A Year (or Two) in Kenya: White

I took the Pathways class my freshman year. I realized it was a mistake maybe the second week in. It was like extending orientation weekend through an entire semester. An hour a week we would devote to learning the history of the university, the details of class registration, Spokane's public bus system. Anyone who had been led on a tour by an ambassador or bothered to read the student handbook or had the minimal spirit of adventure necessary to go beyond the campus confines and into downtown didn't need the class.

And somehow it ended up being one of the most important classes I took at Gonzaga. Funny how that works. It's where I met Sima Thorpe, my thesis adviser and source of more than a few articles for The Bulletin, and Bob Bartlett, then director of Unity House. It was home to the Black Student Union, Filipino American Student Union, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Club, La Raza, Helping Educate Regarding Orientation and all the other groups that brought together those who didn't totally match with the typical Gonzaga student profile of white, straight, Christian, upper-middle class.

Once a month or so I would visit Mr. Bartlett, and we'd talk. He was absolutely fascinated that I came from the Midwest. He told me about his one visit to Green Bay and how his car doors froze shut during the night and how everyone else plugged their cars in to keep them warm. Mostly, though, we talked about race. It sounds crass. He was black, and we spent most our time talking about the difference between white and black and yellow and brown and red and every other color people come in. I have no excuse. Baudette was really white. When I left there were one and a half Filipino families, maybe one black family and some people with American Indian blood. It was so white that the people with Italian blood stuck out. He was the first person I can recall meeting who thought race mattered. It interested me.

Now I live those conversations, have some greater understanding of what he was talking about. You could say I already had a taste in Jakarta, but I don't. I was there for a month. I was a tourist as much as anything else. Racial differences felt more quaint to me because I only knew them for such a short time. I've been in Kenya nearly eight months now. It's different.

So far as I can tell, whites fall into two categories for the vast majority of Kenyans: curiosities and marks. This country is replete with curio shops. They stock the sorts of things like carved soapstone hippos and checkered Maasai blankets that visitors find charmingly exotic. For a fair portion of the population and most all of the children, it's the white visitors that are the charmingly exotic. Kids will jump up and down and spin around and shout "Mzungu! Mzungu!" I've never understood why they think we understand and will look. Honestly it was a good month before I began to notice people shouted after me when I past. For those with a year or two of school, they'll practice their English and shout "How are you?" Those whose teachers have not been as dedicated pronounce it "Ow r ooh?" Those who are excited and whose teachers have not been as dedicated run it all into one word. "Owrooh?" I sometimes wonder how the Germans and French and Italians feel about that. Calling back and waving does nothing. They don't know enough English to reply and are too wound up to stop.

The really intrepid will run forward to try to shake my hand or even touch my arm. My arms are especially fascinating to them. Turns out that East Africans have a terrible time growing hair anywhere that is not on the top of their head. Even the kids at the center who have known and lived with whites for years can spend a good ten minutes just stroking my arms. Some of the staff even asked permission once. A minute later, they said I was like a pig with hair all over my body but softer.

This all mostly happens in the streets of Githima, the poorer neighborhood on Nakuru's western outskirts. It's quieter, at least, in the city proper. Then the kids only stare. A fellow director tried to tell us that the same thing would happen if he were to visit America. I laughed in his face. I told him any white mother who caught her white child staring at a black man would slap her kid around straight away and tell them to stop being racist. Doesn't happen in Kenya. Here the mothers tell their kids to ask the wazungu "How are you?"

After Kenyans have seen their fair share of wazungu, visitors almost invariably become marks. To be white here is the equivalent of walking the streets of an American city in an Armani suit, an Omega watch and gold-rimmed glasses. You are someone with a lot of money who should be encouraged in every manner possible to part with it. There are the more malignant forms of this where street children will follow me, asking for five shillings, asking for bread, for well over a block, or where parents and guardians look to unload their children on me. Then there are the softer versions. At the courthouse last month, a woman pulled me into a backroom to tell me someone had a message for me. He wanted my support for his NGO assisting disabled children. At a school meeting last fall the teacher told all the students that they should work hard and be good students so they would find a white sponsor like our child had. I'm not counting the more general cheating of kicking up the prices for whites on everything from leather shoes to roof renovations. They're businessmen. I figure they do the same to their fellow Kenyans as often as possible.

So many of them assume that we have money and power and are overflowing with the urge to help. The thing is, they're right. We do have them, at least the first two. My monthly stipend here is 160 American dollars, hardly enough to even eat in the States, much less rent a room or pay for utilities. In Githima it's more than enough to keep a place and eat well and still have a little extra. Could probably keep a whole family happy on that money. The exchange rate is strong. A dollar is enough for a complete meal. Twenty dollars is enough to keep the landlord happy. Our money goes a long way, but it's more than that. On no less than three occasions Kenyans whom I had never before met walked up to me on the street and asked me to sponsor their visa to America. Even where we come from has power if we don't think we have the money to spare.

Individually, we can do a lot to help. If we choose to. And I choose not to. I'm here to manage an orphanage for over one hundred children. I'm already doing my part and more. I won't say it's thankless. People from the States often tell that they're impressed by what I'm doing, how meaningful it is and how good. Here, people just keep asking for more. Give me money. Buy me food. Give me a job. Take my kid. It's exhausting. Walking through Githima, I just want to keep my middle fingers up and yell "Hey, darky!" when they shout "Mzungu!" It's not even a slur. Kenyans I'm friends with call me mzungu. It just means white, but it's certainly annoying when I hear it shouted every two minutes. I'm not asking them to be nice. They just need to stop paying attention to me and treat me like anyone else.

Not that there aren't advantages to being white. We're treated better generally. Our former security company very nearly cursed out a black director when the twenty-four thousand shillings for their services wasn't immediately ready. When Demetra and I spoke with them, they had no problem with our monthly payment being a little late. We can go everywhere, too. Security doesn't stop me when I walk into Nakuru's nicest hotels in flip-flops, shorts and dirty T-shirt. I'm white. I dress like most every other tourist. They assume I belong.

Mr. Bartlett once told me, probably in response to some stupid question along the lines of "Why do blacks stay in their own groups and not integrate?" that I would do the same thing if I were the minority. He told me about a friend who did service alone in Mexico for a month or so. A week or two in, he was playing pick-up basketball and felt relieved to find another white and immediately struck up a conversation. Mr. Bartlett explained that it was natural to gravitate toward your own kind. It meant you had something in common. It's not natural for me. As a major stop on most safaris, it's common enough to see whites in town. I don't even make eye contact with them, let alone say "Hello." It's a very conscious decision. I'm not that friendly of a person in the first place, but I actively remind myself not to look when passing whites in Kenya. I'm already enough of an outsider. I don't need to be associating myself with visitors to mark myself out any further.

After all this, my thoughts on race remain mostly the same. It shouldn't matter. Skin color only suggests things about our backgrounds and cultures and is leagues away from definitive. An American Indian kid can be raised by Mormon parents and not know whether he's Apache or Algonquin but know Smith's book back and forth. Some Latino kid could just as easily be from a suburb as the inner city. I may very well have more in common with a middle-class Hmong than a white with a trust fund. In entire populations, intelligence and physical abilities and the like differ, but they're only averages and disappear in the individuals. Race only means as much as we allow it to. It can mean everything. It doesn't have to mean anything. It's just a color. The United States is a special case. Those blacks who come from the history of slavery don't know their tribe or nation. Their heritage is largely based on the color of their skin.

In the meantime, race still does matter, and all we can do is our best to muddle through and not be jerks to each other.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Peace Farm

I met people at Gonzaga with honest dreams of being farmers. Three by my count. Before scholarships and grants and whatnot, they were paying $120,000 for a four-year degree, and all they wanted to do was toss some seeds into the ground, rake loads of manure for the majority of the year, worry about when the next rain would come and spend a week or two harvesting in the fall before starting the whole process over again. It may not be so surprising seeing as how the organic food movement has elevated farming into an exemplary profession, a way of fighting big agribusiness and communing with nature through gentler means of production, but it still boggles me. Perhaps, they would have reconsidered had they spent eight months at an IHF center with an attached farm in Nakuru.

In lieu of such experiences I offer to them my own observations.

Cows are morons. They're huge. They have a mass several times greater than even the fatties who hang out at IHOP. When they bother to, they can build up a good momentum. I know. One of the girls hid behind me when a cow was charging her. And with all of these natural advantages on the unarmed child, they will still run the other way when said child throws very small stones at them. If they really wanted to, the cows could have a revolution and do some damage. Humanity's advantage by way of firearms would be insurmountable, but they could certainly take a few of us down with them. But they don't. Because they're morons.

Also,fresh milk steams. I have yet to massage the udders myself and probably never will, but I've seen the children and farmhands do it. It's kind of frightening, a far cry from the cool, pasteurized stuff that comes out of my refrigerator.

Chickens are mean. Rather than focusing on their more immediate enemies, namely the ones who take their eggs at the end of everyday, they peck each other. We have completely bald chickens running around because some other chickens thought they looked weak.

Also, chickens with their heads cut off can really move. I saw one do about three backflips before it settled for two minutes of twitching in place. Then our cook started stepping on their wings to keep them in place.

Goats are morons and mean. On my first trip into Pokot, our driver bought two goats for himself. Every ten minutes of the three-hour drive back, they would butt heads. It wasn't that impressive. There was no lightning charge and thunder crash of skulls. They would just kind of set their hooves and push against each other's head. Then they'd stop. Then they'd do it again. It wouldn't have been so annoying if they hadn't done it around my legs and worried me about the possibility of getting a foot caught.

Also, whoever thought Satan's lower half should be a goat had the right idea but was looking at the wrong end. He should have given the Great Deceiver goat eyes. The pupils are freaking rectangles. That's evil.

It all seems to suggest in rather strong terms that I should not be the coordinator of the Peace Farm and Gardens teams. To my immense relief, it doesn't actually require any work on the farm. So far, it's just searching for seed and equipment sponsors and starting a manual of all the details of produce and livestock care to keep future Western directors from being taken for a ride by lazy farmhands. My work on the team, despite this, can only generously be called spotty. In the spirit of alleviating that, if any reader should know people or organizations potentially interested in donating seeds or equipment to a modestly-sized farm that provides for orphans and one of Kenya's poorest tribes, please let me know. Or, if you'd just like to make a donation yourself, you can do so through our website.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Chemosop

Che-MOW-sup

She only started talking a month or two ago, but she has already learned to say "Mimi picha." Fortunately she hasn't yet learned that putting a camera with attached lens cap to my eye does not a picture take.

Chemosop is still to small to be listed on our website, but you could conceivably check our sponsorship page everyday until the option to pay for her medical, education and life needs becomes available.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: KPLC

I estimate that I have about an hour to write this post. I can't tell for sure. My Dell would give me an estimate on how time remained before my battery trained. My Vaio does not, but it says 69%. We'll say a minute for every percent. As you might guess, the power is out. In and of itself, this is of no interest. The power reliably goes out once or twice a week, mostly during the day when we don't need to run our lights, the only things that run on electricity here. The water is unheated except by the sun, and we cook with charcoal, so it's not even that big a deal when the power does go out. The only trouble is when it cuts off during the night, and that's not so bad either. I rather appreciate how it encourages the kids to go to bed an hour or two early.

This time, however, it is not a general power shortage killing our lights. It's KPLC. The Kenya Power & Lighting Company. This all started late November. Four months after arriving in Nakuru, we realized that it was a bit dodgy to have not received a single electricity bill. Eager to avoid any legal trouble we paid a visit to their offices, in the Electricity Building appropriately enough. They visited our center, read the meter and then told us the meter did not exist in their system. It might have been lost when they switched to a new computer system. We would need to apply for a new account, and because we had no bill to prove that we had ever paid for one watt, they would also have to charge us for the back hours. The estimate was something around one million shillings. Maybe a little more. About thirteen thousand American dollars. Maybe a little more.

We regretted telling them about the lack of power bills and regretted so easily giving up on those halcyon days when they didn't know we existed. When we submitted the paperwork for a new account, we were quite pleased that they went straight back to ignoring us. There were no phone calls. We received no mail. We had no visits. We thought they were happy. We were happy.

That ended the day before yesterday. It ended in the form of the guard coming to tell me someone wanted to talk to me. I came out of the office to find one man had crawled to the top of the pole that supported our power lines and another was talking on his mobile at the base. The man on top pulls at some cables and comes down. The man on bottom hangs up.

"Hello," he says.

"What are you doing?" I scream. "Turn our power back on."

The conversation continues in this vein for sometime. He insists our meter is not in their system. I reply that we filled out the paperwork in November. He suggests we come to the office to discuss this. I say I am not going to waste any time with a company that lost our paperwork the first time and believes that the best way to arrange a meeting for a missing account is to cut the power to a home for over one hundred children. He raises his voice a little. I raise mine more. He tries to step past me, I step in his way. For a while he is literally pushing me. I had had a bad day and finally had an outlet. So had about five women on our staff. He only gets away by faking an incoming call and going through our barbed wire fence. Demetra goes to the office and is told the matter cannot be discussed because the manager for the case is gone until Thursday morning. They only agree to reconnect the power when they hear I'm away from the center at the time. I regret that I am not there to stare while they do it, but we have power for another two nights. We are content.

A new man and new partner came late yesterday afternoon and left with two cables. There was less shouting and less stepping in the way this time. I was in a better mood. Naomi and Demetra left minutes later to visit the offices. Around 4:30 the manager calls me to ask when we will submit the paperwork. I tell them our people are at his office now. I then ask why he feels that disconnecting our power is a better method for requesting a meeting than a phone call, letter or visit from one of his numerous flunkies. I ask what happened to our paperwork three months ago. He asks where the reference number is. I say his people screwed up the procedure and we are now paying for their mistakes. He says the office will only be open for another fifteen minutes, that we should hurry to submit a new request to open an account. I thank him for offering us such a generous time frame. He is the first Kenyan I have spoken with to have a fine enough grasp of sarcasm to realize it is an insult.

Later that night, Demetra takes a call from a man with KPLC who has found our paperwork. He and his manager are now respectively stored in my contacts as KPLC (GOOD) and KPLC (JERKWAD). Demetra visited both today and received a reference number and promise that the power should be connected sometime before the weekend.

To put it simply, KPLC are bullies. Rather than request a meeting and make a suggestion that power will be cut if you don't, they cut it. They request these meetings at the end of the day, an hour or two before they go home. They leave the power off at a children's home. Rather than looking for the documents you assure them you delivered months ago, they deny their existence. These are tactics better suited to the mob than a public utility.

And it doesn't really surprise me now. When the man we contracted to repair our roof admitted, on the same day this sordid affair with KPLC began no less, that his original estimate was only enough to repair one of our four buildings rather than all of them, I was not surprised. Dealing with matatu drivers who refuse to return our change even when we know the correct amount, police that lose evidence, Children's Department officers that demand bribes and chiefs who need to be reimbursed for their problems before caggabe and maize flour can be delivered to their hungry people has hardened me, to say the least. The obsession with looking out only for oneself and one's own runs deep. Maybe it has something to do with a ridiculously corrupt government that can't manage to punish or even show a unified will to punish those responsible for selling maize during a famine or skimming from funds intended to make primary education free for all children. I don't care. I'm sick of it. It makes me eager to leave. A little more than two months now.

My mom wrote in her last email that she knew Demetra was back and that I was in a better mood because I was writing about squat toilets and football. Sorry to ruin that streak.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Still more football

Kenyan Premier League began the 2010 season on Saturday. Sofapaka dismantled Sher Karuturi 2-0 and Tusker stepped all over Posta Rangers 4-1, both keeping in form with their hopes of again challenging for the league championship. Red Berets surprised by holding Thika United, one of last year's contenders, to a 1-1 draw in Nakuru.

I missed all of it. I was watching the last half of Everton whomping on Manchester United and the beginnings of Chelsea over Wolverhampton and Arsenal over Sunderland. In my defense, that wasn't the plan. Originally, it was to attend the afternoon rugby match between Nakuru and Strath. Having never been to the Nakuru Athletic Club before, we ducked into a kiosk to avoid the torrent for an hour or so. When it diminished to a drizzle, we found the Athletic Club not more than a block away. The stands were even covered, and because rugby players are real men, they played through the sheets. We could have enjoyed a good match and begun learning the rules. As it happened, we were wet and cold and would have had to pay full price for only the second half. We opted for two pots of tea at the nearest thing Nakuru has to a sports bar.

The point? I am what's wrong with East African football. At least, according to Nicholas Musonye, general secretary of the East and Central African Football Federation. Really, check it out. It's an interesting article. Some of it's stupid, like the suggestion that East Africans just aren't built for football. It makes sense if your only qualification for comment is shared blood with the guy who formerly captained the Czech national team, but the fact that Kenya fields a half-decent rugby 7's team that can give New Zealand and England a good match seems to suggest otherwise.

The greater question of whether the English Premier League is to blame for the lack of football development in Kenya, though, is fascinating to me. Absolutely people here care more and know more about the English Premier League than the Kenyan Premier League. I know you can buy AFC Leopards jerseys and fairly sure you can find some for Sofapaka. Probably Gor Mahia and Tusker, too, though those are just guesses. In any case, I never see people wear those. On the other hand, a day you don't see anyone wearing a Man-U or Arsenal knock-off is a day you spend alone in your room with the curtains drawn. SuperSport has even picked up a decent contract with KPL this year and broadcasts about two live games a week. Kenyans don't even have to make their way to a field now to watch their local teams. They just need to trundle to the nearest bar with a satellite, but the TV's remain fixed on Liverpool and Chelsea.

I can understand this to an extent. The teams in the EPL are some of the top in the world. They win the most and have some of the best players. The most important thing, though, England has that Kenya doesn't? Completely professional football. Seriously. Workshops were held before this season to inform players of all their responsibilities and rights, like the right to be paid for their participation. For the first time in league history, full-time, professional referees will be officiating. AFC only made the CAF Cup this year on a last-minute appeal because no one bothered to tell them earlier that the roster, only about three members of which remained on the team after transfers, that they submitted last year was the valid one, not the one they submitted a a month and a half after the deadline.

It's vicious. Kenyans don't care about their own national league because it's a disorganized mess, and the KPL can't attract any interest with Kenya Football Limited and Kenya Football Federation struggling for control.

There's hope, I think. McDonald Mariga was picked up by Internazionale Milan and can be a model for Kenyan success at the highest levels. During the European off-season, there are a few golden months where the only football available is local. More money is coming into the league through the SuperSport contract and two consecutive record-breaking sponsorship deals. That ought to motivate for greater professionalism and higher levels of competition. Or corruption. Whichever.

All of these posts on football have come as something of a surprise to me. Except for the now sadly defunct Minnesota Thunder, I never attended a game. I kept track of Gonzaga's men's team online while I was in Germany when they made their scramble into the NCAA tournament, but even free entry couldn't entice me when I came back. Now I care.

Sports are my break from the center. Nakuru has an absolute dearth of public spaces. There is nowhere you can just be and enjoy yourself without spending money. Shopping, never my favorite activity, has no real pleasure either as once you go through the door, a salesperson will follow you the whole way to make an offer on anything you touch. With football and rugby, though, I can pay a dollar and have two hours away from work and, more importantly, two hours away from the kids.

Not such a fan of selling advertisement space on the jerseys, though. I'm not going to pretend that sports are some sacred realm that should be beyond the reach of marketing. That's a laugher. They're a business and need to make money. It may be annoying, too, for a team to rotate through sponsors and force the die-hard fans to buy new jerseys every few years to keep matching the team, but I can see there being a special appeal to those jerseys and sponsors for that miracle championship run. My problem is that some of the ads are just ridiculous. I know why Sofapaka edged out Mathare United last year. It's because they were sponsored by a cement company and not margarine. Honestly. How tough can you feel when an ad for the oil-based alternative to butter is splattered across your chest?

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Kapanat

Kahp-AH-naht

Kapanat came down with the chicken pox late last week. He's better now, but he still has the pox scars.

Sounds to me like a great reason to pick up a medical sponsorship for one of the kids. Only fifteen dollars a month.

Lent 2010

It was Ash Wednesday yesterday, and I didn't manage to make a single Mass. Not quite the start I would have hoped for my most favorite of Church seasons. The trouble is that it kind of snuck up on me. I didn't even realize that Lent was starting this week until this past Sunday. Kind of left me scrambling for a spiritual practice this season.

A sacrifice, the traditional option, seems a little redundant this year. If it weren't for the monthly trips into Pokot, it would be a bit difficult for me to imagine a life with fewer amenities. The electricity is spotty. The water is reliably off three days out of seven and not heated. I wash my clothes by hand. We rotate between two different breakfasts, three different lunches and two different dinners, all fairly bland. I'm almost certain my closet in Corkery was bigger than my current room.

On the other hand, it makes me appreciate the little luxuries all the more and hold all the tighter. Extra morning mandazi and crips or biscuits after trips into town are essentials. Giving any of those up would be true sacrifices. Unfortunately, I am unwilling to go so far.

So I'm left with doing something more. That's cool. It what I did last year. Regular prayer worked pretty well for those 40 days. Then it kind of fell apart. Then it picked up after I brought a prayer rug back with me from Cairo and was able to ritualize the whole process. Then it fell apart again when I moved into this new room where there literally isn't room to lay it out. So it goes.

Anyway, the plan this year is modeled on last year's, but we're trying a new ritual. The plan is to spend at least an hour a week participating in Perpetual Adoration at Christ the King Cathedral. Fifteen minutes here, a half hour there, whatever works for me that day. So far as I know there is no holy relic or sacred icon hidden in the little room in the back. It's just the Host and a few chairs facing it.

We'll see how it goes. If anything turns up, we'll let you know.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Squat toilets

I have a friend who once argued that the Western world took a precipitous turn downward when it opted to throw its lot behind leavened bread. We were eating naan at the time, and I was prone to believe him. Any sins that fell upon us for this transgression, however, are more than forgiven for our invention of the modern flush toilet. This longing for a proper place to evacuate my waste has already been documented, but allow me the opportunity to elaborate on this Mardi Gras.

The bathroom should be a place of peace and repose. I hear the Filippinos call them "comfort rooms," and that is entirely approrpriate. When you are there, it is your kingdom, albeit temporary. Even in public bathrooms with lines of stalls and a single, long urinal there is a certain intimacy. Etiquette demands you do not talk, and frequent partitions provide more than reasonable privacy. It is a place of relaxation, a place to release all the muscles.

Squat toilets fail to provide this basic environment. The simple fact is that relaxation is impossible above them. Yes, they do provide an opportunity to politely open the sphincter, but this is immediately counter-acted by the stress put upon the hamstrings and upon the arms from grasping the crossbeam on the door to maintain balance and avoid an ignominous fall. What should be a gentle time is now a savage ballet of grip, balance and aim. A really bad ballet.

For the longest time I believed that it was simply impossible for whites to assume the position, that it was a petty revenge for decades of colonization and a lack of success in the Winter Olympics. Then I saw The Grapes of Wrath and realized it was something we had lost through lack of practice. That guy was squat-walking all over the place.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Chemongot

Chem-UN-gawt

Normally it's a struggle to get Chemongot to stop making faux gang signs and put her stupid hands down. This time it wasn't. And, surprise, she looks great.

If you would like to receive a picture of similar quality along with a handwritten letter of not as great quality every month, please consider picking up a sponsorship.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The origins of the art instinct

Dennis Dutton argues in The Art Instinct that our appreciation of art from the passionate intimacy of the tango on along through the words of Raymond Carver and back to Vettriano's The Singing Butler is a form of sexual selection. He founds this argument, at least in part, upon certain universal artistic preferences, among them a consistently elevated opinion of landscapes that resemble the savanna our ancestors once walked.

Having now spent some seven months in Kenya, only hours from Lake Turkana and Olduvai Gorge, I can believe that. No number of millennia, no thousands of miles of migrations, no hours of Lady Gaga can diminish a real love for this land. There is no word but 'majestic' to describe the Great Rift Valley. I drive past it twice a month on the way to and from Nairobi, and I always watch it pass. In rain and in haze and on the clearest days it does not cease to amaze. To see the ground fall beneath you to a plain hundreds of meters below and where it only ends with an indistint line of mountains on the horizon cannot help but make one wish for me time to enjoy it. The rich iron red of the soil and the close rolling hills and forest that border it on the east and the long lakes that follow it to the west lead you into it and let you down slowly.

And one of these days I will finally find a matatu or tour bus that stops at one of the many viewpoints and take the Rift Valley's picture to share.

In no small part this is due to the patchwork of subsistence farms, connected only by narrow dirt roads cut by feet and hooves, along the Valley's wall and base. Men are leading donkey-drawn carts along narrow dirt roads cut only by their feet and hooves. Women are bent over in their fields pulling weeds and harvesting leaves of kale. It's a pastoral setting French and Italian painters only wish they had access to.

In other words, the Rift Valley's beauty is maintained because it's poor. This is some of the most fertile land in Kenya. It may be on a near vertical slope, but were it in America, it would long have been transformed into acres of corn or wheat, an ocean only broken by the occasional thresher. Still Great, this American Valley would look altogether different, less pleasing. Perhaps only a single viewpoint would remain, and it would have to be anchored by a restaurant of some repute to draw in visitors.

Maybe not. Maybe the entire Valley would be designated a national park and protected from encroachment.

Unlikely. It's enormous. People need to live somewhere. Crops need to grow somewhere.

What if the Kenyan economy had a bit more money running through it? What if these subsistence farms gave way to small towns crossed with power lines and asphalt roads? Maybe passing the Rift Valley would only be worth a brief glance then rather than laying down your book for the entire length, but maybe that would be worth it to those who live there.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Picha Mtaani

I stumbled into this one. Businesses and banks and all the rest in Nakuru don't open until 9 in the morning. I arrived at 8:30. Poor planning. So I decided to pass through a part of town outside my routine while waiting. That's when I saw the crowd moving through the city park. This was a curiosity. The greatest action at the park is along the perimeter, at the public bathroom and impromptu instant passport photo studio because the gates are locked all day and all night. I followed them in and discovered Picha Mtaani.

It was the first day of the event. Chairs and barriers were still being arranged. Speeches and whatnot were to come later, so it wasn't until I found the website that I learned anything about the exhibition. To summarize for those not interested in reading the official version through the above link, Picha Mtaani is a traveling photography exhibition using the images of Boniface Mwangi to depict the violence following the presidential election in late December 2007. The pictures are arranged in chronological order beginning with rallies hosted by Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga before moving through to the day of the election and dwelling on the violence in the streets. It finally ends with the arrival of Kofi Annan and the beginning of mediation talks. Sometimes a series of photographs tell a story in miniature, boys looting a shoe store and running from the incoming police, a beating on a city street.

It is to Mwangi's credit that he does not dwell on the most gruesome ends of the violence. There are two pictures of severed arms, another of a man holding his stub and face bright red from the blood running down. As terrible as these things were, more important is how they occurred. The strongest photographs of the exhibition are those of the violence. These are where the crowd lingered longest, fought most for a better position nearer the wall. It is a common observation that people slow when driving past a car accident. Imagine how they would gather if they knew they could see the accident in progress. Police face off against mobs, firing tear gas and swinging billy clubs. Men chase others down and knock them to the ground. A crowd watches as four men take turns kicking and beating a fifth for being of the wrong tribe. The streets these happen on look like those I walk daily. The houses look like those I pass. The people dress and look like those I meet. It was not a civil war with clear sides, with Blues and Grays. It was an explosion of tribalism and longstanding grievances and whatever else that finally found an outlet in the cities. I doubt the Kenyans in the crowd could agree who was beating whom or who was bleeding, back to a wall of corrugated aluminum sheeting. It didn't take years of military training and indoctrination to make these people killers. They just snapped when their government once again failed to care one whit for them or due process and made every effort to assure their election and protect their power.

The most powerful of these photographs for me was one near the end. A young couple is walking together down a street under an umbrella. The man is in a black vest and white collared shirt and the woman in a dress and heels. They are flinching from a headless body, the blood mixing with the rainwater and running under their feet. The battlefields were the streets, in their neighborhoods, not safely mediated through television and newspaper articles.

The curating was weak. The exhibition suffered from too much. Rather than choosing just one or two of the most powerful, it opted for impact through quantity. Four pictures of burned out matatus. Four pictures of people trying to put out the fires consuming their homes with water thrown from their washing basins. It invited thoughts of what these very similar pictures revealed different instead of how horrible they were.

But these concerns of aesthetics and curation are secondary. The point is conversation, dialogue, reflection on what happened, thoughts on a way forward. In this it was effective, I believe. The crowd, four deep at most points along the exhibition wall, was silent. When there was conversation, it was clearly centered on the photographs before them. This is a good thing, but it will be wasted if it does not amount to real action. There is an opportunity for this. A draft constitution that would make critically necessary reforms is set for a public vote in April. By no means would approval make things better, but it would signal a real willingness to improve the situation and not repeat one of the nation's darkest times.

The stakes are high. Some fifteen hundred people died in January 2008. This violence was carried out with bows and arrows, machetes, steel pipes. Now the people and tribes are arming themselves with more effective weapons. There are frequent reports in The Daily Nation and The Standard of gun and ammunition caches being uncovered throughout the country. If it does happen again, it's going to be much, much worse.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Apura

Ah-POOR-ah

Isn't that cute? He looks totally ready for his senior portrait.

Please consider picking up a sponsorship. They are especially important now in the wake of the holiday season. For a month or two we get a flurry of sponsorships and then nothing for a few months longer. Please help us get through this.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Girls and their games

You may noticed a dominance of a certain gender in the last post concerning the kids' toys and games. Or not. Up until they hit puberty, it's pretty impossible to tell the two apart. It doesn't help that we keep them all shaved or that dresses are in scarce supply. That's also a healthy part of the reason it took me seven bleeding months to definitely learn all of their names. It took an entire month just to reliably tell the boys from the girls.

But I digress. The point is that it was mostly boys who played checkers and marbles and the stick game and whatnot. The girls prefer other entertainments. Like throwing balls at each other. Seriously. One girl will turn an empty cup over and stack maybe ten pebbles or so on top of it. A second girl will take six paces or so and begin throwing a ball, normally an old sock stuffed with more old socks, at it. Once it hits, she takes off running and the one waiting hurries to turn the cup back over and put all the pebbles back before grabbing the ball and chasing down the first girl. If she hits, they switch places in the next round. If she misses, she grabs the ball and tries again until she does hit the other one.

Jump rope in two variations is also common. There's the classic version with girl on each end of the rope, swinging it in a wide arc, and a girl jumping over it in the center. Then there's the one where a loop of rope is pulled taut between the waists of two girls to form parallel lines at waist height, a waist length apart. The girls passing between don't so much hop as snap their legs up to keep as level as possible.

In another game that spends most of its time going through the rubbish, the kids will pull out out every shoe polish tin, old Vaseline container, even the plastic caps of water bottles, anything that will hold water really. Then they add water. And dirt. And shreds of grass. Then they go back to the rubbish pit once we light the whole affair on fire and pull out a few burning twigs. They put them under their cups and call it cooking. Yum.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Boys and their toys

Scarcity is one of the things that I expected coming in to Nakuru. It was also one of the things I was right about. The kids don't have an awful lot. Most of them keep their clothes, their pens and pencils, their school books, their toothbrushes, their soap, their everything in a metal box that would just barely fit my stereo back in the States. In turn, a good portion of them share their box with at least one other kid. They really only have what they need. They simply don't have the space to keep toys and the other little luxuries.

There are good reasons for this. The first is that we simply don't have the budget to give them everything they ask for. The only clothes we consistently buy them are those required for school. Otherwise we are almost completely dependent on donations from their international sponsors and local churches for their clothes and toys.

The second reason is that toys don't last very long with this group. A few months ago we bought some cheap handheld games and decks of cards as requested by the Children's Office as entertainment. They didn't last the week. Buttons got stuck and cards were lost. Even good quality soccer balls have a maximum lifespan of a month here. Forget about the cheap ones. They spring leaks in a day and are completely useless by the end of the week. Except as hats. We had a checkers board for a week or two. By the end of four days, all of the pieces were broken or lost, and they resorted to using bottle caps. At the end of the week or two, they managed to split the stone board in two.


So the kids make their own toys and own games a lot of the time. They tend to do this with garbage. I appreciate that. It's rubbish. We don't want it anymore. They can break it all they want. I don't, however, so much appreciate the mess they make going through the bins and fire pit.


This the first game I can remember seeing them play. They would lay one stick across a shallow pit, maybe deep enough for half a pinkie finger. Then one child would flip it up with a second stick and hit it on the fall into a crowd of jumping kids. Sometimes one would catch it and cheer. Sometimes no one would catch it and they would cheer. If it landed on the ground, they would flip it end over end, counting until they got back to the pit. Then they would do it all over again. That's all I ever understood of the rules.

Marbles has been especially popular lately. I never played it when I was their age, but I only recognize a single variation. Four marbles or so are lined on the ground. A boy about a meter away would pull a finger back, balancing a fifth marble on the tip, and launch it, trying to knock the others out of line. That's about it. Once all the marbles are hit, they line them up and do it again. No one ever seems particularly put out in these games, though. Must be some of those where everyone wins.

Then there are the toys that the youngest, those who lack the dexterity to flick a marble or hand-eye coordination to hit a stick, play with. They make themselves, too.


Beside the chunks of scrap wood, you can see a car in Ben's arms. Yeah, that corn stalk with metal wire pushed through the end and plastic Vaseline caps on either side. That's their car. The boys will push those around for hours. They don't normally have corn stalks on hand, so the shaft is made from metal wire. I don't mind when they pull this wire out of a bin. I do mind when they pull the wire out of the toilet wells.


I've seen pictures and movies of kids playing with these in Victorian London. Never in real life. Until now. Except they don't use sticks. Just their hands. They'll chase around bucket tops as well. Anything round.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The rules

I have always had a particular fondness for the Lancelot of T.H. White's The Once and Future King. In every other telling of the legend, the man's kind of detestable. He may be the greatest knight in Camelot, but he's also its greatest playboy. He leaves his illegitimate son to be raised by monks, and his affair with the queen ultimately leads to the destruction of all that Arthur struggled for in his life.

White, however, manages to infuse Lancelot with a real degree of flawed, honest humanity to the point that he even becomes sympathetic. White's Ill-Made Knight is as ugly as a bulldog and only really good at one thing, knocking other knights off their horses and killing them. He is no brute, though. Lancelot's skill at dueling is born of his self-loathing. He never draws back to protect himself. His greatest desire is not to have the highest tilting averages but to perform a miracle. The affair, already tragic on an epic scale, becomes real. Yes, Guinevere and Lancelot love one another, but they love Arthur as well. For White, were Lancelot a good man, it never would have been an issue. He would have always recognized and respected the marriage of the king and queen. Had it been necessary, he would have abandoned the court to protect himself from the temptation. If he were an evil man, it never would have led to its unfortunate end. He would have simply stolen Guinevere from the first and left, not drawing the affair out for decades. But Lancelot is more complicated. He is not a good man but desperately wants to be so. He wavers between the two paths offered to him and, in the end, destroys Camelot.

Lancelot wants to be good. I want to be good. I try to speak honestly and act compassionately. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. We all have our struggles. Mine is with my temper.

It flared this weekend. It was over something minor, too. The rule is that all meals must be eaten in the dining hall. We put it in place to control messes and to discourage kids from saving ugali overnight, attracting ants and whatnot. A few girls on Saturday tried to take their rice and beans out and eat in their dorms. Normally, this isn't a big deal. I watch the door and anyone coming out with a plate, I turn back. When the first came out, she had just put a handful into her mouth and was going for another scoop when she saw me and froze. She tried to say she was bringing it for a staff member. I turned her around. The second girl tried the exact same excuse and only avoided being as pathetic by not actively having her hand in the food when she said it. I turned her around too. Not a big deal. Then they flaunted it. They would try and sneak by when I looked down to take a bite and run back when I looked up. Seeing them hurrying down the stairs into the kitchen again, something sparked.

When they heard me yell and saw me coming after them, they ran. They hid in the charcoal closet. I could have slapped them. I wanted to slap them. I wanted them to be terrified of me, to never consider again for a moment that the rules, even something as mundane as where to eat, were to be treated as a game. But I had rules, too. Their half-finished plates were given to the chickens, and they had to clean all the dishes, all the kitchen, all the dining hall.

A lot of people believe that the law is necessary to protect the weak. I don't disagree with that. Laws and rules are codifications of what society and authority believe to be right and wrong, fair and unfair, to be applied to all equally. However, I think the strong need them just as much. When action is demanded in the moment, they offer an option. Established rules give the strong control. They don't want to be vicious and violent, but those may appear the only options in a temper. Arthur recognized this. Tournaments and the Grail Quest were outlets for his knights to use their skills for something greater than dominance over the weak.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Cheptuwat

Chep-TWO-watt

Really, more here for the attitude and personality present than any suggestion of cuteness. Which is odd. Normally Cheptuwat is kind of moody.

As always, if you would like to receive a picture like this and nice letter from one of our children once a month, please consider picking up a sponsorship.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Cairo adventures: Tourist

My second trip to Europe falls quite neatly within that genre of 'whirlwind.' Arriving in Nice, my French class made its way through the Loire Valley on through to and departing from Paris in little over a week. Every other day we were on the bus, moving between cities. Our stops ranged from the commercial (a perfume factory, a mall) to the classic (the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, a ride on the Seine) and nowhere in between.

More than anything, that trip cemented in me ideas of what a tour should not be. It should not be spent in transit. It should not end before jetlag is overcome. It should not be a desperate search for some souvenir that contains the essence of the visited in neglect of the present. And it most certainly should not be a checklist of the greatest hits. Not that there is anything wrong with the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame per se. They are impressive. It's very understandable why the city and nation would take them as their dominant image. The problem is that they are so present in the global culture. They are such loaded symbols with their freqent appearances in the great romances and legends, not to mention history, that the actual things cannot bear the strain. The grandiose expectations of the visitors break against the mundanity of reality. Especially when the actual things are surrounded by beggars politely asking if you speak English, immigrants hawking kitsch at an impressive mark-up and hours of lines of bored tourists.

And still I ended up visiting the Sphinx and Pyramids of Giza and the the Citadel of Salah al-Din in my final days in Cairo.


I admit. The Pyramids are, for lack of a more appropriate word, wondrous. Every five minutes someone may pass and offer their services as a government-licensed guide or to rent a horse or camel, but that does not detract from the Pyramids' majesty. They are enormous, and they are ancient. Flipping through a guide just outside the entrance, I learned that the tallest presently stands at 136 meters, diminished about ten meters since its original construction. You still don't even begin to gain a sense of just how large that is until you are there and see the stones at the foundation, each of them already at least twice your size, and you lose count of just how many rows there are until the pinnacle.

And then you look closer.

And then you see the neat rows of contemporary brick revealed by patches of missing plaster. The flaws of the Sphinx are even more egregious. The neat rows of brick line the outside of the paws and the metal scaffolding around the rump is still standing.

I can understand why the Ministry of Antiquities does this. Even more than Sugarloaf Mountain for Brazil or Willie the Walleye for Baudette, the Pyramids are the symbol of Egypt. They may have withstood the elements for millennia, but they are not eternal. The hordes of tourists clambering upon the lowest levels only hasten the day that they all come down. The hordes must be drawn in and appeased. The last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World must be preserved, by plaster and brick if necessary.


Not surprisingly, it still bothers me. It's as if rangers began importing ice to Glacier National Park, by sheer force of resources and will slowing the glacier's retreat. What then are we coming for if only to see something that has been maintained through sloppy government intervention? It's not history anymore that we have come for. It's a reminder, a reasonable facsimile, of what once was history. At some point, the Pyramids of Giza are going to be as real as the souvenirs that fit in the palm of your hand.

I know restoration happens all the time. Renaissance paintings have touch ups. The mansions of Browne's Addition's one-time railroad and lumber barons are returned to their former glory with some upgrades to the wiring and air conditioning systems. Things are always changing, being improved, being restored. Why should it matter whether it happens to the Pyramids, too? I guess it doesn't, really, but it strikes me as a ridiculous gesture. While civilizations and languages and cultures have risen up from and returned to the dust around the Pyramids, they have endured, and the Egyptians are not going to let that streak end. It's a strike against entropy and death, preserving the Pyramids for another millennium, proof that some aspect of humanity will continue on even if we do not. Kind of ironic seeing as how they're monuments to death.

The Citadel was similarly fascinating. While museums dedicated to the Egyptian army and police force are also with the complex, the Mohammed Ali Mosque is the undeniable centerpiece. The entire thing is hollow. There are no columns or floors. Just a direct line from you to the utmost ceiling, a sense of the infinitesimal, and every surface is lavished with designs. Bloody amazing.


Coming out, I heard a call to prayer. Just past the kiosk with all its postcards and handbags a man knelt upon a sheet of cardboard. Maybe he worked at the Citadel and was inure to the wonders of the mosque. Maybe he preferred the sun on his face to the electric lights inside. Maybe he was lazy. I don't know why, but he preferred to practice his faith outside rather than walk the twenty paces to pray inside one of the most famous mosques in the world.

Not quite sure what to make of that. I could say it was an act of modesty to avoid the tourists passing through the mosque, but he wasn't exactly discreet. Every group leaving the mosque could see him. I don't know, and I don't know either what it means when such a work of art inspires a greater sense of reverence in the visitor than the one for whom it was designed.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Cairo adventures: The food

I get the feeling that after six months of regular ugali, uji, githeri and rice and beans, the culinary culture of most any nation that had discovered foods not centered around limited variations on corn would have been more than acceptable to my mistreated palate. Still, I think I could have done a far sight worse than Cairo.

I have no idea what I ate. Another problem with the whole Arabic alphabet thing. Might make finding the recipes a bit difficult. I could describe the dishes, but you don't say "I enjoyed tomato, eggplant, zucchini, garlic and onion at Perkins last night." No, you say "That was a particularly tasty ratatouille." You don't say, "Pass the baked flour, salt, yeast and water mixture." You say, "That is some fine bread. Damn fine." A list of ingredients don't a dish make. I'll do the best I can, but imagination in reading this post is called for. Kind of really makes me really regret not taking any pictures at the cafés. That would at least be something for you all.

While I may very well have been ripped off by my taxi from the airport and at my first hostel, I consider my financial success on the culinary front worthy in Cairo. My first night, wandering merely in search of a place that was open downtown, I ended up in side alley, and some men with tea and shisha called me into their café. That's all they served, so I didn't exactly eat well there, but I was around long enough to look a little farther up the alley to find the stalls that did serve food. I came back to that alley every night thereafter. If you paid more than 10 Egyptian pounds, about 2 American dollars, for a whole meal, either you were really hungry or really ripped off.

Seating anywhere in particular was limited, and most eventually migrated to rows of common plastic chairs facing a TV that sometimes played Bollywood, sometimes Egyptian series and mostly the English Premier League. Sit down for more than a minute in any of those chairs, and they would bring a short glass of water. Catch them before they left, and you could ask for Pepsi or tea, if you were the mood for something ridiculously sweet where sugar particles still existed in boiling water. They bloody love the stuff. Dump a few spoons full of crushed black loose leaf and sugar into a glass about four times the size of a shot, and they were good. Morning, noon and night there were kids balancing silver trays with upwards of four full glasses threading their ways through the crowds on the streets to make deliveries.

I had pizza the first night, at least that's what they called. It was built on a pastry, rather than bread, dough, in the first place. I don't think there was any tomato sauce either, am still not sure if that was cheese, and found plenty of olives and peppers on it. But it was great, if for nothing else than having a flavor not built around salt or the harshness of kale.

I discovered macaroni the next day. Kind of lame to name the entire dish after just one of the ingredients when they mix it with generous portions of lentils and fried onions and top it with chickpeas and lemon juice. Discovered then that Egyptians are some of those that like it hot. A spicy tomato sauce is served separate to allow seasoning appropriate to the diner. Even though the mix may have only been one part to fifteen, I could never stand to mix in the whole thing. But it burned so good. Pasta was such a staple of mine in the States that being denied it since July, not counting that macaroni and cheese made with shells and tossed with pre-shredded cheddar, made it all the better. I had the macaroni at least every other day.

It took me almost five days to discover what the giant wooden boxes full of bread and carried on the heads of boys on bicycles were being used for. Kind of a disappointment. It was pita bread. The flavor wasn't a disappointment, though. The Egyptians stuffed those with everything. The first one I had was filled with potato chips. Then there were more traditional ones with hummus and falafel and baba ghanoush. Then there was the one filled with french fries. Favorite though was the one I found in Islamic Cairo on the way back from the Citadel and also the only one I ever learned the name of. I only learned that because when I asked if he had falafel, the guy kept yelling "ful" at me. Tasted kind of like a cross between refried beans and hummus. Tasted kind of good. Not like the side they kept pushing at me. Pickled carrots, pickled potatoes and pickled peppers. It was a little much on the salt.

The very last dish I discovered was at breakfast. Ordinarily I just took the tea, rolls and hard-boiled egg offered by my hostels, but holidays or some such delayed the baker my second-to-last morning in Cairo, and I was forced into the street for my breakfast. There I discovered something to push any lingering thoughts of mandazi far from my mind. Using the same base as the pizza I enjoyed on my first night, bringing the culinary adventures full circle really, the man tossed it on a wide, greased pan for a brief warming before rolling it around a generous topping of honey and confectioner's sugar. That was something special on Cairo's cool January mornings. I shall call it "Fried honey bread."

Time to add Egypt after Indonesia to the list of nations whose cuisines I had no idea about before arrival and cannot have enough of now.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Mutua

Moo-TWO-ah

Unlike, say, Kakwa or Cheyech who have to mug to become Weekly Kids, Mutua always looks this cute. Nose at permanent half-dribble and ears that would make a blind man say "Wow." These are cute things.

If donating to Haiti hasn't totally tapped you out, please consider picking up a sponsorship.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Fifth journey into Pokot

There are two official programs we practice while in Pokot, Survival and Famine Feed. In brief, they are, respectively, purchasing livestock for the poorest of the tribe and distributing maize flour and cabbage to combat malnutrition. Should such things appeal to you and you are not totally tapped out since giving to rescue Haiti, you can donate through the links.

Then there are the unofficial programs. We have, on occasion, brought along our staff nurse and medicine to perform basic treatment at each station, especially during the recent cholera outbreak. One particularly generous sponsor has funded the construction of a water pump and installation of solar panels to power it. We are also an informal taxi service. If someone is looking to make the trip between Chesirimion and Riongo last minutes rather than all day on foot, they just hop into the back of our truck. Except when we're picking up forty-odd kids from their holiday in Pokot, there's always room. We can fit twenty easily and, if we're willing to be a bit uncomfortable, up to thirty. We can always fit more on top.

It's this last service that ground on me this past trip.

“Come on,” I wanted to say to them. “You're the Pokot. You're proud walkers. It's what you do. One of your chiefs once bragged to me that he had walked twenty miles already by the early afternoon.”

When we told one of our Pokot boys that we were going to walk from our hotel in Chemolingot to Ngingyang for the Monday market, he said “We can't do that.” Then he paused to consider and amended himself. “Well, you can't. We can.” We did it in about an hour and a half in the dark. Little snot.

Rationally, I know we have plenty of room. So long as there is enough for all of those who need to go back to Nakuru, there should be no problem. They don't make a mess and aren't troublesome at all. It's not like the other options are all that attractive, either. Walking can take hours, and if they are fortunate enough to find a passing pick-up, they can't afford the ride. If they are still more fortunate and have the shillings, the drivers pack them tight. I know. I rode some thirty miles in the bed of a standard pick-up with some thirty of my closest friends. It still bothers me.

I think it's the attitude about it that gets me the worst. Leaving the market around noon on Monday, people had begun queuing for a ride almost before we even began giving out goats and camels and cows through Survival. No one asked. They just assumed we would be available. When I had to start kicking men off to assure there was room enough for all for the boys and me, they would refuse until I literally pointed and stared at each of them individually. Not even then for some. They tried begging. I think we eventually found room for them all, but if it wasn't annoying.

We bought you goats and gave you cabbage, what else do you want? That was the kind of thought to hold my attention then. They were uncharitable and not all that sensical, but they were there.

Maybe, too, it's the contrast between what I expect to do and what I don't expect. I expect to be fighting over the price of a chicken and how many were actually were bought. I know giving out maize flour will inevitably collapse into a scrum by the bottom of the second sack when it becomes clear some will be leaving with nothing. Having never promised to take anyone anywhere, I don't so much expect to be a chauffeur, though I should after five trips out.

I think it's the sense of “When have I done enough for you?” that is the greatest source of irritation here. I want to feel like I've done something good and decent. When you keep asking for more from me, it kind of depletes that feeling. Depletes it like something that causes something to deplete rapidly. Like a cup of Nakuru tap water depletes the contents of my stomach out the wrong end.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Six months

A little over six months in Nakuru now. It's special. Why? Because I'm halfway through. More lies behind than lies ahead.

A bloody lot has changed in that time. Seven children advanced from pre-school to primary, and another five from primary to secondary. Of the fifteen-odd staff on when we arrived, maybe four are left. I don't teach classes anymore. We have teachers on staff to do that. Pokot, with all of its hunger, poverty, aridity and everything, has become routine. Nairobi doesn't scare me. The matatu drivers know without asking where to let me off. The weekly menu has been tweaked. I had my hair cut. I've lost two notches on my belt. The Harambee Stars blew chances at the World Cup, Cup of Nations and CECAFA Senior Challenge Cup.

I've hardly noticed. Sure, if you ask about them, I'll remember them, no problem. The thing is, they're more distant. They wouldn't be the first thing to come to mind were you to ask what has changed the most. The answer? The most trite possible. The kids have grown. Not the older ones so much, but those in pre-school certainly. They're lankier. They're taller. Their heads are more in proportion to their bodies. How banal. It's the cliché response expected from every aunt and uncle who has not seen their youngest relations in years. Yet it's true.

I know this series is named "A Year (or Two) in Kenya," but it is looking near definite that it is going to be the former of those two options. However, I will only change the title accordingly when I have the tickets in hand. Until then, enjoy the ambiguity and potential for another eighteen months worth of utterly fascinating insight and thought.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Cairo adventures: Shisha and keffiyeh

A professor once told my class that the West is continually re-discovering East. I would modify that a little bit. It's always discovering bits and pieces, mostly having to do with the accessories; becoming heavily enamored; and fitting them to its own concerns. Tibetan prayer flags, anime, and so on and so forth. Shisha and keffiyehs are of particular interest within the college crowd of which I was so recently a member, and this past week I have had the opportunity to observe them in their native habitat, more or less. Shisha originated in India some five hundred years ago and keffiyeh are more of a Palestinian thing, but the point stands that Egyptians were doing them well before American kids ever thought to.

Shisha is ridiculously popular here, as is smoking in general. Walk a block downtown, and you'll pass three combination tea/coffee/shisha cafés, not counting the four that you couldn't see in the alleys. Guaranteed, no matter when you pass, there will be at least four pipes out. Morning, afternoon, evening, night. I don't know if they're so into flavors over here as in the States as I've avoided indulging, but they are definitely not into passing the pipe here. Strictly one person for each shisha. Tend more toward the older set here, too, though not exclusively, mostly because students don't spend as much time at the cafés. If they are around, though, they've probably pulled one down one of their own from the line-up on the back wall and are watching the city pass by between puffs.

But only with men. I don't think I've seen a single woman stomping out a fag end, and I only saw my first sit down at one of the cafés today but that was just to talk to a friend. She didn't smoke or drink tea or coffee or anything.

They wear keffiyehs here, too. You can buy them on the street and everything. In all truth, I can only remember meeting one person who ever wore a keffiyeh, and I never would have known about its associations with Palestine were it not for a particular guest comic in a particular web comic. I'm not going to link to it. If you've read it, you know why.

Otherwise, yeah.

Not much to say except that it's one thing when some Western hipster claims it's a political statement. It's another thing entirely to wear a Palestinian symbol when your nation has gone to war with Israel in your parents' lifetimes.

Speaking of which, a few days ago, a woman asked me to sign a petition demanding that the world's largest prison (Palestine) be made free and healthcare, higher education, rainbows, fine dark chocolates and baby rabbits be made available to all its former inmates. I didn't sign and neither did the hostel's owner. He told me after she left that he didn't see the point. He didn't think the Palestinians really wanted freedom. Egypt had tried to help before, and they hadn't taken advantage of it then. Fun fact, Egypt prefers to call them the War of 1967 and October War.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Chepchumba

Chep-CHOOM-baa

You may not be able to see her face, but I think the color and personality obvious more than demonstrate how cute Chepchumba can be.

As always, please consider starting a sponsorship if you haven't done so already. Classes started again this week, and every little bit helps.

Considering "Blood Wedding" and "Suite Flamenca"

Call it a concentrated effort to escape the provincial life, but there is more than a whiff of pretension about me with regard to the classic high arts. I may slum it by buying only rush tickets and wearing jeans with a collared shirt, but I still attend the opera. I pay attention when a ballet is advertised. When I hear about upcoming orchestral performances I check to see if I can make it. And then if I can afford it.

These inclinations could potentially have made the past six months in Nakuru quite painful for me. As much as I dump on Baudette, it at least has a movie theater that shows movies a week or two after their release. The theaters in Nairobi, the closest, are fortunate to get any blockbuster a week or two before it's official DVD release. I may as well pick up the bootlegs on the streets by then. But I made it to the Cairo Opera yesterday. Watched the Antonio Gades Company's productions of Blood Wedding and Suite Flamenca. Think that'll hold me over for the next few months.

Somehow, Blood Wedding was the less interesting. That surprises me. It's called freaking Blood Wedding. Violence and love are explicitly promised in the very title. There should have been bodies a-flying and passion arousing, knives a-swinging and close embraces. Instead, it was a remarkably restrained vignette. Forbidden love is captured in a measured, precise paso doble that crosses the stage but once. The final fight between the new husband and the bride's true love takes place in slow motion. Honestly, more time was spent holding poses of indifference and suffering than in actual dancing. Which is what I was there for. It was advertised as a ballet, after all. I can respect the male leads for their physicality and control in maintaining their fight of four strikes over five minutes, but it was not what I was expecting.

The fundamental problem, I think, was that dance was simply the wrong medium for this. In preparing this post, I read that Blood Wedding began as a poem. A literary origin makes sense. Blood Wedding needs strong characters, there need to be reasons for the woman to marry the one and still love the other. There needs to be motivation for the men's confrontation to turn violent. In a dance, though, where members of the audience may very well be sitting over twenty meters from the action, all of this is necessarily reduced to and portrayed by a few sweeping gestures and poses. They are less characters and more types or caricatures. Blood Wedding needs subtlety. That is not dance's strong suit.

Fortunately, frantic rhythms, wild steps and just a general sense of overwhelming vitality are, and that is what followed in abundance after the intermission with Suite Flamenca. Flamenco lacks the delicacy and grace of ballet but the energy is something else entirely. The singers' warbling cries, the building strumming on the guitars, the slow steps of the dancers explode without notice into a frenzy but are brought to heel in an instant. Wow. Now I want to go to Spain.

If you are interested in reading a fairly complete description of the performance, check this article in The Daily News Egypt. Or, if you prefer, you can just watch the theatrical versions here and here.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Cairo adventures

That title doesn't make much sense, does it? What does Cairo, a very Egyptian city, have to do with a year (or two) in Kenya? A terrible lot in my case. Kenya is very generous in its tourist visas. For just $25 you can stay in the country for six months and only need to check in with the immigration office once at the three-month mark. After that, though, it gets a little more difficult. Not only do you have to leave Kenya but all of East Africa for at least one night before buying a new visa. Kind of eliminated my original plan of quick bus ride across the Ugandan border.

Thus, Cairo. For a month or two it was struggling with Sharjah of the United Arab Emirates for the privilege of my visit. Flights to both were of roughly equal price, but EgyptAir won out for actually accepting my credit card. Kind of disappointing, actually. Cairo was my first choice because I had heard of it before, but after checking out Sharjah's Wikitravel entry, I got excited. Cultural capital of the Arab world? A museum with letters written by Muhammed? Yes, please, but some other year, I hope.

Anyway. First day in Cairo? Absolutely terrifying. I've been to enormous cities before. See London, Paris, Jakarta. I've been to cities with ridiculous traffic. See Istanbul, Jakarta. After six months in Nakuru, I've even grown used to not looking like everybody else. Those aren't so scary. Not being able to read anything is. Not that my Kiswahili is all that great, but at least it uses the same alphabet as English. If it comes down to it, I can give pronouncing "ndengu" the old college effort. At the very least, I'll recognize the word the next time I see the menu. Not happening here. They don't even use the same numbers. All I see are some backward 3's and dots. It's awfully disconcerting not knowing how much my lunch costs until I get my change back and praying the guy on the street isn't screwing me over. Doesn't help that spoken English isn't as common here as Kenya either.

It's gotten better since then. Kind of hard not to. Mostly I've just walked around, strolling along the Nile, crossing bridges, wandering the streets. You have no idea how wonderful that is until you've been denied it for six months. To walk without direction, just to move and enjoy the motion is something special that I may not have appreciated fully while still in Spokane and made regular trips down the Centennial Trail and across the falls. Nakuru is too small for good walking and way too many people yelling at me when I pass kind of kills the experience. It helps, too, that Khedive Ismail put some really effort into Midan Tahrir, the part of town my hostel is in, around the turn of the century and turned it into "Paris on the Nile." The buildings and their columns and all those other designs and elements make me wish I knew anything about architecture and could properly describe them. Wasn't really expecting the massive window displays of women's nightwear that probably isn't meant to stay on long. Bit of cognitive dissonance there when not infrequently passing women with the full headdress on.

In between seeing where this street would take me if followed long enough, I did manage to visit the Egyptian Museum yesterday. It's described as one of the largest collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world. I'm not entirely sure that's a good thing. Despite having several millennia of history, the range of Egyptian art was rather limited. They did sarcophagi, sculpture and some jewelry. Then it all begins to look the same. Every coffin has the same face, and every statue is either sitting straight or standing straight with the left leg out. As impressive as the excessive bounty of Tutankhamun's tomb was, it was just more of the same, just bumped up a few hundred notches on the money scale. The Egyptian Museum definitely could have profited from a "less is more" approach. The ancients must have wasted all their imagination creating however many thousands of pictographs their hieroglyphics demanded. I did, however, very much enjoy learning about the various deities that weren't Horus and Anubis. Like the ones with cobra, rabbit and dog heads. The one with a hippopotamus head was for fertility. Seems just a mite insensitive.

Until I leave late next Tuesday, the plan is visits to the Citadel, the surrounding Al-Azhar Park, Blood Wedding and Carmen at the opera, and, of course, the Pyramids and Sphinx. Other ideas will be considered.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: The Weekly Kid: Kakwa

KA-kwa

Kakwa can be an absolute moron and painfully difficult to make go to school, but it would be remiss of me to suggest that the boy does not take good pictures.

Perhaps one of your resolutions for this New Year was to do more good in the world? You can start with sponsoring one of our children. Also, my offer to send you a copy of one of my three stories for each sponsorship you pick up still stands so long as you let me know when you make one.

Considering Flannery O'Connor's "The Complete Stories"

A friend and I disagree whether Holly Doering or Shanti Perez should have taken first in the Get Lit! 101-Word Fiction Showdown. He says it should have gone to Doering because, despite the lyricism in her descriptions of eggs, the final line of Perez’s “The Numbers Game” had nothing whatsoever to do with what came before it. My problem with Doering’s “Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” was that it ended in death. Matricide, to be exact. Death is a big deal. It is one of life’s few inevitabilities, and we can hardly begin to understand what lies beyond it. Every time someone writes about it, it puts me on edge. My fear is that these writers use death as a shield. Unsure of their own abilities, they write about something meaningful, rather than trying to write something meaningful, hoping that is somehow brings some gravitas into their work. To even begin to approach it in fewer than one-hundred-and-one words was ridiculous. It just seemed like a cheap way to inject some drama into the story.

Flannery O’Connor writes about death a lot. Of the thirty-one stories in this collection, eleven end with at least one person dying, violently more often than not. But she is no amateur writer searching for some literary heft. She is a master. Though death is always present, always a threat, always a suffocating memory, her stories are not about it, really. They’re about faith.

It’s intimidating, to be honest. If O’Connor ever heard of “Kum Ba Yah,” she must have thought it was the punch line to a not particularly funny joke. Hers is not the gentle ecumenical faith of most American churches today. It’s not the sort of faith that admits the possibility all can or will be saved or that good works alone are enough for everlasting life. Belief in God and redemption are matters more important even than life and death. Far better for her characters to have that moment of recognition, of revelation, moments before a bullet enters their brain than a life lived without belief.

Miracles populate her stories, but these are the sort you wish pass from you. A trio of boys who burn an entire forest. An escaped prisoner who systematically murders every member of your family. A thief who specializes in body prosthetics. These are how the supernatural enter O’Connor’s characters’ lives, not a gentle voice on the radio or small coincidence. God does not merely move in mysterious but cruel and absurd ways.

It’s an intense experience. Mine is an ironic age. Our favorite comedians act purely on the level of irony. The entire hipster sub-culture is one defined by its participation in irony, from dress to drink. There is not a hint of the ironic in O’Connor, however. When she writes that the vandal with a club foot eats the pages from his stolen Bible and calls them “honey,” she is earnest. When the man who rushes to save a child from drowning in the river is described as “some ancient water monster,” she is serious that the boy may have found the better part.

O’Connor’s writings are not experiments or contemplations or riffs. They are statements of belief. She does not ask whether you agree with her. She knows through to the core of her being what she believes. She doesn’t need your approval. To be faced with such certain devotion to something of such importance is an uncomfortable thing. It throws back in our collective faces our lack of conviction in much of anything.

O’Connor does have her weaknesses. Her range, especially in terms of character, is limited. The independent, landed women differ only in name between “A Circle in the Fire,” “The Displaced Person,” “Greenleaf” and “Revelation.” Old men, so certain in their country towns but lost in the city, appear again and again in “The Geranium,” “The Artificial Nigger” and “Judgment Day.” The hateful, useless, college-educated youth is a particular favorite type of O’Connor. They appear in “Good Country People,” “The Enduring Chill” and “The Partridge Festival.”

When she moves outside these limited characters and their similar problems, I find her strongest work. The gentle humor of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” which draws out to the furthest what it means to be a child of God; the boy who struggles to uphold his obligations in “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead;” and the exclamation of who one is in “Parker’s Back” are all favorites. I have a particular soft spot for “The Barber,” too, even if O’Connor apparently didn’t think too highly of it. It was only published without her permission after her death.

A Year (or Two) in Kenya: Fourth journey into Pokot

I only ever wrote that I was growing familiar with Pokot and its people. I never wrote that I understood. Because I don't. I know the names of the villages now and recognize people, but I understand nothing at all.


That crowd behind the boy with a quarter slice of a cabbage? All waiting their turn at a scoop of maize flour. Their options are few. East Pokot has no economy, few shops that sell foodstuffs and fewer jobs with which to pay for the foodstuffs. The people are all farmers and herders on land which supports little. So they wait in line for a free scoop or two of maize flour, often mixed with the desert's dust. Not that it matters so much. The water they'll cook it with is dirty too.

It starts well normally. There is a line. The oldest and weakest are pushed forward to take the first scoops. Others follow one by one. Those who came late push in near the front of the line. Not one but two, three plastic bags are shoved toward the server. Bodies press in. More torn sandwich bags and oil cans are shoved forward and follow the scoop into the bag and out. Over eight now, and they come so thick that once they have their scoop, they can't walk out.

There are tricks the server can try at this point. They can refuse to open the sack until some order returns. They can walk away and force those waiting to form some line. They don't work. The press returns.


I entered this scrum for the first time on my last trip into Pokot. Most of the time I stand at the fringes and take these pictures to send our sponsors. At Chesirimion, the first stop of four, though I watched as the server, back literally to a wall, gave up and walked away from the final third of the bag of maize flour. Five of the strongest took a grab at the top and pulled. It didn't tear and spread flour over the ground, though a lot spilled out as they strained against each other. The strongest just walked off with the lot of it.

I didn't want that to happen in Kadingding, the second station, and when I saw it heading that direction, I finally put away my camera and stepped in. It's different on the inside. I want to think what we're doing is good. The Pokot have no food. We bring them food. It's simple. It's good. On the inside of passing the flour out, though, it just looks like another opportunity for people to act like jerks to one another. The strong push to the front and stay there. Once you catch them pushing the same bag, already twice filled, into your face, they switch for an empty. You yell at them, and they move to your other side. The smallest kids can sneak in under legs and are more than jostled for their efforts.

We bring near a hundred kilos of maize flour to each station. There may not be plenty for all, but there is enough. If they come up one at a time, they will all have something. But they don't. A few end up with more, and more end up with less. It's hard to see what you do is good when the most triste, banal, asinine acts of evil of simply putting yourself before others is all you can see.

But everyone walks away in the end. I don't see knives pulled or people with full bags jumped from behind. Maybe that means it's alright. They're not so hungry that they're willing to fight for a meal or two. I have no doubts that the flour is shared. Invariably only women walk through the line while men sit to the side and watch. Their husbands and children and parents must eat something. The people look thin but not emaciated. And that's the point, I guess. that people eat and avoid starvation. The rest can come later.