On the Eve of leaving the comfort of the Sheywe Guest House for my host family in Lusui, I want to with you information about where I am going, what I have been doing during the past week, and four-bullet guide to learning a few facts about Aid and the US Government.
At the Precipice, Part 2
When I wrote my first blog about heading to Africa, I figured that I would be leaving on a journey that would be dramatically different than the life I was living in America. That wasn’t as true as I expected. So far I’ve been experiencing Africa from a very first-world perspective. From staying in the Holy Cross Community compound to being housed in a relatively luxurious Hotel in Kakamega, the accommodations have been both comfortable and familiar. In fact, right now I am sitting in a hotel room with my fellow American (and Canadian) interns, fresh from making a trip to a very Walmart-esque shopping mart. This is all about to change. Tomorrow morning, I leave for my host family, 15 km out of Kakamega in a very, very rural area. Culture shock has been muted to this point, but I expect it to hit hard as I adjust to the life of a rural Kenyan. I’m very excited to move onto the immersion part of this development program, and cannot wait to be thrown into a foreign community and struggle to adapt and become comfortable in that environment.
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| This scene in rural Kakamega resembles the view from my homestay, which I will move into tomorrow morning! |
KiSwahili Training, Hippopotamus Sightings
The last week I’ve spent with the other 10 interns going through intensive Swahili language training and preparations for both our internship and living with a host family. Our Kiswahili teacher was Mwita, an expert language teacher who came from Nairobi to teach the lessons and has a background giving private lessons to individuals and teaching sessions UN. Just a quick note, Kiswahili in the language, and Swahili are the people. I think I have that right. Think about it like American vs. English. Regardless, it was easily the most of a foreign language that I have ever learned in one week. I can now translate most of the lines to The Lion King Song “In the Jungle.” Swahili Fun Fact: Hakuna Matata, the famous phrase from The Lion King, actually means no worries. Hakuna is a Kiswahili word for no, and Matata means problems, or worries.
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| Mwite used his go-to white board to impress upon our minds the day's three hour Kiswahili lesson. |
Although the rest of the activities during the week of orientation were beneficial, a clear highlight was the time that we spend today in Kisumu. Kisumu is Kenya’s 3rd largest city, and it lies about 1 hour to the south of Kakamega. This morning we packed a small bus (or matatu. Stay tuned to future blogs for a complete run down of the variety of transportation opportunities in Kakamega) and left for Kisumu. There were easily more people in the bus than there were seats, and the journey was quite cramped. Luckily, the beauty of the rolling valleys on both sides of the road provided a needed distraction to the uncomfortable journey.
Kisumu is a sleepy but expanding city. The downtown area felt a lot like Nairobi, except for the lack of consisted hustle and bustle. The resident were definitely following the African way of “Pole Pole”, or take it slowly. After exploring the downtown region, we boarded “tuk tuks” (3 wheeled vehicles that resemble a drivable horse carriage), and went to Kiboko Bay, a secluded resort and restaurant on Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world. Lake Victoria’s borders are shared by Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. After a very respectable lunch at the resort restaurant, we climbed into a tour boat to explore the lake and search for one of its famed inhabitants... the hippopotamus.
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| Walking today along the streets of Kisumu,a more relax, smaller version of Nairobi. |
After about half an hour of touring the lake and searching, we finally came upon a pair of hippos munching on water plants near the shore. Hippos actually kill more people each year than sharks, so it’s not quite a “swim with the hippos” experience. Still, it was amazing to see such huge beast in the wild, even if we were only to catch a glimpse of their heads as they surfaced to catch a breath.
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| Leaving with the other interns to explore Lake Victoria with our boat guides. |
Entrepreneurship Scholars in Reflection
This past year I took part in the Entrepreneur Scholars program, a one year program that focuses on international business skills and facilitates the process of starting your own business. I think the key difference in the E-scholar program that I am just starting to appreciate was the level is independence and responsibility given to the E-scholars. Both in China and New York, individual students were responsible for contacting businessmen individually, setting up meetings individually, than arranging transport to these meetings without any assistance from a professor. The trust given by the E-Scholar faculty was very empowering, and I learned more than I ever could because I was forced to make mistakes and make discoveries on my own when traveling, knowing that I had a support staff if needed. So far in this trip I have felt confident in my ability to take initiative and work in another culture, thanks to the knowledge I gained in E-Scholars.
Become (Relatively) Informed and Well-Read About Aid in Four Bullet Points
One of the important parts of this FSD experience is reading and learning a lot about development as a whole to better improve my understanding of development. Here are a couple of insights I don’t think are well known from a book I just finished “Africa Doesn’t Matter” by Giles Bolton. The book explores Africa’s relationship with the West and poses theories for why Africa has stayed in such relative poverty.
- - There were 39,729 branches of international charities in Africa in 2003. That’s a mind boggling number, and it makes me cringe at the possibility (and reality) of overlap and inefficiency. Obviously, charities alone won’t solve the problem of development in Africa.
- - The United States is country of bi-polar donors. On a private basis, we are near the top of the list of developed countries in terms of per person private donation ($30 per person). On a national level, we are the second lowest developing country in terms of national aid per person (.17% of Gross National Income
- - Africa is severely under populated in terms for its size. India is about a tenth as big, and supports more people. This just goes to show that a lot of ideas about Africa that people might hold are not true when it comes to on-the-ground realities.
- - Only $4 out of every $10 of America Aid goes to developing poor countries, and only 24% of that money goes to improving actual real poverty on the ground. So for every $10 of American Aid, we are making $1 of change in developing countries.
What’s the point of this section? The system of aid to the development world is ineffective (and sometimes uninformed). Especially in terms of US Government, we are not getting a high value for our dollar in terms of development in poor countries. To read more, “Africa Doesn’t Matter” is an amazing book that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in Africa or development throughout the world.
Moving On…
I’ll write again next week and reflect on my first days at the Lusui Friend’s Secondary School, and well as the beginning of my time with my host family.