A few weeks ago, while we were still in Mombasa, a traditional medicine healer talked with us about her work and the relationship between traditional and Western medicine. This healer’s complete confidence in her medical techniques was amazing. Who knows if her ginger root actually did anything to reduce stress levels. It was her belief (and the belief of her patients) that brought legitimacy to her practices. Belief enables a reality of truth that is distinct from our Western double-blind study proof that we need to determine the truthfulness of anything. Say there’s a new drug developed in the US. For this drug to ever reach a human market, it must go through a series of rigorous tests and examinations that prove its potency. We need this rational process to determine the truthfulness of the drug.
This scientific basis to explain truth is one way to think rationally about medicine, technology, philosophy, etc. Yet I think we sometimes confine rational thought to this very narrow definition, thereby delegating any other thought as something other than rational. A friend of mine coined an idea that offers an alternative to this Western-style rational thought. He said there’s a distinct system of thought called cultural rationality. It’s the idea that rational thought can manifest itself through unique cultural perspectives. For example, the traditional medicine healer’s cultural experience regarding her work has, in her eyes, legitimized her practices as rational. I’m falling short of what I want to say, but basically I just want to be cognizant to other systems of thought that may be just as rational as my own Western idea of how to think logically.
Back in Nairobi, we flew through a week filled with a Kiswahili oral exam and development lectures by a mad smart agricultural economist. Though our goal was to touch on ALL of Kenyan development, academic tangents successfully inhibited this pursuit. Kenyan professors love tangents. I think it’s just a different teaching style. In the US, a university class usually stays very focused and on schedule. In Kenya, I need to treat our lectures as informal discussion and change my expectations if I want to learn anything.
We also had the opportunity to attend an International Monetary Fund panel discussion at the University of Nairobi. We listened as the Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, the IMF Managing Director, and a few reps from civil society discuss Kenya’s current economy and its future financial opportunities. Quite the interesting power dynamics at work. It appears that the IMF has moved away from its dreaded structural adjustment framework (read: conditionality, lack of ownership, one-size fits all) to a more acceptable approach to loans. Our professor believes that this change in policy is due to the influx of grant money and investment from China and India. This grant money is building a Kenyan infrastructure without trying to drive development this way or that. So the IMF member states have to change their ways if they want to compete. Serves ‘em right.
Trying to make good on my walking and talking dreams, I went back to the University of Nairobi a few days later to interview some students for a project. It was simply grand to just walk around campus and try to spark conversation with random people. I failed a few times, but talked with two political science students for a good 30 minutes before I realized I had to book it back home. I’ve realized that Kenya, and specifically the Nairobi metropolis, is the ‘real Africa’. It’s a place situated between the Western idea of modernism and the traditional way of life. It’s real and authentic, maybe more authentic than the exotic images we have of Africa as an endless savannah occupied by villages of simple peoples.
The following weekend, Luke, Mama and I trekked it out to Mama’s rural home in Siaya, Kenya. My Mama is originally from this area of Western Kenya, so on the way out there she was made for an excellent tour guide as she pointed out all the places she had lived, schools she had worked at, and stores she had shopped at. The drive was green and mountainous. So many fields of chai and bananas and other goodies. The weekend was spent cruzing around town on bada badas (bicycles) and meeting all sorts of relatives and friends. It was a marathon of epic proportions. Mama kinda treated us like small children, but we countered with a solid argument: We had been in Kenya for 2 months...so we were basically Kenyans. If you say this in Kiswahili it really drives the point home.
But let’s talk about the stars. In the words of Mama, “the stars are so near and so fresh.” That about sums it up. Luke and I sat out on some lawn chairs late into the night trying to figure out why one of the stars was blinking. We also had a sweet discussion one night that has continued and developed since we’ve returned from Siaya. It’s basically this:
1) The action of DOING has no inherent purpose. Its purpose is constructed by who and how you are.
2) Thus it is more crucial to decide who and how you are before you decide what you DO.
I consider this to be my most undeserving opportunity. I have the ability to decide who and how I am BEFORE I decide what I will do. In the US, we place way too much importance on the action of doing, which is not shared by the rest of the world. Having agency to decide who and how you are is a universal process. Most people in this world cannot decide what they do, but maybe we can all decide how and why we are regardless of what we are doing. In other words, it’s really your attitude that defines you rather than your career.
My ISP prep has been working me over. Getting access to Kakuma Refugee Camp is a truly bureaucratic experience. I’ve been all over carnation looking for the one person who says, “Yeah dude, you can live in the camp for a month, no problemo.” I want to explore the relationships that exist in regards to the right of freedom of expression for refugees. I would be so ecstatic to interview refugees and humanitarian relief workers about the importance of freedom of expression. I think it could be a challenge to my own views. I place a high value on the right to say what you want, but what if I come out of this experience with the perception that the majority of refugees don’t give a hoot about their right to say what they want? Maybe their ability to find the day’s food is so much more important. I’m optimistic about how it’s all going to turn out, but right now I feel like I’m in a hot air balloon. Everything’s just up in the air, way up in the air.
During some of my background research I checked out the differences between a ‘right’ and an ‘entitlement’. Entitlements are given to an individual by a governing body as a means to access rights. However positive these entitlements can be in our society, sometimes they can be detrimental to equal distribution. In Kenya, for example, the Kikuyu tribe has a distinct sense of entitlement. The resident anthropologist, Donna Pido, believes that this entitlement is the single greatest problem in Kenya. The Kikuyu tribe was central to the Mau Mau Revolution, a movement that acted as a catalyst for the fight for independence in the 1960s. Yet the Kikuyu’s fought for land, whereas the fight for independence was a broader struggle for a sense of identity as a nation. Over the years the Kikuyu tribe has blurred the difference between these two struggles, and thus rooted entitlement in their role as freedom fighters during the fight for independence.
This past week has been filled with academic rigor in the most pure sense. And it’s taken a toll on me. I sunk into an everyday routine. I was totally comfortable with my daily life. I didn’t even have to think during my walk to school. It was automatic. That’s something I never wanted to feel in Kenya because it’s a sign that I am not pushing myself to explore more or push myself out of my bubble. Though I was in school everyday this past week, I always had this urge to shrug off the academic work and go home. I can push my self intellectually when I’m at Colbs, but I can’t talk with my Kenyan host mother about abortion everyday.
During this automatic routine, I started to become tired of being seen as a dollar sign to so many Kenyans. If I enter into a conversation with someone and get a sense that they’re motives are financial, then I instinctively retreat and thus prohibit the conversation from reaching its full potential. But I’m trying to move beyond this attitude and engage someone in conversation regardless of his or her perceived motivations. A great façade for the money-mentality is the ‘exchange of ideas.’ Give it a shot sometime when you want to make a buck or two.
I am reminded of the color of my skin everyday, and it’s worn me down. But I don’t hold any anger or resentment towards this reception. It’s simply reality. A reality that so many people in our world deal with each and every day.
Hills have been my refuge. We’ve got a bunch of them outside the Kibera slums, and it’s so refreshing to jog up and down these hills in the late afternoon.
So here I am. Everything’s up in the air, and I’m okay with that. We’re in Arusha, Tanzania for the next week chilling with an exiled Black Panther in his mini-Utopia, checking out a crater filled with wildlife, and searching for some bushmen. Just your everyday tourist adventure. And the exiled Black Panther’s dog has some sweet dreads for a tail. Doesn’t get much more utopian than that.
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