For a while, I forgot where we were.
The northern Kenya we experienced on our most recent trip to the field was so vastly different from the one we had visited not more than a month ago. There was seemingly endless grass where before it had been cracked and dry. Cows were fat with milk where they had been drawn and bony. My recollections of the drought faded and I began to think: this is how it has always been here.
"We expect change quickly," said Rosemary, one of our business mentors who has been a teacher in northern Kenya for almost twenty years. "That is why we have such a hard time thinking about long-term things like education." Rosemary went on to say that the time it takes a student to learn and grow feels like a while to wait for change, "change that you maybe cannot even see." Relative to the rapid and obvious transformation in the landscape over the course of a month, the impact of education on a child is much less tangible, and I could, for the first time, understand the difficulty of that timescale shift.
It was amazing how quickly I had forgotten the hard times when surrounded by such abundance. Our memories dim just when we need them to be the most clear: the juxtaposition of the vastly different past and present only amplifies the importance of sustainable, long-range solutions. How can we appreciate change and enjoy relief while still maintaining our awareness of the past?
This corn plant was growing on the side of the road. It sprouted from relief maize that had spilled on the road in the months prior. Tons and tons of maize are transported to northern Kenya every month, even more so during periods of drought. With the abundance of rain the area received in November, those seeds sprouted and began to grow. Pretty nicely illustrates the contradictions and complexities of life up there, no?
