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Books 4: Kenya and the People
'Poverty and Promise' by Cindi Brown is a truly special book. It consists of extracts from the diaries and reminiscences of Cindi Brown who, at the age of 42, went as a volunteer to Kisumu, a Kenyan town on the shores of Lake Victoria, to help with the computer systems and the website of the Tropical Institute of Community Health and Development (TICH), a university in Kisumu. She left after eight months of her two year committment, and this book appears to be a repayment of her bad feelings about not having stuck it out to the end. She left after being robbed in the street, and feeling unsafe every time she stepped out, and therefore unable to do what she had promised to do.
At the start of the book, there is an introduction by TICH founder and director Dan Keseje, a Kenyan who is a doctor of both medicine and theology. I was worried that the book would be a 'Jesus will save you' book, but religion hardly gets mentioned after this, and in any case the writer is tolerant of various faiths.
The book has almost no statistics, or analysis of Kenyan politics. It is simply a narrative of Ms Brown's experiences: at work (not as much as I would have liked); outside work with Kenyans running NGOs; on outreach work with women and at funerals (too many of these funerals, sadly); and on vacation in Ethiopia, Tanzania and in Kenya.
But: the book puts the reader into the scene, and gives you a much closer idea than other books of what it must be like to be resident in Kenya and well-disposed towards the Kenyan people, and yet have to face their shortcomings (and your own) up close. It is sometimes very depressing, and sometimes very uplifting. The great achievement of the book is that at the end neither of these feeling have won out. The poverty and promise of the title are both alive in the reader's mind, without either of them staying dominant.
The book has defects, of course. It would be nice to have a potted biography and to know how Ms Brown came to decide to volunteer as she did - we are given no idea about this at all. She tells us that her parents worked on the maintenance of F15 planes, whose only purpose is war, and it would have been interesting to have her views on the relative effects of weapons expenditure versus development aid on both security and the happiness of nations . She also tells us about paying for a boy who was the gatekeeper at her house to go to school and buying him a uniform, but we never find out what happens to him.
Nonetheless, this is a special book and is highly recommended.
This book has won several awards: see the Poverty and Promise Website: justonevoice