Aesthetically Speaking: Budondo

Friends, this is overdue. Blame it on a lack of wifi in the past three weeks. I write today from Paris, but Paris will have to wait. First, Budondo.

In the past I have obsessed over finding purpose for my trips to the village. Research, workshops, discussion, whatever justified the time. This trip was different. I had little to no agenda and relaxed into the day to day with the family. Moments between moments. Time moved slowly but the days flew by.

Budondo is a tiny corner of the world, and yet a world within itself.

Bukoko, baby chicks, picking for bits of food around the front yard, sleeping in heaps in the smoky kitchen after dark, running over my bare feet screaming chio chio chio!;

Impassible sugarcane fields, thick gardens of bananas, vegetables and wildflowers, sweet potatoes growing in neatly lined heaps of dirt, passion fruit seedlings creeping up banana fiber ropes;

Water warmed over wood fires, mixed with cool water in a plastic bin for your shower, splashed with your hands over your shoulders, stomach, knees, hair, feet, in that order;

Squat toilets, cleaned meticulously, daily, smelling fresh, haunted by the occasional lonely fly. Look up and spot the biggest spider you've ever seen, who diligently keeps the pests away;

Drinking and cooking water pumped and hefted home in jerrycans from the nearby borehole. Note that yours truly has set a personal record of carrying two 3/4-full cans in one go;

Clothes washed by hand in plastic bins with bubbly detergent and bar soap. Scrub twice, rinse once. 

Fabric on fabric. Let the boys clean the towels and the jeans, tough on the hands. With enough sun, it's all dry by evening;

Early morning runs around the village, followed by pointing and screams of children, Mzungu Mzungu, white person white person!;

Morning greetings followed by humming call and response: "wasuzeotia sebo, bulungi, kale, wena wasuzeoyia nyabo, bulungi, kale, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm...";

"Alikuega lusoga". Yes, I'm learning lusoga. "Eeeeeh benange, my god...";

Schedules follow meals and weather rather than clocks. For instance: "We will go after we take breakfast, which is after we fetch fresh chapati, which is after the chapati making lady finishes 10 pieces, but it's raining this morning so she started late. So maybe we'll go after lunch";

When it rains, it roars. Tin roof turns deafening. In my room, mice nest in the rafters. Mornings after the rain I find a baby fallen on the floor, to take outside and throw into the banana plants. Sad day, but that's life;

Mama and Betty cook on three stones over a wood fire in a closed room. I love to sit, listen, chop veg and laugh along, but when the smoke gets too much I have to leave;

Sometime I just sit close by and touch my hand to mama's shoulder, to show I'm paying attention and appreciating;

Tea with every meal. And when I'm lucky, hot, fresh, whole milk boiled with ginger. With a spoonful of sukali, sugar;

For breakfast lunch or dinner, matoke, mutiere, cassava, posho, beef stew, beans, eggs, greens, cabbage. Served with hot sauce, my personal contribution to the meal;

Evening stories from Mukisa, Dad, whose every thought is animated with a smile, punctuated first with "Ah ha! You see:" and concluded with a sigh, a chuckle... then "Yes";

The night still with crickets and wind blowing in the sugarcane, every bed creak and footstep echoing, then before I know it the rooster crowing, then dishes clanging, and voices murmuring. Morning;

And more and more and more.

Corners and Chapters

Just a few days left in Kenya. It's hard to look at endings. I didn't realize how much of a nest I built up here with the help of some wonderful friends. Something about the environment - whether it's planning a weekend adventure, finding the best peanut butter at the grocery store, figuring out how to cook new vegetables or navigating ever-changing security issues.... This is a place to make fast friends.

Saying good bye to C, my coworker, housemate and best friend here was especially hard. Who knows when we will meet again, Australia being where it is. (Really Australia... so far!)  But sad as I am, I feel lucky to have met him. It is a great reminder that a new best friend might always be around the corner.

So, speaking of what's around the corner: While I'm putting finishing touches on my life novel entitled "filmaid: my first real job," I'm also setting up my Yale Divinity School email and perusing classes for the fall. The identity shift from working-for-salary to all-for-the-sake-of-knowledge hasn't happened quite yet, but it's out there. I'm excited.

And in the meantime, a beautiful chapter of vacation and life adventures has just started. Mom has been here for a week. We have enjoyed breakfast with elephants in the Maasai Mara, meeting my Nairobi friends, nursing me back to health from an infection (thanks Mom!) and most recently a harrowing hike around the rim of a volcano crater. Let's just say it involved more rock climbing than she bargained for. Basically my mom is a champion, first to fly herself to Nairobi and second to go on these adventures I've (mostly, sometimes inadequately) planned!

That's all for now. Thankfully part of finishing with FilmAid was also giving back my laptop, which means I am largely screen-free for three months! So at the risk of being bad at email and posting less often... I am enjoying reading actual books, looking at things far away and making more eye contact. What a concept.

Much love, friends.

Easter in Kakamega

I spent this Easter weekend with B, an 81 year old Kentucky-born missionary who has called Western Kenya her home since 1982.

B lives in a mud house, plastered and painted to look like a brick house: a small island of Americana way out in the bush. Inside the walls are bright yellow, with dark blue flowered fabrics for curtains, velvet-upholstered furniture, two bedrooms and a bathroom. B takes bucket showers with river water and washes her vegetables with bleach solution. She throws her compost under a banana tree she's growing in the back yard, feeds meat scraps to a dog who lives on the front porch, and burns any remaining trash once a week. B told me about her own grandma who worked a midwest farm on her own until she turned 100. B, it seems, is on the same track.

It's a cozy home and B has everything she needs, including power, an oven, a refrigerator and several close Kenyan friends, neighbors, family and frequent visitors. On Saturday we got on the back of two piki pikis (motorcycles) to take the 40 minute bouncy ride over dirt roads to Kakamega town, where B does her weekly grocery shopping. We brought home huge bags of groceries, tied with strips of tire onto the back of the piki pikis. B's driver also held between his arms a big jug of bottled drinking water. This week, groceries included a treat– canned peaches. "Don't tell them I'm not suffering" she told me.

But B does miss pickles, pudding, jello and chocolate chips, and brings them back from the United States anytime she goes. For Easter weekend we baked four loaves of banana bread (three of which to give away) and made potato salad with olives. B taught me to play 13, her favorite form of solitaire. I taught her how to text. Over one dinner conversation she recounted the entire detailed plot of the Silvester Stalone movie Cliffhanger, complete with her critique of his mountain climbing technique (for she herself was a climber and a spelunker before she moved to Kenya). The 15-minute story ended with a prompt, "Well that was a pretty good movie, I guess." It was a fabulous time. In a big way, I felt like I was with my own wonderful grandparents.

So what is B doing so far away from home? She is building a health clinic next to her house, which will have outpatient services, a pharmacy and a maternity ward. B is a nurse–a profession that has served her very well–and has set up multiple clinics around Kenya since 1982. While she gets some donations from churches in the U.S., she supplements those funds with her own small pension and social security check. There's no doubt she's bringing something good to the community she lives in.

But first and foremost, B is a missionary, spreading the gospel come hell or high water. Suffice it to say B and I have very different approaches to Christianity. I have a lot of opinions and feelings about that, but this is not the place. If you're interested in unpacking it with me, let's do it face to face and preferably over a drink back in the States.

Our differences didn't stop us from eating, praying and celebrating Easter together. B brought me to the mission church on Sunday, where congregations from five different churches gathered to meet the American visitor (me) and celebrate Easter. Fifty or sixty people gathered in a big mud building–some of whom had been walking since the break of dawn to arrive around 11, when the service started. B and I stayed for the two hours of beautiful music, lots of announcements, and three sermons including one from B. Six or seven pastors were present, all men. I myself stood up when asked to give a testimony– I introduced myself, said some things about Jesus and resurrection and hope, and taught the congregation a song (St. Lydia's-style). Friends, that might have been my first ever sermon, clocking in at three minutes!

I'm very lucky to have gotten to know B's amazing world. She treated me as her own granddaughter, showered me with love and gifts, and was sad to see me go. She is an extraordinary person, and her story will stick with me for a long time.

Close Encounters

The past couple posts have been a pretty heavy, so it's time for a good old fashioned wildlife photo shoot. This is from our visit to an animal orphanage in Nanyuki, a three hour drive towards Mt. Kenya. C took these on his fancy camera.

Waterbuck give wet kisses.

Black and white colobus monkey shares his secret: woo visitors into giving him bits of potato.

The regal crowned crane.

Bongo Bongo Bongo Warthog Warthog Zebroid* Bongo.

Pigmy hippos only ask to be taken seriously.

Are you porcupining for a bite of compost?

Samango monkey helps himself.

Oh hello!

And finally...

The hungry cheetah.

 That's all folks!

*Zebroid is a cross between a zebra and a horse.

Landscapes

Lately I've been more serious, more lost in my thoughts. Visiting Kakuma has brought me back to Tiffany's death. I've realized the past few months in Kenya have provided some welcome distraction from grief.

I've started to think about emotions as landscapes that take shape over the course of our experiences. Some places form over long periods of time, the way glaciers carve out valleys. Some places change suddenly, the way volcanoes burst open the earth.

Tiffany's death was a terrifying earthquake. The world is a different place.

There's something to be said for seeing a place with your own eyes. Maybe I had read the guidebook and seen the photos. But I had never experienced grief like this. Not like this. Now it's part of my body, my internal landscape.

What does grief look like? It is cavernous. It is dark. It is empty. It is craggy. It is deep. Over time, maybe this place will be smoothed over by the weather. It will be less frightening as I become familiar with its cracks and corners. It will be a place to share with my fellow humans.

In the days after Tiffany's death, I thought about other people who live with grief. People who live in places of violence and disaster. People I have never met. People I meet every day. It makes me realize the many emotional places I have never seen or imagined that might be central to another person's life. Truth is what you experience.

Undoubtedly, my experience with grief is tied to faith. Resurrection has never been so true for me as it is now. When Jesus died, the earth shook, the sky went dark, the temple curtain tore from top to bottom. The world was a different place.

If emotions have geography, they also have seasons. At last the spring is here to shed some light after a long, dark winter. Easter is only two weeks away. It will be especially important for my family this year, as we remember that three days after Jesus died,

He rose.

There is life in death. There is hope in disaster. God is not finished.

The Edge of Humanity

I spent last week in Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, close to the border with South Sudan. The camp now has 150,000 people from more 10 countries, with South Sudanese and Somalis each making up a third, and the rest coming from all over Africa and the world.

Kakuma is, for a start, the single hottest place I have ever been. Imagine Texas, during a heat wave, with no air conditioning, and all dust. When it rains, the dust turns to huge sloshing mud, and water flows right through the floor of the tents where new arrivals stay. When it doesn't rain, there are dust storms so thick you can't see ten feet in front of you.

Yeah - it's miserable. No wonder Kenya is happy to lease the land to the UNHCR. This is a place for people who have nowhere else to go.

On Monday, C and I got to visit a screening FilmAid was putting on at the reception centre for new arrivals. Between 300 and 700 people arrive every day fleeing violence in South Sudan. However they get themselves to the border–by foot, bus or car–the UNHCR then picks them up in huge trucks, that travel along a paved road to Kakuma. At the reception centre, they are registered, provided meals and tents, and health care as needed. In a few days they will be moved to Kakuma 3 or 4, sections on the outskirts of the camp, to live in big white UNHCR tents.

It had just rained when we got to the centre, and the place was overrun with children ankle-deep in mud and dust. Everyone there had left their homes somewhere between two days and a few weeks earlier. The adults in particular looked exhausted. I tried to imagine what was going through their minds.

What was the final straw, that led them to make the decision to leave? Who did they leave behind–too sick, too stubborn, or without money to afford the bus ticket to the border? Who is missing–on the front lines, in hiding, or dead?

This is the edge of humanity–of what it means to be human, to stay human, when all is lost. Of what it means for humans to help each other. In some sense I felt like I was looking at foreign policy turned inside out. These are our mission statements, our international conventions, our tax dollars in play. I felt at once proud to be a part of this response system, and so sad that this is the best we can do.

We are all the same. This could happen to any of us–persecution or danger chasing us out of our homes, jobs, communities, everything normal. How would we want to be treated then?

***

Not everywhere in Kakuma is in crisis. In fact, the majority of people in Kakuma have been there for a long time–several years, and longer. Some people have been there since the camp was opened in 1992. Some were born and have lived their whole lives in the camp.

This is how a refugee camp works: the UNHCR has a mandate to provide specific services to refugees, like food, shelter, education, health services, water and sanitation infrastructure, etc. It partners with the Kenyan government and international NGOs to get this work done. To a large extent, life for refugees is structured around these services.

But on top of that, Kakuma operates with its own economy and society. People come to a refugee camp from all economic and social backgrounds. So people who had wealth in their former lives are able to start up businesses and pay for extra services on Kakuma's private market–extra food, power, supplies, whatever it is. All kinds of goods are imported from Nairobi and East African neighboring countries.

Life here is not what you'd expect.

For instance, over the weekend, C and I joined some other humanitarian employees for Ethiopian food, owned and run by Ethiopian refugees, in groovy, brightly painted restaurant. I also got to attend a training for one of many community theatre groups that create and perform skits in their communities on social issues. And you might not know that Kakuma is home to extremely talented and competitive hip hop dance troupes. Check it out. 

It's an inspiring place, and like any other–people bring their talents, their passions, their resources.

***

Here's the thing about a refugee camp. People here are extraordinary.

Refugees, by definition, are people who are fleeing persecution "for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion." C and I had many conversations with one person, M, who fled his country because he had led an organization criticizing the government for violations of human rights. He is much younger than me, and has accomplished incredible things. And for that, he was kidnapped twice and received death threats, and is now living in Kakuma until he can pursue higher studies or be resettled to another country.

Every single refugee, or someone in their family, faced extreme and unsafe conditions in their home country, and had the guts to pick up and leave. Each person I spoke with has an amazing story. And story, it seems, carries more power here. Your story, and how you tell it, is what gives you the chance for resettlement through the UNHCR. Your story might put you in danger. Your story might save your life.

And stories can take your mind off things for a while.

Enter FilmAid. We do a lot of things in Kakuma–training refugees as filmmakers, creating films on issues from cholera prevention to violence against women, running education workshops and investing in local arts groups... The list goes on. Essentially we are a communications organization that works in the crazy niche of humanitarian operations and refugee life. In this setting, information can be life saving, and entertainment can be its own form of relief.

FilmAid's original and favorite activity is evening screenings. We set up a huge screen on the side of a truck and project cartoons, PSAs on health or protection issues, and full-length "family favorites." Thousands of people gather as it gets dark, the stars come out and the screen lights up. When I was there one of the movies we screened was Airbud. Imagine the sound of a thousand kids cheering when a golden retriever scores a soccer goal. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But also just amazing. You have to smile.

***

I'm not sure what exactly I'll take away from this experience. One response is a resounding "What the [fill in the blank with your favorite expletive]." How is this possible. How is this real. How have I never understood to this extent, that humanitarian crises have a profound implications not just for people who are living through them, but for all of us.

I'm thinking about how I can live in response to this deeper understanding. I think faith can play a big role. Not to give explanations, but to open the space for questions. Perhaps most importantly–How can we help? I know that churches, for instance, have served a lot of South Sudanese refugees in the resettlement process in the United States. I know that Lutheran World Federation provides essential services in Kakuma. There is always room for more partners, more funding, more prayer and mindfulness of those who are suffering.

It can be overwhelming to take in what's really happening in our world. It's so much easier to turn off to the news, to think of some reason why people must have brought suffering upon themselves, to forget about what's not right in front of our eyes. I know I will again.

Let this be one more reminder. We are all the same.

Aesthetically Speaking: Nairobi

There's a blog post bubbling up here, and I'm not sure how it will take form.

I want to write about the aesthetic experience of traveling, of Nairobi, of now. The small spaces I'm getting to know intimately. Like memorizing the back of a cereal box as a kid. It's all in the detail.

Let's start easy - the smells, the tastes, the colors. Smoke and exhaust. Lentils, papaya, and boiled water. Red, red, red mud and dark rain clouds.

At home: Tiny fruit flies flying out the sink from unwashed dishes the night before. Damp laundry on the line. Waxy bar soap. Tooth paste that is pink and tastes like baking soda, with writing on the back of the tube translated into six languages. Tucking the mosquito net under the mattress.

On the weekends: Hot sun on a long run, cooking with black beans, listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, eating chocolate after breakfast. One adventure a day. See monkeys like squirrels in the park.

At friends' house: Miss brekkie? No wuzzas, have some homemade gluten-free bread with Vegemite. Learn the rules to Australian football. Cuddle up with the friendly cat named Fish.

On the street: Awareness of my color, my wealth, my everything. Looking up from tree trunks to see how high they go. Huge puddles from rain the night before. Eye contact with strangers, and feeling strange.

At work: Greeting every coworker with a handshake. Obsessing over Dropbox. Sweet-talking harddrives. Endless photos of refugee camps -- crowds, kids, filmmaking. Indie music. Asgeir's Leyndarmal on repeat. On Friday afternoons, Indestructible African Beats and UK's Top 40 of 2004. Procrastination in the form of bookmarking progressive Christian blogs. Tea in the morning, tea in the afternoon.

A sense of falling out of myself, and falling into myself.

Especially as I pass the middle-mark of my time in Nairobi, I crave to experience new things each day. And hand in hand with that, there is occasional exhaustion – and getting lost in thoughts.

And writing them down. For you.