Mingling with the Intelligentsia

Unfortunately, we had to leave fairly early because of a six hour grant proposal writing workshop scheduled for the next day.

We mostly learned about "the causal pathway" during the workshop, and told each other our ideas for grants. The grant proposal my organization wants me to write seems to be far bigger than anyone elses, so everyone expressed their condolences. It's going to be a beast.

Friday, at the Hay Festival, we'd met a guy from Seattle who'd been in Kenya working for The Daily Nation for about four months and was leaving in a few days. Then, randomly, the same night, we saw him at Village Market (easily an hour long matatu from the Hay Festival), and he invited us to his going away pool party the following day, which was to start at 2 PM and go into the early hours.

We really wanted to go but were exhausted and kept changing our minds about whether we even had enough energy. We finally decided to go at the last minute, stopped by Java for a pick-me-up, and arrived at the party around 7 pm. It was at some apartment buildings right next to the University of Nairobi, with the same name as the fancy hotel right next to the University of Nairobi, so first we went through the hotel. It was beautiful and snazzy, with lots of old rich people. Outside in the back, it looked like some Kenyans were having a wedding reception, which was cool to see. Then Andrew called and redirected us.

Turns out, the party is mostly composed of the staff of the Daily Nation, one of Kenya's main newspapers, if not its main. They were some of the most intelligent, education, liberal (by Kenyan standards) people we've met here, and so much fun. I felt like I actually learned a lot in one night, about Kenya, and reporting, and sheng (slang originating among the youth in Nairobi's informal settlement in the 60s, the name of which is derived from Swahili+English, though it's also influenced by many other languages. It's used for communication in various underground cultures, and trickles down to the everyday lexicon of Nairobians. Many young people today grow up with sheng as their native language. New words are created every day, and words connote regions and socials circles, and don't exist except in certain regions and social circles, therefore are used as a sort of admission pass at times. It's also wordplay; a sort of game with language, in the same way pig latin is. They might change the order of syllables in words, take one syllable from one language and one syllable from another, etc. It's frustrating to be learning Swahili here when, really, everyday life is conducted in sheng, to such an extent that even if you were fluent in Swahili, you wouldn't understand huge portions of conversations if you didn't know sheng). We discussed writing, art, literary theory. It was an amazing night.