Identity

It’s easy enough to pick Americans out of a crowd, not so much by sight, but by the sound of them. Just listen for the loud boisterous ones. (Not saying that that is a good thing or a bad thing, just that Americans are loud in a way that people of other nationalities don’t tend to be. It’s just the way we are.)

It would seem strange to us, though, to be able to tell at a glance, before a move was made or a word was spoken, whether a person is a US citizen or a Canadian, no passport or paper id required.

Not so much in East Africa. Here, a persons forearm can, literally, tell you whether they are Kenyan or Tanzanian. Both countries administer a childhood vaccination for tuberculosis that leaves a scar, maybe half an inch long by a quarter of an inch wide, even through adulthood, but, while Kenya vaccinates in the left forearm, just below the elbow, Tanzania uses the right arm.


In Kenya at least, it has become so much of an identifying mark, regardless of age, culture, or tribe, that there are actually “clinics” in this area where refugees, both the legal and the semi-legal, go to have a doctor scrape away at their arm, just so, until it forms a scar almost identical to the one from the vaccination. Just like that, a small scar can identify you as a citizen and help protect you from the police when they start looking for people to deport back to their home countries.

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