Why you'd want to live here

Sense by sense...

Nairobi is by far the greenest city I've ever seen. It's absolutely full of color. There are acacia trees, weird looking conifers, palms, and lush plants covering most open spaces. Tropical flowers grow on fences, gates, trees, and along roadsides. Buildings and cement walls are hand painted in bright colors, and there are still traces of political graffiti from January. When we got here, every surface was covered with ODM and PNU posters. There are little dukas (shops) on most corners where phone credit, cigarettes, fruits and vegetables, soda, cooking oil, bread, eggs, and sometimes cooked meals of beans and rice are sold in red Coca-Cola stalls or under lime green Safaricom awnings. Streets are full of obnoxiously painted matatus blasting hip-hop. Everything looks a bit faded in the dust that covers everything.

No matter where you are in the city, you smell exhaust, burning trash, and sweat. Even a lot of the passenger cars are diesel, so thick blue clouds of exhaust envelop the bigger roadways. It's not illegal to burn trash, so people do it pretty much everywhere... in backyards, in ditches, on sidewalks, wherever, and you can always smell it, even if only faintly. The weirdest thing about it is that I know I'm going to miss that suffocating, carcinogenic pollution when I'm back in deodorized US cities. It's honestly become a sort of endearing smell that I associate with my home here.

Swahili is mixed with English on the streets, though you'll hear Kikuyu, Luo, Somali, Arabic, Hindi, and other tribal languages as well. The music, especially in bars and clubs, is mostly American (a lot of 1990s hits, a lot of Top 40), but the Kenyan music I've heard is fantastic. I'm developing a serious appreciation for both hip-hop and swingy, plunky African music... haha. Never thought that day would come. KJ rents space for our program's office in the compound where Eric Wainaina, one of Kenya's most influential musicians, has his recording studio. Eric is fantastic (as a musician and in person), and fortunately, we get to hear him play quite regularly. His music is very likable... Afro-fusion is the label he's adopted for it, I think. I'll let you all listen when I get my computer home.

Kenyan food is pretty simple – mostly just salt, a few spices, and whatever is in the dish. Lots of carbs (rice, chapati, or ugali, which is a thick mixture of water and maize flour) eaten with lots of red meat (beef, goat, lamb). You use the carb to scrape up the stewy item with your hands, unless you're in a nice restaurant that uses silverware. The Indian influence has caused a lot of staple foods to be deep-fried and really heavily salted, so I've had to learn pretty quickly what my stomach can and can't handle. There's unbelievably good Ethiopian food – my all time favorite – and decent Indian food scattered around, though you can definitely find whatever type of cuisine you want in Nairobi. I take that back. I haven't found good Mexican yet.

But ohhhh, we must talk about produce. You can buy it on almost any corner, and my flatmates and I take full advantage. Avocados for about $.15, tomatoes, roasted ears of maize, papayas, passion fruit, bananas, and the most delicious pineapples imaginable ($1 on the street). Amanda and I finish off a pineapple about every other day, I swear. I've also developed a taste for mangoes ($.50), which are infinitely better than any I've had in the US. I'm getting spoiled rotten and loving every minute of it.

The best time of day is the fifteen minutes or so directly after sunset. It's called magharibi in Kiswahili, borrowed from Arabic. I'm usually on the balcony reading, talking to Amanda, listening to the birds singing, or just cooling off with my feet propped up. The wind picks up and makes the trees in the back lot squeak as their trunks rub together. Now that it's the rainy reason, it gets a bit cold... the only time of day I need a sweater. There's a mosque tucked somewhere in the neighborhood behind our field, and the call to prayer at sunset is carried in little clusters of notes to our balcony on the wind. Very often, clouds roll in that bring us rain in the middle of the night. As it gets darker, the men living in the field behind the apartment light a campfire to cook and stay warm. Its smell mingles with the usual scent of burning trash.

This place is home, at least for another two weeks. I'm starting to realize how much I'm going to miss it.