Learning to rest as work...

Today, I learned to categorize rest as work…or maybe it’s categorizing work as rest…

Lindsey and I didn’t really have anything to do on the grant and we couldn’t do any filming today because it was cloudy and gray and the mums were busy making chiapatti (no idea how to spell that)--fried, flattened bread, kind of like Indian naan bread.

So we decided to go out to the road-side to get our daily mango, which we like to eat with our 10 o’clock tea. As we were leaving, we saw Mum Gladys and Irene, and asked them if they would like a mango as well, and they said they would love one! And when we saw Lisa, we asked her the same and she gave us 20 ksh to get her one as well. And when we passed through the gate, we asked the Uncle there if he would like a mango and he said he would enjoy one as well. Well at that point, we thought it would be nice if we just got one for all of the mums and Uncles. We ran into Mum Kate and Mum Gladys riding down the road in their car and we told them about the mangoes and they were very excited. And then when we were passing the man at the gate farther down the road that protects all the houses on Muteero Ridge, we started talking to him and he asked us to spell our names for him and then of course we told him we were going to get a mango and asked him if he would like one too and he said he would. So here we were, walking toward the road, and we added up and decided we would need about 20 mangoes just to be safe and make sure we had one for everyone.

Well, as luck or fate would have it, we got to the roadside and the one woman on the corner had 3 mangoes--only one of which was ripe. So we went across the road, but that man had no mangoes. And so we went across and up the main road a bit to a line of about four vendors, and they had oranges and bananas and avocadoes, but, again as luck or fate would have it, no mangoes. So, we asked ourselves, do we just buy oranges or do we ride into town to get our promised mangoes? Well, spontaneity grabbed us and we hopped a bus to town (which really is only a 5-10 minute ride anyway). Our usual supermarket was not open yet (at 10:30 in the morning…), so we went to the KPS store, which only had 9 ripe mangoes. And then we bough the remaining 10 from vendors in the parking lot. Oddly enough, the mango price went from 1 for 20ksh (~25 cents) at the street-side vendor to 9 at 30ksh a piece in the KPS store to 10 at 40ksh (~50 cents) each in the parking lot. We’re fairly certain the 40ksh had a so-called “skin-tax” added to it, as we’ve been warned many a time will happen.

It was worth it, though, because everyone enjoyed their mangoes, as did we. : )

Then, I spent the remainder of the afternoon reading Waangari Muthai’s Unbowed. This book is AMAZING, especially since I’m here in Kenya right now. She really explains a lot about Kenyan culture, tribes, and history.

First of all, I learned about “the scramble for Africa” that was formalized by the Berlin Conference in 1885, where the major European powers literally just divided up the African continent amongst themselves. She talks about the colonialism with a unique subjectivism that is not resentful or angry, but not necessarily happy or welcoming either. She seems to have accepted it as it is and understands that both good and bad have come from it and that we must move forward from where we are but still have a deep understanding of what has happened.

She says “reading and writing fascinated them [the Kenyans] and they embraced it with a passion.” Mum Kate wrote in the margins, “STILL!” There used to be a local, pre-colonial object called a glissandi--which was made from a gourd and has since been discouraged and demonized by the colonists and put away in museums in Europe--that was shaken and rattled somehow as a form education and communication.

The people who became Christianized by the missionaries and colonists were then allowed to be taught to read (the Bible, of course), and hence became known as “athomi”--the “people who read”. The British just called all of the Kenyans who refused to be Christianized and who held on to and advocated local customs “Kikuyus”. What I find interesting and revelatory about that is that the Kikuyu were only one of forty-two tribes in Kenya, but the Europeans did not see that. They saw one people--one people that was to be converted and dominated and “civilized”--and called them all “Kikuyu” because the local culture and traditions and lifestyles meant absolutely nothing to them other than as something that needed to be altered and “improved”. But Wangaari explains that the other tribal groups were as foreign to each other as the Europeans were to them.

The Protestant and Catholic churches were designated different areas of the region to convert. They discouraged traditional ways, but the African Independent Church emerged and embraced both Protestant and Catholic beliefs as well as aspects of traditional Kikuyu culture. I really want to go to a Sunday service at an African Independent Church before we leave.

(By the way, the Kikuyu are the most populous of the Kenyan tribes today and were also at the time of British colonization…many of the girls here are Kikuyu and so was Wangaari Muthai so that’s what she knows and what she writes about… and so that’s what I’m learning right now in this book...although she writes a lot about life generally in both colonial and independent Kenya.)

I learned that the first girl in a Kikuyu family becomes like the second woman of the house and joins her mother in all of her daily work as soon as she can walk. When the British came to the area, they introduced a cash income tax. Before the British, Kenyans dealt mainly in goats as a form of wealth. But now, since all the Kenyans had to pay cash and the only way they could get cash was from the British colonists who had it, the Kenyans had to go work in towns and cities or on settlers’ farms. If they went to the towns or cities, they would have to leave their families in the rural areas and could only return 1-3 times per year. The absence of men in these communities created female-headed households but also increased incidences of prostitution, absent fathers, and sexually transmitted infections--all of which are still significant challenges facing Kenyans today.

This has created a culture that did not exist before. Before, in the often polygamist societies that existed, a man would be ostracized by the community if he were to abandon his family. But now he can just run off to the “urban jungle” and there is not a strong enough community to pressure him to stay and support his family. So now, in the often female-headed households, the eldest daughter assumes the maternal role in the family so that the mother can go off to earn a living by selling second-hand clothing from her arm or doing whatever business or transaction she can to put food on the table and, if she’s lucky, put her younger children in school.

And the disintegration of the family structure will only worsen the AIDS epidemic here--where 15% of adults are already infected. The stigma is not as bad anymore, so hopefully there will be progress made. But what of the one and a half MILLION vulnerable children who have been orphaned already? And what of the children of that fifteen percent, of whom who knows how many have access to ARVs to keep them strong and healthy? And you can’t take ARVs on an empty stomach. So, somehow, that fifteen percent has to find enough money to put food in their stomachs AND to get the ARVs they need….which of course they either have to pay for the generics themselves or get a first dose of PEPFAR’s expensive, 1st-line drugs for free and never be able to afford the 2nd dose, which will probably just create an even more drug-resistant and deadly form of HIV/AIDS….just what we need.

When you start making sense of it all and putting all the pieces together, it all just ends up making even less sense, in the end, that we let this all go on. What are we doing to ourselves? And yes, I mean ourSELVES. This isn’t happening to Africans. This is all of us. We all contribute to these attitudes that destroy us, but we also all have a magnificent power in us to create attitudes that build and attitudes that heal. We just have to open our eyes, step back and not even try to fix or change anything. Just look. Just listen. Just feel. Forget what we think we know or what we know we think. Wipe the slate clean and just think about the people. The trees. The rivers. The way we make each other feel. Get down to the simplest bits of ourselves. The bits we have in common. And the bits that are different. But understand that we all value the bits inside ourselves. And we have to respect what is in our neighbor just as much as we need to respect what is in ourselves.

Lindsey and I were talking and she told me something that I believe she quoted from the Dalai Lama but I could be totally wrong on that. It doesn’t really matter who said it though, because the words are wise:

“Loving our neighbor as ourselves isn’t the goal; it’s the reality. We all love ourselves as our neighbor. The problem is, we don’t REALLY love ourselves.”
It’s been said many a time in many a way…if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself.