Experiential Education

There's a soft pop and the rattle of a bottle cap landing on the wooden bench. The warm sodas have arrived. Then come the ubiquitous painted, chipped metal plates with peeled potatoes bathed in oil broth and chunks of boiled goat. Two pie shaped quarters of oil infused chapati lay over the meat.

The small "hotel"(aka place to get food) in the village of Oldurko is filled to its seams with twenty or more community group members.  We've just finished meeting with them about an opportunity to apply to the community group training project. They shuffle small bills around, contributing to pay the cook for our nice meal, complete with soda. We've brought a few Kajiado County Press newspapers to share. Groups of men sit close on benches lining the small space, pouring over the printed photos. I guess that less than a quarter can read the English words. 

Glancing down at my hands, I ponder their sanitation after a morning of shaking greetings. Our thoughtful hosts bring a pitcher of water to rinse at least the dust onto the packed earth floor.  I pray over my lunch with extra ferver and plunge my fingers into the oily food. Many eyes are on me, including a new crowd in the doorway, a group of children, stacked by size against the doorframe. I squelch my natural repulsion for meat, especially meat that has not been disassembled from its original connections. No time like the present, so I draw a deep gag-reducing breath and begin gnawing away at the hunk of bone and gristle with a little meat hidden between two thick swathes of connective tissue. I'm pretending, trying to give the impression that I'm a pro. I've always had an affinity for little pretending games, for drama, so I feel right at home acting out my role of meat lover and Maasai food eater.

Finished with my plate, I rub the grease into my skin like a therapy, shake more hands, smile and thank profusely, and edge my way to the car for the multi-hour jolting ride through acacia bush and clouds of red dust. I hold my stomach and inwardly moan, waiting for the familiar pain to subside. The sun will set before we arrive home.

I recently had a friend tell me that she believes that we in North America have a culture that is arrested in youthfulness. So many of us are stuck in immaturity, she said. Essentially, we avoid hard things, and resist the difficulties of what are actually important life tasks. We do our best to not have to walk the dark alleys and valleys that are the very things that transform us, that expand our souls to ever larger spacious places.

I knew immediately what she meant. Too often, I am kicking against the air, pounding my fists up and down, screeching and whining something to the effect of, "I didn't want life to be this way! I wanted this and this, not that and that, not loss, not disappointment, more loss, this or that really hard thing, uncertainty, conflict, limitation, etc..."

When she put the name "life tasks" to the hard things that come, those life changing, no-going-back, kinds of things that happen to us and we either have to adjust or give up and die, I gave a sigh of relief. Could it be that I'm actually bravely moving ahead through layered tasks of life, moving toward maturity instead of what it actually feels like: plowing chest deep through stinky muck in the murk without a headlamp?

A while back I had a revelation.  It dawned on me that I don't want to be someone who expects life to be a certain way and can't handle if it isn't. I don't like the idea of being someone steeped in her own plans and expectations, full of a sense of deserving things to be a certain way; entitled to a certain kind of life, income, lifestyle, education, opportunity, family, location, fitness, diet, health status, recreation, genre, wardrobe, reputation... you name it.

Knowing this about myself, I guess I'm thankful for the chance to go through what my friend calls life tasks now and not wait around for later. Should I wait till I'm eighty to gain strength and grace with which to enjoy life and to find a path away from entitlement, selfish pursuits, or pining over unmet expectations? Perhaps, in reality, I'm lucky, then, to get a jumpstart on some of the knuckle scraping, bone breaking, chest crushing pain of life. I'm serious! Maybe wisdom and age should be my coveted state rather than the get-what-I-want-in-life attitude I associate with the idyll of being forever young.

My wise friend gave me another pearl. She validated that in the midst of pivotol transforming seasons, one does not feel peachy, nor are there comfortable, familiar things, or lots of people there with you. Usually, she said, we want the whole thing to be over as soon as possible and we just don't like it. Check.

Survival rests in committment to hope, to facing truth rather than running, even if tears are streaming and I'm scared spitless. There must be regular feasting on big handfuls of grace rather than walling myself in pride and anger to avoid self change. Check, again. Regular need for boundless grace.

Opening to an expansive space.

But, all this has a familiar scent. I catch a glimpse of it from the corner of my eye and I've seen it all before. Aha! This is not only regular life challenges ramped up, but it is a central theme to my professional career. Learning through processing your experiences: Experiential Education.

Its the premise that you can't learn or grow until you have shifted from a solid place of balance and are moving, in a suspended imbalance, toward the next step- a place where you have not yet been. You hope for a solid landing, but you can't be certain what will result from this teetering, airy, 360 degree potential.

 All my life, in my work, I've facilitated others to learn from their experiences, looking for metaphors between one experience and another area of life, embracing transformation. I've guided people into beautiful, but unfamiliar and uncomfortable places, walking with them as they struggled or found victory, encouraging them to discover who they really were and who they could become.

 I've often wondered how to write about the connection between my experience of living in Kenya among the Maasai for 3 years and my previous life as an Experiential Educator. Truth is, my work and life in Kenya is the longest Experiential Education adventure I've ever been on. Daily challenges and lessons are metaphors easily transferred to the internal life of my soul that is chewing slowly through sometimes distasteful layers of life tasks, looking for the richness.

This is an exciting time, my friend said, something beautiful is coming.

(Note: In Kenya among the Maasai, age is valued more than youth. Grey hair is a badge of honor as well as, potbellies, balding and moving slow. Things happen to you here instead of you making things happen, for better and for worse. The unexpected is expected. Uncertainty, loss, and even tragedy is accepted as what happens in life, not so shocking, keep quiet, keep living, for better or for worse.)