How-ar-yoo?

By way of greeting, “how are you!” is less of a question and more of a statement on the English language taught in primary school here in the village.  This is the one phrase that everyone knows, and the children scream it at us whenever they can.  “Mzungu! Mzungu! How-ar-yoo!”  Returning their waves and smiles with a, “I’m fine, how are you?” is an endlessly entertaining enterprise repaying our small output with a gaggle of giggling children scurrying away, returning only seconds later to reenact the scene.

This morning we wake earlier than usual to help the TRAKLAP team bring in the corn from one of their fields.  It’s been since high school church group that I’ve harvested corn by hand.  I recall tedium and chaffing in equal measure soon after the initial curiosity of learning how to use the cornhusker tool wore out.  Once mastered, I settled into a hectare length row and tried to think of something, anything, other than what I was doing.  This morning, I find the work enjoyable and a nice change from the routines we’ve developed around the compound.  Perhaps my attitude toward a little hard work has changed in the intervening 30 years, or perhaps the shortness of the row on this little acre plot and the company in which I find myself makes things easier, but I’m having more than a bit of fun.

This would be the very image of bucolic and fertile Africa, women in colorful headscarves balancing baskets loaded with the fruits of their labors, except for the fact that many ears are just nubbins and more than a few desiccated stalks fail to produce a single cob.  The harvest is small this year after sparse rains halted around Christmas -- they should have continued into well into the new year.  As the staple crop dwindles, people who already have little will have even less.  In the northern, drier counties, livestock are dying by the thousands and people really worry about the next few months.  This too, is Africa, one western media all too often portrays. 

Being in a place, tasting its food, laughing with its people, and waking each morning with a little bit more of the red clay soil in my heart, affects a quicker change on me than any change I could facilitate in the community.  Coming here, I sacrifice all ability to consume with academic distraction stories of Kenyan, or African, suffering.  Her story is now entwined with my own, though the fullness of that tale would take lifetimes to unpack.  Traveling requires that we risk that essential part of ourselves which leans toward separating people into boxes of convenience, distance, and dispassion.  Simple definitions and judgments are useless when weighed against direct observation, conversation and harvesting corn together.  We are here striving to be of some use to those who host us and if both parties feel the better for the transaction, then all the more reason to do it.

Turns out that being of some use, no matter how small the contribution nor how overwhelming the challenge, is a balm to the very human reaction of despair.  Our problems seem insurmountable, overwhelming and bitterly unfair.  However, when faced with the alternative, doing nothing and fretting about everything; I must do something, for fretting is in my nature.  Doing something will not likely solve the problems we try to face, but it works wonders for the doer in the personal battle against despair.  For the time being, “how-ar-yoo?” feels more like a welcome than a question; and we’re doing fine thank you very much.