Full of Thorns, But Full of Beauty…Just like Africa...

Today, I made some tweaks to the grant proposal and then Lindsey and I FINALLY got to interview Mum Kate!!! HOORAYYYY!!! (TRUST ME….this is quite a victory haha) We’ve been trying since we got here, and she finally found time in her very, very busy schedule to let us interview her for both the Hekima Place promo video and for our own documentary. I did the camera work and Lindsey did the interview. I had to adjust the settings quite a bit during the interview because the sun kept playing peek-a-boo, which made me nervous because I didn’t want to mess up the scene—but doing something was better than doing nothing. I discovered that it would be very difficult to do an interview outside if you had to be the interviewer and the camera person.

Anyway, enough shop talk (haha…) after a lovely lunch of avocado on toast and fresh mango (mmmmm), we headed out to the 10 acres of glorious land at the foot of the Ngong hills that Mum Kate hopes to purchase as a permanent home for the Hekima Place family. (“If you profess it, you will possess it” keeps being her motto.) We went out on Sunday, too, but this time we were with all the mums and two of the uncles. This area, this country, is so full of beauty and life. We stood at the end of the road and looked out over a steep, grassy valley scattered with the typically African trees that Karen Blixen describe as so distinctly ‘Africa’: “The trees had a light delicate foliage, the structure of which was different from that of the trees in Europe; it did not grown in bows or cupolas, but in horizontal layers, and the formation gave to the tall solitary trees a likeness to the palms, or a heroic and romantic air like full-rigged ships with their sails furled…”| The scene seems painted, a scene out of a movie that strikes you with the idyllic feeling that none of this land has ever been touched with anything but the most loving and gentle of hands, hands that are grateful for Mother Earth’s blessings. This is what could only be described as God’s country. It did not belong to man. Man—and woman—live with the land, they blend their purpose in life with the simplistic beauty of the earth they walk upon.

As we stood admiring the scenery, a woman trekked across the bottom of the valley with a load on her back and slowly made her way up the hill to catch a matatu so that she could go to do whatever business she had in town. Another woman guided cattle up the side of the hill, maneuvering them among a bush here or a tree there or the telephone line poles that stretched across the open land.

It makes me think: in our busy society, we tend to see people like this as living “the simple life”, and I have to wonder how “simple” it really is. What makes our lives un-simple? Is it really possible to live a “simple” life? Some people’s lives do seem simpler than others, but maybe they’re just not quite as loud as the rest of us. But what does simple even mean? Do we not all have to deal with the same struggles of human interaction and love and death and birth and loss and pain and grief and so on and so forth? Granted, some people encounter more of that than others, but is it determined by whether you live what we like to call a “simple” life as opposed to the contrasting lifestyle that is hectic and busy and filled with so-called “progress”?

Kate told us that “you’ll never hear a Kenyan complain about the weather.” Kenyans are so “in touch with nature”, she said, and so understanding and grateful for the way the world cycles. When it rains, it doesn’t matter if it forces them to change their plans because they know that somewhere there’s a big shamba (garden) that grows their food and that needs the rain. What has happened to us that we live so isolated from our surroundings that we don’t consider the well-being of everyone and everything around us, we only consider how it affects us, personally? If living the “simple” life means being considerate and less self-centered as a society and as a culture, then maybe living un-simply is, quite simply, wrong.

On the front of the “Official Nairobi Yellow Pages” there is a quote from Wangari Mathai, the Kenyan who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004: “Investing in the protection and conservation of the environment would be investing in peace.” Peace. And protecting our environment. Would we be a more peaceful people if we protected our environment? Instead of fighting over resources we can exploit from the land, what if we all worked together to protect the beauty of the earth? Ah yes, “Imagine all the people, living life this way…” (I don’t think the Beatles were the first to imagine such a world…nor will they be the last.)

Maybe the lives of people here were simpler before colonization, before wealth was measured in paper bills instead of goats and crops were grown to meet each family’s needs instead of mass-produced for gluttony and there was mutual respect between the communities and the earth, whose support they understood they needed.

Looking up at rolling hills above us, shadows darkened parts of the grassy land, while other parts were glowing with the bright, warm sunshine. I was reminded of a comment Mum Kate made that the land was “Full of thorns, but full of beauty…just like Africa.”

Indeed, life—“simple” or not—and Africa—is full of thorns but also overflowing with beauty if we only take time to protect and appreciate the beauty. And maybe we have to accept the thorns in life, too, but just try to spare each other from the wounds and the blood. But I’m finding that deciding what the wounds are and where the blood comes from, so it seems, is the greyest area of all, even when we think we have the best of intentions.