FWS's first-ever international volunteers arrive

There they are - Jai and Blair, fws’s first-ever international volunteers. Look at them: trailblazers, groundbreakers, pioneers! Or two grubby but good-spirited Aussie chippies that haven’t seen their lost luggage for five days? Depends on how you see it, but for these two volunteers, a clean t-shirt and a new pair of undies wouldn’t go astray! Blair, in particular, wouldn’t mind seeing his bags ‘cause then he could pull out his hat instead of having to go with this number he created from a piece of cardboard and a girly pink t-shirt he found. Over the top? Not when your Scottish skin starts asking for sunscreen at 9am each morning.




















Despite their baggage issues (non-emotional), the boys have got stuck into the carpentry work for Kesho. They’ve spent the week in the backyard at the volunteer house, sawing and planing the timber lengths that will be whacked together to make moulds to hold the concrete for the pathway surrounding Kesho Leo pathway. They’ve been into town with us a few times (an initiation for anyone – dare you to return without feeling exhausted) and have even downed a pizza and beer at Stiggys, the local Australian-owned restaurant. In fact, Daz, Blair, Jai and Mark (our auditor who is coming over to help us fine-tune our accounting systems this end), have a gig on at Stiggy’s this Friday night. Get this for a multi-talented volunteer crew: Daz will sing and play guitar, Blair will play guitar, as will Jai, while Mark will sing (not that he knows that yet – he’s only just hopping on the plane). Sound sensations! Look out Arusha – Food Rockin Shelter has rolled into town.






























Who bought eight awesomely huge water tanks for a terrific price this week? We did. Who dug and dug all day (through 5 foot of our gorgeous top soil) to make holes for those tanks? We did (no we didn’t – our African Building team did – you’ve never seen people work the way these guys do, it’s incredible). Who managed to put four of the eight tanks in the ground? We did! Who managed to totally gob-smack our building team by telling them there were several more water tanks coming…and that they’d be used to give not just Kesho Kidbs, but also them – our neighbours – water? We did.











What else? Well, we completed part two of our “erect a strong boundary fence” mandate this week – in went 190 bouganvillea seedlings. Our smiling Ruben patted them into their new home with the lush topsoil we’d dug up while making holes for our watertanks, while Nikodem, our next-door neighbour at Kesho, followed and gave each a generous splash of local infereji water. We’ll wait about six months or so for these baby bougans to grow up, entwine with the barbed wire fence, grow their own thorns and become a fully-fledged pretty but threatening boundary fence.











Driveway. Spectacular. Strong. Finished!

Oh and Shona arrives tomorrow – and with her, Daniel, Darren’s youngest son (13yo). Personally, I can’t wait for either of them to arrive. Obviously I’m deadkeen to show Shona around (and to give her our resident linguistics legend the job of teaching me Kiswahili), but I’m also deadkeen to introduce Daniel to January. January is our askari (guard) up at Kesho Leo. He’s from a tribe, which Nolasco says, is even stronger than the Maasai. It’s hard to credit – and in fact, when we told Mudi that Nolasco had said that, Mudi cracked up! “A tribe stronger than the Maasai, wwaaahhaaa, never! Eeeh!” I later queried Nolasco again and he said he thinks this tribe are stronger than the Maasai because they had very, very small numbers, but purposefully grew them by having many children and learning to fight hard. They became excellent archers and actually began to tip their arrows with poison. When we met January, Nolasco asked January in Kiswahili if he was good with a bow and arrows, and January smiled slowly and whispered, “safi sana”. (direct translation: “very clean”). Nolasco then hastened to point out we didn’t want him to hurt anyone…he wasn’t to use his spear… but still, I think Daniel, who spent most of his weekends with us in Petersham aiming his bow and arrow at a cardboard box in the backyard, should convince January to give him a few lessons.



I’m looking forward to introducing Shona to Agnes and Elizabeth. Elizabeth (pictured washing our floor) washes our clothes for us and sometimes (well...once) the floor.





Agnes (pictured shaving the coconut flesh), who only started two days ago, has begun cooking us some fantastic African meals each night. We hoed into ndizi nyama for our first meal (banana and beef, but not banana as Aussies know it – it’s cooking banana – which is more often known as ‘plantain’). We gobbled down ugali na mboga (polenta and vegetables) last night. And tonight…I think it’s maharage na wali (beans and rice. Sounds dull – it will be delicious I promise).





Agnes is from Kenya but is staying with her sister in Engosengui (the village where Kesho is being built). She left Kenya a year ago because her father was selling brides for arranged marriages and she “didn’t want to be one”. Her English is excellent, which isn’t rare in Kenyans. She’s on “trial” as our cook, but so far things are working out extremely well. I really like her. She’s bolshy (a fairly standard Maasai trait!) – for instance, she was telling me how she needed to rearrange the food in the fridge so it worked better for her, she’s smart (showed her once how to use our gas oven – and she’s never asked again! Daz had to show me twice!), and she’s straight-forward (there’s no ‘deals’ going on here. If she wants something she asks for it, but she doesn’t ask for the type of stuff that makes us uncomfortable. And that isn’t always the way here. Agnes never make us feel uncomfortable for our Western lifestyle (one that we've downgraded but that is still extravagant by comparison - how can it not be with such income earning capacities). Some of our neighbours come to our fence, or to our door, and gawk at us. Some that come inside, eyeball our fridge and lounge and say how they’d like this or that, and can they have it. Can they have the paw-paws on our tree (the ones that aren’t even ripe yet), can they have our butter, can they have our sunglasses, can they have eight 20L buckets of our water, can they have… it’s all understandable of course, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel uncomfortable and at times, if it didn’t niggle me a little. How many ways can you say: No, sorry you can’t have our butter, no you definitely can’t have my sunglasses, no sorry, you can only have four 20L buckets of water not eight – we have people here who need water as well, no you can’t have the fruit growing on our trees, no I can’t give you 1000Tz ($1) to go to the local fair, no I can’t pay for you to go to English lessons, no I can’t pay for your headache tablets or typhoid bill, no I can’t pay for your hospital bill, yes, we can sharpen your knife for you but not just this minute, yes you can have our axe, but please bring it back when you’re done… I asked Mudi about this – why some Africans ask and ask and ask (and I stipulate SOME here because others have been the exact opposite and have simply given, given, given! and I also stipulate that these are just my personal ramblings and may or may not reflect the feelings of the other fws team - don't know, havent asked them), while others don’t ask anything at all of us. Mudi said “Some Africans are lazy and think it easier to ask you for things than to get it themselves. Maybe they don’t want to walk to the bomba to get water, even if they only pay 200 shillings (20c), but they just don’t want to walk, so they come to your house and ask for your water instead…it's closer”. It's interesting when you put that perpective on it - is this poverty asking? Or convenience? Anyway, the point was Agnes doesn’t ever do this and I like that she doesn’t do this. She comes here, she does her work extremely well and I pay her. It was like this from day one - she told me what price we must pay her and that after one month if we were happy with her, we could pay her more – it was up to us. Very clean cut and very ‘comfortable’ because it’s similar to how things would work at home. Funny how we like to stick to what we know isn’t it? Some traveller! Some community mobilizer!

Maybe I need to be more adventurous and think up some creative ways to say yes to the African neighbours who come asking for this, asking for that…but then you fear – where does it stop? And this is the scary thing about charity and giving - where does it stop? Well, I think that for now, until I evolve a little more spiritually that is, I’ve decided that it stops where I say it does and there’s to be no guilt around that decision. So where does it stop for me? Well, I decided a while back, that it was going to be a fairly big deal to get this children’s village up and that I would work terribly hard to ensure we got it up, involving as much of the local community as possible…but that I wouldn’t give out money/sunglasses/anything much to every African I met in passing because then I’d be out of the stuff I needed to keep going - to keep going in ensuring Kesho went up. I told myself I wasn’t going to be able to pull off a Gandhi so I should just mark out boundaries for giving that I’m comfy with and then stick to them. So for now, that’s where my giving stops. I give for Kesho, and for the neighbours around Kesho, but not to the many millions of Africans who could use a pair of sunnies or a few more 20L buckets of water. That said, I’m absolutely hopeless with the “no guilt” element of my decision, but maybe the guilt is a good thing. Maybe the guilt is what is prompting me to review my decision and to try and come up with a more Gandhi approach to openly helping those asking for it, as well as those I specifically came to help – the Kesho beneficiaries. So once again, history has it: they say you come to change Africa but Africa just changes you. Well, let’s hope Africa does a good job of sorting out this boundary-marking Westerner - and sorting her out quickly. Because she's a little confused.

Beck