A Typical Day

Welcome to the unglamorous world of humanitarian work. A typical day: 6:00 am wake up, turn on water heater in the kitchen, go back to sleep for 30 more minutes until water heater begins working. 7:00 take a lukewarm shower; decide what clothes to wear (something you wouldn’t mind being drenched in exhaust fumes and dust).7:20 Breakfast, toast bread, cook eggs on a gas stove (remember that everything cooks twice as fast on a gas stove); brush teeth; pack my bag: laptop, iPod, money, keys…check; God please bless this day…

The walk from my guesthouse to the office takes about 45 minutes. All along the way, my coworker and I get stared at by every person who strolls past us. It’s something I got used to after a few days—you learn not to get offended. For me, after two months of people bending over backwards and stopping in the middle-of a street to gawk at me in New Delhi, I can handle the subtle staring in Nairobi. The other intern who happens to be Eritrean/American must stand out as much as I do, together with our American clothes, over packed backpacks, we walk while jamming to our ipods…no wonder people stare at us. It’s because you have strange features said a Kenyan coworker who noticed how much more attention people paid to him too when he walked with us. Strange features? Does he mean our jutting foreheads or is he paying us a compliment for our more pleasant Habesha traits? I choose to believe the latter :-)

On the way to work, we usually stop to get coffee from Java House, the easiest way to describe it is a crossbreed of Starbucks and IHOP but with much better quality. It’s my guilty pleasure here. Though almost everything is relatively cheap compared to the U.S. coffee seems to be the exception. It makes sense too because Java is always packed with coffee-addicted Europeans, Americans (and maybe wealthy Kenyans) who don’t mind paying 2-3 dollars for a latte or mocha. The most money I will spend on one thing in a given day is for this single cup of coffee in the morning.

The IRC Somalia, Kenya and Regional East Africa office is not far from Java. On the third floor of the IKM building, is where IRC Kenya is located. The office is very modern looking with bright yellow walls and laptops at almost each of the small cubicles, By the time I walk in with the other intern at around 8:40am, almost everyone is already at their desk, typing away, trying to finish a grant proposal before the deadline or on the phone trying to sort out some kind of logistical difficulty in the field offices. For a new intern, things are less exciting. My job usually involves reading over reports and proposals; it seems the most useful skill I can offer at this point is my excellent grasp of the English language. To be sure, sitting in front of a computer and meticulously reading over a 20 pg technical document was not what I had in mind when I decided I wanted to work for an NGO in Africa. It’s easy to romanticize the lifestyle of a humanitarian worker. I imagined being in refugee camps, working hands on with beneficiaries or collecting qualitative data for field research—something, anything other than the typical 9-5 job. My first revelation in Kenya: humanitarian work is at least 80% administrative and 20% other. But I also realize that working for a humanitarian organization, every small part contributes to the greater whole. Even my unglamorous work right now is necessary so that the overall IRC Kenya program can operate. Without grants, there would be no programs and without a well-written grant proposal, there would be no grants…This is what I tell myself to keep motivated throughout the day.

At 1:00pm we walk across the street to Al Yusur, a Somali restaurant which makes amazing chapattis. We eat in the dimly lit room which is always packed with people from 1-3. Afterwards it’s back to more proposal/report reviewing for another three hours. Time goes by slowly. The walk back from work is more pleasant and a time to really take in the city. If we leave around 5, we drift into the after-work rush hour crowd. The streets are more hectic than usual, traffic moves forth inch by inch, people are pouring out of their offices and running to get on one of the big green buses with the words “city hopper” written on the back that traverse the town. Men leaning out of the infamous matatus (taxi minibuses) call out the locations of where they are heading to try to fill their cars with passengers. We walk past the big intersection where you can take Jomo Kenyatta Avenue straight to town but turn and walk down narrow streets with no sidewalks. One of my biggest, irrational fears is getting hit by some reckless driver speeding down one of these unmarked roads. Judging by how people drive in Nairobi, though, it might not be irrational.

Once safely at home, there are a few hours of relaxation. The most entertainment on a typical weekday is watching one of the three channels we have on our T.V. By 10:00pm, exhaustion takes over and its time for bed, only to begin the cycle again the next morning.