It’s interesting to travel from Tanzania to Kenya and compare them from our Western perspective.
Right off the bat we noticed that Kenyans wear mostly clothes people in our country wear. and in fact, since a lot of them are donated clothes, we see lots of United States college names, sports teams and state names on their clothes. But it is more striking that many women here don’t dress in traditional African clothes – long skirts, shirts, shawls. In Tanzania that is reversed.
And I see a lot more Kenyans wearing eyeglasses. In Tanzania it was so striking how few people had eyeglasses that I asked a couple of Tanzanians why that was so. Basically the answer I got translated to how healthy they are and how little they need doctors. And how they don’t stare at screens all day. Not really a satisfactory answer but it was the best I got. And it seems like Kenyans interact with computers more than Tanzanians in schools and businesses…
The cars in Kenya and Tanzania are mostly Toyotas but in Kenya you see more variety than Toyotas and the cars are higher end than in Tanzania. This is really Mike’s observation – I don’t notice brands of cars.
More of the washrooms have Western style toilets in Kenya. In some washrooms there are equal numbers of stalls with the squatting over the hole in the ground + bucket versus the sitting toilet that flushes (about ½ the time).
In Kenya, people speak English more fluently than in Tanzania. They must teach it in schools for more years than they do in Tanzania or more Kenyan children have the opportunity to attend school.
Kenyan is more cosmopolitan – seeing white people from other countries living here or traveling here isn’t as rare. In many of the places we were in Tanzania, we were the only “whites”. In fact I have been asked twice now if I am a resident of Kenya. No one assumed that could be the case when I was in Tanzania.
Having pointed out differences I have noted so far, there are still a lot of similarities to Tanzania. Many of the small villages are very basic – just dirt or mud roads, huts for their dwellings, animals running around, very little or no electricity. The lower socio-economic class make money from selling goods on the dirt streets, providing transportation (usually motorcycles or tuk-tuks) and trying to get tourists to spend some money that they will get a kickback from.
We still encounter power outages – but they are less frequent here in Kenya. We still get dropped WiFi connectivity frequently but it seems to be less impactful. Sometimes the showers aren’t hot no matter how long one waits. Things we have learned to expect and adapt to during our nomadic life here in Africa.