Or: Exposing the
hidden challenges of being a VSO in Nairobi.
Welcome to a
blog post that’s longer than normal, but I believe it’s worth the journey; grab
a cup of tea and see if you agree. I
promise the very next post will at have more than one picture to look at...
It’s
VSO-ing, but not as we expected
When Dan and
I first hatched a plan to be VSO volunteers, we did a typically large amount of
research on what it might be like, and listened carefully as returned
volunteers and VSO staff set our expectations.
From all those sources, a picture
began to emerge...
The two of us are living in a one-room accommodation, walking to our rural placements and home before nightfall, preparing simple meals on a stove in the corner, and having every evening free to read, learn a musical instrument or write home.The main challenges we face are filling our time, being stuck in one place, eating the local food every day, and coping without home comforts like hot water and TV.
Once we were
successfully through the VSO selection process, we waited a year to be matched
to placements somewhere in developing world; will it be Nepal? Guyana?
Or Uganda? And all the while we
had this same picture in our heads
of what our lives would be like when we ‘volunteered overseas’.
Flash
forward to now and here we are placed in Nairobi. Safe to say the reality has been enormously different from our initial
picture. Take your pick from –
ü
Nairobi is a large, busy city with restaurants, cinemas and traffic jams.
ü
We’ve a hot shower, a spare room and a spacious kitchen.
ü
We can find all the ingredients for our
favourite home cooked meals with varying degrees of ease,
o
Red wine (expensive on our salaries but widely
available)
o
Fresh basil (cheap but available only across
town)
o
Good
cheese (expensive on our salaries and available certain places)
o
Risotto rice (very hard to get hold of and very
expensive even by UK standards, but anything’s obtainable...)
ü
Evenings are spent watching TV and films on our
laptop, skyping friends or meeting people for drinks, meals out and house parties.
ü
The main challenges we face are long and
unpredictable commutes, having a social
life that’s too busy, and fitting in all the holidays we’d like to take.
So far, so
comfortable. Lots of the time we feel
we’ve really fallen on our feet with
a placement in Nairobi:
Having
a bad day? Let’s treat ourselves to cocktails
at the posh hotel across the highway. Shoes falling apart? Let’s visit a shoe shop in a shopping
mall as shiny as those in Dubai. Feeling homesick for our favourite Italian
cafe back home? Let’s go a coffee
shop that serves wonderful cappuccinos.
You get the
idea. But therein lies the hidden challenge of being a VSO in a
place so different from the place we first imagined. The karaoke bars, Italian restaurants and
exclusive spas are catering for the western, mainly white, expatriate
population, and the steady stream of tourists and business people who arrive every
day. We are not them, and (most of the time) we do not live like them. But we look
like we should.
The
trouble with my skin colour
We’ve
already written about being easily mistaken for tourists (see, A Kenya Staycation),
and 5 months in, being constantly ‘welcomed’ to Kenya by ‘friendly helpers’ on
the street is starting to grate on me.
But the most entrenched mistake
people make about Dan and I, is that we’re living an expat lifestyle.
Our skin
colour aligns us to the people living lives here that we cannot hope to afford
on our small VSO salary; to people with business interests here in Kenya, and working
for international NGOs like the UN and Save the Children. These are the people who have a beautiful house
in the white suburbs, only shop in the malls and send their children to
posh international schools. We look
like them, so people expect certain things from us:
We’re
expected have a car and/or driver
Back in the
image of a rural placement, I expected to be stared at, but I never expected
the people staring to be white. Waiting for the bus on the side of the road in
a posh neighbourhood, a white woman driving past in a huge SUV can’t take
her eyes off me. She’s so baffled by the sight of a westerner taking
the bus by herself that she hits the roadside puddle hard with her enormous
front wheel, showering me in muddy water.
We’re
expected have a ‘mzungu’ job
By which I
mean a job with a western-world-size salary.
We recently met a Kenyan friend of my brother’s who grew up in Nairobi
but now lives and works in Dubai. A
chatty, beautiful, middle-class young woman, Jacqui was astonished to discover I was being forced to walk down the
railway tracks on my journey to work, and speechless
when hearing of the tin shack from where I buy my lunch. Recovering, she asked,
‘And how is your stomach feeling after
your lunch? I would NEVER buy from those
places. You know you could get a good
job here in Nairobi, and wouldn’t have to walk.
You should get a Mzungu job.’
It was hard to explain how I was choosing to volunteer, to a lady who
was rightly most interested in improving her economic situation for herself and
wider family. After comparing our very
different lifestyles in Nairobi, she concluded: ‘I’m Kenyan, but I’m more Mzungu than you are!’
No-one
expects us to do things ‘Kenyan-style’
A compliment
my colleagues often give me is that I’m flexible. They simply love that I eat the same food
they do, that I walk to the roundabout through the mud and that I learn more
and more Swahili – and use it. I explain
that I am here to fit in, and that we are trained to be sensitive and adaptable
to a local culture. But still they
regale me with stories of the many White
People They Have Known who hated this or screamed at that – and how they
proud they are of me. It feels the way
it feels when you are showered in compliments for just ‘doing your job,’ but
again and again people are surprised at how differently I behave from others
with my skin colour. I am Helen, Who Just Gets On With Things. I even gather shock and awe in the street;
watched everyday by a street-seller at the roundabout (where I’ve never seen
another white woman), his word-for-word comment shouted at me as I passed, was
‘Madam,I admire the way you walk on the
mud without fear!’ There were maybe
20 other (Kenyan) women walking by at that time – but my journey, it seems, is a statement, an achievement. Our behaviour here is sometimes seen as
upsetting the Laws of Nature, so
much so that we even find Kenyans encouraging
us to behave as typical Mzungu so that the Order
Of The Universe can be restored: on seeing three Mzungus boarding a matatu
in town, the tout rushed over to stop Dan, Eddie and I, trying to lead us onto
the larger, more comfortable bus. He
never thought for a moment that we might travel to work by matatu every day.
Although
confounding expectations has been an unexpected part of the VSO experience, I’m
assuming that we would have experienced similar reactions to our flexibility in
the rural setting we first imagined. But
the difference, I am suggesting, is our proximity to the other foreigners living
in ways that are ‘expected’ of them - my Kenyan colleagues are far more
used to the habits of other westerners because there are so many of them
here. And I was simply unprepared for
the sheer number of people continuing their western lifestyle here, or even
improving on it; in the very same city where our standards of living are much
lower than back home.
Angry
thoughts – and why I’m wrong
Now, I’m about to share some thoughts I’m not proud of, but
in the spirit of an honest blog, here goes...
I feel occasional jealousy
and anger, born of living so close
to all the trappings of expat life, but not attaining it. In our picture of rural VSO life, I was happy
to do without all the luxuries I enjoy back home, because no-one else in the
community would have them either. But
here, just to visit our doctor takes me into an area of town where British
women younger than me have drivers and private gym membership. I walk into the shopping mall with wet trainers
having waded through the burst drain whilst getting off my second bus that morning; they spring out of their car into
underground parking and tap-tap their way to the delicatessen in high heels
that have never seen the mud. Or so I
imagine. It’s the same feeling of injustice when I drag myself off a
THREE HOUR bus journey across town after work, get drenched by the rain, and enter the shiny bar in my hiking
boots (worn to cope with mud) that are now showering mud flakes across the
floor; only to feel completely aggrieved
when I hear laughter coming from the table of white, glossy-haired,
expensively-dressed, chauffeur-driven 22-year-olds who DON’T KNOW THEY’RE
BORN!!! ARRRGHHHHH!!!!
<Deep
breath>
But once I’m
calm, I’m embarrassed by the horrible materialism at the heart of this bitterness
I’ve felt. So, I’d like to conclude this
blog post by reminding myself of the reasons why this ‘hidden challenge’ that
we face by living as a VSO in Nairobi is silly
at best, and disgusting at worst:
Silly.
As we’ve seen, the truth is that we really like having access to malls
and bars and brie cheese that are available for the expat customers who live
here. That we feel homesick only occasionally
is I’m sure in part due to the fact that red
wine is just a short walk away! In
our initial picture of VSO life in a rural somewhere, I wonder how quickly I
might have longed for the luxuries of home?
And we are truly lucky we can afford to sample all sides of Nairobi
life, as described brilliantly by Dan in The Many-Sided Nairobi.
Ridiculous. I’m not really trying to wage a class warfare
against the nameless, faceless expat ‘enemy’.
Those with the fancy cars, and fancy jobs have troubles of their own,
and raising children in a city plagued by insecurity would surely have me
rushing for a car with the biggest wheels I could find. Plus, quite a number of the people who have
‘more than me’ are not expatriates, they’re Kenyans who have achieved education
and success. These folks are simply
enjoying the comforts of a city they can afford to take full advantage of –
exactly what the rest of us do back home.
Finally, many of the people with
such different lifestyles are now my friends. Interesting, caring people from all over the
western world, they have come to Kenya to help build it, just like us, whether
through NGO work or through business.
Some of them have drivers, international work trips and an expense
account. But the grass is always greener; these are the friends who ask us to
help them ‘break out’ of the ‘expat bubble’, whether by taking them on a
matatu, for drinks in a ‘locals’ bar or hosting them in our vibrant
neighbourhood. NGO workers we’ve met
have described a frustration that’s the very reverse of ours. In their previous life they were volunteers
and back-packers, but their new status as NGO workers brings a feeling of being
cosseted by management, their
movements restricted and travel dictated: they are not allowed to take a
motorbike taxi, and barred from taking the bus anywhere, because it’s ‘too
dangerous’.
Disgusting. The ‘inequality’ I’m feeling is grossly
inappropriate when I compare my life to those who have genuine complaints about
the unfairness of Nairobi life. The
reality is that our living standards are hugely, massively, extraordinarily
higher than the vast majority of Nairobians.
I find that I earn much more than my colleagues, even though I’m called
a ‘volunteer’. With my rent paid by VSO,
and private medical insurance thrown in for free, my benefits package is well
above those with whom I share an office.
Our apartment building wouldn’t meet any health and safety standards
back home, but to live there, you need to be earning way above the average
salary, and if I start to compare my life to the 60% of Nairobi residents who
live in slums, I find we are not even in the same world. I find it truly disgusting that
I would dare complain about how we can’t afford cocktails every night of
the week.
So while we
do find it exhausting to constantly challenge the expectations of our skin
colour, and we feel a little jealous of our car-driving countrymen and women when
we trudge through a rain storm; the challenges of VSO life here in Nairobi are
swamped by the benefits of experiencing Kenyan life from within. I’m proud of that ‘achievement’ the
street-seller congratulated me for in the mud, real or imagined. We love knowing the back streets, moving
freely around the city and sharing a few Swahili words with the roasted-maize
guy in South B. And I promise to check
myself when having a moan about what others can ‘do’, ‘buy’ and ‘have.’ We’re
happy here because our life is rich in so many other ways, not least
because of the awesome VSO friends we’ve made in Nairobi, people who know
exactly how it feels to rage about cheese, cocktails, and loud upstairs
neighbours in a city where the main challenges are providing your family with
clean water and a safe place to live.
.........
Further reading: for a more accurate window on how ‘the other
half live', I’ve been reading the Africa Expat Wives Club blog written by an (anonymous)
British expat of 20 years, now living in Nairobi. A full-time Mum, she’s been
blogging for the last 6 years about what life is really like when you make
Africa your permanent home (unlike us visitors!). It’s a very honest blog as she seems to not
be scared of criticism. Notable for
being mentioned in the Telegraph (I know...) as she blogged during the
post-election violence in Kenya in 2008.
