Africa
Wednesday, July 02, 2003
I have been back from Africa for 6 weeks and I am still dreaming of the places and the people that I had the fortune to encounter. I have had some time to reflect on my life and its direction and on the impact that living in Kenya had upon my life's philosophy. I proved so many things to myself while in Africa. I proved that I can walk next to a rhino, I can jump off a bridge and fall for 333 feet, I can white-water raft on grade 5 rapids, I can scuba dive without any more fear, I can travel completely alone in Uganda and see gorillas, I can make wonderful friends and share life and adventures with 25 strangers for 3 weeks, I can compete intellectually in an organization like the UN, I can overcome some of my fear of death, I can make it in Africa if I really want to, I can travel around Nairobi all by myself with my whole paper life (passport, plane ticket, money) in my bag, I can be completely open to new people and new things, I am capable of many things. But my biggest realization has been that I am ready to face my fears about staying in one place and having a real relationship. Honestly, these things I did in Africa never scared me as much as opening my heart and risking being hurt again. If a relationship happens, it will be a great addition, and if it doesn't, I am still happy with my life and the people in it and will continue to make my own unique path and try to live every day as if it's the last. I have found out that living life every day as if it's your last does not mean doing extreme sports constantly (as I thought before), but it's about much quieter things, like appreciating the people around you and telling them so and cultivating relationships with partners, friends, families, neighbors, and co-workers. I wouldn't change going to Africa and now being broke for anything. It was the greatest experience of my life so far.
Here's my good-bye speech to Africa and some thoughts on development and the UN in general:
I think my brain is full to the rim with Africa. No more vivid images. I can't take it. No more bright colors; red earth, blue sky, green mountains. No more goats, cows and chickens in the road and everywhere else. No more babies slung on the mother's backs. No more sing-song languages that I listen to the harmony of. No more singing and dancing everywhere you turn. No more death buses. No more smelly pit latrines with no toilet paper. No more bananas, mangoes, pawpaws, passionfruits, avocados, berries, pineapples, lemons, oranges, limes; all fresh, delicious, available and prepared anyway you like at anytime. No more chapati and cassava. No more brightly colored kangas, kikois, and kitenges and poor men in dress slacks, dirty oxfords, and non-matching jackets riding bicycles. No more out-of-place and out-of-context American and European clothing; everything from Swedish football teams to air-brushed models, from Pittsburgh Penguins jackets to t-shirts that curiously say 'dairy case.' No more crazy names on businesses, matatus, and buses; like Super-Jet Nightclub, African Prince, Executive Beauty Salon, Joke Investments, Thank God Textiles and General Merchandise, Money is Life Gen. Merchandise, Niesche's Silicon Valley Cafe, Fair Price Fast Food's Ltd., The Bar and Butchery, Cape Cod Primary School whose motto is 'no pains, no gains', Beverly Hills Hotel, Taata Baby--Hope for the Best.
No more funny English misspellings -- my personal favorite -- would you like a Coke or Diet Cock with that Ethiopian food? No more red mud, red dust caked and ingrained into shoes and pants. No more crazy Matatu rides with rap/dance music blaring and standing up on the outside. No more immediate mistrust of a stranger speaking to you (What is their angle? There is always one sooner or later.) No more horrible slums. No more extreme poverty. No more endless, endless vistas. No more beautiful cloudscapes. No more emptying of the purse and pockets of only the barest essentials in case it's stolen or snatched. No more being at home in absolute chaos. No more elaborate bargaining and bartering for goods. No more exotic and beautiful animals, birds, insects, plants and food. No more straw-thatched round huts. No more tribes. No more crazy, crazy roads full of breaks and potholes. No more being a rock star, having everyone stare at whatever you do. No more pungent odors of sweat, urine, wood-smoke, diesel fumes, meat smells, and heat all mixed together. No more immediate marriage proposals. No more malaria-medication induced dreams. No more gas and water being sold out of trucks. No more food and small items shoved into your face at bus stops. No more women balancing 30 lbs of sticks, grass, bananas, etc on their heads and walking for miles. No more everyone wearing flip-flops. No more wonderful mazes of marketplace.
No more seeing people struggle so very hard for so very little. No more seeing sick babies that could be easily cured with modern medicine and having it break your heart a little more. A little more broken than the last time you saw a little kid running around barefoot over a pile of garbage with tattered, filthy clothes on, or saw a teenager sniffing glue, sleeping on the round-about and begging for money, or saw a mentally-ill nude woman shouting and running down a street in Western Kenya with no one helping, or saw a slum house with no water and electricity with old carton labels for wallpaper, or hearing about past tribal atrocities in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda......And you have no idea how to help and where to start. And now, you have no idea whether you even should help; if it's your place, if it's your tourism dollars that perpetuate an economy without high-profile, highly-skilled jobs that create a middle-class and with absolutely no good jobs available after a college education.
You wonder if your naivete about international aid and development has proved to be just that. Now you think that (except for medical aid) the answer to the extreme poverty and unbalanced economies lies within Africa and Africans not within project management and "sustainable development." Who knows what African development would look like if the West weren't trying to create it in its cookie-cutter consumer and democratic image, satisfying its never-ending capitalist money hunger, and sending workers who want to live out an explorer or colonialist fantasy???? What do people become when you throw ideas and money at them and then leave when the project is over???? Cynical, dependent and mistrustful. When highly-educated, liberal people like me and many others I've met in Africa reject the UN because of its inefficiencies, misappropriations and ineffectiveness and those that remain grow fat on large salaries, politics and exclusive dinner parties, what becomes of it???? Evolutionary exclusion and irrelevant demise. I am afraid this is the future of the UN.
Before I left Nairobi for good and after returning from Uganda, I went flying with my friend Roman and photographed Nairobi from the air, had a dinner party, packed (which meant an extra bag for my new African things) and spent my last day with my very good friend Gordon. I left Africa on a Tuesday at about 10 pm on a KLM flight and 5 minutes in sighed a sigh of relief because it wasn't shot down. About a week before I left, British Airways canceled flights to Kenya because of a terrorist threat, which meant land-to-air missles trying to shoot one down. I thought that was a very fitting way to leave, scared to death one last time, like a parting gift Africa was giving me and saying, 'don't forget what I'm really like and don't romanticize me to your friends.' I heard some more very scary stories about whites living in Nairobi, the kind that give you goose-bumps and continue to hear stories from my friends who are still there. And I'm thinking, maybe leaving isn't such a bad thing after all. Here are some shots of Nairobi from the air and of me and my friends:
As I was flying away from Africa in the night, I started to cry and this is what I wrote:
Why am I crying? Crying to leave Africa, to leave it and my friends behind, the kind of friends who decide to give Africa a try. I'm so undecided and changed. How to go back to an orderly life? A life with paved roads, convenience stores, to everything familiar. Is that life too small for me? Why did I have to find out? Why did I push my limits to a point where I can't go back? I guess I wanted to see what would happen. Well, things have happened and I am more confused than ever. How to even share my experience, the sights, the smells, the people, the atmosphere of Nairobi and other East African countries? I won't miss the fear but I will miss everything else about it very, very, very much. It has been a wonderful experience and I am very lucky.
I think I have answered some of these questions that I asked myself. No, life is not too small for me here and I can come back to this life. I don't want to live in Africa, I want to make a difference in my own community with other Americans. I have tried to share the experience through this weblog and thanks for reading it. I tried so hard to write well and recreate so many things accurately becaue I knew I had an audience. Thanks for all of the good feedback too, that kept me writing when I thought there was no point.
