Silence in Nairobi

Coming from the centre of London with an occasional pigeon nibbling at my window box plants, an odd sea gull squawking in the spaces between the Georgian rooftops and the Paris-like buildings to the dawn chorus in a Nairobi suburb brought me back decades to my US Peace Corps volunteer days in Kenya, a teacher at a boys' secondary school in the bush. The gardener sweeping outside, the swish swish of morning ritual, sweeping away the night before, the dead leaves of the past, the rhythm of greeting a new day. As I struggled to adjust to the three hour change, London to Nairobi, realising it was still 4.30 in the old place I took time to move into this new zone, this new sound scape.

Swahili outside my door, voices a garden or two over, the birds another layer of soft, sometimes strident fussing, buckets being filled and placed for mopping, metal handle clanging. I stepped into a world of morning chores, birds and people doing their things of life, this All Souls or is it All Saints Day? My airplane was my broomstick for the Halloween or All hallows flight, the day to scare away the ghosts by playing with them, dressing up as them. I had sat between two young men, one on a project to vaccinate 100,000 Masai cattle, the other to check on and then create new water filtration systems using sand in a series of pools in Northern Kenya on the border with Somalia, eight hours then eight hours drive more. I told my story of working with microfinance, recalling my mission to find out about best practice in Kenya, explore in Tanzania for partners to work with, listen for opportunities to use our people from London with improving the performance of the microfinance institutions, these ‘banks for the poor’.

After the visa line and paying my fifty dollars to pass go, easy baggage claim I was met by Kagwiria or ‘Kawe’, a former intern for our work with the UK National Committee of 2005 UN Year of Microcredit, and her neighbour Joe, a student. As we drove the 30 minutes from one end of Nairobi to another we talked about the economic and political situation. Here politics seem closer to life, especially after the turmoil that followed the late 2007 election. On one side of Nairobi people were cheering and partying the result of the old being defeated, the new about to come in, on another the riots, seemingly planned and coordinated to happen, were starting. No one had nightmared that so much unleashed violence could turn the ‘darling, the success story’ of East Africa into festering sores bursting and spewing their infections, killing and displacing people, only now ten months later having the confidence to return home. Peace, relative prosperity and pride gone in an instant, the mighty fallen from their political perches, just as it happens in so many other places, Kenyans in the UK telling me ashamedly that the unrest had been festering underneath, now that the boil had been lanced, it was time to let the wound heal, to tackle the infection where it had started.

Kawe and I talked late into the night over my supper of home cooked stew, rice and salad, bringing me down to earth again. At 26 she’s working with a consultancy that assists Microfinance Institutions to transform into Microfinance banks, as part of a team taking them through a two-year process to get their accounting, human resources, legal systems in order to get approval to act as a bank. This costs about £400,000, a hefty sum given by international donors, to become ‘Microfinance Depositing Taking Institutions’. Then there is the added cost of implementing all the systems, training the staff in the institution. You might ask, ‘Why are they going through this? Why not simply stay as a plain vanilla Microfinance Institution? Aren’t they able to do enough for the poor by giving them credit?’


The answer is that most poor people surveyed say they want a safe place for their savings, not just small loans. We in ‘Northern’ countries are used to banking services, take them as a necessary part of life, even though we’re now braying at the moon about the collapse of credit, this ‘credit crunch’, this unprecedented downturn. We’re scratching our heads, wondering why it took us so long to see we’d get caught by our habits of overspending, our belief in up and not down for prices. In the meantime, poor people with very little access to financial services are asking for a place to save, a microinsurance policy to cover their cow or against drought, a small loan with short term pay back, and if they’re really lucky, a cheaper system for transferring or receiving money from relatives abroad. We were overglutted, still are, with credit card offerings, 0% loans for TVs with three years to pay, offers to spend, spend, spend as if there were no tomorrow. That was until shares started dropping in price, banks going to the government for bail outs, the inter-bank lending stopping because of lack of confidence in the system.

Here is the contrast in the silence. Many of us with so much noise about our consumer lives and our busyness find it hard to hear anything else or to access the silence underneath it all, the real thing that underlies our being. Sometimes it takes a jolt, a metaphorical slap in the face for us to wake up to what is really important.

On the London to Nairobi flight to my left was the German living in Scotland whose team’s mission is to vaccinate 100,000 cattle belonging to Masai, their cattle their lifeline. On my right, the engineer from Mississippi with his team’s project to increase the number of water filtration systems so people on the edge in northern Kenya could start to make the connection between pure water and health. Seated in the middle, with the mission of microfinance, sensible credit, savings, insurance and money transfer as one of the ways for people to take slow and sure steps out of poverty, getting access to planning for their futures. Seems as if the three of us in our three seats had fairly sensible goals for our missions to East Africa, seeking to access a silence underlying it all, an eternal silence of sharing in the pool of existence and access to life worthwhile. I listen to the birds, the sweeping and mopping with their own song notes, the wind brushing the leaves, the silence underneath it all.