My father first brought me to Kenya when I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I confess that at the time, I probably did not understand the benefit to me of such an endeavor. Why couldn’t I just stay home where I could do what I wanted to do (Nintendo) and not be killed by snakes (spitting cobra)? Perhaps it was in some way character building, but to understand that you would need to have a concept of character, which I was lacking. I did have an innate grasp of laziness and fear, and I was able to display a professional level of ingratitude (destined for greatness!) all of which culminated in what my dad would lovingly describe as a ‘rotten kid.’
Being a late bloomer, I was still more a boy than a man-child, and I remember the concept of Africa as a whole being frightening. This trip was an enormous thing, and in the run up to departure time I was scared of the enormity of it. The magnitude of those risks I faced appeared to invalidate the benefits of the trip, of which I had no idea to begin with. On my arrival, however, the large, overarching irrational fears began to melt away in the face of concrete experience. Once in Kenya there was nothing of which I remember being particularly frightened. I ate, slept, breathed, rode in cars, and so on, pretty much the same as back home. The overwhelming fear of the massive unknown was quickly dispelled, and I could enjoy the experience.
Now, considerably older but only slightly more mature, the idea of living in Kenya for an extended period brought me no fear. I have lived in and travelled through enough countries to know that even if there are deadly snakes, they don’t usually search you out. The enormity of the unknown was replaced with the knowledge and expectation that certain things would be similar or different from what I had experienced previously, and I would be able to manage those things each in their own time.
And then I rode in matatus. When you are a child, there is so much that is out of your control that you are simply accustomed to situations where you do not have any say in the outcome. As you grow, you gain more and more say over aspects of your day-to-day life. At some point, you might even end up with that greatest of all illusions, the idea of complete control. To have this false sense of control shaken can leave a person infuriated or stimulated, but at a very basic level it is frightening. Now I get frightened when sitting in a matatu to Mombasa.
Consciously or not, we calculate our risks. Whether to forego a future benefit based upon the possibility of a negative outcome depends upon how great the probabilities of those outcomes are and upon their respective magnitudes. To facilitate the movement of people and goods along the Kenyan coast you can lay down a strip of asphalt, allowing commerce to progress quickly. This strip of asphalt, however, creates the possibility of fatal automobile accidents, which did not occur when goods were carried by foot or animal and ferried across the mouths of rivers. Is that negative possibility worth the benefit of the faster transportation? One could further argue that laying down that strip of asphalt between major population centers not only creates the possibility of fatal accidents, but makes them as close to a certainty as anything can be. Is that certainty, that some people will be killed on the highway, worth the benefit of the faster transportation?
Planners and policy makers might try to mitigate the risks by doing things such as creating a median, a passing lane, or a pedestrian overpass. Or they would, you assume, if there was a budget for it. Or maybe they would not. It seems that there is a budget for keeping the strip of asphalt in good enough condition that vehicles can attain very high speeds, but not enough to paint a line down the middle of the road. But why, they might ask, paint that line when it will not stop accidents? There are accidents on expensive four-lane highways with medians, and there are accidents on the two lane highways with no divider. If you miss hitting a person by two feet while driving sixty miles an hour it is the same as missing that person by twenty feet while driving thirty miles an hour. So say the numbers.
Seen from afar, the risk is almost always worth the benefit. It is highly unlikely that you will be in the matatu that crashes in a ball of flame or mangled metal, even if it is highly likely that one of those things will happen. Yet when you approach a blind curve and the driver passes a petrol tanker by hugging the edge of the asphalt at sixty miles per hour, you are forced to reconsider those risk management calculations.
I put my life in the hands of my driver, who seems to have not considered this situation in much depth, and also in the hands of every other driver on the road. This is apparent to me as we swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid the enormous lorry that has tipped over. No longer scared of a great unknown, I concentrate more on the specific fear of partaking in a high-speed collision. I could have spent my Saturday afternoon sitting at home, with an infinitesimally small possibility of being killed by a matatu, but it was worth it to take the risk. At least it’s not boring.
Kids pile into the matatu, and are passed from one person to another to make room for a bag of grain. Unless they are babies, they are at least somewhat aware that the matatu might crash. But this is not a shocking realization to them. They are accustomed to not being in control. It does not bother them.
I am not in favor of claiming that ignorance is bliss, nor of relinquishing decisions to the fates. Overall I am glad for my small amount of control over the regular happenings in my life. It can be unsettling at times to have this shaken, but may be beneficial in terms of keeping us grounded. Thinking back to when my dad brought me to Kenya, I remember confronting the large irrational fear of the unknown and becoming comfortable with stepping into the world. It did not increase my control over anything, but it did broaden my perspective. It was a valuable experience, just as my explorations of nearby cities may prove to be. It is also good to remember that once you are in the back seat of the matatu, there’s nothing you can do but try to enjoy the ride. There’s always something new on the road.
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
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.
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.
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