crossing the equator

Earlier in the summer I had met two women named Rose and Maria, two Kenyan-born white women that I had met in Kianyaga and gone to visit in their hometown of Nyeri. After leaving Kianyaga, I returned to Nyeri to stay with Maria for a few days while their daughter was on August break.

One of the most exciting things about staying with Maria was going with her to her ROSCA (merry go round) meeting. ROSCA stands for rotating savings and credit association, and are popular in developing countries as a way of saving money for investment. Groups of individuals, usually from the same community, meet regularly, and each individual contributes an equal amount of meeting at each of meeting. One individual in the group then takes the entire sum of the contributions at the meeting, to use as her or she wishes.

Maria's ROSCA consisted of 16 women. The location of the meeting rotates between each member's homes. Everyone paid 200ksh to the host to pay for dinner, in addition to the 1000ksh contribution. It so happened that this meeting was the annual election for the board positions of chairperson, vice-chairperson, secretary, and treasurer! Elections were conducted very transparently. There is no "running" for a position. Everyone gets a slip of paper and writes the name of the person they would like to hold the position, and throws the paper in a basket. The slips are then all flipped over, in front of everyone.

I've studied ROSCAs and other informal lending mechanisms at school... no one told me how much singing and dancing and eating and yelling there would be. Granted this was an election meeting, but choosing the four positions and the recipient of the money as well as collecting the money took SIX HOURS. From 11AM-5PM. Part of this was because some members arrived late so they extended lunch. There was so much food. The host, with the help of some other members, made a soup with pumpkin, black eye peas, and beef, along with chapati. 8kg flour worth of chapati. For twenty people and some babies. It was insane.

While staying with Maria, I also took her 13-year-old daughter to Nanyuki, one of Kenya's equator towns. Kenya is one of ten countries in the world in which the equator crosses.

I never would have guessed that my first time crossing the equator on foot would be in a thick wool sweater. But it was cold.

So how do you know this is actually the equator and not just some hoax sign? There are guides by the sign who demonstrate the Coriolis effect for you. I'm not going to pretend I understand the Coriolis effect. The wikipedia article on it is long and complicated. The guide merely conducts a demonstration with a funnel, a pail and a matchstick. He pours water in the funnel, with a matchstick floating. North of the equator, the matchstick spins in one direction, south of the equator, in another direction, and on the equator, it doesn't spin at all.

There really wasn't much to see and I'm impressed they've made a whole tourist attraction out of it, but I guess you take what your geography gives you.