Wanting to Be Elsewhere

When I got back from Kenya, I had this crazy two weeks when I loved every second of every single day. Whatever I was doing, I was so happy about I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything. The simplest things were so exhiliratingly beautiful and there was never a moment when I wished I could be somewhere else or be someone else or be doing something else. Of course, that return-home high faded, but since then I have decided I want to feel like that as much as possible, to be content wherever I am with whatever I’m doing and never want to be elsewhere.

Since getting back to school, it’s been difficult to move into that mindset. There are definitely Thursday nights up late talking to people or lazy Sundays in the Gardens when I feel alive and I feel that feeling again, but a lot of the time, I’ve been so mired down with so many things and weighted down until I can’t move. There are a lot of places I’d rather be right now, given all the stuff that’s happened in the past few months. Sometimes it’s wishing for another time, wishing for last year and how a lot of things were better back then. Sometimes it’s wishing for another place, wishing to be home with my family and my puppy and somewhere to hide. Sometimes it’s wishing I had someone else’s life, when I see blissfully happy, vom-worthy couples walking on the quad.

I wish I could just embrace the present and fully imbibe in it, but I can’t seem to figure out how.

Top Ten Things Learned In Kenya

In no particular order:
1) Accurate pit latrine aim is more difficult to achieve than you would think.
2) Laughing things off makes life a lot easier.
3) Your family is the most dependable group of people in your life.
4) A kiwano is purely for decorative purposes only.
5) After the third day without a shower, the progressive days don’t feel much worse.
6) With every work experience, it’s important to be assertive to get what you want out of it.
7) You can never have enough empathy.
8 ) We’re too afraid of connecting with other people, but overcoming that fear brings great rewards.
9) I am more lucky, blessed, whatever, than I ever thought I was.
10) Understanding of the wider world beyond your own is so necessary for progress.

Cultural Sensitivity?

Myself and the other interns have had some good discussions since being on this trip. One of the most heated topics is that of cultural sensitivity, and to what extent we should assume some disagreeable practices are “just part of Kenyan culture” and leave well enough alone. Throughout Dukeengage Academy and our training with FSD, we had the idea of cultural sensitivity pounded into us, the reiteration of the idea that we’re not here to change the way people live or to tell them that their practices are wrong. Yet, so many times we run into things that we don’t feel are right; for example, the way women do all the work around the house, stigmatization of HIV/AIDs victims, showing up for work at any old time when clients are clogging the hallways, etc. What do we do then? Some of us have argued that we can never say that any culture’s practices are “better” than any other’s, that none of it can have a moral hue if morality is relative to what you were brought up in and taught all your life. I completely disagree with this sentiment. There are some concrete things that are just right or wrong, or better or worse, and chalking it up to cultural differences simply becomes an excuse for the continuation of harmful practices. Not everything is simply on a flat plane with everything else; some things are on a ladder of quality, not merely “different”.

If I was to encounter somebody beating their wife here, is it moral for me to simply stand by and say “Oh, well, this is simply Kenyan culture. I can’t say that the gender equality we strive for in America is better than the gender balance here, so I should just keep my mouth shut and stop trying to impose my cultural ideals on other people”? Obviously not, I would feel morally obligated to at least say something or express that I don’t think what is happening is right. The treatment of women in the United States is better than the treatment of women here, it’s not just different because it’s an issue that lands somewhere on a moral scale of how we should treat other people. It’s not just about what somebody does to their earlobes or what color they wear at weddings: those things are cultural, how we treat other people with basic compassion is not.

We have been told that those who indifferently stand by and watch something immoral happen are condoning it and enabling it. Would we have said to Southern racists in the 1950’s, “It’s okay that you have these prejudices against blacks, and we have no right to interfere with your culture. After all, this treatment of black Americans has been part of your lives for hundreds of years”? I don’t think so, so why does that idea change so significantly when we’re in a different country? And when something is clearly not working, when it’s inefficient or misguided or hurting people, do we simply stand by and throw up our hands and let it be? Or do we step in and try to point out (kindly) why something is not working, and show how there might be a better way to do it? If a group of people, whether Kenyan or American or Chinese or whatever, possess cultural customs that are hindering their development, I don’t think it’s arrogant or insensitive or paternalistic to point out the problems in their thinking.

Furthermore, culture isn’t just a concrete thing that never changes. Just because the Chinese stopped binding women’s feet and turning them into putrid hunks of painful flesh doesn’t lessen Chinese culture and heritage in any way. It might be acceptable in Kenya to show up two hours late to a work-related meeting (or never show up at all), but these practices aren’t the best for anyone here and they bog down development and productivity like none other. If Kenyans so desire to have an American lifestyle and the wealth that Western democracies represent to them, then they had better get ready to change their concept of time-consciousness. If they get to being more punctual, does that make them less Kenyan? I should hope no one would be stupid enough to think so.

Of course the way we point out the problems in another culture must be done in a delicate way, and that’s where legitimate cultural sensitivity comes in. But if we take cultural sensitivity to the point where we just accept everything because it’s different, then what is the point of us coming here? Yeah, we’re not here to turn Kenyans into Americans, but maybe we can show them some American ideas that are good and in turn take from them the Kenyan practices that are good.

Inefficiency

Note: this is kind of a wandering rant. But to preface it, I must say that of anything in the world, I detest inefficiency, doing nothing. This is something that I absolutely can’t stand, and maybe that’s a character flaw, but it’s why this post is going to come across a bit strong.

I came across a page of fifth grade science standardized testing the other day on the sitting room table. Reading it over, I combed my memory trying to recall what kind of science I was learning in fifth grade. Whatever it was, I was pretty positive that some of these questions were far too obvious for a fifth grader. One of them asked “What does an anti-fungal cream get rid of? A. fungus B. mosquitoes C. headaches D. fire.” Seriously? Now, some of the questions were legitimate science questions about the parts of a flower or types of clouds, but interspersed in the test were laughably obvious questions. Maybe I’m overestimating the capacities of a fifth grader, but in my opinion fifth graders should be able to tell that anti-fungal means something to fight fungus.

The Kenyan education system never ceases to appall me. It might be free, but it’s not exactly quality. When I discovered my third grade host sister couldn’t read, I was completely shocked. Her siblings do her homework for her so her teachers never quite figure out her failure to read. At first, I thought it was just her personal issue with reading; maybe she has dyslexia, and her siblings’ laughter whenever she tries to read or speak English probably doesn’t help matters at all. But in conversation with one of my host sisters the other day, I asked if kids learn to read in first grade. “No,” she responded. “That’s not till Class 3 (third grade). In Class 1 they learn numbers and doodling.” Doodling? Since when did a seven-year-old need lessons in doodling?

In visiting some rural areas, I have encountered the pre-schools for children. These nursery schools contain children that look to be about the ages of 4-5 and they don’t learn diddly-squat. When I was there, I heard them sing three nursery rhymish songs on repeat. There were small posters of the abcs, numbers, and shapes tacked to the wall (or in one case, to a tree). One of the teachers sighed and handed me a student’s notebook, scrawled with the abcs featuring backwards d’s (which my 12 year old host brother still uses) and other malformed shapes that didn’t look much like letters. “They have been doing this all year, and it is still terrible,” she said.
Even with adults, I’m sometimes taken aback. For the most part, the educated people I work with and talk to are intelligent, politically aware, knowledgeable about their work and area of study. But there were a couple instances when somebody paused far too long when trying to figure 20 times 6, or became flustered when trying to write the number that comes after 399 in the record book.

Granted, much of what I’ve seen has been in rural areas, which are bound to be worse off than schools in more modern towns and cities. Even so, how behind they are in comparison to the American systems I’ve experienced is a bit alarming. A child going through such a system surely will never be able to compete with someone who went to even a mildly competent school system in the U.S. The poor foundation provided by basic education surely leads to shaky education in higher education, which in turn slows down productivity at the workplace.

I often feel like everything in Kenya breeds inefficiency to make a giant tangled mess. Much of it starts with the government; when it can’t deliver basic needs and services on time, when it takes over 6 months to switch Shibwe’s status to that of a hospital and not a health centre, when it’s so bogged down by corruption that most Kenyans don’t trust it to prosecute the perpetrators of last year’s post-election violence. This is probably part of the reason Kenyan time runs so rampant here; if nobody can get anything done in an efficient manner, why bother being anywhere on time or meeting people when you say you will? Inefficiency becomes accepted; nobody minds if you take a nap at work, and a day is considered “so tiring and so busy” if you’ve spent it writing names in a book. And education, the foundation for one’s fortunes and status in life, that too becomes dragged down by a culture of inefficiency, where teachers only teach for 20 minutes and then text each other while the kids run rampant, where no one makes the effort to figure out why a little girl’s homework is not written in her handwriting.

People here always want to fly off to America, where they think their problems will be solved and money rains from the sky, but if they actually ever went there, the brutal pace of American life would smack them in the face. I doubt the high school students in Kakamega have ever stayed up until 4 in the morning studying for a test or finishing a project, as I frequently did. This is why I was so indignant when three Kakamega High School boys at a bar told me that “The reason Kenya is not developed is because the United States is racist towards it. When we go to the United States, Kenyans cannot do well because Americans are racist.” First of all, I wasn’t really sure if they were referring to Kenya as a whole or Kenyan immigrants in America. In the first instance, I don’t think America is responsible for the rampant corruption and cronyism plaguing Kenya’s government. I responded to the second by retorting, “Don’t you think it has something to do with the difference in Kenyan and American educations? Maybe Kenyan immigrants are not prepared to work in the American environment.” They shook their heads in disagreement, at which I launched into a diatribe about how I work hard for what I have and my parents worked hard to put me and my siblings through school. Money doesn’t fall from trees in America, we slave to earn it and sometimes we slave and get nothing in return. I’m not sure they understood or agreed with my point, since they just went back to hitting on me and telling me I was beautiful, but the encounter got me thinking about the huge disparities in learning, efficiency, and productivity between Kenya and the U.S.

Semi-original thoughts on aid.

A lot of the things at Shibwe are sent to us from the Kenyan government, USAID, or some other relief or development agency. While these handouts are definitely helpful for the most part, you have to wonder what people were thinking when some of these things got sent to us, especially on the part of the government. For example, the arrival of the computer. The government has called for Kenyan hospitals to start switching their medical records and pharmacy account balances to computer records, which explains the gift of a free Lenovo ThinkCentre. But, the government didn’t take into account the fact that most people in rural areas, even hospital staff, don’t know how to turn on a computer, let alone type up records and balance accounts on it. What exactly is the point of sending us this computer if there’s no provision for training people to use it? Right now, it’s pretty much being used by the resident doctor to blast gospel music during the workday, and since a printer wasn’t included, the things we type up are taking a long time to appear in hardcopy form.

Yet another example of the government’s blind generosity was the appearance of a colorimeter one morning. The doctor turned the box around a couple times and asked me if I knew what it was. I had never seen one of these objects before, let alone know what it did. We opened it to find a manual on how to use it, as well as three complimentary glass test tubes, but no explanation of its purpose. Eventually, the doctor concluded it was for examining blood specimens in the lab, but this took a while. I haven’t seen the colorimeter at all since the day it arrived, and I seriously doubt it’s ever going to be put into operation in the lab, which chugs along with its one microscope.

As for the other freebies the hospital is getting, I have my own doubts about them. I think Arjun and some other interns have already discussed this on their blogs, but I’m going to talk about it too. Sure, it’s wonderful that USAID and Canada’s International Development Programme are providing free AIDS, malaria, and TB drugs. People are dying from these diseases and assisting them is a moral obligation of a kind for those of us in Western countries who have so much more in comparison. But to what point to we continue to prop up Kenya and other developing countries? The fact that the Kenyan government isn’t the one providing these drugs is troubling, the fact that they are relying on other governments to help their own people in an arena that should be the government’s job reveals some serious issues. Is aid possibly just enabling the government to continue its inefficiency and corruption? I would say in a way, it is. The Kenyan government is so accustomed to having other agencies and governments to support it and take care of its citizens I wonder when and how it will ever be able to deal with its problems by itself. Furthermore, where does our moral obligation extend? How did these Western agencies conclude that Kenya deserves free drugs, and which countries did we deny free treatment to because they’re not undeveloped enough? At what point in Kenya’s development do we withdraw these handouts? I don’t claim to have a solution to these things, but I think it’s pretty clear that aid just doesn’t cut it in so many ways. Yes, it’s helpful immediately, yes, it’s saving precious lives all over the world, but it creates reliance and dependency, like a drug addict with drugs.

:)

On Friday, I finally held the training session for the community health workers of the Shibwe area, teaching them about sack gardens, how to care for specific vegetables, and handing out the vegetable seeds. I was nervous about how well I would be received, but all the CHWs listened attentively to what I had to say, asked perceptive questions, and expressed so much gratitude and appreciation that all the boredom/frustration/confusion of the last month and half were made well worth it.

At the end of the session, they all expressed public gratitude to me by standing and clapping while saying words of thanks and blessing. My job was to stand there and make waving motions with my hands to wave it in. This was so Kenyan and slightly awkward and wonderful at the same time that I found myself smiling irrepressibly for the next hour or so. They also referred to me as Mama Deborah, which confused me at first because I clearly don’t have any children. But they explained that someone who cares for others deserves the honorific Mama. I don’t really know if I deserve all this gratitude, because I often just feel that I should have helped in a bigger way. What is seed for 55 families when there are so many more that need it, and so many other problems that should be dealt with? But at the very least I can be confident that this contribution will go to good use. The CHWs spent an hour and half debating which families should receive the seed, based on their need and whether they’re likely to make good use of it. This is the best thing about a community based outreach; that they personally know these people and can all offer different perspectives on each of the candidates. I look forward to receiving reports on how the seed is being used, and I’m satisfied with how things went this week.

Obamamania

If you thought that there was Obamamania in America, you’ve never been to Kenya. Even months after the election and the inauguration, Obama’s face is still everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean everywhere. There are stickers of him on the back of every other matatu, there are fabrics printed with his visage, there is even an Obama bubble gum that features Obama and a family member on each wrapper. My host sister told me that in the days around the election, people plastered stickers of Obama’s face over the pictures of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki until Kibaki started complaining about this abuse. The other day, the Kenyan news showed a reel of Obama killing a fly during an interview and everywhere we go, people tell us they are Obama’s cousin or welcome us to “Obama’s land”.
Here, Obama is not the American president or an American citizen, he’s Kenyan all over. I get the feeling that a lot of people are not even aware his mother was a mzungu, and they are convinced that he’s entirely Kenyan and reject any notions I might raise about his being born and raised in the U.S. We Americans have very little claim to him here; people always act shocked when we say we voted for Obama, remarking that since we are white (or at least not black), we would obviously vote for McCain, as if people choose their leaders simply by the color of their skin.
My host sister said that after the election, Kisumu (the city closest to where Obama’s ancestral home is) celebrated for days and days and “killed many cows for Obama”. Apparently, everyone in Kisumu believed that Obama would come immediately to see them in Kenya, and either whisk them all away to America or annex Kenya. And now the people are disgruntled because Obama has not fulfilled these dreams. There’s something very sad about the way they worship him, the way they are waiting for him to save them. It’s the same feeling I got when I was out in the field with the CHWs and people would look at me expecting me to bring them medicine or bags of food. When I was talking to a street kid yesterday, he asked me if I knew Bruce Lee and Jet Li and Jackie Chan. I sarcastically told him that Jackie Chan was my dad and I live in a huge mansion in America where money rains from the sky. Then I told him I was obviously kidding, and just because I was Asian didn’t mean I knew all the other Asians in the world. “I mean, do you know Obama personally just because you’re Kenyan?” I demanded. The kid’s answer was delivered with an eerie reverence, like a priest talking about God. “Yes, of course I know Obama! He is our father.” A lot of Americans put their faith in Obama in the same disturbingly worshipful way, but Kenyans take it to an extreme, without a thought of what Obama represents as far as ideals go, but merely because he is partly Kenyan.
But at the same time, I can see why they would need to look at him this way, need to have an icon of a successful, powerful person of Kenyan ancestry. Their own politicians and government leaders are corrupt jokes, and when they see a Kenyan succeeding in the well-established democracy of a relatively prosperous nation like America they want to seize his triumph and make it their own. I suppose it’s not unlike people celebrating successful minorities in the United States, but with sentiment a thousand times stronger. At the very least, it makes people very friendly towards Americans, which works out for me.

Cultural Misunderstandings for Make Great the Nation of America

There are multiple times in a day when I stop and ask myself “Is this really happening? What??? Why???” And then I can’t do anything except say FML, or laugh like crazy. Today was one of those days times a billion, and half the time I felt like I was in the middle of the movie Borat, except not only was I playing the part of Borat, everyone else around me was too. If that makes any sense. Some of the highlights of my cultural misunderstandings:

1) I went to a supermarket and bought a kitchen knife for cutting mangoes and also for the demonstration of kitchen gardens I’ll be having next week. The guy bagging my stuff saw the knife and asked “Is this for your kitchen, or for cutting yourself?” I was like “what?”, and he said “You know, this karate, you know?” and chopped the air. I laughed and told him it was for cutting fruit, although I did used to know karate, and then walked out cracking up.

2) I was sitting in a matatu that refused to move, being attacked by street vendors through the window waving random objects in my face, such as bottles of water, handkerchiefs, broken watches, and baby toys for “my lastborn child” (since I’m 20 I must have a couple brats running around by now). I was actually getting pretty thirsty, so I told one water vendor, “If you can get me tangawizi, I’ll pay you for it and tip you extra.” He agreed and ran off. Five minutes later, I turned to Jackie and said “I really hope he understood that I meant the soda drink, not just ginger root…” (the words are the same in swahili). Sure enough, the guy came back with a little piece of ginger root wrapped in newspaper. I laughed so so hard at my own stupidity and gave him some money for his trouble.

3) A guy came up and started a conversation with us. I was explaining to him that although I was American, my parents were from Taiwan, and a lot of people in Taiwan are ethnically Chinese. He said “Oh, and you have a lot of trouble with the nuclear bomb that America sent, no?” I was like, “Well, it was an atom bomb, and it was Japan…”
but he plowed on, saying “Yes, I know the bomb causes lots of problems for you, especially your eyes.” He pulled a “Chinese eye” to demonstrate and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Yes, my eyes are due to genetic alterations caused by atomic fallout.

I hope you enjoyed those gems. More to come later.

Needs Assessments too late

The more time I spend at Shibwe, the more new things seem to be cropping up. I only wished I had noticed or realized these things during the first couple weeks, before I had already written my workplan. It’s definitely true that our projects are flexible and ever-changing; things that I thought were unfulfilled needs sometimes turn out to be pretty well-covered, and new things keep cropping up all over the place.
Take for instance the arrival of the hospital computer. About a week and half ago, a box from the government appeared in the hospital office. It was a computer, a pretty nice one at that with Windows XP and the usual flying windows screensaver. This made me really happy because it meant I could do some computer work without having to pay for cybercafé time, and because I could listen to my one album of music I have on my flashdrive. It’s also great for the hospital, because according to the new mandates for Kenyan hospitals, we should be converting patient records to the computer, as well as doing hospital finances by computer as well. But, the problem is that no one here can type. In fact, most of the staff members really don’t know how to use computers at all. Somebody came in this morning and asked me how I was making letters appear on the screen, and I floundered for a good explanation of how the keyboard works. So, I am going to try and teach a few staff members to type properly, something that hadn’t presented itself as a need until last week. I really wish that I had known we would get a computer at the beginning so I could have a workshop or something on computer use.
Another thing is the hospital mandates. Shibwe only just received these requirements from the government last week (or at least that’s when they were shown to me). The recommendations include so many things I could have helped with in my workplan, most notably getting surveys of client satisfaction. I’m still trying to see whether they could use someone to develop the survey, because I’ve been told that there is a survey already developed at the provincial hospital that can be taken and used here, but I’m unsure as to when they’ll actually go get that. Knowing how things operate around here, it definitely won’t get done this year, if it ever gets done, but I also don’t want to just write these surveys and have them lying around unused after I leave. I guess that’s part of this whole experience; keeping on your toes and adapting your workplan when things change or surprise you.

THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE

In high school, I once took a roadtrip up to Canada with a bunch of my best friends. Since this was the first time one of us was allowed to drive long-distance without parental accompaniment, there were a lot of scary moments on the road. The catchphrase of the trip was “THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE AHHHHH”, repeated emphatically every time a large semi got too close to us or something equally frightening happened. Well, I really feel like I should be using that phrase a few times an hour in Kenya, but the problem is that everyone else around me seems very unperturbed by the dangerous state of affairs. Thus, I think I’ve become very blasé to things that are actually big deals.
On Saturday, myself and a couple of other interns took a daytrip to Kisumu to visit the supermarket there (you don’t understand how beautiful a well-stocked supermarket is after spending a month in Kakamega. I might go to a Walmart when I come home and cry tears of joy) and get some pizza (a real relief after kale and ugali). Anyways, we were in this public matatu, when the matatu driver suddenly turned the van around and dove into these cornfields and went twisting around on these dirt roads. We figured out that this was because they were trying to avoid the police on the highway, since they were violating a whole load of safety regulations, like having 10 people over the limit crammed into the van. We emerged from the cornfields on the shoulder of this road, pretty much leaning over the side of a steep slope. I stared at the blue piece of sky out the window and thought in my head “OMG THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE!!!” but since the Kenyans in the van were just chilling, completely unworried that we might go tumbling over the side of the road, I kept my freak out in my head.
Once we entered the city, we had to cross the road to get to where we were going. Pedestrians NEVER have the right of way in Kenya, as we had been told, and at this point, matatus and cars were coasting at a steady 30 mph stream towards us, making it pretty much impossible to cross. There were no crosswalks, no friendly lights with the little white guy blinking allowing you safe passage to the other side of the road. I think the best descriptor of the situation, credited to one Kerry Allen, was “human Frogger”. We made it across at an undignified sprint, as I was thinking “THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE”.
Eventually we took a tuk-tuk, which is like a go-cart taxi. As the six of us, sitting on each other’s laps in the tiny tuk-tuk, were being jounced along to the big supermarket Nakumat, I cringed watching the traffic go whistling by us close enough to scrape paint off the tuk-tuk. There really was no respect to traffic laws, if they exist, as all the vehicles were just weaving in and out around each other. It was kind of like being in a taxi in NYC, except a go-cart feels a billion times less secure than a taxi. Cars, matatus, other tuk-tuks, and boda-bodas all went whistling by us as we bumped along, and again, “THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE!” resounded in my head. But none of the tuk-tuk clients around us were freaking, so I decided I was just paranoid.
There was another time I was out in the field and trying to catch a matatu home. Standing there with two mamas, waiting for a matatu to come by, we heard cracks that sounded like gunshots down the road. We were told it was teargas, and eventually I got in this matatu that drove down a few minutes later. However, as soon as we got to my stop, there were several other matatus blocking the road and this burly man with an AK-47 hopped out after me and began advancing on the other matatu drivers. Apparently some matatu had been stolen/hijacked/I’m not sure, but I definitely scurried home as quickly as possible convinced that THIS IS HOW PEOPLE DIE.
Then there was the experience at the rainforest back during our first week of work, where a bunch of us were spending the weekend. As we were chilling in a banda, digesting our dinners and resting our tired hiking feet, a security guard came in and began greeting us and welcoming us to Kenya. This was all well and good until we realized he was drunk out of his mind and was wielding an AK-47 in one hand and a large machete in the other. “We sing, we dance, we have a good time in Kenyaaaa!!” he bellowed as he swung his machete near Laura’s head and almost removed her ponytail. Terrified, yet somewhat amused, we cowered in our seats, because that was indeed HOW PEOPLE DIE.