By ROBERT GAKUMU
GUEST WRITER
One evening in 2013, my father came home and announced that the following January we would be hosting an American student from St. Lawrence University in our home. He was clutching in his hand a passport size photo of her. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t add up. There were better, richer, and more connected families in our Nyeri who would have been better suited than us to host a student from abroad, if money was anything to go by. The only American my family had known was a Catholic priest who worked with my father in a missionary organization, but who had long gone back to the US. He couldn’t have made the connections. However, my dad didn’t look like he was kidding. Needless to say, we were all excited and I was especially happy.
It, however, failed to fully occur to me that we would be hosting an international student. For one, my home is located almost two hundred kilometres from the capital Nairobi, in the serene remote village of Nyarugumu, with just a few thousand residents. Visitors, especially from abroad, are rarely seen. Even those who work in Nairobi only visit their homes during Christmas and New Year, then vanish all over again for another whole year.
The residents of our village have known each other since the days of colonial rule in the ‘60s and the subsequent agitation for independence that followed. They settled there after independence from colonial villages that had been set up by the British near the town of Nyeri in central Kenya. Most families, therefore, have to squeeze themselves in the small pieces of land that the government gave them after independence, which were usually less than a hectare. My family is no exception. The only means to get to our home is through a long gravel road and ‘Matatus’ public transport that pick people up and drive them into Nyeri for Ksh50, about 50 cents.
I could not understand how anybody would leave the comfort of his or her home in the states and come to this place that had, by then, not even been connected to the electric grid. That means that everything, from laundry to ironing clothes, had to be done the old way. It is so remote that you could actually bump into some runaway animal at night from the Aberdare Forest, just some few yards away from our home.
My father insisted that these conditions were why our place was ideal. I longed for that week of January, and prepared my friends for the unlikely guest we would welcome to our home.
When the day came, I accompanied my father to go and pick up the student, all along not knowing what to expect. Would she understand my father’s or my own deeply accented English? How about my mother who speaks very little of it? What now? How do I say hi? Do we just shake hands or is hugging more appropriate? Do I pretend I don’t already know her name or what? All those simple but complicated questions were just about to be answered. In fact, our reactions were more or less spontaneous and natural. In no time, although we just met each other, we were already laughing and chatting headed to our home for the rest of the week, which was bound to be full of activities.
After two more years of hosting St Lawrence University Students, we have had to contend with questions from people in my village about why we have “wazungus”(white people) visiting our home each year. Study Abroad Program is not usually a very fulfilling explanation. One time, my sister Emma, while on a hike with the first student we hosted, had to deal with a very angry old man, who came at them breathing fire, having mistaken the student for the British he had fought and chased out of our country. She had to cool him down calmly, and explain that America and Britain are an ocean apart.
Although that does not explain the general feeling towards visitors in our village, it does illustrate that visitors do not always bring good things in a place. However, the opposite is true for the St. Lawrence students in the rural homestay program that I have had a chance to mingle with.
I have been particularly impressed by how much I have sharpened my skills in English after only a cumulative three weeks of speaking uninterrupted English. My skills in checkers, and throwing the Frisbee, have also greatly improved too! I cannot speak for my mother, but she now throws in some English words when we talk with her in vernacular. My deductions could be flawed, though! Believe it or not, now my father thinks it’s easier to listen to an American speak than listen to a Briton speak. That is only to say the bare minimum, though. It has certainly been about more.
I personally grew up in a society where people from abroad, especially white people, were regarded almost as demigods. That is the case for most of my mates and all those older than me who haven’t had a chance to a good education. It was perhaps because the only encounter our fathers and grandfathers had had with the white man—the British turned out to be so bad. They had to endure decades of oppression and alienation on their own land. Although it was years ago, the wounds have not completely healed, especially since some people who witnessed and went through it first-hand are still alive today.
I have tried, several times, to eliminate that low self-esteem and inferior mind-set from people I talk with, but, quite frankly, it’s still prevalent. It’s a topic we have so often talked about with my friends on campus. St. Lawrence students who have been seen with me, or my family chatting, farming, hiking, doing the fence, dancing in church, or even playing with the Frisbee, have been part of a much larger purpose they probably didn’t even fully realize. It has been a chance for people in our small village, in their own small way, to realize that everyone is all the same and to restore faith in themselves, and you know that these two apparently different people are, in fact, the equals.
Just as much as the students learn our culture and our day to day, we also learn from them. We ask questions bordering mostly on what is it like in America, or how do you do this or that in America et cetera. The seemingly simple curiosities, however, answer a far more complex question: Whether the challenges we face are also faced elsewhere? Although we might have our own problems, other challenges exist elsewhere, even in the US. They are not only problems of Kikuyus or Kenyans only. The curiosities of members of my town have also led them to appreciate what they have, but most often take for granted. One woman was so surprised that there are people who hadn’t seen a buffalo or an elephant, animals she had seen almost throughout her life. We wake up to the site of one of only a handful of places you see snow along the equator. Mt. Kenya yet we somehow take it for granted. We get our grocery, cereal, and fresh fruits right from our small piece of land, yet we don’t find that awesome. Everyone in our village seems to know the other, and they always say ‘hi” when they meet you by the road, yet we think that’s how normal looks like. Those who have personally interacted with the students who stayed at our home probably learned to appreciate what they have albeit, maybe, unknowingly.
The whole experience from the one week is probably most fulfilling because of the warm hearts of all the students who attend it, their discipline, their commitment, and willingness to learn, their appreciation to our culture, and most importantly, the chance they accord us to make such wonderful friends. The person who invented this program definitely deserves a Nobel Prize. I have often wondered why just one week? Why not more? We could do better with more.
Since 2014, the year we first starting hosting students from St. Lawrence, we’ve hosted Katherine Lukens ‘15 and Klare Nevins ’16. This past January, we hosted Jonathan Ten Eyck ’17. I call them my two sisters and brother from another mother. They have all been amazing people who have really made my otherwise very boring January’s in those three years memorable. It is particularly my interaction with Jonathan that resulted in the writing of this article. We spent our evenings discussing Kenya, books, movies, politics, and then finally, the idea of writing an article for the Hill. I am grateful to St. Lawrence University for this opportunity.
The author is a student at the University of Nairobi, School of Built Environment (Construction Management), and a rural homestay brother for the SLU Kenya Semester. Contact Details:
1. Twitter: @Bobbythe_Boy
2. Email: robbgakumu@gmail.com
3. Facebook: Robert Ndegwa Gakumu