Emma Redfern: Giving meaning to the African experience

GOING to Kenya was not planned, but living and working there to help the people has been a revelation, writes Emma Redfern

I didn’t plan to come to Africa, not really. Not being a fan of wildlife programmes, Africa to me was Live Aid, Oxfam campaigns and generally depressing news bulletins. I grew up in Argyll, very much a country child. At 18 I moved to Edinburgh and relished the excitement of going to a pub where I didn’t know everybody. I was always happy camping or hiking in the Highlands while my friends were planning backpacking adventures abroad.

Then I got caught up in the internet boom and started developing something that looked a lot like a career. I became too busy to travel, holidays were rare, short and always restricted to Europe or North America. I’d never been anywhere remotely exotic, dangerous or undeveloped.

After ten years in marketing I started to burn out. I was looking for meaning. I thought an MSc in Environment and Development would help me shift my career into corporate social responsibility (CSR). Marketing with a heart. As we came to plan our dissertations I listened to fellow students organising their research in colourful, Third World locations. I think I must have got a bit carried away because, before I had time to consider my actions, I’d handed in a plan to do my research in Kenya. I remember that the choice of country was fairly arbitrary and based mostly on how widely spoken English was. It all sounded great on paper though.

The full realisation of what I was doing didn’t hit me until we had been flying over the Sahara for three hours, then I had to fight down waves of panic. I arrived at the airport late at night. My taxi driver turned off the main road to Nairobi and on to an empty unlit road through a forest. I was certain he was going to murder me for the money he’d seen me take out of the cash machine at the airport.

Of course it turned out just to be a short cut but my first two weeks in Kenya were a sequence of such events as I lurched inexpertly through the practicalities of this utterly alien environment. In those first weeks I was often scared, hungry (all the food looked dangerous) and really wishing I had never come. Then a long bus journey into the arid north of Kenya changed everything.

Much of the north is true wilderness, dry but dramatically beautiful and with abundant wildlife. People here live very traditional lifestyles that are intricately linked with the livestock they depend on. To complete my research I found myself walking through the bush looking for remote cow dung homesteads, drinking tea and talking to people about their life.

Suddenly I saw all that was wonderful about this country and its people, and though it didn’t make the scary things go away entirely, it did make them worth putting up with.

It was here that I met Lipan Kitonga: from humble mud hut beginnings he became manager of the first ever safari lodge to be community-owned and run in Kenya. His first-hand experiences of how communities can tackle their own development tied in closely with the results of my research and so DARE (Development Assistance for Rural Enterprise) was born, helping people to get their own development projects off the ground.

This is a harsh land though. We’ve watched cherished projects collapse under the pressure of crippling drought. Insecurity can also be a problem. Guns flow freely from neighbouring Somalia and Southern Sudan and are used to deal with many kinds of dispute, from water or grazing rights to politics. Development stalls in the face of conflict. When the life of your family is threatened future plans go out the window and all efforts are focused on surviving day by day.

However when the rains come, or the conflict subsides, these resilient people pick up the abandoned projects and carry on. This is not a place for quick fixes but, with remarkable commitment in the face of adversity, people make steady progress.

To sit in a smoky mud hut, chatting with women who have become good friends, helping with the cooking or dangling giggling babies, is a great privilege. But there are aspects of their traditions that are not easy to accept. I hadn’t been here long when I was invited to a local ceremony. I understood little of the language so with big smiles of encouragement I was pushed to the front of the crowd of women gathered outside a hut. I couldn’t prevent the cry that escaped me when I saw that they were proudly showing me the circumcision of a teenage girl. The look on the girl’s face as she defied the pain will stay with me forever.

There is much that is valuable in these traditions though, especially ideas and skills for managing the environment that are relevant to us all. It would be a great shame to lose all that is good in an effort to purge these communities of the aspects of their culture that we, as outsiders, find unpleasant.

So we have found a way to work with the young women, who often suffer most from traditional culture, without riding roughshod over people’s beliefs. We provide support for those girls who do not want to undergo traditional rites. We help them to overcome the conflict this can cause between them and their families. Then support them practically and emotionally through the often difficult transition from a traditional home life to what is probably their first experience of formal education and being a schoolgirl.

I have been here for seven years now. I married Lipan Kitonga and in the process got myself an extended Kenyan family. I love this wild land and the work we do and feel very lucky to have stumbled on to the path that led me here.

• Emma Redfern runs the Development Assistance for Rural Enterprise in Kenya charity darefoundation.com