Nearly 9 weeks...

We’ve made it safely back to Nairobi (yesterday), and have spent a rainy Monday sending things back to Canada (a two hour post office adventure…ugh!!), sharing a last lunch with friends from the tour, and catching up on e-mail. I’m currently trying to upload photos, but it seems to be taking longer than expected. (Is anyone surprised by that?) We don’t have much major news at this juncture, except that we were able to meet up with my aunt and uncle yesterday before they headed out on safari this morning. It was really wonderful to spend some time with them over here, particularly since we haven’t seen them since they visited us in Hawai`i last Hallowe`en.

The end of our trip was sad, but we’re excited for our next adventure. Before we head to Egypt, however, I wanted to take some time to blog about a few things we’ve noticed along the way which we’ve failed to address due to time/Internet availability.

The children in Africa are fabulous. Sure, you could argue that children (by their very nature) are fabulous, but the kids here are different in the best possible way – they care about each other. In the last two months we’ve seen hundreds of children walking around with their arms slung over their friend’s shoulders, or else strolling hand-in-hand. When someone gets something, they don’t run to brag to the other kids – they run to tell them where they can get something too. Have we observed incidents where the reverse is true? Absolutely. While in Rwanda, Luke passed some new pens out the window to a group of raggedy young boys after making the tallest boy promise that they would share. Since he had the longest arms, the tallest of the group took the pens and immediately tried to claim them for himself. Luke reminded him several times of the conditions he had outlined, and even got off the truck and walked over to them to ensure they would be shared. We all watched this and several people gently scolded the bigger boy, but when you take a step back, you can certainly understand the sentiment here – these kids have NOTHING. Trying to get out of sharing with your mates because you just want to have something of your own is a completely reasonable reaction. (And it’s a pen for fucksake, not a Bentley.)

The kids here get so excited about things we take completely for granted – pens and socks, for example. Balloons. Milk carton cars on strings and discarded bicycle tyres pushed around with sticks. (Maybe I’m crazy, but I think my dad and his eight siblings may have played with some of the latter growing up. Am I imagining that?) For example, when we were on our banana plantation tour in Tanzania, Luke gave a little girl a big yellow balloon. By the look on her face, you would have thought he had handed her the thing she had longed for most in the entire world. And she wasn’t two or three – she was probably closer to eight. When was the last time you saw an eight-year-old in Canada/Australia/America/Europe light up like a Christmas tree when handed a simple balloon? Or witnessed kids running down the street waving at passing trucks until they were completely out of sight? The kids here have an entirely different set of values, and contribute to their daily survival rather than waiting to have things handed to them. When they fall down, they get up – they don’t sit around and cry and wait for someone to put them right again. They help with real chores – carrying water, planting and harvesting veggies, carrying their infant siblings around on their backs. Is that the kind of childhood they should have? Not to this extent, no (at least in my humble opinion). But you can see that they’re capable, caring, and strong. I wish the kids from more developed/prosperous nations had more of that.

Something that has warmed my heart but also troubled me greatly on this trip has been the reaction of the children when we wander into their villages. Without fail, I will be looking at something or listening to a local guide when all of a sudden my hands will be seized tightly by two smiling little girls. Most of the time one of them will immediately grab the hand of the next closest adult and request that we swing them in the air…which we always do. It’s awesome to see their smiles and hear their laughter when we oblige this simple request, but I’m always left thinking, “STRANGER DANGER!!” They don’t know us – what if we were bad people who wanted to hurt them? Why do they trust us so implicitly? What are we teaching them by picking them up, holding their hands, taking their photos (usually at their request – kids here love to see their images light up a digital camera screen)? Would I want my own (phantom) children running up to strangers the way these kids do? Hell no! But that just seems to be the norm here.

I don’t want these kids to be terrified of the world – God knows there are enough terrifying things about their lives already – but is there no way we could show kindness without encouraging them to throw caution to the wind?

Then again, the way these kids look after each other, maybe they feel safe because they are

When I was in graduate school, my dear friend Adrienne put some issues on my radar from her own life experience which I – as a white person – had never given much thought to before. One day when we were talking about Christmas, Adrienne asked me if I had ever noticed that all of the characters depicted in Christmas ornaments/holiday cards, etc., were white. In truth, I hadn’t. She encouraged me to take a closer look, and then told me that each year, Halmark produces ONE Christmas ornament in which a black person is featured. ONE. And that’s just for one group of people in the world – what about everyone else??? The last time I checked, white people weren’t the only ones celebrating the birth of Jesus (who wasn’t even white). I’ve thought about the conversation often, and in the years since have paid special attention to everything holiday-related which crosses my path. And you know what? The blatant racial bias is shocking. It’s true that some of the local ornaments in Hawai`i were a little better, but given the multicultural make-up of the islands, there was still a serious lack of genuine representation there.

Christmas may come once a year, but this is a problem which can be observed in many different facets of daily life. For example, when I was a teenager, I used to volunteer at a yearly holiday party for underprivileged kids in Toronto’s Jane & Finch neighbourhood. The second year I went, the little girl with whom I was to spend the day making crafts and singing songs asked Santa to bring her a baby doll with black skin. (The gifts were purchased in advance by the volunteers and then handed out by Santa at the end of the day.) I remember that mum and I thought her request would be easy to fulfill, but instead, it was insanely hard. Impossible, really. We went up to Zeller’s and upon entering the doll aisle were met with an explosion of pink, purple, and…white. Everywhere we looked, cuddly baby dolls with soft pinky-white skin stared back at us. When we finally found a doll which had even a slightly darker skin tone, we discovered that it was neither cuddly nor soft – in fact, it was quite hard and kind of scary looking. We debated what to do – we wanted to buy her what she wanted, but it was just such a hard piece of plastic that we couldn’t imagine a little girl really being able to love it. In the end, we bought her the softest pinky-white doll we could find, as well as a little pink stroller seat thingie, doubling the strict budget outlined by the organisers. (Guilt, perhaps?)

With those two distinct memories in mind, I began my journey in Africa thinking that I would discover all kinds of wonderful dolls and ornaments and other such treasures which I could share with my friends back home. But you know what? Africans have all of the same imported shit from China that we have, and there isn’t a pretty, soft black baby doll to be found! What’s the underlying message there, kids? Interestingly – and by interestingly I mean disturbingly – the print advertisements which are plastered all over the countries we’ve visited may feature way more people of colour than we’re used to seeing at home, but we couldn’t help but notice that most of them have veeeeeery light skin. Much lighter than we’ve seen here. What’s that about?

In an earlier post we mentioned our friend Jade, a British music teacher who has been living and working in Gilgil (Kenya) for the last two years. Towards the end of our six weeks with Jade we were talking about something when she revealed that her students – who are very well-to-do and are both black and white – think Beyonce and Barack Obama are white. Hmmm.

Food for thought.

We’ve now been in Africa for nearly nine weeks – where has the time gone?! Tomorrow we head to Egypt early in the morning. Not sure if we’ll post from there at all – it’s going to be a pretty full-on experience – but we’ll try to post some updates from Morocco next week if nothing else. Lots of love! xox