Fireflies and Afterthoughts

I sit on the train, riding backwards, my forehead pressed to the window. The city is passing me by as I head home after a long day at work, the buildings stretching higher than you'd ever think possible and I can't help but think about Kenya, can't help but think of all the things I wish I could show my family there about my life here...

Flash forward a few hours. It is dark, and I have stepped outside my front door to get some fresh air. I sit on the step in front of the door, and breathe in the thick, heavy, summer air. A tiny fluorescent yellow light flashes in front of my face, blinking only for a moment before fading quickly away. I look around, and the sky is ablaze with the tiny yellow dots of fireflies, the whole thing flickering like Christmas lights. It is overwhelmingly beautiful; I sit incredulous, wondering how and why fireflies light up, and then realizing I don't even care - the beauty is just in that they do, not in the how, or the why. It is the most awesomely natural moment I have had since leaving Kenya.

Flash forward two days. I walk out of the sliding doors of the train into the tunnels of grand central. The air is thick again, but this time dirty - the chalky smoky metallic hotness catches in your throat and sticks all the way down, until you emerge into the main terminal and can finally almost breathe again. The air was never like this there. The stark contrast between Kakamega and Manhattan is unfathomable; I am searching for parallels to assure me that we are not all so impossibly different, but if you are measuring difference in the height of the buildings, the number of people, the cars, the technology - well, you will not find the similarities there. I do not shake the hands of my coworkers when I walk into Senator Schumer's office each morning - I do not know everyone's name, and they most certainly do not know mine. It is a more separate way of life; even
with all of the ways in which we are connected - facebook and twitter and ichat all chip away at distance ad privacy - it is still a far more individualized life. In Kakamega, you know your neighbor's business closely...though the country is far further backwards in terms of means of communication, there is a sense of community on a local level that is incomparable. Each man is, in some way, your brother, your cousin; each woman is a sister, or an aunt. Because of this, you care about his family, her home, or their news, their habari. We here may be more capable of connecting, but this is no indication that we are more capable of being connected.

You will, however, find the parallels if you search in the right places. What is different is obvious, the concrete and iron bridges, the suburbian mansions, the smokestacks, the Internet. What is the same is far less apparent, but it is undeniably there. What is the same is humanity, sitting and eating a meal with friends, laughing about the day, sharing stories. What is the same is family - is coming home to see your parents, your sister, the whole lot of you finding time to take time to spend together. What is the same is sitting outside on a summer night and watching the stars, the feeling of contentment that swallows you when you ride a bodaboda through town as the sun rises, the same feeling of being completely and perfectly
content that drowns you as you sit and watch the sun set on the same rock jetty on Atlantic beach that you've been sitting on for nineteen years.

Beneath the constrains of technology, behind the movie sets of skyscrapers or huts made out of mud, despite black, white, or any shade in between, there are things that pertain to us all. There is much that separates, that devastates, and that divides us, but there is far more that connects, rebuilds, and unites us. Unfortunately, it is often easier to see the former than the latter, but this does not mean the latter cannot overwhelm us if we make the conscious decision to let it. For this reason, it has been an easy readjustment - I have not been consumed with the differences because I know they are superficial in comparison to the parallels, and this is why the experience is life-changing. For knowing this, for feeling more aware of the way in which time always slips too quickly, and for feeling more comfortable with this unbearable phenomenon and learning how to take better advantage of the time I've been given; for taking risks, for failing in order to ultimately succeed; for enduring discomfort in order to appreciate the things that make me comfortable; for the humbling experience of scaling down lofty aspirations; for learning how better to listen rather than hear, to observe rather than simply see...For all of these things, it is life-changing, and for all of these things, I am changed for the better.

ETA: 16 Hours

I'm sitting in the Dubai airport, I've been traveling for nineteen hours, and we have about sixteen more to go. Our group has slowly shrunk from 15 to 11, and delirium is sinking in. We walked through the airport, heading directly to Cosi. I cannot begin to explain the magnitude of my joy. It wasn't even that good, but it didn't matter. I may have told the cashier that I was in love with him. Emily and I had to explain why we were saying we were going to cry - it came down to one question: "Have you, sir, ever tasted ugali?"

The goodbyes were difficult - everyone in my family cried when I left, myself - obviously - included. Jacks gave me a hug and went to run out to the bus, then turned around, and ran back for another hug - crying as she pulled away. Mama Lucy wrapped me in the first real hug she's given me since I got here - people in Kenya are generally less inclined to hug - my face buried in her zebra printed furry winter coat that she wears in the mornings. When Erica and I left WEAEP, our supervisor cried, so Erica cried, so naturally I cried again. But then we got to Sheywe, and the mood shifted entirely.

The sheer amount of technology here is overwhelming. Every single person is on a cell phone, plugged into a laptop, or clicking through an iPod. There are flat screen TVs and tile floors and high ceilings and fluorescent lights. Also overwhelming is the diversity of races - the Kakamega population is entirely homogeneous (hence the "mzungu" phenomenon). Also, why did we fly east to go even farther west? So far I have accidentally said "asante" (thank you) and "pole" (sorry/excuse me) involuntarily on approximately three occasions. Old habits die hard.

Okay, it's time for me to go and rant elsewhere. More when I reach the U S of A.

And Then It Comes Full Circle

Before I left, I said that it always works like this - hello's, and all too soon goodbyes - and I said I would try to remember that along the way.

But here I am, awake as I am every night around 4 AM, my last night with my host family, staring up at the folds of my mosquito net, my music just loud enough to hear, exactly as I said I was 9 weeks ago during orientation. I told my sisters I would wake up around 5 to say goodbye before they leave for school, because since I'm leaving the house around 5 PM, I won't see them before I go. Last night I gave the girls 2 framed pictures - one of the two of them, one of the three of us - and I printed a few more of the family as well. They gave me gifts - a Kenyan woven bag and African-style necklaces, and sent me with paintings for my family at home. I tried desperately to keep it together, turning to help clean even as my eyes welled with tears. I planned on saving the waterworks for this morning, I know I won't be able to help it then, and twice seemed a bit excessive.

I just can't believe it's over. I'll admit, toward the end, I was consumed with excitement to return to New York, but the emotions are mixed, as I have truly adjusted to being here. I no longer find it strange to ride to the stadium as the sun rises, on the back of a bicycle. Or to eat with my hands, or to buy all my food fresh, or to come home and read a book - simply because I have time. I know I'll make a quick recovery, but at the same time - from Kakamega to Manhattan in 3 days is the most extreme transition I could ever imagine.

I have a long trip home, so I plan on reflecting more (perhaps in my 8 hour layover in Nairobi? Yesssss.) But for now, I'm just going to lay here and try to make time slow down for just a little...I was just here, and now I'm going - if life is like that, then we all better get moving and do something because it's equally exhilirating and terrifying. I can't help but feel content that there's nothing I feel I wish I'd done - if you can live your life and honestly say that as often as possible - well, that's my goal, anyway.

Paying it Forward

Today was the last of the workshops. It was supposed to be yesterday, but we got locked out of the office - long, frustrating story. Anyway, I went to Lwanda Secondary School (high school) with 4 of the women that attended the HIV/AIDS workshop the last week in June - Irene, Sarah, Fridah, and Selinah. These phenomenal women taught 200 female students the information we covered in our workshop. I cannot even begin to explain how proud of them I was. The girls were receptive, and of course laughed when we started talking about safe sex practices...again, this is universal and transcends age, race, gender, you name it. On a more serious note, however, it was almost unsettling how unfamiliar the students were with concepts most American sex-education classes cover without a second thought.

I was responsible for facilitating the Q&A session at the end - not an easy task, standing in front of 200 teenage girls and explaining these issues. I was surprised when one girl asked if it was expensive to get tested for HIV. I can't understand why, when they are taught about the virus - which I know that they are - the teachers fail to mention that the government is responsible for providing free testing and treatment for HIV. It comes back once again to the same issue - knowledge and awareness force accountability; without these forces generating constituent pressure on goverment officials, corruption will continue to persist as it currently does in the hospital system.

One brave soul described a situation with her "lover." She asked what she was supposed to do, when, in the moment, no one wanted to take the time to stop and put on a condom. After the hysteria subsided, and after I joined in the laughter, I explained the way in which that moment is nothing, it is fleeting and will pass without notice. But being infected with HIV? That is a lifetime, an infinite number of consecutive moments, strung together forever. She asked, "what if we want to be careless?" To which I replied, "That's the thing - you can't be careless. If you are careless for those 30 seconds, you might be dealing with the repercussions for the rest of your life. And you have to ask yourself if that is a risk you're willing to take." The thing is, teenagers here get a whole lot about abstinence - which is entirely legitimate. But the problem is that some people are simply not going to adhere to that, and there needs to be information provided regarding what one must do should she choose to act otherwise. I'm not condoning recklessness by any means, but it is naïve to assume that all teenagers will abstain from having sex, and the sooner people here accept that, the sooner people can start really talking openly about how to prevent the spread of HIV. These girls were unaware that there was such a thing as a female condom - which is really important in a largely male-dominated society. When one girl asked what to do if her boyfriend refused to use protection, I told her she could be responsible on her own, and she and her peers were shocked.

Anyway, the point is yet again that knowledge is accountability and power and the beginning of change - and the most important part of this workshop was seeing the women pass this knowledge to the girls.

But now it is time for sleep - it has been a long few days.

Anddddd...

I have malaria.

But it's okay. I just feel like I have the flu. I have to admit, I'm a little bummed, I was priding myself on being The Girl Who Never Got Sick In Kenya. But its fine, malaria is intense enough for me. The doctor's office was kind of terrifying, me and ten screaming children, me screaming "the needle has to be new!!!" And the nurse being all "uh, yeah, I know." And me all "oh, um, okay." Etc. The lab test (pricking my finger and sticking the blood on a slide under a microscope) and the consult with the doctor cost about 5 dollars. The medicine prescribed cost $6. Damaris was with me for all 2 hours, she was great.

Anyway, my dad sent me this quote from the book Out Stealing Horses, and I couldn't have said it better myself, so...

"Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking."

Meet Me Next to Mama Tomato

Over the course of the past two months, the interns have devised a means of giving each other directions. The roads rarely have names, so we were forced to accommodate. I think the streets and landmarks are worth sharing:

IMPORTANT STREETS:
Market Street - the street on which the open market is located.

Mama Tomato Street - the street on which Mama Watoto supermarket is located. Emily did not know how to pronounce the name, so "tomato" caught on instead.

In-Between Street - the street in between the aforementioned two streets.

Burned-Down Street - this is actually sad, but this refers to the street on which about four or five shops burned down. Perpendicular to the aforementioned three streets.

Diagon Alley - The market behind the market. You have to go all the way to the back of the real market, and then walk through this alley and cross a bridge to get there (analogous to platform 9 3/4, if you will). It is crowded and has all of these shops with everything you would ever need and the name just made perfect sense.

Golf Hotel Road - the road on which Golf Hotel is located.

Guillaume Road - where Guillaume lives. Even Mama Lucy refers to this as Guillaume Road now. She also uses Mama Tomato street, In-Between Street, and Market Street to direct me.

Kamadep Road - where Kamadep Guest House is, the hotel in which we stayed during orientation.

Dirt Road - connects Golf Hotel to WEAEP Road (where WEAEP is located). It is avoided at all costs when it rains.

IMPORTANT LANDMARKS:
Golf Circle - roundabout on Golf Road.

Boda Corner - at the end of WEAEP road, where all the boda boda drivers congregate.

Gambler's Corner - at the end of Kamadep Road, across from the Field of Trash (see below). A group of boda boda drivers play games and gamble here all day. On this corner one is especially prone to shouts of "mzunguuuu!"

Field of Trash - field in between Buhunghu Stadium where we run and Gambler's Corner. Not fun to walk across.

Scale Boy Corner - Down the street from Yako's supermarket, where a boy sits with a scale that you can pay to weigh yourself on. I've resisted the temptation.

Alafu, We Talked About Risks

This just in: "alafu" means "then." As in, I went to school, then I came home. We've been walking around thinking people were saying "I love you" in a Kenyan accent for weeks.

Today wrapped up the three-day soya workshop. I presented this morning the information I prepared regarding entrepreneurship, microfinance, and small-scale business. Since WEAEP focuses a lot on microfinance, I talked more about developing a business idea, important things to keep in mind, setting goals, etc. We got to talking about risk, and failure, and Wilfrida - one of the Tujipe Mwoyo women I've gotten pretty close with (she's approximately 6'4", in case that's relevant at all) - mentioned that a lot of the time here, if women fail at an attempt to start a business, they rarely try again.

So I told them about my thing with cleaning my room (this is all with the help of Isoso's translation).

For those of you who know me well, you might know that whenever I feel kind of stressed, or if I have a lot to do and am having trouble figuring out where to start, I clean my room. It's a little weird - I admit it. But there's something about it that is really satisfying - sometimes you just have to make a complete mess in order to put all the pieces together. Maybe you stumble across old things that are just adding to clutter. So you can throw them out, and make room for the new. Or maybe you dust something off that you hadn't seen in years, something really important that ends up being just what you were looking for. The point is, you need to be familiar with all the components if you want to perfect the bigger picture.

And then I told them how I was afraid when I first got here. Genuinely shocked, they laughed, asking how I could ever be afraid.

"Well," I told them, "it's the same fear you have when you take a risk in starting a business. You don't know what's going to happen - you're scared you might fail, that your ideas won't be accepted, that you won't accomplish your goals - its different from what you know and what makes you feel safe. But the thing is," I (Isoso) explained, "when you take a risk, you absolutely take the risk of failing. If you don't take a risk, it's true - there is no possible way you can fail. But you rule out simultaneously the possibility of being great, of succeeding, of accomplishing more than you'd ever hoped you would. So it's a tradeoff: you take the risk, sure - you might fail. But you also might not, and that's why you try."

The thing is, failure is just another way of looking at progress. You can choose to see what went wrong, and you can decide to stop, defeated. But this is a choice, a conscious decision. You can also choose to see what went wrong - and take those flaws and use them constructively to make something better. I prefer "setback" to "failure" - the former implies that your process simply took a pitstop, but fully intends to get back en route. The latter condemns you - it implies the journey is over. I told the women how it is important to look at successful local businesses, and think about what they've done to excel. But I also told them to look at struggling businesses - what brought them down? How can I avoid these problems? What would I do to fix them, if I were in that same situation?

I told them about how my project here had gone astray - about how I thought initially that I wanted a small group of girls to teach their peers about HIV/AIDS. I told them, that as this idea unraveled before me, I was forced to revise the means with which I'd achieve the outcome I wanted. It was a stressful and trying experience - for a while, I didn't know how to find a solution. As we talked about goals, I tried to tell the women that this experience was an example of having to reassess one's plan of action to accommodate the needs and capabilities of the community - which is also a really crucial part of starting a business. Sometimes you just have to rip it apart in order to put it all together.

The women were fantastic these past few days - even though I was pretty tired by the end of today, I'm really happy with everything they did during the workshop. The women even had the chance to build Margaret's keyhole garden in WEAEP's backyard, so here's to new beginnings, even as my time here ends.