| Pardon for my long silence. I was in a very rural area of Kenya and it was a wonderful but trying experience. You'll learn all about it soon. I am back in Nairobi and just pooped. It's a little after 10pm here and I'm just emotionally and physically tapped out.
Being white in Kenya isn't easy. When Kenyans see white skin, they see dollar signs. Being white means being a walking piggy bank to everyone you meet. In the better situations, people tell you what they intend to charge you in advance. Far too often, they render services without a mention of money and then present you with an enormous bill after the fact. If you do an interview with someone, they ask for cash. Explaining that paying your interview subjects conflicts with journalistic ethics is difficult, especially when you know the people have real need for a bit of help and that even $3 would go a long way for them.
What I hate most of all is the need to haggle over everything. I asked the price of a quilt and the seller told me it was $600. I replied that I could not even pay a fraction of that and walked off, with the person following me for a long time, reducing the price to lower but still unacceptable figures. In some cases, I've offered charity to people and asked sincerely what the cost of something might be so I can assess whether I could help raise the money or facilitate the needed donations. Even then, the Kenyans return outrageously high requests, likely expecting me to haggle over it.
Then there's the matter of corruption. Everyone's looking for their cut of everything. Someone I met was helping a friend make a purchase. The seller asked him how big he wanted his cut to be so that he could respond to the buyer with the price. In this particular case, the buyer's friend was horrified and did not want to rip his friend off. My hosts in Nyanza province told me that even if I did not agree to pay the Kenyans I interviewed, those people would assume that I had given my hosts a bunch of money and they would feel cheated out of their cut. And of course, no money changed hands between them and me. I paid for the cost of gas for the car and that was it. They provided me with a sleeping bag on their floor and three meals a day. I brought their children small gifts and left behind my headlamp for a man in the family who really liked it.
This is a very frustrating, stressful environment to find myself in. Right now I'm facing a big bill I've been presented with for services already rendered that I had assumed were for free, since money was not mentioned upfront. The bill is from an NGO that operates a guest house where I am staying. The guest house is outrageously expensive (for Kenya) but clean, safe, comfortable, and managed by a lovely man who is also a fantastic cook. I agreed to pay the cost they requested upfront - but didn't realize that every time I sat in their car, I was being charged a lot of money. The guest house is in a remote location that is not accessible via public transportation, which means they ended up driving me around a lot. Long story short, I'm extremely upset. |
