Celebrity Mzungu

Which moves on to the next experience – that of celebrity. Being white in Africa makes me a celebrity. By celebrity I mean a person who is considered an authority on everything, is seen as rich, and who is seen as a way to escape African life. It takes a tremendous amount of sensitivity not to abuse this celebrity because you realize that you can get away with just about anything given the color of your skin. For example, about a year ago a woman I know was volunteering with the Maasai out on the Maasai Mara. She was working with a local health clinic to educate men and women about HIV/AIDS and family planning. Now because she’s a white woman from America, everyone who comes into the clinic – and everyone in the community for that matter – assumes this woman has medical training and is an expert. They would never question her abilities or ask to see her credentials no matter what happened. She is treated with enormous respect. And that really doesn’t work. She’s a bartender from the East Coast of America. She’s a bartender who hasn’t paid attention to this culture for the past six months and is crossing the line. While she was working in the clinic last year, she was asked if she wanted to administer vaccine jabs (shots) to children by clinic staff who saw no problem in allowing an entirely untrained person deliver medical care. And so…because she’s naïve and quite honestly ridiculous, she agreed to help give jabs to kids. No one would ever question her ability to handle the vaccinations – or her ability to handle a child’s life-threatening reaction to the jab. She told me this story just a few days after it happened and I was horrified. I asked her if she would ever do such a thing in America? “No…of course not.” So I then asked her, “So it’s okay to do it here with a bunch of semi-literate Africans…just not at home?” To which she had no reply. This celebrity thing is scary. If I walk into any government office, I am immediately told to not wait in line and to come ahead of everyone else. When I refuse, I am seen as strange. That I would rather wait my turn than receive special treatment is very peculiar. Kenya has a massive colonialism hangover that still has people curtsying to me when I do something kind or when say I pay the housekeeper her monthly salary.

My friend, the one pretending to be a nurse, woke up from her “I didn’t realize” stupor and she’s no longer practicing medicine out on the Maasai Mara. I can appreciate that she just wanted to do some good work…we all do. Which is another challenge in Kenya. How much of yourself do you give to a group or to a person without becoming all-consumed with their needs? Most of you know that I help support and volunteer with a small group in the Kawangware Slum. Last year I was spending a lot of time and energy with the group and I quickly came to realize that I was being seen as their sole source of money, support, and other resources. And that’s dangerous. Expats come and go. We don’t usually stay forever. And when you let anyone or any group become dependent upon you for their survival, it’s dangerous ground. So I decided to pull back a bit from the group. And thats been difficult. Everyone I know in the expat community tries to do a little something to improve the lives of a Kenyan or Kenyans around them. We pay for school fees, medical treatment, food, or some other necessity because we can… But it’s finding the balance in all of that which is very challenging but when you live amongst the poorest people in the world, you realize that you cannot possibly solve every problem or address every issue or you will be exhausted. You have to find a balance between helping those around you and taking care of yourself without feeling guilty. “Do I really need to eat out tonight? So many are hungry…” – that’s the kind of thinking that can creep up on you and that requires your attention when it does because it’s easy to get wrapped in guilt living in Africa. We have so much and most have so little. Balance…is quite tough. I still do what I can to try and make a difference but I realize that the struggle for a family and for their kids far surpasses my abilities and so I have to accept that they are struggling and will probably struggle for the foreseeable future.