Whose Karma - Mine or Donkey's?

By Dawn

This past July, I spent a few weeks leading a writers’ workshop on the island of Lamu, Kenya. With no paved roads and no cars, the narrow, twisting streets are filled with donkeys. Most buildings, including the hotel where we met, are made of dead coral, and since there is no window glass, you hear everything going on outside, from the early morning call of the muezzin to late-night street fights.  

One particular noise was inescapable. It came from the yard next door, where we could see a lone donkey kept in a tiny cage day and night, braying piteously. On Lamu, the donkeys are work animals, carrying heavy loads during the day and allowed to roam free at night, except for this one isolated creature. As the days went by, the plight of this donkey began  to weigh on me. Tony, my teaching colleague who lives in Nairobi, told me not to let it get to me, but I could see that it was starting to get to him too.

Finally, Tony decided to walk over and find the donkey’s owner. From the hotel, we could all hear the ensuing, increasingly heated argument in Swahili. Tony returned and said angrily, That guy is barely even feeding the donkey. He doesn’t care if it’s suffering, he just wants to sell it and be rid of it.

I don’t know what possessed me, but I asked, Could I buy the donkey? Perhaps, I thought, I could give it to someone who could use a donkey and would treat it fairly. This idea seemed impulsive but it quickly gathered steam. One of the hotel workers, Karisa, had befriended Tony. Karisa said that he too was bothered by the donkey’s distress, and that he could use it on his family’s farm. With Tony translating, we visited a veterinarian, negotiated a price ($200, with several people contributing), paid the owner, deeded the donkey to Karisa, released it from that miserable cage, and walked with it to its new home. At that point, everyone seemed happy, especially the donkey.  

Yet afterward, I kept thinking about Swami Vivekananda’s teachings on karma yoga. What had we really accomplished? By “rescuing” one donkey, did we create a problem somewhere else? Did I know for sure that the seller wouldn’t use the money to buy and abuse another animal, or that some other ill effect hadn’t been set in motion? And could I justify the effort to help one donkey when there is so much human misery all around?

Tony went back to Nairobi, but keeps in touch with Karisa, and recently told me that “our” donkey is thriving. I suppose the answer to my question is that I can’t know the answer. For now I can only speculate that perhaps it was that donkey’s karma, and mine, and Tony’s, and Karisa’s that we met on that faraway island before going our separate ways.