Rights?

We Americans are very careful about our rights. We live in a nation founded on the need for personal freedom and rights. One of the things I like about living in Kenya is the fact that I don’t need to protect these rights quite as much as I used to. For instance, when the neighbors dogs bark all through the night and repeatedly wake me up – I don’t really worry about it. It doesn’t upset me and I have no intention of complaining. It just IS. When other neighbors are playing music so loud that it feels like it is in MY house or drums are banging repetitively for hours in some sort of ceremony – I don’t have to worry that my rights are being infringed upon.

When a matatu driver cuts me off, or drives down the wrong side of the road - it may irritate me –but I certainly am not thinking I should “do something” about it.

This idea even applies to shopping – buyer beware – certainly applies here. In fact, there are even outlets available for me to open the package and test the light bulbs I want to buy – before I take them to the check out – because if they don’t work – that is MY problem, not the stores. Before I buy a fan or a toaster – the clerk and I plug it in and be sure it is working properly. After I take it home – I am on my own!

My neighbor may kill a goat in the yard of our apartment building and I don’t need to worry about it. In fact my neighbors once had a funeral with 50 men in our front yard, bowing towards Mecca, on their knees praying – while they carried the coffin out of the building – we just happened to be going IN the building with interns at the same time. It wasn’t a problem, or an offence – it just was.

I have realized that it is very liberating to not have to worry about protecting my rights all the time. I don’t have to protest the things that upset me or “infringe” upon my rights – because quite frankly – no body cares!

There is a negative side to this that I don’t want to skim over – while I don’t feel that sense of “indignation” rising up in me and the need to “take a stand” over many trivial rights. I do still have my basic human rights met. I have freedom to choose where my children go to school and what I will do and say and where I will go. But, for many Kenyans these important choices are not theirs to make. If the local school is full and the teacher doesn’t show up – there is nothing to be done. If an “officer of the law” takes their money or rounds them up in a raid – simply so that bail must be posted – there is little anyone can say or do except pay and pray for safety. If their house is torched by an outbreak of violence – there is no one who has to “pay” for damages.

Our rights are a funny thing. While we may have gone to extremes in America with ludicrous law suits and defensive posturing by every manufacturer around – I don’t ever want to take for granted the freedoms that I have as an American. I am so thankful to carry a passport from the land “of the free and the home of the brave”.