Napoleon Tree

We are now back in Nairobi with our friends and generous hosts Alex and Tabby. Besides having a few pieces of clothing stolen from a hotel laundry, having Lambie stolen from a bus (by far the most upsetting loss), and losing a few small things here and there, we’ve managed to, fairly easily, navigate our way through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda for nine weeks without incident. I’m pleased with our success because I see now, looking back, how green we were to this type of travel despite our previous experience. It took some time to get into our travel groove and I’m glad we began with friends in Nairobi instead of dropping ourselves cold-turkey into East Africa.

Traveling in Africa is entirely different from our previous travels and doing so for over two months certainly increases the intensity. Like many developing countries, travel here requires flexibility and a willingness to go-with-the-flow that I don’t typically possess in my day-to-day life in the US. In fact, developing this laid-back trait is precisely why I felt such a strong need to take the next step with travel and embark on a trip of this magnitude; ten months in fifteen different counties could surely knead me into a more malleable human being.

Africa has certainly begun the process. After two months here I no longer whence at the trucks barreling down the highway straight at my vehicle while passing the slower car in front of them, getting over just in time to avoid a head-on collision. Nor do I utterly dismiss, without consideration, allowing my ten-year-old son to ride a motorcycle, fearing his imminent death. My frustration levels are 1/10^th what they used to be when faced with an inability to get something done, like getting my Internet to work. Being outwardly stared at while walking down the street, tiresome as it may be, no longer fills me with self-consciousness and a desire to hide under the next stone. I’ve actually been able to set aside my ego at times, let go, and accept situations as they are without flying into a rage – progress to be sure. Africa has begun to cure me of some of the soul-sucking pettiness I desperately need to be rid of; pettiness, which has clung to me, like bad breath for years and has only increased as I’ve grow older.

More importantly, a beautiful and hoped-for by-product of travel, Africa is changing the way I see. I must confess my colossal ignorance of Africa before this trip, and there is still much I have to learn. The little exposure I’ve had has been largely negative and, through an American lens, mostly further distorted by pity and superiority. When was the last time we were shown something about Africa that didn’t have to do with famine, war, disease, or leave the feeling that it is a place of helplessly primitive people who need to be saved by western organizations? Of course, some degrees of these things exist in Africa; it is a continent more than three times the size of the U.S. filled with many different countries with different languages, customs, traditions, and histories. How could it not have challenges to overcome just as the rest of the world has? But to reduce the entire continent and its people to a place of famine, war, disease, and helplessness is insulting at the very least.

I have spent a small amount of time in only a sliver of three countries in Africa – Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya – but in that time my ideas of what Africa is have been completely shattered; or I should say corrected and made three-dimensional. It is no easy task allowing yourself to see the ignorance, ugliness, and even racism present in your own ideas about people and places, but seeing it is the only way to be free from it and to grow from it. I’m sure anyone who knows me would say I’m not racist; I myself would say the same thing. But lumping an entire group of people together based on their color and then attributing things like poverty, ignorance, backwardness, and helplessness to them is, in fact, racist. I wouldn’t say I consciously had these ideas, we see what we are trained to see after all, but as I sat on bus after bus or walked down the street just observing without judgment the people and things going on around me I began to note my surprise when I witnessed things that ran counter to the assumptions I possessed, unaware. It has been like an awakening to find respect and admiration welling up in place of pity and disgust.

The first time this occurred I was sitting on a bus traveling from Nairobi to Uganda. I watched as one small roadside shop after another whizzed by. These shops are constructed, usually, from corrugated metal, but sometimes with wood. Whatever the construction they often look thrown together piece-meal using whatever is found lying around. There is nothing manicured or mass-produced about them. Many of them looked, to me, as though they could fall down at any moment. There are one after another of these shops in long rows selling a variety of items. They are in cramped areas and surrounded by raw, dusty, red dirt. Some are painted with ads that have nothing to do with what they sell; some are not painted at all. They have no fancy signs, no seductive marketing to lure in customers. They are not places you would want to linger; nor are they spotlessly clean and beautifully merchandised. But as I observed them time and again I began to respect the resourcefulness of the construction of these tiny buildings, appreciate their unselfconsciousness. They weren’t trying to be something they aren’t; not trying to seduce you into buying something you didn’t need or couldn’t afford. Suddenly, instead of seeing only poverty in them I saw their vibrancy.

This transformation occurred not just in the way I saw these little shops, but also in the way I saw the people, the houses, and inevitably, the countries themselves. I no longer see only poverty in the people walking down the streets, but also the industriousness they possess for the long hours they work; many of them in back-breaking, repetitive duties. I no longer feel pity, an insulting and superior emotion, toward the people for their lack of material abundance, but awe at how they are able to do without so much when we in the US feel so deprived in our abundance.

I am amazed by the grace, ambition, persistence, selflessness, worldliness, beauty, determination, warmth, pride, and grit of the people I have met and seen in East Africa. I have been inspired to push past fear and really apply myself to learning a new language, when the time comes, by person after person I’ve met who spoke two, three, or four different languages. I am impressed with their knowledge of world events and politics, not just of their own country, but of others as well, making me think I should stop putting my head in the sand when it comes these topics and become more aware of what’s going on in the world, despite how painful it is. I am motivated by their entrepreneurial spirit to push past my perpetual and nagging self-doubt and keep with my photography; to learn as much as I can and finally really apply myself to it.

There are many things I’m still learning, things not so easily curable, that have been marinated into my blood from birth, perhaps by heredity, perhaps through societal influence or both – patience with looser definitions of time and loosening my grip on the need to be doing something productive at every waking moment being two of the biggest. Africa has been, in its infinite patience and unabashed pride in being just as it is, a great teacher to me. It remains to be seen whether these changes in outlook will be permanent, I am stubborn and hard-headed after all, but I am hopeful.

And so I leave Africa with a new respect and the beginnings of understanding. I see the people of these countries as not so different from myself or other people I know. I no longer think of these places as two-dimensional and foreign, or as primitive representations of a past my society has managed to civilize itself from. I know now that Africa is full of people with strong abilities and desires to forge their own futures, worthy of respect, and with much to offer the world if we would just get out of the way and let them.

To view photos from my trip visit www.rtwphotos.com