Tuesday, September 25, 2012

More Than Four Years

Kenya. Bungoma. ICODEI.
Uganda. Zanzibar. Kenyan Coast.

From more than four years out, it's like these memories are so vivid and so real, but so far removed from who I am right now. I read these entries and I see myself, maturing in my vision of how things are and how things should be, prepared to tromp off and do some good somewhere--anywhere.

It's interesting to see the pains that I sometimes took to see myself as doing it right. As if somehow, me, precocious engineer and wanna-be humanitarian health worker, had viewed the answer and knew that I could help it along. The picture is more complicated than that, and I guess I'm not doing myself justice to say that I was ignorant of the pitfalls of the sort of aid philosophy that I was taking part in. I'm not sure I was completely wrong, it's just with things like this there are aspects that just can't be quantitatively measured. The 'why?' asked too many times at the different justifications I made for my work and travel leads ultimately to some fundamental ideas...ideas that really aren't based in anything more than the taught principles of a relatively privileged Western white viewpoint.

The sound of the tortoises in Zanzibar...creaking and expelling breathy entreaties for more food. The clinic or rural mobile clinic days with explosive music and medicine, and dancing and clapping and the solar panel that ran a few light bulbs and sitting under the mango tree in the hills and midnight SCUBA and Mnemba island and just-right timed ipod sing-alongs and sugarcane sugarcane sugarcane...Lake Victoria and tilapia and ugali and as many kinds of mango as I ever knew existed in every size and level of ripeness requiring a mango tasting vocabulary that doesn't exist.

Echoes of east Africa colored and contrasted my time in the middle east.

The website for volunteerkenya.org features three of my photos from the trip in the main banner.

I keep in touch, sparingly, with some of the more prominent personalities that I experienced on my trip. I am so thankful that they all took care of me (or, that we all took care of each other). Yes it sounds overstated when I say it, but what's a great memory but for emotion?--my heart is overflowing with love for friends and people I truly think of as Kenyan family. It's hard to call Kenyan women Mama (name) without really coming to see them that way.

Reminiscing is a great way to spend a few moments after a second-year med school neurology exam day. I am sad to say that I really don't write as much as I used to--but again, there will come a season for it!