The Day Before Camp GLOW

Just wanted to write a quick post before I turn into a whirling dervish trying to clean my place and get ready to go to Nairobi in less than one hour. Two girls from my village got selected to attend Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), a week-long experiential learning camp dedicated to empowering girls and exposing them to the possibilities of their future. Peace Corps is paying for all their costs of attending. They are giddy as hell that they get to take a week off from school, learn about girls’ empowerment, and stay in Nairobi. Seeing them so excited, grinning ear to ear for the last two weeks, has made me really excited for them. Nellie says she has never been to Nairobi in her life, and the chance to travel outside their school compound, much less their village, is rare.

A PCV who just returned from the first session (there are two sessions, one last week and one this week) said it was “amazing” and that it gave him hope for change. PCVs are usually pretty cynical about the possibility of change, and PC-run events are usually so disorganized as to be more frustrating than effective, so I took it as a pretty rave review.

I invited my campers over yesterday evening to help me make some teaching materials for camp. I gave them a list of quotes by women, and asked them to design signs that will be hung around the conference room at the camp. I thought it would be a fun activity that would let them express their creative side, but they were really unsure of what to do, and they asked me to demonstrate first. Once they understood, they began scrawling freely with markers and gossiping between themselves. I love high school girls.

These girls, and most students I’ve met here, are so bright and full of potential, but I’ve started to notice how the rigid education system takes its toll. Students are taught all the answers, and they are taught not to deviate from them. They are also not used to being asked to assert their own decisions. I visited a primary school one day, and the headmaster would instruct the students to remove their pullover sweaters whenever HE felt warm, and put them back on whenever HE felt cold. Every student had to do as he was told. I was wondering, what if some of the students felt cold and didn’t want to remove their sweaters? Yesterday whenever I asked Nellie and Harriet what they wanted to do, or how they wanted to do something, they got really uncomfortable and had to hesitate a long time before answering. There is certainly value in teaching strong memorization skills and respect for authority, but I imagine that when students get to extremely advanced levels of schooling, there is a huge learning curve that could be flattened if secondary schools were to incorporate more analytical and critical thinking skills into the curriculum.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to meeting the 32 or so girls from around Kenya that were selected for the camp, and I imagine that they will grow a lot in the next week. Stay tuned.

A Lingering Question from the Maasai Mara

I met this group of American travelers when I was at the Maasai Mara with Patrick in March. They were fascinated with the fact that I’m a Peace Corps volunteer, and suddenly I found myself cornered at the head of the dinner table while everyone shouted questions at me as if I were holding a press conference.

A few people in the group had done some short-term volunteer work as part of their trip. It was an acknowledgement of their sheltered middle-class American life, and their attempt to step out of it and see what the “real” Africa is like. Poverty! Death! Civil Unrest! They figured the best way to do it was to spend a few weeks volunteering with AIDS orphans in Uganda and Tanzania.

One older couple was so moved by what they saw at the orphanage that the idea that what they had experienced might be my daily life left them in awe. The husband, Don, asked me, “How do you deal with seeing such sad things everyday?”

I didn’t know how to answer him, because I was thinking, “I really don’t see sad things everyday. Maybe I should start paying more attention.”

I just shrugged and gave him some lame answer. “I don’t know, I guess you just get used to it.”

But the truth is that Africa is not a land of perpetual tragedy. Yes, I walk around my village and see poverty everywhere. Very few people own clothes without at least a hole in them. Hungry babies toddle barefoot and commando through chicken poo while their drunk fathers stagger around the market. From our Western perspective, this is all very tragic. For my Kenyan friends in the village, this is life. Life is hard. But why should it be tragic?

One day Hillary was unusually quiet so I asked him if something was bothering him.

“Yes,” he said. “I am really struggling to find money for my family. And I’m really disturbed about the way the meeting went today.”

We commiserated about the meeting, and then I said, “So what can you do about your family?”

I thought he was in a real bind and wanted to ask to borrow money, but he only said, “Oh, I will find a way. I have been living this way for over thirty years. It’s the way of life.”

That was the moment I realized that I could stop feeling guilty for not giving people money when they ask. No Kenyan has ever taken it personally when I say no. People were struggling before I arrived and they’ll be struggling after I leave. It sounds selfish and heartless, but the truth is that it’s not my responsibility to feed another person’s family. I have helped some of my friends in the past, either with money to buy food, to start an income-generating project, or to take their sick wife to the hospital, and I will probably help someone again.

But it’s some strange sense of socialism that I picked up somewhere, that makes me feel guilty when I don’t help someone who has less money than me. The fact is that MY money can’t help most people. I’m just a microeconomic insignificance. I’m not really even helping the people I’ve helped. I’m glad my friend was able to take his wife to the hospital in time. I’m glad when my friend’s kids can eat dinner. But the next time they need money and I’m not around, what will they do? Maybe they will find money, maybe they won’t. But that’s tomorrow’s worry. Am I really helping when I only solve today’s worry? (As a development worker, I say no.)

I still think about Don’s question a lot. Maybe I’m just obtuse, or maybe I’ve become desensitized to what I see. But sometimes I really do forget how poor some of my friends are. One friend told me that he hasn’t had money to buy soap lately, and that he has been eating dinner outside, under the moonlight, because he can’t afford to buy paraffin for his lamp. It suddenly struck me as tragic, and I felt completely helpless to do anything for him.

Kenyans put on such a strong face. I’ve met widows who tell me about their lives, and I think, “I would not be alive at your ripe old age. I would have jumped off the escarpment by now.” Once during a meeting a widow was explaining how she had nothing because a tree fell on her house and crushed it in a storm. She started sobbing and I remember thinking, “I’ve never seen a Kenyan cry. This is new.”

An interesting cultural note. I can’t attest to fully understanding the meaning attached to crying in Kenya, but to oversimplify, I gather that it is seen as a sign of weakness. In the U.S., crying is seen as a normal and healthy way to express emotion. In Kenya, men should NEVER cry, at least in the Nandi tribe. Women don’t bother to cry. It doesn’t do any good, they say. After we left the meeting where the widow broke into tears, Hillary said, “She shouldn’t have cried. It doesn’t bring the house back.” (Talk about major emotional invalidation. As much as I like him, I wanted to strangle him.) Instead, women are supposed to be patient through their suffering. It makes it sense how Christianity has taken hold so strongly here. It’s easier to accept suffering when you believe that God has a better life for you after this one.

There is a lot of happiness in these communities. Struggle and suffering are as much a part of life as love and celebration. By extension, death is much more an accepted part of life here, even though mourning is observed just as ritualistically as it is in our culture. You can’t escape the reality of death when you live so much closer to the cycle of life than we do in the West. Crops grow and die; cows, chickens and sheep are born and die; babies are born and die; young and old alike get sick and die.

It’s not the things I see that are hard to deal with. What I do feel sadness about are the root causes of the things I see everyday. Corruption. Tribalism. Gender inequality. Things that are invisible pour les yeux, yet very real.

I think the key to dealing with the frustration of these things is accepting why I’m here. I can do my tiny part – talking to girls, encouraging them to be leaders, etc – but mostly my power lies in my circus sideshow novelty. People come to barazas, meetings and lectures because they want to hear what the mzungu has to say. Sometimes it’s the only time so many people get together in a single place, and it’s when I can suggest to groups how to begin working together. Sure they could do it without me, but up until now they haven’t. Why not use my freak status to mobilize them? I won’t single-handedly weed out corruption or anything else, but once these communities stare at each other across these packed classrooms and see their own power, maybe they will.

Most of all, the key is accepting that I will most likely leave here after two years and have only left one legacy – not of a person who helped build a new gravity-fed water tank or lifted 20 widows out of poverty…let’s get real, it probably ain’t gonna happen – but of the kind-hearted mzungu who strangely looked like a China but spoke some Kiswahili and liked ugali and had an amazing shamba and some pretty good notes about HIV and AIDS.

But even then, I flatter myself.

Lunch in a Kenyan Home, or How Many Peace Corps Volunteers Does It Take To Catch a Kuku (Hen)?

A. One, plus three of the neighbor’s kids.

My friend Chumo is back from Nairobi, on break from studying at the Franciscan brotherhood. He invited me to visit his home today, which I learned is different from a “house.” In Kenya if you say “home” it means the place you were raised – basically your parents’ house. If you say “house” it means the place you live now if you are married. The rule applies in both English and Swahili.

I learned this the hard way. Today I asked some school kids, “Nyumba yako ni wapi?” Where is your house?

They looked confused and uncomfortable. Chumo explained that I had just asked these first graders where the house is that they live in with their spouses, and now they were all freaked out.

I should have said, “Nyumbani kwenu ni wapi?” Where is your home?

Before I left to go to Chumo’s house this morning (I’m using the American “house” terminology here) I went to my shamba to pick some vegetables as a gift. I discovered mutant zucchini and packed one in my backpack, along with two mutant squash. In the U.S. I’d never seen zucchini longer than 7-8 inches. Some of my zucchini have reached 18 inches, and are still growing. Even the yellow squash are huge, about the size of a large butternut squash.

I met Pastor Nelson on the way and he offered to bike with me up to Chumo’s house. In true Kenyan fashion, we had to make a detour to visit his neighbor’s mother, who I’d never met. She welcomed us warmly, and served us tea and bread. She and her daughter retreated to the back of the house while Nelson and I ate. I asked later if it was some kind of custom, because I felt weird sitting in a stranger’s house eating their food and drinking their tea while they weren’t having any. Nelson explained that it was a matter of practicality – the mother and daughter had already taken tea. They came back out and I impressed them with my camera – they couldn’t believe you could see the picture right after taking it. The mother went to the back of the house again, and came back with a live hen, fresh chili peppers (I have a reputation in the village for appreciating fresh chili peppers, which most Kenyans avoid) and four large avocados, useful for knocking dead unfortunate roosters hanging out under ripe avocado trees. In return I gave her two yellow squash – not exactly a fair trade, but it was all I had to offer.

We continued on to Chumo’s house for lunch, where we met Julia and Emily. I met Chumo’s mom and sisters, who brought out bean stew, potato stew and rice. We chatted until the rain started pouring so hard on the iron sheet roofing that we couldn’t hear each other, then just watched Julia crochet a chair cover. Everyone was impressed with the size of my zucchini, and in return Chumo’s mom presented me with five kilos of potatoes from their shamba. When we were leaving she packed my new hen in a plastic grocery bag with a little hole poked in the side so the hen could stick her head out and look around.

Julia and Emily were still laughing at me for saying, “Oh, don’t worry about the plastic bag, I’ll just put her inside my backpack.”

“Oh, Justina, you have amused me so much,” Julia said. “The hen will suffocate in your bag.”

Ah. Didn’t think of that.

I guess the plastic bag served several purposes, because the kuku was covered in her own poo by the time I reached home with her three hours later. Edward, one of the headmaster’s kids, came over and helped me untie her wings and legs.

She got busy eating grass, but the sun was going down and the other chickens were already in the coop. I tried to herd her towards the coop with a stick, but she was more interested in eating grass. She barely noticed that I was poking her in the butt trying to get her to walk, and I thought, well maybe this is why she’s the slowpoke that got caught and presented to me. And I also kept thinking, “Bird flu can be passed to humans through blood and feces,” so I didn’t want to touch her poo-covered body.

Brilliantly, I decided to speak to her in Kiswahili. She’s a Kenyan chicken after all.

“We,” I said. “Enda nyumbani.” Hey, you. Go inside the house.

Sharon, the housegirl’s daughter, watched me in silence, too stunned at my stupidity to even laugh. She called to the other kids in the house, and Kip and Victor (aged 4 and 6) came out to help. The hen clucked indignantly as we chased her around the compound, and the rooster started clucking disapprovingly from inside the coop.

“Bok bok bok bok beh GAWK,” she’d say.

“Bok BOK bok bok bok bok,” he’d reply.

Chickens ain’t so dumb; she followed the sound of his clucking until she found the coop, and went inside willingly. Once again, nature proves that so-called dumb animals are much smarter than people.

An Open Letter to Fruit Flies (Drosophilus I Hatus Yewous) Everywhere

I hate you, in case you can’t read Latin. Who said you could invade my house in droves? Is there a sign on my door that says “Karibu Fruit Flies”? NO. Just because my door is open does not mean you can come in. And what’s with the buzzing around right outside the door all day long until I have to come out and use the choo? Y’all need lives. My doorstep is not the only place you can find sumptuous rotting things to feed on.

Oh, wait, you already know that, because you’ve all COME INTO MY HOUSE UNINVITED AND SAMPLED MY FOOD. You’ve sampled my fruit tray. You’ve sampled my onion and garlic bowl. You’ve sampled my garbage can. You’ve sampled my dirty dishes.

You know what’s really rude about all this? When you’re done eating MY food, you don’t just say thanks and leave. You go over to my mosquito net and hang out. IT’S TREATED WITH POISON YOU IDIOTS. WHY AREN’T YOU DYING? Your nightly dance party on my net is inexcusable.

As 245 of your former colleagues know, I’ve declared war. At first I just took out my trash and washed my dishes everyday. But that’s too much work just to keep a bunch of dim-witted fruit flies at bay. Then I sprayed my house with Doom. Do you understand Doom? It’s supposed to make you die. What’s wrong with all of you? Why are you still living in my poisoned house?

Well, guess what. I have a new lethal weapon. It’s a cardboard mailer converted into a flyswatter. And it works like a charm. Maybe some of you are better fliers than others, and some of you choose your resting points more strategically (narrow edges of bed frames, bookshelves, plastic buckets and basins, and soft surfaces like curtains can’t protect you forever, suckers), but eventually, the flyswatter gets you all. The 245 flattened carcasses in my garbage don’t lie. The new pattern on my walls, made from the splattered blood and pus of Drosophilus I Hatus Yewous, don’t lie. It’s like artwork. I call it “Staccato in Black and Red.”

I know what you’re thinking: My karma ain’t doing so hot right now. Oh, please. You are so full of yourselves. You’re FRUIT FLIES. Not birds or cats or even spiders. There is no guilt here. Every time I get to watch your red and yellow guts squirt out of your bloated little bodies due to a fatal blow, I feel a sense of satisfaction. The only annoying thing with you people is that your damp little corpses stick to my garbage bag, and it’s my last one. Can’t you do something about that? I hate having to see all of you looking ridiculously contorted every time I walk past my garbage can.

I know what you’re thinking now: Why can’t I just live in peace with you all? You’re not doing me any harm. And my response is: If you didn’t come into my house, I wouldn’t have to kill you. Doesn’t that sound fair?

OH MY GOD YOU’RE HAVING SEX IN MY HOUSE!! I just saw some tiny ones of you. That’s the ultimate insult. It’s one thing to invite yourselves in, eat, and leave poo on my food. But I’m not running a brothel here. Can’t you take your private business outside?

I told some other PCVs about you. Y’all are in trouble now. One of them says he has a lovely recipe for fruit fly stir fry, and that you function much like raisins. Obviously I don’t have much use for you, but it looks like other people do. As soon as I collect enough of you, I’m selling you by the kilo, cheap.

Heeere, fruity fruity fruity. Heeere fruity fruity.

A Question For the Gardeners Out There

How do you prevent mustard greens from flowering? My plants were doing great for about 3 weeks, then suddenly they all burst into bright yellow flowers. That would be cool if I weren’t growing them for food, but I can’t help feeling like I’m being denied my right to eat these guys. It seems like I’ll pick a few leaves, then in a few days the plant decides to flower. Some of them started flowering without even waiting for me to pick their leaves. Am I waiting too long to harvest the leaves?

Laptop Woes, Turkana Heroes, and Their Dogs

It’s Cinco de Mayo and six months ago Mika sent me a package via surface mail. It arrived today. Everything was intact, but at the time that she started writing the enclosed letter (in September) she hadn’t had her baby yet. Now little Elise is eight months old, and so are all the Clif Bars, soy sauce packs (about 67), trail mix, and McCormick’s pasta seasonings she sent me. Thanks, Mika and Guillaume, for all the goodies. You have set a new record for the longest time a package has taken to reach me, previously held by my parents, who sent a package in July that arrived in November. Still in the running are the Girl Scout cookies Nandita sent by surface mail in February.

Well, Nick sent me a laptop through somewhat circuitous means last month. He mailed it to Seattle, to the Australian cousin of an American woman I met here who was working for an NGO in Bungoma. The cousin brought the laptop when she came to visit in April (the American, and her cousin, have both since returned to the U.S.) I trekked to Nairobi to pick it up, took a detour with it through Webuye to visit another PCV who bribed me to come over with an offer of his fartin’est chili, and finally arrived with it in my village a few days later.

Like most high-tech gadgets that arrive in Kenya for me, it went inexplicably kaput soon after. I took it to my friend Joseph, who is the IT guy at the college of social work in my village, to see if he could do anything. He took it home to Eldoret for the weekend, to take advantage of Eldoret’s access to the rest of the modern world.

It turns out Joseph is a Turkana, originally from the Lake Turkana region in northern Kenya. I don’t meet many people from the remote northern or northeastern regions of Kenya, so I got inquisitive. He told me how he ended up visiting the U.S. for a few months to help a Belgian friend, who was getting a master’s at Johns Hopkins, with a presentation. The friend’s thesis was on a disease common among the Turkanas. I forget the name exactly, but what interested the student was how some cultural practices of the Turkanas contribute to the spread of the disease among humans. It’s a bacteria (or parasite or virus?) that usually affects domestic animals like cows and dogs. Dogs are valued highly in Turkana culture, and a typical Turkana family can have six or seven dogs, each one for a specific purpose. Some live in the house and some live outside, depending on their purpose. (An interesting bit of gross trivia, as long as you’re not eating: Turkanas used to train dogs to keep their babies clean. In other words, when a baby pooed itself, the dog would come along and lick up the mess. Eeew.) Because Turkanas are in such close contact with their dogs - living, sleeping, sharing food and water, stepping in feces – they often contract the disease from their dogs.

Turkana is an area that I – and many Kenyans – don’t know much about, except that they’re famous for really amazing woven baskets, so it was fascinating to pick Joseph’s brain about his home. From the little I’ve heard and read, Turkana is extremely isolated and undeveloped, far more so than any of the communities I work with in my village. The landscape is supposed to be beautiful, especially around Lake Turkana. The more intrepid brands of tourists find their way up their often enough, and the areas close to the border with Sudan and Ethiopia are saturated with NGOs, which makes prices for accommodation and food really expensive for visitors, an unexpected irony given the poverty in the area. Joseph described Turkana as a place that’s still “uncivilized, where people still walk around nearly naked.” A lot of kids don’t go to school because there are no schools nearby. He says that Turkanas think of their place as a different world altogether from the rest of the country, so that when they travel out of the region, they say, “I’m going to Kenya.”

With Joseph’s help, his friend’s presentation was a huge success. People all assumed Joseph was a doctor, when in reality he only had a 12th grade education. The friend was so grateful that he offered to pay for Joseph to go to university, an opportunity that very few Kenyans have. And now, lucky me, there is someone in my village who knows more about computers than I do. It’s not bad being the second most knowledgeable computer person around, although the fact that I am, is sad.

Fun With Bugs and a Very Tall Escarpment

May 2, 2006. Tuesday, 12:08pm.

I’ve been ignoring these fruit flies in my room for four days now. Well, not totally ignoring them so much as avoiding direct confrontation. I took out my trash. I did the dishes. I sprayed the room with Doom. This morning they were still around, going about their happy little business eating ripe fruit and sucking on old food particles stuck to things. No respect. It was time to get serious.

I went on a violent smashing campaign using a makeshift flyswatter. It was a decidedly un-Buddhist, uncompassionate assault with the goal of splattering their little juicy bodies to create as wide a diameter of pus stain as possible. I got at least twenty of them. Another fifty or so had died on my window sill, where for some reason most bugs in my house go to die, so I swept their shriveled little carcasses into the trash too. My garbage can is a fruit fly graveyard, with assorted cockroaches, ants, termites and unidentified hard-shelled species. Yum, time for lunch.

Yesterday I went to meet a community group located on the other side of the escarpment. Hillary had the brilliant idea to ride our bikes there. It was two hours of squeezing our brakes all the way downhill, a 2,000m drop into lush plains full of sugar cane. In the back of my mind I thought, the return trip is going to suck. But it was another gorgeous, Technicolor morning, about 70 degrees with a warm, friendly sun; the kind of day that makes you feel like nothing in the world could possibly make you happier at that given moment. Blue skies, white clouds, green farmland, wildflowers, and purple hills in the distance. We could see a light blue strip on the horizon – Lake Victoria. The village we visited was the most remote place I’ve ever seen in Kenya. Their land is extremely fertile, and sugar cane is the major cash crop. We could even see smoke rising from the sugar factory about 20 km away. Most residents have water gravity-piped to their houses, because of the scores of streams that flow down from the escarpment. But electricity is non-existent, there are no health services, and the one road through the village is full of potholes (okay, so even major highways in Kenya are full of potholes) and is only serviced by a few matatus a day.

The group we met wants to start a VCT in their village. The national body governing AIDS-related development activities, NACC (National AIDS Control Council), allocates funds every year for certain types of projects, all with convenient acronyms so you can always sound like you’re at a spelling bee. This year their focus has been named TOWA, or Total War on AIDS. They are targeting care of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and people living with HIV/AIDs (PLWHAs), and moving away from awareness and prevention of new infections because a study shows that 97.5 percent of Kenyans know how AIDS is spread and how to prevent it.

But in this remote village the stigma and denial is still there, and access to services that de-stigmatize the disease are non-existent. There have been a few mobile VCTs that have found their way to the village, and there were always lines of people out the door waiting to be tested, so the demand is there. I told them I’d see what I could do. NACC funded the VCT I’m attached to, but there can be a lot of politics involved with successfully submitting a proposal to NACC. The group’s leader, David, went on a tirade about how the biggest problem in Kenya is lack of proper governance. (In other words, you-know-what.)

“We have the potential to develop this area. We have land, we have crops, we have water. The problem is that we don’t have political goodwill,” he said. “Politicians are only helping themselves and their families, not their people.”

Like so many other villages I’ve visited, it kills me to see how they are marginalized because of corrupt leaders, especially because their area is so rich in natural resources. Biking through the area, dwarfed by the sprawling acres of sugar cane, I thought for sure that with people would be doing well and sending their kids to college. David told me that people who sell their sugar cane to the factory often never actually get paid for it, depending on who’s in charge at the factory. “Fortunately the younger generation is starting to not accept this kind of system,” he continued. “But the change is so slow.”

I asked him if he had attended college or university. He has natural charisma and leadership abilities, and he’s passionate and motivated. David only smiled and shook his head, rubbing his thumb against his fingertips to indicate no money. “But it’s never too late,” he said. “You can always get more education even if you are looking into your own grave.”

I like this guy.

After the meeting, David and some other members of his group helped us find a route that would take us back up the escarpment in the shortest time. David kept saying, “You should just spend the night here, and go back tomorrow.” It was 3:30pm and if I had known it would be another four hours back home, uphill all the way like your parents used to say, I would have taken him up on the offer. We could see the rain clouds moving towards us across the plains below. The wind picked up. Hillary put on his jacket. We didn’t bother getting on our bikes because it was too steep and rocky. Mountain biking for leisure is fun, when you’re on Mt. Tam and there’s a bar with cold beer at the top. Mountain biking to beat the sunset with only a small bowl of ugali and beef stew in your stomach, is torture.

It started drizzling a cold, uninspired drizzle. It was nice of God not to make it a pelting hailstorm, I will say that much. Hillary kept saying, “This is the last hill,” and I kept chewing him a new b-hole for being wrong. It wasn’t the last hill for a long, long, LONG time. We didn’t reach my house until it was pitch black. Hillary helped himself to a glass of water and left in a hurry, eager to escape my grumpiness, the worst he’s ever endured. I took the most beautiful, steaming hot bucket bath I’ve ever taken in my life, splashing like there was no tomorrow. The euphoria I’d felt that morning coasting down the steep side of the escarpment seemed like a week ago, but at least I was home. Then I fell into bed.