America the Beautiful

Feeling pretty patriotic today and definitely listening to my "goodbye america" playlist on itunes as I write this. It was a rough day to be an American in my International Humanitarian Law class today. Last thursday, we watched the movie Green Zone. It has Matt Damon in it (yum), just came out this summer, and is about the hunt for mysterious WMDs at the beginning of the war in 2003. Our assignment was to answer some questions about the type of warfare, classifying the conflict, blah blah blah. Basically, write about it as if it were a true documentation of the war and the events preceding it. I had a problem with this, since I knew the kids in my class would think the movie was REAL and not fictional, which would ultimately cause problems. Never in my life did I ever think I would DEFEND the war in Iraq, but that's exactly what I found myself doing today. People were being mean about America and I had to defend my homeland with all I had.
After reminding a few people that the movie was a MOVIE and not a documentary, things turned to Guantanamo Bay and got reallllly ugly. [Just to really put this into perspective of how much it bothered me, I honestly just spent over an hour researching Guantanamo Bay instead of doing more important work]. So, Guantanamo. Yeah, it's not the best, it's pretty damn controversial, but most people in the US are going to agree on those two facts. This one girl in my class, Yvonne, spoke up and expressed an interesting opinion (interesting in the way that it wasn't entirely Anti-American) saying that she understood the motivations behind the creation of Guantanamo but couldn't understand that if the US was treating prisoners SO BADLY, why nothing was done about it. I found this point really interesting and would have loved to discuss it in detail to find out what people though. However, it caused both our teacher and the entire class to get into quite a tizzy. Somehow from this, they called her a murderer and made it seem like she thought everything done at Guantanamo was okay.
I have actually never seen anyone so disrespectful in a classroom environment as our professor got, though. She interrupted/cut off the girl speaking more than once while she tried to defend herself. She raised her voice and told the girl never to speak in class again until she had facts to back up her arguments. And the kicker, really, was that not 15 minutes prior to this conversation, the professor had said how open she was to opinions and that not everyone had to suckup/agree with her. She reiterated this "free to express opinion" point while tearing Yvonne down, and the girl retorted with "that's exactly what I did and you completely threw my opinion away." I have never felt so bad for anyone in a class before; poor girl was so targeted and yelled at by everyone in the class that she issued an apology by the end of the class period.
I ended up walking out of the class early because I couldn't really handle her hate-mongering speech any longer. For a professor who stresses having our own thoughts and opinions, it sure seems like she only wants to hear what she agrees with, and that will 99.9% of the time be Anti-American/western world feelings. I can usually keep myself calm and collected in classes where I disagree with what is being said, but I think this blatant prejudice and hatred just overwhelmed me today. I actually felt unsafe to even voice my own thoughts, even though we would obviously be the most educated on the topic. Oh and my favorite part? When she told the girl that she just must be getting her information from CNN. Wait, what? Since when did CNN become a defender of the war on terror/Guantanamo/president bush/etc. Maybe she should try watching CNN once in awhile to actually know what the hell she is talking about.
After some research, I have actually found out that a few things my professor claimed as 'facts' are actually false, and I definitely plan on bringing these points to her attention on Thursday. I feel the need so strongly to defend my country and defend what we stand for that I will risk my grade in this class to stand up for myself. Not really a choice I ever hoped to make, but it seems like a necessary evil at this point.

Let It All Out

I'll say it. I'm feeling a little lost and homesick this week. This is our first week of our internships and the emotional turmoil of mine, combined with the bullshit of USIU, and feeling pretty sick just really is dragging me down. Monday I had a pretty good day at Lea Toto. I went with Beth, a case manager who deals with all of Kangemi and has 250 kids on her caseload, to bring a girl to the hospital to get checked for sexual abuse. All turned out okay though, but we still brought her to this rehab place since her father is neglectful and she doesn't get to take her medicine and doesn't get fed well. Hopefully she will be healthier after spending a month there and we can find her a new permanent, safer placement. I really like Beth because she's very open with me and I'm not afraid to ask her questions, and she will always translate for me. It was a tiring day, but all in all, I felt good about it.
USIU on Tuesday proved to be a nightmare in getting one of my classes changed. All ended well there too, but it was bad and an advisor was just unnecessarily rude and disrespectful to me. Got home and went to the movies for some American time, which was very much needed.
Wednesday I was back at Lea Toto for food distribution day. Basically the most needy families come once a month and get food provisions like flour, corn, and oil to ease some financial burdens. All was fine until I was left to do the process with clients entirely alone for 20 minutes. I wasn't about to just sit there and not help these people, but the language barrier made things kind of difficult. Finally, the worker I was helping came back and things were fine. After that (and scarfing a quick pb&J since they don't have lunch breaks here?), I went out into the field with another case manager, Faith. Her area that she oversees is much more rural and outside of Nairobi proper- I think in Western province. So it was quite a trek and it really just hit me on that ride that I was actually here. Everyone spoke Swahili or Kikuyu without translating for me, even when I timidly asked. The families we visited were literally more poor than the slum families I've seen, and one father was very obviously not taking his ARV's and looked horrible. The kids were all just pretty confused as to who the HELL I was and what I was doing there. Since they're much more rural, a few of them had never even seen a white person before, so they were pretty scared of me at first. That's probably one of my biggest obstacles here. Kids always LOVE me, that's why I work with them; and facing kids who burst into tears because of my skin color is a huge blow for me. Most of them were really shy, but would come up to me and want to play, but those few who I just TERRIFY really get me down. It just got to the point yesterday where I thought to myself, "what am I doing here? And how am I possibly helping anyone?" I just felt like a tourist to poverty and that made me feel terrible.
I'm really just looking forward to this week finally ending, and getting some downtime. We're going on a little excursion Saturday to look at excavated bones and stuff and I'm really happy about that. I feel like I need it to remind myself of all of the good things in Kenya and why I'm here. It will be nice to get out of Nairobi for a bit.

also, sorry for the lack of pictures. I'll try to take some this weekend.
xo