Kuira

Hishkama to which you reply Marahaba (this is a greeting in ki-kuria the local dialect here, but its only used for talking to someone older than you, as in the younger person says hishkama and the older replies marahaba)

I have been in Kuria for the since Sunday night, but I haven't been able to post anything because there is not electricity in the home where I'm staying and the internet modem that we use is a battery sucker. I was able to charge the computer in town today though and so I have about an hour of battery life to work with while I'm on the internet.

Lets see how to describe this village. Well first of all, village is not a good word to use to try to convey this area. The village that I am nearest to is a five minute walk down the dirt road from the house I am staying in and its called Kehancha, it is connected by dirt roads to several other villages in the area the other big one is Isbenia (which I'm definitely not spelling right). But there are lots of little clusters of shops along the way that are sort of villages, they have different names. Also along the roads you will have peoples homes and shabas (smallish plots of land that people work usually like no more than five acres I think but that could be wrong). So you have the main dirt and occasional tarmac road connecting these different areas. Then you have smaller rougher dirt road will take you into the "interior" but there might be little villages (collections of stores or women selling fruit and vegetables) along the interior road. The schools that we have visited (especially in Kuria) are often along one of these more interior roads.

Kuria is a very different area than Ugenya. First of all, the district is named after the tribe that lives here, Kurians. Kurians have there own language, and customs. Ugenya is a Luo area where Luo is the language spoken ect. The Luo are a very large tribe the spread over more than one district, but the Kurians are a smaller tribe in Kenya (though Kurians actually extend into Tanzania). Kurians are one of the tribes that still practice female genital mutilation (also known as female circumcision) in Kenya. You can sort of see this reflected in there attitudes towards women. Though women serve men food in Luo culture also (this is the thing that I sometimes have a hard time dealing with, after cooking a meal the women don't eat with everyone else, it drives me nuts), so at first I wasn't really clear on the difference here. But I have noticed that there are fewer girls in the mixed schools than boys, significantly fewer girls, and there are more all girls schools in general. Also, it seems that there are more young women around who are the age that they should be in school but for various reasons are not. My host mother is a primary school head mistress, and she says that attrition from the girls start to out pace attrition from boys in the fourth grade, so in general there is less value in educating girls. Also I get the sense that there are more very young mothers around, girls my age with babies, then I noticed in Ugenya. I asked a principle at a secondary school how much of the loss of girls in his school is due to pregnancy, and he said he thinks about thirty percent.

My host family here has been very warm and welcoming. I am living with a woman named Florence, her youngest daughter Fiona (who is probably about four or five) and their "house girl" Josephine who is my age. Florence was very surprised when she found out that we only have help in our house once a week, and I think she thinks our family is a little bit crazy since my father does all of the cooking (Kuira men "don't go in the kitchen"). They have been very accommodating to the fact that I don't eat meat, which has been great. They make lost of other things, rice, Irish potatoes, beans, various boiled leafy greens, fish, little fish (sardines), ugale (corn meal cooked in water).

The battery is dying pretty fast so I think I should post before everything dies. I'm leaving for Nairobi tomorrow, so I will have power tomorrow night. There is lots more to say about Kuria, so I will definitely post one or two more entries about it.