drinking tea and roasting maize

I have a confession to make. I've been corresponding with some friends and neglecting this blog.

Here are some excerpts from some emails...I'm feeling them more than ever now. I don't want to leave in 8 days! I remarked to Diana yesterday (friend from Dartmouth) that I can't remember ever being this conent, in life, in general. Something about being so deeply connected to the earth, the people around me, the struggle and beauty in existence. It's a connection that's easily suffocated in the States. And before you go thinking, "yeah, it'd be nice to live the simple life," let me tell you this connection has little to do with simpleness. There's nothing simple about surviving the way these people survive. What allows me to be content is not the lack of injustice, but working to end it with people who have no choice.
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The more people I meet, the more I realize that to an extent, people are more or less the same everywhere. There are people who are taking advantage of other people; there are people who are honest and trying to do the right thing; there are people who are lazy and people who see themselves as victims no matter what the situation…folks in the slums are no different. Culturally, Africa’s roots to collective society are near and go deep—but they’ve taken quite a beating from colonization and capitalism (more on this in a sec). I point to the communal experience I find in the slums not to say that it’s ok, by any means, that slum dwellers are forced to live the way they live, but to say, first of all, these are real people, with real dreams and real capacity for living life to its fullest, and second of all, we should admire their sense of community and then ask ourselves: why is it we don’t experience that? What are we missing? And what if there is something intrinsic in the way we’re living that keeps us from experiencing that? What if there’s something about the way our lifestyles are steeped in the exploitation of our fellow humans that is antithetical to living in community? What if our need to categorize people based on their economic status springs from a desire to make up for something that we’re unable to provide for ourselves? What if the poor continue to exist because in our commodified state, we need people to pity, sympathize with, and give charity to, in order to make ourselves feel better about being rich and not being any happier than the poor are? These questions bring the injustice of the slums to our front doorsteps…and we now see how both their community and the injustice they experience are tied to our own lived experience.
[“We are all prostitutes, for in a world of grab and take, in a world built on a structure of inequality and injustice, in a world where some can eat while others can only toil, some can send their children to schools and others cannot, in a world where a prince, a monarch, a businessman can sit on billions while people starve or hit their heads against church walls for divine deliverance from hunger, yes, in a world where a man who has never set foot on this land can sit in a New York or London office and determine what I shall eat, read, think, do, only because he sits on a heap of billions taken from the world’s poor, in such a world, we are all prostituted. For as long as there’s a man in prison, I am also in prison: for as long as there is a man who goes hungry and without clothes, I am also hungry and without clothes.” (286, Petals of Blood, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o)]
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so are they happy? b/c it does seem miserable (conditions wise) but perhaps they are just happy inside - it seems like having a community has given them more to look for in life, a different set of values (not materialistic).
Hehehe happy inside…I like that. mmm…it is miserable indeed. These folks are most literally living from day to day, hand to mouth—for example, I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Mita today (generally I don’t eat lunch here, because the people I’m with can’t afford it—actually I was just thinking today about how easy it is now for me to go from 8am till 8pm without food or water or even bathroom sometimes. The hunger sort of sits with you, but it’s not gnawing hunger like when your metabolism is going. It’s like, I could always eat, but I don’t need to think about eating. Even seeing food doesn’t bother me. I’m just slightly weaker) oh my, I even forgot what I was talking about. OK, I was sharing a pb&j sandwich with Mita today and I mentioned, peanut butter isn’t so popular here, right? And he said yes, because there aren’t so many peanuts (peanuts are a big crop in West Africa). He continued, since it’s the kind of thing you have to buy at the store, you couldn’t buy it and keep it in your house—in a night everyone would come to eat it and it’d be gone. Eating is the stuff that’s easy to talk about…the beating, the drunkenness, raw sewage, police raids, thievery…these folks are living pretty tough lives. Stay with them long enough and the stories start to come…a woman’s hit by a matatu, arm and wrist a complete mess, ribs broken, blood everywhere, and her relatives miraculously find a way to get her to the hospital, where they are flat out denied treatment—not even basic first aid care—not for scum from the slums…a mother watches her son shot to death by policemen, for thievery…the mother works 12 hours a day as a house girl, the father died long ago, the boy was trying to feed his sisters…less than a month later, the same mother watches her other son beaten to death, his lifeless body shot up by police…
But they are also happy. It’s a kind of happiness that’s kind of hard to explain. It’s a kind of resilience that catches your breath. From yours and my positions, it doesn’t really make sense…but put yourself in their shoes, and really, what else could a human do? They sing, they dance, they chew khat and play football and tell stories to children and laugh, laugh, laugh—with their neighbors, at me, with good friends…being with these folks, who are pretty much always in a good mood, I’m always in a good mood too. And it sounds kind of lame, but it is true that when you don’t expect much to begin with, any progress is fantastic. The best example I can think of is electricity, which is constantly going out here. If the electricity goes out in the States, people get pissed. They lose a project and they’re SO angry they have to do it over. But in Kenya, you don’t sweat it. We even laugh about it. You pick yourself up and keep going…what else can you do? It’s a happiness that doesn’t justify their oppression…but lives in the moment, in today, because it’s what they have.
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I see no divine reason for this kind of suffering. I wake up to Tyrese’s tiny body, curled into mine, shaking from a bad bout of coughing. He’s had TB since he was born. I think, what if someday he gets sick and doesn’t get better? The fear that his life might be lost is real…it’s not all consuming, it’s just wrapped up in the pain of his current, unjust situation, and in the possibility that it could get even more unjust… In this moment, thinking of learning a lesson from Tyrese’s suffering (thinking of me learning, or of him being able to look back on the experience having learned) seems almost satanic. All I want in this moment is this moment—as Tyrese’s body shakes and I rub his stomach, neither the fear nor the pain are as important as the affection we share.
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I spent the night in Majengo with some friends from SIDAREC. Majengo is considered a kind of dangerous area; typically if wazungu (whites/Europeans; singular form is mzungu) come in they’re definitely gone by dark. I’m the center of attention no matter where I go; but this morning at 7am people were greeting me a little crazier than usual, and their greetings carried an air of genuine desire to extend friendship. At the toilets, the attendant didn’t even make me pay, and said with a big smile, ‘people can’t believe you’re here, that you spent the night—we thought the slums were only for black Africans like us. How did you find the toilet? (meaning how did you like it)’ When I replied that it wasn’t too shabby and I was glad it was there (many slums don’t have anything for miles), he asked me to marry him. I told him I had to think about it.
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