October 27, 2006: Sitaki matumbo ya mbuzi!

While I am staying at the Havanna Guest House, the Supervisory Board of MEP arranged for Havanna to provide full board, clean my room, and to do my laundry. Good for me, not so good for Emma. Emma is the lucky one who gets to implement the deal that the Board arranged. She has been working at Havanna for about a year. The owner of the place, Anna, stops by once or twice a month and the rest of the time Emma is responsible for running the place. In return for working every day that I have been here (even Sundays) from 6am until the last customers leave late at night she is paid 3,000 KSh per month ($43 US). She does have the perks of getting to sleep in one of the rooms at the guest house along with a 100KSh/day meal allowance, but it is literally criminal to have her working like that. Kenyan labor laws state that no one should be required to work more than eight hours per day, but Anna refuses to even sign work contracts with any of the employees. One of Emma’s assistants had not been paid for four months so according to Emma he finally decided to quit without his back pay. Emma doesn’t have any other promising leads for a different job so she is reluctant to stick up for herself.
Nevertheless, Emma takes very good care of me. She helps me with practicing Kiswahili in the mornings and makes sure I have a good story each day about how crazy Africans are. “You know, we Africans are clazy” she says, shaking her head. (R’s and L’s get switched around in pronunciation quite often).
She also introduces me to African dishes. I eat lots of sukumo wiki (greens with ugali), chipati and cabbage with goat meat, pilau (rice, potatoes, and goat), githeri (beans and maize), and maharagwe (just beans).
One day she brought out a dish that looked similar to the chipati, cabbage, and goat meat that I had eaten many times before. The only difference was that the meat looked a little weird – almost a little spiny and spongier than normal. I started eating the cabbage but couldn’t help notice a strange flavor even though I hadn’t touched the chunks of meat in the cabbage.
Emma noticed me having a bit of trouble eating the meal so she came back over to the table to check on me. I had my suspicions, but I went ahead and asked Emma what kind of meat it was.
“That’s matumbo ya mbuzi” she said. “What’s wrong? I can tell you don’t like it.”
I understood the mbuzi part – that is Kiswhaili for goat, but I didn’t know the rest. “What’s matumbo?” I asked.

“Intestines” she replied, pointing to her stomach.

“Oh… intestines….”

So Emma got my lunch that day and I got hers. We were both winners – she got to eat a good meal and I didn’t have to eat intestines.

Not much more than a week or two later I noticed the same strange flavor in a stew with potatoes and small chunks of meat. I went ahead and finished the stew, but left the small chunks of meat. “Were there intestines in that stew?” I asked Emma.
I learned a new phrase that day. To want something is kutaka. If you don’t want something you say sitaki. The phrase for the day was “Sitaki matumbo ya mbuzi!” We continue to get a good laugh out of that one. But now she has turned to trying to get me to eat goat liver. Let’s just say she got another good meal out of that.

Based on her not-so-ideal working conditions, Emma is also my key informant on how much Kenyans suffer. Previous to the current President, school fees were the responsibility of each student for both primary and secondary school. Nowadays, families still have to pay for secondary school, but primary school is free. Back when Emma was in primary school, if your family couldn’t cover your school fees, you were sent home until they could come up with the money. Emma is from bara (up-country), which refers to the central highlands, an area ideal for tea and coffee growing. When her parents couldn’t come up with her school fees she would go home and pick tea on her parents land until they had enough to send her back to school.
To pick tea you put a sack on your back that is attached to you by a strap that goes around your head like a headband. You walk sidewise along the rows of tea, picking leaves and tossing them over your shoulders into the sack. According to Emma it is always tea-picking season. You just find a row that is ready to be picked and start going. By the time you finish one row another will be ready for picking.
Emma made it through secondary and primary school, but wasn’t able to come up with enough funds to finish college. She spent one year in Nairobi going to school for a diploma in food and hospitality. After the year funds ran out so she started looking for work. The best she could find was working for the sister of one of her neighbors from back home – Anna at Havanna.
Emma is very caring and kind, which I have found to be the case for many of the women in this area. But she also has a very strong personality, which I haven’t found very much in other women her age here. Most women seem to quietly accept the subordinate role given to them by their husbands, but Emma sticks up for herself and is sure to let someone know when they are being rude or improper. I have heard many men complain that their wives are not as submissive as they used to be. I’m sure it’s females like Emma that try to get through college and work for themselves for a while instead of immediately marrying that are helping to bring the changes about.