weighty thoughts

It was easy to slip back into the Canadian traditions, though I hadn’t been home at Christmas for 5 years. I brought gifts hand made in Kenya so I didn’t really need to shop for generic goods – but I offered shopping services for a few people just for the fun of it! I thoroughly enjoyed going from store to store, examining so many lovely things.. luxury and frivolity is not something there’s a lot of in Kenya. In some ways I feel relieved that all of these things – delicious food and luxury items - so easily available and within almost everyone’s reach - like this is the way life is supposed to be.

And then, I remember Kenya... where a lot mothers have to feed a whole family on less than 50 cents a day. Tea for breakfast if you’re lucky enough to have tea leaves, sugar, milk, and clean drinking water – any one or more of those items can be out of reach. Ugali every day - not because it’s delicious, but because it does a good job of filling up stomachs. Most people only have meat once in a week or less – most days people survive on greens and ugali, or maybe beans and maize. And that’s Kenya, a peaceful and lucky nation by far. It gets worse in places like Sudan, where kids think food falls from the sky, because it has been for a full generation. And if the big loud bird doesn’t roar overhead and drop its bulky cargo, they simply don’t eat.

For me, it’s easy to slip back into the luxurious, entitled world in which I was raised. It’s simple, and familiar. I can start thinking about which orange juice to buy, or what colour to paint the walls, or if one more pair of shoes will fit in my closet, or how large of a TV I need. Should I buy a new car or one that’s a couple of years old? Should I buy a house with 3 or 4 bathrooms? Should I go to Mexico or Jamaica on my holiday? Should I get floor or upper bowl seats to that concert? These are important decisions!

The only thing that gets me – and really, I am not judging, because I too am one of the entitled – it that none of these questions could possibly even enter the heads of millions of people. They are thinking about the essentials in life – such as how can I scrape enough together to make dinner, or how will I pay my children’s school fees this term, or how will I get to my job when the public transport hikes the fare? Can I raise enough money from my family, friends, and co-workers to get my relative’s body out of the morgue? Can I afford the medicine for my sick mother? Shall I send my child out onto the street to beg because kids always make more and then we’ll all have enough to eat?

That’s probably one of the reasons I live here in Kenya – guilt. Guilt that if I moved back to Canada, everything would be easy and privileged for me again. I could ignore the other parts of the world again, because they would not affect my comfortable life in any way, and I could get back to making the easy choices. But why is it that I have been given the opportunity to spend more on a dinner out than a lot of people make in a month? Will it begin to bother me that my neighbour or cousin has the latest and greatest and mine isn’t quite as good? Will I forget the meaning of a dollar when I have thousands of them every month?

Why do I have so much when so many have so little?