The Balancing Act

The soil in much of Palakumi location, Ganze district, is red. It is the red of desert rocks in the American southwest, the red of a sunrise mellowed by a thin layer of clouds in the east, a red that gets in your socks and shoes, and dusts the cuffs of your trousers. As the wind kicks up, the red dust spreads itself over the rest of your clothes, finding seams and pockets in which to deposit itself.

Red color in the earth is usually an indication of an old, weathered soil, with a high proportion of iron oxides and a low nutrient holding capacity. Most of the soil in Palakumi is sandy, like a beach. Sandy soil makes for easy cultivation and tillage, but does not retain much in the way of water or nutrients. The rains do not fall in abundance there. The majority of the vegetation is low bushes and scrub, a few grasses, and some scattered trees. Most of the trees that have been left produce something that was once a cash crop, either coconuts or cashews. They stand in irregular clusters. Buyers no longer come for the cashews since the factory was moved to a different district. A few locals tap the coconuts to make a syrupy alcohol that keeps unemployed young men occupied for the day. The clumps of trees are like little segments of the forest that once spread over the whole region, holding tightly to what is left of the soil. If you pick up a handful of the red sand, it sifts back through your fist without holding any form. It appears, on first analysis, to be relatively devoid of organic material, as if the scattered leaves and grasses break down into nothing and simply disappear.

Soil organic matter is integral to a healthy agro-ecosystem. Organic matter can bind mineral particles together, helping aggregation and increasing porosity. Organic matter can tie up nutrients so they are not immediately available to plants, but it can also build up a long-term store, increasing the overall nutrient holding capacity of the soil. Organic matter provides a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of both sandy and clay soils and a buffer to shifts in soil pH. Without organic matter, sandy soils like those I saw in Palakumi can see nutrients quickly leached away, and crops, without the aid of substantial inputs, will grow poorly.

And yet when Gabriel hears that Ganze or Kilifi districts are the poorest in the country, he disagrees. He tells Benson and I that there are riches waiting to be tapped right here, from the ground under our feet. He, a farmer and retired teacher, sees potential in this dry, red soil. He says the metric that they use to measure wealth is flawed. Benson nods in agreement. He is an extension agent with whom I have been walking across the community, visiting farmers participating in our organization’s program. More than any other element of my first impression of Ganze district, it is the optimism and the belief in the ability to move forward that I find striking and valuable to take with me. Gabriel, Benson and I sit for a couple of hours at the end of a long day, discussing myriad topics, from the upcoming Constitutional Referendum in Kenya to agricultural practices in the United States.

At the end of my stay in Palakumi location, my feelings are mixed. I am optimistic about the participation of the farmers in the program and their enthusiasm. I am eager to begin work in my role of developing training programs for the extension agents with whom I work. At the same time I am concerned about the expectations that are in place already. Managing the expectations of the people who pull their livelihood from that dry, sandy, red soil, may prove to be as much of a challenge as the logistics of delivering trees to our expanding network of farmers and extension workers. If expectations are not managed well, even results that the organization would deem a success could turn out to be a failure in the farmers' eyes.

The challenges facing any development project are innumerable. Creating a problem definition helps in that it gives structure to a project, and yet it hinders in that it allows for the exclusion of elements integral to the human, natural, and agricultural ecologies at work. It is all too easy for the organization, on the path to completing its goals, to ignore those factors that are outside the scope of its problem definition. As in the soil, where a balance of sand, silt, clay, organic material, air and water make a healthy system, a development organization must strive to balance the factors pushing and pulling it in different directions. From the expectations of program participants and donors, to the science and logistics behind the operations, to the mundane details of the budget, it is imperative to allow for a sharp focus on the task at hand without losing that task's place in the broader picture. Looking forward, I try to balance my optimism with caution, my assumptions with an open mind, and the limited scope of my training project with the breadth of Gabriel’s everyday life in Palakumi location, Ganze district. In the end, hoping not to sound too much of a reductionist, I have come to think that balance itself is a goal. When we speak of sustainability, that ill-defined concept so popular in the vocabularies of development, economics, and environmental management, it may be valuable to keep that goal in mind. Balance in the soil, balance in the organization, and balance in development as a whole.

Qualified Labor

The sub-machinegun in the fat woman’s hands pointed in every direction but up. As she chuckled, the barrel would loll lazily up and down like a rowboat at sea. When she shifted her weight from one side of the seat to the other the target would switch from my kneecap to my lower abdomen and back. My limited knowledge of anatomy, gleaned from a pair of wilderness medical courses, half forgotten biology classes, and emergency room dramas, filled in the details. Bang! A bullet shatters my femur, the inferior vena cava ruptures, and I bleed to death on the way to a malaria clinic- the nearest place with clean bandages. Pop! The bullet passes through my lower intestine then hipbone, and I die a week later of a lingering infection brought on by gall spillage into the rest of my body. Crack! The bullet only cuts through my shinbone under the knee, and aside from never being able to walk straight again, I recover. This seems the best option that presents itself as the gun completes its pendulum swing.

Actually the best option is that the foot-long clip protruding out from in front of the trigger guard has no bullets in it. That is sometimes the case in developing nations when security guards must provide their own weapon and ammunition. Or perhaps it is not a real gun at all, but an elaborate replica, sold to the woman at a substantially lower price than the real thing, intended to do no more than discourage would-be thieves. That would be nice.

I had eyed the gun and its gross mishandling as the woman entered the bank. I smiled in a state of surreal bemusement to my coworker sitting next to me. We had been waiting on the bench for a friend who was at the teller. As the woman passed us we glanced at each other, both hoping that she and her spiraling firearm would not sit down. It was not to be. The woman wore a green jacket and a camouflaged skirt. The jacket was the kind you see in a full dress military parade. The skirt was the kind you see at monster truck rally or wet t-shirt contest. She smiled merrily as she chatted with a bank employee who she knew. I could not tell if she was on duty or coming to collect her pay. The only thing I could tell was that she had no concern for gun safety.

The only gun I have ever fired was a .22 caliber hunting rifle. Given the size of the shells and the rate of fire, you could assume that it was intended only to bring down animals under around two hundred pounds that could be killed with a single shot. A person can be killed with a .22, but a moose, bear or wild boar would likely end up very angry at the sudden inconvenience of a bullet in the backside. The gun I fired was adept at punching holes in paper targets at up to 100 yards. Further away than that and the targets were safe, as long as it was I behind the trigger. The process of removing a spent cartridge and getting the next one in the chamber ready to fire took at the least a second, and more if you wanted to aim the second shot.

At the rifle range, firearm safety is paramount. When the voice over the loudspeaker calls for guns to be lain down, they are lain down, chambers open and empty. There is no touching the guns until the voice says the range is clear and gives the go ahead to begin shooting again. A gun in the hand was carried unloaded, preferably in a case, always pointed either at the ground or the sky. It may be the case that in the fifteen-plus years since I have been to the rifle range, safety regulations have changed. Perhaps now it is standard protocol to let the barrel of your gun swing past every person in range. If so, the guard at the bank followed safety standards to the letter.

The possibility of a sweaty palm dropping the weapon that now sat two empty seats away and spraying bullets all over one side of the room was both very real and somehow hilarious. The jolly, rotund, heavily armed and camouflaged woman had all the necessary qualifications to play Aunt Jemima in a syrup commercial. This Aunt Jemima makes pancakes for the Zapatistas and conjures Che Guevara’s ghost. Or she blithely puts the rebels in the square out of their proletarian misery as she smiles in a matronly manner to General Dictatopolous, telling him to wipe the maple syrup away from the corner of his mouth.

Her employment in the position of security guard meant that someone saw this woman as qualified to provide protection for the largest concentration of wealth in a fifty-mile radius. Any person with a preconceived notion of how a security guard should behave would be quite surprised at this hire. She could not move quickly, she was oblivious to her surroundings, and she handled a weapon capable of slaughtering every person in the room as if she were burping a baby. But so it goes.

Qualifications are relative. Relatives often get hired instead of qualified people. Job security is a political issue, not a performance issue. That is unless you screw up so royally that it makes headlines, in which case it is still a political issue, only now performance factors in to the politics. A job can support a person’s family as well as their own self; to not have a job is to live in poverty. Anyone would rather keep a job than lose it. Given these premises, it makes sense to simply not do your job, because in doing it, you run the greater risk of screwing up and getting fired. Show up, exist quietly, and collect your paycheck. And so it takes a half hour to deposit money at the bank, and the security guards may pose a greater threat to life and limb than armed robbers.

Some combination of the serious and the ridiculous, curiosity and the desire to avoid socially awkward escape to the other side of the teller kept us in our seats. Of course it would have been prudent to simply wait outside, putting a thick cement wall between the potential machine-gunning and us. But the woman had not been fired yet, which means she had yet to let any stray bullets hit anyone. Given the circumstances, that made her pretty well qualified to handle the weapon. One can take comfort in that. One can also take comfort in the air conditioning inside the bank, but outside the bank you might die of heat stroke, so why take such a risk?

The Great Divide

One of the perks of working in the field of international development is the opportunity, every once in a while, to find a little slice of personal paradise. Being stationed in or regularly travelling to remote locations allows for the exploration of places untapped by the developed world. At times, either at work or play, you can reasonably fool yourself into thinking that no one else has experienced what you are doing. For a brief moment, you imagine there is something unique and groundbreaking to your time and place, and that your presence there is special. It is to be the first to climb a cliff face, or to stumble on a secluded cataract in a forgotten ravine. You blend an element of fantasy into the surrounding reality, and find a momentary escape coupled with adrenaline, endorphins, or simple relaxation.

Conveniently forgotten are certain facts: that you are the first to ascend the cliff face not because it is an impossible climb, nor because none have been there before you. You are the first because no one within a hundred kilometers ever had a climbing rope, and no one saw the need to climb that cliff when there is a perfectly easy path up the back slope. Similarly, every local knows the waterfall that you have found and thinks it nothing more special than a somewhat inconvenient place to wash their clothes. In the moment, though, you aid yourself with a small willful loss of perspective, and the results are either a sense of accomplishment, slightly misguided self-importance, or just a good story. There is a small divide between reality and your experience of it, and none are left the worse for it.

Enter tourism. No longer is your cliff face untouched, and you find your waterfall on a postcard. Gone is the isolation of the moment; gone is your minor fantasy. But tourism brings its benefits. It boosts the economy, taking in wealth from other places and distributing it here and there, almost haphazardly, but distributing it nonetheless. The surplus of available labor recedes slightly, and new opportunities arise. The loss of your sense of importance is a small price to pay, and the little divide between your fantasy and reality is washed away.

Were your artificially inflated moments of greatness the only sacrifice for increased economic wellbeing, all would be fine, but this is the developing world. In the developing world the power of wealth is exponentially greater than in a world where the rule of law protects all people equally. In the developing world the lines between help and hindrance, the legal and the lawless, a poor girl and a prostitute, are all blurred. Within the developing world there is the great divide.

The great divide sits between the traveler or expatriate, the outsider, and the country around them. The great divide is between the deep history of people and land and the superficial observations of the itinerant visitor. The great divide lies between the expectations of the observer and the forces driving the objects in view. Any outsider looking for the divide to be bridged from the other side will be disappointed.

In a dance club outside of Mombasa, the western world has plunked itself down with an unconvincing thud, and the beacons of a globalized society gyrate and shout in time with a thumping background noise. The expatriates and visitors who want to find some semblance of what they left behind are met with a quizzical hybrid of the familiar and the strange. Some immerse themselves in the familiar, using the same ignorance, willful or lazy, that allows the person at the waterfall to imagine that they are the first to discover it. Now instead of overlooking the laundry spread on a nearby rock, they overlook the disparities of wealth and power in the room. They overlook the rail-thin girls’ obedience to the middle-aged businessmen and concentrate on finding a good margarita. They leave the club much as they would leave any bar back home, only with a vague sense that not everything was as it seemed. Other visitors indulge in the strange, taking advantage of the position that they find themselves in, giving commands and debauching themselves until they catch their plane back to their normal place on the totem pole. Finally, some of the outsiders stay, making a life, for better or worse, from a de facto position of economic power, but often without making headway into the social strata around them. These expatriates are still tourists. They are tourists because they do not understand anything beyond the great divide that separates them from the vast majority of the people who cannot enter the club. They may stay for ten or twenty years, or for the rest of their lives, but until they make the effort to cross the divide, they will always be tourists.

Some travelers say that they do not want to simply be a tourist. Perhaps they want a better story to go home with, or to get pictures that no one else has. Perhaps they feel an ethical imperative to be more than another economic blip that drips dollars, euros or pounds along their way. Perhaps they cannot ignore the moral infractions and disparities in power that are illuminated, but at times supported, by tourism. Perhaps they are idealists.

To be more than simply a tourist takes effort. To break that mold demands more than visiting out of the way locations where other travelers do not go. In Kenya, the people of tribes, classes and political parties know hundreds of years of history. Like anyone’s history, theirs is not a perfect knowledge of past facts, but a perspective provided to each individual from a lifetime of input. It is a history of conflicts, successes and failures, and peoples living and moving across the land. To be more than a tourist here requires attempts to understand that perspective, and to see past the surface. That is what it is to try to bridge the great divide. It may take years, and it may seem impossible, but there is just as much need to bridge the divide as there is need for the material advantages of development. The first step on the bridge is to realize that you arrive a tourist, knowing nothing, but open to learning. To keep an open mind takes serious effort, but no one said this would be easy. If a vacation is what you're looking for, there are plenty of tourist destinations out there.

On First Impressions

The taxi ride from the Mombasa airport to Kilifi took a little over an hour. I chatted intermittently with the driver about music and life in Kenya, but my attention was tuned more to the scenes passing outside my window. As we jostled through the crowded streets on the outskirts of the city, the first images that sank into my mind struck me as odd not because of any sense of the exotic, but rather because of their familiarity. Kenya looked just like Paraguay.

At the time of the cab ride in question, I had spent just about three years of my life in Paraguay. I had been in Kenya for an hour and forty-five minutes. Paraguay is a landlocked country in the middle of South America. Kenya is on the east coast of Africa. Paraguay hugs the Tropic of Capricorn while the equator passes through Kenya. The elevation in Kenya climbs from sea level to highlands and Mount Kenya’s peak reaches well over 5000 meters. Paraguay has the elevation changes of your average pancake, with perhaps a sliver of melting butter pushed to one side representing the country’s highest point at 755 meters. Paraguay’s population is just over six million people, and Kenya’s approaches 39 million. Kenya is home to over forty distinct tribes of people. With the exception of some very small indigenous minorities, the people of Paraguay are basically one big tribe, in that they are a group distinct from their neighbors on all sides, virtually all mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Guaraní backgrounds, and they identify themselves as Paraguayos. Before my drive to Kilifi, I would have said that Paraguay and Kenya had little more in common than belonging to that loosely defined group of nations known as the developing world. Yet even with foreknowledge of these drastic differences, through the window of my taxi, I could not keep from seeing similarities wherever I looked.

The sides of Mombasa’s roads were packed with vendors selling all manner of goods that I thought I had seen before. From bruised vegetables stacked in wooden crates to cheap plastic goods, car tires and multi-purpose tubing, the curbside wares all were known to me beforehand. Men pulling overloaded crates blurred the line between the pedestrian shop fronts and the edge of the road. An overabundance of corrugated metal made familiar rooftops and fences, while the occasional abandoned construction project, a gutted hotel or office building, gave hints of graft, laundering and tax evasion that leave similar skeletons in several Paraguayan cities.

As we pushed into more rural stretches of road I thought I recognized the grasses, bushes and trees on embankments and in ditches. Corn grew in fields lain out to fit irregular contours and property lines as it does on the small peri-urban farms outside of Asunción. I identified leucaena, a leguminous tree that can provide significant benefits to agricultural soils and can be used as supplementary forage for animals, but when left to its own devices becomes an aggressive weed. I had managed a stand of leucaena in Paraguay, and here it was, thousands of miles and an ocean away, greeting me. Goats were tied to trees and fence posts in a remarkably familiar vignette. Even the traffic patterns were similar to those I had experienced in my years on the island in the middle of South America. The tragedy of the commons manifests itself regularly in poorly regulated traffic conditions all across the developing world, so the similarity in driving styles can be ascribed more to human nature than any national preference, but this notwithstanding, the number of similar sights, sounds, and even smells struck such familiar ground that an unprovoked thought popped into my mind, saying, “Kenya is just like Paraguay!”

Of course Kenya is not just like Paraguay; they are quite different. I knew as soon as the thought existed that it was untrue, and yet it was the first thought that came to my mind. I only remember it now because it made me chuckle to myself. As far as first impressions go, it was no brilliant insight.

The term ‘first impression’ is actually a misnomer. Given the colloquial meaning of the phrase, it would be more accurate to say first conclusions. When you ask for a friend’s first impressions of a new job, or place, or potential romantic interest, you are not asking for the first thing that person saw or heard, but what they then thought about that data. But the word ‘impression’ implies something that acted upon your senses, so the true first impressions are just the sensory input you receive, the sights, smells, sounds and so forth. It is the identification of these inputs or the reactions they provoke that in everyday speech we call first impressions. My first impressions of Kenya were the images outside my window, but if asked for my first impressions, I would respond that I at first thought it looked quite a bit like Paraguay, only with African people occupying the place of South Americans.

These first impressions are actually the conclusions of split second reasoning often based upon quick associations with past experiences. So people with different past experience will have different first impressions when confronted with the same data. Only when presented with more information and using some sort of rational thought could the prejudice of previous experience be overcome. Given the limited evidence presented in a first encounter, one would seem naïve to claim that they always trust their first impressions. This does not mean that one should never trust their first impressions or that those impressions are worthless. Rather, it seems that first impressions can tell a person a good deal, but must be viewed in the context of their previous experience. These early conclusions or instant associations may say more about the viewer than the object in view. I would be lying if I said my first impressions of Kenya were not positive, but if this train of thought has brought me to any conclusion, it is that perhaps it is best to reserve judgment until further impressions are made.