I apologize for taking so long to make another blog post, but to be fair, I was in Africa.
As can be assumed, the internet was wonderfully scarce over there and I was able to appreciate the world while being "off the grid", a little bit. The general lack of wi-fi is one of those things that we as Americans find disastrous or terrifying, but is something that I personally found to be one of the many blessings Africa had to offer me.
... And thus, we have the theme of this blog post: the prominent first-world viewpoint of the third-world, and how it's wrong.
... And thus, we have the theme of this blog post: the prominent first-world viewpoint of the third-world, and how it's wrong.
Three days into the trip I had the opportunity to have a really powerful conversation with my (our) awesome
safari driver, Dennis. ---------------------------------------------------------->
We were talking about the differences in our cultures, about the people, about the children, and he told me a story:
Once, he had a Swedish family reserve his services for the week. The party consisted of a mom, a dad, a daughter, and their two body guards. Dennis took them on Safari, and afterwords brought them back into the city. As they got out of the van, a small mob of children crowded around them, doing what small Kenyan children often do when "mzungus" [white people] show up. They crowded around with curious eyes full of laughter, looking at these strange visitors and playfully asking for sweets. But they were met with a very different tone: the body guards got out of the van, waving their guns at the kids, yelling at these children as the Swedish family looked on, unfazed.
Dennis told me this story with a deep sadness, talking about how he couldn't imagine why someone would treat children like that... or would treat anyone like that... he said he had watched 30 minutes earlier as our class of 'mzungus' had been mobbed by a similar crowd of children and how we had instead made wonderful friends and playmates... becoming human jungle gyms as the kids climbed all over us, playing with our hair and pinching our skin to see if it would come off. :) "Could you imagine waving a gun at those children, Jake?" I couldn't.
He then addressed the root of it, asking me what I thought of when I thought of Africa.
The thought process went a little bit like this:
Dennis: "Jake, what do you think of when you think of 'Africa'?"
Me:
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This is a problem. Everything I've ever learned about Africa has been very skewed- not entirely wrong... but definitely skewed. It's true, there are plenty of animals in Kenya... but (embarrassingly, to my surprise) there are also big cities... with plenty roads and vehicles to top it off. It's true, there are violent conflicts and mobs in Kenya, but when our van got surrounded by a mob on the second day, the people were smiling and laughing, holding "Peace for Kenya" signs, not machetes. And Finally, there are definitely starving and/or hungry children in Kenya (we met a lot of them), but contrary to what I've been told for most of my life, most of the kids look a lot more like this:
(Niomi with nine of her new closest friends)
The point of this blog post isn't to dismiss the suffering of many people living in Kenya; we spent a lot of time with a lot of people who have a real need for resources. We wouldn't have a project if that need didn't exist. Rather, this post is meant to address the gross, stigma-stained glasses through which the first world views those sitting two levels down. The truth is, these people have something amazing that we here in America are often without: each other.
The people I met in Kenya were some of the absolute most kind, wonderful, and generous individuals I've ever met. People with 'nothing' welcomed us into their homes and shared the little that they had with beaming faces. I saw boys sharing mattresses in one room apartments, friends sharing a patch of grass under the shade and lunch when the other would have gone without. I met amazing people who had 'escaped' from the streets, getting a college education in the US, but who then came back to the slums of Nairobi to help pull up the boys who hadn't made it, yet.
They may have had "nothing", but as far as I can tell, these people have what is most important. They have love and they have each other, because they need each other.
Coming back to America, I was struck by how many THINGS we had: supermarkets overflowing with food from all over the world, large quantities of immediately available medicines and first aid....toothbrushes for our dogs...... but when I look around in all of our wealth, I also see a lot of lonely people. I'm not saying that we don't have friends or family, but we (the general we) definitely don't have the sense of community that I witnessed in Kenya. We're taught from a young age that you have to beat others and get ahead, you know: "survival of the fittest"? In our capitalist society, our peers are our competitors, our future employers, our target market, but they're not our life-partners. When we succeed, we're not supposed to look too far back.. it could hurt our careers, hurt our reputations... I can't imagine escaping a slum, where all of my friends are addicted to glue and living on the streets, and then feeling like it was socially accepted for me to go back there. People would wish "something better" for me.
In my experience in the USA, I've noticed that we feel awkward depending too deeply on others... like it's a sign of weakness to let other people see our needs, like we're constantly trying to convince the world and ourselves that we're just fine on our own. As an RA on campus, here at Lehigh, I see this all the time. It's literally my job to help people connect with others, to get past superficiality and to overcome the fears they have of being vulnerable, so that they can form real relationships... It's something I love doing, but its unfortunate that so many people need help doing that. It's unfortunate that we're so deprived of that connection to other people... that we suffer from a poverty of the heart.
Dennis doesn't feel like Africa needs to be saved. He told me, "Jake, the people here have nothing... but they have everything. That's why the best life is in Africa". Is that true? I'm not sure. But I know there is definitely a great life in Africa, and that there's a great life here, too. We just need to learn to appreciate the most valuable resource that we have: one another.
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