Kenyans often asked me if their country was different than I expected it to be. I learned quickly that there's not really a good way to answer this question—it's hard enough to sort out what I think in my own head, let alone describe it to someone whose opinion of people like me is shaped by my response. Looking back now, I can see where my expectations were most off: It was not in my perceptions of poverty or faith, but instead in the things that I considered close to my experience as a young white woman from the United States. That is, I was more wrong about the people and situations that were similar than those I already knew would be different. My misperceptions of similarity are best exemplified by conversations I had with Ruth, a member of Eggpreneur who served as our driver and translator while we stayed in Machakos. //\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\ Our days were pretty routine in Machakos. Lauren and I would wake up around 7am, eat breakfast at 8am, and get ready for Ruth to arrive. While we waited, we would play with two-year-old Mark and pull funny faces at baby Micah, the sons of Liz and Matt Dickson (founder of Eggpreneur). When Ruth pulled up to the house at around 9am in her van, her daughters, Caisey (17) and Brenda (13) would tumble out and scoop up Mark and Micah, their cousins. You see, Eggpreneur is truly a family affair. Ruth is Matt’s sister, and before Liz went on extended maternity leave to take care of the boys, Ruth and Liz and Matt would all pile into the van and drive to the Eggpreneur demo farm for work each day. Now that Caisey has graduated high school, she took on the role of writing and managing Eggpreneur’s blog while she considers universities. In the future, Liz hopes Mark will take over Eggpreneur as CEO. During our time with the family, though, Caisey and Brenda stayed with the boys while we loaded up the van with snacks and our interviewing materials for the day. By 9:30am, Ruth, Lauren, and I would be on the road. We drove to the farm to pick up Ann and Nelly, two of Eggpreneur’s five employees. They usually work in the small farm office answering phone calls from clients, or travel to various communities in Machakos County to give “awareness” about Eggpreneur. While we were in Machakos, they joined us in the van so we could all drive to interview clients of Eggpreneur—women we dubbed micro-Eggpreneurs. The rest of the day would pass in a blur. We walked from house to house, visiting women and assessing their poultry farming venture. Lauren and I traded off interviewing duties with each woman we met. Most were happy to see us, all were extremely hospitable. We were always greeted with karibu sana’s and tea or juice at every home we entered. After visiting three women, we would hit the road again to avoid rush house. The drive between the Eggpreneur farm and Syokimau (where Matt's house is near Nairobi) was about 40 minutes without traffic, but on the Nairobi-Mombasa highway there is no such thing. On average, our drive each day was a little over an hour. On the first day we drove to the farm, we sat in a complete stand-still for around two hours. There had been an accident on a bridge about 1km down the road from us—a semi-truck, matatu, and moto-taxi had crashed, and two of the vehicles went over the bridge and into the water below. We learned the next day that seven people were killed. It was tragic. This was one moment I was struck by the sense of mortality I had neglected to consider for those I interacted with in Kenya; I had thought about the possibility of death due to poverty and old age and the like, but never as the consequence of something as seemingly random and Western as a car accident. After that accident, Ruth would slow down a bit (if only to the actual speed limit) and we would sit in solemn silence driving over the bridge. The rest of the time in the car was usually quite lively. The upside of having such a commute is that it gave Lauren and I time to prepare for the day’s interviews and pick Ruth’s brain about whatever topics we could think of. She is a doting mother and loved to share stories about her daughters. She told us about the cement factories that rise up along an industrial section of the road, pointed out zebras and ostriches and Maasai shepherds herding cows as we passed the border of Nairobi National Park, and dutifully responded to our endless Eggpreneur queries. I listened to music—a lot of Fleetwood Mac and One Direction, which are two distinct kinds of nostalgia, I think—and we all chatted. There were times that it was quiet, too: Lauren would be napping or I'd be caught up in a song or—and this was most often the case—Ruth would be focused on navigating a particularly perilous stretch of highway. After observing the aftermath of yet another accident on the same bridge one day, I asked Ruth about her experience as a driver and how she stays safe amidst the chaos of the Mombasa road. As a female driver on roads saturated by males, she's especially careful—she pays attention to the road and is just daring enough to make it. She said the reason accidents are so common and so fatal is simply because men drive, and men are aggressive. (She noted, though, that you’d never make it through your commute without being an assertive driver). She continued on, saying that women often feel unsafe stopping at a roadside food stand or taking Ubers alone. (This was another surprising similarity—Uber pervades the greater Nairobi area!). The conversation transitioned then into a discussion about women’s safety in general: Ruth told me about the advice her mother gave her when she was young, and how she’s worried about Caisey following in her path and getting pregnant too young as she heads off to college. According to Ruth, she and many Kenyan women share a harrowing fear of men. "We think of men as our brothers," she said, "but you have to know they can turn into animals in a second." When Ruth mentioned sexual assault, I took the opportunity to gently press the topic. I asked her what the typical course of action was for a woman who had been raped in Kenya. I was (pleasantly? unfairly?) surprised to hear that there were branches of women’s hospitals in major cities across Kenya that provide a rape kit including emergency contraceptives and HIV protection to women that check in after an assault. Ruth told me that after a woman goes to the hospital and feels safe, she reports the assault to the police, they catch the guy, and they put him in jail for 30 years. I tentatively asked if the police always follow through, and she replied with, yes, of course they do, but 30 years just isn’t enough, don’t you think? I was shocked. Then she asked me how long rapists go to jail for in the United States. I had to tell her that it kind of depends, actually, and that just weeks into my time in Kenya, a boy who bragged to his friends about having sex for the first time by raping an intoxicated girl was almost tried more leniently because he "[came] from a good family" and had impressive college prospects (NYTimes). I had to tell her that since the 2016 election, 138 government officials, including our president, have been accused of committing some degree of sexual assault or harassment (Georgetown Law). I had to tell her that due to restrictive reporting standards, my own university has reported, on average, less than two cases of rape each year since I’ve been there despite the fact that I could rattle off the names of nearly 20 people who are survivors of rape that occurred at Santa Clara University, and those are just the ones who know and trust me enough to have told me personally (University Operations). I’m not quite sure how to describe what I felt as I shared these stories with Ruth. I was embarrassed. But also, kind of... relieved? On one hand, I was ashamed that my country, the one that never failed to elicit words of wonder and respect whenever I told Kenyans where I'm from, had failed to adequately support women and survivors of sexual assault. I was also ashamed to realize that my own unchecked Western assumptions were rearing their ugly heads, for I had felt a flicker of surprise and discomfort that a developing country was doing something better than my own. On the other hand, it was refreshing to see pieces of a romanticized America fall away to reveal a less-rosy truth. It was conversations like this one that threw off my preconceived expectations of Kenya. I never expected to be discussing something as topical as sexual assault and gender inequity with the women I met in Kenya. In the class I took as a Global Social Benefit Fellow before coming to the field, my cohort spent countless hours discussing and researching social entrepreneurship, theories of change in developing countries, and our own host enterprises. A critical descriptor of social entrepreneurship is that it is an inherently pro-woman approach to transforming unjust social equilibria. We had conversations about the intersection of feminism, Christianity, and African culture as a framework from which we should view the challenges we might face while in the field. We talked at length about preparing to adjust to different social and cultural norms, some of which might be uncomfortable as a woman. But once I arrived in the field, I learned that what it means to be a woman in Kenya is something quite different from the expectations I developed during my studies: A woman is not always seen as less strong or capable than a man, although she can be. A woman is not always objectified and expected to become a wife and mother, although she can be. A woman is not always treated as an independent, faithful being, although she can be. I was also struck by the conversations about gender that occurred among the Catholic Sisters whom we stayed with in Eldoret. There were times I was impressed by the independence and capability they displayed; if a broken chair needed fixing or a chicken coop needed renovating, the Sisters would take up the job on their own. Had we not been staying in a compound inhabited only by Catholic women, this may not have been the case. There were also times I was surprised by the Sisters' high regard for men. They spoke of the priests as the most influential, most powerful beings in their vicinity, and lauded the efforts of men in the community who wanted to pursue poultry farming alongside women. (Certainly, there is nothing wrong with this; it was surprising only because Eggpreneur is intended to serve women). When Lauren and I asked, many Sisters told us one of the hardest parts of pursuing religious life is giving up the opportunity to marry. In fact, I can’t count the number of times we were asked if we would join the congregation, only to be cut off by another Sister saying something like, ‘No, you should get married! Have children!’. Since being back in the United States and interacting with my own sort of Christian sisterhood in the form of my sorority, I have been thinking often of the juxtaposition that can exist within a group of close-knit, independent women coming together to do good in the world, who at the same time get caught up in the excitement of gossiping about boys. I have learned that being a woman does not restrict you to one behavior or the other. \\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\// When Ruth, Lauren, and I would finally arrive back in Syokimau after leaving the farm, we were greeted with smiles from the happy family. While Caisey and Brenda hurried to help us unload the van, Ruth would twirl Mark into the air and give Micah a kiss. Liz rushed to Lauren and I, asking how our day was and if we needed a snack and generally doting on us as if we were her own children. After the welcome back affair—it usually lasted 15 minutes or so—we typed up our field notes from the day and relaxed for a couple hours until dinner. At 7pm, all of us—Ruth, Caisey, Brenda, Liz, Matt, Mark, Micah, Doris, Lauren, and I—would pile around the table to share stories about the van getting stuck for the third day in a row or the new word Mark learned or whatever else we could conjure up about our days. By 9pm, we would fall into bed. Lauren and I filmed our daily video, and as we sat facing each other on our one-foot-apart beds, we talked about Eggpreneur or our families back home or our favorite moments of the day (but mostly we talked about Eggpreneur). We fell asleep to the hum of mosquitoes and the pitter-patter of guard-dog Buster's footsteps outside our window and the feeling of comfort that can only come from being with family. So went our days in Machakos. \\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\//\\// No matter how different our lives may seem to be around the world, I learned that we share more with each other than not. Beyond the deeper questions that we all ask on our search for truth and purpose and love in life, it was these things—family dinners and assault cases and car accidents—that reminded me of our shared human experience. It was also these things that led me to feel like I, too, could be a citizen of life in Kenya, even though I come from a very different home. To feel so comfortable in a place that continued to challenge, mold, and strengthen me is a blessing I cannot ignore. With "karibu sana, feel at home!" a near-constant echo in my ears, I am grateful for the hospitality everyone in this country showed me in spite of our outward differences. And despite my expectations of how my gender might have affected my field experience, I found that, for many Kenyans, that I am a woman was far less important than that I am white or less-than-Catholic. As their focus was drawn to these other aspects of my identity, I had the opportunity to reflect upon what it means to be a woman For me, what it means to be a woman is exemplified by the strength, ambition, and responsibility demonstrated by micro-Eggpreneurs in Machakos. It is the trust, sisterhood, and devotion to service that defines the Assumption Sisters of Eldoret. It is the endless love and sincerity of mothers like Liz and Ruth. Yes, these women showed me what it means to be a woman. But more than this, they showed me what it means to be a gracious and compassionate human, for it is the genuine kindness and community welcome extended to every individual that turned Kenya into a home.
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About this journalRamblings from my time in the field and beyond. Mostly about Kenya, mostly works in progress. ArchivesCategories |