- Photo contributed by Elizabeth Kilbride
Elizabeth Kilbride
Opinions Editor
When my family visited Kenya last summer, I didn’t know that bombs had been set off in Nairobi a couple of weeks before our departure from JFK. I hadn’t done any sort of research for this trip, at all, because this was my mom’s thing and quite frankly I wanted little to do with it. After spending a while poking around a Maasai village, observing the various projects she’d thrown her support behind, the fam went on a safari. We bumped about the Maasai Mara led by a guide named Richard, whom my dad took an immediate liking to.
Dad was planning on solving all of Kenya’s problems in his head, so naturally the talk turned to President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The two had been candidates in the 2007 Kenyan election; debates over the legitimacy of the election led to 1,500 deaths and the displacement of several hundred thousand others. The unrest was mostly ended in 2008 by a power-sharing agreement, in which Kibaki received the presidency and the position of prime minister was created for Odinga.
I discovered all this while I was somewhere in the middle of the county. What I learned of Kenyan politics, I heard from Richard, and what I heard from Richard was, “White people don’t get involved in the government here anymore. No way.” Then he cited the public flogging of a white political figure who then withdrew from the country’s public affairs.
“Bet you didn’t hear about that one, did you?” he continued, not a little wryly, in response to whatever form of alarm had splattered onto our faces. “They’re pretty careful about what they let filter out. The Western press doesn’t really get a lot of what’s going on here.”
It was another week after that before I had internet access. (WiFi, believe it or not, is unreliable at best in the bush.) When I finally got myself a functioning piece of technology, I went right ahead and Googled Kenya. I typed it into the search bar at Reuters and NYTimes.com. I read stories about poaching and solar panels and biodiversity. Some of it was interesting, some of it wasn’t; the common thread was my newfound knowledge that “the Western press doesn’t really get a lot of what’s going on here.” I guess I always thought that with the right search term, you could know anything; but there wasn’t a lack of stories on Kenya, it was only that I began to doubt whether these were the right stories.
NCHS has pledged to help us – its students – enter the brand spanking new global community. As Board of Education member Mary Freiberg put it at a meeting held by the League of Women Voters on May 16, “One point that makes our district unique is that while other districts are eliminating many programs, we are preparing our kids for an increasingly globalized world.”
And while technology integration was discussed as the means to this end, I can’t help but think it’ll be hard to prepare us for the globalized world when the text we’re exposed to is limited to textbooks and what pops on AOL News (Shaq’s retirement and the failure of the modern tomato) before we open up our emails.
If the Western press is truly limited, then we’ll leave this place knowing a lot about the Civil War and maybe even remembering some geometry, but we’ll keep waiting for someone else to tell us what’s going on “out there.” Most concerning is that we think we’re able to know everything. Like good researchers we’ll hit up ABC-CLIO (or Wikipedia…) and think we can find out everything about a country far away, like say Kenya. But we won’t find the article about the white government official who was publicly flogged. I tried. It’s not there.
In all this, the good news is that my recent cyber-searching led me to a couple of links I like. If you’re ever in the mood to to find out some of what’s “out there,” I recommend Reuters and Generation C, and invite you to share any others you know that I missed.
