Suburban Discontent

The following are my last thoughts before coming to Kenya, which I never got a chance to post. Much has happened since, and it feels like they were written years ago; nevertheless, I submit them here for your perusal. I'll post more about my life since I've been here as soon as I have the time to write. I promise.

From May 21, 2007:
My last week home has seen a strange transition in both the content and pattern of my thoughts. Maybe stange isn’t the right word. Interesting. Psychologically noteworthy. The first few nights back in suburbia were relaxing and peaceful, if totally mundane, affairs. Hanging around the house (such a sterile off-white! so antiseptically clean!), lying in a hammock, reading and eating and realizing why I don’t have television in Montreal (Dancing With The Stars, anyone?) With all this unstructured time on my hands, it doesn’t take long for me to revert back to my old high school form. By my second night I feel the teenage angst seeping back into my veins, running through the wires and corrupting the spirit. My thoughts turn toxic and decidedly unproductive. Evenings are the worst; I sit around, my eyes glaze over, reading the same sentence of Go Down, Moses five, six, eleven times as my mind wanders to thoughts of a city where creative impulses are nurtured, not quashed, and eccentricities embraced, not feared. A city where all the flaws and problems and hardships of life are right out in the open, raw and on display for anyone to see; where such filth and grime coexists with the glitz and glamour of Montréal nightlife in a bizarre symbiosis that is fascinating to watch from my third-floor balcony on Avenue des Pins. I look out over the brightly coloured roofs of Plateau Mont-Royal and my senses are stimulated to the fullest degree. In this moment, my body is on a couch in upstate New York, my eyes are trying to focus on 19th century Mississippi, but my mind is caught up in a Montréal dusk-dream.

I am never more enthralled by Montreal than when I’m in Delmar, NY. Here, my family’s 2-story colonial is across the street from a mirror-image of itself, as if East Poplar Drive itself acts as the mirror, reflecting not only physical structure but its occupants’ very aspirations, values, and preferences for vinyl siding. Here, Poplar is about as far removed from Pine as can possibly be imagined, and the naming of streets after trees seems perverse in both cases. [Sidenote: I remember a book from when I was growing up, about a man who moves into a plain, cookie-cutter neighborhood and builds a house that’s brightly coloured and shaped like a boat. All the neighbors are outraged, incensed by his unconventional taste. They take their complaints to him in turn, but one by one, the man convinces his neighbors to redesign their own houses to better match their personalities, and the whole town becomes a brighter, better place to live. Moral of the story? The world needs more boat houses.]

In spite of all their seemingly vast differences, though, my lives in Montréal and in New York both share in all of the luxuries and conveniences that living in the modern Western world entails. Before I drag myself into a bottomless pit of clichéd middle-class pseudo-philosophizing, I will just say that the next few months will be witness to a stark break with all that I have known in life thus far. I’ll be in western Kenya for the summer, in the city of Kisumu working with Africa Now, an NGO that specializes in enterprise development amongst impoverished, often rural, communities. What does this mean? I’m not sure, exactly. I expect to work on micro-finance projects that deal with the establishment and growth of village banks in rural areas, where it is difficult for large, commercial banks to access a profit margin sufficient to make opening a local branch worth their trouble. But even my specific tasks are uncertain as of yet.

My intention is to learn about global development in action, on the ground, in the field, with eyes wide open to all of its various successes and failure. In particular, my interests lie in examining the prospects for small-scale business growth in impoverished areas of the world. More importantly, I’m at long last venturing outside of my secure North American bubble of clean water, shopping malls, SUVs, and the like. I can’t say I have the vaguest idea of what I should expect, despite the hours of training, preparation, and cultural sensitizing I’ve already gone through. This is for the best, I’ve come to realize, and I’ll continue to resist my urge to form baseless expectations for my trip as my departure date nears.

And so I’ll do my best to keep this updated for anyone who’s interested in following my experiences, though ultimately this is more for the benefit of my own thought-organization and reflection. I promise to keep tree-hugging and granola-munching to a minimum while I’m gone, and I should be across the pond and a world or two away (I’m going to the third one, apparently) the next time I’m heard from.