Three Down

You know that feeling, after you’ve just run a marathon and realise you can take a minute to breath? Yeah me neither, but I can imagine it feels somewhat like this.

Though I really don’t have a good excuse for not writing in so long, an excuse I do have. Originally, we had planned to spread our five training sessions over three weeks. We had our first meeting on Monday, and announced the schedule to our new Board members. Well, apparently the dates we had planned for, particularly during the third week, simply did not work with their schedules. After re-juggling and considering everyone’s weeks, the agreed training sessions ended up looking like so: Monday, Wednesday Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. A little worrying, since Graham and I felt like we still had mountains to climb in order to finish the plan for the second training, let alone the third.

However, in hindsight, getting forced to figure it out with considerable time pressure was the best learning experience I could have asked for. Instead of procrastinating and waiting for other people to help me figure it out, I was thrown in with Graham, given about forty eight hours to plan seven hours’ worth of training material. Other than the rough work we had prepped while determining which topics to cover on each day, we had little to work with. It’s amazing what you can accomplish once you get pushed out of your comfort zone.

Rest assured, all the sessions turned out to be very successful – simultaneously the most relieving and rewarding feeling I have ever experienced. Two sessions packed with auditing, budgeting, goal setting and case work, all from scratch.  There were countless touching and eye-opening experiences. If and when the internet starts working again, I will post about all of them. 

Election Night

The elections wrapped up last night, and it was pretty exciting to say the least. It was surprising to feel so excited during the counting process, not at all what I was expecting. The overall stats were pretty good. 67% of the bank members came out to vote - we are happy with that! [100% was the goal, and Maurice tried suggesting we extend the elections one more day... for democracy you know. We told him that it would be undemocratic to change the dates, since it didn't give everyone the same opportunity or knowledge]
On the note of Maurice, he was not as excited as I had thought he would be. A small part of me thinks this might be because he is scared of the Board. He runs the Bank throughout the year, does an amazing job of it, and knows more about the members and the system than anyone else does. I think he's a bit scared to let these six people into his project that he has built. Completely reasonable, he cares incredibly about the Bank's success, since it has such an impact on the community's life. Another part though that I have made a note of is that many places in Kenya have "Boards" and "committees", yet these really don't do much other than have the title and a little bit of corruption on the side. I think once Maurice realized that this would be a Board Board, one that meets monthly and evaluates both the Bank and Maurice's role as the CEO, he got a little nervous. Not accusing Maurice in any way, but the Kenyan way of doing things is to get things done the easiest way, then re-image the whole scheme to make it seem that it was done another way. 
We will conquer that issue in the Board training, which is set to begin in 30 hours! Surreal - the little imaginary Board that Graham and I have built the training for, whom we just referred to as the BoD now are very much real people!
Introducing Pamela, Joice, Joyce, Rose, Fredrick and Michael - our new Board members!

Project Run Through

It’s somewhat of a running joke at Kaguya that none of my blog posts refer to the projects we are working on this summer. Not fair but kind of true, I guess when compared to Grahams blog

So I figured I would start writing waaay better project updates than he does. Challenge accepted.

The goal for the time that I leave Kenya is to have created a Board of Directors that will create both security within the bank and member engagement within the community. Please note that the six members that will be elected for this position a) probably won’t speak English b) have probably never worked within a formally structured job setting before and c) are completely volunteer. The elections run until Saturday, May 26th, after which we will have our six board members. The first day of training is Monday, May 28^th. And from that day, there is thirty days until my flight leaves Nairobi to return to Canada.

Within those thirty days is 5 days of board training, two days of audit education, one full-fledged board meeting, one bank day celebration,  dealing with the Barclays saga (to be explained soon, it’s completely comical) as well as determining how to deal with Honey Care Africa (another situation that makes me break into hysterical laughter just thinking about it).

As of tonight, the end of the third day of voting for the Board, 30% of the members of the bank had voted. We haven’t yet reached 100%, but we’ve got until Saturday evening. At a minimum, we are hoping that over 50% of the members show up, to really promote democracy. [side note: people here love the idea of democracy, though they have trouble grasping the full concept. I congratulated Maurice on the fact that we had a 44% turnout rate for the focus groups last week, and he told me he was upset. When I told him that no, 44% for a focus group is really good, he accused me of not believing in democracy, because it would only have been democracy if all 280 members had attended. I told him that democracy was providing every individual an equal opportunity, which we had done. He refused my answer and that conversation ended pretty quickly]

Actually, just realising that there is little over thirty days left almost gave me anxiety. More like a shock that my trip is a little under half-way over. 

A Quick Hello

I apologise for not posting for so long, I can’t believe that a week has flown by – it’s been crazy busy over here.

Over the weekend, Kaguya grew from two to seven! Victoria and Lisa, from Nutrition, joined us on Friday, and our three Education girls, Chaviva, Allie and Sarah, got in on Monday. The past few days have been spent showing the girls around and introducing them to the Kenyan way.

On top of all that, the Nomination and Election process is in full swing. We had a great nomination week, with over 29 nominees. We had a mandatory nominee meeting on Sunday, to congratulate them and discuss what the positions would entail. Some people didn’t show up, so we ended up with 22 very strong candidates to the position. Its very exciting, as we were a little nervous that we would not get very many at all, or that we would be left with weaker candidates.

Throughout this week, we are running elections. So far, 25% of the members have come out to vote! It’s Thursday on this side of the world, and these elections run until Saturday evening. How exciting the project is getting is unreal.

I’ll post a longer blog tonight, I am just running off and heading to Kisumu, we need to get some more groceries! (Mangos are 45 cents, needless to say, its mostly all I eat)

Holla Holo

There are very few stores in Kanyawegi. I could probably count on one hand the number of stores I have seen since being in the region that would qualify under North American standards. Here, it is all about the markets. Graham and I have spent a majority of our days in Obambo market, where the Bank is located. Obambo is small and quaint, with a couple Mandazi places, one place to get cold soda, a place to watch football game in, and a few open air stalls the merchants use. Most of the produce isn’t grown locally, but is bought in Kisumu and brought here. It’s a lazy little market that only gets exciting when it starts to torrential downpour.

Holo, a twenty minute bike ride, has become my new favorite market. Tuesdays are known in the region to be Holo Market Days. No joke, we couldn’t hold a Focus Group late on Tuesday because people would be at Holo, and luckily we didn’t. Maurice took Graham and I, and it was such a fun end to the day. While it doesn’t compare in size or crazy to a Thai Night Market, it is a wonderful place. We can find all our fruits and veggies there, along with rice, beans, lentils and any dried fish we could desire (we passed on that). Plus, one little stall made crazy good African Samosas.

 
I’m pretty excited to head over there again next week and really get to explore. It’s a nice medium between the African slumber of Obambo and the relative intensity that is Kisumu.

Monkey Business

So far our exposure to wildlife in Africa has been pretty limited. We have BB Cow living in the yard, some goats that bleat at us as we bike to the Bank each morning, some irritating chickens and roosters that start cock-a-doodle-dooing at 5 am, and the pack of guard dogs that howl all night. The little birds are kind of cute, little balls of bright blue and yellow bouncing between trees. We also have somewhere between three and seven geckos roaming the house. Pretty lame on the African Exclusive animals.

BUT I DON’T CARE ANYMORE BECAUSE I SAW MY FIRST AFRICAN MONKEYS

They like to live in the Mango trees that line Kaguya. They were running across the roof of one of the buildings towards the mango tree. The children who live on the property were playing with our bikes when they pointed them out to us. I was in such a fit of excitement I quite forgot about pictures. Mama Pamella and Mama Syprose laughed when I told them how excited I was about seeing one. Apparently they are huge pests and eat all the good mangos during mango season. And apparently they frequent Kaguya, I just need to pay attention and spend more time lurking near the mango trees.

Maybe I’ll even tame one and make it my best friend. Who knows, Africa is a crazy place

Mama Africa

I’ve found that since I have been here, it becomes so easy to get dialled into creating processes that you can lose sight of why you’re even in Kenya

While here, I have connected closely with Pamella, our house keeper. We call her Mama Africa, and she calls me her Daughter (watch out Mum, I might not be coming home!). She’s extremely sweet, and taught herself English over the past few years of working in the GIVE household. She told us that people assume she has a university education when she speaks with us since she is fluent (she only has up to a grade 8 education)

She’s been a member of the Bank since the beginning, aka 2007. She claims that the past five years have changed the way she lives her life. Before she began saving, she wouldn’t even have a spare 50 shillings, and her household had no security of any kind. The Bank gave her the venue to do so, though it wasn’t until 2010 that she really got into it. She was a recipient of GIVEs second round of microcredit lending, which she used her loan to grow her little grocery shop in Kanyawegi. Her business grew, and most of all, she was given confidence and strength. Pamella now is a consistent Super Saver, coming to the Bank sometimes more than twice a day! She saves whatever she can, even if it is only 20 shillings (about 30 cents). She can afford to put her children through school, and even had the ability to send her eldest to Boarding School, which is much more expensive than public school here.

It sounds like such a clichéd story you get from a brochure or on those late night infomercials. But it was surreal to hear it coming from Mama herself, and to hear the passion in her voice as she talked about how much the Bank means to her. She’s currently nominated for a Board of Director position at the Bank, and she is the perfect candidate. I almost want to fix the elections to guarantee her a spot, because she does nothing but good for the Bank.