Life in Machakos

It has been a busy week! Our subteam spent Monday and Thursday in Nairobi for meetings, and Tuesday and Wednesday at the hotel working. The meetings in Nairobi were very productive and interesting. We were able to meet with the project managers of various flagship projects to learn more about their current performance metrics submission process, and we were also able to meet with the Monitoring and Evaluation Directorate in an effort to learn more about their current process to evaluate the progress of government projects.

Based on the information our team gathered this week, we defined the current and recommended processes and began to design the high level framework and architecture of the dashboard. This upcoming week, we will start formally documenting our recommendations to Kenya Vision 2030. On Tuesday, our team plans to meet with our contact at Vision 2030 to provide a mid-term report; I can't believe we are halfway done with our time here!

Here are a couple of things I learned about Kenya throughout the week:
1. Nairobi traffic is no joke. On Monday morning, we left Machakos at 5:30AM for the 45 mile drive to Nairobi, and we didn't arrive until close to 8:30AM. The condition of the roads does not help to make the situation any better, and it is easy to see why the Vision 2030 Delivery Secretariat has made the improvement and expansion of the Nairobi roads a priority. Our entire team spent countless hours this week making the drive back and forth from Machakos to Nairobi for various meetings with the client.
2. Hospitality is very important in Kenya, even in business meetings. We were offered coffee and tea in every single meeting we attended this week, and additionally we were often provided snacks or a complete meal. Everywhere we went people went above and beyond to make us feel welcomed.
3. In Kenya, time is subjective. You can decide to be time-driven, and use predetermined meeting times to structure your day, or be task-driven, and not move on to the next part of your day until a task is complete (regardless of the time). From my two week experience, it seems like the task-driven approach often wins out, and meetings are constantly delayed or even canceled; at times, our team has even found ourselves adopting a task-driven lifestyle :)

On Friday, we all stepped away from our project work and spent the day at Daystar, a university in the Machakos area. Our team ran a workshop with approximately forty students and provided general career and job application advice. The two activities I enjoyed the most was a discussion we had on democracy and a speed mentoring activity. For the democracy talk, we watched a short video on the life and assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (our day at Daystar happened to fall on the anniversary of the assassination) and Lotem led a discussion about what this event meant to him and how it impacted his views on democracy. We then broke into groups and had a chance to learn what democracy means to the Daystar students; it was very interesting to hear their views on politics in Kenya, especially so recently after the issues with the 2007 elections. We also conducted a speed mentoring activity, which gave us each the opportunity to talk to the students, answer questions, and provide advice from our experiences. I was amazed and impressed by the passion and drive of each student!

The group at Daystar

This weekend we decided to stay in Machakos in an effort to get to know the town better (and catch up on some sleep!). On Saturday, a group of us took a day trip to Nairobi and visited the elephant orphanage, where we got to see orphaned baby elephants, the giraffe center, where we got to feed giraffes, and the Masai market, where I practiced my bargaining skills and bought (even more) souvenirs.

Baby elephants at the Elephant Orphanage

At the Giraffe Center

In addition to Nairobi, we also took some time this weekend to explore Machakos. Saturday night we ventured downtown to Wizards, the local night club. Sunday we took a hike around the nearby hills of Machakos, which was beautiful! On the hike we got a chance to meet and talk to some of the locals and play with some of the Machakos children; everyone was so friendly and welcoming!

Machakos from our hike

Machakos children we met on our hike

After getting some rest this weekend, it is now time to prepare for another busy week!