Nairobi 1 of 2

[quote]The work I feel best about here is the work with kids. This is both because it’s the most entertaining and fun and because it feels less a part of this larger fucked up system. It’s direct: they ask, I answer. So it says something that the very first chance I have to do exactly that is discarded so easily. The first impression the kids of Talai Primary will have of me will be that of an unscheduled absence; a broken promise. The urge I have been fighting for a week is surrendered to in a half hour: I’m going out of site. Again.
In one sense, I recognize that releases like this are necessary. It’s easy to tally up all the things that I have going for me – the trappings of material life that I enjoy with such ease, the minimal obligations and time required of my work – and question what I could possibly need a break from. Pleasure reading? Ten hours of sleep a night? All the same, I know that I need to forgive myself for feeling an urge for effortless conversation and for the easy and immediate empathy of other volunteers. I feel guilty nonetheless. Though I suppose if it really bothered me, I wouldn’t go.
As the matatu from Talai bounces up and down the rutted track towards Kabartonjo a shiny, well maintained Land Rover comes barreling up the road behind us at a speed possible only with US funded and maintained shocks. The presence of my white arm, frantically waving from a matatu full of dark faces is enough for it to stop. This is the reality of life as a Peace Corps Volunteer. If Aid work attracts ignorant idealists, then the Peace Corps attracts the subsection of that group who also like hardship. Or at least – it becomes clear as I climb into the front seat of the air-conditioned car – the idea of it.
It’s a frustrating decision, but not really a decision at all. We congratulate ourselves constantly on our use of public transport, on living at the level of those we are supposedly here to help; Peace Corps “integrates” at the most basic level. The falsity of this pretension is never more apparent, more visible, as when I am crawling over people out of the back of a matatu to claim my seat in a passing luxury vehicle.
The virtue of “ground level” work – of joining a community – is never really available. If I get sick, they send a car for me. They’ve shipped a bike from the states for my use and I don’t even want it. In the unlikely event that I got pregnant they would pay the flight home and back, though the cost of terminating the pregnancy would be up to me. I have vacation days and zero dependants and a free ticket home the instant I decide I’ve had enough. The Peace Corps is stepped down from the World Bank consultants writing reports by the pool at the Nairobi Hilton, but our “integration” is most strongly evident in the minds of those who will never really experience this place. Living here, even for a short time, lays plain all the things that slip below the radar of my daily concern; the laundry list of issues most Kenyans face that do not concern me or enter my life here. And when the opportunity comes for a free ride in an air conditioned SUV with working seat belts, we take it. Or at least I do. And though the decision saddens me, there was never any question of anything else happening.
Timothy Kibet, my director, is in the car. They are coming up the mountain from visiting Patrick’s site and giving him a ride to Kabarnet on their way back to Nairobi. Kibet came to my site last week. All the volunteers in my class are still on quarantine: unable to leave site for our first three months. The frustration of such forced isolation is good indication of its common sense. The ups and downs of total cultural immersion and sudden and complete isolation are difficult enough without the option of escaping to Nairobi or Kisumu every weekend. It is a good thing that Patrick and I are headed into Kabarnet to ‘go shopping.’ If Kibet wonders why our bags are already completely full, he doesn’t ask.
In the past I have heard people use experiences like this one as evidence that Kibet is clueless or simply doesn’t care. In fact, Kibet is merely an old hand at a game PCVs are only beginning to play. It’s called: how to keep your job while not doing any work. Kibet has a harder time of it than we do. Keeping my job means dealing with people basically unsure of what I am doing or why I am here and whose own jobs are laxly supervised and defined. Kibet has the challenge of dealing with over-entitled, anxious and youthly-self-righteous Americans. He has mastered an elegant balance between fulfilling his basic duties and providing us with as wide a berth as possible. His passing leaves no wake, ruffles no feathers. Were I he, I would do the same.
Peace Corps employees in Nairobi enjoy all the same benefits I do in terms of health care and drivers. They also receive off American and Kenyan holidays and earn a Western salary in a 3rd world economy. I currently pay for everything I need – including travel, drinking, eating out – on 15,000 shillings a month. The entry level sales job I held in the states before leaving paid the equivalent of 180,000 shillings a month. Kibet likely makes three times that. There is also the car allowance and security allowance given to US employees living abroad. A job like that doesn’t come along very often.
In Kabarnet, we halt short of having him actually drop us at the stage. James hasn’t arrived from Kimegul yet, so I take Patrick to see the city library for which I have recently acquired a membership. The only architecturally distinct building in Kabarnet, it’s a hold-over from Moi’s era. His Presidential Palace is just up the road, four stories, two wings with banquet hall and motor pool all surrounded by the tin metal shacks and sparsely planted shambas of apparently less important, less deserving Kenyans.
Reuben, the head nurse for the dispensary in Talai, has remarked several times that a library is needed to help the children to reach their potential. He ends his description of their glowing faces and sky-rocketing careers with the same lowered tone and breathy phrasing that accompanies most requests for money or favors here: “…and perhaps your friends in America, they will donate books.”
The requests and suggestions I receive here are often fairly pie-in-the-sky. Laptops for the primary school kids. Paving all the roads in town. Bringing modern large scale farming equipment for free use by farmers. They are proposed with a blind faith in Western wealth and power and with the first hand memory of the immense amounts of money that Aid has suddenly and surprisingly injected into minor and neglected corners of life here. Past experience shows that the possibility of winning the lottery – of asking for something huge and unreasonable and finding that the people of Norway or a group of churches in Georgia want to give it – is real. Projects like a library are typically proposed with so little thought to the actual obstacles in accomplishing them that I have adopted a blanket sort of optimism when responding. Asking why such equipment or facilities are necessary or how they will be constructed and then maintained is an inevitable dead end. These “What if…’s” are mentioned to me precisely because the people proposing lack the time, interest, knowledge or resources - or all of the above - to put it together themselves. In short they lack every aspect of the project that might prevent it from becoming just another poorly planned example of international aid throwing money at a dimly perceived community need.
The library Reuben has proposed is such an idea. He doesn’t have a clear idea of where it would go, or who would want to use it. He hasn’t thought about who would manage it once open or where money for maintaining and growing it would appear. All the same, I agree with him, a library couldn’t hurt. However, I have been pleased to inform him (several times now that I think about it) that the idea of getting books through donation is one about which I have a very definite and very negative opinion.
There are 36 branch libraries in Kenya (as well as a traveling donkey cart and camel caravan division for isolated areas). The library in Kabarnet (the largest and best in my district) is the source of my cynicism. It is full of donated books. Donated books are like donated canned goods. For every can of Hungry Man stew, there are eight cans of Purina Cat food (whether people intend this for starving pets or just think beggars can’t be choosers, I don’t know), four cans of pumpkin pie filling (probably the ones you forgot you had leftover from last year’s Thanksgiving when you went shopping this year) and two cans with the labels missing (presumably intended for famine victims hungry for a surprise).
I got a card because there are a few old editions of classics with cracked spines as well as a fair-sized section of children’s Kiswahili books, perfect for the aspiring language student. Most of the rest is trash. Which makes sense, since the books that are given away are typically ones that - if they weren’t something as inherently useful and valuable as a book - we’d just throw away; there’s an anthology of religious pamphlets spanning a half century, stacks of faded and torn National Geographic, trashy romance novels, spy thrillers. If it was overprinted: its here. It makes the rising literacy rate impressive; if this is what I thought reading made available, I don’t know that I’d be in such a hurry to learn either.
However, a book here – any book – is precious. The total book stock for the Kenyan National Library System is 800,129 for a population of around 37,000,000. (My alma mater in the states has 1.1 million volumes for less than 3,000 students.) Getting a card requires a letter of recommendation, proof of employment, and (in the case of a non-permanent residents like myself) a hefty deposit. There are two check-out desks and each book is recorded twice before being allowed out the door. Beyond that they routinely pat you down as you leave (unless you are white, in which case they just wave you through). I return a Bill Bryson book and some Hemingway. I check out Ender’s Game for Patrick who has never read it. James calls us from town and we head to the stage.
If I had stopped to consider for a moment longer before abandoning a school full of children actually interested in learning about public health, I would have realized that this trip to Nakuru assumes hosts whose presence is actually doubtful. The Barton’s are working in El Doret this month. Their original job in Nakuru ended after they tried to stop other employees (also earning a 1st world salary in a 3rd world economy) from stealing food meant for the poor. They were accused of racially slandering the thieving employees and changed jobs shortly after. At their new job, they haven’t seen their new supervisor in three months. Such is the bureaucracy of Peace Corps that they are secretly living and working in El Doret half the time: assisting their former supervisor, an ex-pat also dismissed because –as we will recall – his employees are thieves.
In the matatu headed south, already committed, we discover the absence of our hosts. Charles, another volunteer from our class, lives just a few hours south of Nakuru in Limuru, just outside Nariobi. A brief conference with him and we’re decided: it’s a weekend in Nairobi, not Nakuru. At 4p on Friday, he agrees to sleep and feed three and to guide us around Nairobi for two days. As much as PCVs (especially those in the throes of culture shock their first few months) may be suspicious or tired of neighbors, townspeople, children or drunks constantly pushing their heads thru curtains, knocking on the door far too early or late, and handling the dishes left on outdoor dish racks – I can only assume in the mistaken belief that I use my tea kettle as a secondary wallet - other volunteers are always welcome. It is an aspect of African culture that we shamelessly use and enjoy: circumstances over plans, guests over work.
Despite the copious anxiety that accompanies any initial journey to a place, the presence of the only white face (outside passing Land Rovers) standing on the side of the road is a guarantee that we have arrived in Limuru.
Charles is waiting with Aron, a Kikuyu youth who has been helping out with his after-school soccer club. Aron has insisted coming along as the encroaching twilight heralds danger for us whiteboys with full backpacks. Talking a bit on our way to get groceries, Aron mentions that he actually doesn’t feel safe by himself in Limuru after dark. I joke that if he’s not safe on his own, then parading around with four white boys with overstuffed bags must seem like a death-wish. He nods.
Laden with groceries and liquor, we arrive at the stage as the last of the light fades from the sky. Twenty minutes ago the sidewalks and streets were packed with bikes, donkey carts, hawkers and cars. Now things have emptied out and only those with nothing to lose or nowhere to go remain. Oh, and us, of course.
Charles stands on principle and refuses to board a matatu to his village at two times the normal price. In protest of a sum less than a quarter, we stand in the growing darkness waiting for the touts resolve to soften. The voices in the dark, the shadows from the colored fluorescent tube lighting that illuminates the inside of the matatus seem more threatening, more vicious in the dwindling twilight. Even separate from Aron’s warning, I have the distinct impression that we are, in fact, not particularly safe here.
At every matatu stage, our skin color entitles us to shouts and whistles, even the occasional grab (we are, after all, often the sole person who clearly doesn’t belong and therefore must be either coming or going) but usually these are directed at us. They are, in some sense, desirous of our attention. If not respectful, they at least address as people. Here, the comments bounce around and above us, flicking in and out of English, Swahili and Kikuyu. They aim to pull responses from eachother, not from us. We are rapidly beginning to resemble balls, tossed around for amusement. One trio, whose eyes I accidentally catch while avoiding someone else’s are thrown off balance when I respond in Swahili to their break-neck Kikuyu. As the two on the sides laugh at their friend’s sudden silence, I say again that I can’t understand when he speaks so fast. He stands and point at me, jabbing his fingers in the air. Deliberately speaking faster than before, his voice heightens in pitch and volume.
There are magic numbers when it comes to traveling with whites in a majority black country. Alone, I experience the highest level of available intimacy. People speak to me; they will speak with me and real conversations do occur. Two mzungu: I’m still welcomed, but it takes time and effort to move past the hawking or serving manners kept in store for visitors. Three: you are generally just left alone. Four, I realize as the blood rushes to my ears and I stammer out a reply whose phrasing accidentally takes the tone of: “I guess you don’t hear so good, huh?” looks like a gang. And here, in the dark, burdened by American made backpacks and sacks of groceries, our gang is outnumbered and clearly out of place.
Around this time (and partially at my urging) we board a matatu and taking advantage of experience, don’t mention the fare. Especially in the bigger cities, you often see wazungu with their quick-dry shorts and hiking-socked Merrils arguing with touts who are trying to forcibly pull their backpacks off and herd them into the vehicle. The secret is that those who know the fare don’t argue it. They simply hand over what they know is the proper amount and refuse to give more. Whether its because its after dark or because we’re a half hour out of Nairobi or – as Charles will insist later – it because, they are Kikuyus, this strategy doesn’t work tonight.
Aron and I are sitting at the back of the van as the three boys in front argue and curse at the tout. I attempt to interrogate the woman next to me as to the price she has paid. In a remarkable display of on-the-spot diplomacy – motivated by a desperate desire not to be involved – she says to ask the tout, as he will know the price. “True,” I say. In an unintentionally devious way, the argument at the front distracts him from charging Aron and I in the back.
Dropped by the highway where we arrived, we hurry up the embankment before the tout realizes his mistake. As we search for a cab to go the rest of the way to Chuck’s I repeatedly imagine the matatu screeching 180 degrees, careening across three lanes of traffic as the tout, his face cast in the blue glow of fluorescent leans out the open door with a machete, ready to panga our heads from our shoulders.
The only cab we can find, with seats like a twenty year old couch whose springs have collapsed, will take us as soon as the driver finishes the game of craps he is playing. They play on an overturned coke bottle carton between abandoned truck trailers by light of a pile of burning trash. He loses. I can’t help buy imagine that this will affect the price.
On the way back Chuck lays out the timid and pale character of the hostility we survived at the stage and the darker examples he’s experienced. His story of being hit by corn cobs and bottles while running reminds me of my own time on the Hopi Reservation in north-east Arizona. Being hit by a quarter full can of Schlitz as I ran along the embankment of a desert ridge, my immediate and overwhelming reaction was confusion; as though they certainly wouldn’t have thrown it if they knew who I was. It’s happened often enough to Chuck that the question of why is no longer compelling.
None of this was mentioned to Anne, Charle’s director, when she visited last week. This mirrors my experience of Kibet’s visit to me. I believe that the Peace Corps staff really does care about us, about our experience, our comfort, but the overlap between the things that negatively impact our lives and the things that happen to be under their control is minimal. Our problems mostly involve (at least from our perspective) not having enough money, something they can’t change anyway. The only card the administration really has to play is changing our site, a process so protracted, difficult and frustrating – since it mostly means starting over again all the processes of integrating that are frustrating you to begin with – that many volunteers choose to go home before being moved. And so we seldom mention difficulties to our directors due to a sense of it being a fruitless, time consuming endeavor to do so. Better to grin and bare it.