I imagine this to be my last open letter "from the field" for some time, as I turn my energies towards being here in Kenya, and perhaps to writing a book in the near future.
I wanted at the very least to follow up from my last bulletin, though, before turning entirely inward into novel-writing, to update you on Amos Wright and his family, the Liberian refugees I wrote to you about in late June. With the support of the friends and family who responded to my request for donations, we were able to send Amos enough money for his wife and children to make the journey home to Liberia, overland from Ghana. They are now settling into their "homeland", which the children have never seen as they were born in refugee camps, and are in the process of setting up house near Amos's mother – who eagerly awaits her son's return to join the family this October… I don't know how to properly thank everyone who reached out to help, but Amos puts it this way in the open email letter of thanks he sent for me to share with you:
"Dear All You Lovely People,
My children, wife and I are so proud that you have been a source of our joy and smiles in our extremely challenging times. We still don't know how we could have counted ourselves in the number of returning refugees had you not stretched out your blessed hands of concern to help us overcome one of our main challenges.
Thank you so much for every penny that you donated to help facilitate the repatriation of my family."
As I said in my June letter, Amos became a friend of mine in Ghana, where we both attended a Non-Violent Communication (NVC) intensive 6 day workshop. His incredible story, from Liberian security forces to Sierra Leone as a refugee and then to Ghana, gives you some idea of the depth of character and shining heart that Amos possesses, but it's hard to put into words... I hope that at least some of you get to meet this incredible person one day. I've attached two pictures of him and his family, which he sent along with his thank you message I excerpted above. After our NVC course, Amos and I were paired up as "empathy buddies", and we talk or chat online each week, offering each other support and listening in our day to day challenges and joys.
It's hard to compare my "challenges" with those of a refugee who lives on fifteen dollars a month and dedicates his time to mediating conflict and building peace, mostly as a volunteer… but I have to admit I've encountered a few in my time in Africa. And yet, separating out the difficulties and the joys is artificial and skims over the richly woven tapestry of experience here. Somehow the frustrations and the laughter and the stumbles and the dancing all jumble into one brightly coloured garment that I wear with wonder, feeling both at home and very much alien in this land of red earth and rain and wildness.
Alien. Although I've spent a great deal of my life feeling quietly out of place, like I have a secret cave in my heart full of strangeness, an awkward and unlovable gawky self that lives just beneath my skin and always threatens to be revealed, there's really nothing to make you feel "other" like being a visible minority, which I never was in Canada. Skin colour. All the layers of history that are twisted into the stories people tell each other, and themselves, about what a person's colour means or doesn't mean… it's a lot of baggage, a lot of walls that get in the way of just being a human being, interacting with other human beings, wanting to learn and grow in mind and spirit. I am WHITE here, glaringly white in a way I never knew before, when I had no colour label attached to my self image. Mzungu, foreigner. "Hey white lady, come here." In any crowd I pass through, there are a range of reactions.... laughter, stares, or feigned indifference and heads turning deliberately away. I am absolutely alien here, and alien with a particular shade of skin that has over a century of ugly and patronizing history attached to it. So it is that most of my first encounters with new people in public take place through veils -- adulation mingled with fear and shame, or deeply buried anger and envy coated shallowly with starchy politeness. I am studying Swahili, and the more I learn, the more aware I become of what is said about me as I move through the streets of Nairobi. I face my discomfort directly, when I have the energy, by striking up a conversation with whoever it is I'm having this experience with, trying to make a genuine connection that cuts through all the veils. Sometimes it works, and something in each of us shifts and softens and I feel a warmth spreading out from the centre of my heart that lasts all day, just for sheer joy of having connected to a fellow being in such trying circumstances. Sometimes it doesn't work, and I leave with a kernel of sadness in my heart, hoping that in some way in my life I will see at least the beginnings of a world where everyone can just be, can connect as human beings without fixating on the surface features that are different. I can't fix the power dynamics that are attached to skin colour almost everywhere in the world – except within myself. So I just continue on my way, feeling the joys and sorrows of connecting and of failing to connect, across the barriers.
At home. In other ways, Africa has embraced me like a long-lost child. Somehow, Africa peels away the layers of my defenses and reveals my own "orphaned-ness" to me… then she pulls me to the bosom of her red earth and tells me stay... you are home. I have been adopted by at least four families in four countries of West Africa, and a few here in the East as well. It's the irony of my time Africa – the parts I have seen, at least, from North to East to West and back again – that life seems so much more vibrant and intense with the constant spectre of death and danger in the wings. Life is uncertain. It is loud and bright, a mishmash of colour and sound and smell, it has teeth, and it doesn't stop for any individual. It's a wild, deep and rushing river, deadly yet teeming with life. You swim fiercely, or it rushes past you and spits you out on the bank for something to devour.
The stark contrasts here are even sharper because I find myself thrust from one end of the spectrum to the other almost every second day – it can leave a girl's head and heart spinning, leaving aside altogether the confusion of deciding what to wear each morning!
At the UN compound in the Gigiri area of Nairobi, I exist in a bubble of Westernized cosmopolitan privilege. Exotic, but a bubble nonetheless… in the Cafeteria, I can sip a cappuccino under swaying hibiscus hedges, watching shocking yellow birds dart down from the branches and steal beakfuls of unmistakably Kenyan, molasses-scented sugar from bowls of it left unattended on tables. The occasional troop of monkeys saunters by and peers in office windows, while inside the long multistory buildings, thousands of people from across the globe surf the internet, chat in all flavours of lilting English and French and a multiplicity of other tongues, and hold meeting upon endless meeting to decide what protocol to follow in this or that situation.
My home, in a sheltered neighbourhood near Gigiri, is another oasis. Our landlord is a German fellow who came to Kenya over 15 years ago and sensibly decided never to leave. He has the mellowed expatriate glow, the easy smile of a Northern European who has relaxed and expanded into the looser, less regulated world of Africa… but he's still German, and the place runs like clockwork. My tiny cottage is hooked up to an automatic backup generator, so my lights barely flicker while millions of others in the wider Nairobi area lose power and regain it at random intervals. I have hot water on command, water pressure that makes it a real shower, and a lusciously vine-embraced garden that is my own little pool of tranquility.
Having recently learned to drive (yep, it only took me twice the usual 16 years… but I did it!), I no longer have to suffer the freakishly unsafe yet occasionally thrilling matatu experience… a tooth-rattling public transit treat that I typically pay twice the going rate for, owing to my white skin. Driving in Nairobi, however, even in the comfort of one's own car, has its hairy side. For instance, the fact that "road rules" are on paper only and the reality is the simple jungle law of eat or be eaten. Or that most vehicles are ill-maintained, if they are maintained at all (I have personally witnessed an old scarred matatu being "repaired" by its driver at the roadside, with what appeared suspiciously like a fork, and having some of its loose innards tied back together with a rag). Or that most drivers are not "licensed" in any sense of that word that would mean a damn thing in Canada…
Of course, I did choose the most upside down and backward way possible of learning to drive. For anyone wishing to duplicate my recipe of Driver's License Madness, follow these simple instructions: Wait until age 32. Move to a foreign country where they drive on the left side. Choose a city that is to all intents and purposes a giant overgrown village where there are no street numbers, only landmarks, and all the motorways twist like anacondas mating. A city with potholed and poorly marked roads, little if any street-lighting, and just a lot of general motor vehicle insanity. Learn to drive on a hulking, diesel SUV without power steering. Manual transmission of course. Oh, and yes, last but not least… let this SUV be an imported car with the steering wheel on the… left side of the car, doh! Take lessons with local who speaks to you partly in Swahili and partly in English, and who frequently mixes up "left" and "right". Go for driving "exam", fill out endless forms, visit three government offices to pay "fees" and voila! You have yourself a bona fide Kenyan driver's license... and you can drive pretty much anything, anywhere if you can do this!
Anyway, somehow I have indeed mastered the art of driving, and am now as free as anyone else with a vehicle to screech along Uhuru Highway at 70KPH one minute, then crawl at 2KPH through a roundabout shortly thereafter while traffic cops mysteriously stand beside the automated traffic lights and give opposite signals, waving cars to "come on, hurry" through a red light and then to stop for green…. Well, small mercies -- at least here people are not honking continuously as they do in Bombay, where the traffic experience is taken to an entirely new plane of madness with the cacophony of millions of drivers hooting all day... and this goes on from 5AM to 11PM without a moment's cessation.
Driving has managed to increase the speed at which I jerk back and forth between worlds, because just a turn to the left instead of right in some areas can take you suddenly from wealth and privilege and high gated compounds, into jumbles of street stalls with piles of fruit and vegetables, old women in billowing skirts bent double carrying firewood on their long treks home, hustlers meandering along between the loosely formed "lanes" of traffic hawking everything from maps to magazines to pillows, people with missing limbs shuffling somehow along dirty sidewalks and begging for change… pulsing innards of Nairobi, where in some places a million people live on a piece of land equivalent in size to one golf course, under leaking tin roofs and on dirt floors that become mud in the rains, and where going to the toilet at the wrong time of day might mean being raped, so most folks go in a bucket and fling it out the window into the "street", such as it is.
For all the horrors that life in a slum brings with it, though, the communities within them are intensely tight knit and in some ways are like villages, only without the support of productive land that can feed and "employ" those living on it as it would in the countryside. My visits to Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, have been some of the most enjoyable experiences of my time here, the times I felt safest, most welcome, and most fully able to connect to the people I was meeting in a meaningful way. Some of the work that youth groups in the slums are doing – and I am excited that the project I'm working on here means I get to work directly with these amazing groups – is phenomenal. On the smallest scale, groups of young people growing up in slums are organizing to provide services like waste collection, recycling and sanitation, that their own government seems unwilling to provide to these economically poorer areas, and often are using the small profits not for themselves but to support other community ventures, like schools.
The work I'm doing with Environmental Youth Alliance, in our contract with UN-HABITAT, means getting to interact directly with these groups and learn from them, while also providing the support and capacity building to help them expand their revenue generating projects so that they can become a source of decent livelihood for the group as well as increase the impact of the social good that they are doing with their work. It is about as rewarding as I can imagine work being…
I've left so many stories untold, so many funny moments just jotted down in bullet point form and left for "my book", whenever it may be born. If this is indeed the last update from the field, then I thank you all for coming along for this journey since I began documenting it in January 2007... wow, that long ago!
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