Kisumu & You

By Megan Sonier, Global Advocate Class 12. Originally posted on Megan’s blog, Stories of Seed & Soil.

During the course of the first phase of Mama Hope’s Global Advocate Fellowship, you spend time reflecting on a number of questions, most of which center on you and yours: your motivations, your hopes, and your goals. After three long months at home, building up cookie-cutter responses to hand out to friends and family members as they bombard you with whys and whats and whens, you finally arrive in your placement country where you continue to face these same questions, but in different ways, each day.

People ask them with their glances on public transportation, with their abrupt grab of your wrist and insistence that you buy from them the bottled water, the bus ticket, or the gospel CD that they are selling that afternoon. The questions come with every bead of sweat that glides down your crispy forehead and stings your raw, peeling nose. They pound your brain like the evening rains pound down on the roof above your head and they settle down around you like the now cooling air that will maybe let you sleep comfortably that night. They ask: Why is it that you are here? Why is it that you wanted to come? Why is is that you stay?

Your pre-made and practiced answers are still tucked away neatly in your pocket, ready for whenever you need to deploy them. But these rehearsed responses chip and crack over the weeks, fractured and eroded by a steady, yet always surprising, recognition of the way things are and of your place within them. Kisumu is not concerned with what you expected it to be, nor with what you hoped it might become. It has its own pace and rhythms, its own visions of what the future might hold.

You have been told that you will learn more from your community than you could ever imagine teaching them, but Kisumu is not here to educate you. It does not owe you an explanation for the way it works. It does not exist only as a foundation on which you can build a wider worldview. It does not give a damn if you return home to your air conditioned room and walk-in shower with a greater appreciation for the material objects in your life. Its daily operations will not halt to allow you time to inquire about everything that is not yours and not like yours.

Kisumu existed long before you came here, and Kisumu will continue to exist long after you leave. What is a marvel in your eyes and shock to your system is the every day bread and butter and routine clock-work that those around you operate on daily. Kisumu is a new phenomena to only you, and you, a big-eyed Western expat, are an old and tired narrative to it.

You have been told that your community is to take the lead — you know nothing about Kenya, you are not the expert, you are not to analyze, to solve, or to implement. Yet, you have been invited here, so you are expected to do or contribute something that will benefit the well-being of the people around you.

But the reality is, with the exception of the greater Mama Hope family who graciously welcomed you into their program and into their homes, most people did not ask you to come here.

Exchanging cultures, broadening global perspectives, sharing with others your story and allowing them to gift you their own in an effort to feel a greater solidarity over what it truly means to be human — these are your values, not theirs, and everyone around you is just trying to go about the day without getting whacked by your giant backpack and giant values as you fumble down the street.

You feel wanted, yet always imposing, and most days you wake up feeling like a blackhole, sucking up everyone’s time and food, waiting for that moment that you figure out what exactly that something you are supposed to be doing is.

And then a group of eight western university students come to volunteer at one of your placement sites, and your discomfort is shifted from yourself and onto these new volunteers and their desire to seek out those they deem less fortunate than themselves and their need to solve problems that they mistakenly classify as easily solvable.

You stare at the designs and plans and solutions that they place in front of you and your partners and your eyes glaze over as you begin to itemize in your head the bill that these volunteers have racked up on private car services, fancy guest houses, imported western foods, and weekend safari bookings.

But the volunteers will soon leave, they will go back home with their designs and plans and solutions shining brightly in their portfolios and resumes, yet collecting dust in a folder in Kisumu, laying dormant in the absence of start-up funds. You calculate if the final total of all of the luxury expenses that the volunteers racked up while they were here could have covered these costs if directed to your partners instead.

You sit in hours of meetings, drowning under questions to which you do not know the answer. The volunteers come to you when they need help, when they do not understand, when they want to strategize. You have only been here for six weeks, you do not even know where you fit within this community, so how can you tell them where they fit? But they would rather talk to another fellow mzungu than your site partners. The American knows best, her similarities are comforting, she knows what she is doing.

You see their faces drop when they realize just how capable, just how brilliant your site partners are. You built all this? You have this many projects? You did it that fast? They look discouraged. They wanted to find pity. They wanted to be saviors. But instead, they were met with prosperity and smiles and passion, and they don’t know what to do next.

You do not feel self-righteous or holier-than-thou sitting next to these volunteers and the subtle harm that emanates from their intended acts of good, but your opportunity to compare the nature of their time in Kisumu to that of your own allows you to take notice of your unique ability to be vulnerable — an ability to be comfortable with not doing anything but simply accompanying your site partners and not pursuing your own dreams, but serving to support theirs.

March is a collection of moments, mundane and ordinary, but beautiful in their honesty, that remind you of this vulnerability and that help to ground you.

Plates of fragrant tilapia — courtesy of the silver sliver of the neighboring Lake Victoria that you can sometimes see from your walk to work on clear mornings — stewed with garlic, onions, and tomatoes. You sit on the front steps of your home, tossing the translucent bones and slimy skins to the stray dogs and cats with your host family. You start scolding the dogs for not sharing with eachother, because talking to animals is what you do at home, and your host family laughs at your absurdity and you join in too. You sit together staring at the night sky, talking not about humanitarian work or cultural differences, but about how millipedes contribute nothing positive to society.

The gentle tap on your shoulder and finger pointing out the window of the old man sitting behind you on your matatu ride home, indicating that you have arrived at your destination and it is time to get off the vehicle. You know that this is your stop, you have been commuting back and forth from this spot every day for the past six weeks. But you do not brush the man off with the egotistical pride in your familiarity with one route of Kenyan public transportation. You are tired, and you are sweaty, and you have gotten off at the wrong stop more times than you can count. So, you shake his hand and smile and hope that he does not mind that you have been profusely sweating on him for the entire duration of the ride and that you accidentally combine the Swahili thank you of “asante sana” with its Luo counterpart of “erokamano ahinya,” to form “erokamano sana.”

You look back from day to day and feel as nothing has changed, you are just as out of your element and just as naive as when you landed six weeks ago. But then, you look back to that first day, and you realize that you are a world away from where you once were. The motions are the same as when you first arrived, but somehow, they are now different, they have a quality that they did not have before.

Motorbike rides are not as thrilling, they have become embedded into a routine of normalcy, and you no longer wake up in a panic when your day does not have a set and precise agenda. But the bananas you buy on your way home taste sweeter with each day and your journal has become overflowing with memories that make your heart feel full.

Moreover, you are no longer simply waiting to be doing what you are here to do, and wondering all the while what that might be, but you are doing it, and have been for weeks already.

Your favorite spot in Kisumu is the large sprawl of land, overlooking Lake Victoria, that is the home to David Omondi’s evolving eco-farm. Right now, it is covered in rocks and weeds, but as you stand there listening to the flaps of the greenhouses smack against their metallic skeletons, you can see those rocks and weeds transform into the demonstration plots that light up David’s eyes when he talks about his dream farm. You both stare at the climbing beans that are spiraling on their own accord around vertical wooden poles and agree with child-like wonder that plants are so incredibly smart.

You step into Erick Aluru’s office on a Tuesday morning and he announces that he is going to grow ndugu. You do not know what that is. He tells you that they are called arrowroots in English, but Google images tells you that they are the yams that Sheila prepared for breakfast the other day. On that morning, you had protested. Yams, are sweet and white, and these yams were riddled with purple swirls in their flesh. You are thinking of sweet potatoes, you are told. But you know sweet potatoes to be bright orange. Further consultation with Google also throws taro, cassava, and yucca into the mix. You are skeptical of global tuber classification, but not of Sheila’s cooking and not of Erick’s dream, so you sit down and type up a budget and strategic plan together.

For six weeks you have made the conscious effort to be present — to not worry if you are checking off enough boxes, if you are changing the world, if you have stories to tell in a future job interview — to focus on each face, each plant, each moment.

You have come as you are and have accepted what you are not. You have asked thoughtful questions, but have respected where your questions and opinion were not needed. You have let yourself be open, to be humble, to be vulnerable. Your role in all of this is likely to change with each passing week, with each day that goes by — but now, you have no doubt that you have one.