A Frustrated Rant about Love, God and Idle Worship

Because the women are always busy doing laundry and not knowing how to speak English, and the elders are always perched somewhere in a plastic chair doing nothing but looking noble, my core friends at Lokusero are 20 something year old guys, who watch after their goats here and there, sometimes fix the fence that gets destroyed by elephants in a different place every night, but who mainly like to sit around doing absolutely nothing. And they love to ask me questions about America and they all have their own absurd and ill-logical plan to get to America and come back rich.

But they dont ask me the things that I would expect- about big houses, rich people, movie stars, cars and different food. Instead, they ask about the things that theyre familiar with because thats all they know. So they ask about traditions, ceremonies, female circumcision, marriage, weather (and they always lump the entire US into one overarching question- "Is your country very cold?", which takes a lot of explaining and often maps drawn into the dirt with a stick). Other things they like to ask about: whether we have goats and chickens in our houses and if not, where does meat come from?, what houses are made of ("What do you mean cow dung is not a good insulator??"), and if people have big dogs as pets and if so, can I get them one?
Ive realized how free the US is. In terms of religion, traditions and love mainly.

In the US, people who break traditions are encouraged and thought to be original and cool. Originality and individualism is valued. If someone wants, they can have Thanksgiving in April and everyone has their own tradition for Christmas- some people cook duck, some people order out for chinese, and all of it is more than welcomed. The more original, the more individual, the better. And love. Being able to love who you want, and when you do love, being able to be with that person and if you no longer love each other, being able to split up. Ive never thought higher of divorce than I do now- thats a huge freedom and a huge luxury- the notion of standing up for oneself and being true to one's own desires. Those ideas are unheard of here, especially for women. And the oppression of women- not so much literal, explicit ways (although there's that too: circumcision, early marriage...) but its just so deeply rooted in the culture that its even worse. (Like isnt it better to beat a dog out of spite and anger, trying to make a point by purposely crossing a line, than to beat a dog without thinking twice about it because there is no line to cross?) The guys around here, even the good, new age guys who I hang out with and who oppose female circumcision and who claim to want equality, they dont do shit all day. They sit around for hours doing absolutely nothing, while right in front of them, girls and women are walking to and from water pumps with gallons of water strapped to their hunched over backs, carrying two children, fetching firewood, doing laundry,... The guys cook half the time and take the goats out in the bush for them to graze but that usually ends in a pub stop and stumbling home hours later, but still midday, drunk.

And people still pay dowries for marriage here! Women! Being traded like goods! In exchange for sheep, a cow, some sugar, a few blankets. Marriage here is an agreement between two families- its more of the families choice than the couples. The freedom to date! To love someone and fall out of love, even the freedom for a woman to enjoy sex!

Im becoming thankful for, or at least aware of so many things that I hadnt even considered before. I dont want to say "take for granted" because I think gender equality and loving who you want to love are things that should be granted. So its not a luxury of ours, its them being deprived of a basic necessity of life. The ability to strive for something higher and better as well. To not just settle for the bathroom door that sticks every time one opens or closes it- but to raise one's standards and not just settle for something thats just okay and will be enough to get by. I've always hated (and a big part of me still does) the home improvement mentality, that makes one always think their lives would be better with a dining room of a different color, and a guest room with nicer blinds. But the self- empowerment behind that, the notion that one is in control of his own happiness and comfort, and its he who is responsible for having not gotten that job he only half tried for, of having a house thats messy or a yard thats cluttered.

Here, its not the people who are in control, responsible and able, its God. These people really follow the bible, not as a code of morals, the aesops fables that I see it as, but as literal history that, with enough prayer, is likely to repeat itself. Why dont they see that the people in biblical stories, they didnt follow their traditions, they broke out, they rose up and became leaders and made decisions and did things! They were radicals and they were not always socially excepted and they were not idle. They were empowered.

I went to church last sunday. I was so impressed by their devotion. And their energy and strength. Kids whose voices Id never heard before because theyre the shy kids in class who are incompetent, never understand whats going on, and obviously see no value whatsoever in education, can stand and pace in front of their whole village preaching the word of god and leading prayer and songs, dancing up and down the aisle. And then everyone will collapse into cathartic and emotional prayer asking God for things that they might realize they already have been given if they didnt throw their candy wrappers on the beautiful, massive expanses of untouched land around them (dont they see that THIS is God?? Theyre too busy looking up to the heavens, that they dont see God all around them. And look at this land! If they just looked at it, how is it not clear that the earth must be older that 6000 years- just by actually looking at it!) And school. Theyre the ones who take school for granted as one of their very few tickets out. All of these things- they pray for things to be handed to them accompanied by the booming voice of God, telling them exactly what to do, not realizing that maybe the oppurtunities they turn down every day in waiting for some divine intervention, maybe THATS what God has given. They think progressing and striving for something better means that theyre not content with what God has given. But like a parent, maybe God sets us up for success and then steps back, hoping we'll run with it, instead of sitting at his feet with empty pockets and open hands.

Here's a joke I know: So theres a guy and his town is flooding and the flood has risen so high that hes stranded on his roof and waters are still rising but he's not afraid because he says "God will save me". A boat comes by to rescue him but he turns it down saying, "God will save me". One more rescue boat and then a helicopter come by but he turns them all down saying "God will save me." So then, of course, the flood waters get too high and eventually he drowns. When he gets to heaven, he asks God, "Why didnt you save me?? I prayed and prayed" and God says, "What do you mean? I sent two boats and a helicopter!"

I wish the kids here put as much into their education as they did into their prayer. So heres my little prayer: Im thankful for being empowered, for relying on myself and not others, and certainly not some unattainable, heavenly force. That's just bound to bring about either a massive inferiority complex, some serious disappointment, or the idleness that prevents this community from moving forward.

September 5th
Two months since Ive been away from home and counting. I landed in Kenya on the first and am living in a little village hours outside of the first city big enough to have internet. I don’t even know where to begin. Ive been here only five days but already feel so saturated that I barely have anything to say, like when your bladder is so full that when you actually go to the bathroom, you can just get a tiny trickle out. So Ill just start talking in the very formulated, bullet-point mode of organization that completely contradicts how this entire society is run, but may help me regain a small feeling of western control.

-To get to Nanyuki, the town that I am in now, I piled into a dirty van this morning with nothing written on the outside except for “Maximum: 14”. I squeezed into the front seat and was handed a little boy who was to sit on my lap. I gave my money to a man wearing khaki pants and a huge pink down jacket despite the heat. The driver, who cant get enough of the name “Cookie”, was the same cheerful smiling Kenyan who drove me and my friend Dickson to the village on my first night here. On that ride, the van was so packed that after the fifth person piled into the front bench seat, I found myself scooted over until I was straddling the stick shift, every shift of gears establishing a closer relationship between the drivers hand and my inner thighs. But he was oblivious to it anyway, as he jabbered on his cell phone, opened the door while racing down an ill-kept dirt road to check on the underside of the car, and joked in Swahili with the my Maasai warrior friend on the opposite side of me. Today, he had been wearing a heavily beaded and accessorized tan hat that jingled when he walked, and a shirt that said “Everyone has to have something to believe in. Right now, I believe I’ll have a beer”. Before we left, he had to get out of the car and hold people in as he closed the door, similar to how you close a closet door really fast after throwing the last few things in there that there is obviously no room for. An hour later, when everyone piled out of the van to crouch in the shade while the driver opened the hood to replace a few parts that had fallen out along the way, I counted twenty men and women, seven small children, one nursing infant, and one large chicken. Despite the crowded, hot, long and bumpy ride, no one complains. The baby didn’t cry once and the two five year old boys sitting on my lap didn’t utter a sound except to point out to each other the elephants moving past our window. Im not sure what keeps them so quiet, whether it’s a constant mild illness numbing their motivation to complain or fidget, a general acceptance of the way things work, or whether it’s the cultural lack of any desire to work to better itself that has frustrated me since the minute I stepped off the airplane and into an airport lacking any organization whatsoever despite the teeming mass of people who had no idea what they were supposed to be doing or where they were supposed to be going. Either way, the obviously sick boy sitting faintly on the ground with a chicken on his lap and staring into a plastic bag ready ready for him to vomit into, casts shame on every American parent to a whiney kid who throws a hissy fit at the supermarket when his mom wont buy him the flavor of ice cream he wants. “Nzuri?” I asked a woman sitting next to me, who I assumed was his mom. (Is he okay?) She nodded at me confidently, said something to the boy which sounded something like “hey, sit up and stop passing out. You’re scaring the white girl”, repositioned the baby in her lap, and continued to stare out the window.

-My house is a room in a long cement building with a tin roof, separated into rooms with a small area in the front to make a fire and cook, and a room in the back with a table, chair, bed and a window. Light comes from a propane lantern and water comes from a pump 5 minutes away. And for those of us who arent immune to the countless diseases transmitted in the sitting water that feeds the pump, drinking water comes from a bottle. Maybe that explains why people here drink very little water and a tons of tea- which has been boiled and so is safe. But I think the tea isn’t so much for hydration, its more for the spoons and spoons of sugar that they put in each cup. The bathroom is a cement building a few hundred feet away with a hole dug in the ground with no toilet paper. Im not sure if everyone brings their own or if Im the only one who does that.

So much more to say but sitting down in front of a computer for a few hours to write has been pushed to the back of my priority list and has been replaced with beading with my favorite old lady friend Grace who looks ancient but is surprisingly spunky and agile. She speaks about 10 words of English, all of which Im proud to say Ive taught her, and I speak about the same in Maasai. I wonder how old she is but she has no idea. Other things that have replaced computer time: futile attempts to clean my feet, fetching pales of water, drinking tea and staring off into the distance, playing with focusing and unfocusing my eyes, washing laundry, learning swahili, and roasting goats.