My internship

Around 11:30 AM on Monday a man wearing an orange teacosy on his head and a matching gown squirted a watery liquid into my mouth from a green stained plastic bottle.  I'm as confused as you are right now, providing context won't really clarify things but I'll give it to you all the same.


I'm interning with Action Now Kenya (ANK), a small non-profit which provides micro loans and business training to people living in the informal settlements of Nairobi.  ANK has three full time employees and four community workers who occasionally report back to home base.  In 2007 ANK started working as a partner organization with the microfinance agency Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/).  In this relationship Kiva dealt with the investors and ANK dealt with the clients (the people receiving the loans).  Soon after partnering with Kiva, ANK and Kiva dispersed over $100,000 in small loans.  The timing, however, was incredibly bad, just a few months later post election violence erupted in Nairobi (http://tinyurl.com/ycuwu5j).  The fires, violence, displacement of people, and looting were most intense in informal settlements and so many of ANK's clients were unable to pay back their loans because their businesses were destroyed or looted.  When Kiva asked for money from ANK to pay back the investors, ANK wasn't able to reimburse the investors at once and is still trying to do so today.  On a positive note, ANK recently started a new loan program independent from Kiva.  On Monday I went into Kibera to meet some of our current and prospective clients.
Kibera, and informal settlements in general, are difficult to explain so I'll save most of the details for another blog post.  I'm pretty sure that over half of all small businesses in Kibera are either hairdressers or dressmakers/tailors, and so on Monday I met some hairdressers and dressmakers/tailors.  I mostly enjoyed the dressmakers because they had beautiful old sewing machines and tended to employ/train other community members.  I also met a doctor who runs a clinic which has been burnt down on two occasions and which he has rebuilt doggedly after each disaster.  I met a man who makes the best Mandazi (less sugary but better than doughnuts) in Kibera.  I met an old lady who sells onions at a stall at 10 cents an onion.  I ate a lunch of chapati (kinda of like a tortilla) with beans and kale at the hotel (which translates to restaurant) of one of our clients.


I was also invited into the house of the husband of a prospective client.  He happened to be a priest of a church particular to Kenya and was wearing an orange teacosy on his head and a matching gown (I guessed they had something to do with him being a priest, although I'm still not entirely sure).  I'm telling you about the teacosy and gown mostly because I was taken aback when I first saw them but when I learned he was a priest they began to make just a little sense to me.  On second thought maybe the hat looked more like a chef's hat, but not the kind that look like a soufflé, instead the kind that looks like a cylinder.  In any case, in one corner of his house he had an elaborate alter with many differently colored candles, religious images, rosaries, and shepherds' frocks.  I talked to this man for a while about his wife's business before conversation turned to his alter.  He picked up or pointed to each item and told me its significance.  Eventually, he picked up a green stained bottle and...you already know the rest.  I found out later that the liquid was blessed water that had been boiled with special curative herbs.  The whole incident was really quite strange.  


After walking all over Kibera to meet clients I was happy to get back to my apartment and relax.