An Invitation to Steven Labarakwe

At the 2011 Elementary School Heads Association Annual Dinner last week, Laurel had the opportunity to share artifacts from the ESHA trip to Kenya and to tell members about our invitation to our Kenya host, Steven Labarakwe, to visit schools in the Washington, DC, area.

Steven is the education officer for the Laisamis District in Northern Kenya. Introduced to us by Joseph Lekuton, Steven was the guide, driver, and mentor for the ESHA group's two-week Kenya stay. As Laurel discussed in last week's post, "Preparing the Manyatta," Steven has agreed to spend two weeks with us in the U.S. to make presentations to students and faculty about the Samburu culture and life in northern Kenya. We look forward, too, to the possibility of including in his visit an evening discussion for school leaders with Steven, where topics of global partnerships and meaningful service learning could be addressed.

Six schools have stepped up as hosts for Steven's visit, including: Beauvoir, The National Cathedral Elementary School, Washington, DC; The Calvert School, Baltimore, MD; Green Acres School, Rockville, MD; The Harbor School, Bethesda, MD; Norwood School, Bethesda, MD; and The Woods Academy, Bethesda, MD. We're in the process of scheduling a planning meeting by conference call to consider program possibilities in order to shape the visit to suit the needs of each host school.

Our next immediate step in moving this forward is to support Steven's visa application. Toward that end, I will be poised by the phone tonight, on standby should the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi wish to speak with me. He meets with Embassy officials on Monday at 8:00 a.m. Nairobi time -- 12:00 a.m. in my part of the world.





Our hope is for Steven's visit to take place from April 4-15 of this year. In this two-week stretch, there is room in the schedule for visits to two or three additional ESHA-member schools. Interested? Contact me at info@elementaryschoolheads.org.

Claudia

Photos:
Artifacts, ESHA Annual Dinner, 2/23/11 (Tom Shipley)
Steven Labarakwe & two of his children, Ngurunit, Aug. 2010 (Laurel Seid)
Kenya travelers with Steven Labarakwe & Joseph Lekuton, Parliament, Aug. 2010

Preparing the Manyatta

I sometimes marvel that six months have passed since we traveled to Kenya. Part of the marvel has to do with the strange way time has of moving on whether we want it to or not, but the largest part has to do with how present the memories still seem to be. I look forward to Claudia's thoughtful blog each Sunday morning which never fails to remind me of some aspect of our trip. As I put together a large box of materials this morning to display at this week's ESHA Annual Dinner, I realized that, if all goes well, the next big event could be/will be Steven's visit to Washington.

Already, thanks to Claudia's leadership, a small group of people are beginning the process of planning his school visits. I feel confident that we will present, in varying formats, both a beautiful and powerful narrative of the life of the Samburu people. I understand that many good and talented folks would become intimidated by the prospect of planning what will essentially amount to a week long intensive Samburu workshop at different locations. As an educator and school leader, with good support, this planning feels like business as usual. My thoughts, however, keep turning more frequently to my role as Steven's hostess and friend. I have to prepare my manyatta!

Hopefully, in less than two months, Steven will come with his clear professional purpose of raising awareness and seeking on-going support for education in the Laisaimis region of northern Kenya. But, as I well know from our own travels, this may turn out to be the easy part. Steven has been traveling to northern Europe, specifically Sweden and The Netherlands, for several years with this same agenda. He knows how to make formal school presentations. This trip to Washington, however, will be his first trip to the States and, apart from the four of us who traveled to him, a handful of missionaries from his schools, and some interest in President Obama (hugely popular in Kenya for obvious reasons), he has had little exposure to real Americans.

When I think of this, suddenly, I have a brief spasm of mild hostess panic which I can't ignore. We live in an area of fairly great wealth and privilege, particularly by Kenyan standards, and there is just no getting around that. Compounding my concern about the clear difference in resources is my worry that, even if this inequity did not exist, I am not sure I will be as gracious a hostess as Steven was a host. For countless miles and in different types of scenarios, Steven patiently explained Samburu culture, taught us some useful Swahili and Maa phrases, drove for hours, engaged in stimulating conversations about politics and education and saw to it that we ate and slept well. So, now my thoughts turn to how we make our life here seem inviting while not intimidating, pleasing without being overwhelming, and generally positive. I am filled with so much excitement that I am mostly thankful that I have time to wrap my brain around the magnitude of it all.

Laurel


(Photo: Claudia Daggett)

Telling the Story with All of Its Elements: FGM as a Samburu Tradition

Our local village library has a devoted group of volunteers, the Friends of the Cotuit Library, that hosts a monthly speaker and luncheon. This month, I am that speaker, and the topic is ESHA's Kenya experience. I decided in short order that the focus would be limited to the week we spent among the Samburus in Ngurunit. Nevertheless, what a challenge to try to synthesize and select 30-40 minutes of key ideas and photos!

Many of the thoughts that I plan to share have been articulated on this blog over the past several months. A theme that we had not explored in print (electronic or otherwise) is the internal conflict one can feel when -- while wishing to treat all people with respect and dignity, appreciating the richness of cultural differences, and feeling a strong desire to help ease human need -- one is faced with the clear sense that one's own core values conflict with that culture.

Such was the case as Laurel and I were introduced by Steven to what we came to call the "wedding village." Here we met a just "circumcised" fourteen-year-old girl about to become a bride. How can I both wish to preserve cultural diversity and feel abhorrence with coming face to face with the practice of female genital mutilation?

While I don't plan to dwell on this question in my remarks at the village library, I believe I need to include this aspect in the telling of the story. I will tell about the warmth of the Samburu people in Ngurunit, their remarkable perseverance, and their needs. But I'll tell the whole story, in the hope that it gives those present a more complete picture, a fuller understanding.

I had a bit of a warm-up this week when I spoke with a reporter from my local paper, the Barnstable Patriot. Thanks to Kathleen Szmit for capturing the essence of my comments and the nuance of the issues with sensitivity and respect in her article: "African Adventure," Barnstable Patriot, 2/11/11.

Claudia

Understanding the Human Condition: Worldmapper

How do we teach about the human condition?

As an accompaniment to powerful first-hand stories, Worldmapper offers a vivid visual resource. Produced by folks at the University of Michigan and University of Sheffield, Worldmapper is a collection of nearly 700 maps in which territories are re-sized according to the subject of interest in what is know as "equal area cartograms" or "density-equalizing maps."

Take this fairly standard-looking world map, showing land area...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=1

...and "re-size" it to display available water resources...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=102

...or the distribution of the Human Development Index combining health, wealth and education measures to represent quality of life...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=173

...or the world population of illiterate young women, ages 15-24...

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=197

...or any of 692 other variables. The Worldmapper website includes maps in PDF poster format for sharing in print form.

Thanks to Christian Harth of both St. Andrew's School (MS) and the Global Studies Foundation for sharing this resource in his 2010 NAES Biennial Conference presentation.

Claudia

Map use is permitted by Worldmapper under a Creative Commons license, © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).