Weekend Update

So I hadn't planned on posting twice over the weekend, but Saturday made me want to write. It was a bit raw last night, but I have not edited it, so it is also honest. Sunday morning already feels better.

Day 13- Guilt Tripping

One of the worst aspects of being a white person alone in Nairobi is the constant feeling of being a target. Any time I am walking alone, it is very clear that I stand out, and it is also clear that many people see me as quite different. Most days I only see one or two other whites all day, and in 10 or 12 bus/matatu rides I have seen a grand total of one other white, and the vehicles are always full. The expats have cars and the tourists take cabs, leaving just a few people in my situation.

In most cases the feeling of being a target is pretty benign- all the kids in Kibera singing HowAreOoo as I walk by, the street kids on the Ngong Rd. following me asking for a money until I am forced to give a firm hapana, the safari touts in downtown Nairobi looking to steer me to their preferred agent, or the merchants at the Masaii Market who see blood in the water as soon as I make my first purchase and will not let me browse without insisting on haggling.

Occasionally it gets more annoying, as in today when I was supposed to meet Ben in the city center at 10 and ended up standing around for about 30 minutes, which of course invites all kinds of people to start up a conversation, and I am too polite to ignore them. So I end up talking with a man who claims his name is Joseph and he was an orphan under the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, and he could not possibly ask for money, but... Or the next guy who just wants me know that Kenyans are friendly people, and oh by the way he is a pilot for safaris and his phone number is...

Meanwhile the guide books make you totally paranoid about talking to anyone on the street, and probably for good reason, but you feel like a total jerk if you ignore someone talking to you, as I did last weekend, and they turn out to be just a friendly passerby. In the end, it drives you to buy a newspaper and find a coffee shop where you can sit by yourself to wait, albeit for a cost of about $5.

Thankfully, when I am at Tumaini or at St. Al’s that feeling of being a target goes away. Certainly I am a curiosity, but at least they know who I am and that I am basically in Kenya to help out. Unfortunately, after today I feel a little less warmly about one person who I had enjoyed spending time with previously, and yet I also feel horribly guilty about expressing any negativity toward him.

Ben had insisted that I come meet his family today, and I agreed in spite of my previous plans to watch rugby, especially when he suggested we meet at 10 in the city center and he would take me home to show me his neighborhood, meet his family, have some lunch, and then see me off. I figured I would be back in the city by 3.

What I did not count on was Ben getting caught in terrible traffic and not arriving in the center until 11, and then us getting caught in more traffic heading out to his place and arriving close to 1, a full 30 km outside the city. Nairobi traffic is simply not to be believed. Imagine DC traffic, except the Beltway does not exist. Or Boston traffic, except 128 does not exist and the Pike and 93 are two lane roads. It is a total nightmare to get through the city, yet there is no ring road to go around it. Ben does this commute every day, leaving at 6 am to arrive to work close to 9.

What I also did not count on was Ben laying it on very thick about his personal struggles and those of the people in his neighborhood, and keeping me there until 4:30 to give me the full effect. The neighborhood where Ben lives is undoubtedly a step up from Kibera, but it is far below the standard I had assumed a professional, even a professional in community development, would inhabit.

The houses there are cinder block, with tin roofs, no plumbing, and no electricity. The roads are wide enough for a vehicle to pass through, but uneven and muddy enough that I would not want to try it too often. There are plenty of small shops, and a nice looking primary school, but it is impossible to imagine that it is so much nicer than anywhere within, say, two hours of where he works. And yet it must be the best he can afford.

He has three adorable sons between the ages of 2 and 8 and a nice wife, but all four of them were painfully shy, not able to say more than a word to me. His house has a very small sitting room/dining room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms, all withing a plot of probably 25 x 25. His wife graciously cooked us a big lunch of beef stew (of course) and rice, after Ben had asked earlier in the week if I ate fish and I gave him the honest if perhaps rude answer. Better to be rude up front than be unable to eat a well-intended meal, I figured.

Ben laid out for me what the rent was (I am paying much more for my single bedroom at Tumaini, and it seems like a pittance), what he paid in school fees, and what he paid for transportation to work, etc. He told me what he earns as a consultant to CLC and Hands of Love, and made clear that he is barely making ends meet. He mentioned how his phone had broken, but he could not afford a new one. All somewhat shocking for a bright, college-educated man of nearly 40 years old.

He then brought up again his goal of creating partnerships between St. Al’s and Georgetown, and he was particularly interested in sociology research. I tried to point out that Georgetown had previously sent a couple of delegations to St. Al’s and wondered if perhaps he had spoken to any of them, as official representatives, but it did not really register with him. I told him I no longer worked there, and I had never been involved in any type of academic research when I was. But he persisted, and I finally offered to try to set up a meeting when I am back in DC if he could give me a proposal to take along. If the proposal makes any sense, I will see what I can do, but I don’t have many expectations.

Our next stop after lunch and a relatively lengthy discussion of US and Kenyan politics (Travers, I could really use a briefing at this point, my limited Obama/Hilary talking points are getting kinda stale) was to go to the local community center that Ben helps to run on weekends and his spare time. We had actually been by earlier in the day, but the youths were at lunch and Ben really wanted me to see them in action.

The community center is two small rooms in a pretty nice building (it has electricity). The room where the kids were gathered has a tv/vcr, a small library of educational tapes, a blackboard, and a few (but not enough) plastic chairs. The other room is for vocational training and had sewing machines and those hair-dryer things for women’s beauty parlors. There were probably around 30 kids in the room, ranging in age from 8-20, I would guess.

They told me briefly about their projects, including the vocational training, a small farming project involving a few sad looking tomato plants, HIV/AIDS education in the local schools, and a chicken-raising scheme that failed due to disease in the chickens. Then they told me about their challenges, which of course boiled down to not having any funding, and it is a truly legitimate challenge. The session wrapped up by watching a short video showing the horrible impact of AIDS on a few Kenyans in the early 90’s, a true scare-tactic video, and then a few skits/songs/poems from the students about AIDS.

And then of course they turned to me to see what I could do to help them. And I felt/feel terrible. The problem for them is that, unlike St. Al’s, they don’t have any full time support structure. They certainly need help, though they are not as badly off as others, but there is no place reliable to direct the fund-raising. That is not precisely what I told them, but that was the message I tried to convey. Once again, Ben promised a proposal for me before I leave, but I would be hard-pressed to ask anyone to give to such a program without more evidence that the money will be able to make a difference. Without stronger adult leadership, any contribution would be little more than eyewash.

In truth, the situation was a microcosm of one of Jeffrey Sachs’ points in The End of Poverty. While it is imperative that those who are in a position to give do more for the poor, it is foolish to ask them to give if there is not a good plan in place to use it. Sachs contends, and I believe, that stories of wasted/stolen aid money are overblown, but he still admits that there are instances where it rings true.

The situation also points out the vastness of the problem, and it truly can seem overwhelming. It is most certainly the sort of thing that cannot be totally sorted out by one man, or even by a small, committed group of individuals, Margaret Mead notwithstanding. And it makes it hard to square the idea of giving to one program, like St. Al’s, when you know that there are people who are just as needy but who have not linked up with the Jesuits or someone else with international reach and strong organizational skills. It is the sort of either/or game that can drive you crazy if you let it, and I am really wrestling with how to keep it from doing that to me.

At the end of the day, I am sorry to say I wished I had not come out there, but I really cannot blame Ben for bringing me. What I was really wishing was not that I had remained in the dark, but that there was nothing to remain in the dark about. I still gave Ben and his wife many thanks, and I will continue to thank Ben throughout the next week, especially after he was so very kind as to ride back into town with me and make sure I made my connecting bus, a huge expenditure of his time, but something that made me feel much better given the very real prospect of me being on my own after dark in one of the worst neighborhoods in Nairobi otherwise.

For my part, I paid his fare both ways, and also told him he could have my phone when I leave Kenya. I told him it was no good to me after I leave, which is not really true because I could continue to use it with a new SIM card almost anywhere in the world, but I felt a little better about myself giving him something for his troubles, and he seemed grateful for it.

Thankfully traffic was lighter on the way back to town (though it looked brutal for Ben’s return journey), and I was home in time for dinner at Tumaini, which was also a good thing, as they were celebrating the feast day of the namesake of one of the Sisters (apparently as big a deal as a birthday here), which made for a lively dinner with several songs, and soda and cake and ice cream following our (gasp!) chicken dinner. It brought me back to a 10 year old birthday party, minus the pinata and the unwrapping of GI Joe’s. Basically, it brightened my day enough to feel ok about writing this.

In the end, I hope this doesn’t come across as too bitter, I am very conflicted about the day in general. I signed up for this, I had to know it was part of the bargain. And while I don’t particularly enjoy guilt trips, I also know they are effective, and sometimes they are necessary. After all, I am also the one who asked all of you to read this blog.