"Day 1- Elangata Wuas" by Sean Hewens

We arrived in EWaus via a taxi from Nairobi. The night before we met up with Carrie, the third Smallbean volunteer from St. Paul, MN. She arrived a day before us and was a bit less jetlagged. We’d also met Ariel, the wonderful Maria’s Libraries co-director who has been in Kenya for the last month setting up our MobileCAP program at each of the four library sites around the country. Ariel is a bundle of energy and is traveling out to Elangata Wuas (EWuas) with us for the first day of training.  Unfortunately, she’ll have to bolt back to Nairobi early next month to catch a plane home to Texas where she will be resuming her doctoral studies.

Getting out of Nairobi was of course a challenge—Sammy, our taxi driver arrived TIA Africa style, an hour late (7:30am instead of 6:30am). We were delayed just enough to get us thoroughly stuck in a Nairobi “jam” behind belching matatus and street vendors selling newspapers and phone cards. Shortly after escaping Nairobi we sprung a flat tire, Sammy shrugged his shoulders like this was nothing out of the ordinary and had us rolling again in under 20 minutes. We headed south and then west from Nairobi, turning off the main paved road onto a rough road, with 27 kilometers of bumps, rocks and ravines to roll over before arriving in Elangata Wuas and Kudu Hills, our “hotel” on the outskirts of town. We met Caro for the first time, the amazing first lady of AfricaSOMA, our partner organization on the ground in EWaus. She had some bad news, informing us that although there were no bugs to speak of in EWaus (for my first time in Africa outside of the Holiday Inn in Dar es Salaam I won’t be sleeping with a mosquito net), there are tons and tons of snakes. If I had been informed of this before choosing our library sites, this might have been a game-changer. Have I mentioned I hate snakes? Our accommodations are at the top of what seems to be a giant rock boulder in the “Kudu House.” There’s no electricity or plumbing, but with a lovely view and front porch, I really, really hope, we don’t see snakes.

The beautiful Elangata Wuas Resource Center

We dump our bags and hop back inside Sammy’s taxi (along with 6 other people -- Who says 9 people are too many for a taxi? Not in Kenya!), late to start the first day of training. Seven kilometers later we arrive at the new library. It’s beautiful and largely empty, save for our students and maybe a thousand books, arranged in categories on the floor delineated by chalk writing on the cement. We are told that the shelves are due to arrive next week, just in time for the grand opening of the library on July 30th. Through a stroke of luck, we are teaching the MobileCAP in EWaus at the perfect moment. The library has just been completed and three librarians have been chosen from the town -- Catherine, Joyce and the very tall and somewhat mysterious William.

The first two are present upon our arrival, along with the two Citizen Archivists (Leboo and Eunice), the long-term volunteer (George), and an assortment of other enthusiastic Kenyans and Canadians, who we learn are university students on summer break or volunteers for AfricaSOMA living in EWaus for the summer. Everyone greets each other and we jump right into the training.

From the outset, there are several noticeable differences from our experiences in Tanzania in February. First, the average age of our students is perhaps 23, as opposed to the high school kids we taught in Tanzania. Second, everyone’s English is quite good. Rather quickly, we are moving into some fabulous discussions about what it means to be a Citizen Archivist and how everyone is going to go about documenting life in EWaus over the next five weeks.

Third, the level of computer and photography knowledge in the room is a bit more advanced than in Tanzania. Particularly George and Leboo (who we later learn are both in their last year of university in Nairobi) know their way around a computer reasonably well.

Fourth, I’m happy to say that Smallbean Team is a bit more organized than it was in February, particularly with the addition of our Citizen Archivist Project Handbook. We’ve spent the last month creating both the fabulous layout and graphics with help from our graphic design intern back in Boston (go Amy Hufnagle), and the wisdom, sweat and tears from the last two iterations of the Citizen Archivist Project in Tanzania and Brighton. In short, it makes life much easier to have a wonderful guide that the students can learn from, and that I, along with Priyanka and Carrie, can be working from, as we are teaching class. And finally, and this is much more similar than it is different from the great work that Newton-Tanzania Collaborative did in Kwala in February, but Maria’s Libraries and AfricaSOMA have done a fabulous job priming the pump, so to speak, for our arrival in EWaus.

The students are all very excited and, even better, extremely well informed about the Citizen Archivist Project. They’ve clearly thought about what they want to document and how they will go about telling the story that is the community of EWaus over the next five weeks. I should also mention Leslie, the Masai warrior ascari (security guard) who lingers at the edges of things, who often pops up in pictures and is always curious about the computers and cameras. He also keeps the computers and solar panels safe at night with his stick and very large knife. The only English word he appears to speak (at least in my presence) is “solar”. A Masai warrior from my own heart!

Students checking out a computer with Leslie peering curiously behind them

Sean Hewens explaining the Citizen Archivist Project

Teaching goes very well on the first day. After the introduction and the overview of the project, we move onto the basics of photography and interviewing, teaching both the functionality of the cameras and the digital recorders, along with much cooler concepts like perspective, the rule of thirds, and open and closed questions. The students are smart and enthusiastic and are picking things up very quickly. At the end of the day, we spend a bit of time on the computers themselves, mostly getting our feet wet with the basics of uploading some of the practice photos and interviews we’ve done. We end the day discussing the agenda for tomorrow, our scavenger hunt and first foray out into the village to document community life in the heart of Masai land. One negative for the day, it’s cloudy for the entirety of the afternoon and there’s no real chance to test out the solar system. What happened to that African sun I have been talking about so much for the last three months? Tomorrow it better be sunny! We head back to Kudu Hills on two piki pikis (motorcycles), Carrie and Priyanka on the first, me and a Dutch AfricaSoma volunteer on the second. About halfway home, our Piki Piki catches Priyanka and Carrie pulled to the side of the road -- a flat tire, our second of a very long day. Thirty minutes later the flat tire is fixed, but they’ve lost a key part that seals the valve to the tire. We all search in the dust unsuccessfully, the end result-- us walking the last 3 kilometers on foot, arriving back home just before sunset. Day 1 of teaching the MobileCAP is a success, flat tires or no flat tires.