Convenience And Kenya

The ubiquitous dust and plethora of motorbikes and coca-cola signs were some of the things that first struck me about Kenya. Another was the lack of garbage cans (anywhere) and mirrors (as in homes, restaurants) and the odd absence of people asking for spare change.

Sure, lots of people, including children barely old enough to walk, routinely asked the other trainees and I to give them money or a personal possession, such as a backpack, sweater, camera, etc. And every market day I was pestered by some vendor or Masai handicraft maker to buy something I didn’t want or need. But that’s just the nature of sales. (As a jewelry designer I often strongly encourage people to buy my necklaces, too!) 

But in Loitokitok I rarely saw local Kenyans standing on the roadside asking their neighbors for a handout. The one time I did involved a young man with a massively swollen and misshaped cranial who sat with his parents at the Saturday market. They had a donation basket. I also recall the massive generosity of his fellow Kenyans who, with little to spare, stopped – the whole village, it seemed – to give whatever change they had in their pockets.

From time to time I also saw people helping a severely mentally impaired man who I’d passed by on the corner as I walked to the Internet cave/Mt. Kili restaurant. One of the locals told me that once when this poor young man went missing for several days practically the entire community went on a search party for him. They found him in a field, bloodied and left for dead. Someone had tried to rape him.

Crime and poverty is endemic in Kenya. But I got the impression that the community – after family and perhaps the church - did a pretty good job of looking after its own, especially those experienced in misfortune.

This was brought home to me this week when The New York Times carried an Op-Ed piece on the way Americans view income Inequality (“Inconvenient Income Equality,” by Charles Blow, December 17, 2011). Apparently a growing number of us are in denial over the increasing measure of income inequality in our own backyards. I wonder whether we might have something to learn from Kenyans in this regard.