Brutally honest opinions, please!
"Asante Sana," I said in thanks to the kind British man who had helped me lug my
seventy-five pound suitcase into the Tube compartment. He looked at me quizzically, cocking
his head to the side, "Pardon?" I cursed myself internally - fifteen minutes in London, and I had
already made a fool of myself. "Thank you. I meant thank you," I clarified. The man swiftly
turned and walked away, probably to a compartment that wasn't occupied by a bizarre
seventeen-year-old American girl. "Thank you. Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyou," I
repeated under my breath, attempting to drill the phrase into my brain. After a month of
expressing gratitude in Swahili, it was going to take some time to make the English response
routine again.
I stepped away from the doors and wedged myself into the only open seat, finding myself
sandwiched between the Plexiglas divider that signaled the end of the row and a woman wearing
enough perfume to fragrance half of Britain. Exhausted, I leaned my head back against the Tube
seat. The last time I'd slept had been over twenty-four hours earlier. A full day of hectic
packing had been followed by a nine-hour red-eye from Nairobi to Heathrow and rushed
goodbyes. This was my first chance to reflect since leaving Kenya.
Studying abroad in Africa had made me bolder. The girl I had been in June would have
blanched at the thought of finding highly venomous black mambas in her cabin. She would have
hesitated to volunteer to teach a group of thirty Maasai 'mommas' the Hokey Pokey. She would
have respectfully declined the offer to hold a freshly killed goat's intestines during an impromptu
biology lesson before the weekly goat roast. But the girl zipping towards her hostel on the
London Underground was braver than she used to be, and had embraced every one of these
opportunities. Along with this new confidence came a more relaxed outlook on life. Before this
summer, I had always been a planner and a scheduler, too concerned with the future to appreciate
the present. It is impossible to be this way in Kenya. There is a Swahili saying that I was taught
by our driver, Ernest: Haraka Haraka Haina Baraka, which means Hurry Hurry Has No
Blessings. Enjoying a spectacular view of Mount Kilimanjaro while eating a leisurely breakfast,
helping our chef Susan make delicious chapatti, spending entire afternoons doing nothing but
enjoying the company of new friends; I see the merit in that saying where I wouldn't have
before.
In the past month, I had grown not only as a person, but also as a scholar. The wildlife
management course I'd taken had been rigorous, but fulfilling. The part of me that relishes an
academic challenge had blossomed as a result of tackling the School for Field Studies' program.
While hastily recording habitat vitality as our Land Cruiser sped through Tsavo National Park,
while participating in official wildlife counts of Amboseli with Cynthia Moss, while conducting
interviews with the locals to determine the extent of human-wildlife conflict, we were
surrounded by people whose livelihood depended on successes in the field we were researching.
Through the work I did this summer, I came to better understand the purpose of higher learning:
not just to accumulate facts, but to apply knowledge gained with the goal of positively impacting
the world
I shifted my attention back to the present, to the train car rattling beneath me. Before
leaving for Kenya, I had scrimped and saved for months so that I could afford to travel in
London on my own for a week after the SFS program finished. Sitting there, zooming into
central London, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride at what I was accomplishing. I was
exerting my independence, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, absorbing foreign
cultures like a sponge. I had never felt so alive.
