African Education, Part 1

I recently returned from a trip to Kenya, where I spent three weeks teaching music all over Nairobi: a primary school, a secondary school, a university, a church community center, and a military post. 

This is my third trip to Kenya. The first was the traditional safari one: my then 85-year-old mother hosted my kids and I for a three-week Overseas Adventure Travel trip in Kenya and Tanzania. Days and days of bumpy roads (I thought, why aren’t roads paved?) and lots of lions and antelope and beautiful scenery. Yummy food at the luxury camps, with African flavors (rice and ugali and well-done meats and squash and watermelon). But made into Western salads, and with coffee and desserts. 

At the end of that first trip, I stayed for a few days and visited a contact – a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend (literally), who taught music at a Kenyan university. I observed the Kenya National Music Festival and had lunch with my new friend and my daughter, who is also a musician. My daughter had learned Swahili at the university at home -- that was why we were in Africa in the first place! 

At the music festival, the educators complained of the ensemble’s pitch rising – complaints of  music educators everywhere. But I noticed that when the piano was playing with the ensembles, the piano was almost completely ignored by the singers. The pitch might end up a whole step higher than the piano. Why was that, I wondered? The kids were energetic, from all over Kenya (many, presumably from the areas outside of the tourist areas, stared at our white skin). The food at the very bare-bones hotel was all African, and not so tasty to my Western sensibilities. Ah, I thought, now I’m really experiencing Africa.

Anyway, the three of us hit it off, and we made plans for me to come visit and teach. A few months later I returned to Kenya, this time to teach. I went with a colleague and my daughter, and we stayed in a hotel on a university campus. I was blown away by the warmth and welcome of the people I met. They loved having us there! We were treated like royalty. I especially loved the sweet and energetic students.

We visited a school for boys on an old colonial campus, built in the 1920s. At the time I picked up that it was an elite school, and assumed that it was a private school. The students were lovely – passionate, hanging on every word. I halfway joked with someone at home that you haven’t really lived until you have a couple hundred high school students all staring at you, hanging on every word. Seriously, it’s intense! You feel a little like they’re all in the ocean and you’re holding the life raft. It makes you feel like you're really doing something worthwhile.

Speaking of talking to people back home, here’s a quick run-through of the questions I typically get: 
(1) What are toilets like? Well, there are lots of hole-in-the-ground toilets in Africa, but in Nairobi we used all western toilets, except in one location. That’s the same batting average for my recent trip to France!
(2) Were we on a mission trip? Most decidedly no. I used to get a bit offended by this question. We wanted the project to be a collaborative trip. Is that really not possible in Africa? 
(3) Another question: were we afraid? No, not ever. Although that might have to do with how we had a military escort with us everywhere...
(4) Did we see poverty? Yes. But it’s hard to evaluate poverty. I’ve seen poverty in other places – Peru, in particular. The first time I saw the slums in Nairobi, I thought it was the same as the slums in Peru. Now, I don’t think so. I'm no expert, but I think poverty is worse in Kenya. I later read that over 50% of Kenyans live below the absolute poverty level – that’s the $1.25 a day level -- the level where you’re not sure you have enough to eat or a roof over your head. 

On trip number three, I stayed three weeks, and somewhere in there lost my deer-in-the-headlights feeling (brought on mostly by culture shock and jet lag). We traveled through the slum once at night, and I realized, oh, it’s completely dark, and oh, there are still people absolutely everywhere. It’s just like in the daytime, only with cooking fires and complete darkness. Oh. This is much worse than the slums I saw in Peru and Brazil, which had at least tapped into the electrical utilities.  

This led me to some sort-of unanswerable questions. Why is there so much poverty? Is there anything we can do? 

African Education, part 2

As I began to discuss in the first part of this blog post, on my third trip to Kenya I started having more questions than answers. I was particularly plagued by a sense that I was gradually developing a vague sense of how terrible the poverty is in some sectors of society, and plagued by questions of what can be done to help.

I realized that the boys school that I had visited was not a private school, but rather an elite government school. It is a free, or close to free, national school. The boys go there by scoring the highest on national exams, and some travel for three days, sometimes on the backs of trucks, to get there. Wow. 

And why are there checkpoints everywhere, that we get waved through? I realized that they’re places where the average Kenyan driver has to pay money to pass the checkpoint. I guess if you live there you might think of it as a toll, but it sounds suspiciously like bribes to me. And why the bumpy roads? I realized that the government doesn’t seem to be investing in infrastructure. In fact, where roads are being built in Kenya, it seems to be being done by Chinese companies. I started thinking, these bumpy roads don’t just create inconvenience. They stop commerce. Sending packages, for instance, is almost completely unknown in Kenya. You can’t just order something on the internet, because there’s no way to get it delivered.

Speaking of internet, why only slow, cellular-based internet? Same answer. The government doesn’t invest in it. Why no credit cards? Commerce is done completely in cash (and barter). Why is there almost no sheetmusic at the national school, with the best and brightest of Kenya? Again, the government doesn’t invest in it. Oh. 

Although some African countries have tried to improve their higher education institutions, and expand them, they face serious problems. One problem is the lack of academics to staff them. According to a Chronicle article (“Africa’s New Crisis: A Dearth of Professors”), African universities cannot address these problems without the help of Western academics. "Our colleagues need our help, and all ships need to rise in the world," said David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University. Cornell introduced a master of professional studies program in Integrated Watershed Management and Hydrology at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia. It is now funded by USAID. (See this link).

After my third trip to Africa, I was plagued by the question, why is Africa, and specifically Kenya, like this? Why doesn’t the government invest in roads? Why not, for instance, buy some music for those kids at the boys school? Why not invest in some internet infrastructure and connect with the world? When we were there, the answers seemed to be all over the place: you can download music off the internet, for free, for instance. Adult musicians at one location can teach student musicians at another. But everywhere ordinary people are hobbled by difficulties that are outside their control. It takes time to download music, and a printer, and paper, and you have to pay for that slow internet connection. It’s not easy to physically get people from one location to another. It’s not that these things aren’t doable; they’re just not easily doable. We Americans tend to come in with this sort-of smug, can-do attitude, and we feel terrific! Look what we can do! We just need to show them how to download music! And we throw a great deal of resources toward "helping" people, without trying to understand the complexities of the society and cultures that we're visiting.

Answers are just not simple. In my quest for answers to my “why” question, I read a little book. It was the first of many that have brought up the negative sides to Western aid efforts. I read William Easterly’s “The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.” He points out that 50 billion dollars of aid have gone to African countries over the last fifty years, and there is essentially nothing to show for it. It’s simply not worked, other than creating a culture of waiting for the West to come in and help. The countries that have improved are the ones who did it themselves – Botswana is a shining example. He particularly criticizes USAID. The same thing happens over and over – Westerners come in and try to fix things, and in the process misunderstand the issues and get mired in (and sometimes prop up) corrupt governments. I’ve talked to several people involved in some sort of aid to Africa, and they all say that’s it’s universal: in order to help people you have to work with these local governments, most if not all at some level of corruption. 

This leaves me with very mixed feelings. I’m trying to help educators and students in Africa, who are hobbled by bad roads, bad Internet, and little supplies. I can’t do much about the bad roads and bad Internet, but I definitely have access to stuff. Heck, I can probably get all kinds of people to donate to a project helping music students in Africa! And notice how the project has shifted. It’s not feeling collaborative any more. It’s feeling like a helping project now. I’m no longer offended by people asking if it’s a mission trip, because, well, it's starting to feel like one. 

After all this thinking, it basically comes down to, for me, do I continue with this project or not? And when I ask myself that question, I think of a secondary school student, we’ll call him Samuel, who plays the piano. There’s an old piano in the little music building – a very old piano, that the music teacher barely saved from destruction during the riots of 2008 (a whole other story). Samuel plays and plays on that piano. I heard him play Liszt’s Liebestraum, and it was magnificent. Samuel gets Skype lessons from an instructor here in the US, that we set up. Before then he was essentially self-taught. He’s brilliant. He can sightread and play by ear – skills that usually don’t go together, trust me. I also heard him play Brubeck’s Take Five, with a saxophonist. He got the style just right, and improvised. He wants to study engineering at an American university, and keep studying piano. We’re trying to help him. How can we not?

Oh, by the way: the next step for us in our quest for funding for this project? USAID.