Two Years in Kenya
In the mid-nineties I spent two years in Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer. I was 36 at the time. You might think of the Peace Corps as the domain of the recent college graduate but there were a fair number of mid-lifers, like me, and even some retirees.
I had been studying Mandarin in night school at the University of Minnesota and was hoping to get assigned to Mongolia, which was the only country on the volunteer list that had a subset of Mandarin speakers. But that isn’t how the Peace Corps works, it’s more of a take-it-or-leave-it model and so when they offered Kenya, I took it. In retrospect I was lucky. Mongolian volunteers were given a special dispensation to pack twenty extra pounds of clothes because the country is so cold. During my time in Kenya, I swam in the Indian ocean; visited a desert in the north and a rain forest in the west; went on safari; and even climbed a snow-capped mountain almost exactly on the equator. A pretty fair trade.
I taught math and computers at a Polytechnic in the city of Eldoret, roughly the equivalent of our write programs by hand and then I would go through them and see if I thought they would work or to try to find bugs or logic flaws. Not efficient, but in the Peace Corps one thing you have plenty of is time.
My students were very high energy and extremely friendly. I can remember when the Polytechnic Sports Games were at my school, a competition with all the other polytechnics from across the country. I was standing on a hill watching the games with the student council president. I couldn’t help but notice we had brought in ringers for practically every sport. When I mentioned all the unfamiliar faces, he just smiled and patted me on the back. “Friends of the Polytechnic,” he replied. I’ve kept in touch with him, and we are Facebook friends. He assures me all my students found gainful employment in the IT industry; if they did, I have a suspicion it was more despite me than because of me.
Eldoret is the epicenter of the running culture in Kenya. Home to the Nandi tribe, it’s where most of the famous Kenyan runners come from. Most notable was Kip Keino, the gold medalist in the mile at the 1968 Olympics. I’d occasionally bike up to his orphanage just north of Eldoret to help out. He is very modest and soft-spoken, so much so that you can forget he was once the very best, not one of the best but the actual very best, at what he did. In many ways he kick-started the African running boom that continues to this day. And there he was, just calmly chatting with me!
My Peace Corps experience was slightly atypical in that my school was in a fairly large city of over a hundred thousand rather than the more stereotypical village. It certainly was overwhelmingly African; there was a handful of American missionaries (they tended to congregate and keep to themselves in their protected neighborhoods) and six or so other Peace Corps volunteers and that was about it. There was also a contingent of Chinese workers as China had a project in place to rebuild the local hospital. I befriended one of the engineers and he started tutoring me in Mandarin. In some ways that was the quintessential Peace Corps experience: learning Mandarin while living in Africa!
One common complaint of Peace Corps volunteers is what’s known as the goldfish bowl syndrome. Everywhere you go you are the center of attention. It can wear you down. I always related it to being a minor celebrity, like the kid that played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies or maybe the soup Nazi from Seinfield. Walk into a restaurant and all eyes would follow you.
For me it often felt like the entire city of Eldoret knew who I was. In Kenya there is an informal subset of workers that are self-employed and work right on the sidewalk or in tin huts between buildings. They are referred to as jua kali (“hot sun”) workers because, well, that’s where they ply their trade. Once I went to a jua kali tailor because I needed a pair of pants let in and this man, who had absolutely no reason to know me, referred to me as mwalimu (“teacher”) because he knew who I was. This happened almost daily in my town, but it extended ever farther out. I was re-entering Kenya from out of country once and the passport control person recognized me; he had a cousin that also taught at the polytechnic. That was in Nairobi, 200 miles from Eldoret.
Oddly enough, when I returned to the states the first thing I missed was the goldfish syndrome – here I walked into a diner and ordered a burger and absolutely no one noticed or cared! Hey, it’s me! I’m here!
People have mixed opinions when you tell them you were in the Peace Corps. Some look at it as kind of noble; others look at it like an extended vacation. As in all generalizations, the truth lies somewhere in between. I prefer to look at it from a slightly different angle: it gave me an opportunity to experience things I never would have experienced otherwise, an opportunity to meet people I never would have met otherwise, and, conversely, a chance for people to meet me, someone the likes of which they never would have met.
I have a similar cryptic answer when people, as they invariably do, ask if I would ever do it again. My answer is I would never do it a second time, but I would do it again the first time in a heartbeat. Which, when you think about it, is a pretty good definition of a great memory.
