On the Cusp of Kenya

This is it, hours before I leave Canada for three and a half months. This is an article that will be appearing in the Imprint at the University of Waterloo on Friday, which is partly new and part of an old blog. I will write for this school paper about my Kenyan experiences every two weeks when it comes out. I will also be updating my blog about once a week. I want to greatly thank everybody that made this trip possible, your support has been greatly appreciated. See you all back in Canada, feel free to comment or drop me an email at cmbrenna@uwaterloo.ca  .

On the Cusp of Kenya

             I am departing to live in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya for three months for an international volunteer program called Beyond Borders. This will easily be the biggest change of my life and right now I am teetering on the edge, about to dive head first in. A lot of preparation has gone into this trip, as it has to making any big step in life.  A lot of people had to provide support for me to get here and I leaned on friends, family, my fellow thirteen students on similar trips to Uganda, India, Ukraine and Dominican Republic, professors and total strangers that talked to me, wished me good luck and vanished into the woodwork. I am anxious and excited before going, but I know I am only prepared because I have this support.

            I will be working in the slums of Nairobi called Mathare and Kariobangi. These are the second and third largest slums in Nairobi, characterized for their poor infrastructure, poor water quality and lack of security and privacy. My whole entire life I have lived in suburbs, in a house that could likely fit ten Mathare dwellings. This is partly why I am so anxious because of the fear of the unknown. I have read books, talked to people that have experienced slums, and watched movies that show their struggles in depth, but I still have no idea what slums will be like until I am there. Overall, I just see my worldview changing in ways I cannot imagine right now.

I anticipate this trip being a time of great personal growth because of how much I see my world view changing. No matter where I go, I will see poverty on a scale that I would be very unlikely to see anywhere in Canada. I think Joseph Schumpeter’s term creative destruction is very applicable because of the changes I will undergo in Kenya. Joseph Schumpeter was an Austrian economist that moved to the United States in 1932 to escape the Nazism in Germany where he had been teaching. He coined the term creative destruction after Karl Marx’s use of the term in describing how healthy economies would nonetheless encounter times where great amounts of change was underway and through the destruction of established systems came new innovation and thinking. Essentially like the phoenix, a period of destruction would cause new ideas to be accepted into society. Nazism might be a good example of this because after the end of World War One and the amount of financial hardship that Germany endured during the 1930’s came the fascist Nazi movement. Creative destruction can be positive or negative, depending on what is destroyed and why it is. I see myself undergoing a change that leads to positive personal development on Beyond Borders, and indeed I already have. Every year, every month, every day should be a moment of growth and this summer will reflect this attitude.

I will be learning a lot overseas and I think I will be greatly changed because of it. Ideas I might have had in the past will die to be replaced by a global view of the world that will not shove problems that we create in the developed world under the rug, so to speak. That is the outlook I see myself having when I come back, but I will only know when it is over. While I am over in Kenya, I will undergo creative destruction that will give me a new worldview when I get back. I look forward to sharing these changes throughout the summer.