Town and Country

Pelé, Hermán and I were up well before the break of dawn. We would spend the morning in the field, from around six until around one p.m. Then we would go back to their home for lunch and a siesta. Sometime around three they would head back to the field and I would move on to visit another farmer or family. This morning we were up early and the weeding had to be done. The cotton field that Pelé and Hermán worked together was a good kilometer away from their home, and we would set out after drinking máte, just as the sky was getting lighter over Misiones to the east.

Before leaving the patio where we often ate together, Pelé took a small plastic bottle from his coat pocket and took a swig. He offered it to Hermán and I, and we each refused, so he took another in our honor. To start the motor, he said. The old soda bottle was refilled on a daily basis with caña, a sugar alcohol like rum only sweeter. Pelé spent a good amount of his time in a mild state of inebriation, and several times a week was stumbling drunk. He was not an angry drunk, nor a mean drunk. If anything he was a happy-sad drunk, who delighted in the company of others, resented his position as the town drunk, and had no idea how to not be seen as a bit of a buffoon. He was a short, strong, and funny man, not a deep thinker, but a quick wit, and despite him being some thirty or forty years my senior and perpetually intoxicated, he was one of the best friends I had in the two years I lived in southern Paraguay.

Pelé was far from the greatest farmer in the world, and he never took to my suggestions of planning crop rotations or using green manures. But despite his alcoholism, which likely inhibited any large leaps forward in his lifestyle, he provided his wife Dominga and daughter Vicki with a decent standard of living. The amount of work done was greatly improved by Hermán’s arrival as the son-in-law, but even without Hermán, Pelé managed. Outside of the occasional day labor on the nearby ranch, he will never be employed by anyone. He owns no land. If he lived in the United States, he would likely be a homeless man.

In the developed world, there are few if any positions in the professional workplace where it is acceptable to arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This does not mean that people do not get away with it, or that functioning alcoholics don’t manage to keep their problems under wraps, or that some people never look the other way at such behavior. Overall, though, in a developed economic system that has amounted centuries of specialization in multitudes of professions, there is no place for a person to be operating as inefficiently as they do when they are drunk.

The world of the small farmer, either at a subsistence or small holding cash crop level, does not have the same professional culture. Showing up on time is not an issue. Of course you go to the field early, because it is incredibly hot in the middle of the day. But if work needs to get done in the middle of the day, it will get done. If that work can be done at another hour, it will likely get done at the other hour. You can hoe a good number of rows with a few shots of hard alcohol in you. You might not do the best you can, but it will get done. You take a break when you want to take a break. You drink when you can afford it. There is always work to do.

A job is a different cultural animal. A job tells you when to work. It tells you when to stop. It tells you how you must be while doing that work. At the organization I work for in Kenya, our extension agents range from those around twenty years old to those in their fifties who have spent all their lives working on a farm, and from those fresh out of high school to those who did not complete middle school. In that population the difference between the developed economy sense of work and the small farm sense of work manifests itself in myriad ways.

Two weeks ago we fired one of our field extension agents for showing up drunk. He apparently is an alcoholic, and his intoxication at work had occurred several times before being brought to the attention of his superiors. Today I ran a training session at his farm, and when I greeted him he seemed cheery and not at all upset over the matter. Perhaps he was covering up disappointment, or perhaps for him the idea of a job was a novelty that just did not work out. I was reminded of my friend Pelé, whom I last saw a couple of years ago while working back in Paraguay. He had not changed too much in the intervening years. He still holds his own in the manual labor department, and still makes lewd jokes at regular intervals. He still spends his pocket change on caña, he still makes a lot of noise or falls off his horse when drunk, and he still gets into the occasional yelling match or fistfight with his rivals of forty years. But he does look older, Dominga looks a little more tired, and Hermán and Vicki have long since moved to Buenos Aires in search of jobs.

Viewed in a harsh light the history of development is one of people being left behind. In a way it is the inevitable flip side of someone getting ahead. You can’t have one without the other. You go to the town; you leave the country. Like the law of conservation of matter and energy, it can appear that development is a zero-sum game. But in the face of that cynical equation stands the human being. The ability to learn and grow is the ability to empower one’s self without disempowering others. It may not always work out that way, but the potential lies waiting, not only in the youth getting his or her first job, but also in the farmer of forty years, open to the possibilities that are out there.

Assorted Stories

The Arabuko Sokoke Forest

On the way to Vitengeni we passed through the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, a strip of land five to ten miles wide and thirty or forty miles long. The area, protected by the Kenyan Forest Service, appears to be the one place in the coast region that has not been denuded of trees. It is also home to elephants.

I had not expected to find any of the more exciting wildlife species so close to my place of work. Since my arrival in Kenya I have seen monkeys, large insects, bats, chameleons, several other types of lizards, and one octopus. They were all very nice to see, but they are not big wildlife. With the exception of the octopus, which was entirely out of place according to my preconceived notions of African wildlife, the animals I have seen here are all expected to be around populated areas in tropical countries. But I never expected to be near the sorts of animals that spring to mind when one thinks of an African Safari. Just the possibility of seeing an elephant was fresh and exciting, and for the ten minutes we cut through the forest, I was not thinking at all about the ten candidates for Field Officer that we were to interview that day.

The vegetation in the forest stands in a stark contrast to the surrounding areas. Passing under the electric fence designed to keep the elephants in, it is like entering a different country altogether. The road is a tunnel carved through the dense undergrowth and the large canopy overhead. The air is cooler and moister. The green is darker. We did not see any elephants on the way to or from Vitengeni, but a pile of dung that appeared to weigh around twenty-five pounds testified to their presence, and to their ability to produce deliverables similar in quality and quantity to those of many bureaucracies.


Witchcraft

Witchcraft is real. Even in Kenya, arguably one of the most developed nations in Africa, witchcraft and superstition have a strong presence. I do not believe in hexes or curses, or the power of incantation, but witchcraft is real. It is not always visible, but it is there, lingering in the doubts and fears of a large and poorly educated segment of the populace.

On my first Saturday in Kenya three of my new acquaintances and I went to a local restaurant for lunch. Two others and I sat in a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw, and one on his motorcycle. Rounding a bend in the road and looking toward the intersection ahead I saw the street crowded with people, all running in the same direction, yelling. Not knowing if it was a riot, a terrorist attack, or a parade, we slowed and asked the driver what was happening. He was quiet for a moment before hearing from someone in the crowd that there was a witch. The crowd passed in front of us quickly, and I saw some boys running to catch up, looking almost euphoric at the excitement of the witch-hunt. We turned in the other direction and stopped in front of the restaurant, not understanding what had just passed before us.

Our friend on the motorcycle went to investigate, and returned a few minutes later somewhat dazed by what he had seen. A woman, her clothes just shreds barely clinging to her body, had been chased into a field by the mob. She was raving as hands and stones hit her. Two men in regular clothes got through the crowd to her and held her down, then dragged her to the police station away from the mob.

I imagine that some of the people in the crowd were frightened, and I imagine that some were angry. I hear that the woman was unbalanced or insane. But what I remember seeing with my own eyes were the boys, laughing at the game, as they chased after the witch to kill her.


The Paraguay Roll- Not on the Sushi Menu

When my bus rolled over in Paraguay it was probably going around twenty-five miles per hour. It was large and rickety, and probably could do no more than fifty miles per hour even had it been on pavement. The man who was supposed to be driving was passed out in the front row, and the guardia, the man who usually collects the fare, sat behind the wheel, trying to figure out how to switch gears without grinding the transmission into dust. He also was trying to reach his máte drinking equipment, which was stashed in a glove box four feet to his right.

It was around four in the morning. Apart from myself, the passed out driver, and the guardia acting as substitute driver, the only other person onboard was a kid of about ten on his way to Pilar to go to school for the week. The bus came through my community on Mondays and Fridays, at any hour between three and four thirty in the morning, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that ride you would wait a few days for the next bus or take a long walk through the sand or mud or both to Humaitá, about ten kilometers away, where at least one bus passed a day, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that bus you either made the walk back, or spent the night in a hammock on the courtyard of the home of one of the ex-dictator’s ex-lieutenants, but that is another story. This is the bus story, or one of them.

I glanced from one window to another, trying to catch a glimpse of something in the darkness, remembering the ride to Pilar not long before when the sky over the Argentine Chaco was illuminated by bolts of lightning and the clouds appeared out of the blackness, backlit and ominous and beautiful. Now there was nothing out the side windows, and the dim yellow headlights only illuminated twenty feet of dirt in front of us. The guardia, sitting behind the wheel, motioned to the kid to help him reach his máte equipment, and then he himself leaned across to the glove box. I glanced again out the side window. There was still nothing.

Then the headlights shown on the small tree as we were about to run it over and I shouted a warning, I’m not sure in what language. The guardia looked up but we were already over the tree and heading into the ditch. He tried to swerve us back onto the road and I thought it would be the wrong way to turn the wheels given the ditch, and an image of the wheels turning against the slope and losing their hold appeared in my head and I grabbed the handle bar above the seat in front of me as we began to roll. We rolled slowly, and I turned into it, and the seat across the aisle and one row in front of me came crashing down. The kid held on to the pole by the door. The man in the driver’s seat held on to the wheel. The passed out driver fell across the aisle, and we stopped.

We were silent for a moment. The bus was on its side, and its side was on a slope, leaving the wheels pointing up at close to a forty-five degree angle. We rocked a little, as the top of the bus, now sharing the lowest point with my side, rested on a brambly collection of woody shrubs. One of them, not the kid, thought about trying to climb out the bottom and work his way out under the shrubs, but I advised against it. The kid said he was scared, but the real driver, who had sobered up quickly, reassured him. There was nothing to be afraid of. We climbed out a window and jumped off the side of the bus to the side of the road. The wheels were still turning and the guardia climbed back in to turn off the engine. When he came back out it began to set in that they would lose their jobs, and he swore and punched the tire in frustration. The real driver, older, wiser, perhaps still a little drunk, took it more in stride. It was one of those things that happens. He grinned a resigned grin. There was nothing to do about it now. Ten minutes later the bus that passed through Humaitá every day came by and picked the kid and I up. The driver and the guardia stayed with their fallen comrade. The kid sat at the front of the new bus, and I toward the back, and I never saw any of them again.

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.