Sam & Christina in Kenya: Day 93 - Community Relations

Buying from our favorite market vendor

Bro Love

Teaching the kids how to ruin a good picture

October 11, 2012 (Sam)

(Disclaimer: the ideas and opinions expressed here are based on our interactions and experiences here in Ongata Rongai. They are not generalizations about all Kenyans, or Americans.)

Today is our three-month mark. I can’t believe time is going so fast. We’re halfway through our stay in Kenya already!

I think, looking back on the time we’ve spent here so far, one of the things I’ve come to love the most about Kenya is the community feeling. In America, it’s so easy to isolate ourselves, to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. We can do everything from the comfort of our homes. We have surround-sound entertainment centers, self-cleaning backyard pools, workshops stocked with every power tool Home Depot sells, home gyms complete with unused treadmills, and, of course, Amazon.com. Essentially, were World War III to kick off, we’d all be okay with staying in our houses for probably a few years... at least.

We used to have to go to book stores to buy books, car garages to get our cars fixed, and public parks to swing on a swing-set. But in this age, we’ve basically created our own individual self-sustaining environments within the confines of our own 2,500 square foot homes. Everything that we used to have to go into a public setting somewhere to do, we can now do without ever having to see or talk to anyone else.

We have home-theaters (equipped with reclining couches, Netflix, and microwave popcorn), home-gyms (even our personal trainers have been substituted for the internet), and home-offices (fax machines, printers, computers that allow us to be productive without being bothered by other humans). We have deeper conversations with our iPhones than we do with our own neighbors. We have car-bubbles that we drive everywhere in. We walk a few feet from our cars into Super Wal-Mart, and are met by hundreds of faceless, nameless, emotionless people rushing around with their grocery carts, stocking up on enough food to allow them to re-isolate themselves in their house-bubbles again so they can avoid human contact for another several months... at least.

I’m not saying that any of these things are bad in and of themselves, but it is true: we live in a culture of convenience. Every resource must be available at our fingertips. And in affording ourselves these conveniences, we have paid a great price: the price of real, neighborly, face-to-face, human interactions and relationships.

This is not the case in Kenya. I swear, we couldn’t live longer than a day without leaving the house to resupply. And even then, we can’t get more than one or two items at a time. We have to go to one shop to get phone credit, another to get papers printed, another to find hand sanitizer, another to buy toilet paper... the list goes on. Even buying food is a multi-stop excursion. One street vendor for eggs, another for vegetables... wait, the prices on your onions are too high, we need to make another stop, then another for bread, another for milk. It’s like the super-market exploded into a hundred little, ill-stocked mini-markets.

And for Kenyans, this way of existence is even more extreme. There are no food cupboards, chest freezers, or walk-in pantries here. From our experience, no one here even owns a refrigerator. Instead, people just buy what they need for each day. If a certain food item is needed for dinner, they just go buy it from the closest street vendor. This means daily interactions with neighbors, shopkeepers, and peddlers; so neighbors actually develop meaningful relationships... even with their local tomato hawker!

And even in buying from vendors, there is engagement in conversation. There are no empty-eyed cashiers staring off into a space where they’re not being inconvenienced by having to ring you up. No, not here. Marketplace pleasantries consist of us exchanging extended greetings, uncomfortably long hand shakes, small talk about Kenya, and endless haggling over paying 18 cents or 24 cents for a mango. All this before even picking through the produce to find a ripe avocado for dinner.

Don’t even get me started on transportation. In the States, we are used to and comfortable in our car-bubbles that we move around in from place to place. In Kenya? Forget about it. Riding on matatus, you’re making new friends whether you like it or not. That’s what happens when there are 20 people crammed into a 14-passenger tin can. That gentleman in the business suit who you’ve never met before? He’s now sitting on your lap as you fly over speed bumps at 30mph.

We are constantly interacting with other people. And we love it. We are in a real, live, people-based community here. Our friends aren’t limited to the few people who we may have welcomed into our home. We have random friends on the streets, friends that ring us up in the grocery store, friends that bag our produce in the street market, friends that find us deals on matatus, friends whose names we don’t even know but treat us like family.

I think I could spend a long time here. A few more years... at least.