A summer in Kenya digging for life's truths

Over the summer, a great deal of luck — in the form of a generous and kind professor — helped me wind up in Kenya, studying archaeology and paleontology.

I spent about two months in the country — in Nairobi, near Mt. Kenya and then most of the time up near the Ethiopian border on the shores of Lake Turkana, one of the most remote places in Africa. At the time it didn't seem unusual, it was just reality.

My time there was an odd mix of the spectacular and the tedious. Part of me was learning to identify fragments of animal bone, excavating and being awed by the herds of zebra and milling giraffes. The other part of me was complaining with my friends about how I could never eat beans and corn or a sawdust biscuit again.

One would think that I would be upset with myself for my preoccupation with trivial matters in the midst of a truly special experience. But actually, it seems as though these little griping events made the trip more real, less of a dream. And, maybe, I'm a little more appreciative of other people's situations when I've been grateful for a goat to eat out in the boonies.

I found it hard to be sympathetic towards the beautiful animals of the Kenyan savanna. Watching a National Geographic video, I couldn't understand how someone could hunt zebra, giraffe and antelopes, at least not when there are domestic animals around. But in rural Kenya I learned that most livestock is kept for its milk and rarely eaten.

There's little meat and little food in most of Kenya. People were hungry. I was hungry. I had definitely changed by the day I looked at an oryx and thought, "What a beautiful animal. So graceful . . . I wonder, can we hit it with the Land Rover and eat it?"

Like most good learning experiences, my time in Kenya brought a number of my beliefs into question. Issues became more ambiguous. For example, in the arid land along the Ethiopian border, we met a village of a small group of people, the Dassanatch, who live as pastoral-nomads.

Theoretically, they live by raising cattle and doing a little hunting and gathering. In actuality, they live on boiled maize flown in by relief agencies, as they struggle to keep their animals alive in the midst of a two-year drought, in a place that only rains once a year in the best of times.

When we met them they had temporarily settled on land set aside as a national park. Unfortunately for them, the government is currently trying to stop the over-grazing that has led to the desertification of much African soil.

Now, this land was not a prize by our standards — mainly thorns and bramble — but the Dassanatch were embroiled in a debate with the Kenyan Wildlife Service who wanted them to leave. I understood the government's objectives. They do honestly want to help stem a serious problem that is ravaging the continent.

But when faced with the actual situation, I realized that without freedom of grazing lands, some of these people would simply die. How can we sacrifice a group of people? Because our planet is being overpopulated and they're the lucky ones picked to be sidelined?

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Three hours before I was to go to the airport and leave Kenya, maybe for good, I was lost in the middle of a bazaar without any money.

Haggling with close to zero in your pocket gives you a tremendous advantage. I think that day I won the Queen of Barter award, impressing even the shopkeepers who ignored potentially lucrative customers to try to get me to trade a deck of cards for stone pipes.

It was then that I made my third major realization about Kenyans. Most of them, at least the ones selling stuff, love that game that's played in the marketplace. Sure, they like to make quick cash off the foolish fat-bellied tourists, but they would rather be challenged.

So many foreign visitors are ashamed to bargain. They feel sorry for the merchants, but there's something besides money and pity that you can give them.

Respect. Mutual pleasure in the game they play for their livelihood.

These things mean more.

Francesca M. Soria '02 is an anthropology major from Norfolk, Va. She can be reached via e-mail at fmsoria@princeton.edu.