Mzungu and you know it!!!

I realised yesterday that no matter how long I live and work here and try to get speech and language therapy recognised and understood in the different places I work in… To the majority of people I meet and work with, I will always just be ‘the mzungu’ (white person).

Kenyan friends and colleagues always say to me ‘it’s just the uneducated people who think of you like that’… well, a lot of the time it is people from low socio-economic backgrounds that think of me as just the mzungu – the matatu drivers and conductors, market sellers, motorbike taxi folk, people wandering the street… however, a lot of the time it is well educated people – doctors, nurses, teachers -  who think of me as just the mzungu too.

I was on the wards at Vihiga District Hospital yesterday, and as always, I’m greeted with the same blank expression from a lot of the staff members when I introduce myself (again), explain what I do (again) and ask if there’s anyone on the wards that need to see me. I was referred to see a patient on the male ward and his notes were missing after I’d seen him with David and Florence, so I returned an hour later to write in them. After updating them, I explained what I’d written to the interns, possibly doctors, and nurses (they all wear white coats to give them that instant ‘status’ that I never know who’s who) and a white coated man came up to me and said ‘hello mzungu’. I stopped, looked at him in absolute disbelief at his complete disrespect for me, not just as a professional, but as a human being, bit my tongue and replied ‘I am not a mzungu’ and walked off. I have a reel of things to say back to someone, but I was determined to remain as professional as possible, so I kept quiet. This is a man who is supposedly educated. This is when it dawned on me… no matter what I do as a professional here, to most people. I am just a mzungu…

It’s an automatic barrier and block to the work I am trying to do, and it definitely slows down the potential progress that could be made. I am however eternally grateful to those colleagues of mine who have never, ever treated me as anything but Rachael. These are the people who are going to make a difference in Kenya.

So actually, as tiring as it gets: I’m bloody proud to be a mzungu. Why? Because I get to work with the elite in Kenya – those open, friendly, passionate, ambitious, caring, inspiring Kenyans, who every day work tirelessly for their communities and people with disabilities. This makes each and every one of them 20 million, trillion times better then that man in the white coat.