well, here i am in kenya.

(preface: I wrote this two weeks ago, and in the past two weeks I've experienced quite a lot of hospitality within Kahawa Sukari. So you can ignore some of the more melodramatic statements...)

So it turns out that Nairobi is drastically different from rural Kenya. I spent the past week in Western Kenya, around Eldoret. It’s in the Rift Valley, where farmers primarily focus on milk production and growing maize. I spent two days visiting small scale farmers (really small. 1 acre, ½ acre, 0.2 acres, etc) and then two days co-facilitating a workshop on the WTO and agriculture with small scale farmers from across the Uasin Gishu district.

Before this past week, I frequently pondered to myself exactly where was the Classic Kenyan Hospitality that people are always talking about? Because I wasn’t sensing it. Not that I blame any Kenyan for not rejoicing about yet another mzungu moving in, but people on the street in Kahawa Sukari tend to look at me with one of three expressions:
- 1. why are you here?
- 2. you don't belong here,
- 3. well, it wouldn’t be a sin to kill you. (different from a "I want to kill you" look - which i have NOT gotten in Kahawa Sukari. Just that to kill a white person wouldn't be a sin against the laws of nature, Christianity, etc.)

So then I went out to Uasin Gishu and spent two days with Hellen and different leaders in the Uasin Gishu Small Scale Farmer group dropping in on small scale farmers, totally unannounced. Okay, so some of the babies cried when I smiled at them. But on the whole every farmer was gracious and welcoming. They showed off their farm and their livestock, invited us into their homes, answered our questions, gave us tea, and were patient with my attempts to communicate in Swahili. At one place we were served tea and Githari, new beans and old maize cooked together. After the meal, the woman asked us our names - because in their culture they serve food to visitors first and ask them their names only after they have eaten. I mean, that’s really intense, eh? At another shamba, a calf was named “Deborah”, at another one the farmers gave us bananas and hacked sugar cane for us.

Back at Hellen’s, where i stayed for the week, there were three women in their late teens / early 20s who live there sometimes, I think. One of them had never been close to a mzungu before, and as the week went on she got more bold and touched my hair on my head, exclaimed over the hair on my arms and skin, got freaked out by my hand veins, touched the skin on my feet, wanted to know why my eyelashes weren’t black, etc. They taught me how to make ghee from boiled cream and how to make ugali (the main food of Kenyans). One of the young men who came through the house thought that Hellen had brought me as a wife for one of them, which led to a few awkward situations.

In short, the trip was the classic Cross-Cultural experience that one reads about in essays and poems written by MCCers. It’s the experience that I guess I was anticipating when I heard that MCC was sending me to Kenya.

So I’m still trying to figure out how to live as an MCCer in Nairobi, where hospitality doesn’t drop on my lap, where it’s possible to live almost as though I’m in the US, where I can be as isolated as I want to be. My experiences before coming to Kenya led me to anticipate that Doing Service Abroad would be entirely like my trip to Eldoret (both the good and the uncomfortable and the sad bits). Not only did I expect those types of experiences, but they were the ones which I understood to have Value.

But now I’m back in Nairobi, and if I’m going to live here for another 2 ½ years, I need to find a way to Do Service Abroad here. At some point I need to be able to identify the Value in my experiences here, even if this is not the mythology of Service that I grew up with.

Friday I took a van from Eldoret to Nairobi (6 hours), threaded my way through the crowds downtown to the Thika Road matatus, tried to convince the matatu conductor not to rip me off, and then plodded down the dusty main street of Kahawa Sukari to my apartment. That night I went with Esther (Kenyan NGO woman) and a bunch of folks from RODI (Resources Oriented Development Initiatives - an NGO that is a partner of FATNEA) to a nyama choma place down the road. We ate hunks of roasted meat, tried to talk over the band playing a stream of congolese influenced music in swahili, and then watched some World Cup football. From the crowds of people packed in to watch Ivory Coast play (they lost), I got some hostile stares, some lewd stares, and some curious stares, but was largely ignored. It’s the first time any RODI folks invited me out on the town.

# posted by debbyscott @ 9:48 PM