Disease

I have spent the last month or so in Kisumu – taking a holiday and allowing myself the space and time to reflect and write on these past 5 months of my life.

I am fascinated by disease - probably because I’ve lived with one for the past 18 years of my life. I grew up not thinking about living with diabetes, because it was normal, and I couldn’t remember living without it. As I passed through high school, and moved towards college – things became shockingly more difficult. The highs and lows seemed to stay around for longer, impacting my body in ways that I had not experienced before, drenching my days with haze and lethargy. Last February I transitioned from the insulin pump I had worn for the last 10 years of my life back to insulin shots, after days of no change from high bloodsugars. I wrote about living with diabetes for the first time in my life for college classes – and found that I had a lot to say, that it wasn’t something that as I claimed so proudly ‘didn’t affect me.’

I assumed that the experience I was having was what every other person with diabetes – or any other chronic illness for that matter – was having. Instead of working through how this disease is actually affecting me, I went searching for others’ stories – thinking that by telling theirs, mine would also be told. The problem with this search is the assumption that any other person living with a disease is feeling the same as me. I applied every bad doctor’s visit and horrible day I’ve had to everyone else, thinking they, like me, were screaming to be heard.

I interviewed 20 people with HIV, asking them how they felt about living with it and how it was affecting their lives. Most of them shrugged their shoulders, letting them fall as they told me it wasn’t a big deal. They complained of not enough food and putting their children through secondary school – which are problems of almost everyone living in Kochia.

This past month I’ve thought a lot about disease, about grouping people into that category of ‘living with a chronic illness.’ I thought that they would have an experience similar to mine – that I could generalize and come up with a single, coherent conclusion. Turns out generalizing people like this defeats my whole original dream – about wanting to hear about what individuals’ lives were like outside of their disease, because I have put them in a category, and re-grouped them. That I’ll never be able to understand or write about other peoples’ experiences by asking them surface questions and meeting with them once, or even multiple times. That some people may not even have the luxury of thinking about how their disease affects them because they are so worried about providing the next meal for their family. That maybe living with disease doesn’t affect other people like it affects me – and that I should stop searching so desperately for that same answer.

Diabetes has greatly impacted my life, both positively and negatively. My bloodsugars have been mostly high here – from regular soda and tea filled with too much sugar. My thighs are bruised from injecting myself, and I am not as precise about counting carbohydrates. It is a part of my story – because it’s a part of me. Is this applicable to anyone else? Who knows.

I’m spending Christmas in Kisumu, thinking about where I want to spend the next part of this grant, and writing my own story. I hope you all have a fantastic holiday season, and would love to hear from all of you via email if you get the chance!

Evaluation

The beautiful thing about Fairhaven courses are the written evaluations that come at the end of the quarter.  While all my fellow Westerners are taking finals, I wrote my eval for the first quarter of this Adventure Learning Grant, and pasted it below, because I feel like it sums up my 5 months here incredibly well. Enjoy!

I have spent the first quarter of my senior year of college in Kenya, learning more in these five months than any other time in my life. I left with the intention of gathering stories of people living with HIV, but found that the basket I brought for collection is heavy and overflowing with so much more.

The majority of my time has been spent in a small village of West Kochia, Kenya. People ask me where I am from, and my mouth is full with my tongue under my top teeth pronouncing the th and rolling the r in Tethra.  It is named for the smallest market I am near, where mamas sit on spread out blankets behind the piles of oranges, guavas, tomatoes they sell.

I have been living with two of the most incredible people I have ever met. They started a small Self Help group to uplift people in their community with a primary school, small clinic, and support program for orphans and the elderly. They have adopted me and tell people I am their first born child. We discuss Kenya, people, life across a low table heavy with tea and mandasi.

I have spent these past five months witnessing life and the sameness of people living across the World. I have conducted interviews of people living with HIV, rode in every type of transportation available, harvested maize, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

Time has slowed as much as a graph illustrating exponential decay, with days feeling as wide and spread out as the Horizon. The distractions or commitments that usually clutter my life are no longer present, allowing me to see an entirely new landscape, which I cling to and memorize like the lyrics to favorite songs. I memorize the faces, voices, and posture of people when we meet – really listening to people for the first time in my life. I memorize the laughter of children when they wave hello to me, and where the homemade speed bumps are on my ride home so I can grip the back of the motorcycle tightly to keep me from falling off. I memorize greetings in Luo, to make old ladies’ faces crease with smiles as I touch my cheek to both of theirs. I memorize the feeling of home I have when rounding the last corner and smelling lemongrass after being away.

The most important thing I have learned in these five months is that people are the same everywhere you go. That as Elie Wiesel says, there are treasures in all of us, we just need to take the time and space to look. I find myself becoming the richest person in the world, heavy with the most fantastic gems and nuggets of gold anyone has ever possessed. I am weighed down with stories, quotes, faces, details of people I meet every day, and get to re-visit and examine them again and again through writing - magnifying rarities with words.

I cannot even begin to express the depth of my gratitude for this phenomenal grant, opportunity. I have been given the chance to witness and explore the World fully – using all five senses in their completeness to celebrate and understand how incredible we as people are. I cannot even begin to express how much I want to spread this awe and appreciation to other people. I cannot even begin to express how much this has changed my life.

5 Months

It has been raining so much here I can’t remember if I’m in Washington or Kenya. I have been sporting gum boots to trek between the house and Abba for the past couple of days.  There is so much water you can’t tell where the ditches are in the sides of the road – everything is murky water. My steps make sucking sounds as I pull my feet from the mud. People warn me about worms and billhazia.

I have been making frequent trips between Kochia and Kisumu in the past couple of weeks. The surroundings are lush and green from all the rain. Some unlucky houses are surrounded by puddles, and rivers rush loudly underneath bridges. The crook of my arm hangs out of the window and grows moist from approaching rain. It smells the same as Washington.

Before taking these five months to explore, I never allowed myself any time. Every moment in Bellingham was planned meticulously – between school, volunteering, exercising, and homework, I had no single moment to sit. The days were so well planned that I could not even take in my surroundings, just kept moving to the next thing, with my life as blurred and hazy as looking through train windows. If I somehow found an unplanned chunk of time – I would inevitably fill it. Here, time is as vast as Lake Victoria. By having no plans, I can absorb every detail that passes. By having no plans I can recreate these details through writing – which is as fulfilling to me as sitting down to play my favorite piece on the piano.

I am fascinated by strangers. I find myself studying people more intently, paying more attention to every aspect of their face and posture than ever before – so that I can come home and write. It makes every encounter deeper, and more interesting. It’s as if I have been blessed with a child’s pair of eyes – impressed and engrossed by everything they take in.

This Wednesday marks five months – the halfway point for this grant. I can hardly believe I have been away for so long. I can hardly believe it’s December and Christmas is right around the corner. I am further from my original proposal than I ever imagined possible.  I have laughed and smiled more than ever in my life. I can hardly imagine coming back to the United States.