My Kenyan family

There's nothing like picking tea in the field and hearing Mama and my youngest sister quietly singing praise songs to themselves. There's nothing like playing baseball with a ball we made ourselves of banana fibers and a piece of firewood as a bat. There's nothing like holding my youngest brother's hand and herding the cattle home at the end of a long and satisfying day. There is absolutely nothing like an African smile. And there is nothing like being part of a family in rural Kenya.

I spent the past week living with a Kipsigis family in Chemosot, Kenya. My mother’s name was Betty, but I simply called her “Mama.” My brothers were Dennis, Tony, and Collins, and my youngest sister was Halita. I also had an eighteen-year-old sister I never met because she was completing her final year of secondary school and had a different holiday schedule from the rest of us. Baba (father) passed away three years ago and we had a family member named Geoffrey living with us who tended the cattle and helped with most of the male labor.

A typical day for me began at 7:00 after the sun was already well in the sky and the cattle had been taken to the pastures to graze. I would wash my hands and face with warm water before proceeding to eat breakfast: six sandwiches filled with butter or jam, at least two bananas, a boiled egg, pineapple, occasionally a cold sweet potato or two, and of course several steaming cups of hot milk with a little bit of tea, as I like to call it.

The morning was usually spent doing some sort of labor. The first day, we harvested maize by shucking each individual cob and throwing them in piles, then hauling them back to a grainery in several wheelbarrow loads. Another morning, we took hoes and cleared a field of weeds and grass to allow for planting. We also picked tea and brought it to a buying center for weighing before taking it to a factory to be processed and sold back to the people who grow it so they can drink it.

After a few hours of work we would gather in the yard for porridge. Porridge is a sort of millet slime that somehow captures the heat within itself so you feel the warmth go all the way down your throat and chest. It reminds me a bit of cream of wheat and I actually like it a lot in small doses. Unfortunately, absolutely no food item comes in small doses in this community. Accompanying the porridge was some sort of carbohydrate such as mandazi (a sort of fried dough), biscuit crackers, or boiled maize (corn on the cob) that did not taste or feel anything like American corn whatsoever. The kernels were bigger, harder, drier, and starchier.

Following this second breakfast of sorts, I would sit around with my brothers and we would talk or just stare into space for awhile. After a few days, I brought out a deck of cards and began teaching them card games. By the end of the visit, I had taught them Speed, Go Fish, War, Egyptian Rat Screw (which I renamed Royals), SlapJack, Hello Sir Hello Miss, Spades, Poker without gambling, and Spoons. They loved it and played every chance they could get.

At first, I felt weird introducing an activity into my experience which eventually took over most recreation time. I was worried about interfering with the community I was studying, but I ended up learning a great deal about sustainable development. In many ways, the cards represented a development program and I had to learn how to introduce them properly. At a certain point, I had to be disciplined enough to remove myself from the game and make sure they could continue playing once I left. There were also a few times where I became frustrated at the way they would change aspects of the rules, but I soon realized that I had to allow the games to adapt to their culture.

The best example of this happened when they were playing Speed. Speed is a two person game, but they involved every single person present. One person would hold the player’s cards for him and another would flip the next card over when a stack would run out. To me, it seemed chaotic but I realized that the communal nature of their lifestyle made this process allow the game to fit beautifully into their culture. To interfere in this process would be making the same mistake the World Bank and IMF made with Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s. Maybe if these organizations had tried introducing card games first, they wouldn’t have privatized land ownership and conflicts such as Darfur or wildlife degradation in Kenyan game parks would have never occurred. Maybe they would have realized that traditional agricultural practices actually make great use of the land and introducing a Western method might actually ruin the land and force people to relocate to an area that now “belonged” to another “tribe.”

Angry rant aside, the cards became a great learning experience for me and a fun activity for them.

I also introduced them to baseball, which was incredibly complicated to explain to people who had never even heard of it before. My acting training was essential as I tried to explain what a “force out” or “stealing a base” meant. In the end I’m still not sure they completely understood it, but we had a great time anyway.

My family lived a simple and humble life that deeply reminded me of my own upbringing. I shared a small room with my two brothers and Geoffrey who slept in a bunk bed...Dennis on top, Tony and Geoffrey on the bottom. We shared meals in a dimly lit room and sometimes said prayers together by the light of a lantern. While my family in the U.S. has always had electricity, I felt the same familiar closeness and reliance on one another that I have come to appreciate so much throughout the years.

The last night, Mama brought out a cake she had made that said “Logan, Kwaheri” in icing (kwaheri means “goodbye” in Swahili). After eating, she gave a type of speech thanking me for coming and delighting in the friendships we had formed. Then she had me say the prayer before we went off to bed. Somehow, I made it through without crying and realized in those moments what it means to be family in Christ. I will admit that I shed more than a few tears when I told them goodbye a few days ago.

There are many many other things to be said about my experience in Chemosot, but that is for a later time. If you are reading this, I hope you will ask me questions because I would absolutely love to answer them.

I am now back at the compound in Nairobi and ready to begin class tomorrow. In addition to Swahili and the core course on Culture, Environment, and Development, I am taking a Health and Medicine class and a Socio-Economic Development of Kenya class. After two weeks of study and staying at the compound, we head to Tanzania for a week, followed by three weeks in an urban homestay in Nairobi.

At the moment, I need a break from writing and will probably try to post some pictures before I eat dinner. Missing all of you,

Reynolds