Mario Konschake

My first impressions as a physics exchange student in Nairobi 

November 2003


While I’m sitting here writing this report we are completely on our own in the student halls. We are pretty lucky that we are, because just two weeks ago we had no place to go. This all happened because the lecturers went on strike on the 11th of November. It might therefore also be a bit early to give a good report about the university here but it is not too early to write about my first impressions. Let me start at the very beginning.

I arrived here on the 1st of October early in the morning together with Falko while Marko was already awaiting us at the airport. Everthing turned out very well from the very beginning. As we arrived at the campus we were introduced to Alex and Robinson, who are in Germany right now as our counterparts of the exchange. They helped us very much with finding a room here at Chiromo Halls, because, contrary to some statements made before, there was nothing booked for us here. Fortunately we managed to get rooms here within one single day.

My room and the view from my room.
In Marko's room: Marko (left), Falko (middle), and I.
The rooms here are very small which I found a bit depressing at the beginning but since then I feel very much at home here. Except for a few rooms, most rooms are divided by a thin, wooden wall which does not extend all the way to the ceiling. You are practically sharing a room with someone else all the time. This is definitely something one has to get used to. We were not sure whether to share rooms with Kenyan students or to share them ourselves. At the end, we settled on Falko sharing a room with someone else and Marko and I sharing another room. I am still very happy with this solution and I would recommend it to everyone coming after us because there are a lot of people here who are drinking a lot or are listening to loud music just like everywhere else in the world. This means that you can have really bad luck with your roommate. Having said that, it is not very difficult to make friends here, especially because you are the only mzungus (white men) on campus. All the students are very friendly and interested so far. Sometimes it was getting even too much for me, because it also means that it is a problem if you want to be alone. Sometimes I just feel like having lunch on my own, which is not always possible. However, most of the time it is just great to have people around to talk to and  have discussions with.

Marko (top) and Falko doing laundry.
Everything we were worried about before we arrived here has become insignificant. I refer to all the concerns one usually has when leaving Europe like  hygene, those nice little cockroaches in the rooms and basic food. Of course, it took me a while to get used to this, but now it is not a problem any longer.

Falko (middle), Marko (right), and I in a classroom.
The university was supposed to start just one week after we arrived here. However, there were another two weeks during which students continued to arrive here and no lectures were held. Unfortunately, this also means that so far we only had three weeks of proper lectures before the strike started. My first impression on the lectures here is quite ambivalent. At the very beginning, I thought that everything is going to be very easy. This changed very quickly and now I find the syllabus in principal appropriate for me. The system here is obviously different from the German one and so there are courses offered which I have already taken at the Freie Universität Berlin and others where I do not even know the basics. For various reasons it is advisable to attend a variety of different lectures first before making a final decision which to take. One reason is that there are some lecturers whose English is very difficult to understand. Another reason is that some lecturers often come late or not at all to the class they are supposed to teach which is, of course, very annoying. I am very happy with my mathematics course which is very appropriate for physics students and also with the project on astrophysics which I began. We do not know if we can complete any of the courses which we started to attended because no one knows when the strike is going to end. For this reason I am quite disillusioned about the prospect of transferring these semesters’credits back to Germany. However, I was aware from the very beginning that I might have to repeat the same courses in Germany. So, it is not the end of the world at all and there is still the chance to study because the library is still open and I took out some books for studying at home. Furthermore, I now have some time to work on the project on interactive screen experiments. I got interactive screen experiments working on the computers in the Department of Physics and will soon present them to the chairman of the Department of Physics.

We are still struggling with the Kenyan bureaucracy. My feeling towards it is very ambivalent as well. On the one hand it is a bit funny and one the other hand it is just annoying. I maybe should describe a typical Kenyan office which I have already seen quite often. One has to imagine an empty room, with a totally empty desk, the telephone sometimes not hang up and someone sitting behind the desk reading a newspaper, giving you the feeling that it is unacceptable to disturb him/her. Fortunately, there are also better situations. At any rate, it can be very annoying when you walk from office to office to get a Student ID and then, when everything is sorted out, the person in charge realises that someone who has to sign a document is not around and absolutely no one knows where he/she is or when he/she is coming back. It might be tomorrow or next month. We will keep on waiting.

Marko (right) and I visiting a nice family in the town of Machakos.
Me in a Matatu, travelling Kenyan style.
Apart from all this, Kenya is an amazing beautiful country with very nice people. Our last lecture ends on Friday mornings and there are also no lectures on Mondays, giving us plenty of time to travel and see some other places apart from Nairobi. We have been to Machakos, a town not far from Nairobi where we met the nicest man I have ever met in my life. He was showing us around and invited us to his family without demanding anything. This is very great since in remote areas people usually see you rather as a source of money than as a human being, which is understandable, I suppose. There are a lot of people here not having very much money which takes some time to get used to as well. This usually does not spoil their friendliness and vividness.

Furthermore we have been to Hell’s Gate National Park. Walking around among baboons, giraffes and zebras, was a great experience. We have also been to the coast for a whole week right after the strike started and in western Kenya, visiting a rainforest and Lake Victoria.

Me with a dead vulture in Hell's Gate National Park.

From a tourist point of view this country is great as well, but one can read about this aspect in any guide book.

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Mario Konschake, November 2003
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