Mzungu! How are you? How are you?

Thanks for hanging in there with me! I have not been away from the Internet for this long since 1994 or so – and that includes the stint I did as a hut warden in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. It has taken some getting used to and has been both frustrating and a relief to not have access to it (if you know what I mean).
Mpeketoni is treating me very well these days, so well that I dreaded the idea of boarding a bus to make the 18 hour journey back to Nairobi. Lots has been going on and I am starting to feel more and more comfortable in the area. Here is a bit of a recap of the past few weeks.

I have had a few questions regarding the issue of being a white in the middle of a rural African village. And while it has been weird, I have not had any major problems with it – just cultural differences and biases to sort out. I’ll see if I can give you some examples to let you know what it is like.

First off how many other whites are there in the settlement scheme? Well, last count of the Lake Kenyatta Settlement Scheme (which includes all of the smaller towns and 10-acre plots around Mpeketoni) is that there are about 30,000 residents. Of those I have seen two other whites and have heard about two others. Including me, that brings the total up to 5 or about 0.02% of the total population in the area. The other whites, or Mzungu (which actually means European in Swahili, but it is applied liberally) are all male: one Italian priest (one of the few people in the entire area that drives a car), one German solar equipment dealer, one wealthy Dutch donor (he has funded a number of primary schools in the area), and one German development coordinator that used to run the GTZ program. The latter is now in Sudan so his ridiculously huge mansion sits empty all but two or three days out of the year.
Does that mean that I stick out? Yes, a bit. When I walk down the street there is quite often a chorus of kids excitedly yelling, “Mzungu! How are you? How are you?!”
I‘m not sure where they pick up the “how are you” phrase, whether if it is from Mzungu tourists that have come before me or if they are taught it in school, but any child knows it well and isn’t shy about using it.
The bravest ones run up after me and want to shake my hand. Much more rarely the even braver ones hold out their hand and say, in all sincerity, “Give me a ___” where the blank may be ten shillings, a ball, candy, or a soda. Some of the adults skip the little things and ask for my bike or the mobile phone that Naïm lent me.

In comparison to other rural Kenyan villages, Mpeketoni is considered quite cosmopolitan. Most villages in Kenya are dominated by one tribe; there are very few residents that aren’t from that tribe. In Central Province around Nairobi, the tribe that is found most often is the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu are also the largest tribe in Kenya. Closer to the coast and the lower areas you find many Kamba, and on the coast and in villages like Lamu you find the Swahili people.
Mpeketoni was a resettlement scheme started by Mzee Jomo Kenyatta (the first President) who was a Kikuyu. The idea of the resettlement was to move people out of the over-crowded Central region out to uninhabited land on the coast. Mpeketoni today has a large number of Kikuyu, but due to its location on the coast there are also a high number of Swahili, Kamba, and other tribes. I think that since Mpeketoni has so many people of different tribes and is also close to the tourist town of Lamu, me being noticeably different than everyone else isn’t as big of a deal as it could be if I were to be in an older village that is dominated by just one tribe.
So in short, yes I do stick out, but from what I gather people in Mpeketoni are quite hospitable to different people and it should not be a problem.

I’d also like to give you some quick sketches of main people in my life right now. I’ll start with more about Isaac, but later I’ll tell you about Emma – the woman that runs the Havanna guest house, and Paul Mutinda, the MEC secretary.

Isaac

Isaac is the technician from MEC that I am attached to. His role is to make sure I get familiar with how things work in the community and the project and my job is to make sure that he is involved in the work that I am doing so that when I leave he can keep going with some of the work.
But as it goes we are about the same age and have quite compatible personalities so we have become very good friends outside of the work. People tease him of being my bodyguard because we are almost always seen together around town.
Isaac is a fantastic storyteller and whenever there isn’t something more pressing to discuss he often spontaneously launches into stories about growing up in Mpeketoni.
Isaac is the youngest of his siblings. In fact there is an extraordinary difference between his age and the age of his eldest sister. A few days back we ran into someone in town that he introduced as his nephew, Martin. Martin was just a year younger than me, which made him about three years younger than Isaac. I had met Isaacs’s two older brothers and knew that he had a sister in the area, so out of curiosity I asked Martin which sibling of Isaac’s was his parent. Well Martin needed to clarify, in reality it wasn’t that one of Isaac’ siblings was his parent, it was that one of Isaacs siblings was his grandma. You follow me? Isaac and Martin are only three years or so apart in age but Isaac and Martin’s grandma are of the same father. It turns out that Isaac has a half sister that was born in the 1920’s. That also means that Isaacs’s dad was already in his 60’s when Isaac was born.
Isaac recently finished a diploma in Electrical Engineering from a technical college near Nairobi. He wasn’t always on track to go off to get a technical degree – in fact he didn’t graduate from secondary school until he was already well into his 20’s. In primary school he often skipped classes for various reasons. One year the American military was training the Kenyan army in the area so he spent his days following the American tanks and marching soldiers (and yes he did shout Mzungu! How are you? And received chocolates and trinkets in return). Another year the teacher was very strict and caned him for missing class, so instead of returning to class he would find a tree along the way to school to sit in all day until the kids started to return home. He would do a few math problems in the tree to make it seem like he was still going to school when he would get home.
Later he turned to taking his favorite dog out to the bush to hunt Dik Dik’s, a very small antelope, instead of going to class. Even after he decided that he wanted to be an electrical technician and that he needed to get his act together he still got into all sorts of trouble. In secondary school he was almost expelled for instigating a riot. He helped lead a student protest against the school because they couldn’t wear “civilians” (causal clothes) on the weekends at the boarding school. Somewhere in the protest they decided to try to burn down the administration block. They didn’t get the admin building but they did get a small kiosk that sold the students things like school supplies and sodas.
Isaac is like most people that I’ve met in Mpeketoni in that he is already married and has a child and that even though he works full time at MEC he has two or three other sources of income. One of them of course is farming the shambas. Nearly everyone that is in Mpeketoni is here because they have a 10-acre plot of some portion of one out in the shambas that they farm. He also is an electrician around town on his own time. Some nights he leaves MEC at 6:30 or 7pm only to head to someone’s new house or business to install electrical wiring. There was even one day that he had left MEC in the evening, went to a job that had a deadline and worked until morning only to return to MEC at 8am.
Another trait of Isaac that I have heard is common in Kenya is that he very much dislikes being alone. He is always with someone and hates the idea of eating by himself. At lunch he usually bikes 2km out to his house to spend it with his wife, Beth, their daughter Susan, and any of his brothers family that might be around.
Beth is quite shy, but a very gracious host. Of the three times I’ve met her, she has always sent me off with a full stomach. Their daughter is a big fan of shaking my hand and either refers to me as Isaac’s Muzugu or Uncle Andrew.
I’m sure I’ll have more to tell you about Isaac later, but that’s all I can think up right now.

Generator Riddlers:

So a week after I got to Mpeketoni the large 150kVA generator broke down. That left only the 60kVA generator to carry the load. Unfortunately the load during the day is always more than the generator can handle, so the technicians are forced to ration power – sort of rolling blackouts in different areas throughout the day. In the US, rolling blackouts can occur when there is a shortage of capacity – all it requires is for a technician to flip a switch and they can disconnect and reconnect whole neighborhoods. In Mpeketoni a rolling blackout isn’t so easy to execute.
Three times a day the technicians shut off the generators and head out to the town with their climbing gear. One technician climbs up a utility pole and disconnects jumpers that conduct electricity around the pole. After disconnecting the four lines they climb back down and head to the next pole. The whole process takes about 45 minutes each time.
Needless to say it would be god to get the generators all up and running again and any problems with the one generator that is running means total blackout until it gets fixed.

I know there are a few highly qualified mechanics and a few people that took Alex Farrell’s Electric Power Systems class with me out there reading this. So what I’d like to propose is that I fill you in on as many details as I can about these generators and you guys tell me what we’re doing wrong. As issues come up I can post them to this blog and you all can help us out. And if we can’t get it figured out over the Internet, you’ll just have to come out here in person and bail us out. It’s an open invitation.

Generator Riddler #1: A warm up

Okay, so I think we have this one figured out, but I’ll put it out there as a warm-up to see if this can work at all.
Isaac and I went to Lamu in mid-September for a night. When we came back we found that the generator had been running for only a few hours total in the past few days. There was a problem with the 60kVA where it would run fine for an hour or two then quit.
Diesel generators run at a constant speed – these ones are considered high speed gensets because they run at 1500 rpm (1500 rpm with a four pole generator produces electricity at 50Hz). The rotational speed of the generator is indicated by a frequency dial on the control panel. The range on the dial is only from 45 to 55Hz because there is very little variation in frequency during normal operation. The disel generator spins a rotor inside the electrical generator to produce three phase current at a constant voltage of 415 V (line to line). As more people demand more power the currents on each of the lines increase and the diesel engine has to work harder to keep at the same speed. The current that the electrical generator can handle is the limiting factor on how much power can be produced. In normal operation, if the line currents get too high the control equipment automatically drops the load and stops producing any current.
So here is the problem. After running for an hour or so the generator would start to make a randomly pulsating rumbling sort of noise. The noise would come and go for a few seconds and one of the technicians mentioned seeing the exhaust turn black when the noise was being produced. After a few seconds of that noise the frequency dial would start to drop much more than normal – it would drop by 2-3 Hz and sometimes recover. But always within 30-45 seconds of the first noise the frequency would completely fall off and the control equipment would drop the load. Once the load was dropped the generator speed would go back to normal. The line currents were never near the limit of what the electrical generator could handle.
The technicians, not knowing what was going on would turn off the machine to inspect it. Unable to find anything they would start it up again after an hour or so and it would run fine for another hour before the same problem would occur. Not wanting to press their luck they would leave the genset off for the rest of the day if the problem occurred two or three times. This went on for about four days until we figured out the problem. Any thoughts out there on what the problem was?