Cypress Teacher Learns She Can Do Without in Impoverished Kenya

It was last year that Suzanne Hawkins, raised in white, suburban, well-off Orange County, stepped through the looking glass into a reverse world.

Abruptly, her life changed from white to black, from privilege to poverty. The insider became the outsider, the educated instantly ignorant.

Now, after a year as a Peace Corps teacher in this village 80 miles north of Nairobi, Hawkins is unsure who has been teaching whom.

She says she has learned that possessions can be more trouble than they are worth, that solitude can be comforting, that bigotry hurts, that the undercurrent of stress in her white world seems somehow missing, even for the only white woman in a black world.

Ironically, she says, her archetypal suburban upbringing probably set her on the road to Kenya. Raised in a large family in Cypress, Hawkins followed the middle-class trail through college, earned a master’s degree in education and then wanted to see the world she had studied so much. “I had never traveled much before,” she said. “To meet people all over the world appealed to me.”

The Peace Corps seemed the best opportunity, and it sent her to the cool, green highlands of Kenya. Now, at age 26, she lives in an unheated, two-room shack lighted by a kerosene lamp and picks bugs from her food before she cooks it. Her main diet consists of rice, vegetables and ugali, a cornmeal paste.

She spends her days in a concrete-sided classroom, the walls tinted by reflections of the packed, red-dirt floor. Her chalkboard is a section of concrete painted green. Her class is 30 teen-agers, who are attentive as she lectures in English on math, physics and chemistry.

She spends most of her nights in her shack, because she must not socialize where men are. “It’s a big risk. You can tarnish your credibility, especially being a white woman,” she says. “The perception is that Western women are available. Men here will misread friendship for romantic involvement.”

She has discovered that materialism is strong among the Kenyans, who have little. “The kids here are amazed that people can actually be unhappy in the States because they have everything. In a place where these kids have nothing, they find it hard to believe that all Americans aren’t happy.”

But shedding her possessions has shown her they are not so important. “For myself, I’ve learned to do without a lot of things. I’m not so preoccupied with materialism anymore.”

You really don’t have a choice, she says. “You have to live with everyone ripping you off here. And transportation being what it is, you don’t want to have anything valuable on you. That’s asking for trouble.”

She says she feels secure in her shack on the school compound--”it’s only been broken into once”--yet once the sun sets, she stays indoors, fearful of robbery and rape. “There is such a disparity between the rich and poor, and there’s no middle class. People can get killed for a few shillings here. In a country where they have nothing, they see white and they think rich.”

Hawkins says she has never been on the minority side of bigotry before. “Society is so sexist here. And racist, in my case, so I get a taste of both frequently.”

People, young and old, stare and call her mzungu, an epithet for white person, she says. She often is overcharged when she buys a head of cabbage or rides a matutu, a van-like bus. “It’s like being in a fishbowl and having people stare at you. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that,” she says.

“Some students have never had any social interaction with whites,” explains John Nderi, headmaster of Kiaguthu School, where Hawkins teaches. “Most of us have heard about whites--they have taken so much from us with colonialism--that until we have the experience of knowing some, we don’t realize that all whites aren’t bad.”

Nature sometimes stirs the caldron. Occasional drought makes food scarce, leading to tribal clashes in some areas. Hawkins says she has witnessed rioting over the scarcity of food:

“In a caste system like in Kenya, a leader of the class can incite a riot, and the rest follow. If you don’t act according to the group, you’ll get beaten up.”

The group pressure extends into her classroom, Hawkins says. “It is very disturbing to me when one student is really trying to learn and be conscientious about studying and is distracted because the rest won’t allow him to study,” she said. “It is so typical in this culture--the mob mentality.”

Though she is the only white person in her village, there are 148 other Peace Corps volunteers throughout Kenya, and 80 more arrive each year. For three months, each lives with a rural Kenyan family and tries to learn Swahili and Kenyan customs.

Then volunteers are sworn in and assigned--mainly as water engineers and technicians, agriculturists, foresters, small-business advisers, town planners and teachers. They’re paid 4,000 shillings a month, about $130.

A Peace Corps hitch is two years long (“You miss two Thanksgivings and two Christmases”), but if you can’t take it, you can leave early. But Hawkins does not talk of bailing out despite the hardships and fears because, “It’s really beautiful here.” If that seems too trivial to counterbalance loneliness, prejudice and poverty, Hawkins says she would have thought so, too--a year ago. Not now.

She says the beauty of the land and the simplicity of the life have erased the stress that seems a part of the suburban burden. That stress was worse than having to boil milk before using it, having to tote water from outside the shack, having to undergo regular vaccinations. It was even worse than the danger. “I don’t know anyone in the Peace Corps who is stressed,” she says.

“Going back to the suburbs doesn’t seem likely. (Upon leaving the Peace Corps) I’d like to find a place I’d like to live, then look for a job. Not the suburbs. Definitely not the city. A little place out of the way. I’ve gotten used to this slower pace. It has become real important in my life.”