My African Adventure - Part 1
Submitted by editor_en on Tue, 04/01/2008 - 15:53.
DAY 1, 30TH March 2008
Left last night from cold, rainy & stormy London. A quick 8 hours later we’ve landed in Nairobi, ready for the first leg of too quick trip across East Africa, to meet with grantees from the Staying Alive Foundation – to see what they’re doing on-the-ground, and if there are other ways we can help them.
Despite the political troubles of only a few months ago, on the short ride from Nairobi airport, there was very little evidence that it wasn’t ‘business as normal’ in Nairobi. I saw one wall with “Vote No” painted on it (‘no’ what? I wondered to myself). Other than that, through my jet-lagged and somewhat hazy vision, I noticed a lot of high-end adverts (for cars, tvs, computers) and no sign of the awful political troubles that have been very much part of Kenya’s history at the beginning of this year. I hope the calm that is in place now is permanent (although there are already rumblings of the beginnings of fighting in the Rift Valley again).
Last time I was in Nairobi (August 07) the weather was perpetually grey and overcast. Today has been beautiful – blue sky, perfect temperature (although the Nairobians we were with were complaining that it was too cold… but hey, I’m from London, so I’ll soak up any sunshine going!) – and the brilliance of the colours of Nairobi are pinging out everywhere. It’s Sunday, so it’s market day, and you could pretty much get anything you wanted. The fruit and veg looked great, the chickens (still living… for now) looked somewhat distressed. Being a vegetarian, I passed on by as quickly as I could!
This afternoon, we visited one of the projects that the Staying Alive Foundation is funding: “Positive Youth Initiatives”. It’s headed up by a fabulous “rock star” of a girl, Georgina. In July of last year, Georgina openly told her friends, family, and the media, that she’s HIV+ve. She was infected by her first boyfriend (who later died of TB), but she has chosen to live her life positively by channelling all her energies into peer education. She’s a counsellor working at a hospital, and through PYI, works with other young people to help them understand what it’s like to live with HIV, to get tested, how to tell family and friends if it’s a +ve result etc. The group (which also included Barbara, Ian, Kennedy, Joseph and others) meet every Saturday, and despite the difficulties of the political crisis, continued to do so throughout the fighting.
It’s hard really to understand what they must have been going through over the last few months: on a very basic level (but one that we’d all understand), there was often no phones/SMS available… forget about not being able to organise your social life, you couldn’t even text your family to check that they were ok. And there was no food – literally. And for those living with HIV, not only were they not able to eat, but many found that they couldn’t access their drugs and had to break their treatment programme.
Over 100,000 Kenyans are now living in camps, displaced through the fighting, and many more are living with friends and family, having to leave their own homes behind them. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been closely watching CNN & the BBC for any news about Kenya, hoping that the violence didn’t flare up again and cause our trip to be cancelled (obviously, it’s all about me!!). But sitting here talking to people now, I’m amazed at how much Kenya ISN’T in the news. Surely the international world should be more aware of what’s happening in Kenya now the fighting’s stopped, rather than only writing about the country when they can count up the dead bodies?
Our first day is at an end. We've just returned from a fabulous dinner with Maryanne (who has her own day job with FHI, but spends so much of her time mentoring our grantees in Nairobi – THANK YOU! What would we do without you!), Jacky Kowa (herself a SAF grantee who blogs on the site weekly - read them, they're genius!), Barbara and Georgina, both from PYI. We went to a beautiful Italian restaurant and ate outside… it was the first time Georgina had ever eaten pasta before, and I’ve promised her that if she gets a scholarship to attend the Mexican Int’l AIDS Conference, then her first Mexican meal is on me. And Jacky has promised me that she's going to write about me in her next blog... sorry Jacky, beat you to it!!!
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