Inter-planetary travel
Most of us will never experience what it's like to travel to a whole new world. Every place we go is somehow the same -- no matter how "exotic" our destination, the sight of a familiar brand of jeans or the smell of a fast food outlet or the sound of pop music will remind us of "home," and how the world is becoming smaller and smaller.
But, last night, I met some young travelers who are truly experiencing the world in a whole new way. My friend Simon, who lives in Nairobi, Kenya, is here in Chicago to chaperone a group of Kenyan boys. The boys, most of whom are orphans, are part of a rural youth soccer program and they're visiting as part of a cultural exchange program sponsored by the American Youth Soccer Organization.
Before this trip, many of them had never left their village in central Kenya. In fact, the trip to Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, to go to the airport was such a big deal that six busloads of villagers came along to see them off, just for the experience.
They traveled for almost a full day to get here, which is a pretty brutal introduction to airplane travel. Many of them kept looking out the windows of the plane for almost the entire journey, looking to spot some land beneath them.
Because they live pretty much directly on the equator, their days and nights are of even length throughout the year. So, when they arrived here, after all those many hours of flying, they were shocked to find that it stayed light for so long into the evening. It's something they learned about in school, Simon told me, but they never imagined what it would be like. They were not sure the day would ever end.
Since arriving, they've been settling in with local host families and playing soccer in some of the local parks. They've also gone on lots of cultural outings, like last night's visit to Ravinia, where Sweet Honey in the Rock and Ladysmith Black Mambazo were playing.
The boys were driven up to Ravinia, from the city, along Sheridan Road. And, as if a typical American home wasn't luxurious enough, the elegant mansions of the North Shore struck them as eye-poppingly beautiful. They kept asking who lived in each one ("The President?") because they assumed that homes of such consequence must belong to very famous, powerful people.
Once in the park, the boys huddled close together, both for warmth -- a pleasantly chilly evening by our standards qualifies as pretty darn cold to them -- and for comfort. Because of the program, the crowd at Ravinia was more racially diverse than usual, but the boys still stood out, both for their matching warm-up suits and for the way they unabashedly held onto to one another. Kids here outgrow that kind of physical affection long before they get to be 12 years old.
They were not crazy for the pre-concert picnic experience that is such a big deal to us. Something about the idea of such a large crowd of people traveling all that way just to sit on a lawn and eat is, admittedly, rather odd when you think about it.
But the Ravinia Festival folks [full disclosure: I am a volunteer with some of Ravinia's Community Outreach and Eduction programs] had provided tickets for pavillion seating for the kids, so they could actually see the performers on stage. And, once they were seated there (where it was warmer), the attraction of the place was more obvious.
The program, from Sweet Honey in the Rock's pan-African sounds to Ladysmith's traditional South African music, was not totally familiar to most of the kids, since much of what they hear on the radio is rap and pop, but they connected to it immediately. And they had huge smiles on their faces by the time the performance was over.
The boys are so unfailingly polite that it's hard to know exactly what they're thinking about this experience. I'm guessing that their sense of culture shock and dislocation is pretty profound, since I often feel that way when I return here from only a couple of weeks in rural Kenya or Tanzania. The sheet material bounty of what's here -- the amount of food in a typical grocery store, for example -- is truly overwhelming. It's almost embarassing to me to have them see the riches with which we are surrounded.
And I wonder, too, what they will say about this place when they return home in a couple of weeks. Will it even seem real?
