A Mzungu Is Not: A Miracle Worker

Met with a community group today that wants help getting electricity and a water system in their village. I tested out my flip charts on What a PCV Is and Is Not, feeling a bit anxious that everyone would be bored out of their minds. But this is Kenya, where every meeting, workshop, social event and church service is one big exercise in boredom, where half the audience is always asleep, and yet people are too polite to walk out to save themselves from dying of ennui.

Despite this, I somehow held a classroom full of old men and women at rapt attention while I droned on about the importance of sustainability and community involvement. Maybe it was just the mzungu novelty factor. Anyway, I was nervous that people would scoff when I said that I’m here to help with capacity-building—training people on proposal writing, computer skills, income-generating projects, and raising awareness about health issues—and that I’m not a donor myself. But I think most people walked away understanding of what I can and can’t do for them, and no bitterness. It was another lesson in giving Kenyans credit for being able to understand and accept who I am instead of who they think I am.

There’s always this weird specter of anxiety over whether any development work I do is crossing the line of imperialism. The difference, I think, between development work and George W. Bush invading Iraq is that development is about listening to the locals and helping them find their own solutions to their problems, rather than storming in and imposing the American way on the downtrodden masses who will tell you they’re grateful for anything you can offer, then six months down the line will realize you’ve just given them a fleet of fishing boats and they live in a landlocked country. I think it’s more of that liberal guilt coming out, but it was strange to be addressing forty people whose combined expertise and resources and knowledge about their own community far outweighs mine, and being told that they wanted me to tell them how to implement these projects. I’m just some yahoo from halfway around the world who (you can’t tell anyone I told you this) couldn’t identify Kenya on a map a year ago, and certainly had no idea there are millions if not billions of people in the world who don’t have clean water or electricity.

Hillary confirmed that I had been completely honest and set the community’s expectations appropriately in terms of how much I’d be able to do for their projects, but after the meeting so many people came up and said they suddenly had so much hope that they’d never had before, simply because I had come to speak to them today. It felt like a lot of pressure and made me wonder if I had said something to give them false hope.

Many Kenyans will chalk it up to a legacy of distrust left by former President Moi’s regime, where people no longer believe in their leaders, from the village chief and local religious figures all the way up to the president, because they were so corrupt and showed no interest in developing their own country. In the meantime NGOs and foreign governments were assisting Kenyans and getting some results. The assumption that a lot of people now have is that anyone who is foreign can be trusted, and anyone who is Kenyan cannot. And that is why, according to many Kenyans, a community like the one I met today was so eager to hear what I had to say.

This group's situation is not uncommon. In 1999 they had applied for electricity through Kenya Power and Lighting. KP&L replied with an estimate, and said they would be happy to wire the community with electricity if the beneficiaries could contribute one million shillings, which was only ten percent of the total cost of the project. It sounded like an outrageous amount, and the community got discouraged and abandoned the project. In reality, 1.3 million divided by 100 beneficiary families divided again by seven years is a rather manageable amount of money to raise, but at the time no one pointed that out. It's a common problem that a community gets discouraged rather than exploring all their options, and for some reason it takes a completely incompetent and unqualified "advisor" like me to be the catalyst for action. It remains to be seen whether I can deliver.

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The BBC interviewed some Nairobi youths about the effectiveness of abstinence-based programs used to teach people about AIDS. There were the usual answers about the importance of girls (mind you) remaining virgins until marriage, but one guy’s response caught my ear.

“It’s unrealistic to tell people that virginity is important,” he said. “First of all, where are you going to find a girl who’s a virgin? And second of all, what are you going to do with a virgin once you’ve found one?”