August 17: In preparation for the long-awaited opening of the EAC women and children’s health clinic (still waiting on government approval – they were here a few weeks ago and made a long list of demerits – including that the windows were six inches too high, the roof was too sloped, and the metal doors made the clinic seem too sterile! Oh, the waywardness of big government.), we are all spending the next two weeks conducting an extensive community health survey. The intent is to evaluate the quality of services provided and the before-and-after benefit to the community (and also because these kinds of “Monitoring and Evaluation” plans are a current hot topic and must-do amongst those nonprofits/NGOs hoping for any sort of funding – no serious donor deals with organizations without such a plan anymore.) So add this to the long list of great and practical experience I’m getting here.

The method is essentially unmethodical: we’re paired with an EAC English/Giriama speaking staff, with whom we walk around in the woods until we come upon someone working in their fields. Then we tell them we’re with Vutakaka and we’d like to ask them a few questions. In most cases, people here are delighted to talk about their lives, health issues, reproductive histories, and anything else we might care to know. So that’s what we spend the next two hours doing. I have learned some incredible things about people here. The elderly women I interviewed yesterday had a fair-sized garden, but could not remember ever producing enough to feed her family. She had experienced domestic violence in the past six months. She’d had malaria in the past three months (in fact, yesterday), as had everyone living in her home – even though they all slept with bednets. (Malaria is truly wreaking havoc on this continent.) She knew HIV/AIDS was transmitted through unprotected sex, but wasn’t sure of any of the other ways and would like to be better informed. She knows people who have had this disease (though I’ve heard most people here won’t admit to this – I suppose believing it to be taboo. If you know someone with it, then you might have it too.)

Interestingly, this woman, who was post-menopausal, was completely perplexed by the notion of “family planning”. Family planning is a buzz word in areas where development work is being done (like Takaungu), because it’s been stamped as one solution to two of the biggest problems here: food security and the spread of HIV/AIDS. Likely in her late 50s (she wasn’t sure), and from a time pre-dating family planning, when the very idea would have been anathema, she was understandably curious. Children are the ultimate blessings here – the more the better. It’s social status, social security, labor, legacy, and longevity all wrapped into cute little packages. So limiting them really doesn’t make any sense to people here, especially to older people who are less likely to have felt the threat of AIDS, cheating spouses, failed crops, hungry children, illiteracy, drug addiction, and the general frustration of needing things but not having enough money to get them.

The problem is that people here – sadly, everywhere – need more these days. When we colonized their land, we brought our diseases, so now they need immunizations. We brought them new crops, but they weren’t good for their climate and soil, so now they need fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation to make them grow. We brought them democracy and capitalism, so now they need formal education to teach people how to lead. We brought them roads and bridges so they could get to the centralized markets we also brought them, so now they need vehicles, fuel, and maintained roads to get there. The ones that can’t afford these things fall further and further behind, so that the income, health, and education gap between city people and rural people is today nearly insurmountable. Like anyone with grandparents knows, in Africa too, “things were simpler back then”.

I really wonder what these people must think of us. Regardless of how we’ve glorified them, our ideas of capitalism, land titles, family planning, immunization, “safe sex”, women’s empowerment, and so on, are totally foreign, and in some cases, totally inappropriate here. They lived gloriously for centuries without any of these things, yet now we say they should adopt them in a matter of a few generations because it’s for their own good. My worry is that if they are never able to completely understand why - the whole thing being so absolutely bizarre (why would a painful poke with a needle keep me from getting a disease? Better yet, why would owning 5,000 acres of land be appealing when my neighbor only has one?) – will the principles ever be adopted? Or will they loosely and haphazardly assimilate these Western ideas, only to find that after we’ve packed our things and gone, they’re poorly trained, with vague understandings, unable to read the instruction manuals we left, unable to obtain the diesel to power the pump we provided, and correctly assuming that they were much better off before we ever showed up.

So as far as the question about the loss of traditional knowledge, that has been really difficult for me to understand. But I guess it’s the same thing that happens in tribal communities in the US that are losing the ability to speak their native languages – if you don’t write something down it will eventually cease to exist. Not a single adult person I’ve interviewed in the community health survey has been able to read or write in any language – so any knowledge they have is handed down by word of mouth. Oral tradition worked fine for much of their history, until foreign groups came in with new ideas, and everything got confused. So again, maybe White people aren’t the cause of everything that ails Africa, but I have yet to find a single large-scale problem here or, for that matter, in any of the other parts of Africa I’ve seen, that didn’t come from the outside (except malaria).

I’m sure there are people who could have said what I’ve said with 75% fewer words, but they are probably kind of dull. So thank you for reading. I’m off to Mombasa tomorrow to purchase the supplies for the irrigation system. There’s a lot of lose ends to tie up and the design isn’t really final yet, but I have to get on with it. I’ll have to make dowith whatever I come home with. I hope all is well with everyone. I’ll be home in exactly a month!