Typical Day In the Neighborhood

Sundays are for church, thank God. My day off. I went to Eldoret to run some errands and meet a friend. Sunday is always the most laid back day of the week because everyone is in church all morning. My new organization has a strict dress code – no trousers for ladies, and no t-shirts. That rules out most of my wardrobe, so I had to make a trip to the mitumba, or open-air used clothing market.

Eldoret has a lively mitumba but apparently not on Sunday mornings. There were only about seven vendors (as opposed to the usual hundreds), but I still managed to get four nice shirts (collars and buttons) for 10 shillings each. You can’t beat the Kenyan mitumba, man; that’s where I’m buying all my clothes before I return to America.

Around 3pm the multitudes of mitumba vendors were sprung from church and began to set up shop along the side streets in town. It was a bit overwhelming because there are the street “stalls” which are just a plastic tarp on the sidewalk (I mean “sidewalk”) with a pile of clothes selling for so cheap that you don’t even have to bargain (ten shillings for shirts, 20 shillings for trousers in odd sizes, colors and fabrics), and the dukas (permanent shops) that sell both used clothes and somewhat fashionable new clothes from China for 600 shillings or more.

Next to the mitumba were a bunch of mamas selling the usual selection of vegetables and fruit…and lethargic termites squirming in a large bag. I had to stop and stare. All around me people were laughing and yelling at each other in mother tongue.

“Blah blah blah blah China blah blah,” they said to each other, which I took to mean, “The China is looking at the termites.”

The vendor pulled out a plastic bag and started filling it with termites for me.

“No thanks, not today,” I said. “Why don’t they fly away? They still have their wings.”

“They cannot,” a man next to me said. “They are inside the bag.”

An old mama had just bought a bag of termites, flitting their wings with a doomed sort of resignation, and offered me some. I shook my head and watched her stuff a handful in her mouth.

“Why do you fear?” the man said to me. “They cannot harm.”

“They are so sweet when you fry them,” the mama told me, still shoving live termites into her mouth, wings and all.

“Okay,” I said, walking away quickly. “I will come another day.”

I hate hawkers. I boarded a matatu back to my town, and settled in next to a man who was arguing with a hawker who was shaking a book of first grade Kiswahili lessons in his face.

“I’m not studying Kiswahili these days,” he said, in Kiswahili.

The hawker didn’t budge. “Why can’t you take one?” he said.

“I don’t want this book today,” the passenger said.

The hawker held the book in his face and still didn’t move, as if he hadn’t heard.

“Bwana!” the passenger said. “I said I’m not buying it today.”

The hawker lingered motionlessly for another minute, still waving the book in the passenger’s face, waiting for the passenger to stop ignoring him, then gave up and went away, fortunately for him because I was contemplating how hard to punch him.

I hate matatus. Our matatu started to leave town, and I noticed we were taking a detour on a muddy dirt road, through maize fields.

“Why are we going this way?” I asked the man next to me.

“Ahh,” the man said. “Sijui Kiingereza. Kiswahili tu.” I don’t know English. Only Kiswahili.
“Kwa nini tunapitia njia hii?” I said.

“Iko traffic huko mbele,” he said. There’s traffic ahead.

I didn’t understand why there was traffic coming out of Eldoret on a Sunday evening. It took a few minutes for me to realize he meant there were traffic cops along the road, and our driver was trying to avoid them.

“Kwa nini wanafanya kama hii?” I said. Why are they doing this?

“Kwa sababu wako watu wengi,” he explained. Because there are too many passengers in the vehicle.

“Ai, hiyo ni mbaya,” I said. This sucks. “Ni haramu.” It’s illegal.

“Kweli, ni haramu,” he said. Yes, it’s totally illegal. “Wanataka pesa mingi.” But the conductors want to make more money.

Matatus are limited to 14 passengers by law, but conductors typically pack as many people in as they can because it means more money, unless they’re traveling a road with police checks. If the traffic cops discover that a matatu is operating over capacity, or that someone isn’t wearing a seatbelt, or that the vehicle’s license, registration or insurance is expired, they fine the conductor, driver, or offending passenger. Sounds like a pretty good road safety system, doesn’t it?

In reality, the police checks have only managed to ensure compliance on the few main highways where they are stationed, but in the sticks, which is most of Kenya, matatus are basically death traps packed so full of people that you can see eyeballs pressed up against the windows, with the conductor and some passengers literally hanging out the open door. And if the traffic cop finds a matatu in violation of one of the road rules, they are willing to accept a bribe rather than levying a fine.

Kenyans have been riding in over-filled matatus all their lives and have stopped wasting their breath complaining. I’ve been here just long enough to feel enough satisfaction complaining openly to lame conductors, which usually embarrasses them because they’re not used to being confronted, that it somewhat makes up for the fact that the conductor never actually reduces the passenger count to 14, or fixes the broken seat belts, or turns down the radio, or opens the window.

We managed to avoid the first police check, but we were stopped at the next one. I looked around and noticed that we were over capacity by four or five people. The conductor got out, went behind the vehicle and spoke quietly to the cop, and we were on our way without any argument.

Fifteen minutes and four stops later, our conductor was still stuffing more people in. The man next to me said, “Gari imejaa, tuende.” The vehicle is full, let’s go. He was the only person saying anything to the conductor.

The conductor ignored him, of course, and we went on our way, with three passengers hanging out the door. Several stops and five more passengers later, I lost my patience.

“Kwa nini unafanya kama hii?” I said loudly. Why are you doing this? “Ni haramu kujaza kabisa kama hii.” It’s illegal to fill the vehicle so full.

“Kwa nini unacomplain?” the jerk face conductor said. Why are you complaining? “Unaweza kutembea.” You can walk, then.

This did not please me, so I stopped speaking in Kiswahili.

“You’re doing something illegal, you know it’s illegal, you know you’re wrong, and you’re telling me to walk? You’re only supposed to have fifteen people in this vehicle and we have at least 20 or 25,” I sputtered, teetering on the threshold of strangling him, a not uncommon way for me to be in matatus, matatu stages, open-air markets, and anyplace where there are idle or drunk men.

The man next to me said, “Fourteen, it’s only supposed to have fourteen people.”

“We have fourteen people,” the conductor lied, as all the extra passengers crouched silently in the aisles.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” I said, loudly, as the man next to me laughed. “You count how many people there are here. This is illegal.”

“It’s not illegal,” the conductor lied. “If it were illegal then why did that policeman let us go through with extra passengers?”

“Because you gave him some kitu kidogo, maybe,” I said, using the Kiswahili euphemism for bribe, which translates as something small.

“What is kitu kidogo?” he said. “I don’t know that word.”

“Of course you do,” I said, speaking even more loudly. “Kitu kidogo ni bribe.”

“I don’t know that,” he said again. “There’s no kitu kidogo.”

“Ulilipa kitu kidogo,” I said, just to clarify for everyone on the matatu. You paid a bribe. “That’s why they let us pass with too many people on board.”

“Corruption,” the man next to me muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear. I was glad at least one person was willing to back me up publicly.

A Somewhat Flawless Move, A Relatively Flawless New Site

[First installment]

The lowdown on the new house. I’m settling in well to my new digs. My new organization, a well-funded, well-organized VCT in a town only one hour from my old village, sent their giant Land Cruiser to pick me up, along with all my worldly Kenyan possessions, and take me to my new house. This place is huge compared to my one room in the forest back in the village. I have a one-bedroom house with a kitchen, large living room, bathroom and toilet. The water comes on somewhat predicatably every other day, but it only comes out of the kitchen tap (not the showerhead, bathroom sink or toilet), and usually early in the morning (6:30 am, when I’m never conscious) or in the middle of the night (3am, when I’m never conscious). If I fill the toilet tank with water, it flushes in true Kenyan fashion, churning violently for 3 seconds and invariably leaving some traces of, uh, debris. For three days I stubbornly tried to use a pee bucket, with a daily hike to the neighbor’s choo for disposal, but I generate enough waste water from washing dishes and bathing that I can just pour-flush the toilet. I have a small yard enclosed by a high concrete wall, about half a point (1/20 of an acre), one corner of which is dedicated to rotting garbage. The previous tenant planted a few pumpkins; I may try to plant some vegetables but the soil doesn’t look very fertile. I’m surrounded by neighbors on all sides, who have all planted maize, so I should probably say I’m surrounded by fields of maize on all sides, plus an assortment of kids who are all relatively well-behaved, although their curiousity has already caused them to accidentally kick over a bucket of water in my kitchen and accidentally steal a nail from my coffee table. Note: I have room for a coffee table!! The compound is a far cry from the lush forest full of monkeys, rolling fields of tea and pineapples, and year-round springs of my last site, but I can’t complain about having a much bigger house in exchange.

The mattress saga. I inherited my “new” bed from the woman who was living in my new house before me. She told me the bed was 4x6. I’ve been sleeping on a 4x6 mattress, which my old organization bought for me when I first moved in last year. So I offered to buy the mattress off them for the current retail value based. It was a convoluted way to help out some of the members of the VCT who hadn’t been paid any allowances for over a year because my supervisor simply refused, citing “a complete lack of funds.” Mysteriously, he somehow had enough funds to buy a second printer for the VCT, a purchase which was neither discussed with nor approved by any other members. But such were, and still are, the ways of the “disorganization” I used to work for. Anyway, I paid the money directly to the treasurer, and instructed her to put it into the VCT’s petty cash account, which she would then use to pay a few people some back allowances they’re owed. It’s only a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of shillings they are owed, but they were grateful.

Sean had kindly come from Kisumu to help me move. When we arrived at my new house and put the mattress into the bed, we discovered to our dismay that the bed was only 3.5x6. Kenyan bed frames are like boxes that you drop the mattress into. So my too-big mattress curled awkwardly over the edge, forming a concave, soft little pit that I could sleep in if I didn’t mind always being rolled into the middle where there is already a Justina-shaped imprint. It was already 7pm and I was getting worried.

“We need to make this mattress fit the frame,” I said, getting my German carving knife out of the kitchen.

Sean stared at me. “Justina!” he said, eyeing the knife. “It’s not a cake!”

He suggested that I asked a fundi (carpenter) to extend the frame a few inches on either side to accommodate the mattress. I said, why pay to extend the frame when I could cut the mattress for free? We started sending smses to other volunteers.

“Depends on the quality of the mattress,” Kumiko wrote.

“Woah, that’s a tough one. How much would it cost to extend the frame? I’d probably just leave it hanging off the edge myself,” Jenly wrote.

“Extend the frame,” Willie wrote.

“Tell Justina to chill out,” John wrote.

“I wouldn’t cut it,” Ali wrote. “And Pat says to return the mattress and get the right size.”

Enough people seemed to think cutting the mattress was weird, so I agreed to think about it some more. The next day I went to a fundi to ask for an estimate on a frame extension.

“One thousand bob,” he said.

“What?? A new bed costs 2,000 bob,” I said.

“No,” he lied. “A new bed costs 3,500.”

“Just cut the mattress, then,” I said, handing him my carving knife. He agreed to cut the mattress, tighten the bolts on the frame, which was really wobbly and squeaky from the last tenant and we’ll not wonder the exact reason, fix a chair leg that broke during my move, and hammer a bunch of nails into my concrete walls, all for 400 shillings. Not a bad deal, I thought.

It was definitely a jua kali job (literally “under the hot sun,” a term for the open-air shops where fundis craft their products, many of which turn out pretty ghetto); the chopped edge of the mattress ended up with a feathered, uh, texture, but after taping the fabric cover back with duct tape, you could barely tell the difference. Well, except the mattress is still about half an inch too wide, so I have to stuff the edge into the frame, which makes it more firm (good), but which also makes it harder to tuck in blankets and the mosquito net.

“UR CRAZY!!” Sean smsed me when I told him. “That totally goes against nature! Which of our advisors ever said, ‘Justina, cut the matres?’ It doesn’t make sense!”

[Next installment: My new organization, an amazingly well-run and productive place, for Kenya]

Two Very Brilliant Things I’ve Discovered In Kenya

1. Pee buckets

Jenly turned me on to these. Then I realized at our cross-sector meeting that a lot of other volunteers use them, too, because we had a 15-minute roundtable discussion over dinner about pee bucket techniques. It’s just like it sounds – a plastic bucket you pee in.

When we went to Jenly’s site for Eco Day she announced enthusiastically that we were all welcome to share her pee bucket with her. The choo was a short hike from her house along an uneven dirt path, so peeing in her bucket was more convenient at night or whenever we felt lazy.

On my way home from her site, I stopped in Kapsabet and shopped for the perfect pee bucket – I was looking for just the right size and color, with a lid. I found a 5-L sea green one for 30 shillings, and when I got home, I immediately wrote Pee Bucket on it so that no one would decide to drink or wash their clothes in it. My own choo is only 25 yards from my house and has a light, so there has never been an issue of accidentally dropping the flashlight in there or crashing into a tree along the way. But it has always been one of the worst smelling family choos in Kenya, because I share it with three other adults and seven kids whose idea of using the choo is to use ANYPLACE in the choo (How exactly do you land a piece of poo right in the corner unless you’re firing it out of a cannon?) During the day the biggest flies in Africa, who happen to all live down inside my choo, find their way out of the hole and zoom around the stall buzzing at the top of their lungs. After awhile I just became impervious to the smells and the deafening hum and the pus-filled bodies crashing into my butt. The only thing that bothered me was that my clothes would be impregnated with the choo smell for hours even after a 30-second stint.

But the pee bucket has changed all that. Now I pour a few teaspoons of bleach and a cup of water into the bucket, and wait for it to fill up. It’s impressive how much fluid passes through me each day. It’s impressive how I no longer worry about whose body excretions I’m tracking from the choo into my house on the bottom of my flip flops, or whether the choo smell from my clothes is seeping through my skin into my bloodstream. Tonight I tried using my pee bucket as a poo bucket, after consulting with other Peace Corps pee bucket experts. The key is lining the bucket with a plastic bag. I’m not sure how I feel about it after only one experience. It was cool to lift a heavy bag of poo and wonder if the reason I walk so slow sometimes is that I’m carrying around a couple extra pounds of pure poo. It’s also cool to be able to poo anywhere in my house, or to be able to send text messages or write a letter while I’m on the bucket. But pooing in a place that’s not a toilet or choo seems incongruous with my limited ideas of proper poo sanitation.

If you visit me, you get to use the Guest Bucket.


2. Murenda

My favorite vegetable in the world is kong xin cai, also known as ying cai in Taiwan. It might also have an English name, water convolulous, whatever that is. I tried to plant some in my shamba but I think I planted them too early and they never germinated. Then I discovered murenda, a local vegetable also called murere, or riwek in the local Nandi language. It tastes almost exactly like kong xin cai, but its appearance and texture are different. The leaves produce this gooey substance and if you don’t cook it long enough the leaves are slightly prickly. There is a local vegetable in Borneo called jungle fern that looks completely different from both murenda and kong xin cai, but tastes almost the same. Jungle fern is also gooey, and the edible parts are the leaves and young shoots, which end in a curly tendril. A plate of sautéed jungle fern looks like little green seahorse tails tossed with spinach.

Countdown to Farewell

Well just as I’m finally feeling like a part of my village, I’ve made my decision: I’m getting a site change. Today I rode my bike past one of the primary schools in town, and instead of the eighth grade boys stopping their football game to screech, “China china yangyangyangyang howayoo howayoo hiiiii,” in modulated nasal voices, they just said, “Hallo, madame, howayoo?” and continued playing.

Yesterday I passed the same school and some of the older girls asked me to join their game of jump rope, which ended up being the most hilarious thing they’d seen in years because I couldn’t clear the twine they were holding 2 feet off the ground. Today they greeted me by name, if only to outdo the boys, who only know me as madame.

Peddling past the familiar fields of maize that hug the rolling foothills of the purple escarpment looming in the distance, I started to think of all the things, and all the people, I’m going to miss from my village.

• Most of all, and most obviously, my friends Hillary, Julia, Emily and Mwalimu Nancy
• the neighbors’ kids, all the different shopkeepers, vendors and other people around town whom I buy things from – Chumba, who is probably the most honest and down-to-earth shopkeeper I’ve ever met in Kenya
• and his neighbor who sells my favorite bread (United, unsliced)
• Nellie at the agrovet
• Mary and Joshua (or is it Joseph) at the hoteli
• the ladies at the posta
• Julius and the characters at the petrol station
• the woman who never smiles who runs the duka (shop) where I buy potatoes and green peppers
• the bored youths who run the only supermarket in town
• Eric, my tomato vendor, who is STILL trying to set me up with his brother
• all the mamas who sell me vegetables
• the old old Mzee who wheels around jerrycans of water with his fiercely loyal and slightly less old dog with the saggy nipples
• the two or three rotating Luo fundis (tailors) whose collective ability to understand my English seems to fluctuate from proficient to less than zero in a single minute
• all the high school girls I’ve befriended from my school and others around the village
• the Luhya kids who scream my name when they see me after I taught them that screaming China is bad behavior
• our DO who has the best deadpan humor in all of Rift Valley and borrowed all my back issues of Newsweek and who must not be that corrupt because he’s been around for almost nine months now
• the matatus drivers and drunks who sideline as matatu touts when they’re coherent enough to make out potential customers coming from a distance
• the nurses and other hospital staff at the Mission Hospital
• the cook at the Catholic parish who owns two bicycles he souped up himself
• the precocious eighth grade midget at the School for the Disabled who I hope will become the first female President of Kenya
• Alfred the water technician who lives next door and always seems to be passing me on the road
• the farm manager and his staff who used to visit me in the shamba to admire my crops hoping to score some free zucchini and squash
• the old Mzee who spends all day every day tending only one cow which happens to always wander onto the VCT premises and eat all the plants intended for landscaping
• the divisional public health officer who always seems to have somewhere important to rush off to on his motorcycle but was always happy to talk to me about whatever work I was doing in the community (a rare trait in these parts)
• the black-and-white Colobus monkeys chortling in the trees next to my house

Wow this is not even an exhaustive list but you get the idea. The move seems like it has been a long time coming, but the logistics have come together quickly and I'll probably be whisked off to my new home without much time to say goodbye.

Pondering On the Slow Train

We're on the slowest train in Africa, rattling our way through the Rift Valley, peering down into lush green valleys full of maize, dense forests, velvety pasturelands and a thin jagged brown river. I've just asked Devin and Shinita why there's so much poverty in Kenya when everywhere we look there is an abundance of natural resource, fertile farmland and healthy crops. It's a complicated question, and we debate for about ten minutes before we shrug our shoulders and sigh in resignation. We don't really know the answer. Kenyans don't really know the answer.

A Kenyan Peace Corps staff member once old me, "Your village has no excuse for being poor. You have fertile soil, constant rain, lots of land for farming and grazing, your cows give lots of milk, you have tea and pineapple cash crops." On an individual level it seems like people just aren't organized and forward thinking enough to use their resources to their full potential. But that's an oversimplified interpretation. "It would be so simple, if only they would..." It's easier said than done.

Then there's the bigger picture. Road infrastructure is so poor that transport costs are prohibitive for most small scale farmers who try to sell domestically. The U.S. and other developed nations' farm subsidies make the cost of exporting Kenyan cash crops prohibitive as well, except for the largest growers. NGOs buy up a lot of the crops from rich landowners, so neither the money nor the food goes back to the local communities. And then there's...for example...

In my community there is a civil servant, a government employee, who is known to be corrupt. He is supposed to serve our location, which is one of the smallest administrative jurisdictions (it goes, top to bottom: national, provincial, district, division, location, and sublocation). He answers to the Ministry of Health in Nairobi, the national headquarters, NOT to his bosses at the District, who are all aware of his irresponsible work ethic. Because all the decision-making is centralized at the headquarters, the process of getting him fired for his widely known professional transgressions would take a lot of organization, patience and time. When this civil servant steals money from community groups made up of village farmers - who have no reliable transport, no cell phone, no internet access and no money - he knows that for these poor communities, organizing to throw out the bums probably wouldn't be a very rational use of their time. On top of all this, there so much turnover in all the levels of Ministry admin that a case can easily get lost in the shuffle everytime someone new comes on board.

I want to read a book called As They See It, by Raymond Downing, an American doctor who has lived in Kenya for over 15 years, whom I met a few weeks ago. In his book he talks about AIDS in Africa and why Africans - leaders and villagers - think it has continued to spread despite the increased availability of information and drugs. I think a lot of his findings can be applied to a lot of the social problems in Africa, including poverty, and I also think that until Westerners start listening to what Africans have to say about their own problems, and letting Africans find their own solutions, we're not going to see a lot of improvements. Western solutions, in my opinion, haven't worked because they're not tailored for African culture. How could they be when we don't understand it, and after being in Africa for decades we still can't understand it? There's a lot of PCVs who feel like the best solution would be for all foreign aid to just pull out of Kenya kabisa, cold turkey. The presence of foreigners only reinforces a false sense of dependence on Western-designed solutions that don't work in non-Western cultures.

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Kiswahili language lesson:

In our sleeper car there is this sign over the window that says, in both Swahili and English:

Ni hatari kujitokeza nje ya dirisha.
It is dangerous to lean out of the window.

I find the word kujitokeza humorous. It's translated as "to lean" but when you break it down literally it looks like this:

ku = to
ji = reflexive verb infix meaning to do something to yourself, e.g.

jitayarisha -> prepare (yourself), get (yourself) ready; tayari = ready
jisaidia -> help yourself, an idiom meaning to use the toilet
jifunza -> learn, or literally, to teach yourself

toka = go out of
eza = causative verb suffix indicating that something is being made to happen

So, kujitokeza literally means to make yourself go out (the window). Somehow all those actions you inflict on yourself just to stick you body out the window makes for a funny image in my head.

Listening Skills

I realized this weekend that by the time my COS (close of service) rolls around in August 2007 I will have attended three July 4th parties sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Nairobi, which is basically a chance for American embassy staff, PCVs and Marines to get together and eat hot dogs and have a tug of war. PCVs always get a goody bag full of free toothpaste, soap and other hygiene products donated by various companies who know how dirty and cheap we are. Score.

Life in Kenya has been a bit disorienting lately. It's weird to have a capital like Nairobi, where there are so many western-style amenities and a large middle class, and then go back to a place dotted with mud huts and banana farms and women carrying firewood on their heads. It used to be that I looked forward to going home to the serenity and familiarity of my village, but lately my community doesn't really feel like my own (drop me an email if I haven't told you all about my supervisor going nuts), and towns like Kisumu, Nairobi and Eldoret are my refuge from a culture that I understand better than ever, yet accept no more than I did a year ago.

I met an American grad student at the July 4th party who is doing a summer internship with the UN in Kenya. She was the perfect example of why I've become a little jaded about the international development community. I really think most development workers have impressive academic credentials from top universities, are pretty intelligent people who have lived in different countries, and can regress the hell out of any policy issue, but have never spent enough time in the cultures they're working for to really understand why most sustainable development programs are neither sustainable nor development.

The longer I'm here the more I understand why Kenyan culture is the way it is, and the more I realize I'll never fully understand why Kenyan culture is the way it is. I see that there is logic to the way people behave, whether I agree with the value system it's based on or not. And I realize that the reason most development programs aren't successful is because the people designing and implementing them don't understand the culture and people that they're trying to benefit. Development needs to happen at the hands of locals, not foreigners with good hearts, deep pockets and no freaking clue.

I wonder how many policy makers and program designers have actually lived in a rural Kenyan village, talked to people living their about all the things affecting them - traditional customs like circumcision and wife inheritance, gender roles, HIV. I met an American doctor living in Western Kenya who has spent years researching the AIDS epidemic from a Kenyan cultural perspective. His observation over the years is that when Americans brought over "AIDS awareness," they actually brought over the American moral debate and culture war over AIDS - teaching abstinence-only vs. autonomous decision-making skills - and we've never bothered to ask Kenyans what they think of AIDS in their own country. And how can we distinguish what they really think from what Western health and development workers have told them to think?

The doctor facilitated a lively discussion between PCVs, Kenyan Peace Corps staff and Kenyans from the local community about the way the development industry has dealt with AIDS in Africa. One of the Kenyan Peace Corps staff asked, "Why can't we just tell everyone who is HIV positive to stop having sex instead of just giving out ARVs, which don't cure them but only help them live longer? New infections are caused by infected people having sex after all."

There was a lot of thinly veiled eye rolling and scowling from the Americans, but the only comment was from one PCV who said, insightfully I thought, that in any other audience the Kenyan would have been instantly torn apart by the Americans for his views. In most situations I think we're all still quick to pounce on any views that go against our own value system, but personally it was a reminder of how hard it is for me to be humble and not jump to conclusions everytime a Kenyan says something that offends me. And yet as little as I understand Kenya, I still understand a thousand times more than most Americans.

As I was explaining to the American grad student how deeply ingrained female circumcision, wife inheritance and other traditional practices are in Kenyan culture (in many tribes they are fading quickly but in the villages you still see a lot of resistance to change), she kept scowling and shaking her head and saying, "There must be a way to educate people so they stop doing these things." And I realized how perfectly her question embodied all the well-intentioned arrogance and utter cluelessness of Western aid workers, including Peace Corps volunteers (though to a lesser, more cynical degree). Somewhere in there we all know that the only people who can address Kenya's problems are Kenyans. But yet we all want to do something to help.

I tend to think all we can do is let Kenyans tell us about themselves, then go back to America and tell our friends and family about it. The Peace Corps has three official goals, paraphrased below, but I think only two of them are realistic.

1. To provide the host country with volunteers trained with some semblance of technical knowledge in some area of development the host country needs. Health, education, small enterprise, fish farming...etc.

2. To create a cultural exchange that raises host country nationals' awareness of Americans and our culture.

3. To create a cultural exchange that raises Americans' awarenes of host cultures.