Maxipad Mission

Maxipad mission

Written Monday afternoon 3/9/09

This morning, Clara (office administrator) and Elizabeth (Gender & Health Coordinator) announced that Always (of maxipad fame) is donating supplies to local girls who can’t afford their products. This is great news because at the nine primary schools ACCES runs, the older girls in 6th, 7th and 8th grade will often stay home and miss class when they have their periods, because they can’t afford pads. (Though come to think of it, what did women do before pads? I’ll have to ask…)

The Always people are coming through Kakamega tomorrow, and to get the supplies, we have to give them school rosters with the girls’ names and signatures, signed and stamped by the school nurse.

Given this mission, Clarah, Liz and Maggy and I all dropped our plans for the day and divvied up which schools each of us would go to. I’d never gone out to the field on my own before, but it was now or never. The girls need pads!!! Liz didn’t know how many they would actually get, but I was hoping for a year’s supply each.

I grabbed my blank rosters and walked from the office to the gas station where the matatus (passenger vans) pick up passengers. Once they fill up (i.e., smoosh 20 or so people in the 15 seats) they can leave for their destination.

I think I’ve mentioned before that it’s to one’s advantage to find a van that’s almost full to avoid having to sit around. The downside of this system is that the touts will fight over passengers, and it’s impossible to walk by matatus without being asked “Madame, where are you going? Where are you going?” I’ve even seen the touts take old mamas by the arm and physically lead them to their vans. Hah!

Normally, someone from ACCES finds the right matatu, haggles over how much we’ll pay and I just stand back and watch the show. But when I got to the station alone, I was swarmed by matatu touts, harassing me to get in their van. I didn’t see the minibus we’d taken the last time, so went with a tout whose matau who said he was going to Imbale. A few people in the matatu even motioned for me to come join them – Kuja! Kuja!

Though I’ve been to five out of the nine ACCES schools, I couldn’t necessarily tell you which road each is on. I haven’t actually seen a map of the greater Kakamega area, except for the very general one in my Kenya Lonley Planet. All I remember about the Imbale school was that it was a really rough dirt road, and it was further out than the other schools – it took maybe an hour or 45 minutes to get there.

Once happily situated in my van, feeling proud of my new independence, I decide the next order of business was to get some food, as I’d be gone all day and only had tea and bread for breakfast. Vendors will walk from matatu to matatu selling snacks, so I bought some bananas from a woman selling them from a basket.
Shortly after, some street boys, probably about 9 or 10 years old, came up to my window and started asking for pesa (money). I’m sure their ripped t-shirt and trousers had once been different colors, but they’d long since become a light brown/grey color that is the uniform of street boys. I instead gave them a banana each and told them to stop sniffing the super-smelling glue from a small, plastic much-refilled container one had.

I was surprised when they gave me back the bananas through the window. Ingrates!
However, a young bespeckled guy sitting behind me, wearing a button down and slacks, informed me that I had bought Cooking Bananas, not Sweet Bananas. Right.

So I waited for another vendor to come to the window and bought some peanuts (ground nuts here) and cookies (biscuits) and shared with the two urchin boys. After that I shut my window to try to get them to leave me in peace but they loitered.

Meanwhile, the guy behind me had gotten out of the matatu in search of a Sweet Banana vendor for me. He came back a few minutes later, followed by a cart banana vendor. Hah. So I got my sweet bananas after all.

When the matatu finally filled up, we pulled out of the gas station/matatu stop and headed off at around 10 am – only an hour or so wait! Great. A nice woman next to me, in a smart (sharp) grey skirt suit, looked at my instructions from Maggy: first I was to go to Imbale, then Shivagala school. She looked at the paper a little quizzically. Not a good sign.

After bumping along for 45 minutes in the rickety matatu, picking up and dropping off passengers every 200 meters, we hadn’t turned onto the dirt road that I remembered. I asked the tout again – “Are we going to Imble?” “Ndyio, tunaenda” (Yes, we’re going.) Hmm… I was starting to think that maybe he’d lied to me just to get me on the matatu and take my fare (not unheard of, especially with mzungus (foreigners).

After another 10 minutes, I started seeing signs for a town called Mbale and assumed that When we pulled up to the Mbale market, I alighted (got off), hoping that Imbale was a nickname for Mbale or something. I was immediately swarmed with boda boda (bicycle taxi) and piki piki (motorbike taxi) guys looking to supply me with transport on the next leg of my journey. I showed them my paper and they passed it around, all looking at each other and grabbing it from one another and asking questions about my destination.

I told them I was going to a shoole kidogo, a small school where the kids were orphans and didn’t wear uniforms like most school kids. Finally one said he knew it, so we agreed on a price and I got on the boda boda. We pedaled through the market and started heading to the “interior”. He pedaled slowly and pretty soon I realized he had no idea where he was going. I told him to turn around and

Long story short, Mbale and Imbale are definitely NOT the same place, and after asking more people all over town if they knew Imbale, I had to go back to the office, defeated, because it was too late in the day to try to get to Imbale (my little jaunt started at 8:30, and I didn’t get back until 2:30). Mbale is probably only 20 miles away, but such is transportation in Kenya. I thought it was all quite hilarious and would have been a fun adventure and a great story, if it had not been for my failed mission. I was pissed off at the possibility of these girls not getting their pads because of my ineptitude. I swore that if I couldn’t get those names again on Tuesday, I would take the money for the pads out of my seed grant money or my own pocket.

When I got back to the office those who had not gone out to the field were apologetic but also agreed with me that it was pretty funny. I plan to try again Tuesday with a home-made map and a little help from a co-worker in getting on the right matatu.

More soon...