On A Roll

At least the Sox are. And also excited to see the Hoyas schedule in my inbox this morning. As for me....

Days 8-10 More Reading, More Thinking, Some Work

Monday was almost a completely wasted day as far as being in Kenya. St. Al’s was on holiday, I am not really sure why (Labor Day is May 1 here), but that was going to be ok, because I was scheduled to spend the day with Ben and Dennis working on the student database project. So I called Dennis around 8 to see where I should meet him, and he replied to say he was out of the office on appointments for the morning, but he would call me before 2 to bring me to the office.

That left me with little choice but to hang around Tumaini until 2, so I spent some time at the internet cafe across the street to read more about the Sox, and I mostly spent time in my room reading (more on that later). Finally around 1:30 Dennis called again to say that he would be out for the afternoon too, helping one of the graduates get her visa to go to the US for college.

Obviously that is the most important thing he could be doing, and I don’t blame him for bailing on me, but by then I had been sitting around all day and it was now too late to do anything useful with the afternoon either. I did resolve to check out the clothing market nearby to see if I could find anything useful to allow me to continue avoiding laundry (there are no laundromats in Kenya), but even that was largely a bust. Odds are I suck it up and pay for some extra boxers and t-shirts pretty soon.

Mostly, though, I read. Which was great, because I finished Jeffrey Sachs’ remarkable, inspiring The End of Poverty. I recognize that I am about three years behind on this one, but hey, I’ve been busy, right? In any case, it is without question the best economics book I have ever read (and I liked Freakonomics), and it gave me hope for the people of Africa just knowing that such a brilliant mind is in their corner.

At the same time, it was profoundly disturbing and depressing to read some of the statistics- not just about how poor the people are in Africa, not just about the devastating impact of diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria, not just about the enormous geographic obstacles faced, but also about how poorly the rich world, and in particular the US, has done in helping these countries. I hope everyone gets a chance to read the book and thinks about these issues when they vote, but I would also like to point out a few of the most striking issues:

-As of 2004, the US spent 30 times more on military than on development aid. No other wealthy country comes close to that ratio, with only Greece and Italy even going over 10:1 among the 22 wealthiest nations. The war on terror cannot be fought by tanks and planes alone.

-As of 2004, less than .2 percent of US GNP went to foreign aid. A mere .7 percent of GNP from the 22 richest nations could potentially eradicate extreme poverty around the world within 20 years, and those nations have all signed on to various international agreements pledging that amount, but the follow-through is totally lacking. The other countries are almost as bad as the US, but the US is the largest economy and must take the lead for this to happen.

I haven’t been following the presidential races too closely since I have been gone, but I also don’t recall hearing much about increasing foreign aid from any of the candidate before I left either. Of course that is not surprising- no one has ever won an election based on promising to send more money to places most Americans will never see. But we need only go back a few generations to see what a dramatic impact such aid can have. Europeans should be even more willing to give aid to the developing world. After all, where would they be without the Marshall Plan, when the US gave more than 1 percent of GNP to rebuild Europe from 1948-1952.

Tuesday morning school was back in session, but conditions were not exactly ideal when I arrived. It turns out Kenya Light and Power had discovered that some Kibera residents had been stealing electricity, so they simply shut off the entire grid, including St. Al’s, meaning that the library was completely dark and there was no indication of when power would come back. The classrooms get enough natural light to get by, but I was forced to move down to the lower school and to stay in the teacher’s prep room.

So it was that I spent my morning through lunch, chatting with the teachers who came in between classes, but essentially without any responsibilities or contact with students. I did have more good conversations about the school, particularly with a physics/math teacher named Mr. Safari. I shared with him some of the lessons from my reading, but mostly we talked about why he was at St. Al’s, and how he had come there.

He had previously been a teacher at a public (i.e. funded) school, but chose to come to St. Al’s based on their mission and on his own convictions. His prior situation had offered better pay and much better working conditions, but he believed in the work of St. Al’s and he thought it was important to serve that community. His attitude is shared by most of the teachers there, many of whom could likely find other work, none of whom come from any great privilege.

It is easy to say you want to help people when you are like me and know you are returning to great comfort and more money that I need in two weeks. To actually live it out like the teachers at St. Al’s is impressive, and I only hope that the new school can be built soon to allow them to achieve government certification and ideally some more compensation for the staff.

In the afternoon I walked to the office of Hands of Love, a Catholic outreach organization in Kibera where Dennis and Ben have their office. Dennis was still involved in the visa application, but Ben sat down with me and showed me what they had as far as a student database on the laptop there. What they had was not in fact a database, but a list of questions that could be used to create a database, and a stack of files, one for each student in the graduates program, listing some, but not all, of that information.

I decided then that I would need to teach myself Microsoft Access- it couldn’t really be that hard, and it was the only database program available to us, with no internet capacity to allow me to search for anything else. So I sat down and built a database in Access and started to input the information. Most people who know me, particularly my former colleagues, will have a good laugh at the idea of me 1. creating an organizational structure and 2. spending my day at data entry, but that was what was required, and I was without question the most computer literate person in the room.

Ben’s plan for me is to have me do the same for the 240 current students at St. Al’s over the next few weeks, and while the work may not be the most exciting thing I can think of, it may also be the most useful thing I can do, but only if I can also teach people how to use the database when I have left. I believe that will be my biggest challenge (outside of collecting all the missing data- addresses, parent/guardian names etc. tend to be tough to pin down in this community), but at least it is something I can attempt.

In the evening, I finished another book that I had been working on throughout the day, particularly while sitting around at St. Al’s, a moving piece of fiction by the Kenyan author Ngugi titled Devil on the Cross. The book was evidently very controversial when it came out in the early 80’s, and you can see why. It is a scathing indictment of the colonial powers and of the Kenyan elite who aided them and still control much of the wealth in the country. It was originally written in the tribal Kikuyu language but was translated by the author, who may currently be living in the US (not sure about that now).

The book was recommended by Fr. Charlton before I came, so I had purchased it on Amazon, but I was glad to have waited to read it, as I think I understood its context much better, even after only a few days here. It has a real anti-capitalist bent, so I am sure some people might not enjoy it, but the interweaving of Kenyan history, culture, and religion was definitely worthwhile to me, and I hope I get a chance to find some of his other works.

Wednesday I reported to school again, this time hoping to take part in the teacher’s staff meeting to finally meet everyone and hopefully get into the schedule more formally, but just as the meeting was about to begin, Jill pulled me aside and asked if I would be willing to speak with the Form IV class while the meeting took place. Of course I would be willing, but what did she want me to talk about? Careers in Kenya.

Now there are many subjects I consider myself an authority on, and even more that I am willing to talk about at length despite a lack of any real knowledge, but talking broadly to a whole class about their career opportunities without knowing them or knowing their country at all is a bit daunting, so I hesitated. I balked. I hemmed and hawed. I finally said it was a very bad idea. If I had some time and resources to research such things, it might make some sense, but my background as a college admissions officer at a highly selective institution in the US did not give me enough background to do anything of the sort.

Jill seemed disappointed, I am not sure what I had said to suggest I could perform such a role, but she conceded and suggested instead I gather the law club to talk to them about the law. Now that was more my speed, even if I know next to nothing about Kenyan courts. At least there are some broad principles to work with, and the British legal tradition to fall back on.

I did talk to about 40 students interested in the law, and I did a very basic lecture of how a criminal trial works, then turned it over for questions, which were all insightful and appropriate. We talked about the presumption of innocence, we talked about international law, we talked about the death penalty, we talked about the responsibility of the juror, we talked about the right to counsel, we talked about the inequality of justice for the rich and the poor, and we talked about conflicts of interest and other ethical issues.

One student raised the issue of a Kenyan who has recently been in the news for bringing suit against the Roman Empire, Pontius Pilate, Herod, etc. on behalf of Jesus Christ, which almost led me to explain FRCP 12(b)(6), but not quite. It got my brain flowing, and it got them excited too. I envy people who get that feeling from teaching every day, and I hope my brother Titanic is having similar experiences as the school year starts up back home in his first year as a full time teacher of history.

After class one student in particular, a young man named Lawrence, pulled me aside and asked to speak in private. He had even more questions about the law, and what he should be studying, and how to get to become a lawyer. I shared with him my own experience, and suggested that Kenya was likely to have a very different system. I also tried to bring up the negative aspects of the profession, and how many people I knew who claimed to hate their job, but, not surprisingly, I couldn’t really convey how awful it was to make thousands of dollars a year, provide for your family, and be involved in a respected profession. Nor could I tell him how he might get to a similar position himself beyond the usual platitudes of hard work.

In the afternoon I returned to the Hands of Love office for another crack at the database. There had been a miscommunication (shocking, I know), so there was no new data for me to input, and Dennis and Ben had a meeting outside the office for the afternoon, so I was left alone with the computer, to try and teach myself more about Access. I think I succeeded in making the database a bit more user-friendly, although I also found myself wishing I had taken some more time before diving in.

I also spent some time in the afternoon reading through a book I had been given by Jill to help me prepare a lesson for Education for Life next Monday. The book is titled This Way, Please: A Book of Manners. It was written by Eleanor Boykin for a US audience in 1948. I am still unsure how to convey wisdom like this “Meet arriving guests at the door, unless there is a maid to do this... Direct girls to a room where they may take off hats and wraps... Your mother will be in the living-room, ready as hostess to welcome the guests who will show their good manners by going to speak to her immediately. Your father will probably be around to make people feel at home too.” Somehow that may not be applicable to orphans who live in 10 x 10 shacks with 6 other people. Although I will remind them to have a big bowl of punch in the center of the room.

After I left Hands of Love, I came home to do some more reading, only to discover my light fixture, previously uncooperative, was now totally broken. I told the maid about it, and she brought the maintenance guy, who then disappeared for a long time, leaving me talk to the maid, who I should add has been one of the friendliest people here.

I am embarrassed to say I don’t know her name, and now I feel like I cannot really ask her. She is young, probably 24 or so, and always has a smile for me. This time, she wanted to know a bit more about me, and we got to talking about why I was here, where I live, am I bored, etc. I told her that reading is keeping me interested, and gave her Devil on the Cross to read for herself.

For her part, she told me she had been to college but had to drop out for financial reasons. She was very negative about her future prospects in Kenya, saying that she had no real hope for a better job, or for any real excitement in her life. She told me she would like to do something that was helping other people, but for now she could only be concerned with helping herself and her family. It was a pretty sad conversation, and I could not really do anything to make her feel better.

It is true that there are very limited opportunities in Kenya, and even if the economy grows and development aid helps, it is unlikely to mean much to her. She said she would like to visit Boston sometime, and I assured her of a warm welcome if she ever makes it, but I am sorry to say I doubt I will need to follow through on my promise.

My next reading project is Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, and it was all I could do to put it down to write this entry, so I suspect another book report will be part of the next blog entry. After that, I am done with all the “topical” literature I brought along, and will start heading back to the Western world in my reading, I reckon.

I hope everyone is having a good September so far, particularly those who are getting back to school, either as students or as teachers. I really miss all of you and look forward to seeing everyone again. Please feel free to send an email to let me know how everything is going, I am currently checking email once a day thanks to a membership at the internet cafe across the street. I may not respond to everyone, but I am interested.