I Am Crankypants

December 16, 2005, Friday, 10:51pm.

Today was a bad day. Not because anything particularly bad happened; it was
more like waking up on the wrong side of the bed, which is bad in itself
because there�s only one side of the bed I can wake up on without hitting my
head on the wall. I stepped outside my house and the compound was full of
people � old mamas, middle-aged men, kids in church uniforms. They were
obviously not from my village because when they saw me, all movement came to
a complete standstill and they stared dully at me like they�d never seen
anyone walk by putting one foot in front of the other. And as usual they
assumed that foreigners don�t have ears, because they started whispering,
�Fffsstssfzzfsfff mzungu fffsssttsffs.�

Well it�s probably not the best idea for me to try to write a blog post in
this kind of crappy mood. But the truth is that I�m tired of not doing
anything day after day. Spending a week in Kitui at in-service training was
good for getting some distance to reflect on things and realign my
perspective with reality. I�m going to try to start working with other
groups in my community and detach myself from the organization that I was
originally placed with. There�s no point trying to work with an organization
whose management is corrupt and ineffective, and whose members no longer
attend meetings because they�ve lost interest in working with leaders who
sabotage all their efforts at progress. For awhile my counterpart and I were
plotting different ways to stage a coup, but I�ve never heard of a
successful two-person coup. I also realized that rule number one of
sustainable development (okay, maybe it�s rule #3) is that any project, even
a coup, needs to be initiated by and include the active participation of the
community or group it benefits, otherwise they don�t feel a sense of
ownership and therefore...(chorus) it can�t be sustainable. The members of
my VCT got so discouraged and apathetic that they weren�t even interested in
overthrowing the leadership. They just stopped showing up for work.

It was also helpful to think about better approaches to community entry
after all the different assumptions people in my village have made about my
purpose in being here. Actually there�s only one assumption, and that�s that
I suddenly decided to leave my comfortable lifestyle in the U.S. to come to
Kenya to pass out money for free, and by some stroke of luck this remote
community dominated by tea fields and dairy cooperatives (Nandis love their
milk) is going to be the beneficiary.

From now on, instead of introducing myself by saying, �I�m a volunteer with
the U.S. Peace Corps,� which sounds to the Kenyan ear like, �U.S. money
money money money all for YOU!!� I�ll explain that the Peace Corps is not a
funding agency, I�m not a funding agency, and neither are my friends or
family back in America. I�m merely here to facilitate people�s efforts to
identify resources and solutions within their own communities. There is
nothing that perpetuates a person�s sense of powerlessness than believing
that the things they need to improve their situation can only come from
outside.

Well, I�m starting to sound like someone�s Master�s thesis, but somehow the
theoretical babble makes me feel a little more optimistic, like it provides
a structured framework for understanding all the madness.

YUCK there is a hairy spider on my window curtain.