Final Week in Nairobi

October 5, 2008; Nairobi, Kenya — Our final days in Nairobi are nearing an end and tomorrow morning we board a bus for the 9-hour trip to Mombasa. The shift to the coast and away from Nairobi and Kenya’s central highlands marks an important transition in our semester in East Africa. We will be entering the predominantly Muslim and overwhelmingly Swahili-speaking communities along the Indian Ocean, beginning in Mombasa and continuing onward to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. At the end of October we will head to the Tanzanian mainland and begin the safari portion of the program.

Last week was probably the most academically demanding since we arrived. Swahili classes took on a bit more urgency as the 2½ -hour final exam on Friday approached. Our daily routine began with morning Swahili instruction followed by ninety minutes of my Modern East Africa history class and then two hours of David Sperling’s religion and culture course in the afternoon. Swahili classes were largely an intensive review of the substantial amount of material covered in the last four weeks. In my course we focused on the development of colonial Kenya while David spoke in detail about the basics of Islam. David is an expert on East African Islam and over the years has developed many contacts in the Muslim communities along the coast of Kenya and Tanzania. His lectures were meant not only to round out the academic portion of his course but to prepare us for the people we will meet while we are on the coast—especially during our upcoming home stays in Pemba.

After the Swahili exam on Friday students returned home to spend the remaining time with their Nairobi home stay families and many of us also paid a final visit to our neighborhood pub, “The Office.” The proprietor and regulars toasted us in grand style and some the students gave Freddy (the owner) a new bottle opener for serving his room-temperature beer. The Office has been a nice, if unexpected, addition to our program and one of the many ways in which Riruta has come to feel like home. Yesterday we had a luncheon to say farewell to the home stay families and to thank them for making us feel so welcome and for taking such good care of us.

As I finish up this week’s entry I have mixed feelings about leaving Nairobi. Like many of the students, I am eager to move on to the new experiences that await us, but I have come to feel comfortable in Nairobi and will miss being here. This was not something I initially expected since Nairobi can be a daunting and difficult city with a nasty reputation that is not entirely undeserved. However, now that the students and I have discovered all the interesting things the city has to offer, selected our favorite stores and restaurants, learned to navigate the bus system, and made many friends here it will be hard to leave. Once we arrive in Mombasa we will be back to the disorienting anxiety of finding our way around a strange city and an unfamiliar culture just as we were when we arrived in Nairobi a month ago—but with it comes the excitement of immersing ourselves in something new.



Our final day in Riruta, Nairobi, 4 October 2008