The Answer, Of Course, is Everything

I walked into the coffee shop, shocked, as I took a glance at who sitting at the table waiting for me. Here she was: the one who wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer, the one who my father said wanted to meet me, and, much to my surprise, the one who I saw sign language interpreting just one month ago.

Though it's our first time to truly meet, we hugged each other. Is this because of the norms of deaf culture? Or is it that we've been so connected for so long, that it seems inevitable that we will become close friends? That our ties to Peace Corps, Kenya, and the Deaf Community will keep us inextricably linked for years?

In six months, I had moved from Gede to New London to Madison and now to Milwaukee. I spent weeks with a general sense of uneasiness, trying to reestablish friendships that had survived on three-paragraph emails once every six months. I struggled trying to whittle my two-year experience into a five-minute story that could be easily digested.

Even after all that time, I wasn't very good at it. My sentences would begin with "In Kenya..." and I would bite my tongue, knowing that I was creating this huge distance between myself and whoever I was talking with. They would nod and glance off to the side, wondering how they could possibly respond. Wondering if it's polite to ask questions. Or wrong to dramatically change the conversation to something they can talk about a bit more comfortably.

***

Beth and I spent a couple minutes of reflecting on how strange it was to have seen and even talked to each other before even knowing who each other was, much less that we were emailing each other! As the conversation shifted to my experience in Kenya with the Peace Corps, I wasn't really sure of what to say or how to say it. "When I was getting ready to go into the Peace Corps, what would I have wanted to know ahead of time?" I asked myself.

The answer, of course, is everything.

Luckily, Beth was of the same mind. I told her much more than she could possibly have absorbed, frantically trying to cover as much ground as I could. She was the first person I met who was actually interested in all the details. Or at least put up with all of my details to get the answers she wanted.

***

Nearly a year later, on the other side of the globe, Beth is sleeping on a thin mattress on our dining/guest room floor. It is, of course, a huge sense of pride for me: being able to host Peace Corps volunteers. I hated being so disoriented in Nairobi. I hated not really knowing enough about Kenya's history. I hated feeling like I needed to figure everything out for myself.

Meeting with people who knew America and who knew Kenya was always so exciting for me. I met an American Anthropologist who, among other things, is an expert on the political economy of the Kenyan-grown, organic stimulant khat, often closely associated with trigger-happy Somalis. I got to know people from the American Embassy and listen to them talk about working with the Muslim community along the coast of Kenya.

Spending two years in the village, you tend to not see the larger picture: of what happened before you, what's happening around you, and what's in the pipeline. Getting to see that was enormously refreshing for me. I hoped that I could offer that for Beth.

***

What brings her to Nairobi is a workshop on sign language interpreting, one that my organization happens to be co-sponsoring. In America, it turns out, Beth had run an interpreter training program for sign language interpreters. I knew she was good, just didn't know she was that good. Now she was co-facilitating this workshop.

This is what Beth is most qualified to do: train sign language interpreters in Kenya. (There is a huge need for this.) It also happens to be what she most wants to do. Unfortunately, it's outside of what Peace Corps wants her to do. She's supposed to be a teacher in a deaf unit in a rural village called Siaya.

She has great potential to make a meaningful impact here, which isn't something you can say about a whole lot of people in the development industry. I've been happy to show her the ropes, give her advice, and do my best to make her realistic about what she's getting herself into. Now we just need to work on getting her to do what she does best!

Correction: Originally I wrote she's a teacher at a deaf school. She's actually a teacher in a hearing school with a small deaf unit. May seem like a insignificant distinction to the outside world, but for those in the know, it's a world apart...