Kenyan Q&A

One of the first to-dos Timm and I had when we landed in Nairobi was to buy a cell phone. Our friends Matt Peterson and Luke Bruckner, who've made this trip before, had recommended we carry one with a Kenyan number.

That became brilliant advice when we were dropped off at a different place than Walgio expected in Kisumu town. I'm not sure we would have tracked him down before dark by simply asking around at the shanties next to the bus terminal. ("You know, black guy in his 60s, drives a blue car? Have you seen him?")

The line at the downtown Safaricom store was out the door when we arrived, which seemed a little odd for a ho-hum Tuesday morning. But apparently that's the norm, even though there are Safaricoms everywhere. Absolutely everyone has a cell phone, and between upgrading (Internet-equipped phones seemed to be the new thing at Safaricom) and adding airtime (everyone also seems on the pay-as-you-go plan) the cell phone stores are as busy as the matatu roundabout during rush hour.

I got more text messages over four days in Kenya than I do in a month here.

And people seemed to be using those cell phones constantly. This is just me speculating on culture differences (really, an incredible unwise thing to do based on 12 days in a country, I know), but my theory is that Kenyan cell phone etiquette differs from ours because of the lack of home telephones over the years. In particular in rural areas, the sudden access to one another when mobile phones became common must have been an incredible change from the days where someone would have to track down a public phone to make calls. They aren't burdened by the memory of telemarketers calling and being ignored during dinner, for instance. Which made every call, it seemed, vital to answer.

You know that American guilt we share when a cell rings during a meeting, or the polite way movie theaters demand we turn our phones off, or how we'll automatically hit "ignore call' when we're having a face-to-face conversation? None of that exists there. I saw one person screen a call. One, and he called back 40 second later. Phone rings in the middle of our conversation? It's answered. During a meal? Answered. During church? God goes on hold.

As a result Kenyans are very much in touch. Again, I'm speculating, but that characteristic seemed to cross over to national conversation. When we finally found a newspaper, what impressed me was that people from different walks of life, over the course of a few days, had talked to us about the exact issues on the front page. The agenda of the day, even though newspapers don't circulate everywhere, seemed to get around to everyone pretty seamlessly.

This is an awful transition, but that Kenyan curiosity I'm still speculating on seemed to apply also to people's interaction with us. Or at least we were asked a lot of interesting questions, and hopefully we did an adequate job of representing our country with the answers. Like these:

Do we know Shakira, Will Smith or Beyonce? You have two guesses as to who asked this, and the first doesn't count. The teenagers at Kamasengre are familiar with Western pop music, apparently. We explained the geography of the West Coast from Alaska to Los Angeles is as way of excuse for not being able to personally greet Jay Z for them, but the follow up question from one of the girls was the one that got me: Aren't you a journalist? Why don't you just go interview them?

Have the Twin Towers been rebuilt? It was hard to tell how much news from the U.S. is circulated in East Africa. The Kenyan papers didn't have much and the British or international news didn't give us much play either. (Other than Obama, of course, you may have heard he's popular there. Do you own birth certificate joke here.) But they knew about 9/11, obviously.

What does a beard or mustache mean? This was my favorite question. Since Timm doesn't travel with a razor and other Americans had showed up in the past with beards or at least some of that traveler's scruff, they were curious about what statement a little chin hair means. In Kenya, it's one of two things: you're a Muslim or a village elder. For us, we told them, you're either a hockey player during the Stanley Cup playoffs, you're lazy, or just a guy who likes a beard. In America a mustache, Timm told them, means you're a cop.

What is Yellowstone like? For a country so beautiful and full of animals and national parks, that was a really interesting question. It's like many places in Kenya, in a way, though our buffaloes have fur and the trees have needles rather than fruit. Summer traffic in our national park reminds me of some of the jams we sat through as well.

Is there corruption? Yes, but... There's corruption, and then there's Kenyan corruption. Talking about politics in a developing country is always a good way to gain perspective on the relative health of our political system. We don't have to pay to join the military or police force, they were surprised to hear, you actually get paid to sign up. And our elected officials pay taxes like the rest of us (at least they're required to by law, unlike in Kenya's parliament, which is a huge issue there right now). Actually, I think Kenya is in a really interesting position as a country only a few decades old, with a year-old constitution and elections coming up. Though no one kids himself about commonplace government malfeasance (breaking news about corruption makes page three in the paper, if you can imagine), people also seemed pretty hopeful that a new generation of politicians are on the way. Having Western oversight of that process through embassies and the UN helps, we were told.

Washington, D.C.? No, Washington state. Again, more geography. Timm's explanation of how seasons so drastically change the amount of daylight during the course of a year in Alaska fascinated people. If you live along the equator, you apparently don't give much thought to the tilt of the earth's axis.

How is college paid for? Again, a question the students were really interested in. Our mix of student loans, grants, scholarships, work study and upfront payment by the student or family is similar in some ways to the Kenyan system, and very interested to those students contemplating college. Being allowed to chose among so many options seemed to grab their attention also. Students in Kenya who do qualify for college usually don't go right out of high school either, we were told. So an 18-year-old taking a loan out to leave for a big university isn't really familiar to them — and given the rising cost of tuition here, maybe it won't be for us either.

Can I have your email address? Really popular question, even with people we'd barely met. But the answer was always yes.

After all, they already had our cell phone number.