Cool Water House

The city name “Nairobi” comes from the Maasai phrase ‘Enkare Nyrobi’, which translates to “cool water.”[^1] Eason and I named our summer house the Cool Water House. And to the city’s credit, it was always perfectly around 22C and lush with green vegetation, truly an oasis. The city itself was vibrant, lean and hungry for more. It reminded me of New York and seeing the young population working extremely hard inspired boundless hope for the future of Africa in me. However dark the times, however blatant the corruption, I could see a path illuminated by the incredible souls around me, for as Desmond Tutu said, “Hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all of the darkness.” I think we Americans collectively have something to reflect on here as well.

My summer abroad was incredibly formative for me. Walking around the city, talking to people, and work has had a strong influence on my ideologies and plans. My career trajectory took a big turn because of it, more in another post.

My world view has drastically shifted to include developing countries in the picture as well. As a byproduct of growing up quite sheltered in US and Taiwan, I never understood what mass poverty actually entailed until I was there. Many things I took as self evident was thrown out the window, my assumptions about the world were challenged on multiple levels.

It was only now that I realized that I was not living in this world, I was living in only first-world countries. Sure, while I could name most countries on a map, the majority of countries were’t on my map of the world. Recognizing the existence of something is not equivalent to keeping them in mind. With the internet, there’s nothing you can’t find online. You can read stories, watch videos, and hear testimonies; but it took me seeing it in person to make it real for me. My hope in sharing these stories is that I can use my voice to showcase the humans behind the statistics who’s incredible experiences have shaped me so much.

The Mara

Going to the Masai Mara was hilariously part of my justification to my parents on why they should let me go to Kenya. Their only personal and anecdotal connection to Kenya is through friends who have been to the Masai Mara with travel agencies to see the animals. So I tried to draw the connection and point out that they all made it back out alive and bodily intact. See mom, they’re over 65 and survived, let me go already!

It was late August, the Great Migration was drawing to a close so Eason and I took a Friday off work and rushed to the Mara to catch a sight of the animals. The Masai Mara is renowned for its majestic animals, especially the big five: Lion, Leopard, Elephant, Rhino and Buffalo. I am glad that between the Mara and Nairobi National Park, I was lucky to see all 5 in person. Yet there was also a fascinating new species prowling around the vast Mara. It hunted in packs and had a tactic of observing and stalking from afar before encircling its prey; with a top speed of 100km/hr and paws of death that crushed everything it run into, it was a formidable apex predator—I am talking about the Jeeps. Chasing the animals around was somewhat of a guilty pleasure. If I was an animal living in a exclusive marked protected area, I wouldn’t want Canons pointed at me constantly. And not from all tourists at that, only those who were willing to shell out bribes to the park rangers “guarding me.” Furthermore, if I was a Lion, the “King of the Jungle”, I certainly wouldn’t want to have literally 100 people watching me have sex.

The animals of the Mara were fascinating, but what I took away even more was from talking to the people there.

The Masai Mara is by far the poorest place I’ve ever been. This feels quite stupid out loud, but it was the place where seeing the tattered books in a rundown school made all the pictures and videos I’ve seen suddenly feel real. The classrooms are all cramped with students when full with desks and benches that are falling apart as the teachers try their best with the limited resources they have on hand. As they made it clear to us, the problem did not lay with the will of the students or teachers for they were ambitious, it was a problem chiefly of money. You can learn more about the school and donate here.

We also paid to visit their village which was a morally-conflicting experience. On one hand, we were invading their privacy and the watching them dance for us was deeply wrong on multiple levels. On the other hand, it was their villages entire economy.

It was the first time I encountered a polygamous society, in Nairobi it’s now much less common. Each women builds their own house out of mud bricks by hand and the husband rotates sleeping between the houses. Going into their homes was a novel experience, it was cramped and dimly lit with only a small window for ventilation and a weak lightbulb for lighting. The kids are tasked with herding cattle with sticks, I even saw a kid that can’t be more than 5 driving dozens of livestock back home by himself. They’re also in charge of fetching water from the river for cooking and drinking that the mother then uses to cook millet on the stove in the tiny house.

In comparison, although our accommodation was the most budget resort in the local area, it still had running water and a tent over my head, so I was pretty happy and didn’t mind. With no wifi, weak signal, no electricity outside of 5pm-10pm, and hyenas and lions in the bushes, the campfire was the only source of entertainment and place of gathering after dark.

Somewhat unintuitive, one of the poorest places I’ve been to also congregated an incredibly international group of people. I met agents from various western countries’ intelligence agencies, doctors, engineers, businessmen—people from all walks of life. We chatted about our travels, home countries, American foreign policy, life after graduation, health care…etc. But the most memorable conversation I had though was with our guide earlier in the day, Salou, after everyone else had already retired to bed. We started talking about our dreams in life.

Salou said he dreamed of driving people around to places where they need to be, in short, he wants to be an Uber driver. Why? I think in his context, it does seem like quite an incredible job. No person in the village could possibly afford a Jeep, which is the only car that would be able to traverse the terrain; so there are only bodas (motorcycles), but even that was out of reach for most. Thus people just walked to most places they needed to be. It would be glorious for him to be a taxi driver. Just like how I dreamed of being a pilot once upon a time, this is the coolest mode of transportation for him.

In turn he asked us what did we dream of being as a child. We named several professions but one career was particularly hard to convey: Astronaut. In a struggling attempt to describe what an astronaut is, Eason uttered the quote of the year, “Astronauts drive rockets. Rockets are like cars, except it goes vertically up while cars go horizontal.”

“Did we really land on the moon?” I’ve met moon landing deniers before, but Salou was genuinely information deprived, having only vaguely heard rogue claims of humans setting foot on the moon. Next he asked, “do people live there?” We told him no, you can’t breath on the moon without a special suit and no ones there permanently; however, there is the ISS which we likened to a floating house in space, though I think he may have taken it too literally. He also asked us if there were trees on the Moon.

It was an immense privilege for us to be the first to tell him what the moon, astronauts and rockets actually are—triumphs, in my mind, of the human race. But how can someone be over 40 and not know about this? How can we grow up in worlds where our access to knowledge is so different? Perhaps the ultimate triumph for humanity will not be when we start colonizing other planets, but rather when every single person on this Earth has the resources and opportunities so that they could discover their truly greatest potentials, indiscriminate of their background; so that if they worked like hell, they would have as good a shot as anyone else to become an astronaut, or whatever their dream is.

But fast forward 30 years, will I still be at that campfire? Or will I go to a boring luxury lodge with a staff member tending a campfire that no ones ever at? I sincerely hope it’s the former rather than the latter.