March 30 – My shaking hands today with Kenya’s Vice President, Minister & Permanent Secretary of Youth Affairs, etc. – part of my 15 minutes of fame
Through my working on the Believe Begin Become business plan competition, I tagged along today to a presentation of checks to TechnoServe, hosted by Kenya’s Vice President at his office! I shook the VP’s hand as well as the Minister and his Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of State for Youth Affairs (the latter oversees all the daily ministry activities). Besides the TechnoServe Country Director (who spoke) and the Believe Begin Become Program Director, there were several other senior executives from private sector companies: Managing Director of Lenovo for Eastern & Southern Africa, the Chairman of the Kenya Pipeline Company, and one of the Board of Directors from Kenya Commercial Bank (largest in Kenya). If we can get copies of pictures, I'll post them. TechnoServe was receiving a dummy check for 45 million Kenyan Shillings from the Youth Affairs, 7 million from Lenovo, and 1 million + other programs from Kenya Commercial Bank (70 Ksh = US$1). The press were snapping photos, the Ministry recorded and video-ed the speeches. Not bad for 1 30-minute meeting (with 2 years’ of work behind it). Now we wait for the checks to clear…
March 26 – Lauren, our niece, is volunteering at TechnoServe Peru
Our “it’s a small world” continues when we found out that our niece, Lauren, who has been traveling throughout Latin America is working for TechnoServe Peru! And the introduction was through friends--we didn’t introduce her! I know that she will be valued as a volunteer consultant, as all of us are in Africa.
March 26 – Inquiring minds want to know about our TechnoServe projects
Rick is fully enjoyed his role as unofficial Deputy Country Director for the TechnoServe Kenya office. He is a sounding board, mentor, and strategic and tactical advisor to the Country Director, who’s a very competent and visionary man and who started his job Jan. 1, 2007 after being a senior staff member for about 8 years. Rick is also working closely with the new TechnoServe Africa CFO and many of the other Kenya senior staff, playing part-time devil’s advocate and part-time Solomon. The projects and managers he supports run the gamut of industries TechnoServe Kenya assists: dairy, bananas, legumes, the new coffee and cashew efforts, and entrepreneurship programs. No piggies this time, but he’s learned all sorts of new fruit, veggie, and dairy vocabulary! His title is Senior Adviser. We’re not sure if the “Senior” refers to his level in the organization or his age.
My role is to advise and support TechnoServe Kenya’s 3 entrepreneurship programs: young women, piloting a model to scale up micro-enterprises, and Kenya’s 1st annual business plan competition which TechnoServe brands as Believe Begin Become (BBB). Though conducted since 2003 in Latin American, BBB ran for the 1st time in Ghana and Swaziland in 2006 and is now in Kenya, South Africa, and again Ghana and Swaziland in 2007. Kenya’s Believe Begin Become team anticipates receiving about 10,000 applicants, training about 8,000 for 1 day in 23 locations across the country, then providing intensive coursework for over one week to 300 semi-finalists in 8 locations. Since I have peripheral experience from Swaziland’s BBB event, I can give some advice. But the team has an experienced leader, so my role with this group will be smaller than the other two. I am very active in Young Women in Enterprise, Upscaling Micro-Enterprises and other marketing projects. Along with grant/proposal writing, I’ve judged 3 of the Enterprise Club competitions as described below and started to “build the capacity” of TechnoServe’s implementation partner, Project Baobab. My activities with the Upscaling group are starting to scale up now, pun intended, so stay tuned for more in a future blog.
March 23 – Finally the arrival of our boxes shipped from Swaziland and 2 dinners with new friends
On Tuesday night after we returned from Lamu, we were driven to Karen, a very high-income southern Nairobi suburb, where we were finally able to have dinner with my Brazilian friend, Deborah, and twin daughters Alice and Daisy. Though I would guess the 15-year olds were mostly bored, the 3 adults really enjoyed learning about what we were all doing in Nairobi. The food at the Talisman Restaurant was great and apparently their goat cheese and cilantro samosas are loved throughout Kenya. To fully catch up on Deborah’s and my 40-year hiatus will probably take the rest of our stay in Kenya. Later in the week we would learn that Deborah’s husband, David, who was traveling in the U.S. and U.K., had met with the sister of our TechnoServe Country Director’s wife. The coincidences continue…
On Thursday evening, Rick and I went out to dinner with office colleagues, Anna and Greg, at Open House, the best Indian restaurant we’ve visited in Nairobi so far. They had recommended the Kijani House and Peponi restaurant in Lamu, so they clearly know their food. The evening flew by with lots of getting-to-know-you conversations. We talked about all of our people coincidences to date, saying we would have expected that everyone knew everyone in Swaziland with just 1 million people. But Anna told us that Nairobi is viewed, especially by the ex-pats and professional workers, as really a village with so many people connected that our coincidences are actually the norm. So far it seems that way to us…
One of Rick’s and my running jokes is waiting for the boxes we had left in Swaziland mid-December to arrive in Nairobi. Had we known the agony and expense involved, it would have taken much less time to fly everything back to Calif. then back to Kenya. Over 3 months after we packed them, our boxes finally got through several days and trips to customs. It had been so long that it was hard to remember what we shipped. Friday night felt like Christmas as we explored the surprises in our boxes. T.i.A.--another funny quirk we have accepted about our African experiences (T.i.A. is described below in another part of the blog).
March 17 to 19 – Touring Lamu Island is as if we’re stepping back 50 to 100 years in time
We wanted to visit the Kenyan coast which is predominantly Muslim and where the Swahili culture and language (spoken across Tanzania and Kenya) had begun. Arabs had come to the coast and islands hundreds of years ago to trade then conquered (loose term considering the actual resistance) Lamu and nearby islands forming an archipelago. Lamu Town is Kenya’s oldest town still existing. It symbolizes everything Swahili and became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001. So less than 48 hours ahead, we arranged to fly to the Island of Lamu off the northern Kenya coast (about 100km safely south of Somalia) to see for ourselves the fascinating origins of Swahili.
Our flights in a 40+ seater 2-engine prop-plane were on Fly 540, a relatively new airline with bright orange planes. The hand-written boarding passes maybe should have been the 1st clue about service levels. We almost missed getting onto our flight because they never announced that the flight was going to Lamu after continuing from its 1st stop in Malindi on Kenya’s southern coast (we didn’t know that (there or Malindi) was a stop on our supposedly non-stop flight). The rest of the flight was uneventful.
The arrival, however, was definitely interesting. The smallest actual airport we’d flown into was Livingstone in Zambia to see Victoria Falls with Carolyn. In 1997, we landed on an airstrip in the Masai Mara. The least efficient, small airport to which I’d been was Dominica in the Caribbean. Lamu was in a different league altogether. Actually we landed on an airstrip with 2 other passengers on Manda Island. As we disembarked from the plane, we observed that the Arrival and Departure Lounges were open air, with wooden beams supporting the thatched-roof, and comfortable wood plank-topped cement benches. Our luggage was available within a few minutes and was picked up by a young man wearing a t-shirt with our hotel name, then carried about 200 yards along a dirt path to the dock. After 15 or so minutes, Mr. Hamid, our official greeter and guide, arrived by speedy-ish boat. Rick and I plus 2 young women, who had arrived on Air Kenya around the same time, were going to the Kijani House Hotel in the village of Shela. We all climbed into the boat for a 10-minute cruise to the hotel. The driver and a friend pulled the boat up to a rock-pile wall in front of Kijani House and we climbed out. I was certainly ungraceful for all my boat entries and exits because of the uneven sand or rocks and my recovering broken ankle.
Kijani House is a lovely inn right on the Indian Ocean with 2 swimming pools, lovely landscaped grounds, and good food. Our hotel room was actually two-storied with shutter-windows, no glass, and a balcony overlooking the sea. I almost immediately sat on that balcony, put my leg up, and read until it was too dark. Rick walked around the hotel grounds and up the shore to a large compound supposedly owned by a German couple whose husband had cancer but wanted to come back to Lamu where he died recently.
Dinner was in the open-air bar and dining room. If we wanted something other than the day’s prix-fixe dinner, we would have to order it in advance and we could eat about 45 minutes later. So we ordered lobster, salads, and a shared crepe dessert and sat down with a Tusker beer to wait. We joined the 2 young women from our earlier boat ride and ended up sitting with them for dinner. They knew each other from work. The one named Wendy was returning to Wisconsin soon to tend to her sick mother. The other woman was Erica who had grown up in Beverly, Mass. less than 25 miles from my home in Swampscott, both on Boston’s north shore. Both worked for another NGO in Nairobi. More amazing little coincidences…
The next morning after a delicious fresh breakfast (the best yogurt I’ve tasted), Mr. Hamid helped us into a boat in front of the hotel to go into old Lamu Town where he guided us around for the next 2 hours. There are no cars on Lamu Archipelago and donkeys are used for movement that can’t be hand carried. Though I’ve yet to visit Arabic countries, Lamu Town felt like a town we’d find in Egypt or Morocco. Some of the oldest houses, originally built from coral reef “stones”, are being restored with more modern materials but we could see part of the old coral walls. The streets were about 5 feet wide between 2 or 3 storey buildings, wide enough for 2 loaded donkeys to pass if we stood in a doorway (which we did a few times). We walked by an old and a new mosque, the old built in the 14th century. The new one was built by Saudi Arabia in the mid-1900s but the “congregation” was founded in the 1890s by a well-known Swahili scholar. We visited the Donkey Sanctuary for orphaned and ill donkeys, the Swahili Museum, and shops (I bargained for a cotton kikoi cloth sarong), then stopped for a fresh juice at a small café.
After our boat-trip back to Kijani House, we changed into our swimsuits, I put on my new sarong, and we walked to the dining area, passing by a turtle over a foot long (we later heard and then observed that turtle and friend mating, a picture which Rick had go back to capture. We had a delicious small lunch of prawn, avocado & mango salads with curry & coconut milk dressing (and yes, I plan to make this for our gourmet group). We couldn’t leave Lamu without taking a ride on a dhow, the old African wooden sailboat, so Mr. Hamid arranged for a private sunset dhow cruise around the edge of the island that is covered by mangrove forests. For many years, Lamu’s main revenue was from mangrove logging . The Kenyan government under pressure from global environmentalists stopped the logging. It’s taken quite awhile for the island’s economy to recover, but that’s been helped by Lamu tourism and community leaders creating an Art Festival and two dhow competitions annually that draw large groups of visitors.
Back to the dhow cruise, we saw a beautiful sunset and were heading back to Shela and our hotel when the junior of the 2 dhow sailors managed to sail us onto the edge of the beach. What was supposed to be less than 1.5 hour sailing turned into almost 2.5 hours, with the return trip powered by the junior sailor pushing and the senior guy poling the dhow all the way back to the hotel—in the dark. However, the evening ended with a wonderful dinner at the nearby Peponi Hotel. The highlights of that meal for me were the spicy mango soup, incredibly fresh white snapper, and the gooey chocolate dessert with nuts and cookies chopped up inside, accompanied by homemade vanilla ice cream. Rick boldly asked the owner/hostess if she’d be willing to give up the recipe for the soup, which he went back the next morning to get since the computer with her recipes had been already shut down. More food for gourmet group.
After 2 nights sleeping under a mosquito net with ocean breezes wafting through the room and 2+ days of reading, ocean, and wandering through an ancient town, we were totally relaxed. We took a boat back to the Lamu Airport on Manda Island. Our luggage and we were hand-screened; we waited in the open-air Departure Lounge, then flew back through Malindi again to Nairobi where we fast-forwarded 50 to 100 years in time.
The time-warp on Lamu is what I imagined my father experienced during World War II when he was stationed in different parts of Eastern Africa as a pilot, including on the island of Madagascar. When he left there, he said something like, “I bid a fond farewell to this jewel on the Indian Ocean.” Exactly, Daddy.
March 16 – Multiple Musings: Matatu = Crazy Taxi; Pedestrians constantly jaywalk with impunity; random but regular Police Roadblocks; and W.t.A. or T.i.A.
As we drive around Nairobi and elsewhere in Kenya, we are continually flabbergasted by the craziness of the matatu drivers. A matatu is a mini-van with a regular route to/from certain villages or cities. Drivers probably take lessons from the kami-kaze school of driving. Their cars are beat up but tank-like so they don’t care about frequently darting into and out of your way. It’s astounding that they don’t cause or get into many more accidents. Kombi drivers and vehicles in Swaziland seem tame, and Micro drivers in Chile are downright boring by comparison. But they must all be genetically related or mutated though living thousands of miles apart.
Kenyan culture has a wonderful, though crazy-making tendency toward assertiveness which emerges as amusing insanity among pedestrians. They blithely cross multiple highway lanes despite speeding traffic. In a congested area, they either don’t look at drivers at all or just glance up at the car that almost hits them. It’s as if they dare you to hit them. When they do acknowledge the nearby presence of a car, all pedestrians seem to have this cute mode of looking as though they are scurrying the last 2 feet of their casual challenge to cross an incredibly busy street. I’ve begun to giggle and admire them in a bizarre way. It may prove Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest…
All our trips outside of Nairobi are on brain-rattling, pot-holed roads. Our drivers dodge in and out of lanes past slow trucks spewing nasty black fumes or crazy matatu drivers who stop often and without warning to drop off/pick up passengers. Then there are the ever-changing police roadblocks every 25 km or so which force us to merge quickly to the right lane to pass one row of spikes then veer quickly left around the second row of spikes. Our driver never really knows whether he will be stopped. Supposedly these are random checks for contraband (if our car is stopped we open the “boot” or trunk) or vehicle safety. 95% of the time we sail—or slowly jerk—through the roadblock.
Because of all the above, it is quite understandable that Africans at multiple levels of society say either T.i.A (This is Africa!) as in Blood Diamond or W.t.A. (Welcome to Africa!). Rather than lose our minds or be depressed at the aggravation that continually pops up (e.g., the 5 or more times per day that electricity goes off and on and therefore internet and phone service—electrically-based phones), we have come to accept and laugh at the antics. Truly most of the things that happen are inconveniences or attributable to cultural differences (speedy customer service vs. slower, hang-loose attitude). However, T.i.A. or W.t.A. are spoken everywhere by most everyone.
March 15 – More Differences between Kenya and Swaziland: Haunting Poverty Affects Both Man & Animal;
Rick and I have now spent several days being driven out and back into Nairobi on work-related and pleasurable day trips. Nairobi is a huge, sprawling, rather- sophisticated city of over 3 million compared to 100,000+ population in Mbabane or Manzini, Swaziland. So poverty inside and on the edges of the city is exponentially more severe. Even on Nairobi’s main streets, we periodically see men pulling large, rickshaw-like handcarts of goods. Bicycles are prevalent in villages and in Nairobi. It is not unusual for an older man to be pumping up a hill slowly or young men with 5 plastic crates filled with bottles or food piled 5-high on the back of a bike, tied down with a bungee cord. Unlike southern African women who mostly carry huge loads on their heads with babies tied to their backs, here we see most young and old women with a strap or tump-line around their foreheads attached to huge loads on their backs, with babies sometimes tied in blankets to the women’s chests. As you can imagine, posture of these poor Kenyan women is terrible (though I’m sure a head-load compresses the spine, at least the body is upright).
20 km or less out of Nairobi is when we start seeing donkeys pulling carts piled high with bales of hay, bags of rice, or other assorted goods, often with a man standing at the front edge of the cart holding the reins and a small whip. Donkey- and human-pulled handcarts are widely used in towns and villages off the main roads. Also there are lots more bicycles and individual human load-bearers seemingly walking long-distances as well. Obviously bicycles and donkey carts are better than a person bearing the load. But in addition to not having a choice of transportation other than those and matatu taxis, these methods are ways people have adapted to the terrible road-conditions. Yes, the roads are being improved, slowly, but dusty, bumpy “diversions” to the road shoulder on one side then switch to the other side of the highway can be ignored by the donkey, bicycle or human mode.
Just a side-note, it is scary for us in our comfortable cars to closely pass these along a fast road. They donkeys, cyclists, and people barely glance at the inches by which we miss them
March 12 – Adrian, our son, is 30-years old today
How did we get to be old enough to have a 30-year old son??? We were sad to not be celebrating Adrian’s major milestone in person. Diana was our proxy, heading up to Boston for the weekend to be with her big brother and a few of his friends for dinner. He’s living in his new condo, enjoying his new job, dating actively, and knows his way around Boston now as well as D.C. (actually better than the SF Bay Area any more). Pretty good life! Happy Birthday, Adrian, and many, many more.
March 11 – Flamingoes of Lake Nakuru
We took another day trip to Lake Nakuru, 2.5 hours and 100km north of Nairobi. Our driver, Steve, did his best to stay out of pot-holes and bumps, but the ride each way did seem never-ending. We passed through many towns teeming with cyclists, donkey carts, and people visiting each other and going to market. One unique characteristic that I hadn’t seen elsewhere was the style of displaying fruits and vegetables in kiosks along the highway. Rather than the typical pyramid piles of the same exact produce in nearby kiosks, many green grocers displayed their goods upright inside a wooden sort-of bookshelf. These were pleasingly colorful and definitely more attention-grabbing…at least to me.
We arrived at the Lake Nakuru Park expecting to see a few scattered groups of typical game and many flamingoes. We saw tens of thousands of pink flamingoes! As we approached the large, soda-based lake surrounded by mud flats, we thought there were large gatherings of pink flowers in the water. As we drove closer, the flowers turned into non-stop flamingoes which were busy standing, dipping their heads to eat, grooming, and periodically flapping up to cruise over their friends. Our pictures on the website are good but cannot do justice to the feeling of discovering maybe 100,000 pink birds.
We did see some sacred ibis birds, a lone white pelican and 2 quite lovely crowned cranes. And Rick spotted and captured a picture of a very cute Dik-Dik, the smallest of the antelope-type species, which we hadn’t seen since were on safari in East Africa back in 1997. The rest of the drive through the park was much less unusual. Just several troops of baboons, herds of gazelles (Thompson and other variety,) and groups of reedbucks, cape buffalo and zebras as well as the occasional one or two white rhinos, reintroduced to the park a few years ago. We’re trying not to get jaded so we allow several weekends to pass between animal-viewing trips.
The last thing to note was that at the end of our drive back to Nairobi, everything in and on the car, including us, was covered with a layer of red dust. As soon as we got home, I showered. The tub ran reddish brown with my dust-removal for most of the time under the water. The last time I remember being so thoroughly coated with dust was after hiking in Bryce National Park in Utah. Then the water washed off reddish-pink talcum-like powder.
March 9 – Ironically Nairobi doctor solves WW’s ankle mystery apparently missed by Stanford docs
Those whom I visited while in Boston, New York ,Philadelphia and California may remember that I was limping a bit. Sometime as I was walking in Boston, I must have hit my ankle. A few days before I left California from Nairobi, since my new, regular doctor was away, I was treated by a nice 4th year Resident and a different attending doctor who recommended I receive an X-ray, which I did. I headed off to Nairobi as planned. My flight into Chicago arrived late so I had to run to the gate for London--to be happily surprised I was upgraded to Business Class and miserably in pain. By the time I arrived in Nairobi, I had requested a wheelchair, which certainly surprised Rick who awaited me in the lobby of Jomo Kenyatta Airport.
After a couple more weeks, my ankle was still painful. After a great deal of effort, my Stanford doctor’s clinical coordinator said I should see a physician in Nairobi. So our Office Manager arranged for an appointment with a doctor at M.P. Shah Hospital nearby. He examined my ankle, recommended a CT-scan (for which I paid less than US$110.00!), and told me to return to see him in 2 days. Lo and behold, he told me that I had a hairline fracture across my fibula bone about 4 cm. above my ankle. Since it was in place and healing he suggested elevating it as much as possible, continue on ibuprofen (which he had to look up in his pharmaceutical book), be careful because I have osteopenia (preliminary to osteoporosis), and return to visit him in late May. I sent the diagnosis to my doctor via her coordinator and received a very defensive reply that the X-ray could not have seen the break, yadayadayada. Hmmmm, Stanford vs. Nairobi medicine…
March 8 – The Roads to Juja, Kangari, and Ruiru--to meet rural, female future entrepreneurs
One of the projects which I support is the Young Women in Enterprise which recruits and trains 15 to 20-something year old women in entrepreneurship, business and life skills. About half of the 260 are in secondary school and the rest have left school (hence the common African term school-leavers vs. America’s drop-out) either after 8th grade or after 1 - 2 years of secondary school. After almost 200 hours of course time the majority of these women compete within each club with their individual business plans. We are talking about simple businesses—lots of beauty salons (also called saloons), retail kiosks (road-side stalls) selling greens or cereals or sundries—with a few other ideas per larger club, i.e.;, fresh juice creation, lending library, and cafe.
Many of these women have some truly amazing characteristics in truly challenging circumstances: self-confidence, passion and determination. Over half of the school-leavers have children of their own or are responsible for raising siblings or elders. The majority live in slums or slum-like dwellings none of us would think are habitable. During the 12 competitions, Rick and I judged one together in Kangari, I judged at 2 more in Juja and Ruiru, and Rick attended the award ceremony at Kibera, the infamous slum of “The Constant Gardner” movie. The 3 events I attended were north of Nairobi, on the road to or past the city of Thika. The shortest trip was 40 minutes and the longest 2.5 hours, on bone-jarring, traffic-filled roads (more in another blog).
The community centers-cum-churches and judging rooms had cement or dirt floors, corrugated tin or cement block walls, with wood-beamed corrugated tin or thatched roofs. Sometimes there were glass windows, but mostly walls had openings with metal shutters. Verb tense changes The audience and judges were seated on plastic stackable chairs. Wooden tables were moved in and out of spaces as needed. Lunches for the judges, teachers, and club members were nourishing and tasty: rice, meat stew, roasted chicken parts, cooked veggies, chapati (fried and tortilla-like), with bottled soft drinks including Fanta Orange and Grape (no longer popular in U.S.) along with standard Coke. Inevitably, we started judging later than planned because of travel and other typical event-glitches, and there were always more than the expected number of presenters (good news because more girls rise to the challenge). So lunch was generally around 3:00 p.m. rather than 1:00 p.m. then the awards ceremony started about 4 or 4:30 rather than 2:00.
It really does take a village…and the pride and support for the girls was quiet but very tangible. The girls waited nervously surrounded by the audience of parents, friends, and local officials filling and overflowing the hall. At least 80% of the next couple of hours was entirely in Swahili. The ceremony opens and closes with a Christian prayer. The protocol of respect for elders and authority was very strict. Each important person in the hall sat on the makeshift stage, was announced with proper (often long) titles, and was allowed to speak. Those whose speeches we could influence, we requested that they try to inspire all the girls to start their businesses even if they don’t win. No matter how often we explained that the grant by Nike Foundation was for only young women, at least one of chiefs or other male officials commented about the villages’ young men needing the training as much as the girls.
The speeches by parents were awe-some. Even though I had no idea what the words meant, I could understand from the emotions what was being said. Two older sisters of the girl who won 1st prize in Juja stood next to her. The one who spoke was beautifully dressed in a coral suit and heels, the other in a tailored purple dress. It was clear from the tears that the older sister talked about her pride in her younger sibling, especially in light of overcoming parental deaths and her bearing 2 children, to still have the determination to start a business.
The other really inspiring parent was the father of one of the young girls in Kangari who did not win a prize but was one of the speakers. Though again the words were entirely in Swahili, he spoke tearfully and proudly about this daughter. After the ceremony, one of my colleagues interpreted for me. The gist was that: he had started his own small business in 1970 which allowed him to feed and clothe his (large) family, put them all through school, and that he was so proud of this, his youngest daughter who was following in his footsteps.
My last judging experience was at a public secondary school in Ruiru, another semi-rural area, which had been started in 2002 by the principal. She was so proud of the accomplishments of her students, staff, and that this year they now had a “Form 4” class. She was clearly thrilled to provide some of her students with the Enterprise Club experience and hoped to repeat it with next year’s students.
These amazing young women and their teachers are some of the reasons why Rick and I have hope for Africa.
March 4 – Afternoon with new TechnoServe friends (& small world continues)
Fred Ogana, TechnoServe Kenya’s Country Director, invited us to join his wife Judy and their sons Sifa (2.5 years old) and Imani (4.5 years) for lunch in Karen, the community outside of Nairobi named for Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame. The Oganas drove us to a hidden B&B called Marushla where we had lunch by the pool. It felt like we had someone’s picturesque, tropically landscaped backyard—totally to ourselves on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. Lunch was delightful and so was the company.
While Fred and the kids swam in the pool before lunch, Rick and I chatted with Judy about how and why we’re in Nairobi when another coincidence came to light! Judy knows David Coulson because she had interviewed with him for a job a couple of years ago. He is husband to Deborah, cousin of Alice von Briesen and whose personal assistant here is married to the brother of TechnoServe Kenya’s office manager. They also know each other through their association with the local art community. Even though we know the so-called professional folks in Nairobi are a small group, the coincidences seem amazing for a country the size of Kenya. But we keep hearing and are starting to believe that Nairobi, a city of 3 million, is actually a small village…
