The Ugly American (August 11, 2006)

One of the aspects of Busia that I find challenging is learning to remember how to place myself in the context of the local community. It's incredibly tempting to feel that because I've learned so much about the town and the language that I am somehow an organic or normal part of everything around me. With the number of Kenyan Asians in the cities, it is easy to pretend that I'm just another local walking around. Compounded with my views on U.S. policy, domestic and foreign, I have often felt like a citizen in exile in my own native country. It's been easier still to disassociate when the representations of Americans here in Busia center around being war-mongering, power hungry, rich, and negligent of the devastation and poverty that we create and perpetuate. Sometimes I forget that having grown up in the U.S. I'm not really free of the idea of American exceptionalism in that I sometimes begin to believe that I'm the exception to the geopolitics of the (first world) expat NGO/aid community.

Along the same vein, it is incredibly easy to romanticize rural life. How many times have I heard my friends and colleagues say that they are humbled by the joy and generosity they witness among communities that have so little? While this is true, I find myself steeling myself against a romanticization of the poverty here. Yes, I find that communities and families and neighbors are more supportive of each other, but would it be the same if there were more resources? Would a mother trade the time she spends with her sick child for a health care system that would save that child's life? I don't know, but every orphan I meet or child's funeral I attend keeps me from tripping into a view of idyllic pastoral life. While I may not subscribe to the tourist/backpacker view of East African exoticism, I can't help but wonder if my exoticization is more insidious.

While I don't feel that I fit the stereotypical representation of the U.S., I also can't pretend that I don't represent some of the wealth and excess of the West. I have been travelling, and for all my disdain of the young backpacking tourist, in effect that's exactly what I am. I may pretend to go local, but I know when I bargain I'm seen as cheap, when I ride the local transportation I'm viewed as penny-pinching, and when I refuse to give blanket amounts of money I'm seen as simultaneously greedy and stingy. It's not just because I'm an American, but because I am clearly seen as a non-Kenyan and as someone rich, and therefore as someone who is pretending at poverty or limited funds.

But to take it further, part of being a U.S. expat means owning up to the responsibility of being a citizen of a country that has an ambivalent, and often bankrupt, moral conscious in international affairs. I vote, I dissent, I organize, but none of this civic engagement really matters outside the context of domestic politics when my country of birth watches as the world abandons justice and humanity, not only in African states but around the world and in our own (local) communities. This is part of what I inherit with my passport; the knowledge that in many ways my government is complicit in furthering systems of inequality and injustice in the name of U.S. security, free markets, and profit protection. Whether or not I like it, being an American is ugly, but in some ways I'm glad it's ugly. This tension forces me to renegotiate and rethink my position in Kenya, in the U.S., and in the world at large, much more critically.