The Seasons

I’ll be honest, the prospect of living within the tropics for the rest of my life is very low on my life goals right now. Though there is a lot of sun, some good rains (I love the rain!), and the ability to go outside at all times of the year, I’m still a sucker for the whole 4-season model. It is incredibly embedded into my psyche, so much so that I’m not truly realizing the passing of time these days. Yes, it is November 4^th but it might as well be sometime in the spring or summer. We’re in the short rainy season here. I swear, it really messes with your brain to think that the calendar keeps on changing, but the weather doesn’t. You see, my body doesn’t believe calendars so much as it believes in the cycle of getting colder and warmer over a longer time-period. So yes, my sense of time, in the long-term, is skewed. Cool

I miss the cold, and warming up. I miss seeing things like leaves, snow, and steamy breath. I miss frozen lakes, driving in the snow, and bundling up. I miss running and sliding on ice, weather slowing down our busy lives, and hot beverages (being a contrast to the cold, rather than attributing to the heat…). I miss the food that is cooked with the seasons! I miss all our food! I miss walking in the snow and messing around with my friends in it. I miss watching football (not fútbol) games, lying on the couch with my dad. I miss watching the NBA. I miss going to the stadium for baseball games.

There are so many things that I’m missing so badly that I thought I never needed while living in the US. I’m now realizing the things that have become so important to me as I’ve grown up. They haven’t always been altruistically the most meaningful, but the significance that these things have in my life are more important than that. It’s part of my culture. I never used to notice it, but I’m exploring that right now. I’m excited to look into what my culture is because it has seemed so non-existent for so long. I came here thinking I had no culture. I’m okay though cuz I think it might be tough for anyone from the US to articulate their own culture. And by culture, I mean something close to what James Spradley says: “Culture is the acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate behavior.” I’m not sure if I’m fluent in articulating my culture, but I’m getting there. It’s exciting to me, so I think I’ll keep trying.

As much as I miss things, I know I’m not coming back for another 7 months. I’m not dwelling on the things I miss. I can’t. I just know they are that much more important to me, and they will be that much more meaningful to me when I get back. Maybe I’ll live better that way. I hope you can experience the important things in your life and relish in them. Better yet, I hope you have the experience of not being able to do the things that are most meaningful to you but that it wouldn’t be permanent, so you could go back to them with a renewed passion! If you’re reading this, I probably miss you too! Do write.

Prayer and iTunes

I don’t believe I’ve shared much on the spiritual part of my life, though this may be entirely insufficient as well. I guess it’s always a struggle (my journey that is), but anyway, there have been a few things standing out to me lately. These have a lot to do with adjusting to life in Kenya. I’m certainly figuring out how to live here, just as I have done in MN and Guatemala.

Prayer hasn’t been an easy thing to keep up with. I’m still continuing to explore how I can keep my relationship with God going strong here. I felt like I had found it up at school with the opportunity to pray and go to mass with the monks. That sincerely filled me well. Even though there are so many religious here and they even pray morning and night in my place here, it feels so much different. Missing Sunday mass while traveling is hard for me too (I do get the readings sent to my cell by text message though!). Anyway, what I’ve found to be fulfilling comes from something I did almost a year ago.

Before leaving for Guatemala, I found myself sitting on my bed at home in Denver downloading every single podcast that I found interesting. It turned out to add up to some 700 tracks. I had no idea when I would listen to them or how they would even help me, but I was glad that they were free and seemed like good things. I listened to few in Guatemala and over the summer, but now, I’m listening to a few of the tracks on a daily basis.

I’ve pulled out all the ones that are prayer and all of them that give some kind of information or instruction. Now I enjoy at least one of both per day, and it’s been quite enriching for me. My favorite podcast to listen to is the U of MN Duluth Newman Catholic Campus Ministry podcast, which consists of homilies recorded by Fr. Mike Schmitz. He simply has a gift for preaching especially in a relevant way to college students. Otherwise, I’m really enjoying America Public Media’s “Speaking of Faith” podcast.

En(courage)ment

I would like to share with you all in the world wide web a heart-warming experience from Monday, October 26th. I was out around Hardy (close to my place here) doing research with my field assistant, and we barely managed to catch a matatu in the rain. We were in a spot where little traffic came by, and we would have waited another hour to catch the next one. Still raining, we reached my stop, and my field assistant, Joseph Kamweti made a joke about me needing to do some marathoning now. I jump off the matatu in my Tevas, gray slacks, and green rain jacket. From that stage to my front door, there is no pavement, gravel or anything, simply dirt (mud by this point). So I start running, head down, looking to dodge the puddles in the road, not being able to see more than 15 ft ahead. I have the thought to transfer the contents of my pants pockets into my jacket but decide against it in favor of getting back faster. I run for about 10 minutes, and I’m just dirty and soaked by the time I reach the guest house. Frustrated, I go in the back door, and the cooks welcome me to Africa, once again. I squeak down the corridor towards my room to go change. What do I find a the foot of my door, but one package and one letter?
I thank God as I pick them up with a smile on my face. “Ellory Eggermont” and “Kalene Morris” say the return addresses. “This can only be good,” I say to myself as I bring them to my desk. I remove the soaked clothes, dry off, and change into some warm PJs. I’m not going out anywhere for the rest of the day. I do find my borrowed cell phone not turning on, and later, it would turn on and off on its own will. Broken phone number three. That’s more phones broken than I had ever owned.
Sitting down, I find my knife and open both. I take a deep, calming breath and look inside Ellory’s package first. Inside the Celestial Seasonings chamomile tea box, the first thing I see is the most beautiful, red, sugar maple leaf, taped to the inside of the lid. It’s my only experience of fall. You know, it’s terribly tough to live without four seasons. I open the box to find the front page of the St. Cloud Times from Oct 7th. She says it’s “just for packaging,” but I want to read all the headlines. Newspapers are significantly different here. Next, I see a Snickers bar and wild berry Skittles, but what is this? There’s some yellow thing in front of it. It’s cut-out of the letter “E,” “You can share if you want, but you shouldn’t. This is for YOU!” Needless to say, I took the advice and paraded my permission in Martha’s face when she ridiculed me as to why my wrappers were empty. (which is an odd fact because when I showed her what I had received, I told her I wasn’t too sure as to why Ellory would send me empty Snickers and Skittles wrappers…weird. Must be trying to tempt me…) Next, I found some great tea (Numi, Berry Black Fruitea Darjeeling Black Tea), and the best homemade paper I’ve seen. What a smile I have on now, even as I was so upset a bit ago. Finally, at the bottom, I get the most perfect letter, especially on a rainy day. I think those girls from the box in the summer of ’08 really know how to write the most without too many words.
I couldn’t wait to eat the candy, so I read Kalene’s letter while chomping on a snickers and some skittles. Some people just know how to bring back great, comforting memories, and other people can really do a good job (this being some great timing) at encouraging me spiritually. Thanks! Hearing about senior year helps too, since that’s all I’ve really got left at CSBSJU. I’ve been thinking about that a lot since I left. I’m sure it’ll come up again, so I’ll delve into it there.
What a relief it was to get some snail mail on such a day! It’s become pretty important now that the internet is mostly gone and quite restricted. Now that I’ve got a few things done, I’m planning on spending a huge chunk of time writing to people and sending more things. It’s exciting :)

October in Kenya: Revelations, Realizations, and Reality

So! What has happened in the past four weeks in the life of Chris Morgan? Well, I wish I could have updated you more often, but here it is. I hope you enjoy it. Also, I plan on writing deeper on some of these issues and others that are important to me. This means you should tune-in in the next few days because I’m hoping to publish a blog once per day for the next however many days it takes to put all the topics up.

Lunch at St. Claire’s Student Hostel has become a bit of a fixture for me on Mondays. Martha goes from her Human Rights class with our friend Mary Anne back to her hostel, and I meet up with them to eat some amazing chips (French fries… that term doesn’t really make sense here…..ha!) and visit with the cooking staff with whom we’ve become good friends. They visit our place often and are friends with our cooks, so we see them often. Bertha, Beatrice, and Maureen work as the cooks there and are my age. Lunch with Mary Anne is a good time to just hang out and relax a bit. She’s been stressed lately being that she was about 36 weeks pregnant when we started this and starting CATs (mid-terms exams). Well, now she’s given birth, but I’ll talk about that later. We’ve formed a close friendship with her.

One of my classmates at CUEA, a priest from Malawi, told me that he could get me a really nice touch-screen phone just like his for pretty cheap compared to the original price, so since mine from the US was breaking, I decided to take him up on it. I gave him the money, and he went into town to buy it since he would surely get a better price while bargaining than I simply because of his skin color, and possibly superior Kiswahili skills. Martha sent for one too, and we waited patiently. Finally, we got them on a Saturday evening. The very next Monday, the first day I brought it out with me, I found that both screens had cracked. I had no recollection of hitting anything hard with my leg, so I was quite surprised and upset. Anyway, I started using a borrowed phone again until I think I ruined that one while running home in a rainstorm. (Stay tuned!) After that, I used Martha’s first phone she bought here, and she threatened many things would happen if I broke hers. I am happy to report that the phone is still in good condition. She even offered to give me her touch-screen phone for me to use instead of fixing the other one.

Losing internet is the next big topic. I have had no access to internet at my residence since Oct 18^th. This has created a problem of being in contact with people, especially with my parents on skype (though I do miss other conversations on skype too!). Ha, let me finally get around to the cause of it. There has been a lot of talk of a huge increase in bandwidth for the whole of Kenya in the form of some huge cable from I have no idea where. Anyway, all the internet companies basically are scrambling for their share of the market and have even resorted to sabotaging the other companies. Case in point: our building was supposed to receive a fiber-optic cable direct by the beginning of October. They couldn’t do it because the cable that was supposed to come was stolen. We still had internet, but just at a different capacity. Now, the internet in this area has been sabotaged, so we have zero internet now. Of course the schools and a couple cyber cafes were able to quickly repair theirs. That is where I go now.

Papers and research have been an interesting task since the loss of internet. So it’s back to the stone-age of card catalogues and talking to a person in order to find these funny things with paper and ink. I don’t know how much longer I can take the human contact or the tangible readings. In all seriousness, I was able to use my own, personal field research and a few books to complete my papers well. I spent the majority of last week on writing two papers for my masters-level classes. First, I completed a 16-page rough draft on Male Socialization in the Maasai Culture for my African Culture class. Second, I finished a 13-page final draft of a paper discussing the enculturation of African culture and Christianity in Africa for my class in CUEA, Living and Promoting Justice and Peace.

Have you ever given birth? I haven’t. Do you know someone who’s given birth? Why, yes I do, Chris. Have you been with them in the hospital, before and after? Hmm, well… From noon on Friday the 23^rd to the evening of Saturday the 24^th, Martha and I joined our great friend Mary Anne in Avenue Hospital. She was two weeks too early and had to have a C-Section on Saturday because, after inducing her twice, she hadn’t dilated enough. I’ll tell you more about that if you choose to ask, but anyway, it was good to be with her. I have never been with anyone who has given birth. I didn’t see the surgery or anyone else giving birth, but it was an unforgettable experience, knowing a piece of what the end of pregnancy looks like. I have a lot of respect for the whole process and that role that women have to physically bring children into the world. Incredible! Some things were surely imbedded in my mind for use at a future date.

We have been experiencing a little more of the dangers of Nairobi lately. Don’t be scarred! That’s not to say that it’s not serious, but things like pick-pocketing happens everywhere. Once a guy tried to unzip Martha’s backpack, I picked him up and set him aside. He left with nothing. What I really wanted to say is a story from one day this last week. I boarded a suspect matatu and didn’t realize that it was a pick-pocketing operation until a bit into it, at which point I simply tried to defend from all the most obvious tactics. Again I was spared because of my vigilance. Yes, both guys sitting on either side of me tried to reach in my pockets and bag, but I had the grace of a nice lady, Lisa, in the front seat who helped make them nervous. Other people in the back were certainly stolen from. I saw the cell phone being transferred out of the matatu. Lisa and I walked for another 15 minutes to our destinations, which was a really important time to talk about what happened. She helped me to realize the gravity of what could have happened and what to do next time: alight (an English word for getting out of the matatu. I forget if I knew that word before arriving here). Now, Martha and I are suspicious of town and matatus, mainly people taking advantage of us. I hope this doesn’t sour or consume my experience here, and I see good hope of that happening.

So, I went to the dentist the other day. I haven’t been in a number of years and was worried that I had an infection under my tooth implant and maybe some cavities. The doc took a look and a quick x-ray of my implant and pronounced my mouth to be in tip-top condition. Sweet, I guess I just have to brush more around the implant because of the extra gaps I have there where food can enjoy good cover. I paid a total of $29.22 for everything including the digital x-rays. Thanks Kenya!

I just returned on Sunday from Nanyuki. This is the end of the rail line, which the British installed in the colonial days. It’s not the end of the whole thing, just the one going north from Nairobi. It sits in the morning shadow of Mount Kenya, and the British keep their military base there. My reason for going was part of my coursework in my African Culture class (Tangaza College’s Maryknoll Institute for African Studies-MIAS). My field assistant, Joseph, lives close to the town with his mother, youngest sister, wife, two daughters, and brother’s family. He is the eldest and his father died in 1989, so he assumes the role of his father. Don’t be mistaken, all of these people do not live under one roof, for once a man is married, he cannot go under his mother’s roof or eat her cooking again. She has a house of her own in the original compound, in the middle of their land (maybe 10 acres of farm and pasture). He has a house there too but plans to move it over the Christmas holidays (“days” being plural because there is more than one “day” to the time off from work, school, etc.). His brother already has his own homestead outside of the original compound with his wife and three children. They grow mostly all of their own food. This made me want to live with them. Anyway, I can do that wherever, so I will. Martha, her field assistant Idah, Joseph, and I enjoyed about 24 hours in his rural home there in the shadow of Mt. Kenya, which we couldn’t see because of the clouds. We had great food, enjoyed fun and laughter with his beautiful family, and talked a lot about culture.

On another point, If you want to hear anything more about any of these topics, feel free to be inquisitive! I purposely leave out some things to tell people who will write me. Though, for the casual reader, I can assure you that you’re getting the real stories. Don’t worry too much!