Mmm…mmm…good!

We have eaten many new things in Kenya. They have a staple of rice and beans. The rice is soft and sticky and the beans are pinto beans that are stewed with tomatoes to give the juices and the beans a good flavor.

Their other staple that every Kenyan woman must know how to make is ugali. If a woman gets married and cannot make ugali she is sent back to her family until she learns how. Ugali is simply maize (corn) flour added to boiling water and stirred to make a kind of dough (think grainy playdough). You eat ugali with your hands and it goes with a variety of different things including kachumbari (sliced tomatoes, onions and peppers drowned in the juice of a lime), skuma (boiled and seasoned kale – like spinach), cabbage, and some kind of meat – we’ve had fish.

I had to prove my worthiness as a wife! My attempt at ugali.

The best meal according to a Kenyan is nyama choma – translated literally it’s grilled animal, but it just means any kind of meat. They are not picky about their meat and it often includes or mostly consists of bone and fat.

Another great Kenyan dish is pilau. It is rice with certain spices that give it an orange color and nyama choma. We’ve been told that it is common to slice a banana in with it and when we tried it we were very surprised that it was very good.

They eat everything with chapati. Chapati is like a thick tortilla, but more flavorful. They like to tear it into bite-size pieces and cover it with beans – either pinto beans or a kind of bean soup that tastes like lentils. The chapati soaks up the juices and it’s really good.

They love to drink hot things (tea, coffee, cocoa). There is a saying in Swahili, “When it’s hot, take it hot. When it’s cold, take it cold.” Well, it’s never cold, so we’ve been hard pressed to find anything cold! We haven’t tried anything we really didn’t like which has been a pleasant surprise! The abundant and very sweet bananas and other fruits have been a highlight, and good for us too.

A passion fruit! We had only had the juice until we got here.

Flat Sweet Flat

We live in an area called Nyali. We are told that Nyali is the rich part of Mombassa. We do live in a gated community but it’s not what you imagine. Our neighborhood is near the Nyali movie theatre and that is where we get off the matatu (Public transportation). From there we walk along a dirt path through a field which seems to serve as a community dump and where we often find goats grazing. We walk past the family who lives under the big tree and a small Muslim church with corrugated steel for a roof. Then we cross a small paved road and arrive at our community’s outer gate. From there it is just a short walk along the dirt road to our building’s gate.

The road home... Our building taken from the trash pile. We are the top, right balcony.

We have a security guard that always greets us as we enter and leave our building. Just outside the gate is where our trash it burned three times a week. We just leave it on the pile and the care taker burns it. This is one of the many smells that floats through our apartment during the day. Our building has a cement parking area on the ground floor where the children in the building play. We often watch them from our balcony and enjoy to see them having fun in the cool evenings.

Our apartment is extremely nice by Kenyan standards. We have two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room. We have running water but not heated water and a sink and line up on the roof for laundry. We have two gas burners which use a propane tank. We can’t drink the water from the tap but we buy big containers of water and we have a dispenser in the kitchen. You will know how nice our apartment is comparatively by remembering or re-reading the post from the 17th of March where we talked about visiting our friends at their home in Likoni. The overwhelming majority of Kenyans live like our friends in Likoni and very many live much worse.

The sitting room/dining room.

The kitchen and the bathroom.

The neighbors that we have met have been very nice. One neighbor, Sofi, even brought us some nyama choma (grilled animal – precise animal unknown).

Things we don’t have that we are all used to: a garbage disposal, laundry machines, air conditioning, an oven (not that we could use it in the heat) a normal sized refrigerator, hot water, TV, internet, and carpet.

Things that we do have that we’re not used to: a sink for laundry, mosquito nets to sleep in, four fans (two blowing directly on each of us) to keep us cool enough to sleep at night, common power failure, lots of bugs eating our food, and the occasional lizard.

Despite these differences we are getting along just fine and we’re gaining a greater appreciation for all that we have.

Meet the Staff

We would like to introduce to you the staff of the Accounting Department at Yehu Microfinance. These are the wonderful people we work with everyday. They make Yehu run smoothly and the work they do allows over 12,000 people to work towards self-reliance. They have made us feel very welcome in Kenya and have taken good care of us.

Bernice Githinji is the first person we met when we arrived in Mombasa. She gave up a Saturday to pick us up from the airport and take us to the store for food. She has a good sense of humor and is strong in her opinions. She often speaks to us in Swahili because she thinks we should know the language already. She is the Assistant to the CEO and we’re not sure what she does everyday! :)

Kombe David Mathoh is the Accountant for Yehu. He is the fearless leader of the department. He is very kind and quiet and probably the busiest person here. Once when we needed to meet with him on a Tuesday to go over a report he said, “Okay, just a minute, I have to finish something, just a minute.” When we stayed until 6pm on Friday waiting for him to have time for us and he tried to tell us, “We’ll do it on Monday” we knew we had to be a little more insistent!

Phoebe Mwanjala has a great laugh. She is always welcoming and willing to help us learn whatever she is working on. (Note: We have found when a word ends in an “I” or “Y” the sound will often be left off. Example: One of the branches of the bank is in Mwambalazi, but people usually say Mwambalaz) One of our favorite things about Phoebe is that she says almost every day that she “is feeling dizz” when she gets tired or hungry. It makes us smile! Phoebe has a husband and a little boy that she misses at home.

Gerald Makonde Mshanga is “cool.” He loves to use that word and thinks things from the States are cool! He likes to try to speak with an American accent rather than the more common British accent but things usually come out half and half. He is a hard worker. Gerald loves ugali (a Kenyan staple we will show you later) and says it makes you strong and gives you lots of energy, so Justin should eat it everyday.

Maina is an intern like us. He is a local student in his second of six years of accounting school. He is always very polite and very quiet.

Adet Kache is Yehu’s CEO. He is very kind and always willing to help us at any hour of the day or night. He is completely devoted to the success of the bank. He is extremely motivated and hard-working. Adet arrives early and leaves late each day and we rarely see him at the office without and appointment because he is so busy and hard at work (hence, no picture yet).