Poverty has a face

November 10, 2007

Never have I felt so far from my world as I am today. And I just now ran away to a place called Shewe Guest House, the most upscale hotel in Kakamega. I am sitting in a banda, overlooking a peaceful green valley. From the town, I can hear the politicians speaking and people cheering for them. But that is another story.

Since I first came to Kenya, I’ve lived in Kakamega for the equivalent of 8 months. Kakamega is a very poor town, even though is in the midst of an active agricultural area and is a commercial center. I’ve been working with micro finance clients who are generally not the lowest on what is called the pyramid of poverty. My meetings with clients are held at central meeting places which have limited my experience of what their lives are like. I’ve also been invited to people’s homes in Kakamega but surprisingly those houses didn’t match my preconceived notion of their living conditions. Those people live in permanent houses with cement walls and cement floors. They were sparsely furnished, but the family lived comfortably by Kenyan standards.

Last night, that changed. The picture is Faith and Junior. When I lived in a part of town called Koromatangi, these children lived along the road where I walked to and from town everyday. Their house on the road was a one room mud walled hut with a dirt floor. I was never invited in, but from the door I could see that there were no furnishings in the house. Really, like most all little kids on the lane, Faith and Junior were always excited to greet the mzungus who lived in their neighborhood. But Junior was especially enthusiastic. He’d wait in the road in front of his house at the time he knew I would be walking home, and from way down the road I could hear him shout, Mzungu, Mzungu! Then, as I got closer, he would run and jump into my arms, sometimes stumbling along with his pants falling down around his knees. He was indomitable. When Bob visited, he and Junior became good buddies. I think he was drawn to Bob because of the curly white hair and Bob’s crazy laugh. Bob loved Junior’s spunk, often he had just gotten in trouble for doing something mischievous. Ultimately, Bob and I decided that we would like to provide financial support for these children to attend a private primary school. In Africa, investing in a child’s education is one of the only effective ways to help him to find a better life as an adult. School tuition, uniforms, transportation, lunch and books and paper cost $375 per year for each child. I really don’t know why we chose these particular children over the hundreds of other children like them. In Kenya people would say that we had been sent by God in response to their prayers.

Yesterday, I visited their house. In an informal way, our financial support has made me the “shosho” or grandmother of the house. Mama ya Faith met me at the road to escort me to the house. She looked so young; she must be about 21 or 22 years old. She has three children, Faith is the oldest and she is about 4.

At the house, I met poverty face to face. This family of five live in a one room house that is approximately 8 feet by 14 feet. The room is divided in half by a sheet hanging from the ceiling. The sitting room has two or three chairs and a coffee table. The second “room” contains a bed in which all five people sleep and where they store what few things they own. There is no electricity.

Every child in the neighborhood greeted me in the yard. I brought my camera and they loved it when I took their pictures and they could see them on the monitor. There were so many little hands grabbing at me and so many unattended snotty noses.

Mama ya Faith sent one of the kids to buy a coke for me. Conversation was difficult, she spoke broken English and I spoke bad Kiswahili, but the welcome was genuine. Shortly, baba ya junior came home. I had never met Joseph before and at that moment; the reality of everything hit me. The dad is very sick and if I am guessing right, he is severely affected with AIDS. His eyes were sunken and he was gaunt. When it got dark in the house, they sent one of the children to buy about 12 cents worth of kerosene for the lantern.

Even living here, until I experienced it, I was hanging on to my idealized view of poverty. It’s disheartening and discouraging. I want to save everyone. But, in reality, even Bill Gates can’t provide for them.

My good friend, Peter Ingosi, who has been my mentor and teacher in Kakamega has told me a thousand times that the “way forward” is not by giving people money. Until yesterday, I’ve always been halfway skeptical of this advise. He’d tell me that ultimately, they have food for today, but nothing else. I had to meet poverty at Faith and Junior’s house to finally understand his advice. Right now, there are no jobs and no hope for people in Kakamega. Foreign aid has a choice, we can feed the people for one day or we can use our resources to help them build industries that will provide jobs to feed them tomorrow and the next day.

You know what, it is an overwhelming job. Sometimes I want to give up and turn away just like I am doing today as I sit here on the Veranda of Shewe Guest House. I want to pretend that somehow people will manage because they have for hundreds of years. But, it is getting harder for me to ignore that in my time and place, I have been more than fortunate. All of my problems together don’t measure up to the struggle Africans face when they have the perseverance to get up every morning and find a way to make it through another day. Words sound so corny and inadequate in trying to tell this story. I just hope that sharing my experience will help people understand at some level that it is so important that we keep trying, because the people here are not giving up, they have no other choice.

FAMILY LIFE IN KAKAMEGA

I woke up feeling gray today. Not on my head, but in spirit. The weather here has been very rainy, people say it is due to global warming. It is supposed to be summer here, but it has rained every day and night for the last couple of weeks. And I mean rain, it absolutely pours down cats and dogs. It makes traveling around town very challenging. Balancing an umbrella while riding on a boda boda is a practiced skill, and then the umbrella doesn't totally protect me so I end up soaking wet when I get where I am going. Believe it or not, it is a little bit cold as well, jacket weather. It is just not what you expect in equatorial Africa.

In any event, I was invited to the home of my friend Evelyn Buhenza last night for tea. She lives in a permanent two bedroom house with about 10 or 12 members of her family. The house doesn't have electricity. The kitchen is a small shack behind the house where the mama cooks over a fire and the tradition 3 stones. the goat pen also shares the kitchen. Goat milk is rumored to be very nutritious especially for people with HIV. Their are also some chickens who live in the house with their chicks so that they are out of weather and more likely to survive. Evelyn is my friend who is HIV positive and has herpes xoster which is a large brown growth on the left side of her face. It is painful, it semi paralyzes her face and she has lost all of her teeth on the left side as a result of it. She is taking ARV which is very successful in keeping the virus from progressing However there are side effects like the stomach ulcers she has.

Evelyn has been lucky that her family has welcomed her back after her husband died of AIDS and she tested positive. The stigma is so high here that most HIV positive people are left to manage on their on. However, Evelyn has joined another woman here who has publicly acknowleged that they are HIV positive and have become active advocates for overcoming stigma and inspiring other HIV positive people to seek ARV treatment and to find ways to live positively while looking toward the future. As many of you know, Evelyn has returned to school to get a degree in social services and i have raised a small amount of money from people in Chico to assist her with the tuition. I really respect and admire her and am happy to be able to support her work. She has told me that when she tested positive she felt like she has received a death sentence and that her family felt like they were living with a dead person. But now she has so many opportunities and is so enthusiastic about her work and her goals for the future.

My greyness disappeared after meeting with her at her school this morning. She has to be extremely brave because as we walked down the street, people openly stared at her and her face. I am uncomfortable being stared out because I am white, but people here believe that a person with HIV has somehow done something immoral so her reception is for the most part very distant. I've realized how far we've come in the US since the Ryan White case.

She is also one of the rare women feminists in Kakamega. Women have traditionally held an inferior position here. Sincerely their only option was to get married early so that they did not remain a burden to her parents. The Luyha tribe, where I live, still pay dowries. Funny enough, when people die here they are buried in the family plot inside the shamba or boma. But if a woman dies without getting married and her husband dies and she doesn't remarry, she is buried outside the boma, usually at a place far away. She was also telling me about women and children outside of marriage. It's required that the woman name a father on the a birth certificate. If she doesn't know the father, she is forced to name someone. Then , the man's parents are entitled to come and take the child to raise. However, if the family doesn't believe the man is actually the father, they will take the child but most likely the child won't survive.

Those sound like terrible stories, but ultimately, it is all about a scarcity of resources. People do what they have to do to survive and to keep their families going. These are such hard concepts for me to understand and I try my best to not make any judgements because, I have never been faced with those choices. I imagine it will take more than one or two generations to make the changes that Evelyn and those few other women are stuggling for.

POLITICS IN KENYA

This is an election year in Kenya. The president serves for 5 years and can be elected to office twice. The current president, Kibaki, is running for reelection.

Kenya gained indepence from the British in 1963, so they haven't been participating in government for very long. It is unbelievably interesting to watch the process that we must have gone through a couple of hundred years ago. The first president was kenyatta, he was highly respected and got the country off to a good start. Then, in 1981, i think, Daniel Arape Moi took power and ruled until 5 years ago. Moi was totally corrupt and almost bankrupted the country while doing nothing for the people. He neglected all the infrastructure so badly that i think it will take 20 years for Kenya to catch up, even under the assumption that the government will honestly allocate money for the projects. The worst and biggest hurdles to economic development is the roads. The roads make it almost impossible to get raw materials to and from places and to get finished goods to market. The other day I took a matatu to a town called Kericho, which is the tea capital of the country. The road was so bad that the cars have simply driven off the side of the road and made a new dirt road. it was literally four wheel driving the whole way. and of course, the driver drove mostly 80 miles an hour except for the really bad potholes. as we say, any day you get somewhere safely in the matatu is a good day.

anyway, all the politicians(they are called aspirants) who are running for office are now campaigning around the country and the people are talking about nothing except the elections. It is Kibaki(a kikuyu) against Raila Odinga(a luo). Kibaki is for the status quo, which is to keep all power in Nairobi and manage in a top down approach. Raila is supporting a radical idea which is to transfer power to the provinces and let them decide how to use their taxes and natural resources best. Unfortunately, the majority of the people in the rural areas are not well educated about government and are easily swayed by who gives the best t-shirt at the rally. in addition, no matter who gets elected, managing resources in kenya is all about taking care of your own. first priority is your extended family, then your tribe, then your community. It has been that way for hundreds of generations and i sincerely don't know if it will ever change. i think there is a growing population of young people who would like to see change, but they are swimming against the current.

Yesterday at the Golf Hotel, one of the "American" hotels in town there was a big rally. i was eating lunch there and watching the dynamics of the goings on. There were quite a few well dressed men who exuded an air of importance who i took to be the candidates and their staff. Their was a canopy set up on the lawn and all the seats there were filled with men. There interstingly enough, a section of chairs outside the tent where the women sat. The rally started with a long prayer and then, the women did some sort of welcoming song for the cadidate. After that, it was a speech that could be heard by any candidate in any country.

However, in spite of the exclusion of the women by the general audience, there are several women who are running for office all over Kenya. The unfortunate thing is that, every day in the newspaper, there are stories about those women getting beaten up. It is condemned by the press, but of course, the people in the rural areas who are participating in this do not frequently read the papers. it is definitely a slow going and painful process of political reform.

I wish I was going to be here for the elections which are held in December. The energy of the town has really picked up with all the activity and i imagine things will really start to get interesting. My prediction is that Kibaki will triumph. In my experience, Kenyans are slow to accept change and prefer to hope that the current situation will improve, rather than risk the unknown.