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Friends United Meeting |
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July-August 2005
Reducing Waste
By Mary Kay Rehard
The following is an excerpt from Mary Kay Rehard’s March “Reflections on Simplicity in Kenya” which were used at Winchester Friends, Indiana. The full articles will be available this summer from Mary Kay Rehard and Patrick Nugent (co-principals of Friends Theological College, Kisumu, Kenya) as they travel among Friends in the United States or from the Quaker Hill Bookstore.
Friends in Kenya live in a very different context from most Friends in Indiana Yearly Meeting! I think Western Kenya would probably seem more familiar to our great-grandparents or your Amish neighbors than it seems to me or to you. Because life in Kenya is simple of necessity, we are struck by how little Friends here discuss or reflect on the sorts of issues that are so vital to Friends seeking simplicity in the USA. But in fact, Friends here in Africa are living simplicity quite unselfconsciously, and there is a great deal we North Americans can learn from our Kenyan brothers and sisters in Christ!…
Reducing waste is a very important matter in a place where there is no garbage collection, and no recycling services whatsoever. Like some rural communities in the USA, Friends in East Africa must organize their own ways of disposing of waste, and the two most common strategies are burying and burning…
Unlike us, Kenyans generate much less household waste. Why? Here are some reasons:
Subsistence farming. Every Kenyan has a shamba or home garden. They grow much of the food their families need: maize, beans, sukuma wiki (kale), onions, tomatoes, bananas (both kinds—for eating fresh and for cooking), avocados, guava, mangos, passion fruit…Luhyas (the major ethnic group among Friends in East Africa) consider eggs a very special treat, and chicken is their favorite, most expensive kind of meat!
Eating a very simple diet. Our family enjoys the Kenyan diet—once or twice a week. But because of our upbringing, our digestion can handle limited quantities of sukuma wiki and we desire more variety in our meals. People all over Kenya who have enough of what they need eat the same thing every day:
breakfast at 7 a.m.—chai or milk tea with lots of sugar, and maybe some bread and margarine.
lunch at 1 p.m.—beans, usually prepared with onion and tomato, served with rice or chapati which is like a tortilla; or githeri—a stew of maize kernels and beans favored by the Kikuyus; or a cabbage, potato and carrot curry with rice.
supper at 7 p.m.--ugali (cornmeal paste) and sukuma wiki (sauteed kale also prepared with onion and tomato). On special occasions, Kenyans would add meat—beef, goat or chicken stew.
tea at 10 a.m. or 4 p.m.—generally only if there are visitors; sometimes it includes a boiled egg, roasted peanuts, steamed sweet potatoes or ripe bananas.
This is the ideal. Many Kenyans don’t have enough money to eat regular meals outlined above…But no matter where they live or how much they eat, the diet of most Kenyans includes almost no processed foods; everything is cooked from scratch. One exception is in Nairobi where more and more young people are surviving on kuku na chips (fried chicken and french fries).
Shopping locally and frequently. Most Kenyans don’t create greenhouse gases to get their groceries—they don’t get in a vehicle to get food, they use their two feet. They shop at a local village market in walking distance of their home. Because they eat what is locally available, the food doesn’t require transportation, refrigeration, etc. Most Kenyans don’t have electricity, so they also don’t have refrigerators…
Purchasing without packaging. Kenyans carry their own bags or baskets to market, and many of the things they buy are not wrapped in any sort of package.
Re-using. Kenyans can find uses for things we can’t imagine!…One of our night watchmen has a cottage industry, converting old tin cans into small kerosene lamps for the home. Newspaper becomes toilet paper. Gunnias (plastic fiber gunny sacks)…get re-used many times over to carry all sorts of things…If you look closely at shoes, clothing, or handbags, you’ll see many places they’ve been mended, many times over. In fact, you can .x anything in Africa.
Kenyans get an A+ for Reducing Waste! In the global picture, they consume less and re-use more, making them great friends of the earth, and good stewards for future generations.