Background-- I was in Kenya for work this month. I was sick basically the whole time but I fought through it to be productive and then rewarded myself with lots of drug induced sleep over the weekend. The Sunday that I was scheduled to fly back to Amsterdam, a team member of mine in Nairobi took me and one other America-based team member to see the Rift Valley. It was worth the entire day in the car.
Thoughts--I have so many conflicting feelings about this sign. On one level, it's just a sign. On another level, I've allowed it to come to represent everything that I believe to be wrong with the world, whether those things are actually problematic or not. I would like to make some overarching blanket statement about how Kenyans have an amazing spirit (they do) and how much I learned while there (more than I could ever possibly hope to share) but that comes across as shallow and incomplete to me. Because I travel so much, people often ask me what a specific place is like. Until this moment, I've felt more than comfortable passing complete judgement on European countries that I'd visited for an incredibly brief time but when it comes to people asking me about Kenya, I hesitate. I found myself more often than not attempting to disengage from the conversation when someone asks me what Kenya is like because my circuits overload. It's such a loaded question! Yes, I can tell you that the wildlife is amazing. Yes, I can tell you that there are slums in Nairobi, just like there are fancy hotels. But none of this paints a picture of what it is actually like. I find myself wanting to refer people to specific news articles, books, films, photos, and websites about this place because my brain is too small to have fully processed everything after being home for only three weeks. I also hesitate to make any comments on it at all because I feel the desperate need to contextualize the shit out of everything having to do with Kenya. And this extends beyond just Kenya; this is what the whole of the whole world outside of Western Europe and North America is like for me (I am really hard on Western Europe and North America simply because I feel I should be, even though I do enjoy those places). I have so much white-girl guilt/liberal shame/desire to be the new generation of human that I think I've overwhelmed myself. If this was Europe/Canada, I would've said something *hopefully* witty and amusing by now. But, it's not. Everyone's been so curious about what it's like in Africa and all of a sudden I've become the resident expert when I've only, briefly, visited two countries. I think my problem is this: being a white girl and choosing to go to Africa seems unfathomable for most people who are not African. Yet everyone is dying to know what it's like. So, just get up and go! Just do it! I'll be here, processing my experiences for at least the next few lifetimes, especially since I have every intention of going back.
