In the Philippines, I was in a bit of a funk too. Something familiar had shifted and it wasn’t at all how I remembered. Outside of my grandparents’ gated and guarded village, there is a small area where squatters live. It has little shops and vegetable stalls, children running around unattended and half-naked with their sun-baked skin. The men wear a lot of basketball jerseys or walk around without shirts, cigarettes attached to their mouths. I visited the Philippines about a year ago (before going to Kenya) and I remember being alarmed by this squatter area because the home my grandparents had lived in for years and years was much more private. When I went to their house on this trip, I realized how sturdy these “squatters’” homes actually were, these places I once referred to as shacks. They were made from cement and tin, some were two or three stories, some had windows. They had electricity and televisions and clean running water. There was a black tinge to everything from the air pollution that is all over the city, but it was certainly more developed than the mud and stick houses that I see everyday in Kibarani. The homes were exactly the same as when I visited a year ago, and yet, it looked so different. It took me a while to realize that it was I who was different.
When I returned to school, we had some time to plan for our new classes. I am teaching 10 classes of English, 5 classes of Kenyan Social Studies, 3 classes of Christian Religious Education, and 5 classes of Library each week. I also run detention during lunch each day and when I’m not with the kids, I run to and from the classrooms assisting the teachers with our new attempt at a behavior plan (basically alternative methods to corporal punishment). So, in short, I was losing my cool a bit, jogging up and down the stairs at school, trying to get as much done as possible. On Friday, our principal asked me to go with her to do a home visit. The little brother of one of my boys, Mwandi, had stopped coming to school because they couldn’t pay school fees (which is approximately $51 a year including the feeding program). His mother had been hit by a lorry crossing the highway in front of Kibarani and she had some severe brain damage, now talking like a child. Now, I have done a number of home visits, but the conditions here were some of the worst that I have seen. Flies buzzed around everywhere because she did not have enough soap to wash dishes. While we visited, a neighbor brought them some chapati choma (a bit of cut up chapati in a bean soup served in a small black plastic bag). The mother took a dirty bowl and put half of the chapati choma in it, giving it to the baby of the family who stuck his dusty hands into the bowl. Shoveling the food into his mouth, he grinned at us from the doorway, the sun streaming in as he leaned against the doorframe, pushing back the ripped curtain that served as the barrier between the house and the outside.
Visiting Mwandi’s family was a wake-up call to get my head out of my frenetic plans and breathe, to get back into this world, to remember why I am here. Somewhere along the line, I concluded that my life was supposed to be comfortable with my green Starbucks straws and air-conditioning. I miss those things, not to mention, I miss my family dearly. But, I know that I have given part of myself to Kenya and Kenya is in my blood now, along with Mwandi and Idi and Hamisi and Vero and all of my students here. I saw this beautiful quote recently which said that we must stop asking children “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and start asking them, “What problems do you want to solve? What change do you want to create in the world?” The world is asking something of all of us. We were all created to meet a need, to give something that is uniquely US to the world. We are united in the struggle with this question, friends, so let us not be afraid to ask it and then to breathe, wait, and listen for an answer.