This week I started at Mutuini Hope Centre, it’s a safe place for kids and vulnerable people. They have two classrooms so they’re considered a school instead of a Childrens home. The children are currently on a school break and due to Covid restrictions they aren’t allowed to hangout here except for lunch, which is unfortunate. The Hope Centre has this amazing program where they make a fresh lunch every day for local vulnerable children with rough home lives. They also deliver lunch and porridge in the morning to eight grandmothers who can’t make their own food. It’s amazing how thankful they are, thanking God and giving us their blessings.
I’ve been making more friends and most of them have never left Kenya. I get lots of questions about life in Canada and it’s made me realize just how lucky we are in Canada. I mentioned that I love to walk barefoot and a lady told me she didn’t wear shoes until she was in high school. “How cool, you must like it too then”, I said. “No, we were just really poor and couldn’t afford shoes”, she responded. What a kick in the gut that was. Growing up, my friends and I had shoes for every occasion. Sports shoes, fancy shoes, mud boots, you name it we had it. It was normal. When I use my iPhone I get asked, “Is that a iphone? That’s really nice, how expensive was it?” It’s something I’ve never really thought twice about. We all have iPhones, MacBooks, and AirPods, there’s no other choice in my mind other than to have these things.
It’s hard to not feel guilty about being born in Canada and having all these things. Wearing shoes to school is normal in Canada. Having an iPhone is normal. Having access to clean drinking water, refrigerators, washing and drying machines, dishwashers, sit down toilets, showers, electricity and your own bedroom, even your own bed is normal. How am I not supposed to feel guilty when these things are novelties to Kenyans? It makes sense now why they see white people and think we’re all rich.
We have a government that isn’t corrupt and looks after their citizens in a way that they don’t in Kenya. Canadians were so lucky to have CERB payments throughout Covid. Kenya shut down and people lost their jobs. Most people had no compensation and many families lost their homes and had to live on the street. When the schools shut down, many kids didn’t have access to a computer for online learning like Canadian kids do. Families pooled their money together and got one tutor for a large number of kids. I did online school this year and complained nonstop about how much I hated being on a computer at home all the time and how I thought my life was so rough, it puts it into perspective.
Life is all about perspective and I’m learning so much and I’ve only been here for three weeks. I think if you have the opportunity to volunteer in a country that isn’t as well off as your home country, you should. As little as some of these people have, they are some of the happiest, chilled out people I’ve ever met. They hand scrub their laundry, make food fresh every day, and enjoy the life they were given. They don’t complain about how hard it is and what they wish they had. It’s inspiring and I hope to take away this outlook on life.