Ruby Slippers – There’s No Place Like Home

by Grace K (Kenya)

A leap into the unknown Kenya

Ruby Slippers – There’s No Place Like Home Home. What comes to mind? It might bring a sense of warmth, love or comfort. The well-off having numerous ones at their disposal while the unfortunate might have four dilapidated walls to call their own and yet still, home to others is the cold tarmac of the streets of the borderless abode. The Habitat found that “1 in 4 people worldwide live in conditions harmful to safety, prosperity, health, and opportunities.” We all wish we could follow the yellow brick road down to the comfort we want to call home. I, like a few others, am lucky to call two places home. One above and the other below the equator. To my North American classmates, I’m the girl born in the tropical land of Kenya but who grew to love the sight of the season’s first snowfall in the midwestern state of Illinois. I wasn’t born into an affluent vacationing family nor was I traveling there to further my education, though I did benefit from it, our young family packed our few earthy belongings and joined my old man into the unknown. Third culture kid, a word many are not well-versed in but explained why I was left wondering why I felt out of place returning to the land where tribes still existed as BCC defines means “children who spend their formative years in places that are not their parents' homeland.” The well-meaning American who introduced me to the word represented the nation I was once too fearful to enter as a child expressing to anyone willing to heed that ‘we should return to our motherland.’ Little did I know that at that same airport, I would be just as anxious returning to the land where my skin color would not stand out. Author Van Reken conveys these feelings noting the life of a TCK creates “rootlessness” and “restlessness” where home is “everywhere and nowhere.” In that very same airport that was a bridge to the two lives that called to me, I was at a crossroads. Due to the life I had gotten used to, culture shock post-arrival hit with a severity that no amount of planning could prepare for. Things taken for granted such as running water come to mind as I recall a line of schoolgirls standing around a single drip tap. The Conversation News Report reports nearly half of Africans do not have clean water access and even more lack access to sewage infrastructure. The boarding school I attended required uniforms to be worn with classrooms being many yet teachers few. My taste buds yearning for familiar home-cooked meals. Rather than students rotating classrooms, the teachers would meet us in the single room we would stay the entire school year. Desks doubled as lockers which contained books and apparels, were engrained with our names as stealing was rampant. Teachers were in low supply with subjects going untaught. I was eventually enrolled elsewhere all this being such a stark difference from the land of the free. One is reminded of how a character on any generic show sputters how there are starving kids in Africa, and you shouldn’t waste food. Having witnessed the begging kids in real life I questioned, ‘Where were the food drives?’ and ‘Where were the good Samaritans?’ My American history books always read, “Kenya a third world country..” usually followed by a statistic and further followed by a well-intentioned peer leaning over seeking confirmation by asking “Isn’t that where you’re from.” As one stereotype was confirmed others were shattered. I have witnessed both the affluent and the needy co-exist side by side. I now know we were not as worse off as the media paints us to be. People anywhere want posh items to impress who knows who and it is no different here. Oxfam international stated “The number of super-rich in Kenya is one of the fastest-growing in the world.” As the disparity rises my heart grows every day for both the deprived and those who aide.