My Summer in Kenya: Home Visits

It’s been a busy few days of food security/diet diversity home visits with the women in the community. I realized today that so far, for me, this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job here this summer. I love spending time with these women – they are incredibly resilient and hard working and seem to make the most of things with whatever they have. I love spending time outside with them in their kitchen gardens hearing both the good (and the bad) and knowing that for them this is their livelihood. If these women didn’t spend all day working in their gardens their families quite simply would not eat. Secretly, I am also amazed at the Kenyan woman’s ability to bend over at the waist like a gumbi doll keeping her legs straight and work like this in her garden ALL day. First of all my hamstrings wouldn’t let me do that and second I wouldn’t last 30 minutes.

We also had another “Champs” meeting, this time with the women at Muchui. We have planned to incorporate orange sweet potatoes (OSP) into four different dishes that wouldn’t normally have sweet potato in them: chapattis, mokimo (a mashed plantain dish), githeri (a maize and beans stew), and uji (maize porridge). They have been growning white and purple sweet potatoes for awhile, but have only just begun growing the orange variety. They are quite high in Vitamin A so we are trying to encourage them to use them as much as possible. It was really interesting to sit back and watch them talk as a group (in Kimeru – the local dialect) how they could do this. They were very animated and they even decided that they could dry the OSP, grind it into flour, and incorporate it into even more dishes.

Other than that not much is new. I feel like I am settling in here and learning to live by “African Time” – our taximan AND our translator were both one hour late yesterday… but we finished the work we set out to do, so “hakuna mata” as they say.

Will post pictures when I can.