Learning not to Flinch

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Adapt to the host culture. It was one of my bedrock assumptions till life in Kenya.  And in Kenya I try to do it too.  But whereas in Germany, Belgium and Italy yes my mind, manners and understanding were expanded but I personally didn't feel contorted out of shape, well here in Kenya I feel I'm becoming a harder, more brittle, less responsive person. Not a nicer one.

At BigCorporate I'm one of two non-Kenyans of thousands of staff.   My students, many from the most challenging backgrounds, have shared their deepest stories with me as they prepare their US college applications. It's a moving time to hear how major hurdles have been overcome. But I can't help thinking that these are the brightest, most resilient survivors, and left by the wayside are their weaker peers, who couldn't manage to make it in circumstances that adults in my culture wouldn't expect to have to overcome.  And such are the pressures on our resources, mental and emotional, that I don't give more than give a passing thought to those who couldn't make it.

So what are the stories that the students have shared?

Of his male circumcision ceremony aged thirteen, conducted with only the running water of the river as painkiller, followed by a month living rough in the bush as the wound heals. Don't flinch or cry out as the knife bites or your peers won't respect you. This is how a man should behave.

Of being left on holiday with the grandparents while the parents have to work, and overhearing the grandmother arranging for your (female genital) circumcision ceremony against your and your parents' wishes.  'It'll all be done by the time they get back.' Of trust betrayed.

Of being orphaned aged ten, the eldest of three siblings. And of the measures taken to beg maize seeds, plant a shamba, tend it at dawn before school and at dusk after school, to raise the money to pay for food and school fees for the family. Taking on a man-sized burden aged ten, the age of our wayward son.

Of your Physics and Chemistry teachers leaving your rural school two years before your high school exams. Of the headteacher press-ganging you to take over, and of, for the next two years, teaching your peers and the year below you subjects which no one has ever taught you. And, on probing,
'And how did the classes do?' 'The Chemistry class came second nationally in KCSE, the Physics class fifteenth.  No that had never happened before at the school.'

Of younger siblings dying of HIV without necessary care because the family's money was going to feed the habit of the alcoholic parent.  Of terms, years, spent out of school because the child could not raise the school fees and the parents looked away.  Of life in a society in which many go uncared for and you have to fend for yourself.

At our children's school I and others get frustrated by the gaps in warm fuzzy child-centred implementation. At the obtuseness of staff unwilling to see how this might feel to those in the school's bottom billion. But I do get it too. Warm fuzzy child-centredness is not the Kenyan reality for many.

We and our children have been through brutal situations you wouldn't anticipate in a UK context. The school bus of year three (seven year old) pupils coming back from a match, which passed the bodies of eight alleged thieves shot dead on the road by police. The alert staff member who ordered the bus to
 'Look to the left', away from the bodies.  And the sense from the school that this was so ordinary that they didn't bother to tell the parents or warn that there might be adverse reactions.

Our ten year old's ten year old friend who was carjacked and held up at gunpoint.  Our friends - over fifteen of them - who have been held at gunpoint and robbed during the three years we've been here.

Our housekeeper requesting the day off to search for a new school for her nine year old, who had been beaten till her back bled by the maths teacher in her select, expensive, private school.

Incest and rape disclosed in open plan offices.

A friend who grew up in Kenya described her mother's memories of pick-ups full of bodies of people killed during the independence struggle being driven past. My students describe their experiences in the terror of the post election violence of 2007, of random violence and of their experience of this as a pattern. One of them was born in a displaced persons camp during a cholera outbreak, and in his 18 years alive was displaced back there in the next two waves of violence.  A sense that life isn't secure. That nothing can be counted on. That you focus your energies where you can maybe make a difference, but that may mean tunnel vision as we ignore those who would need our help.

So yes, we adapt, but how I long for a welfare state, for emergency services who respond, for social workers and a legal system which seeks to meet the needs of the vulnerable, flawed in its implementation though they may be.  And if you live in a country where you have these still, well don't let them wither away, look first to a reality where they are only a distant dream.