Jonathan vs Jeniffer

Two months ago I was in Paris, having a very different version of a vacation than I am now. In Paris, I stayed with a friend Jonathan, and his sisters. There could not be a bigger class difference between staying with Jonathan and staying here at Lokusero. And I’m somewhere in between. By American standards, I’m middle class, maybe upper middle class. But when I stayed with Jonathan it was obvious that I was much below the standards of his usual company. I was dressed in clothes that were functionally tasteful but not by any means lavish, extravagant, or high class. He was high class.

Well past midnight one night, drunk until lucid on his own fatigue and desperate desire to let down his bullet proof walls, the image he had been brought up to maintain, we ate takeout pizza and I listened as he complained and dug for answers to a huge number of unanswerable questions. He tossed the half eaten pizza slice down onto the cluttered bare slab of table thrown in the middle of an obviously unused kitchen, in disgust. Judging by the amount of nights he spends at overpriced restaurants- the kind you go to “to be seen”, he explained to me- I’m guessing the crusted plates stacked in the sink were weeks old. “Zis peeza iz sheet”, he morosely proclaimed as if his idealistic hopes in the good of the world rested in that flavorless slice of lukewarm pizza. Secretly, I rejoiced. After all the incredible food I had had in Paris, takeout from “Speedy Rabbit Pizza” was nothing compared to oober American Pizza Hut or Dominoes. I was brimming with patriotic pride.

His life had no meaning, he said. No end goal to strive for. All of his inherent values were rooted in the acquisition of money which, being a millionaire by the age of 22 and having worked for none of it, had already been fulfilled. Ah, what a perfect ice breaker for a late-night conversation over shitty take-out. What a cliché! Straight from the movies. But the US is so beyond melodramatic clichés. As well as in the pizza arena, in terms of cinema, la belle France, with its flaky delicious pastries and impossibly perfected baguette, lags far behind the US. The consciously emulated cliché of the scene (the romantic tragedy of it!) would have been acknowledged and avoided by now in an American kitchen. We’re already onto indy films for god sake! Random and awkward is the new tragic romance and the French are at least several years behind.

All in all, after having successfully reassured myself that France is not better than the US, as all the French seem to believe, I dropped the subject from my mind and fully applied myself to the situation at hand. Which amounted to this: money, the abundance of money, wealth and stature one has not worked for, being brought up through high society values, results in misery. (We’ve all seen Titanic. And doesn’t Kate look beautiful in her suffering? That’s all they can hope for. That beautifully misunderstood misery, the tragedy of which maybe somehow justifies and gives credence to the whole pretty process. The same allure people have to drama. That pathetic boredom of oneself that an audience is needed to justify ones own self worth. And how do you get an audience? By putting on a show.)

Despite Jonathan’s endless reminders of and references to his Italian leather boots, spacious Parisian apartment and bottomless credit card, he was miserable. Money and those beautiful imported boots, which he made sure to heavily let fall on each step so as to reverberate the metronome of his stride in the sleeping Place de Victor Hugo (maybe the ripples would grow and lap up on some distant shore to prove he had been there and done something), that excessive publicized abundance was all that he had. His hastily predetermined self-image lacked the depth of a self-made one. So he was miserable. And lost.

Here, two months later in the Kenyan Maasai community surrounding Lokusero Primary School, self-made is all that they’ve got. People are left to their own devices from the beginning. I sit in my room with Jeniffer, a mother of three who is only a few years older than me. We bead together, neither one of us being able to speak the other’s language. Her three toddlers are wandering around somewhere, sucking on dirt clods, kicking around elephant dung like soccer balls. The closest thing to a toy that they have are little cars made of milk cartons, sticks and the lids to containers of lard, which they tie to a string and let wheel behind them as they walk. At one, three, and five, they are more often than not left to wander, take care of and amuse themselves. And at Lokusero, complete with more than two changes of clothes, I’m as upper class as it gets. One US dollar being equivalent to 80 Kenya shillings, once a week for the five weeks of my stay, I would go to town and buy the following week’s worth of groceries for 5- 10 people as easily as my friend whose impeccable and magazine-decorated house Im staying at now, my last night in Kenya, equipped with armed guards, several maids and set on 15 acres, paid my four hour private taxi ride to her house with a wad of bills and a quick, dismissive, “don’t worry about it- it’s nothing.”

After talking to the headmaster of the school, I learned that sponsoring a kid through secondary school costs about 300 US dollars per year. For most Maasai families, considering the four or five other kids they have to worry about, and that selling cattle, their only source of income, would be relinquishing their only known livelihood, that fee is insurmountable. But for me, an average middle class American, someone who will often make a choice between muffins at a café based on a 50 cent price difference, left the teacher’s office thinking I could sponsor my favorite student through an entire year of secondary school in a matter of a few determined weeks of babysitting.

Many of my friends from the community don’t understand why I decided to spend my time there when I could be in the states, going to movies, taking real showers and eating more than the cabbage and potatoes that I had for lunch and dinner every day of those five weeks. “If I ever ever made it to America”, I heard many people say, “I would throw away my passport and never come back.“ But what’s the better life really? Yes- many of them have never sat on a toilet seat, they have no running water or electricity, and water must be fetched in the morning because by the afternoon the wells and springs are dry. But no one is depressed or anxious, people aren’t jealous of one another, there are no problems with body image, stress or suicide, things that in the US, are commonplace and a regular part of life. Is this really a better life than waking up to roosters, walking through the fresh early morning air into the forest for a bucket of water, cooking over a fire, hours from the closest town but surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of friends and family, spending the day walking around the forest grazing goats and going to sleep when the sun goes down? Their whole lives are right there.

Clinging onto the roof rack of the bus to town, racing down bumpy red dirt roads through open fields of yellowing grasses, elephants and giraffes against a perfect clean blue sky, my friend the bus driver says, “Life in Kenya”, despite the corrupt government, changing world and devastating draught, “is akuna mutata”, no problem.

In western countries, maybe its something about that constant desire to better oneself that set Jonathan into a directionless cycle of depression. Fashion magazines with new styles, new colors for every season, and by the time the magazines get into print, the styles have already changed. News coming out every minute from 20 different sources, if we skip a week of which, were ill-informed and naiive. So everyone’s constantly behind schedule. The world’s moving faster and faster with styles, diet advice, technology. By the time you get a new program for your new shiny white mac, you only have a few months before the operating system changes and you have to update all your software.

Some people feed off of that chaos. They need to be rushing and always need to have a to-do list in progress or else they get antsy. In a lot of ways, I’m that person. I love making lists and crossing things off so I can see on paper that I’ve been productive. I like being efficient and planning out the routes to take in order to conquer as many obstacles and cross as many items as possible off my list. But it’s all a distraction. This way of life based on bouncing from goal to goal, implying that this right now, is not good enough, not where we want to be.

But is the other side of the coin any better? The contentedness that makes people idle and lets them settle for sub-par conditions. Maybe by acknowledging finding this balance as a struggle of mine, I'm one of those people who’s not content. Looking for answers means that I have questions. Does questioning things mean that I’m not happy with it as is? And if we let things go, stop questioning, would we have a shitty government ruled by class division, bribery and corruption like Kenya’s? Would we all be God-fearing Christians like the Masaais who mollified me as we said out tearful goodbyes that if God wished it to be so, we would meet again? “No!” I thought, “If I work my ass off for the next few years, saving every penny and eating in for every meal as you sit idly by, THEN we’ll meet again. And you’ll attribute it not to my hard work but to your constant prayer.”

Westerners- we do things. We make things happen. But why must an underlying discontentedness accompany that? Would we have the motivation to strive for better if we were perfectly happy with the way things are? Is it worth it? Is it worth getting things done, making things happen and moving things forward if we never take the time to enjoy the fruits of our labor?

I read a bible passage that said literally word for word “friendship with the world is enmity with God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” I asked my friend Nasioki if it actually meant that because I just couldn’t believe to have read that in a book that so many people follow as a set of guidelines for how to live life. I asked if that was correct and he shrugged and said, “Ya, I guess. That’s how it should be at least”, like it was a truth that didn’t quite make sense to him but would eventually be beaten into him. His skepticism, I’m sure, lay as proof that he is a sinner and further propels the fear of God that has stripped him of all solitary thinking and genuine personal beliefs and left in its tracks a worn down, beaten up, quivering believer.

But those same people, who believe that worshipping this land and this moment, is pagan, godless and sacrilegious, are the ones who are the most, using western words, spiritual, zenned-out, and “in the moment” people I’ve ever met. And we modern skeptical scientists plan for spiritual retreats months in advance and, the more “in touch” of us, map out our days with hours blocked out for meditation and yoga classes. None of it makes sense. We’re both all terribly opposite and upside-down, preaching one thing and practicing the exact opposite.

And when it’s put like that, I can step back, look at it all, and laugh, and go enjoy a nice lunch of fresh salads, cheese and crackers on the beautiful veranda of the house I’m staying at in transit from Maasai village to the white, democratic super-productive hippy bubble of Boulder. They’re all bubbles. And I’m in a bath tub watching them all float around, bump into each other, pop and reform. I’m poking at all of them, trying their boundaries, letting myself drift from one to the next, not yet choosing to embody any just one.

And speaking very literally now, no double meanings whatsoever, these last five weeks have saturated my pores in dirt and dust and the bath water is straight up disgusting. It will take many more baths over the next week or so to get fully clean again.