Election Week aka Vacation

I'm trying to get more pictures of local houses (they're more of huts made with clay dirt and straw) and neighborhoods but I don't want to intrude. It's also a little hard to take pictures on a motorbike. So I guess just more pictures of beaches...

Luckily nothing crazy to report here. Life in Kilifi during the election just kept right on going. It didn’t really change much, people still went to the beach, walked around, etc. The only things noticeably different were how the shops were closed, and there was one army truck full of soldiers sitting around bored. The polling centers here were pretty much empty. I think I saw one of the polling workers with his head on his desk? My impression is that the people here are boycotting the vote because their candidate withdrew (see my attempt to explain below). I asked my roommate, whose family is in Nairobi, what it was like in the capitol, and she said it was very tense. No one outside, doors and windows locked. If I understood her correctly, there is one neighborhood where if you’re not holding a stone, that means you’re part of the resistance party (no longer recognized as a political party by the government - as least I heard) and you’ll get stoned. In some places, the polling centers are blocked by protesters so people can’t vote which just further delayed the election process. The general opinion of the local people I work with is that they just want this election to be over so they can move on. The crux of the political situation is due to tribal lines - if I may generalize and summarize what I hear from other people. This is one area where tribalism still has power today. According to a coworker who moved to Kilifi from Nairobi, it doesn’t particularly matter what the presidential candidates campaign on, or what their platform is. Majority of people vote according to their tribe loyalty (i.e what tribe the candidate belongs to). And since there are a few top tribes that take up a majority vote of the population, there’s a sense of certainty of who will win even before the polls are closed. Hence the opposition petitioning withdrawal, corruption, etc.

Since there wasn’t any disruption to life here in Kilifi that I saw, my expat colleagues took advantage of that. On Wednesday, we went to the beach, and went to a club with salsa dancing! On Thursday, election day, my roommates and I layed low for most of the day to suss out how Kilifi would be then went back to the beach again (I guess that’s what happens when you’re 5 minutes away) when we found out it was pretty much normal, then had an impromptu dinner party of chipati (I learned that this was actually just the word for the naan) and curry stew thing and invited other expat coworkers to come over.

Making chipati from scratch (not me obvs)

Not to paint a pretty picture here or over-glamorize my experience; all, maybe for the exception of me and another person, were fellows, meaning their time with the company would end after 6 months since they're not choosing to extend their offer to a full-time position (which tbh makes me just a little unsure what I signed up for). This company is a startup with with a non-traditional business model, if you can call it that. They (we?) service the supply chain of planting trees -from training, providing resources (i.e seedlings, water buckets), financing, distributing, and selling trees. The farmer provides the labor - ensuring good growth, removing weeds etc. Trees are a long term investment-like up to 10 years! I won’t get into it all, but since this is a small company, the fellows had a lot to vent about. I was like...what did I get myself into…...

Friday, we went kayaking in this creek (the part before it spits out into the ocean- huge and not like a river creek like I thought it was). It was definitely one of those moments that felt more like I was on some weird vacation rather than this was actually going to potentially be my life for the next two years. I’m trying not to think about what happens after…

Then went snorkeling at low tide on the beach with some of the guys. They swam quite far out - like past feet-on-the-sand level and I’m like ok don’t drown, don’t drown, keep up, keep up. I finally made it where they were. I didn’t have my own goggles, but someone was nice to share and I’m like treading just to slow my breath and I barely get the goggles and mouthpiece on and look down..can’t effing really see anything. I mean I saw the reef was right below us but due to the rains recently, the visibility wasn’t really that good. I saw some fish but still….I guess it didn't help that I still felt so out of break underwater. When I came back up, they were like cool, right? I’m like sure.. They wanted to swim further out for better visibility, but I was like.. I’m going to float back.

For dinner we went to this place called Distant Relatives (DR). It’s a backpacker joint, but on Fridays it’s pizza night and it attracts a good mix of locals and foreigners. These are decent sized personal pizzas for 600Ksh (6 USD) Apparently after a certain hour, I think it should be renamed Dreads and Drugs. Like so many hippie looking caucasian people with dreads talking about how crazy their last ‘trip’ was if you catch my meaning. There’s a drink called dawa, which is sprite (or their equivalent) with honey and vodka. It’s quite refreshing in the heat. Their local beer is called Tuskers and surprisingly not a light beer, like most southeast Asian beers, though they do have Tuskers Light and also Tuskers Cider. A pricey beer can be 300 KSh so 3 USD and that's more on the expensive end.

Before the Dreads N' Drugs kick in

Rest of the weekend was lowkey: me resting my sunsenstive skin and then going to the beach some more, drinking mango juice or passion fruit juice. I don't have enough data or strong enough network even to stream shows or movies. Sad. After a long break with only a couple days of work, I'm still in this surreal disbelieving bubble that this is real. I'm miles and miles away and this is for work not a gap year or vacation, and I wouldn't even have a steady job to come home too anyway.

But with a sunset like that...