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.