trip.
V, Lila and Duncan managed beautifully on their own, as I knew they would. The only thing I did for them was to stock the freezer and pantry with prepared meals. Since Lila’s birth, I hadn’t been away from her for even a single night, until I left for weeks. But V is an extremely competent Dad and she is old enough to understand where I am going and that I will be back. They went camping one weekend. Some cousins visited another weekend. V was even a "dance dad" and got Lila ready for her first ballet recital. With V's month long India trip closely followed by my own, we're all happy to be on the same continent and looking forward to enjoying summer together. And I hope you have a wonderful summer too!
