Dorothy Vanderbeck has fond memories of host family in Mombasa
By Matt Chiappardi
HIGHTSTOWN — Dorothy Vanderbeck’s five-month odyssey in Kenya was not only an experience that had the potential to be taken from the pages of “Midnight Express.” She also experienced a vibrant culture that touched her emotionally and changed her perspective on the world.
Despite nearly becoming a prisoner, she can hardly maintain her enthusiasm and affection for Kenyan civil society as she recounts her extraordinary trip.
She stayed with a host family, the Mwacharises, in Mombasa that gave her a place to come home to every night where she could share her day and process her thoughts. It’s one of the fondest memories she has of her trip. The eight-person family lived in a small house with bright blue walls, pictures of the family everywhere.
”The warmth of being a part of that family was remarkable,” she said.
Few houses have running water in that part of Kenya, and bathing was a ritual that involved warming up small pots of water.
Kenya is one of the poorest countries in the world, with millions of people who live in slums that surround the city centers. Working sewage systems are a luxury many people just don’t have.
Ms. Vanderbeck described how in Kibera, which she called “the largest, densest slum in all of Africa” — people would throw human waste out their windows in plastic bags. She called them “flying toilets.”
”There were mounds of aged plastic bags scattered around and you couldn’t breathe through your nose,” she said.
Ms. Vanderbeck takes no pleasure recounting these horrid conditions.
”I don’t want to exoticize poverty,” she stresses.
One day in Nairobi, she said, she saw a group of white tourists who had paid to be taken on a tour of the slum just outside the city. At first she was “positively mortified.”
”How dare they come and invade these people’s lives,” she said.
But seeing the tourists crying over the squalid conditions moved something else in her.
”It’s good for people to see and understand that it exists,” she said.
A desire to help drew her to Kenya, she said, but another fire was lit in her when she read about Kenya’s first president after its independence from the former British Empire in 1963.
Jomo Kenyatta, she said, “translated Shakespeare into Swahili.”
”He concentrated on cultural issues, instead of focusing on economic benchmarks,” she added.
But there was a darker side to Mr. Kenyatta’s civil society movement, she said.
”Jomo Kenyatta’s compromises let British landowners keep their land, and resentment still permeates everyday life in Kenya,” she said.
What she calls a totally exhausting experience, emotionally and mentally, landed her back in New Jersey with no regrets. In fact, she says, it’s given her a greater appreciation for how connected she is to her own hometown and the people here.
”Coming back (to Hightstown) I now realize what a great place I grew up in. I understand now what it’s like to be part of a community,” she said.
Since Kenya is populated overwhelmingly by people with dark skin, some people, she said, had expected her experience to allow her to empathize with minorities in the United States. Ms. Vanderbeck disagrees with that estimation.
While “being a white person in Kenya gave me an opportunity to understand what it is like to be visible by my skin color, that visibility associated me with the oppressor, in the Kenyan case, with British colonial administration,” Ms. Vanderbeck points out.
As far as her experiences under African skies, Ms. Vanderbeck smiles as she says, “It rocked my worldview.”

