Starring Centre Stage

Applicants to American colleges persevere through a laborious application process. First come the SAT 1 tests, centrally marked multiple choice assessments of critical reading, maths and writing skills. Then SAT 2, subject specific tests. Then the forms, lists of courses taken in termly breakdown, extra curricular activities & levels achieved, athletic prowess and coaches' attestations, that Little Catrin can indeed run a 3 minute mile.  But central to it all are several essays on topics of your choice.  They are, the guidance says, seeking to 'personalise the form, to offer a window on who you are'.  500 word autobiographical vignettes on you at your best.

At first reading the prompt questions look anodyne enough. 'Write describing a person who had influenced you, and describing the influence they have had.'  'Write describing a life changing experience or an ethical dilemma you have faced.'  But this is a tricky act to pull off.  Typically, I'm told, these essays aren't the product of a sole author. An American friend who studied at Harvard and went to an elite high school, noted that she had six adults, two of them Harvard graduates, critiquing her college application essays. 

I always advise clients to imagine the competition. So in this case, imagine WellGroomedHighFlyer, daughter of two Ivy League grads, now lawyers both, from suburban town USA.  What will she be writing on, - on the life changing time with her exchange family in Mexico?  Her prowess and experiences in the first violins of elite national youth orchestra?  Which are the welltrodden topics the assessors will be blenching at reading yet again?  Now think what you would be contributing in different experience on a US campus. Which experiences express the heart of it for you?

And face to face, one to one, the Kenyan students seem to get it.  I've had such moving conversations these last few days, as students sift through their lives, and identify who they are and what has made a difference for them.  The student from Dandora, where the community lives on Nairobi's rubbish and toxic waste dump, who only got to high school thanks to a chance Irish sponsor. She spoke of the experience of growing up in a slum. Of sewage running down the streets, which, when it rains, reaches your home.  Of 15 families sharing their toilet. Of her peers with little to live for, now enmeshed in drugs, but how they turn ashamed from her, when they are on a high, wishing they too could have a sense of a future.

Another girl, an elected peer mentor at high school.  The government introduced guidance and mentoring initiatives a few years ago after riots in high schools.  She spoke of the stresses her peers brought to her, - money problems, homesickness, worry about siblings left in unstable situations at home, talk of suicide.  'Suicide, really, how often was that mentionned though?'  In her two years as a peer mentor there had been several suicide atttempts by girls in her year, and over ten students had discussed feelings of this magnitude with her.

The pressures of poverty run through almost every story.  Around a third of the students have described domestic violence and alcoholism. I'd say over half have lost a parent.  One lad describes losing both parents by the time he was eleven, and how he and his younger siblings set up house alone, until a member of his church came to bring them into his home at the height of the post-election violence. Living on a knife edge.  One lad's story hinges around his father breaking his leg.

'I didn't really understand why this was so important?'
'Because he was the breadwinnner. With a broken leg he can't earn. So we couldn't buy food, and we had to leave school.' 
Another girl speaks of how she, brought up by her single mum, has learnt to juggle the family finances.  From age 8, she, and her younger brother, would take Thursdays off school each week. They would go to the weekly market, where they would hawk paper bags to the shoppers.
'You split up to maximise sales. But it means you are more likely to be harrassed by the shoppers who will think we are streetchildren.' 
Again, I'm counselling against stories at full strength. This isn't Oprah.  We're not going for the Pity Card. You are highly qualified applicants who are applying as equals. Identify the heart of your story and focus on that.  But nonetheless.

But many others seem to lack confidence in the weight of their own experience. Have maybe never basked in the reflecting glow of a parent's eyes. Lack insight into how different things are elsewhere, and how laudable their survival, and survival with spirit and honour truly is.  Reading one lad's first draft of his experiences at athletics training camp, I plough through to page three, when he mentions that this was a pre-Olympic training camp.

'Really? Are you THAT good?' 

'Well no, no, its not true. I just thought it was more interesting like this.' 

Another writes of being presented with a (fictional) honour by the elders of her tribe, when authentic articulation of the person she is, is what is called for.  I really see its difficult for any teenager.  It's harder still between cultures. But in guidance theory, this is the fantasy stage, before a grounded sense of individual identity has been won through trial and feedback. 

British Quakers pose Advices and Queries which are read out loud in Meeting for Worship each week, for each worshipper to reflect on, privately, in their own lives.  

'Seek to know one another in the things which are eternal. [..] Remember that each one of us is unique, precious, a child of God.'

Yes, where we can, it would be good to support successful college applications, and this is the key, lifechanging objective for our students.  But more important for me, I'm coming to see, is this insight at the heart of the US applications process, that each individual is unique and precious, that each has a valued story to tell which deserves a hearing.  It's a privilege to be present, as some realise what their story, or what today's story, is, and the great deal they have to be proud of.

In Sickness and In Health

B, our part-time cook, has his wife and most of his children in the village in Western Kenya, hours and hours away from us, in Nairobi.  So I was particularly worried when on a Monday he told me he'd be going back to the village at the weekend, as his wife had been taken ill with anthrax.

Anthrax?  OMG.  Pictures of those unfortunate archaeologists who broke into the Egyptian pyramids, biological warfare and very very rapid unhaltable onset.  

'Go now, go now, don't wait for the weekend, here's your coat,' I urged.

And I think he read from the whites of my eyes and involuntary recoil, that maybe we needed to delve a little deeper.

Aching joints, severe pain, sudden inability to do jobs around the house. 'Arthritis?' I offered tentatively?  'Mmm yes, I think that's maybe what she said.'

He decided he would wait till the weekend, and travelled 8 hours by bus to offer her support.  And brought her, painridden, back to Nairobi by bus on Monday. 

Tuesday at work he's clearly very preoccupied. We search together on the internet for the symptoms of arthritis, possible ways to alleviate through diet, and possible equipment he could maybe get a local fundi to knock up, to help her to manage more independently at home. 

'I'm taking her to a doctor in Nairobi tomorrow,' he said, 'those rural doctors in the the clinic, they're just in it for the money, I want to be sure.'

Wednesday, he's at work, all smiles. 'Its typhoid, not arthritis!   I knew those rural doctors were crooks.'  She's been given antibiotics, and after a week's treatment they say she'll be back to her old self.

But reading through our medical guide, typhoid, if not caught during the second week, turns to severe diarrheoa, intestinal perforation & bleeding.  How then would she have got by matatu to the more reliable doctors in the capital?  It's been a close call.

I remember, sixteen years ago in Madagascar, travelling by taxi-brousse (matatu) from Tana the capital, to Taolanaro (Fort-Dauphin) in the south. The trip was meant to take three days, on dirt tracks, through the arid desert.  We were crammed in, six of us across the width of a minibus (I was slimmer then!) Chicken under our feet. Hot, dusty.  Then we broke down. Needed a spare part. We waited hours for another vehicle to pass in the opposite direction, to take the driver and the spare part back to the capital, for him to patch it up and get a new one, and return to us a day later. And we waited, patiently, or not so patiently, in the dirt on the road in the shade of the bus.  Allocated the more capacious front seat, by popular unspoken consent of the matatu, was one poor woman, with very distended stomach.  She looked very ill, groaned weakly through the journey.  I learned from the women around me that she had end stage cancer. Had travelled, alone, three days on the bus to Tana, to confirm the diagnosis, and discover what else might be done. And learning there that the answer was nothing, was now enduring this journey from hell, four days back home, to die.

I'm an avid fan of House, the medical diagnosis detective series. I get that medicine can't always be an exact science.  And I've been highly impressed by tales, from our visiting medical students from Kings College Hospital, of the video conferences they hold with rural doctors in Somaliland, to show London doctors diseases they might never otherwise encounter face-to-face, and to give Somaliland doctors the benefits of House-style consults down the wire.  But boy is it something to be grateful for when we DO have access to doctors who diagnose reliably.

I keep assuming that my haziness and lack of clarity on key bits of information for life here are because I'm new to the country. Slowly I'm learning, not least through B & wife's complete uncertainty what the doctor had said to her, that this is part of the Kenyan experience. Not really knowing. Not being sure. Unable to verify or find out more due to lack of access to books, reference guides, reliable practitioners or the internet.  Expecting to be reliably informed, believing that one will understand if things are explained clearly, feeling one can rely on clear information, - these aren't self evident truths, I learn, for much of the rest of the world.

Friends

It's one of the most painful experiences as a parent for me, when your child comes home, distressed, at friendships moving on, loved ones breaking up with them, upset and harsh words on the playground.  It's part of growing up. It happened on our UK playground too. And certainly for FirstBorn, the pains and manoeuverings got more manageable as she got older and recognised she'd been round this block before.

SecondBorn found our transition to Kenya particularly difficult. It took him over two terms to relax enough to find a friend, who then moved to Ghana at the end of the year. So we, and he, were very relieved that this second year is happier, and that he has made friends whom he wants to invite home.  But last week he came home from school in floods of tears. 'When are we going back to UK? When are we going home again?'  One group of his friends, all from a homogenous racial group, have decided they no longer want him to play with them. 'You can't play with us anymore because you aren't from our racial group.'

It's difficult on lots of levels.  In our tiny UK village school, inclusion was a central tenet on the playground, in the curriculum, and in the beliefs of the parents and staff who chose the school. But the school, an oversubscribed church school in a predominantly white area, was far from diverse. Yes, our children's friends had skins of different colours, but the value systems and backgrounds we shared, having chosen and been selected into the school, were very similar. In Britain, as a parent, we had a common understanding on what was acceptable and appropriate.  Yes, there were hiccups, but the teaching staff would talk of their beliefs and how they sought to apply them, they would model what they professed, and parents would get involved on behalf of the children of others if they saw something out of kilter.  It was a loving, closeknit community.

Here in Kenya, life is deeply stratified. Barriers, guards, electric fences and protectionism are part of daily life of the privileged.  Some children are picked up from school by bodyguards.  Others are predominantly parented by nannies, who fear for their job security if they discipline as needed.  Even expat liberals talk only of what we can do to support a chosen few - the partnered orphanage, the charity for the vulnerable - rather than of wholesale inclusion. Yes, we chat to a far more diverse group of people than in UK, but looking round the playground, given the choice, the different 'tribes' keep largely to themselves. White Kenyan Mums in one bit of the playground, African nannies in another, African drivers here hanging out with the icecream man, Kenyan Asian mums on that bench there, and the expat mums - of all skintones - sitting on the steps of the cafeteria.  It's not about race I don't think, its about shared experience, and with whom you feel most at home. And yes, I admit, all but a handful of my parent friends here, of all races, have spent time out of Kenya, mainly in UK.

One expat mum with children at another school told me of her preteen daughter's efforts over 18 months to break into the friendship groups. After her repeated invitations to playdates being turned down, the mother eventually collared another mother, and asked for an explanation. 'It's nothing personal, but we know you're passing through Kenya, not here for the long haul. We choose our children's friends for them.'

My best friend at sixth form came from Botswana. She related with relish how studying for A levels would raise her bride price in cows when she went home. I remember how horrified she was one day, when, true 1980s liberal, I said 'but we're all the same, aren't we?' 'No we aren't,' she was clear ' our differences really matter.'  And they did. I learned the stories of her friends who had left school to join the armed struggle against apartheid in South Africa, how to plait cornrows, to speak odd phrases in Ndebele, to dance wild Setswana dances. My world is a wider, richer, more nuanced world thanks to her.

Does it matter for SecondBorn that his friends tell him he can't play with them because of his race?  Well it does, bitterly, but does it matter more than it did in UK, when a friend would say he couldn't play today because he wasn't good enough at football?  In my culture it's unacceptable to give race as a reason for withholding friendship. But I live in Kenya, and in Kenya divides are all around. How far can I impose my values, my desire for a nice, kind, inclusive & tactful society on others?  Especially when its their country.

I wish for my son as good as I was given, and better. I wish for him friends who share their heritage wholeheartedly.  I wish for him the understanding that friends are chosen for their spirit and what we enjoy doing together, not for their background, station or future potential.  I wish for him the experience that good friends can be found and made anywhere, and that friends from different backgrounds have insights to share, not blackballs to endure.

Wearing the Pharisee's Shoes

Listening to the parable of the Good Samaritan, I've always imagined myself in the role of the victim, waiting injured by the roadside or of the Samaritan, who stopped to help. Never that of the Pharisee who walked on by. But Kenya can put one in uneasy, unpalatable situations.

We spent Saturday night in an idyllic lodge on Mount Kenya's slopes.  Big skies, forests in which one might see elephants, dramatic waterfalls, a swing you could lie back on and look up at the clouds. Just what the doctor ordered. 

And then came the Sunday afternoon drive back to Nairobi. Generally good roads, your usual idiots who overtake on blind bends, but nothing to raise the blood pressure 18 months into life in Kenya. Until round a corner, we screech to a halt, stopped by a major road accident, clearly just happened.  Two matatus, windows smashed out. Bloodied bodies lying on the road. Shopping everywhere. Children searching for bodies down the hillside. Passenger vehicles with smashed out windscreens. One overwhelmed policewoman. Woman with blood steaming from her arm. Women screaming. Hundreds of people milling around, impotently.  Men pulling passengers from the matatu. Four men, holding a woman by each limb, lying her on the road between the matatu ahead of us, and our car, as if to say, 'She's not alive, doesn't matter where we put her.'  Other drivers doing that Kenyan driver thing, sneak around the obstacle by going off road on the other side, causing total gridlock.

No ambulances here, or none upcountry.  A kindly man, desperately asking cars to take some people to hospital. And yes, of course, we should help. Do as you would be done by. But our security regulations say not to. And, in a way, in a cover-your-back corporate way, its not that they are wrong, for their perspective. The crowd was understandably distressed. We had only just arrived, and had no damage on the car, so you'd hope people could see we hadn't helped cause the crash. But, Sunday afternoon or not, it felt that it could turn ugly, children in the back or no.  In a threatening crowd situation, keep the doors and windows locked and get out of there, fast, say the regulations.   I'm really sorry, I said to the man, we aren't allowed to take people to hospital. And you could see what a weak answer he thought that was.  And then I got out of the car to direct it between the bodies.  Out of my comfort zone, way, way out of it.

So what did the Pharisee think, as she drove on by? She thought of her security, and that of her children, and the cost of securing it. She thought of HIV and of the importance of buying rubber gloves for the first aid kit for another time.  She wondered where the nearest hospital was, and also wondered if it was true that you got stuck with the bill, as she'd heard from friends, if you deliver passengers there.  And she thought of the Good Samaritan, also a foreigner on a road in insecure parts, but who followed his first instinct and got involved. 

Office Politics

There's a German bumper sticker from the 1980s 'Alle Menschen sind Auslaender. Fast ueberall.' Everyone's a foreigner almost everywhere in the world.'  I've been thinking this week about cultural differences in offices I've worked in.

Based in the London outpost of a German embassy university advice centre, only two of the six staff were German, but we had all lived in Germany and worked bilingually. It felt German through and through. We even had a German government auditor in to check that our filing system complied with the German government Dewey decimal system, so a document filed in London could theoretically be located immediately by a new arrival from Bonn.  We typed on German keyboards and used the formal 'Sie' with colleagues we'd worked with for years, 'Frau K, ob Sie..' Mrs K, would you be so kind as to?'  And on Fridays, when Bonn Head Office finished work at 2pm, we'd shut up shop early and finish the week with cream cakes and high quality coffee from china crockery. Kaffee und Kuchen. A 1030 am glass of sherry on the red letter day when Margaret Thatcher, never a great advocate of strong UK German relations, resigned. Those were the days.  Working life never really reached those heady heights again.

In small consultancy business start-up in metropolitan Wales we bonded during those early days when we had no desks, phonelines or clients and mobile phones hadn't yet been invented. Greggs pasties and team meetings often over egg and chips at the local greasy spoon.  Outreach business advice to imperilled rural firms in Angelsey by public transport in those days before I had my driving licence:  slipping into my slingbacks before client meetings after an uphill trudge from the train station that truly was only a telegraph pole, not even a phonebox to call a taxi, in the Angelsey rain, again. Late night midnight oil proposal writing.  My intensive early morning Welsh course where we learnt to address council meetings appropriately 'annwyl cyfeirion...'  Hwyl and high spirits.

Brussels life, in a swish office where we wrote letters in 9 EU working languages, and spoke five of them in meetings depending on whom you were chatting with. Dutch or English for the Flemish admin staff, polished French and subjunctives for the director, Spanish for the Cool Crowd, - at its coolest with Latin American accents, Danish or Swedish for the interesting sounding high level discussions which I couldn't follow.  Bises or handshake, one way of determining nationality from afar.  French, Belgians, Italians, Spanish kiss, Dutch, Germans, Scandanavians shake hands. Two kisses (French) or three (Belgian)? 

How the Scandanavians would enter an office with an urgent & important request, and politely wait for the interminable personal gossip to grind to a halt 20 minutes later:  their assumption, if you're talking about it in work time, it can only be work, and therefore should be allowed to continue without interruption to its conclusion, even if its function is not immediately evident.  How space was made for lunch, no matter how frantic the pace, - a proper lunch, with soup, main course and salad. How wine at lunch time would  never be frowned upon.  How pastries, not biscuits, were the appropriate accompaniment to coffee. And how, when I worked for six months in the Italian sister office, cappuccino was only drunk after 10 am by one anglophone new consultant, to hoots of derision from all others.  Seemingly a bit like ordering 'buttered toast with marmite, cut into soldiers, please' in a high class breakfast meeting. Not done here, grown ups drink espressos after a passing early morning frailty.

And in Kenyan BigCorporate, I start to realise the similarities and oddities in all the other places I've worked. Kindly BigBoss welcomed me to the company by taking me for a true African lunch of goat, ugali maizemeal and greens.  And, in true African style, your family matters, and I've been introduced to both his wife and his son.  What till now I've taken for granted & suddenly isn't there: no stationery cupboard, with paper, pens, maybe even a secret stache of post-its and new unchewed pencils with nice sharp points. Here its bring your own supplies. Bring your own flash drive. Bring your own biro, workbook and phone.  One landline to the office of four.  One computer in the department of ten networked with the printer.  Internet access for managers only.

Friendly, competent colleagues, clear commitment to corporate social responsibility, but startling for an outsider to Kenyan corporate life, a weekly day of prayer.  A desire to win shouldn't surprise anywhere in the corporate world, but BigCorporate puts its money where its mouth is. All staff selected for the high prestige intercompany athletics were seconded for a month to the preparatory camp, with professional coaches to hone their game.  They won, hands down. 

And as a newcomer the things I don't know how to interpret. Is it a typical Kenyan architectural design flaw or well designed security measure, that there are no buttons to select your floor from inside the lift?  Could be either. Lack the data to analyse it. Just don't run for the lift as its departing, don't absentmindedly continue chatting to your friend as you enter. Stop, look, press button, and only then enter the lift indicated, or you end up, yet again, whizzing past your floor, on, up to the top floor with seemingly no means to redress or return.