Sharing
November 22, 2005, Tuesday, 12:27pm.
One day Hillary and I were at a school doing community outreach. We were waiting for the students to get out of their classes so we could herd them into an assembly room for our program. There was a pile of boulders under a tree and we decided we wanted to wait there. Hillary started scaling one rock and saw some bees swarming around a hive in the tree.
He came back down and said, “We better not disturb those bees. They are very aggressive and can even sting you until you die.”
“Oh, you have killer bees in Africa?” I said. “We have them in some parts of the U.S. They come from…um…”
Oh yeah. They come from Africa.
***
Last week I told Hillary that if the Peace Corps evacuates us after the referendum that he could have all the stuff I left behind.
‘Oh, that would be terrible,’ he said. ‘The best thing you could give me is your contact information.’
This is a man who lives in a mud-and-dung hut smaller than my single-room house that I complain about, and shares it with his wife and three kids. I thought maybe he was just being nice, but then I remembered that he comes from a culture that is not shy about asking for things.
‘Give me your postcards of San Francisco.’
‘Um, you want my postcards?’
‘Yes, give me your postcards. I want them.’
I’ve given away half of my postcards. There will always be cheap San Francisco postcards in Chinatown anyway.
I really think there’s a whole set of cultural norms about sharing in Kenya that I’ll never understand. The things that I consider freeloading seem to be known as sharing or kindness here. And everyone feels like they’re entitled to what you have.
My neighbor Nehemiah came over one night to borrow my cell phone. (Here you buy a chip that stores your phone book, messages, and how much credit you still have to make calls, and can fit into any phone, so lots of people just buy a chip and use a simu ya jamii—basically a public mobile phone—when they want to check their messages.) I let him borrow it, not knowing any better. A few nights later he asked to borrow it again, this time overnight. I agreed on the condition that he return it before I left for work in the morning, which he did. A few nights later he borrowed my phone again, and kept it overnight again.
A few days later he asked to borrow 200 shillings. I agreed on the condition that he pay it back within a week. The next night he also asked to borrow my phone. I thought, ‘This dude now borrows my phone every night, and he owes me 200 shillings.’ And that’s only half the story. Around the same time, some of the girls at the school stopped me as I was walking to my house and asked to borrow my phone charger. I gave it to them, and they returned it the next morning.
A week later a different group of girls came to my door asking to borrow my phone. I gave it to them, and they said they would return it in an hour, which they did. But then they started borrowing the phone every other night, then every night. One night they came to borrow my phone, but Nehemiah had it.
‘Look, you’re going to have to start finding another phone to borrow every once in awhile,’ I said. ‘Between you and everyone else on this compound who is borrowing my phone, I never have my phone.’
The girls nodded and apologized, but I heard them whispering to each other when they left.
When Nehemiah returned my phone, I said, ‘You know, you use my phone more than I do.’ Which is not exactly true, but I didn’t care because he still owed me 200 shillings.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ he said.’ Really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trouble you.’
He was really embarrassed. No one has borrowed my phone since that night, but I sense that people took my reaction to be a bit harsh and selfish.
As much as people make a beeline to me to ask for money and everything else under the sun that they think I came here to pass out for free, they’re also constantly asking each other for handouts, especially if they have a relative who has a job. People here help each other out when they don’t have money to spare. When I ask why they’ve just given their cousin 100 shillings when their own family is starving because the maize did poorly this year, they just shrug sheepishly. ‘Some people are very good at asking for things,’ they say.
The Kenyans on the Peace Corps staff go through hell every time they go home to their villages, because all their relatives (and everyone in a Kenyan village is related) expect that because this person works for an American organization that he or she has enough money to share with everyone.
I’m also noticing that some Kenyans have no concept of basic personal finance. Like, if they get money, they don’t necessarily spend it on their most pressing need. They spend it on a trip to Eldoret to eat fried chicken. So maybe this is also what allows them to give money to their relatives or a neighbor instead of saving it for the next time their kid gets sick. Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that some people’s definition of ‘most pressing need’ is who’s right in their face rather than what’s really important in the big picture.
Kenyans do favors that strike me as things they don’t need to be doing for people they don’t know. An example of this happened last week, when a guy came to the VCT with a piece of paper containing some questions. He said a student at the school of social work had a class assignment that was due that day. The student didn’t have time to come in person, so she sent this guy to the VCT to see if anyone could help her. The assignment was to interview a counselor about some of the challenges he or she has faced in her work. The messenger guy handed my co-worker the list of questions, and my co-worker started writing out all the answers.
Now if I were in that situation I would say, ‘Tell that lady to get her own matakos* over here and do her assignment. Why should she send someone here to ask someone else to do her homework for her just because for whatever reason she couldn’t get her act together to come here in person and complete the assignment by the due date?’ And I told my co-worker this. He just nodded vaguely and kept writing, probably baffled by what a selfish American I am.
So I don’t know. I think there are some things that are so ingrained in each of us that we’ll never be able to see them clearly enough to fully understand why we are who we are, and therefore, why we aren’t who we aren’t. Whatever those things are, are probably the same things that make me impatient on those days when a gang of street kids in Kisumu march at me with their palms outstretched, ordering, ‘Mzungu, give me fifty bob.’ Hell, if I were in their shoes I’d probably do the same thing. Shoes? Street kids don’t have shoes. This is why I’ll never develop a completely non-judgmental compassion for people. How can I possibly understand what it’s like not to have shoes when it doesn’t even occur to me that it’s possible not to have shoes?
Thinking back to the story about the school assignment, I just remembered something Hillary told me once: ‘We Africans don’t quarrel much about time.’
It doesn’t solve the whole mystery, but it does help me understand about 2% more than I did before. I think that’s the current rate of cultural discovery for me here in Kenya.
* Matakos = butt cheeks
One day Hillary and I were at a school doing community outreach. We were waiting for the students to get out of their classes so we could herd them into an assembly room for our program. There was a pile of boulders under a tree and we decided we wanted to wait there. Hillary started scaling one rock and saw some bees swarming around a hive in the tree.
He came back down and said, “We better not disturb those bees. They are very aggressive and can even sting you until you die.”
“Oh, you have killer bees in Africa?” I said. “We have them in some parts of the U.S. They come from…um…”
Oh yeah. They come from Africa.
***
Last week I told Hillary that if the Peace Corps evacuates us after the referendum that he could have all the stuff I left behind.
‘Oh, that would be terrible,’ he said. ‘The best thing you could give me is your contact information.’
This is a man who lives in a mud-and-dung hut smaller than my single-room house that I complain about, and shares it with his wife and three kids. I thought maybe he was just being nice, but then I remembered that he comes from a culture that is not shy about asking for things.
‘Give me your postcards of San Francisco.’
‘Um, you want my postcards?’
‘Yes, give me your postcards. I want them.’
I’ve given away half of my postcards. There will always be cheap San Francisco postcards in Chinatown anyway.
I really think there’s a whole set of cultural norms about sharing in Kenya that I’ll never understand. The things that I consider freeloading seem to be known as sharing or kindness here. And everyone feels like they’re entitled to what you have.
My neighbor Nehemiah came over one night to borrow my cell phone. (Here you buy a chip that stores your phone book, messages, and how much credit you still have to make calls, and can fit into any phone, so lots of people just buy a chip and use a simu ya jamii—basically a public mobile phone—when they want to check their messages.) I let him borrow it, not knowing any better. A few nights later he asked to borrow it again, this time overnight. I agreed on the condition that he return it before I left for work in the morning, which he did. A few nights later he borrowed my phone again, and kept it overnight again.
A few days later he asked to borrow 200 shillings. I agreed on the condition that he pay it back within a week. The next night he also asked to borrow my phone. I thought, ‘This dude now borrows my phone every night, and he owes me 200 shillings.’ And that’s only half the story. Around the same time, some of the girls at the school stopped me as I was walking to my house and asked to borrow my phone charger. I gave it to them, and they returned it the next morning.
A week later a different group of girls came to my door asking to borrow my phone. I gave it to them, and they said they would return it in an hour, which they did. But then they started borrowing the phone every other night, then every night. One night they came to borrow my phone, but Nehemiah had it.
‘Look, you’re going to have to start finding another phone to borrow every once in awhile,’ I said. ‘Between you and everyone else on this compound who is borrowing my phone, I never have my phone.’
The girls nodded and apologized, but I heard them whispering to each other when they left.
When Nehemiah returned my phone, I said, ‘You know, you use my phone more than I do.’ Which is not exactly true, but I didn’t care because he still owed me 200 shillings.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ he said.’ Really, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trouble you.’
He was really embarrassed. No one has borrowed my phone since that night, but I sense that people took my reaction to be a bit harsh and selfish.
As much as people make a beeline to me to ask for money and everything else under the sun that they think I came here to pass out for free, they’re also constantly asking each other for handouts, especially if they have a relative who has a job. People here help each other out when they don’t have money to spare. When I ask why they’ve just given their cousin 100 shillings when their own family is starving because the maize did poorly this year, they just shrug sheepishly. ‘Some people are very good at asking for things,’ they say.
The Kenyans on the Peace Corps staff go through hell every time they go home to their villages, because all their relatives (and everyone in a Kenyan village is related) expect that because this person works for an American organization that he or she has enough money to share with everyone.
I’m also noticing that some Kenyans have no concept of basic personal finance. Like, if they get money, they don’t necessarily spend it on their most pressing need. They spend it on a trip to Eldoret to eat fried chicken. So maybe this is also what allows them to give money to their relatives or a neighbor instead of saving it for the next time their kid gets sick. Maybe it’s more appropriate to say that some people’s definition of ‘most pressing need’ is who’s right in their face rather than what’s really important in the big picture.
Kenyans do favors that strike me as things they don’t need to be doing for people they don’t know. An example of this happened last week, when a guy came to the VCT with a piece of paper containing some questions. He said a student at the school of social work had a class assignment that was due that day. The student didn’t have time to come in person, so she sent this guy to the VCT to see if anyone could help her. The assignment was to interview a counselor about some of the challenges he or she has faced in her work. The messenger guy handed my co-worker the list of questions, and my co-worker started writing out all the answers.
Now if I were in that situation I would say, ‘Tell that lady to get her own matakos* over here and do her assignment. Why should she send someone here to ask someone else to do her homework for her just because for whatever reason she couldn’t get her act together to come here in person and complete the assignment by the due date?’ And I told my co-worker this. He just nodded vaguely and kept writing, probably baffled by what a selfish American I am.
So I don’t know. I think there are some things that are so ingrained in each of us that we’ll never be able to see them clearly enough to fully understand why we are who we are, and therefore, why we aren’t who we aren’t. Whatever those things are, are probably the same things that make me impatient on those days when a gang of street kids in Kisumu march at me with their palms outstretched, ordering, ‘Mzungu, give me fifty bob.’ Hell, if I were in their shoes I’d probably do the same thing. Shoes? Street kids don’t have shoes. This is why I’ll never develop a completely non-judgmental compassion for people. How can I possibly understand what it’s like not to have shoes when it doesn’t even occur to me that it’s possible not to have shoes?
Thinking back to the story about the school assignment, I just remembered something Hillary told me once: ‘We Africans don’t quarrel much about time.’
It doesn’t solve the whole mystery, but it does help me understand about 2% more than I did before. I think that’s the current rate of cultural discovery for me here in Kenya.
* Matakos = butt cheeks
posted by Justina at 10:44 AM
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