Into Kibera

The Kibera Slums are among the biggest in the world, sitting twenty minutes outside central Nairobi. They host their own informal economy, a myriad of well-intentioned NGOs, and as one pompous Brit told me, are almost "touristy."I had never been to a slum before, never witnessed the nauseating smells, the piles of trash, the battered children, and unstable shacks. When it comes to the third-world images on US television screens and the sponsor-a-child advertisements that show black children with flies on their face, all those images could be taken from any given corner or alleyway in Kibera and it is a powerful thing to have it there in front of you.

I went with 600 cookies because I wanted to, and because I believe if you wish to write about the world, you have to see it on its good days and its bad. A coworker and I walked down the main road and back up a hill to the abandoned railroad tracks. We were the only white people, apart from one man off playing soccer in a makeshift pitch. The kids clustered around, smiling and reaching out and only sometimes grabbing. There was an incredible amount of order, all things considered, and that is something you do not expect from slums.

On top of the hill I looked out and saw the aluminums roofs follow the base of the valley to another hill, and then continue on out of sight who knows how far. A stream of muddy water rushed through the central part lined by trash, and its hard to imagine an African rainy season down there. I have asked myself each day since how one fixes this, the absolute mess that happens when humanity at is primal center is left to its own chaotic devices. NGOs are good ideas, but are based on big important peoples' generosity, and are almost never sustainable. The corporate world supports itself, but is largely run by those interested in their shareholders bank accounts and buying fillers for their homes. It seems to me that to take impoverished children out of a slum, to find the money that will build pipes and toilets and electrical sockets, it requires a fundamental shift in how everyday human beings view success, and the ideal life. It requires everyone to reassess their priorities by seeing a big filthy picture. Frankly, I'm not sure that's possible with seven billion lives, and so the world will continue on for a long time, some of us profiting, some of us suffering, the icecaps still melting, all largely based off mere circumstance. This is sad to say, and pessimistic, but it is hard not to go to places like Kibera and start feeling painfully realistic. It is also hard to go to places like Kibera, and not want to hand each child a cookie and a few shillings, regardless of its sustainability, or far reaching impact.

The day before, I went to a work event: the launch of a new investment city 100km outside Nairobi. There the President of Kenya spoke, and said that God must indeed be on Kenya's side given that on this special day rain miraculously decided to fall for the first time in six months. He, and others, saw it as a blessing, and I wondered how any President of Kenya could think God is on anybody's side with places like Kibera sitting on the doorstep. I have said this before, and say it often, but any God that sits by apathetically as kids spoon dirty water into their mouths and wither away with hunger is not a God I ever want to believe in, much less fall to my knees and pray to. 

Westgate

I live ten minutes down the road from Westgate Mall, in a affluent Nairobi suburb 8 km from the city center. A year ago no one in the world would have known about Westgate Mall except those who live here. After the recent terrorist attack that left over 70 people dead, Kenya entered the world's radar as a place not so pleasant to be.

As these things go in the public eye, years of progress can be shattered by one bad thing. It is a shame a beautiful place with beautiful people can be meaningless next to one United States of America travel warning. I have walked around some dangerous cities, from the capital of Guatemala to the capital of Texas, and as you go around and around and around and turn on the local news you start to realize bad things, catastrophes, little tragedies, they happen everywhere in the world with no real rhyme or reason. Sometimes I really think it's dumb luck alone that gets us to 80.

Our perceptions of safety are always curious to me, especially in deciding where we will and will not go. I know that on the streets of Nairobi, I am one of very few white people, wearing a nice suit; there is certainly no blending in, and I am probably perceived to have money. Yet nothing has happened yet, beyond the many casual encounters with the kindest Kenyans up and down the dirt roads and paved highways and offices and bars. Maybe I will get unsuspectingly robbed one night and maybe not; maybe I will even get kidnapped, tortured, killed, and buried in an unmarked grave, but probably not. Back home in those quiet safe American cities, the murder rate is still uncomfortably high, psychological counseling severely underfunded, and firearms widely available without background checks. What happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut is as bad as it gets. These days no place makes me nervous like the USA, and nowhere is actually all that utopian.

A friend working in Guatemala for five years once told me that, despite a number of stories of late night muggings and midday break-ins, she refuses to live in fear. I tend to agree; you make smart decisions and do the intuitive thing, but that doesn't mean you board up your house, live every day in a box, and retreat from the ups and downs of real life. Those who do are pretty much dead already; at least that's my view, and one probably different from others. The urgent urgings continue to pour in: be careful, be careful, be careful, ten cuidado, be careful. I am, very much so, and I hope everyone else is too, wherever in the world they are. 

The New View from Turkey

Each morning in Istanbul began with the solemn hymns of Muslim prayer drifting in from a nearby mosque. It was a peaceful, steady way to wake up in the darkness, moving from the bed to the shower to the suit, then down the elevator to breakfast and out the door into the chaos of metropolitan Turkey. It’s back to the professional world for me – the offices and coffee breaks, the ties and dry cleaners and hotel rooms, the meetings and the schedules and the rush, the rules and the routines – all to the backdrop of new faces and places.

As most suit-and-tie professions go, you donate your days and endlessly attempt to take back your nights. For a week my nights were christened by the streets to Taksim Square, history's glowing mosques lining the Bosporus, and Turkish music down the alleys that evoke the flying carpets and magic lamps of A Thousand and One Nights. After living in Qatar, it was delightful to be in a Muslim country that sits somewhere in the realm of modern thought, where couples kiss in the street and girls wear short skirts into bars.

I remember flying into Istanbul the first time for a connection, and thinking how good it would be to stop awhile. In another one of life's unpredictable progressions, at the narrow meeting place of two continents, standing on a quiet balcony with a Turkish girl at night, that little wish manifested into the tangible things around me.

Thinking About A Time Back Then

I did not realize how traumatizing my job in Qatar was until I sat on my mother's couch and watched the days and nights flicker by in books and other nothingness. Back in that desert land there were ethical questions -- those that sit somewhere between obvious treachery and little white lies -- that no one ever wants to ask themselves. There were unjustifiable problems in funding -- simply not enough money to pay basic costs -- that bleed into now and make these days harder. Then there were lonely adaptions to the Islamic world during Ramadan, and what that means when no one is there to help you or tell you what to do.

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood,
Throws down in front of us is not to bar,
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are.

Such is Qatar: a vague hazy country that does not sit within real world circumstance, and a place that feels as though it does not exist wholly for me. Yet time and space are nature's great healers; rainy days and long bus rides help, listening to the potent quietness of life, looking up at all the vacuous space in the clouds, thinking how few things there are to do and casually coming to terms with a time it was all so very occupied. These short still pauses, the long drawn out monologues with myself, these passing coincidences and periods of impeccable timing, all fill me very full with gratitude, for what was and what is and what isn't, and for all that is so very suddenly set to come.

Back Down South

I have gone south on Interstate 35 more times than I can count over the years. They are some of my earliest memories, and some of my best, alone on the open road as the sun comes up and still when the sun goes down. I know the flat moonlike landscape of Kansas too well, ditto the dense forests and perfect lakes in Minnesota. I know it is Missouri when the hills start to roll, and Texas when the world goes dry and flat. It is a strange and special part of the country to me, and one I will probably always come back to after being somewhere else.

The most worn and well-known path sits between Austin and Dallas, that three plus hour span that separates my first recognizable family home from the first place that was mine alone. In the middle lies a million small unknown towns, the true just-off-the-interstate Texas. The two 35s join up at Hillsborough, and then you must stop for a kolache in West. Waco marks the halfway point, and Temple says you are an hour out. The IKEA of Round Rock says you are entering city limits, and then finally the numbered streets begin, the longhorn football stadium and the tower fly by out your right-side window, and baby skyscrapers line the horizon by Town Lake.

Austin has turned into a once a year trip, a meeting place of old friends who once roamed the city with me and are now dispersed across the globe. Every time I go I am reminded it is a city of littered memories, virtually every hidden alleyway shooting back to a good conversation or a bad night alone or something that did not have to be that way but was. This is youth I suppose, and what college is made for, but the feelings are grey and yank at my stomach from time to time. It's good, helpful even, to be around people around back then too, those that feel similarly bittersweet about this wonderful city; I imagine I'm not the only one who finds value in both coming and going each time we stencil this all into our itineraries.

Visiting the old bars on Rainey Street reminds you change is good, and part of me finds it fitting that in a few short months Lustre Pearl will be bulldozed, erased forever, new condominiums built up in its place. So many people still have not left that drunken world and it very easily could have been me back there pouring beer and coming home at 5am feeling empty. There are plenty of reasons to desire Austin again; its coffee shops and drinking joints and running trails and delightful fall weather and hill country and beautiful girls in dresses on a friday night resonated back then and do with me now. That all crashes into the many periods of exponential growth that are never particularly fun to revisit.

The goodbyes in Austin happened swiftly like they have happened before, and things continue on like they always have. The front porches that once sustained the toughest of conversations are still there, now supporting someone else. New underage students scurry about on Sixth Street hoping for a stroke of luck. Someone else probably stands up on Mount Bonnell at night, entranced by the red lights flickering on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off. People leave and fresh people arrive and it is exciting for them, something new, like it once was for me. It will always be there indeed, cycling people through the same lovely motions, forever, and I can always come back and pick out which stage certain people fall. After a while -- it could have been a week or a month -- I drove north on Interstate 35, passing everything in reverse, leaving Speedway and Alta Vista and all the other little realities in the rear view mirror. I did not look back too much because I've done it so many times already. 

Passing Through Joplin

When I got pulled over for speeding off Main Street in Joplin, the officer asked me if I was familiar with the small Missouri town. My mind had been on other things, least of which my driving, as far back as Minnesota, and I wanted to tell him an elaborate story that would explain everything. I wanted to tell him I had no idea what the hell was going on with my life and hours in the car alone had not decided much at all. I wanted to tell him that I did not know if I would stay the night, and if I did it would happen almost certainly in the back of my small car in a parking lot because these days hotels are not justifiable expenses. There was more too -- thoughts that hit you hard like bugs on a windshield across miles of open road -- but instead I told him it was my first time, only passing through to pay respects, which seemed a forgivable offense to him. I continued on Main, looking out at abandoned buildings, for sale signs, and the essence of a city still recovering.

The tornado hit Joplin two years ago, but it is still evident something bad happened. At a mile wide it passed through town diagonally; the line separating new houses from those surviving the storm is quite distinct. There are plenty of places in the world catastrophes like this are commonplace, but I imagine it is especially difficult on those in small town America. Here, everything stays the same, always, generation after generation, peaceful and quiet, a beautiful little bubble. It is light years away from mall shootings in Kenya and sinkholes in Guatemala. Call it naivety or ignorant bliss or great fortune, but in any case it must be one great shock when someone wakes up one day and their neighborhood, previously plagued by an occasional high school dropout and petty theft, is simply not there at all.

I found a coffee shop and a pub and stayed the rest of the night, talking to a strange bartender of Irish descent who had an affinity for tattoos and exotic pets. When my night was done I said goodbye to a raw assortment of faces I would never see again. As the sun woke up, I woke up too, groggily crawling from the backseat to the front, rubbing my eyes, starting the engine, and beginning the long drive south to the most stable resting place I've got these days. 

The Mayo Clinic

It is a great blessing to have never before visited the Mayo Clinic, but it's still a miraculous place. The tallest building in Rochester looks out on the infinite greenery that is the Minnesota of my earliest memories, the land of the 10,000 lakes. It is a well-oiled machine inside. Through the lobby and up the elevator and down the halls, every room has its purpose, this one for lung cancer, this one for another cancer, the best of the best treating life's most difficult maladies.

I drove six hours down to Mayo with my grandmother, and our procedure was short and simple. They numbed her side and pulled out a plastic tube and covered the wound and we were quickly on our way out of town holding on tight to good news. But that was our day. Earlier I sat outside with my mother in the waiting room, the lobby, and the restaurants that surround Mayo, and we watched the many families who had all come to Rochester hoping that someone will be healed of their problem. Mayo Clinic, and all hospitals really, are little heavens and hells each day for all sorts of people. 

Whenever someone asks what period I would most like to live, I always say right now because I see myself in some other time dying young of a common illness that no longer exists. Any examination of medical history is a disastrous look at the world of trial and error, a million mistakes and a lot of dead people, divine mandates, peculiar ointments, and over-ambitious surgeries, all giving us textbooks full of information we have today. Still sometimes this is not enough. I sat in Mayo Clinic thinking, as I often do, about things that make everyone the same; it is the fact we all get sick and die that makes Arabic people and Chinese people and Guatemalan people and American people equal. You cannot pay your way to perfect health. Sickness shows no regard for race, or economic class, and a CEO or a slum dweller can both be humbled by a man in a white coat.

I watched our doctors at Mayo carefully: their manner, their movements, their words. They do not perform miracles, but execute carefully crafted techniques -- a compilation of all those who came before and all their hours of tireless study. It is a remarkable profession really, one that takes on incomprehensible levels of responsibility, but they probably change more lives a day than any other job in the world. In another life, perhaps one to come, that will be a position for me, but I feel tired for them sometimes, and think they are real gifts to humankind.