Peace Corps/Kenya

May 12, 2008

Peace Corps/Kenya has been temporarily suspended, all Volunteers have safely left the country. The Peace Corps intends to return Volunteers to Kenya when the security environment has improved.
This is the vague announcement, highlighted in red text, that still greets visitors to the PC/Kenya homepage. It is still a bit of a shock to me, three months after the Peace Corps’ presence in Kenya ceased to be a current enterprise. I’m still amazed that Kenya’s internal political strife could have caused me to have an entirely different experience had I joined a year later, or had Kenya held its ill-fated presidential election a year earlier. Leaving Kenya after two years in July 2007, I was satisfactorily oblivious to how abruptly it all could have fallen apart. And I guess that is the darkest uncertainty lurking beneath all of the illnesses, family emergencies, and whatever other mitigating factors that so often cut short many PCVs time abroad. You could fall into your ideal working and living situation, the idealization of the experience from your pre-departure imagination, and then a few days later be rushing to the airport without saying goodbye to anybody in your village.

If this sounds overly dramatic that is because it probably is. For the vast majority of PCVs, their service does not end with evacuation. To be honest, the moment it happened in Kenya, I think to some degree I lost the ability to look at this issue in the most rational light. A year ago I would have found it entirely unfathomable that things could deteriorate in Kenya so quickly as to force this to happen. Intertribal tension was always there, but its intensity level was at that of jokes and seemingly lighthearted stereotypes, not Luos and Kikuyus chasing each other with machetes and CNN making comparisons to the Rwandan genocide.

During one of my last weeks in Kenya I traveled to Kitui, a town in Eastern Province, to facilitate a few sessions for the newest group of PC trainees who were about midway through their pre-service training. They had been in training for over a month already, plenty of time to get a little dirty, get completely exasperated with the pace and style of training, and have some truly memorable cultural experiences. They were days away from hearing their site announcements, and it showed on their faces. Everyone had this nervous energy and anxiety: they were about to find out where they’d be living for two years, or so they all thought. The agonizing thing about the timing of the evacuation for this group of new PCVs is that they had just enough time at site to lay the foundations of their work and build relationships with people in the communities. In many ways, they were just completing the most challenging and important part of their service, and then never got to enjoy the fruits of that labor.

I also remember helping a youth group in a small town near my site in Kajiado complete the application for a new PCV. They were ecstatic beyond words when one of the girls from the aforementioned trainee group was selected to be assigned to their group and town. The same excitement was felt in 40-plus towns and villages across Kenya, only to be followed by an abrupt parting of ways a few months later.

Kenya is calm now. President Kibaki and challenger Raila Odinga came to a power sharing agreement at the coaxing of Kofi Annan and others, and my friends who have visited Nairobi recently report that it is the same crazy bustling place it was before the violence. But the PC Nairobi office remains shuttered, and I’m constantly reminded how different my PC experience could have been

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