We had heard good things about the Nairobi National Museum, so when we were in Nairobi in December, Anne and I decided to pay it a visit. The museum sits right off the Uhuru Highway; a main thoroughfare that is currently under construction. All of our trips to Nairobi have involved an impressive amount of time spent sitting in traffic on the Uhuru highway collecting dust from the construction site(s). On that day, we hopped out of the matatu early to avoid sitting in just such a jam. The highway is largely shade-free, so even an extra five-minute walk left us sweating and dusty when we walked in to the museum. Amid all of the traffic and dust, the Nairobi National Museum is an oasis. It’s surrounded by a botanical garden that buffers the noise and the exhaust, and shades the grounds. It’s nowhere near the scale of Central Park, but the relief of suddenly being in “nature” instead of the city is similar.
The layout of the museum reminded me a bit of the American Museum of Natural History, as one of the first exhibits is a Hall of African Mammals with a large bull elephant as the centerpiece. Actually, in this trip to Kenya that’s the closest I’ve gotten to an African elephant so far. They also have an impressive exhibit of skeletons of early humans since many of them were excavated by Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. It was amazing to stand in front of the 1.5 million year old skeleton of Turkana boy, but it wasn’t that exhibit that stuck in my head. That would have been the exhibit on toys.
In the hall dedicated to showcasing the 42 different ethnic groups in Kenya, including their traditional children’s toys, there was a single tiny display case dedicated to “modern” toys. I don’t even remember what the toy itself was, but the caption struck me. It was a simple statement that the children of Kenya had a long tradition of fashioning their own toys out of whatever was handy. The traditional toys for each tribe were often made out of wood or bone or hide, but the modern toys are commonly made out of trash. Soccer balls, for instance, are made out of many plastic bags that have been mashed into a ball and secured with a woven string net. They are remarkably durable (i.e. they don’t deflate when faced with thorns) and, as the kids often play barefoot, sting much less when kicked (or when you catch one to the face). The caption went on to say that this was a tradition that should be continued. The writer was worried that pre-fab toys were starting to rob Kenyan children of the experience of making their own. I think that’s a more pressing concern in Nairobi than it is in Stella, but the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated the writer’s point.
The toys that the kids make here ARE ingenious. They have pull cars made with plastic jugs as the bodies (turned on their sides and with one side cut off to allow for passengers), peeled sticks as the axels, and plastic lids as the wheels. They tie a string to the jug handle in front and the cars roll around just as well as anything you can buy for $9.95 at Wal-Mart. They make toy guns with sticks and rubber bands that can shoot a pen cap thirty feet. One of the boys makes tiny drum sets with tin can lids, sticks, and metal soda cap rattles. Making their own toys from scratch has all kinds of implications at the orphanage. Any given child has thirty-one brothers and sisters, so things are inevitably broken or “borrowed.” It’s a real boon for them to be able to simply make new ones with free materials. This part of Kenya also has nothing in the way of official trash collection (there’s just a designated pile on the property that the chickens pick through and then is periodically burned), so making toys out of it is an informal recycling program. It’s a lot more pleasant to have the plastic bottles used in toy cars than it is to smell them burning all day.
Materialism is a stereotypically American, or “Western” phenomenon, but it’s one thing to know it and another thing to experience the opposite of it. I brought a suitcase and a backpack full of stuff for six months. The other volunteers were surprised when I got off the plane at how little stuff I had, but over the last few years of bouncing around between the Netherlands, Kenya, New York, and Idaho, I’ve downsized to a couple of suitcases full of “essentials” that are always with me. This is the first place I’ve lived where that looks like a ridiculous amount of stuff. Even the last time I was in Kenya, I lived with thirty-three other American students, so we were surrounded by laptops, water bottles, books, sunglasses, shampoo, iPods, and many other possessions that we take for granted. When the kids here went home in December (for a month), they took everything they owned with them, and three siblings shared a duffel bag. Keep in mind that for kids in an orphanage in Kenya, they are very well off.
I’m not advocating that everyone run out and dump their things and move into a studio apartment. I like my stuff. I’m sure I’ll acquire plenty more of it in my life. I imagine, though, that I’ll spend a lot more time considering if I can make something instead of buy it, or repair something instead of replace it.
(Bonus points for the name of the movie the title comes from.)
