Needopedia

There are many, many, many ways of getting out of your comfort zone while traveling, but I went looking for more anyway while we had a few days in Nairobi. We use Project Expedition to find small-business local tour experiences, which is how I came across the Nai Nami Story Telling Experience. Here’s the blurb:

– 3 hours of storytelling experience in Nairobi Downtown (not slum!), guided by former street children
– Every pair of attendees gets his own guide to facilitate an inspiring exchange
– See Downtown, the side of the city center where the real local life is taking place and you wouldn’t go yourself
– Opportunity to visit a hidden market where the locals hustle
– Have lunch at a Kibanda to exchange and ask all your questions about street life

Our tours are not designed to be sightseeing tours. It’s a storytelling experience where our guides will show you the places you will never venture alone. We will take you through the bustling streets of Downtown in the city centre, which used to be the home of your guides. It is a vibrant place where local people do business, shop at hidden markets, eat at Kibandas and enjoy the authentic Nairobi life. Each street has its own stories and secrets, which we will share with you.

I am not done processing this, but I will say that when it was just the five of us again, one of the kids said with wide-eyed seriousness, “This isn’t [our home town],” and we all nodded slowly for a long time.

One lens we can look through is litter. A few Sundays before we left, Dwayne, Wes and I went to the bottom of our hill and walked up to the ‘funny-4-way-stop’, with 3 trash bags. We filled them up, found a few more bags among the garbage and filled those up as well, before we ran out of time and garbage bags. It was annoying, especially after Dwayne and I handwashed all this so it could be recycled, but it made a huge difference on the hill.

I couldn’t find a bottle cap on the streets in Dubai.

In the part of Nairobi we are staying, there is enough trash in a few blocks to fill several trashbags but with enough determination and time, it could get reasonably clean.

Downtown (as in the opposite of uptown) Nairobi: I wouldn’t know where to start. It wasn’t that there was just litter on the street; it was the street. And it was a tangible metaphor of the hopeless and desolate poverty downtown. Our story-telling guides, who have “made it” out of the streets, were very pessimistic about life every getting better–even as they were actively working towards helping others.

Out of respect, we didn’t take pictures while we were downtown. Again, Bing comes to my rescue for published photos of what we witnessed.

I have some thinking to do.