First Kenyan Field Trip

James picked me up at my apartment 20 minutes after scheduled. He was driving a minbus and I hopped up front into the seat on the left hand side feeling disoriented riding shotgun on the wrong side of the car. We made the very short trip to the office, parked and rode the elevator up to the sixth floor where we were picking up another co-worker, Anne, and then heading out of Nairobi to visit two farmers. Anne wasn’t in the office when we arrived, so we waited and when we finally headed out we were an hour and a half later than originally planned.

James is in his forties, very quick to smile, and from what I can tell has a favourite word. Happy. “I’m very happy to see you, David, and very happy to spending the day with you,” was his greeting and he riddled every other sentence with the word; so much so, it was hard not to return his smiles and yes, be happy. Anne is younger, late twenties or early thirties, with very short hair and thin frame glasses. She sits in the first bench of seats behind the front of the bus and her somewhat quiet voice is hard to hear over the noise of the road as we make our way out of Nairobi.

When you first get to Nairobi, one of the first things you’ll learn is that traffic is bad. Everyone you meet likes to warn you of the rush hour traffic jams and tell you that he wakes up an hour or two earlier so that his commute is 30 minutes rather than the 2 hours it would take in traffic. Judging by my short walk from my apartment to the office, I believe them. The smaller streets that take me to the office are gridlocked with cars, motorcycles, buses, bikes, and people. There are no traffic lights or followed stop signs at intersections, so they quickly become a snarled mess of vehicles inching into to the middle, playing chicken with their counterparts, until they can make their required turn. Pedestrians aren’t given an inch in any of this, so we’re left doing the same, inching out, playing chicken, until we can somewhat safely cross the street. And if I’ve learned anything so far it is that the little old Indian lady driving her BMW, who you think might give you a pleasant wave of her hand to safely let you cross does not. She does not lose a game of chicken.

James weaves through the city streets, through the snarled intersections and equally confusing roundabouts. The mini bus we’re driving has a flat face with no hood so everything is right outside the windshield and the cars in front always look dangerously close. After 10 minutes of city driving we turn onto what James describes as a super highway. It looks like an unorganized and dangerous construction site. There are people everywhere, some walking, some working, others just watching. With cheap labor, an unemployment rate of 40%, and not much capital to invest in Caterpillar machines, Kenya has replaced the backhoes, concrete mixers, and pavers of a US road crew with human workers. Hundreds of them peppering what will become some sort of “super highway.” The road goes from a very reddish dirt to paved, paved to dirt, from two lanes to three and then to one and back to two. But the traffic is moving in our direction, out of town, unlike the cars stopped on the other side trying to get into the city. Between the people, traffic, construction, and changing grades of road I find myself not sure where to look or what to focus on.

Anne points towards the green mountains in the distance and says that’s where we’re headed. Before we get there, we pass through two or three towns. I notice a surprising number of places advertising car washes and every other cement building seems to be a beauty parlor. I point the later out to Anne who finds it a lot funnier than I intended it to be. Again, people all over line the streets. We pass two markets of tightly lined up wooden shacks or tin roofed structures in dirt lots, with most of the shacks selling vegetables. The markets seem to be the center of activity with people and rickshaws weaving in and out of the road. At one point while driving up a hill, there’s a man pushing a wooden rickshaw in the opposite direction, down the hill. The rickshaw is loaded with something I can’t make out but based on his speed, the weight of his goods give him significant momentum. He is barrelling down the hill, putting a foot down to lift the rickshaw up and then riding airborne for 30 feet until he puts the other foot down and launches himself again. He speeds by us hanging on to the rickshaw, his feet dangling 5 feet off the ground. Amazed by his speed and recklessness I let out an unintentional “woah!” Laughing, James jokingly asks if I’ve seen anything like that in the states. None of us can quite figure out how the daredevil plans to stop the rickshaw.

We finally get out to the mountains and turn off the road onto a one lane dirt road that heads down a steep hill and park the bus 400-500 yards down the hill. The trip out of Nairobi seemed like an endless string of crude apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, and people, but we park the bus in a very quiet, rural area surrounded by large green hills. The path we walk down winds through small farm plots and James points out the different vegetables. Cabbage and spinach take the title of most popular. We come to a steep drop and below see a clearing. It’s a small farm set right up against a creek. There’s a hose with one end in the creek and the other end attached to a blue pump which looks like a small stair stepper exercise machine. A farmer is leaning on a narrow piece of steel that rises up from the pump as a means of support while he pumps his legs up and down. His stair stepper motion pulls water out of the creek, through the hose, through the pump, and through a hose connected to the other side of the pump. This hose extends 20 or so feet into his plot where his son uses the water pumping out of the end of the hose to water the crops. The pumps blue paint stands out the brightest in the field. It looks a little out of place and the power with which the water exits the one end of the hose is surprising.

We talk to the farmer while he’s working, pumping up and down on the foot pedals. He’s barefoot and is wearing a tattered golf shirt that swallows his wiry frame. He’s broken a good sweat and explains that he does this 6 hours a day, that since he bought the pump he’s doubled the size of his land and has starting building a new house. He has five kids, one of whom is only 3 months old and is described, with a smile, as a mistake. The rest of his kids are older and he says that he’s been able to afford their schooling with the income from the larger farm. The pump waters his crops more efficiently than what he had to do before which was stick a bucket into the creek, fill it, and then carry it and finally dump it over his crops. He did this 6 hours a day, the same amount of time he works with the pump, but was only able to cultivate a piece of land that was barely sufficient to keep food on the table, let alone pay for school fees. Because the pump waters the crops more quickly, he can water and tend a larger area of land, allowing him to earn more than what he ever would have aspired to with a simple bucket in his hand. He explains all this, sweating and pumping in the hot sun, with a palpable enjoyment and satisfaction.

We move on to another farmer that is nearby and hear a similar heart warming and meaningful story. This farmer is a woman and with the help of the blue pump has found even more success than the first farmer. She’s used it for close to two years and now half of her farm, which has grown significantly since she started, is for vegetables that she sells to a large food manufacturing company. The profits from her six hour days support her family of six. She says she has a lot of people asking to borrow the pump but never lets them, “They can buy their own pump.” A hard worker with a competitive spirit, I think. It’s no wonder she’s made a good entrepreneur.

We trek back through the fields and take off in the bus. James is very, very happy I was able to see the pumps in action. I agree and also note how nice it was to see parts of the country outside of Nairobi. We make our way back into the city using a different route that actually feels remarkably similar to how we left the city. People, car washes, beauty parlors, markets, and rickshaws line the road. Traffic is dense, construction is everywhere. We get back to the office, our field trip finished.

I head to my desk and open an Excel spreadsheet. Rows of numbers stare back at me from the screen, accounting for pumps sold, shipped, and delivered. In the past, Excel spreadsheets have mocked me for the countless hours I’ve spent calculating and formatting numbers and data points that seem worthless and hollow. But today, I win. These numbers represent blue pumps, new entrepreneurs, and school fees. These numbers have meaning.