CULTURE SHOCK

I can vividly remember when my two lectures of communication and culture, Mrs. Anne David and Mrs. Awiti, taught me about culture shock but I never paid much attention to it, not because I was not interested. This is because I never guessed that I would come to experience it personally.

                        Communication and culture is a requirement for the students of Daystar University, it was unnecessary for most of us, so we thought but as I think back and remember what I learnt I could now testify and say that it is one of the greatest things that daystar could have offered me as an institution.

           You see I had always thought that I would never experience culture shock but now that I am. I can smile and say I am not surprised not because I had seen this coming but because I am in a strange land. All my life I thought that I would finish graduate school and get my internship at one of the media stations in the big city, which would later lead to my job. Never had I sat and thought that I would one day be in a land like Laikipia living among them and working in their environment. So it was a shocker when I got the opportunity to go to Laikipia but then again it was one adventure that I couldn’t afford to miss.

So now that I am here, I am experiencing culture shock. I cannot understand their language and at times it causes frustration and then I go back to the reasons why I came to Laikipia. Not only is language a problem, which presents a huge problem when I want to get some information from them but the environment at large. Laikipia is a dry land, according to its residents it hasn’t rained since last year November but then again they have plenty of food, shocker isn’t it. Don’t be that much because I am the one that is experiencing all that and each time I walk past the market place I tend to ask myself the same question over and over, how do they manage to produce this plenty of food.

The other shock that I am experiencing is the number of donkeys this people have. Hey, I am coastal do not blame me if I say that I am shocked to see many donkeys. In our culture we still use human labor to do chores but in Laikipia the donkeys do it for them, they fetch water, carry their grass for them, and also carry goods for them.

           I am not a tribalist but when I decided to come to Laikipia I expected it to be a land populated by Maasai but the shock was on me when I walked into a land full of Kikuyu speaking people.  Not that I don’t have any kikuyu friends I do, but then again I remember what people say, the Kikuyu’s are everywhere. I asked myself why that is. And my answer was because maybe they are among the few that we can really call Kenyans’, because they are ready to live anywhere and work with others for the good of the society.

Well I may write all day and all night but my shock, and denial won’t end today but maybe someday when I have fully accepted the environment I will look around and laugh. Laugh because my teachers did there best and now maybe when am done, I will walk to these two lecturers, holding my head up high and thank them for the great work that they do each day.

-THE END-

BY: PEGGIE MATI RUA.