Camping

I like camping. I have really happy memories of camping weekends with friends as a teenager. In the rain, in the main, but still.

I like the pared down existence, campfires, woodsmoke, dew, even, amazingly for my everyday workaday persona, early mornings.  Snug sleeping bags, gratitude for home comforts on return. Here in Kenya I love the dawn and dusk views, orange-tinged, indigo colours, the wildlife spotted inadvertently. On this last trip, the monkeys in the tree overhead pooing in the early morning, catcalling in disgust when awoken by the rowdy group. At Lake Baringo the hundreds of crocodiles ten feet away at the lake's edge, the hippos emerging to eat. Unaccustomed noises, of the forest, the dawn chorus, the bushbabies crying, monkeys burping; at our last campsite a beautiful, lone voice in the nearby mosque, calling to evening and pre-dawn prayers.  A different, more contemplative, more conscious reality.

Sadly my attempts to persuade our family that camping is a fun and profitable activity have been less garlanded with success.  They share excitement at bits of it, - toasted marshmallows and the wildlife centrally.  But many of our trips together over the last 18 months have had major dealbreakers.  Baringo, on the banks of a beautiful lake, amazing views, world-rated birdlife, swimming pool in the next door hotel. But invasion into our tents by biting ants, leading to a total of 237 bites in one night to four family members.  Collapse of stout family and rapid decamp to hotel next door. 

Last weekend we had planned to camp on the slopes of Mount Kenya. But after our two nights in a beautiful lodge further up-country we decided that two further nights of drizzly camping might not add to the experience and returned home early. Fortunately as it turned out, because, despite a car jam packed with camping mats, duvets, plastic plates and so on, it transpired on our return that the tent poles were still neatly stacked intact in the hall.

So this weekend we decided to remount our steeds, undaunted by our previous falls. Back to Timau on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Stunning views of the peak from our tent, beautiful solitary pitch on green, green grass on the banks of a small river. Peacocks, geese, ducks and ducklings gambolling happily free range. Magical waterfalls. And smugly we patted ourselves on the back at this beautiful, beautiful bargain spot.  But April is the rainy season, and while Nairobi has been dry as dry, we were in Mount Kenya the area of peak rainfall.  We wandered off for a Sunday outing elsewhere and returned three hours later to find our tent awash with water. Bailing helped, but the bedding was sodden.  Water squelched in as you trod on the groundsheet. Don't pitch the tent by the stream on the lush green grass in the rainy season.  Make sure you line the awning up 100%. And make sure you read the small print instructions of the luxury tent in detail before the first major rainfall, - in particular the bit which recommends you play the sprinkler over the canvas three times before you first set off to 'expand the cotton cells', to check the luxury seams for leaks, and to wax, rewax and wax again.  Sodden decamp to another hotel and return this morning to pack up the now, somewhat dryer, tent.

So much of life in Kenya is about coping with contingencies. Improvisation. Lateral thinking with limited or inappropriate resources.  Those graduate assessment games - which team can build the tallest tower with uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows, which team can build the biggest freestanding bridge with just newspaper and sellotape - they don't particularly reflect life in UK, but they are just perfect induction for life in Kenya.  On our way home today the car radiator kept overheating, despite the extra coolant added yesterday. As we lurched from small town garage to the garage in the next small town we tried a range of different tacks to remove the heavier water which was preventing the coolant from getting where it was needed.  What was needed was a small tube, - but neither we, nor our new mechanic friends, had any tubes.  We tried sopping up the water with a flannel. With wider tubes. And then, gingerly, coasted home, trusting to luck.  Decamping to a hotel isn't a very imaginative response to our different problems camping. But what, in retrospect, I think we're all learning, is about sizing up situations, assessing, looking for solutions, working out the risk, being willing to leave the straight and narrow preplanned option for the unexpected byway.  And that, I think, though not pared-back camping, is new simple learning of the same kind, to be proud of.

Honesty and Integrity

Yesterday we returned two days early from our Easter break. After a marvellous two days in Meru National Park, where we'd spotted three cheetahs (a mum and two cubs), a jackal, and a lioness, we'd decided nothing in our drizzly second stopoff could match this, and returned to our own beds and home comforts.   Just as well as it turned out, for unpacking the car at home we discovered we'd left the tent poles behind...  Suspicious minds might suspect sabotage from the less-camping enthusiastic parts of the family, but lets not go there now.

SecondBorn rushed out to chat to the guineapigs, to assure them of our continued affection. They were hungry, with no food nor water in their bowls, despite the generous provisions left with the guards on our departure. I asked for the remaining food back. One solitary carrot and some dry pellets were produced, from what should have been several apples and some seven or eight carrots, enough for two guineapigs for another two days. One of our trusted guards must have taken the guineapig provisions home to eat or sell.

I can understand the impulse, particularly if he feels his own children wouldn't mind an apple or two.  The price of food has risen massively recently.  Guards aren't well paid, though ours get added benefits including a food allowance. But this food was given for the guineapigs, who can't get out of the cage to get their own. It was given in trust, for the animals. I understand the impulse, even the belief that animals matter less than humans, but its stealing to act on it. It makes me furious. As I said in my subsequent pep talk, we try to treat staff well, as family, and you don't steal from your family, particularly if you're a guard.  I can understand all the factors, but it rankles disproportionately. It's about trust not carrots.

I've been told recently of two others in my life, whom I like and trusted, who've taken far bigger missteps from positions of greater power than the above. Staying honest is far more difficult when you need more now, or feel your current affluence is transitory, or feel you deserve something which you haven't been given.  When you don't believe anyone notices that you are in need anyway. The gap in income distribution between the small minority of the rich, and the significant majority of the poor, is massive in Kenya, one of the most unequal countries in the world.  I read last week that I think 57% of Kenyans surveyed have had to cut back on meals at least once in the last year, have been unable to afford the most basic foodstuffs for three daily meals. Again it puts the missing carrots in a different perspective.

And we all like stories with happy endings, a strong narrative arc. I read the Kenyan papers most days, and yes, while many of the items describe the pressures of poverty or mental illness - the father who killed his son with a panga, the mother identified as a witch, the man sentenced to two years hard labour for stealing 4500 KSh (£40) - the in-depth feature attention of the broadsheet journalists, and the readers, focuses on the good luck stories, rags to riches. The student who did well in exams, the internally displaced woman who was lent 130 ksh, (£1.20) as a business start up loan and set up her own chappati making business, which is now thriving.  I'm guilty too. We all want to hear the good news and successes, not the pains, underhand deals and difficulties on the way. Certainly not the stories of those - the vast majority - for whom there are very few silver linings to their clouds, who are stuck, still stuck, maybe ever stuck, in a morass of poverty, unpalatable choices, opportunities blocked. We focus attention, as the Germans put it, on the parsley sprinkled on the top of the potatoes, not on the experiences of the vast majority, the potatoes.  So then there's a great pressure I think, to spin a good yarn, even if its not true, to put yourself on the side of the parsley not the side of the potatoes.  And the more we all focus attention on the good luck stories, fictional, airbrushed or not, the more it estranges the majority from their own day to day experiences, their lived reality.

Don Helder Camera, a Brazilian bishop noted: 'When I give bread to the poor, people call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.'  Newspapers, - costing 40 KSh/day, - a family daily income for many in the slums - are by their nature, bought by the affluent.  It's not good business, I'd guess, to startle the horses too much with your analysis.  But I can't help thinking these rags to riches stories perform the function of the lottery in UK, - offer something to dream about, tangible proof that there is a way out of the current day difficulties (for a tiny minority), a sop for the masses, fairydust in February.

Working on student employability in UK I used to segment the 'market'.  Eager beaver students, high performers, sussed, already in action, they'll get jobs anyway. Fun to work with, engaging, great case studies, yes you can help them to up their game, but infact, working with them won't impact on your indicators, they'll find work on their own. Focus attention more on the tail, the reluctant learners, those who struggle, and by helping them achieve what employers need you can make a significant difference, to them and to their life chances.  Here in Kenya, though I advocate for equality of access to our services, the decisions are different.  If you can only work with a few then you work with 'the best'.  There are so many from whom we are already averting our gaze, we focus on those capable of getting our attention, who spin a good line. Like a mother with more children than she can cope with we give up on hopes of equality of opportunity, support to all who need it in measure with their needs, to offer support just to those who push themselves forward.  Where in UK employability work might mean working with those with a youthful conviction for a drug offence, to help with disclosure and telling their story, here my Kenyan colleagues are less forgiving. One strike and you're out. Youthful experimentation and you're out. There are so many we have already chosen not to help, if you misstep, you're out too.

But for me there's more to careers work than helping people get the job, than helping them access the elite university. Here, where so many have had so little parental attention, I am truly discovering the importance of helping people feel centre stage in their lives. Helping them reflect on who they are as an individual and the context in which they grew up. Which are their life stories, their values, the episodes which have made them who they are?  An awareness that might nourish them through their lives. And this matters for all, matters even more for those who maybe won't bask in society's praise, for the reluctant learners, though of course, what they want is help to get a job. 

Telling bedtime stories is one of my favourite bits of motherhood.  When the children were younger, what they loved were stories of When Mummy was a Little Girl (and naughty), and stories from their own salad days, - accounts of the time when Firstborn would play at trains in cardboard boxes with all her stuffed animals behind her, when SecondBorn would make dens from sheets, from throws, from anything, and would sit besheeted, beneath the washing line or between the beanpoles in the garden for hours on end.  Ok, not deeply significant stories maybe, but proof that someone had been watching them.  Caring and treasuring them. Remembering. Proof that what they do and did and how they did it, was significant, mattered, made a difference in the world. 

As a careers advisor here I've found myself drawing on different stories from my past. It's a contentious issue in career guidance, disclosing issues from your own past. The focus is meant to stay entirely on the client.  You really don't want to play the role of the old buffer who never stops telling stories from her own experience, completely alien to the client, distorting the structure of the interview. But I think, here, where my clients have so little access to people with degrees, to foreigners from outside, its acceptable in restrained moderation.   And I find that the stories that I'm disclosing are those painful bits from my past, AntiHero Catrin. In particular my failures. When discussing university application strategies and success rates with individuals, spelling out that 8% success rates mean that 92 highflyers out of a hundred didn't get in to Cornell last year, the client nods dispassionately. Thought bubble, this won't mean me.  But then out pops my story - how I too had been a good student, but how despite that, despite wanting it badly, I didn't get in to Oxford University, and how I cried for three days on hearing the decision.  That its their decision to apply only for highly competitive colleges, but to be aware this is a risky strategy, and here I am, with a good life, but an example that in competitive processes we don't always get what we may feel we deserve.  Look of stunned silence on student face.  Of course, growing up in Kenya, of course they know we don't always get what we want or might deserve.  What I think stunned, repeatedly, was someone in power disclosing her failures. Where she fell short of her ambitions.  A story which tells of a different reality to rags to riches and magic wands, - of fallbacks, contingencies, stepping stones, pick yourself up, dust yourself down, snort loudly into the disintegrating tissue and on we go.

For some students it's a revelation that in the eyes of others, outside, to have stayed honest, to have performed well, when you grew up in a rural village where most people were illiterate, and you went to a less-favoured regional school without many books or any computers, this is a major achievement.  It's reframing what success means, to something personal. With the cards that you have been dealt, your life has been a major success. You can be truly proud. Don't look at those more fortunate and judge yourself by their glittering prizes, what you have done, with your cards, is significant success.  It's about being there, being present in your life and choices. And about analysis too. About asking why the poor have no bread, why your regional school has no books. About analysing and questioning society's views of success and how it represents them, and about speaking up on our stories, our missteps, saying sorry, putting right, acknowledging painful realities, making it possible for others to speak of their pains.

Quakers believe that all of life is sacramental, that each moment of each day is God-given. While I can believe that for my own, mostly fortunate, life, I have difficulties with that testimony here, where so many have such difficult lives and choices.  I wouldn't want to say it to others, less fortunate.  But what it does mean for me is that it matters that we tell our difficult stories and struggles, at the right time, if it feels appropriate.  That we don't airbrush out the less palatable hard parts, that it isn't just the highs, the successes, the sunny uplands of which we should tell, but also the dilemmas, the griefs, the absent fathers, the university rejections, the jobs we just couldn't hack, the tussles with children, the unsalubrious jobs in credit control and cleaning student flats of maggots, the, at times, frantic paddling beneath the water.  I think of my friend here who sometimes works as a prostitute to meet her children's school fees.  If this is her reality it matters that she has someone with whom to share it. Someone who's willing to listen on equal terms, not as a social worker, but as a friend who's had unpalatable choices too, though not of this magnitude.  We're not peddling snake ointment and myths here, we're sharing life experiences, and we're making sure we're leaving in some of our key learning points, the authentic bits of the recipe which might really make a difference for others, even if they don't always show us in our best light.