Forty-five thousand dollar Toyota Land Cruisers park in front of a modern shopping mall whose interiors rival the variety and low- to mid-range product quality of Walmart in the U.S. or MediaMarkt in Europe. Globalization is tangible here in a way that is more subtle in Holland, Germany, Spain. The stark contrast between the new, well-lit Nakumat superstore and the traditional open markets brings familiarity to wazungu who make Kenya their home for any length of time. In the streets of Nakuru, I may see one foreigner each day, but in the Nakumat there are several with each visit.

It’s an easy thing to do, to default to the place where prices are presented on labels and product return is possible, even if challenging. There is an attraction to the familiar—the clean floors, brand name foods, pharmaceuticals, cameras and thirty-six inch LCD televisions. Skippy, Del Monte, Yoplait, Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic level the playing field in one respect, but create a greater chasm in the same stroke.

I calculated the number of jobs displaced by the new shopping mall as no less than 150. Bernard confirmed my observation with a story of local concern when Nairobi based Nakumat hired Nairobi managers and sales clerks instead of training locals. A stark contrast to the promise of jobs when they bid construction. Sounds terribly familiar to the multiple-decades onslaught of the same in the U.S.

Just around the corner women sell fresh produce purchased from the farmers, washed and stacked for the passers-by. Onions, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, squash, carrots, eggs, corn, zucchini and some vegetables I do not recognize. None bright in color nor perfect in shape. All show the blemishes of food produced on a farm in which soil, rain, and human hands remain the primary motivators of planting, growth, harvesting, and delivery.

For the average tourist, their goods and wares are but an interesting display worthy of a photograph, smile, and attempted greeting in Kiswahili, “Jambo!” and “Asante!” But for the locals, this is where their food has been traded for centuries.

The farmer’s market is where those who labour in the fields traditionally came to sell their produce to other vendors, wholesale. In recent years, it has become a place for direct-to-consumer sales as well and is now terribly crowded. It is not as easily found nor is it a place for the faint of heart. Not like Barnes & Nobel with the launch of the last of the Harry Potter series, but suffocating, stifling, a Japanese subway car at rush hour packed beyond comfort at any level.

Shoulders, hips, thighs, breasts and backs pressed tightly as mud sucks at the bottom of shoes and bare feet, and vendors scold those who do not recognize when they have stepped on the corner of a vendors mat, an onion or bunch of cloves pressed into the mud.

At roughly eleven thirty, the gate closed for reasons no one was able to explain. Bernard and I were caught inside along with hundreds of others. We were told this happens every day, for a half hour, maybe more. The chain which held the two halves of the gate in union gave me further sense of feeling trapped. Bernard and I looked for another exit, but others who had also done the same said there was none.

Twenty minutes passed. The sun penetrated my hair and caused my scalp to itch in that tell-tail pre-burn state. A young man climbed to the top of the right gate, jumped over, and pressed the gate to open again in our direction. The full assembly of vendors and buyers who had aligned themselves for the gate to open the other direction, on both sides, were forced to move en mass against the growing pressure from behind.

I recognized the situation as somewhat dangerous and made certain I did not fall. Bernard and I waited for the pressure to subside, but we realized to remain where we stood was no longer an option. The only way out was to press ahead, to physically move ourselves at any expense toward the gate which was now just one meter open.

I caught the eyes and face of a teenage boy to my front and side. Clearly, this was a daily, almost enjoyable challenge for him despite the anxiety and frustration it caused everyone. He yelled, pushed, and squeezed past me in the opposite direction. I turned to Bernard who was as astounded as I despite his having lived here all twenty one years of his life.

We pressed hard, hands on the shoulders and back of those in front. Our legs shuffled in small strides, some to counter-balance, some to make progress. The mud threatened to cause us to loose footing. One … two … three meters passed the gate which was now at a forty five degree angle. The pressure was released and I laughed uncomfortably, looking back to Bernard who was shaking his head. We were free of the market and pleased again to be in the hustle of the Nakuru streets.

Bernard and I walked to the Top Market, in the center of town, one block off Kenyatta Avenue. This is the kind of place both locals and tourists enjoy for the environment is less chaotic, the pressure to buy reduced to a simple nod, wave, or greeting. The diversity of foods produced from both soil and tree is accented by mounds of fresh spices and herbs. The colours and aromas are astounding.

The desire to purchase a small bag of each without knowledge of its name or culinary function is overwhelming, a reminder of what it was like to be a child and believe in magical powders, crystals, and perfectly polished stones. Some seventeen years ago I purchased a massive amount of spices from the bizarre in Cairo, Egypt. The last of that cayenne pepper now sits in a glass jar on the back of a stove in a kitchen in Seattle, Washington.

The Relationship of Shopping
I have in the past nine months transitioned from East Jerusalem and the West Bank of Palestine where a relationship is quickly established with each and every vendor, to the comparative cold of Holland and Germany where a greater effort must be made to make connections. In Barcelona, Spain European shopping convenience is complimented by the slower Mediterranean culture. Here in Kenya the contrast between the two worlds is directly evident. Traditional open markets offer time to make eye contact and talk and shake hands in the never-ending Kenyan weaving of fingers, palms, and fist bumps.

I walk the narrow paths formed by women sitting on the ground, their produce displayed before them on open gunny sacks and each greets me. I stand in the grocery store for ten minutes, a clerk just a few meters away too busy with his or her cell phone to bother to ask if I needed any assistance. At the check-out counter the plastic bottles and shrink-wrapped packages slide past the bar code scanner, the speed of transaction is far more pressing than the interaction. Those in line behind me grow impatient if my card does not scan or I fumble with my wallet.

What’s more, I pay three to four times the cost for the same vegetables only one or two days earlier purchased from the farmers’ market in which Bernard and I ventured. The florescent lighting, clean floors, and clerks in matching blue uniforms give customers a sense of confidence and familiarity at the expense of the lost relationship.

I am seated on a bed within a mosquito net tent, on the third level above a market street, at the edge of Nakuru, Kenya. The apartment is rented by Bernard Masai, my adopted son and cherished friend.

I have been here for just four days, arriving from Palestine via Tel Aviv last Thursday. In East Jerusalem and the West Bank I worked with my film partner Farid to conduct final interviews for our short, documentary film “I am Palestine“.

The contrast from the nude beaches of Spain to the warm, inviting West Bank of Palestine to the poverty of Kenya is overwhelming. What drives me to continue on my journey is learning to allow my days and weeks to unfold one at a time, moving in a general direction but all plans open to editing.

Access for All
We are without running water (no one recalls when last the building complex enjoyed this amenity) and are given a 50/50 chance of electricity for the full day. I reset my connection to the carrier twice today already, each time careful to place the phone on the window sill at the right time, hoping the initial handshaking protocol and bandwidth negotiation will result in something faster than last time. The “H” is eventually presented, even faster than 3G and I am pleased. But how long will it last? The struggle to obtain a quality cell phone and data connection is a constant reminder of the fragile nature of technology in this place.

Seventy five liters of water was this morning delivered by a young man who fills five twenty five liter jugs from a private tap, delivering them by bicycle. I commented he must be one of the strongest men in Nakuru, his legs for the effort in cycling and climbing stairs, his arms for the effort in handling and transport. He agreed with a proud smile. It is but 100 Kenyan Schilling for the total run, or $1.25 USD. Bernard explained the courier pays roughly half of this to fill the jugs, earning by my best guestimate $7.50 a day.

We are now listening to George’s Winston’s opening “Tamarack Pines” to the album “Forest”. The intentional misuse of the upper octave produces a dry rhythm adequate to drive the living to elevated levels of ecstasy or bring the dead back to life. For me, it is a combination of the extremes, and I am revitalized.

While I am one who picks an entire album to match or help generate a mood and listens from start to finish without rewind or pause, this morning I cannot help but shuffle from Vivaldi to Mannheim Steamrollers, from Enya to George Winston and then Vangelis. With six hundred and fifty albums loaded on my laptop, I want to share them all with Bernard whose experience of music has been limited to the call to worship the orphanage where he lived, public radio stations, and YouTube videos.

Classical greats, the Blues standards, American Jazz and rock ‘n roll are as readily available in this digital world as is a full education in nearly any subject for those with Internet access. Yet, they remain out of reach for lack of time, direction, or even the knowledge they exist and thereby the motivation to seek them. This is true not just here in Kenya, but all over the world.

The Story of Our Time
Since my first visit to Kenya in 2007, when I walked into the compound of the Pistis orphanage, I have struggled with an understanding for the tremendous gap between those who drive Toyota Land Cruisers and the children who hold glue bottles to their noses to stave the pain of hunger, despite the immediate juxtaposition of a few meters, or daily contact in the parking spots.

Last night Bernard, Lindah and I discussed the careful balance between storytelling and knowledge sharing as the key to human satisfaction. With stories alone, we lose touch with the sciences which grant us opportunity for an improved quality of life. Without sciences, we lose touch with that which makes us human–the need to feel something deeper than facts and figures. We need also the magic that is ever present just below the surface, the stuff which strives to satisfy our need for connection in a horribly disconnected world.

Not just in Kenya, but around the globe the gap between functional knowledge of how things work both in our technology devices and the greater universe in which we exist, is not, in my experience, closing. No, the gap is growing as the implementation of technology in consumer electronics becomes more readily available to all who can afford or are even compelled to embrace its services.

To uses a GPS for its location services is to call upon the fundamental function of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, the fact that gravity affects the speed of the signal as it moves from satellite to my phone does in fact affect the apparent distance, triangulation, and my position. And yet, how many people who use a GPS have ever heard of Einstein or are aware that time itself is affected by gravity? Does it matter? Maybe no … or maybe yes.

For someone who believes I was afflicted with Malaria because I did not pray hard enough to Jesus, how do I explain the life cycle of the parasite, the symbiotic relationship with the mosquito, and the terminal effect on th host when she folds her arms across her chest, smiles, and says, “My brother, you need to believe. Jesus love you, but you have to believe. See me? I have not had Malaria return to my body since I believed. Jesus is protecting me. And Jesus is protecting my babies. They are healthy, because I believe. You! You must believe too. And you will not have this Malaria in your body.”

I could use a readily available microscope in one of the half dozen “labs” in the town center to show her the crescent of the broken cell affected by the parasite, but without a lifetime of education or repeated, demonstrable evidence, will she use a mosquito net at night? How many of her children will die before she finds that no amount of prayer will stop the infestation?

Either the uneducated believes the explanation much in the way he or she believes in the power of prayer or a massive gap in knowledge and education is brought to bear.

The more we specialize in order to deliver more complex products, the more the average person must simply trust that somehow it just works. No one has time nor do they necessarily care to understand. In Kenya this discussion is given form in an overwhelming, tangible manner. In “developed” countries the gap also widens between a working knowledge of how the world works and those that harbour an understanding.

While in Barcelona, Spain I finished a book titled “Mountains Beyond Mountains” about Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard graduate and practicing doctor who has dedicated his life to working with the impoverished to eradicate TB, AIDS, Malaria, and many other diseases which take the lives of those without means in a far greater percentage than those who have the resources to gain access to proper medical attention and health care.

In the three hours ride from Nairobi to Nakuru Friday night, the radio music program was interrupted by occasional news updates. One announced the Kenyan government’s plea with those afflicted by diabetes to continue to take their medication, to stay with the prescribed program or suffer the consequences.

As with all medical professionals, making certain a patient is diligent in taking their medication as prescribed is not only the means by which the cure might be realized, but also the difference between the control of a disease or the creation of a super-strain which grows resistant to every known antibiotic manufactured by all the pharmaceuticals combined.

As Farmer describes, it is not his job to teach the people of rural Haiti the life cycle of a parasite or means by which a virus uses human cells to reproduce. Rather, he needs only to gain their trust and belief which they would otherwise put into the power of superstition and prayer.

Farmer is willing—Farmer has no choice but to integrate the human propensity for storytelling into the modern world of knowledge if not to deliver a higher quality of education than to simply deliver the result of that education in the form of a vaccine or antibiotic treatment.

The means by which that treatment was developed, the full history of pharmaceuticals is lost to the belief in the power of that one small pill, ingested with the ease of a phone call on a hand-held device who inner functions most people will never understand, not do they care.

The smell of smoldering charcoal mixes with uninhibited exhaust from a two-stroke, three-wheeled tuk-tuk engines rev with the anticipation of passengers. Red rooftops protect the interior of wealthy homes whose compound walls differentiate the rich from the impoverished. Broken glass embedded in the final concrete course dares any to enter.

Deep, red earth mixes with muddy brown. Greens dark against a cloudless sky only to find bold African rain beating down a few hours later. Tall, thin Sudanese women walk in slow, flowing grace, their faces dark faces a full head above the others. Kenyan women balance sacks of produce on their head. Men transport their loads on shoulders and back.

Bicycles have been replaced, for the most part, with imported Chinese motorcycles since the last time I was here in 2008. The bota-bota displaced by the piki-piki, emitting more fumes and again increasing the danger to the driver and passenger. I miss the two seater bicycles with carefully adorned seats, battery powered lights and sound systems. There was a creativity in those taxis that is absent in the gasoline powered replacements. I refuse to ride on a motorcycle without a helmet and so Bernard and I walk several kilometers each day to conduct our errands.

Nothing truly functions here in Kenya, at least not as it was intended. At the same time, nothing is so fully broken so as to not function without creative application of a tool designed for another purpose. Electricity is not a right, nor even a privilege. Rather, the power to light a room with a single, bare bulb is a desired outcome as unpredictable as the rain in the Rift Valley, recently afflicted by global and local, micro-climate transformation.

Children whose feet are dry and cracked due to lack of protection or sanitation beg for food with one hand cupped beneath the other. The gang leaders stand watch in order that donations of money, clothing, or food are not immediately consumed or taken for personal gain.

The glue boys hold empty bottles to their noses to stave the hunger they have felt for years. Attempts at blocking the sale of toxic adhesives for purposes other than those intended has found little footing. Those who have fallen through the cracks are invisible to the eyes of the locals, children whose future can be described in just a few, bleak words. Empathy has an expiration date at which point the average human heart and mind no longer harbour capacity for more.

Perfectly composed women in high heels and tight jeans and flowing dresses walk elegantly, careful to avoid potholes and sidewalks which terminate abruptly. The contrast of styled hair and expensive wardrobe to the backdrop of the dusty streets whose traffic is more an example of chaos in particle flow than civil engineering. Their poise and look says, “I am better than this place. Just passing through.”