Month 1: Land and Culture

[Part 1]

It takes 21 hours of travel to get to Nairobi. I arrived at the reception hut of our campsite around 1am, along with a group of students and professors who I did not know. Luckily, the fever from my vaccines had faded over the flights. In my disoriented state, I was given a tent and a laundry list of “environmental dangers and coping mechanisms.” These included: check under your pillow, never be barefoot, put a bucket over the drain, only brush your teeth with bottled water, and wear earplugs at night.

Lying under my mosquito net, I felt a panic attack bubbling up. I took deep breaths and tried to ignore the voice in my head chanting “oh my god what the fuck did I get myself into?” I had just started the first day of a 3-month field study across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Morning came, and we all introduced ourselves. Immediately, I knew I liked these people. They seemed just as tenacious and open as me. Today, I consider some of them my best friends.

Skipping the administrative minutia and our evacuation from the January 2019 Nairobi terrorist attack, it would take about a week for us to get settled into our projects. The itinerary was split into 3 months: one project per country, one country per month. These were all-consuming projects without weekends– fieldwork for the first half of the day, classes and discussion groups at night. 

We would spend our first month in Kenya. My research project concerned the interaction between culture and natural resources. Under the guidance of a UN advisor, my field partner, Fred, and I focused specifically on land across various regions in south- and sw-Kenya. Looking back now, this project is so special to me. I learned way more than I expected to.

Lesson 1: how to dress myself.

Having just come from the below-zero degree weather in Canada, I was physically and emotionally unprepared for the Kenyan sun. I dedicated so much mental effort to coping with the discomfort of the heat. The daylight was so violent that I had to cover myself almost completely–– long sleeves, long pants, hat, black lens sunglasses, and scarf (I looked like I was in disguise). They say you get used to it, and that’s kind of true. In my experience, the discomfort stays the same, but you slowly stop thinking about it.

Lesson 2: land is culture.

Throughout our field interviews, primarily in Mount Kenya and Maji Moto, I became aware of a feedback loop that exists between land and culture. Land and culture shape one another: there is a continuous negotiation between land’s yields and the needs of its tenants. I use both terms in a general sense: the cultures of activity and awareness that people engage in, on one hand, and the land- with all its changes- that we find ourselves cohabiting. With the rise of urbanization, many people left their hometowns in search of better financial opportunities. 

As major farms were established along Kenya’s southern water sources, resource management shifted from local indigenous communities to major exploitative industries. In one area we worked in, Mount Kenya, agriculture appeared as the center of natural/cultural evolution. Virtually all of our participants were not originally from the area, but came from their villages (anywhere from 2-8 hours away by car). They brought along items and traditions from home (which some said they did not know very well) and integrated them into the rising urban fabric of Mt. Kenya. 

Lesson 3: everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.

My biggest hurdle that month, emotionally and academically, was my relationship to truth. 

With our guide and translator, Fred and I walked around talking to people. We tried our best to awkwardly maneuver around our vanilla clipboard questions. Soon, we were navigating stories of migration, drought scares, conflicts over work, people’s emotions and personal histories. At the end of each day of fieldwork, our night-classes began. Regrouping the interviews of other students, we pieced-together a complex web of stories. This project, and my first introduction into regional human-natural relations, was also a major emotional experience.

In Mt. Kenya, we mainly spoke to people who worked in the nearby street markets. We learned that the biggest source of work in the area is at the flower farms–– huge

plots of greenhouses growing and shipping flowers out on daily KLM flights from Nairobi to the Netherlands. (The Netherlands, famous for their flowers, relocated most of their production to Kenya.) Workers told us of the long lines formed outside the farms at dawn. The farms hired workers through a “lottery” system. Each worker picked a number and hoped to be selected for a day of work. The instability of the situation was infuriating, especially for workers who were repeatedly rejected. They were angry, and listening to their stories, so were we!

We went to meet with the farm-owners. Though we had initially assumed malicious intent, it turns out that they simply weren’t able to provide enough jobs for the growing community of workers. In fact, they had switched to the lottery system to avoid the retaliatory vandalism they experienced in the past. The system, which we had perceived as purposefully exploitative, was actually an attempt to be fair. But, these farm owners were also furious. They blamed the government for this issue, and, in listening to them, so did we!

We then went to talk to local government officials. In our courses, we learned that the colonial-era land-division into crude, square plots had resulted in a massive resource disparity between the allocated lands. Flower-farms were sucking wetlands dry, local farmers couldn’t till dry plots, migrant-workers were pouring in, and health concerns arose due to water shortage. The situation was an absolute mess of competing information.

This looked like a real-life version of The Grapes of Wrath. Who is right? Who is to blame? What is the solution? How does this move forward?

Lesson 4: journaling.

As I grappled with these issues, my expectations and frustrations, I wrote the following journal entry:

[End of Part One]

[Part Two]

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