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All about: Making a new startThis programme is devoted to moving to a new country, making a change in career, moving out of your old life and into a new one! I would like to share my story about moving from the city of Nairobi where I grew up and attended school, to go and live and work in a village in the rural area of Western Kenya. When I was a child we (the children in the family) rarely visited our rural home in the village, a typical practice among Kenya's town folk. Therefore I grew up used to tarmacked roads, piped water, electricity, a relatively reliable public transport system, and basically all the essential amenities one would expect to find in an urban area. This makes the village a rather unpleasant place to be. So when my job required that I travel up country to work and live there I was very apprehensive. My fears, in addition to the possibility of having to do without the basic comforts of town life, included the fear of snakes and the kind of house I would have to live in. A friend who had lived in the area had told me that there was only one bus plying the route to the nearest major town, Kisumu. The bus left at dawn and returned at dusk, and in the rainy season when the roads get so bad the chances were high that communication with the nearest main road was virtually nil. Also, the cultural norm is that when attending public gatherings (of which there would be many in the line of my job) women are expected to sit on the grass while men took all the seats. I have no major quarrel with that, but I have a handicap such that sitting with my legs stretched out or folded on a flat surface makes my lower limbs numb. Coupled with this is my constant fear of crawling things. I was lucky to get the chance to make a trial visit to the village. This offered me the opportunity to live for a month and see if I could stay on. To tell you the truth by the end of the first working week I was back in Nairobi. My bosses on the project were worried that I would not return, but I surprised them when I turned up on a Sunday evening on the public transport. From then on I knew I had returned to stay. I guess travelling on the public transport and learning how the route connected to surrounding areas helped overcome some of my fears. Over the years I have come to learn a lot from village life about things such as humility, and about appreciating all the possible differences in people's livelihoods. I have come out a much stronger lady. I have also found that with the decline in the management of Kenyan urban centres, I tend to miss the village everytime I travel to the city. My sisters find this very strange, but I tell them they will never know what they may be missing until they experience it. I am glad I stayed, and now, five years down the line with my job done I am rather apprehensive about returning to work and living in the city, Nairobi. Jane Alaii, Kenya I am a Barbadian national presently living in Hackney in the East End of London for the last six months. My wife Janice is a Londoner of Barbadian parentage. I met Janice in Barbados five years ago. We were journalists at Barbados' oldest newspaper, The Advocate. I was drawn to her because I was fascinated by her Cockney accent which was conspicuous in the Advocate newsroom. I very soon made the happy discovery that Janice was from Hackney in the East End of London. Happy, because I spent a very educational six month period on a Baha'i Faith outreach project in Hackney in 1995, in which I got to know the borough very well. Here we were, over three thousand miles away, and we shared so much about this part of London. Janice and I got married in 1999 and made the decision to re-locate to London last May. Uprooting ourselves from Barbados was understandably difficult. As if it was not enough to juggle the logistics of selling some of our personal effects, arranging to ship other belongings, saying our goodbyes to many friends and family members, my only sibling died last August after an unusually brief bout with Leukemia. Even though our move to London has had the blessings of my parents, my wife and I still feel in a tiny corner of our hearts, that we have abandoned mum and dad and our two lovely nieces. However, along with the other challenges of living and working in a vibrant, multicultural city (and country), and adapting to a new climate, my experience has been a fascinating one. We miss our friends, we miss the warm weather of the Caribbean and of course, we miss our family immensely. Although we have made many friends here in a short space of time, and have ushered our five month old son, Sultan, into the world, I have come to the conclusion that making a new start in life is surrounded by uncertainty. A belief in a power stronger than ourselves, (God) provides the candle that illuminates the darkness of that uncertainty. John Stevenson |
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