Starts with a "K," ends with an "a"

Given my travels so far this year, it seems inevitable that I feel compelled to give my thoughts on a comparison of Kenya and Korea.

The question I find myself asking, however, concerns the best way to do this. The two most obvious option would be a humorous point-by-point look at the two countries in the "Kenya has cheetahs, Korea has chopsticks" vein. While not without merits, this approach runs the risk or reducing everything to its lowest comedic denominator, not something I particularly want to do with this topic especially.

So I think what I'm going to do is just do a kind of free-flowing ramble on the subject at hand and see what bubbles to the surface.

In one of my kindergarten classes the other day, I started humming "In the Jungle" as the students worked on their frog pictures. I was only a few bars in before some of the kids started singing along. Apparently it's one of the songs they've learned. It's also one of the songs I taught my Grade 5s in Kenya. The interesting thing, however, is that my middle-class students in Korea are more likely to have seen a real lion than my Kenyan students, despite the latter living a few hours away from one of the most famous wilderness preserves in Africa. Money, of course, is the eternal variable. The Koreans (and the Canadians, and the Europeans, etc.) can afford to go to the zoo, while the Kenyans at my school were struggling to get enough to eat.

This isn't meant as a "pity the poor Africans" post, nor a "damn those with money" one. If anything, it's more a reflection on the ridiculousness of modern life. The very fact that I can go from continent to continent so easily underlines how truly small our world is. Just because I can, however, doesn't mean I should. The environmental implications of air travel alone are staggering, to say nothing of the potential cultural ramifications of the linguistic imperial propaganda I carry with me. Of course, if I were truly concerned about either of these, I'd still be in Canada. And I'm not. But still.

I'm digressing now, so let's get back to the original Korea/Kenya question. Both make me think, assess myself and my place in the world, but for different reasons. Both make me laugh, and sigh, and leave me utterly exhausted at the end of the day.

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And so it is. More later.