Returning home

It’s January 28, and I’ve been gone exactly one month and now en route home and started the process of more fully getting caught up on current events. Let me get this straight: a Heisman-nominated football player had a girlfriend that he didn’t know was fake, and she died (well, not really since she was fake) just before the national championship college football game in which he was playing?  My main reaction is this:  if we can make up our significant others,  this opens up all kinds of possibilities and in about 14 seconds, I’m not going to be single.

Currently I’m somewhere between Nairobi and Amsterdam in the darkness, wondering why KLM airlines prints the names of its destinations on its motion sickness bags. As someone is holding up the bag to their mouth for an impending vomit, this seems like an ineffective time to make the sales pitch for future air travel.  In my experience with vomiting, both as the vomiter and a vomit observer, is people just want to get it over with and not think about much else while in the actual act.  If in charge of vomit bag design, I’d help move the process along for the ill-fated traveller, maybe include pictures of head cheese (really Europe? Why?) or a transcript from a Rick Santorum speech (sorry to those I just offended).

Head cheese: When real vomit just isn't enough.

While waiting in the Nairobi airport, I was also faced with a puzzling advertising/sales scenario that I’ve wondered about in other airports, which is the sales of suitcases at an airport, specifically after the security checkpoint.  Again, in my experience, I have found that nearly 100% of the travelling public has arrived to the departure gate already with a suitcase, or isn't interested in purchasing an empty suitcase to lug with them during their travels.
 
Over the past week in Samburu, my colleague Siva and I started up a new project.  We learned that it would be funded about three weeks ago, so I extended my stay a little while to take advantage of already being here. The background of the project is this: a defining aspect of Samburu culture is its livestock and pastoralism. Herding cows, goats and sheep (and to a lesser extent, donkeys and camels) is not only one of the few ways to earn an income in this region, but the size of the herd is also a sign of stature and well-being.  When greeting someone in Samburu it is perfectly normal to ask “how are the cows?” and despite how perfectly I set someone up by asking that question, no one has ever responded with “udderly good.”

Historically, younger males look after the family’s herd.  Sunrise to sunset, they would be out in a landscape that is shared with Kenya’s wildlife. Over time, a young pastoralist gains a lot of environmental knowledge through direct observation while in the landscape, such as which wildlife species eat which grass species during different seasons of the year, and so on. 

But, this culture is changing, and it’s changing quickly.  For some Samburu parents, they prefer their children to be in school rather than tending to livestock (in the case of boys) or collecting water and wood (for girls), and this represents a significant shift. So a question arises about whether local knowledge about the environment is at risk of being lost within the next few generations as youth are in the classroom and not in the landscape with the herd. And if knowledge is at risk for being lost, how do Samburu people feel about it? So, this past week we tried out some different methods for how we might address this question. One involved a 7-8 kilometer tromp through the bush in which I was often reminded about Samburu’s difficulty with estimating distance, and that the words “just over there” when spoken by a Samburu often imply the exact opposite. I might say, for example, that Amsterdam is “just over there” from Nairobi. So we’re off and running with this project, which gives me another path back to Samburu later this year.

 

Taking a break from a walk through the bush!

 I usually end up having some periodic moments of reflection toward the end of these trips, but not in any real intentional sort of way. They just sort of happen, like a bowel movement.  Now, I’m not a terribly emotional sort of guy in my day to day life, and generally regard emotions as obstacles to what I need to get done, but Samburu is a place where I’m willing to acknowledge that I feel stuff sometimes.  Sometimes instead of emotions I prefer to use the word distractions, but for this entry I’ll use the emotion vernacular to avoid any confusion.

Samburu is a place where emotions collide. I love and I dislike this place simultaneously. I’ve met some of the best people of my life in this area, and some of the worst.  Some of the world’s greatest inequities and challenges are front and center. Children die of cholera. Women are threatened for wanting to own property.  Schools have more classrooms full of students than they have teachers to teach in those classrooms. But there’s encouraging and inspiring examples of what’s being done to deal with this stuff so it’s not an entirely depressing place. Look hard enough, and you can find hope.

The final days of my trips to Samburu become predictably difficult, partially because the price I pay for a mango will increase 1315% when I return to Colorado and I hate anticipating that with every bite of a mango I take during my final days here (I did the math. That is a correct percent).  

Supporting education, via the Samburu Youth Education Fund which has a website where we accept donations at www.samburuyouth.org (did you pick up on the subliminal message?), around here is fun and of course it’s wildly fulfilling. It’s helping provide a promising future to people who have unquestionably earned it. Hard work and education: those are long-held values of my own, and when some action so clearly expresses your values, it just feels good. But, the perception of this philanthropy by others – usually those that place less value on education – is the guy from U.S gives away stuff and that can lead to a sentiment of I need to get my share. 

“Why do you give that child schooling and to me you give nothing?”

That is a statement asked of  me the other day when I responded to a guy I barely know that I would not buy him a donkey. It provides sobering insight into the amount of work yet to be done to build awareness about the importance of education, or he might argue the amount of work to be done to build awareness about the importance of free donkeys.

Sometimes I have to chalk up these frustrating instances to just accepting it as Samburu culture.  Few people keep track of time, for example, but I’m able to appreciate and adjust to the fact that Samburu have a different relationship with time, or more specifically being on-time.  So when someone agrees to meet at 2pm, I know and accept that they might actually mean a week from Wednesday for morning tea.  Or in the case of my father, meeting at 2pm actually means between 1:00 and 1:30. My dad could get four flat tires, run out of gas, sit in gridlock, and still be on time because he accounted for those possibilities. He keeps “what if” time. I keep normal time. Samburu keep no time.  

But I can’t always easily dismiss some of these instances to “oh, that’s just being Samburu.”  Years ago I attended my second circumcision ceremony, the first one being my own which I believe did not involve much fanfare as it was overshadowed by the news of being born.  Those ceremonies occur in the early teen-aged years here. Long story short, the actual, er, snippage, was done poorly and the young man was in a fair amount of pain many days later when he should otherwise be able to at least walk around as though he were riding an invisible miniature horse.  So we took him to the doctor in our vehicle for the simple reason that we had a vehicle and could help out. The doctor had to correct the problem through a sort of on-the-spot second circumcision, to clean it up.  I felt awful because I gave the young man my uninformed perspective that he probably just needed some antibiotics and instead, out came the scalpel for Round 2. 

When I was 11 years old I injured my arm doing something that I was asked many times not to do, and to this day I'm unsure if either of my parents know the real story. The splint crafted out of a magazine and duct tape  -- courtesy of my brother's recent first-aid training in junior high health class -- failed to heal the arm after a few hours while we hid in my cousin's bedroom, and we just couldn't come up with a good enough cover to hide my injured arm for the unknown amount of time it needed to heal. I remember my brother suggesting I just wear a baggy shirt for awhile. My mom took me to the emergency room "probably to get a cast."  A few hours later I was in surgery and my arm fails to extend 180 degrees to this day.  So like this boy with the dangling foreskin, I too, have been caught off-guard by imminent medical care involving a knife.

After the procedure, the return trip to the boy's village involved 3-4 miles of a very rough dirt road. Very rough.  This kid just had his donner (how we referred to it in my house when we were kids. No explanation.) clipped again with no anesthesia or pain-killers, and was now being bounced around in the backseat.  Ouch.

During the initial botched circumcision, he did just as a Samburu boy is supposed to do in that ceremony:  he didn’t show pain or so much as wince and therefore he showed his readiness to become a man.  I would be in a fit of tears when the scalpel merely entered the air space of that region, let alone when it did any snipping in front of chanting spectators.  Following this encore circumcision and the bumpy ride home, he cried openly. And he was criticized for it aggressively by an elder as he was carried from the car to his hut. The boy wasn’t being a man, by Samburu definition. I wanted to punch that elder in the face, maybe even hold him down and botch a circumcision on him which would be difficult as his foreskin was removed decades ago, so I guess I would just snip the next layer. My point is, maybe there’s a fundamental human right to express pain.

And that’s my point. Spending time in Samburu has generated questions in my mind about how much latitude am I willing to give a culture to practice their traditions and at what point is it okay to judge a situation as inhumane, cruel or just poor form.  I have seen rampant jealousy, corruption and poor treatment of Samburu to each other. I have seen Samburu abuse and hurt one another for considerable personal gain.  Myself, I have been lied to often, stolen from, and if a 2007 rumor is true, had a curse placed on me. Development work can be incredibly hard, and Samburu has helped me understand why.

But this unpleasant stuff, this crap, is always over-shadowed and diminished by the goodness I have experienced in Samburu, and their inspiring resilience. I know many women in a few villages around here, women who experienced awfulness in their lives such as arranged marriages at an unfathomably young age (14!), female genital mutilation, violent abuse, and denials of rights such as owning property or going to school.  Despite these challenges, I have never been to a community with so much laughter, nor been the subject of so much good-natured ribbing and teasing. So many of us want laughter and happiness. And the women in these villages want it as well, and they make it happen. In abundance. They give the finger to the past and look ahead with laughter and goodness in volumes that I cannot entirely articulate.  

I know a young man whose father was killed by a machete in a bizarre love triangle that involved his mother and another man.  In the aftermath of this tragedy which left him orphaned, he asked if he could go to a boarding school to finish 8^th grade where he would have his needs met and could probably focus better on his studies. And he further asked how he could earn money to help pay the cost. He is one of the most humble and hard-working young people I have met in Samburu. It pained him to ask for help to support his education. He has no father and a mother who is on the run.  And now, he will graduate from secondary school in November where he is currently in the top 15% of his class and talks about his future desire to work in health care. When I see him, he shows unnecessary levels of gratitude and humility that speak to the strength of his character.

Again and again I have come to know people in Samburu who show incredible resilience and an unthinkable loyalty to hope.  I look around the Archer’s Post community where I home base when I come to this region, and I see the trash, the unemployment, the apathy and the substance abuse.  It’s not always an easy place in which to feel hopeful.  But I meet people who grew up in this reality and environment their entire lives– they don’t just visit it a few times a year! – and they believe life will be better. They really, really believe it. It’s baffling and illogical to me sometimes, but it is so damn inspiring.