The Numbers Game

Since shortly after the second world war, when major development efforts began in what was called the third world, hundreds of projects have set out to bring a quantifiable good to some quantity of people. Though methods have changed and theories have developed, the planning of development projects is today at its core quite similar to what has gone on for the last sixty plus years. The project planners set targets, and the targets are always numbers. There is a problem with this method, however. Numbers provide planners with better information to make decisions, but concurrently reinforce a way of viewing issues that is radically disconnected from the nature of development. Development is about empowerment, and in a system of top down planning, it is the planners who are empowered.

Numbers help set goals. Most simply, numbers are countable, so they make projects accountable. They make something achieved or not achieved. They are attainable. Numbers can impress donors, governments, and voters. Because they provide something concrete, numbers have come to hold a central position in the world of development. Without a doubt, numbers are necessary to monitor and evaluate projects, yet the way that numbers are set up and used can detract from the very goals they are intended to quantify.

If, as a planner, I look only at numbers, then I have the power to solve the problems of development by balancing the other half of the equation. This makes me quite an important guy. I can direct resources where I think they will be best used. I can get even better numerical information, balance an even better equation, and pretty soon I can lay out a plan to solve just about anything. That can be quite gratifying. Hitting a target becomes less about the overarching goal as it is about me. This sort of ivory tower planning has occurred in innumerable situations in the short history of the development industry, from the halls of academia, to the UN, to the management levels of any international and national NGO. It has produced the kind of surveys in which poor families have their every possession catalogued, from livestock to land to eating utensils. All in the name of informing the planners, so better decisions can be made for them.

My intention is not to demonize the development industry or those who study the challenges facing people in the developing world. Rather, the point is to remind us that there is a person who is represented by that number, and if our goal is empowerment, we should be aware of whom it is that is being empowered by our actions. Not many country directors, World Bank economists, or members of the board would like the field staff to show up and take account of every possession in their homes.

Development has some very large numbers involved. Billions of people live on some few dollars a day, don’t have access to clean water, and don’t get basic healthcare services. These numbers need to be fixed. But this is not an equation that can be balanced. To balance it is to treat people as numbers, which does not allow them to be free acting, independent variables.

In any project there has to be a plan, and that plan must involve some numbers to monitor and evaluate its effectiveness. But that plan should also have at its heart the notion that each number, each targeted individual, is actually an independent variable, and the true goal should be to make them even more independent, not to pigeonhole them into some preconceived scheme of economic behavior.

In the end, numbers are a tool like any other, and can be used wisely or poorly. Tools are empowering to those who use them, but if we become too enamored with our tools, we lose sight of our goals. In the orthodoxy of development speak, it is kosher to say that the planners and workers serve those people who are the targets of their projects. But if the targets are numbers, and the numbers are a tool, then who is serving whom? In our desire to fix these broken numbers, we must not lose sight of a basic equality, stemming from our shared humanity, with those whom we are there to serve.

Great Expectations

On Sunday we moved. It was not a difficult process, from one furnished apartment to another, and it only took one tuk-tuk, or rickshaw ride to carry all of our things to our new home. The new surroundings are quite comfortable by any standards, and I likely have more amenities than a large proportion of Kenya’s population. It is a two bedroom, one bath half of a duplex, larger than any apartment I ever had back in the U.S. Two beds, a couch and two easy chairs, a book shelf, a coffee table, an inconspicuous rug, assorted remarkably tasteful decorations and side tables, and a couple of squeaky fans compliment the recent renovation. Located just a fifteen minute walk from my office, it seems too good to be true.

But not all is so easy, for not all challenges have revealed themselves. On the first night in our new home, we unpack our belongings along with the few new items purchased to fill any gaps in the furnishings. A new water filter, ice trays, and a handful of sponges and soaps all make their way into the kitchen. It is apparent that the stove and small refrigerator are not nearly as new as the paint on the walls. They are chipped and stained with use, and the rubber in the joins has begun to dry and crack. Luckily my misgivings about the refrigerator are calmed when we plug it in and flip the switch on the outlet. It begins to buzz and hum and our recently purchased groceries go in.

Later that evening we look to the stove to prepare for dinner. Three of the four burners have all of their components. One is conspicuously incomplete, missing the black ceramic plate that splits the flow of gas into a wide circle of flame. This fourth may not help with cooking dinner, but if we ever have need of a Bunsen burner, we should be covered. The oven appears to be electric, and also appears to be completely non-functioning, given the jumble of wires hanging uselessly out the back. Neither of these are real problems, as I cannot remember ever needing all four burners, and it never is cool enough to seriously consider baking.

Next to the oven sits the large orange gas tank. It feels heavy, indicating it is almost full. I lift the rubber hose connected to the back of the stove and go to put it over the nozzle of the tank when I notice the white substance plugging the hole where the gas should come out. I am unfamiliar with this particular type of nozzle. Perhaps they put a plug in to guard against leaks. I scrape the white stuff with my fingernail. It feels like chalk or plaster. Perhaps it is some new kind of filter, allowing gas to pass out but nothing to get in and block the flow. That is an unlikely possibility, given the apparent age of the rest of the tank, but I try putting the hose over the end anyway and opening the valves. No gas comes through. I close the valves, pull the hose off and look at the white plug again. Plaster. It has to be plaster, but why would anyone put plaster in the nozzle of a gas tank? My short fingernails can’t reach any further into the opening, so I grab a spare screw and prepare to scratch or drill a hole.

As soon as the screw puts pressure on the chalky white substance, it crumbles and gives way like a paper-thin wall. Out pour a tiny dead spider and an enormous dead grub. I probably killed them when I opened the gas valve. I’m not sure what they were doing in there together, nor which of them constructed the barrier, but at least the gas blockage has been dealt with. Or so I think.

After cleaning out the nozzle and replacing the hose I open the valves again and try to light the stove. Nothing. No gas moving out. Try again. Nothing. I remove the burners and open the top of the stove, checking that all the pipes are going in the right direction and that turning the knobs on the front of the range actually opens another valve. It’s getting late. We’re hungry. The pipes appear to be in the right place. The range gets put back together. The hose is reattached. The valves are opened. No gas comes through, and our first dinner in our new home ends up being two melted and re-cooled candy bars, thanks to our loudly buzzing fridge.

Quite often it seems that our happiness is dependent more upon our expectations than the objective circumstances we find our selves in. Thankfully my girlfriend and I have enough perspective and our senses of humor are strong enough that we were not left devastated by our low-grade chocolate dinner. That said, a working stove would have rounded out an overall better dining experience. The same concept holds true with birthday presents, family vacations, and development projects. It is all too easy to fall into latching on to the latest idea as the cure for the ailments of the developing world. With each iteration of big words and projections, expectations are raised. This may be necessary in the world of fundraising, where once a bandwagon is big enough it reaches the critical mass needed to possibly make an impact on a large scale. For the people targeted by these projects however, such great expectations can create as many problems as opportunities.

Throughout the history of the development industry communication with targeted populations has not been crystal clear. The interpretation of a message will always depend upon the previous experiences of the interpreter. The greater the differences in experience between those creating a message and those hearing it, the greater can be the difference in the interpretation, and hence expectations generated. What you say and what is heard are not always the same things when speaking to your coworker at the water cooler. When the message is generated by the moneyed donor or the scholarly professor, and received by the semi-nomadic tribesman, the orphaned urban youth, or the small farmer the difference in what is said and what is heard is potentially that much greater.

I work for an organization that plants trees with small farmers. This activity holds a great amount of potential to generate income for rural families and to help halt certain environmental woes such as desertification. People should know that the potential impact is great, but it cannot end poverty on its own. Such rhetoric, though perhaps useful in motivating donors, only sets up the targets of development projects for disappointment.

While in the field, I walk a line between the desire to motivate people to be excited about the projects we do, and the need to ensure that we manage the farmers’ expectations fairly. I cannot help but be seen as someone in a position of more power than those people I work to serve. My education, my speech, my nationality, economic background and skin color all point to my being in a position to make changes happen. It is radically unfair that it is so, but so it is. And in that position, it is my responsibility to speak plainly, to explain clearly while not talking down, to motivate without planting false hopes, and to work enthusiastically on a project that will take years to bear fruit.

Despite these responsibilities of good development practice, at the end of the day each individual has the capacity to base their happiness either upon their prior expectations, or upon a more objective idea of their wellbeing. In that light, a stove that does not cook, a refrigerator that can’t make ice, a leaking roof and a rubble filled toilet that will only flush twice a day are things that can either make you pine for those things you don’t have, or remind you of those things you do. A few hundred trees on a small farm plot will never buy someone a Mercedes or cure malaria, but it might pay for a high school education, a clean water system, or keep someone invested enough in their community to have them see options beyond moving to a slum in a major city. Those, at least, are some of my expectations.

Town and Country

Pelé, Hermán and I were up well before the break of dawn. We would spend the morning in the field, from around six until around one p.m. Then we would go back to their home for lunch and a siesta. Sometime around three they would head back to the field and I would move on to visit another farmer or family. This morning we were up early and the weeding had to be done. The cotton field that Pelé and Hermán worked together was a good kilometer away from their home, and we would set out after drinking máte, just as the sky was getting lighter over Misiones to the east.

Before leaving the patio where we often ate together, Pelé took a small plastic bottle from his coat pocket and took a swig. He offered it to Hermán and I, and we each refused, so he took another in our honor. To start the motor, he said. The old soda bottle was refilled on a daily basis with caña, a sugar alcohol like rum only sweeter. Pelé spent a good amount of his time in a mild state of inebriation, and several times a week was stumbling drunk. He was not an angry drunk, nor a mean drunk. If anything he was a happy-sad drunk, who delighted in the company of others, resented his position as the town drunk, and had no idea how to not be seen as a bit of a buffoon. He was a short, strong, and funny man, not a deep thinker, but a quick wit, and despite him being some thirty or forty years my senior and perpetually intoxicated, he was one of the best friends I had in the two years I lived in southern Paraguay.

Pelé was far from the greatest farmer in the world, and he never took to my suggestions of planning crop rotations or using green manures. But despite his alcoholism, which likely inhibited any large leaps forward in his lifestyle, he provided his wife Dominga and daughter Vicki with a decent standard of living. The amount of work done was greatly improved by Hermán’s arrival as the son-in-law, but even without Hermán, Pelé managed. Outside of the occasional day labor on the nearby ranch, he will never be employed by anyone. He owns no land. If he lived in the United States, he would likely be a homeless man.

In the developed world, there are few if any positions in the professional workplace where it is acceptable to arrive under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This does not mean that people do not get away with it, or that functioning alcoholics don’t manage to keep their problems under wraps, or that some people never look the other way at such behavior. Overall, though, in a developed economic system that has amounted centuries of specialization in multitudes of professions, there is no place for a person to be operating as inefficiently as they do when they are drunk.

The world of the small farmer, either at a subsistence or small holding cash crop level, does not have the same professional culture. Showing up on time is not an issue. Of course you go to the field early, because it is incredibly hot in the middle of the day. But if work needs to get done in the middle of the day, it will get done. If that work can be done at another hour, it will likely get done at the other hour. You can hoe a good number of rows with a few shots of hard alcohol in you. You might not do the best you can, but it will get done. You take a break when you want to take a break. You drink when you can afford it. There is always work to do.

A job is a different cultural animal. A job tells you when to work. It tells you when to stop. It tells you how you must be while doing that work. At the organization I work for in Kenya, our extension agents range from those around twenty years old to those in their fifties who have spent all their lives working on a farm, and from those fresh out of high school to those who did not complete middle school. In that population the difference between the developed economy sense of work and the small farm sense of work manifests itself in myriad ways.

Two weeks ago we fired one of our field extension agents for showing up drunk. He apparently is an alcoholic, and his intoxication at work had occurred several times before being brought to the attention of his superiors. Today I ran a training session at his farm, and when I greeted him he seemed cheery and not at all upset over the matter. Perhaps he was covering up disappointment, or perhaps for him the idea of a job was a novelty that just did not work out. I was reminded of my friend Pelé, whom I last saw a couple of years ago while working back in Paraguay. He had not changed too much in the intervening years. He still holds his own in the manual labor department, and still makes lewd jokes at regular intervals. He still spends his pocket change on caña, he still makes a lot of noise or falls off his horse when drunk, and he still gets into the occasional yelling match or fistfight with his rivals of forty years. But he does look older, Dominga looks a little more tired, and Hermán and Vicki have long since moved to Buenos Aires in search of jobs.

Viewed in a harsh light the history of development is one of people being left behind. In a way it is the inevitable flip side of someone getting ahead. You can’t have one without the other. You go to the town; you leave the country. Like the law of conservation of matter and energy, it can appear that development is a zero-sum game. But in the face of that cynical equation stands the human being. The ability to learn and grow is the ability to empower one’s self without disempowering others. It may not always work out that way, but the potential lies waiting, not only in the youth getting his or her first job, but also in the farmer of forty years, open to the possibilities that are out there.

Tackling Taboo Territory: A Cultural Commentary

On Culture

The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.

From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.

There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.

Cultural Imperialism

It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.

Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.

I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.

Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.

The Balancing Act

The soil in much of Palakumi location, Ganze district, is red. It is the red of desert rocks in the American southwest, the red of a sunrise mellowed by a thin layer of clouds in the east, a red that gets in your socks and shoes, and dusts the cuffs of your trousers. As the wind kicks up, the red dust spreads itself over the rest of your clothes, finding seams and pockets in which to deposit itself.

Red color in the earth is usually an indication of an old, weathered soil, with a high proportion of iron oxides and a low nutrient holding capacity. Most of the soil in Palakumi is sandy, like a beach. Sandy soil makes for easy cultivation and tillage, but does not retain much in the way of water or nutrients. The rains do not fall in abundance there. The majority of the vegetation is low bushes and scrub, a few grasses, and some scattered trees. Most of the trees that have been left produce something that was once a cash crop, either coconuts or cashews. They stand in irregular clusters. Buyers no longer come for the cashews since the factory was moved to a different district. A few locals tap the coconuts to make a syrupy alcohol that keeps unemployed young men occupied for the day. The clumps of trees are like little segments of the forest that once spread over the whole region, holding tightly to what is left of the soil. If you pick up a handful of the red sand, it sifts back through your fist without holding any form. It appears, on first analysis, to be relatively devoid of organic material, as if the scattered leaves and grasses break down into nothing and simply disappear.

Soil organic matter is integral to a healthy agro-ecosystem. Organic matter can bind mineral particles together, helping aggregation and increasing porosity. Organic matter can tie up nutrients so they are not immediately available to plants, but it can also build up a long-term store, increasing the overall nutrient holding capacity of the soil. Organic matter provides a balance between the benefits and drawbacks of both sandy and clay soils and a buffer to shifts in soil pH. Without organic matter, sandy soils like those I saw in Palakumi can see nutrients quickly leached away, and crops, without the aid of substantial inputs, will grow poorly.

And yet when Gabriel hears that Ganze or Kilifi districts are the poorest in the country, he disagrees. He tells Benson and I that there are riches waiting to be tapped right here, from the ground under our feet. He, a farmer and retired teacher, sees potential in this dry, red soil. He says the metric that they use to measure wealth is flawed. Benson nods in agreement. He is an extension agent with whom I have been walking across the community, visiting farmers participating in our organization’s program. More than any other element of my first impression of Ganze district, it is the optimism and the belief in the ability to move forward that I find striking and valuable to take with me. Gabriel, Benson and I sit for a couple of hours at the end of a long day, discussing myriad topics, from the upcoming Constitutional Referendum in Kenya to agricultural practices in the United States.

At the end of my stay in Palakumi location, my feelings are mixed. I am optimistic about the participation of the farmers in the program and their enthusiasm. I am eager to begin work in my role of developing training programs for the extension agents with whom I work. At the same time I am concerned about the expectations that are in place already. Managing the expectations of the people who pull their livelihood from that dry, sandy, red soil, may prove to be as much of a challenge as the logistics of delivering trees to our expanding network of farmers and extension workers. If expectations are not managed well, even results that the organization would deem a success could turn out to be a failure in the farmers' eyes.

The challenges facing any development project are innumerable. Creating a problem definition helps in that it gives structure to a project, and yet it hinders in that it allows for the exclusion of elements integral to the human, natural, and agricultural ecologies at work. It is all too easy for the organization, on the path to completing its goals, to ignore those factors that are outside the scope of its problem definition. As in the soil, where a balance of sand, silt, clay, organic material, air and water make a healthy system, a development organization must strive to balance the factors pushing and pulling it in different directions. From the expectations of program participants and donors, to the science and logistics behind the operations, to the mundane details of the budget, it is imperative to allow for a sharp focus on the task at hand without losing that task's place in the broader picture. Looking forward, I try to balance my optimism with caution, my assumptions with an open mind, and the limited scope of my training project with the breadth of Gabriel’s everyday life in Palakumi location, Ganze district. In the end, hoping not to sound too much of a reductionist, I have come to think that balance itself is a goal. When we speak of sustainability, that ill-defined concept so popular in the vocabularies of development, economics, and environmental management, it may be valuable to keep that goal in mind. Balance in the soil, balance in the organization, and balance in development as a whole.

The Great Divide

One of the perks of working in the field of international development is the opportunity, every once in a while, to find a little slice of personal paradise. Being stationed in or regularly travelling to remote locations allows for the exploration of places untapped by the developed world. At times, either at work or play, you can reasonably fool yourself into thinking that no one else has experienced what you are doing. For a brief moment, you imagine there is something unique and groundbreaking to your time and place, and that your presence there is special. It is to be the first to climb a cliff face, or to stumble on a secluded cataract in a forgotten ravine. You blend an element of fantasy into the surrounding reality, and find a momentary escape coupled with adrenaline, endorphins, or simple relaxation.

Conveniently forgotten are certain facts: that you are the first to ascend the cliff face not because it is an impossible climb, nor because none have been there before you. You are the first because no one within a hundred kilometers ever had a climbing rope, and no one saw the need to climb that cliff when there is a perfectly easy path up the back slope. Similarly, every local knows the waterfall that you have found and thinks it nothing more special than a somewhat inconvenient place to wash their clothes. In the moment, though, you aid yourself with a small willful loss of perspective, and the results are either a sense of accomplishment, slightly misguided self-importance, or just a good story. There is a small divide between reality and your experience of it, and none are left the worse for it.

Enter tourism. No longer is your cliff face untouched, and you find your waterfall on a postcard. Gone is the isolation of the moment; gone is your minor fantasy. But tourism brings its benefits. It boosts the economy, taking in wealth from other places and distributing it here and there, almost haphazardly, but distributing it nonetheless. The surplus of available labor recedes slightly, and new opportunities arise. The loss of your sense of importance is a small price to pay, and the little divide between your fantasy and reality is washed away.

Were your artificially inflated moments of greatness the only sacrifice for increased economic wellbeing, all would be fine, but this is the developing world. In the developing world the power of wealth is exponentially greater than in a world where the rule of law protects all people equally. In the developing world the lines between help and hindrance, the legal and the lawless, a poor girl and a prostitute, are all blurred. Within the developing world there is the great divide.

The great divide sits between the traveler or expatriate, the outsider, and the country around them. The great divide is between the deep history of people and land and the superficial observations of the itinerant visitor. The great divide lies between the expectations of the observer and the forces driving the objects in view. Any outsider looking for the divide to be bridged from the other side will be disappointed.

In a dance club outside of Mombasa, the western world has plunked itself down with an unconvincing thud, and the beacons of a globalized society gyrate and shout in time with a thumping background noise. The expatriates and visitors who want to find some semblance of what they left behind are met with a quizzical hybrid of the familiar and the strange. Some immerse themselves in the familiar, using the same ignorance, willful or lazy, that allows the person at the waterfall to imagine that they are the first to discover it. Now instead of overlooking the laundry spread on a nearby rock, they overlook the disparities of wealth and power in the room. They overlook the rail-thin girls’ obedience to the middle-aged businessmen and concentrate on finding a good margarita. They leave the club much as they would leave any bar back home, only with a vague sense that not everything was as it seemed. Other visitors indulge in the strange, taking advantage of the position that they find themselves in, giving commands and debauching themselves until they catch their plane back to their normal place on the totem pole. Finally, some of the outsiders stay, making a life, for better or worse, from a de facto position of economic power, but often without making headway into the social strata around them. These expatriates are still tourists. They are tourists because they do not understand anything beyond the great divide that separates them from the vast majority of the people who cannot enter the club. They may stay for ten or twenty years, or for the rest of their lives, but until they make the effort to cross the divide, they will always be tourists.

Some travelers say that they do not want to simply be a tourist. Perhaps they want a better story to go home with, or to get pictures that no one else has. Perhaps they feel an ethical imperative to be more than another economic blip that drips dollars, euros or pounds along their way. Perhaps they cannot ignore the moral infractions and disparities in power that are illuminated, but at times supported, by tourism. Perhaps they are idealists.

To be more than simply a tourist takes effort. To break that mold demands more than visiting out of the way locations where other travelers do not go. In Kenya, the people of tribes, classes and political parties know hundreds of years of history. Like anyone’s history, theirs is not a perfect knowledge of past facts, but a perspective provided to each individual from a lifetime of input. It is a history of conflicts, successes and failures, and peoples living and moving across the land. To be more than a tourist here requires attempts to understand that perspective, and to see past the surface. That is what it is to try to bridge the great divide. It may take years, and it may seem impossible, but there is just as much need to bridge the divide as there is need for the material advantages of development. The first step on the bridge is to realize that you arrive a tourist, knowing nothing, but open to learning. To keep an open mind takes serious effort, but no one said this would be easy. If a vacation is what you're looking for, there are plenty of tourist destinations out there.

On First Impressions

The taxi ride from the Mombasa airport to Kilifi took a little over an hour. I chatted intermittently with the driver about music and life in Kenya, but my attention was tuned more to the scenes passing outside my window. As we jostled through the crowded streets on the outskirts of the city, the first images that sank into my mind struck me as odd not because of any sense of the exotic, but rather because of their familiarity. Kenya looked just like Paraguay.

At the time of the cab ride in question, I had spent just about three years of my life in Paraguay. I had been in Kenya for an hour and forty-five minutes. Paraguay is a landlocked country in the middle of South America. Kenya is on the east coast of Africa. Paraguay hugs the Tropic of Capricorn while the equator passes through Kenya. The elevation in Kenya climbs from sea level to highlands and Mount Kenya’s peak reaches well over 5000 meters. Paraguay has the elevation changes of your average pancake, with perhaps a sliver of melting butter pushed to one side representing the country’s highest point at 755 meters. Paraguay’s population is just over six million people, and Kenya’s approaches 39 million. Kenya is home to over forty distinct tribes of people. With the exception of some very small indigenous minorities, the people of Paraguay are basically one big tribe, in that they are a group distinct from their neighbors on all sides, virtually all mestizos, of mixed Spanish and Guaraní backgrounds, and they identify themselves as Paraguayos. Before my drive to Kilifi, I would have said that Paraguay and Kenya had little more in common than belonging to that loosely defined group of nations known as the developing world. Yet even with foreknowledge of these drastic differences, through the window of my taxi, I could not keep from seeing similarities wherever I looked.

The sides of Mombasa’s roads were packed with vendors selling all manner of goods that I thought I had seen before. From bruised vegetables stacked in wooden crates to cheap plastic goods, car tires and multi-purpose tubing, the curbside wares all were known to me beforehand. Men pulling overloaded crates blurred the line between the pedestrian shop fronts and the edge of the road. An overabundance of corrugated metal made familiar rooftops and fences, while the occasional abandoned construction project, a gutted hotel or office building, gave hints of graft, laundering and tax evasion that leave similar skeletons in several Paraguayan cities.

As we pushed into more rural stretches of road I thought I recognized the grasses, bushes and trees on embankments and in ditches. Corn grew in fields lain out to fit irregular contours and property lines as it does on the small peri-urban farms outside of Asunción. I identified leucaena, a leguminous tree that can provide significant benefits to agricultural soils and can be used as supplementary forage for animals, but when left to its own devices becomes an aggressive weed. I had managed a stand of leucaena in Paraguay, and here it was, thousands of miles and an ocean away, greeting me. Goats were tied to trees and fence posts in a remarkably familiar vignette. Even the traffic patterns were similar to those I had experienced in my years on the island in the middle of South America. The tragedy of the commons manifests itself regularly in poorly regulated traffic conditions all across the developing world, so the similarity in driving styles can be ascribed more to human nature than any national preference, but this notwithstanding, the number of similar sights, sounds, and even smells struck such familiar ground that an unprovoked thought popped into my mind, saying, “Kenya is just like Paraguay!”

Of course Kenya is not just like Paraguay; they are quite different. I knew as soon as the thought existed that it was untrue, and yet it was the first thought that came to my mind. I only remember it now because it made me chuckle to myself. As far as first impressions go, it was no brilliant insight.

The term ‘first impression’ is actually a misnomer. Given the colloquial meaning of the phrase, it would be more accurate to say first conclusions. When you ask for a friend’s first impressions of a new job, or place, or potential romantic interest, you are not asking for the first thing that person saw or heard, but what they then thought about that data. But the word ‘impression’ implies something that acted upon your senses, so the true first impressions are just the sensory input you receive, the sights, smells, sounds and so forth. It is the identification of these inputs or the reactions they provoke that in everyday speech we call first impressions. My first impressions of Kenya were the images outside my window, but if asked for my first impressions, I would respond that I at first thought it looked quite a bit like Paraguay, only with African people occupying the place of South Americans.

These first impressions are actually the conclusions of split second reasoning often based upon quick associations with past experiences. So people with different past experience will have different first impressions when confronted with the same data. Only when presented with more information and using some sort of rational thought could the prejudice of previous experience be overcome. Given the limited evidence presented in a first encounter, one would seem naïve to claim that they always trust their first impressions. This does not mean that one should never trust their first impressions or that those impressions are worthless. Rather, it seems that first impressions can tell a person a good deal, but must be viewed in the context of their previous experience. These early conclusions or instant associations may say more about the viewer than the object in view. I would be lying if I said my first impressions of Kenya were not positive, but if this train of thought has brought me to any conclusion, it is that perhaps it is best to reserve judgment until further impressions are made.