Natl Bk Wk

It’s God country. Yesterday a man stopped me as I was passing on the street and said, “Good morning, madam.”

“Good morning,” I said, having no idea who he was.

“Good morning and God bless in the name of the Lord our Father who gave us this blessed morning so that we may be grateful for what He has given us this day so that we may be grateful to be alive this blessing of life that I am so grateful to our great Lord for giving us and God bless you madam God bless us all we are so grateful for this wonderful gift he has given us today to be alive to serve him it is such a blessing from our glorious God Almighty Lord and let us now go forth and serve his name and celebrate the name of Jesus our Almighty Father madam I am so grateful to be alive…”

“Okay, see you,” I said, walking away.

Natl bk wk. The perils of SMSing someone who isn’t used to your abbreviations:

Me: natl bk wk opening 2day at library im givn talk on vct u shud come if ur in town.

Neetha: National black week? I think I must have missed something.

Yesterday was opening day of National Book Week, September 25-29. Why is opening day on the second day of the week? I don’t know. It’s Kenya. The director of my VCT was invited to give a talk on HIV/AIDS and VCTs. Since he is both busy and important, they sent me instead. I’m neither busy nor important, just a curious sideshow. Perfect for attracting attendees to an event that didn’t draw many attendees.

This event was a perfect specimen of “organized” events in Kenya. Because.

1. It started five hours late.
2. None of the guest speakers showed up.
3. The actual “guest of honor” was basically yanked off the street to replace the original guest of honor who didn’t show up. To his credit, he was a good speaker.
4. They expected hundreds of attendees and only 50 showed up.
5. Of these, most of them were school kids looking for an excuse to miss class.

I should have expected that a “library” in Kenya only vaguely resembles a library in the U.S., both in physical structure and in its relationship to the community. The District Librarian, who runs the library and who was running the event, said that when he goes to schools and other groups to tell them about the library, most people think it’s a place where you go to buy books.

One first grade class attending the event yesterday gave a stunning performance that illustrated why this might be the case. On cue, they all recited:

“A. Library. Is. A. Place. Where. Books. Are. Kept.”

So is a bookstore. So is a closet. So is under the bed.

The current library is two “temporary” buildings, one for childrens books and one for adult books, each only half full of books. Their collection is pretty dismal, although I will say they have a beautiful hardcover copy of the Quran, in Arabic with English translation. Like a lot of community-based projects, it seems like they’ve adopted a “we’ll take whatever we can get” policy. They have a set of reference books from 1952, a reference for what, I don’t know. The spine just says REFERENCE. Next to it is a set of Encyclopedia Britannica from who knows when. All the books in the adult section are obscure, dry texts on obscure, dry topics that no one in the community – I promise – would ever use. They have a few novels – including gag-meister Lisa Beamer’s book “Let’s Roll,” about September 11 – donated by a former Peace Corps volunteer, and a relatively decent children’s book collection.

One of the library’s main audiences is students who come to do research before their exams. I don’t understand what relevant information they might find at the library, unless it’s some random textbook lodged between the dusty volumes of irrelevant information.

I tried to feel out the library staff to see what kind of vision they had for the place. They want to expand their book collection. They want to have robust resources on HIV/AIDS, magazines, leisure reading materials (fiction novels), and childrens’ books. They want to have a computer lab. Most of all, they want to build a “real” building, even though their current buildings are more than enough room to house their current books. The staff has a lot of great ideas that need a lot of careful prioritizing.

National libraries in Kenya like this one are government funded. They get grants each year to purchase books, and have a partnership with an NGO that distributes donated books to developing countries, so every three months or so they get new books. I always took for granted public libraries in the U.S. They’re just there. They’re just well-diversified. There are just books for every number in the Dewey decimal system. Childrens’ books for every reading level. Adult books for every taste. Dizzying reference books that put me to sleep. Periodicals archived back to the dark ages. And that’s just the offline stuff.

My tiny personal book collection here in Kenya would be far more relevant and interesting and useful to the average person in my town than the books at the library. That is a pretty unfortunate reality. But the local community is still in the early stages of understanding the importance, and the magic, of books. I talked a little about it during my speech, but everyone’s eyes just glazed over.

“I remember when I was growing up I loved to read. Books bring the outside world right to you, worlds that you’d never be able to access just being at home or going to school. The world is such an amazing place that you wouldn’t even know about without books…”

Glaze, glaze, glaze. One kid’s head bobbed to the side and his eyes rolled back into his head. Dead asleep.

The guest of honor stood up to make his speech: “I’m going to tell you a story about a pauper who went begging for money. He begged and begged until finally a pastor took pity on him and gave him a Bible. Before giving the pauper the Bible, the pastor put a lot of money inside, but didn’t tell the man. The pastor told him, “Read this Bible and pray everyday for God to help you find money, and one day you will get what you ask for.” Well the pauper was lazy, and didn’t like to read, so he went home and put the Bible on his shelf. “I ask a man for money and all he gives me is a stupid Bible,” he thought. A year later the pastor sees the pauper again, and the pauper is still dressed in rags. The pastor asks, “What happened? Did you read the Bible like I told you?” The pauper says, “No, I don’t like to read. I needed money and you just gave me a stupid Bible. What good are you?” And the pastor knew that the pauper was a fool, and would always be poor. The moral of the story: If you want to hide something from a fool, put it in a book. If you don’t want to be a foolish person, learn to read.”

Laughter and applause.

Ah, nothing like scaring kids into wanting to read. Well, the truth hurts. Might as well use it to get people to do what you want them to do.

Nairobi Is Another Planet (Unlike Pluto)

Most recent case of mistaken identity:

Person I’ve just met: “Justina, that’s a Mexican name.”

Me: “Well, um, I don’t know. Probably not.”

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“No, but I studied French.”

“Your accent is American but it’s like you’re a Mexican.”

“Interesting.”

But my favorite is, “You’re American? You must be a Red Indian.” I can’t help it; I just say, “Yes, you’re right. I’m a Red Indian.” If Kenyans ever asked if I was Native American it would be no fun to say, “Yes, I’m Native American.” I just think it’s great that Kenyans have a name to describe people who are neither red nor Indian.

Most recent re-realization of an obvious fact: There is a whole other world in Kenya called Nairobi. I was talking to one of the researchers who is collecting data from our district for a study on antiviral gels that might protect women from getting HIV. She and all of her colleagues are from Nairobi – born and raised. I asked her that question that Kenyans always ask me that drives me crazy: “So how do you find this place?”

“It’s so boring,” she said. “On weekends I have to go to Kisumu or Nairobi or Eldoret, otherwise I’ll feel so bored.”

Coming from a year in the village, I think my new town is an impressive oasis of developed civilization, but I think if I were coming from Nairobi it would be different. What am I talking about? Everytime I come back from Nairobi I go through a readjustment period. It’s not as severe as culture shock, but it’s realigning my expectations back to village life – people staring open-mouthed everywhere I go, people screaming racist things everywhere I go, mamas selling vegetables at the market who think I don’t understand them complaining to each other in Kiswahili that I’m so rude because I didn’t buy anything from them, peoples’ hands suddenly springing out horizontally towards me, palms up, as soon as they see my pale skin. “You give me fifty bob. You give me bread. You buy me soda.” NO NO NO NO NO NO.

*SIGH* I feel her on Nairobi. Java House is just a comfort zone. A refuge where I can drown my cross-cultural sorrows in an espresso sundae and an actual green salad with actual Romaine lettuce. I never even liked Romaine lettuce before Kenya. Now it’s just so crispy and fresh and raw, a combination not found outside the capital city, in food or elsewhere.

The researcher was telling me about some of the other communities she’s been posted to for other projects. She was in a village near the Ugandan border one time, and it was market day. Her co-worker said, “Don’t look to your right. Just look left and you’ll be okay.” So of course she looked to her right. There were crowds of naked men bathing in the river. So she looked left. There were crowds of naked women bathing in a different section of the river. And thousands of people milling about at the nearby market, paying no attention.

“I’m a Kenyan and I realized there are places in Kenya that I just don’t know about,” she said.

Another time she was sent to do research in a remote village on the coast. She was told not to wear trousers because women who wore trousers in that area were assumed to be prostitutes. When she got there, wearing a skirt, she realized that the women in the village wore traditional skirts made from lesos (large pieces of colorful fabric) tied together so that they puff out really big around their hips…and nothing above the waist.

“I don’t know why wearing trousers makes me a prostitute when all the women in the village are going around showing their breasts and they’re not prostitutes,” she said.

She also told me about an area just inland from the coast, where she was doing research for an iron-supplement project. “It’s an area that gets a lot of relief food,” she explained.

“Oh, is it a drought area?”

“It’s dry but they do get short rains throughout the year,” she said. “They could grow food but they’re just lazy.”

“Lazy?”

“It’s easier to rely on relief food,” she said.

“How do you know the problem is laziness?” I asked.

“Everyone knows those people are lazy,” she said, authoritatively.

I won’t completely agree. But I won’t completely disagree either. When you live where you see what really goes on in these poor rural areas, you see beyond the clear-cut, academic explanations. As much as compassionate observers like to (rightly) point to all sorts of other contributing factors – a corrupt, irresponsible government, poverty, lack of access to education, a sense of disempowerment – it’s naïve to insist that there’s not a tiny bit of laziness as a result. Laziness – and every other development-crippling vice – isn’t innate, of course. There are extremely valid reasons for it. But it has been hard for me to get past the guilt of judgment and moral superiority and just be able to draw a Problem Tree (for a problem such as “No Income”) with one root called “Laziness.” To ignore that it exists is to paint an incomplete picture, and ultimately to leave one problem unaddressed.

What Have I Been Up To Lately?

Book currently reading: God of Small Things, by Arundati Roy. A brilliant writer, a genius with words, highly recommended.

Music currently listening to: A bunch of MP3 mixes Lynn and her co-worker Joshua sent me. Thanks, y’all! I love them, cheeseball tunes and all. God bless the 80s.

Last movie watched: The New World, the “bonus” flick on a gladiators-themed, 8-movie DVD. God bless cheap (ahem*pirated*ahem) DVDs from Nairobi.

Last good movie watched: Spirited Away, for the second time. (Send Miyazake flicks! Princess Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service. Send Margaret Cho. Send Eddy Izzard. SATC. Six Feet Under. Anything except gladiator movies.)

Current project at work: Teaching a computer skills workshop. My sitemate Tony stopped by my office today and I said, “I’m teaching my co-workers how to turn on the computer.” He laughed. I was serious. My co-workers were pretty stoked to learn the word for “keyboard,” “monitor,” “CPU/hard drive,” and “mouse.” Today they learned how to minimize and maximize windows, how to drag and resize them, how to copy files to different folders, and how to type a letter. I won’t say it was two solid hours of gratification watching them get excited as they learned. The gratification was there, but it’s hard to describe what it’s like to teach in Kenya. It’s easier to rant about the failures of the education system here. About students who graduate from high school with the critical thinking skills of a primary school student. About students who always say they understand when they clearly don’t, because they’re afraid to ask questions for fear of being ridiculed, and when asked to articulate what they don’t understand, are unable to. About asking someone with a college education a simple question such as, “What is counselor supervision?” and getting the answer, “It’s for counselors.” Teaching this workshop has made me realize how smart some of my co-workers are, even though their chosen career is, for example, um, janitorial engineering. They ask questions that show they are trying to piece together some cause-and-effect relationships behind how these programs and functionalities work. The sad thing is that most of the time, and for most of their lives, they’ll never have the opportunity to realize their full potential. In most situations they’re not expected to, or their voice, their ideas and opinions are not valued, and therefore never requested, or even suppressed. So after awhile they just do what they’re told and keep quiet the rest of the time. It has really made me understand the value of an education – especially for women – and the value of money, in a way that I never have before.

Latest time-wasting craze: The daily sudoku puzzle in the paper.

Latest attempt to recreate the comforts of home: Tuesday night, when I had two other volunteers over for dinner. Earlier that day my co-worker had given me a giant bag of oyster mushrooms – yes, oyster mushrooms, which I didn’t think existed in Kenya. It turns out she’s friends with a group of mamas who grow oyster mushrooms and sell them as an IGA (income-generating activity), which means I now have a mushroom hookup. It was one of the happier moments of my Peace Corps service, up there with the first time I had a Javahouse espresso mocha chip sundae in Nairobi, and every time I get a letter or package or postcard in the mail (keep ‘em coming, folks, put a smile on your favorite PCV’s face today!) Dinner was pineapple curry and Justina’s special mushroom mystery surprise, followed by a (bad) selection from Tony’s gladiators DVD, a giant vat of popcorn and chocolate. By 10pm our tummies were full of uncommon non-Kenyan food, and our brains were full of a very bad movie about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, with lovely cinematography. Tony went home to put yeast in his mead. Really, it’s not a metaphor. He’s actually making mead. Neetha and I stayed up for another three hours gossiping in American (an actual language.) I LOVE BEING NEAR CIVILIZATION!! The next morning I made spinach-mushroom crepes, and Neetha said, “Oh my God, you made crepes!”

Current domestic source of befuddlement and mild insanity: Mysterious curls of poo on my walls. How does poo get on the wall? I thought I had a mouse but mice don’t run up the wall to poo. Hickory dickory dock. I get a lot of slugs, so maybe they’re leaving their poo on the walls. But there aren’t any slime trails around the poo, which makes me wonder if it’s coming from geckos. Whatever it is, it’s gross, and rude.

Still wondering: Should I have gone back to Nairobi a day early from Lamu to meet Barak Obama? He had a meet-and-greet with Peace Corps volunteers at the embassy. It’s the media coverage that’s killing me, along with hearing other volunteers rave about what it was like to meet him. Guess what I learned? Obama is charismatic as hell. Obama has a great sense of humor. Obama knows how to deflect idiotic questions. Dammit I missed him! Even today there was an article about him in the paper. Kenyans LOOOOVE this guy. Although they love him a little less after he gave a speech at Nairobi University saying that corruption and tribalism are crippling Kenya. Three weeks later politicians are still complaining that he was given misinformation about Kenya’s political scandals from the opposition party, and that his portrayal of corruption here was wrong, but nonetheless he should stop talking about things that are none of his business. Because the best way to deal with problems is to tell people to stop pointing them out.

Word Games

Mondegreens, Kenyan style. I’m going to try to start a collection of these. A Mondegreen is San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll’s term for that phenomenon when you’re listening to song lyrics and think they’re saying something different from what they actually are.

He says, "For those of you who have not yet received the pamphlet (mailed free to anyone who buys me an automobile), the word Mondegreen, meaning a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric, was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright.

As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright. A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green, Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism."

These aren’t exactly Mondegreens because they weren’t sung to me, only recited in a normal Kenyan accent, but confusion ensued anyway.

1. One day Hillary called me sounding really distressed. “I lost my hand,” he said.

“You lost your WHAT?” I said, shock setting in as I imagined having to get used to a one-handed Hillary. “Your hand?”

“Yes, my hand,” he said.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “How? What happened?” Some thugs attacked him in the middle of the night and chopped it off with a machete. He got it caught in the grinder at the maize mill. A rabid dog went nuts and bit it off.

“She went into labor, but by the time they arrived at the hospital she had died,” he said.

Long pause.

“OHH,” I said. “Your AUNT. You lost your aunt.”

“Yes, I lost my hand,” he said.

[Nandis often add an “h” where there is none or remove an “h” when there is one. They also pronounce “p” as “b” and vice versa, “s” as “z” and vice versa, and “j” as “ch” and vice versa.]

2. One of our teachers told us during training, “The Luo tribe, we like feces.”

“You like feces?”

“Yes, Luos love to eat feces. We make our living as feecermen around Lake Victoria.”

“Fishermen? You catch fish in Lake Victoria?”

“Yes, there’s lots of feces in the lake.”

Mondegreens, American Style. Peace Corps volunteers all agree, Kenyans can’t make heads or tails of our accents, either.

1. Me: “Hi, I’d like to buy a Celtel card.” (A card that allows you to put prepaid credit on your cell phone.)

Vendor: “You want what? Carrots?”

2. Americans can’t roll their “r”s. Kenyans can’t hear “r”s that aren’t rolled.

Me: “Where’s the train station?”

Taxi driver: “Where is…? China?”

Vacation Posts To Come

I plan to post some notes from my trip to the coast, I promise. Check back here...sometime.

The Merits of Site-Rathood, The Merits of Patience

I have a site mate in my town. Peace Corps is a different experience when you have another volunteer nearby. I don’t feel as isolated as I did in my old village, where the only other foreigners were the Chinese road crew, whom I couldn’t really communicate with, and whose existence guaranteed that no one would ever grasp the concept of Pacific Rim immigration to America.

“But you look just like those Chinese of the road. You’re not American.”

“That’s because you don’t know what Americans look like.”

“But you must have a background in China.”

“No, my parents are from Taiwan.”

“Oh! How do you find Kenya as compared to Taiwan?”

“I don’t know. I live in America.”

Having a site mate also means it’s easier to be a site rat – to stay at site for several weeks without needing to leave. I used to take off for a bigger town every chance I got at my last site, if only to have fried fish and a milkshake made from real ice cream, or to meet up with other volunteers to blow off steam over cold beer. Now stress relief is only a text message away.

“U wana come over for dinner? I’m conducting a chow mein experiment. No guarantees on edibility.”

“Yeah…nimpo tomorrow morning?”

“Okay. What’s playing at the 5 bob movie house?”

It’s a nice feeling of solidarity. We speak American. We roll our eyes at each other when we’re harassed for money or when people stare as we’re walking around town. We try to make familiar food with unfamiliar ingredients. We speculate about where to find wireless internet, drool over my new laptop, eat popcorn and drink Trader Joe’s tea while watching DVDs, talk openly about our bowel problems, commiserate about cross-cultural frustrations, and spend Sunday mornings practicing nimpo while the rest of the country dies of boredom in church.

Having a site mate validates my perceptions and reactions to the confusing culture I live in. My neighbors might act hostile towards me for whatever inexplicable reason that they would never tell me about if their lives depended on it, but at least I have someone nearby who can say, “Yeah, I get that from people, too. I don’t understand it.” And suddenly I have someone to not understand it with. It’s great.

The difference is all in the immediacy. All this validation was available to me when I was living in my old village; it was just so much less accessible. I had to wait until the weekend, travel 2 ½ hours, and hope to run into someone who was also in town.

In addition to my site mate, there are two other volunteers who live within 30 minutes of my town. It’s like a Peace Corps Volunteer zoo, at least to all the people staring when we’re together, but the monkey house isn’t so far from the ostrich habitat and the hyrax exhibit and the snake farm, and I’m glad I can bust out of my cage whenever something gives me the urge to jump up and down baring my teeth, screaming and scratching my armpits.

More on the Disempowerment Thing. People may feel disempowered, but let them see their own abilities, and they just fly.

My first week at my new organization, my co-worker shoved a handwritten letter in my face.

“Can you type this for me? I need it right away,” he said.

“Wull, why don’t you do it yourself?” I said.

“You’re much faster. I don’t know how to type,” he said.

“Then this is your opportunity to learn,” I said.

“I don’t have time today. I’ll learn next time,” he said.

“Well who’s going to type your letter today?”

He looked at Carren, who started shaking her head. “Do you know how much work I have today?” she said.

I sat him down in front of my laptop and told him to start typing. He just stared at the blank screen.

“What do you want to do first?” I asked.

“I want to write the address on the right hand side,” he said. I showed him the Tab key. I also showed him the Space Bar, the Shift key for making capital letters, and the Return to go to the next line.

He wasn’t lying about not knowing how to type. It was agonizing watching him hunting and pecking for keys that I knew by heart, so I asked if he wanted to know anything else, and left him alone. An hour later I came back, and he was beaming. He had finished his two-sentence letter, all by himself. He was extremely proud of himself, and so was I. It was obvious that he’d had an incredible sense of accomplishment that day, and it was gratifying to see “sustainable development” at work, especially after wondering if I had been too harsh making him type the letter himself. Dr. Phil is a total cheeseball, but that day I had to say, tough love ain’t such a bad policy.

Back From Vacation

I got a new laptop! My brother so kindly brought me a sleek, lightweight little number and I just started playing with it tonight. I’m looking at it going, they make this stuff in the first world? Ship me home now! I mean, this thing doesn’t even have a PS/2 port for my mouse. Apparently in the 21st century developed world, mice use USB ports. And a little red light that senses movement, instead of a rolling dust magnet called a “mouse ball, snicker, snicker.”

Post-Vacation Decompression. Nick and Cath are winding down their whirlwind tour of Kenya, hopefully catching their flight out tonight. First I have to send them a big thank you (THANK YOU!) for tugging so much crap across the Atlantic for me, including probably 15 pounds of Clif Bars, trail mix, dried fruit, cereal, giant Toblerones and Swiss chocolate. Thanks to Mika and Guillaume for the 15 pounds of Clif Bars, trail mix, dried fruit, cereal (gone in three days), photos and hilarious letter. Thanks Mom for all the wrinkle cream and plane tickets. Hm, wrinkle cream and plane tickets sound like some ex-pat formula for coping in the developing world.

Just slowly transitioning back to PCV life since my wageni left town. It’s weird having just moved to a new site and organization with only a year left here. I’m not exactly starting over from scratch, but I still have to take the three-month “do nothing” period, where my primary responsibility to is to listen and observe and learn the needs of the organization and community, but restrain myself from starting any projects. I’m not strictly following this rule since there are other volunteers in my town who have asked me to help out with their projects, and I’m still working with a few groups from my last site. Hm, I feel like I’ve written this before in a previous post, and it sounded just as boring then as it does now.

What I Would Name My Dog If I Had One. We had a three-day intensive language training in June where I was speaking Kiswahili like a pro, and then promptly got lazy and forgot it all by the time I got back to my village. But the one thing I do remember is that there are at least three different expressions for “good Kiswahili.”

“Kiswahili sanifu means fluent Swahili,” our instructor, Kitui, said. “Kiswahili halisi means proper Swahili. And so does Kiswahili mwafaka.”

The four of us in the class started giggling. “What was the last one?”

“Kiswahili mwafaka,” he said.

“Mwafaka?” we repeated. Kitui nodded. Pretty soon we were four adults in our twenties and thirties with tears streaming down our faces laughing. Poor Kitui just looked at us quizzically and tried to continue the lesson.

“Very good,” he said, each time we pronounced “mwafaka” and burst into more tears laughing.

We finally stopped hyperventilating and collected ourselves, and explained why we were acting like idiots. “Mwafaka sounds like a curse word in English,” we said. “It gives the statement, ‘I speak Kiswahili mwafaka,’ a bit of a different connotation.”

Every so often our language instructors put on a skit for us where they imitate dumb things PCVs have done in their classes. Would not be surprised if this one shows up in their performance.

Phases of the Moon, Phases of Obsessive Anger. Okay, I’ll be honest. Living in Kenya involves a lot more negative emotiveness than I let on in my blog. As if you hadn’t guessed. In fact this blog is a diplomatic miracle by some estimates. But the frustration is mostly personal internal struggles with impersonal external factors, all manifesting themselves as obsessive rants in my head in the privacy of my own home or out loud in a safe circle of drunk, raving PCVs.

Anyway, the objects of my frustrations have evolved over time, although mostly boil down to the same things that have frustrated me from the beginning. Right now, it’s a sense of disempowerment and lack of problem solving skills on an individual level.

All my frustrations were triggered afresh three weeks ago when I met with a community group in the sugar belt near Kisumu, whom I’ve been working with for three or four months now. My irritatable, opinionated version is that this group seemed to think that creating change in their communities requires very little effort on their part. By “very little effort” I mean they had never truly thought through the project in question. What problem do they want to address? What is the best way to address it? Does the community really need it, or are there already systems, institutions or infrastructure in place that can be improved upon with fewer resources to solve the same problem? Or do they want to start the project in question because there happens to be a lot of government money available for, say, orphan and vulnerable children (OVC) projects this year?

I’m not EXACTLY saying this group was reluctant to get off their arses. I’m just saying there was a failure to grasp the reality of what goes into starting a large project like, for example, setting up an orphan support center. An honest mistake.

It’s one thing when a group approaches me and doesn’t really know where to begin. That’s common and understandable. People don’t have access to information about their own communities the way we’re used to in the U.S. The last time I’d met with this group, about six weeks ago, I had asked them to seriously consider the questions above, along with a bunch of others. I gave them a detailed list of items to investigate in order to conduct a needs assessment in their community and research what needed to be done to get the project off the ground, to sustain it, and to expand it long term.

I got to the meeting and they hadn’t done any of the research – recommendations I had made not for a giddy power trip, but because I believed it was the best place for them to start. So I tried to get them started again. I asked them if they knew of any similar existing services in their community, and they said no. I asked how they knew, and they said they lived there, so they knew.

It turned out that there were five other organizations that were already offering the exact same service in their community. Not two. Not even four. FIVE. And in this room full of so-called leaders and motivated change-agents, none of them had even made an effort to find out more about their own community. Why didn’t they consider any of my recommendations? If I answered that question honestly, this blog would lose its diplomatic miracle status. I’d even given this group a hard copy detailing how to conduct a needs assessment, one that I had written specifically for their project and their community, not a generic photocopy I got from one of my Peace Corps training manuals.

In the last meeting they had expressed interest in sending one of their members for a workshop. I had given them the phone number for a guy at an NGO who sponsors these workshops. Today I asked them if they had contacted him.

“No,” they said. “We wanted you to do it for us.”

“I don’t know this guy,” I said. “I’ve never met him. I’ve never spoken to him. I only know his name. The workshop is for your group, not for me. I’m not understanding why you want me to call him.”

“Because you’re a mzungu and you have more credibility.”

“It’s time to lend yourselves some credibility then,” I said.

On top of all that, the group’s chairperson handed me an application form that he had completed. When I asked what it was for, he said didn’t know. I asked why he had filled out the form and he grinned sheepishly because again, he didn’t know. I then asked what he wanted me to do with the form. He was either too embarrassed to tell me, or he didn’t know, because he couldn’t even speak at that point.

“My recommendation is that you contact the organization that gave you this form and find out exactly what it’s for,” I said. “Then you can decide if it’s really something you want to submit to them.”

I got the feeling I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. The guy is no dummy. And yet I was telling him, because he was acting like he didn’t know better. Why?

Why? Why?

There are times in Kenya when I’m truly baffled by people’s behavior. Anthropologists say that there is a rational explanation for everything people do. I don’t need a PhD in anthropology to say that that’s crap.

I left the meeting feeling like I had wasted not just that afternoon (including the time and cost of transport, which I paid for myself), but all the previous meetings I’d ever had with this group. They’d gotten nowhere. Okay, to be fair, they had registered themselves with the national governing body, and secured an office space, all for a project that would turn out to be redundant in their community. In their excitement to start this project, ostensibly because they wanted to apply for money as soon as possible, they had failed to think through their real reasons for wanting to do it, and whether those reasons had anything to do with benefiting their community. They ended up investing time and money to start a project that they scrapped in the end.

I was ready to abandon this group. Let them wallow in their harsh sugar belt lives. They didn’t have the commitment, independence, or problem solving skills to bring development to their communities. I went back to the crisp climate of my town nestled in the tea-covered escarpment and complained to my co-worker.

“Oh, no,” she laughed. It was a very Kenyan response which a year ago would have sent me through the roof. This is funny to you? Now I take it for what it is – sympathy and understanding and shared frustration disguised as light-hearted amusement. It’s like a member of a widow’s group once told me, “We women hide our suffering by being patient.”

Anyway, my co-worker eventually convinced me to change my mind. “Be patient,” she said, a familiar sentiment. “Don’t give up on them. This is how our Kenyan people are.”

She was right. I fumed for three days, the sugar belt group’s chairman sent me an sms apologizing for their lack of commitment and organization, and I am still planning to meet them again. I’m reevaluating my own approach and communication style to make sure they understand my role and their responsibilities. But next time, they’re paying for my transport.