Growing up Luo

Is there love and romance in Bondo, Kenya? In the Luo culture of Bondo and all of western Kenya, sex marks every passage in life, even death. It is meant as a means of spiritual cleansing, but in this hot land under mosquito nets, bodies and spirits were sick with fever. In this dry, hungry district, AIDS has wiped out an entire swath of the Luo tribe, leaving orphaned children on every empty doorstep, clutching a fish from the lake or anything they can get their hands on to survive the fetid water and malaria that rages here. This is the poorest district in Kenya, and we are so far from anything soft and romantic it seems romanticism itself is what’s dirty.

Trying to lose myself (unsuccessfully) in much-needed sleep as the cockroaches scuttled around my bed on the concrete floor of the Switel Hotel, I was unable to take comfort in romantic notions and instead found myself envying the chiseled, wise-eyed women of Bondo – the mamas – I had seen them in the scorching sun growing food for themselves and the orphans. There is a kind of harmony in their strength, in their customs, a harmony that is dying as the people one by one abandon their fields and try to live our reality – the harsh killer ratrace cities.


And I, the unofficial ambassador from Rome in my soft silk dress and starched white skin, stood blistering in the sun that bakes their land and kills the corn that they futilely try to grow because we told them to 30 years ago (now we have returned to tell them that corn can never grow here, that the indigenous crops that we had once shamed are much more hardy and nutritious). When I look in to the eyes of the children here, I know there is no God except for all the miraculous green we see before us in this dusty field. With my educated manner and blinding skin of ignorance, these people ask for deliverance in the same way I have asked the God of Rome to deliver me from my own petty woes; like the white-haired Roman, I was impotent to help, tied up in immense red tape and bureaucracy. And instead of receiving deliverance, I am was cursed with the role of savior – to convince my huge organization to bring some help, any help, even pumps to bring Lake Victoria’s water 50 metres to quench the cracked land or mosquito nets to cover the children at night from being ravaged my mosquitoes and succumbing to malaria – and on none of this was I able to deliver.

In Bondo, it was evident that my own petty appeals to a higher power in my ludicrous romantic quandaries were as laughable as the mamas’ appeals to me (the organization that had sent me here to assess the situation had cut off support to this region months ago).


Like a boy whipping his dusty cattle toward a red algae-covered watering hole, my white God of Rome always finds a way to motivate me and terrify me into submission. Safely back with my God, I watch a video of myself in Bondo surveying the meager crops that the mamas and children managed to eek out of the scorched earth and feel nothing but shame and powerlessness – what a scam, I let them down, my whole organization let them down, my whole society destroyed theirs in the first place, and our pebbles of assistance are designed only to prolong their colonial dependency. I went to Bondo with the best intentions, but in the end all I got was a weeklong adventure and some nasty parasites. All they got was let down once again by my people. In the face of such immense devastation, I hope their Gods can to more to inspire them than mine can.



Care for AIDS orphans among the Luo of Kenya (click on title)
www.web.ca/~iccaf/humanrights/kenyainfo/kenyajan01.htm

Kenya: cultural traditions fuel the spread of HIV/AIDSwww.plusnews.org/AIDSreport.asp?ReportID=5502&SelectRegion=East_Afric

Kenya: AIDS awareness thrust of talkwww.therecord.com/links/links_050329121921.html

Human Rights Watch: Women’s property rights violations and HIV/AIDShttp://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/02/13/kenya5339.htm

Policy implications of inadequate support systems for orphans in Western Kenyawww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11518603&dopt=Abstract

Village in Kenya deals with water, social and economic issueswww.rg-j.com/news/stories/html/2004/05/15/70860.php

Mama na Dada – grassroots women’s organization in Kenyahttp://voicesofwomen.org/mamanadada.html