David's Journal

You Never Know

2007-11-12T22:01:00.000+03:00

Tonight I’m tucked into Room 312 of the Embassy Hotel, City Center, Nairobi. It’s the hotel where the Simba Mbili restaurant sits on the second floor. Hotels here are very strict, checking passports, sometimes reserving them until check out, etc., but the Embassy doesn’t trouble itself…or you, with these details. It’s that kind of place. The rooms are cheaper than the petrol bill back and forth to Lukenya, where I live, and driving the forty kilometers out there after dark, well, it’s just not safe enough. So from time to time if business runs late or if it begins again in Nairobi early, I find myself here.

I have taken the opportunity, given their genteel laxness on identification matters to pad their list of celebrity guests. An audit of this year would find that Hunter S. Thompson, T.S.Eliot, Evel Kneivel (I may have misspelled my own name on this one), Thomas Merton, Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, and tonight, you tell me why, because I have no real idea, Brian Boitano, have all taken shelter under the sky blue mosquito nets here.

People often say, when explaining the inexplicable, ”You never know.” But sometimes you really don’t. I’m here tonight because Peter (Ha-neld), whom you know, hurt his back a little while working on the dam. He went to a clinic in Kinani, got an injection, felt better for a day, and then, “the pain went down” as Peter tells it, “to where he passes the stools.” He had the cause and effect part wrong, but Peter’s pain had indeed headed south and come into full bloom, as Dr. Hussein confirmed, as prolapsed, thrombosed hemorrhoids. This is homey but still polite company, so I’ll spare the more lively details and just note that in this, a country that does not coddle its sick, Peter needed immediate surgery.

We drove a long way to Nairobi West Hospital to find Dr Alkama. I’ll bet you already know he wasn’t in his office.

This is the courtyard outside Dr Alkama’s second story office.

Peter waiting in reception room

We headed slowly downstairs to try to find something to eat, and on the way, a man I somehow immediately recognized as Dr. Alkama was coming our way. We walked, Peter hobbled, back upstairs and the doc had a look-see.

I found Dr. A’s sign while waiting.

Different doctor, same conclusion. He couldn’t perform an outpatient procedure; it was a little more serious than that. Peter needed to be admitted and have the surgery today.

“How much will it cost,” I asked.

“About 40,000 Kenya shillings.”

Peter looked like someone who had just dropped his winning lottery ticket into a whirring Cuisinart. It might as well have been 40 million shillings.

You can’t exactly put a figure against ‘roid-free living, but $606.00 US is a lot of money for all of us here. I liked Dr Alkama very much, and asked if there were any reasonable alternatives. He suggested St. Mary’s Hospital down Langata Road on the outskirts of Kibera, near the women’s prison. Probably about 10,000 ks there. Still far out of Peter’s range, but much closer to ours. Dr. A wrote a note referring us to a surgeon he knew there and explained the need for expedition in Peter’s case. I pinned all my hopes on this paper.

We wound our way there. Peter was stoical in his discomfort, if increasingly noisome. He was brave in the way a young boy is brave -- observable courage.

St. Mary’s is a cash and carry place. To keep costs down, no insurance billing, no big admin staff. There were people everywhere, lining every hallway, some very sick, most just waiting as all people who are sick wait, quietly, individually. We got Peter registered and were sent to the door marked PUSH. There were hundreds of people around, none unaware of us as we passed and que-ed up.

Once his vitals were recorded,
Peter with a thermometer in his armpit.

Peter was sent to see the surgeon. Another long hallway lined entirely with people. This hallway ended in a breezeway and I found my way outside and sat on a small patch of grass next to two Masai guys. The Masai are country, not city, and so mostly seem out of place. They are untamed, heavily armed, and, in the minds of many other Kenyans, unpredictable. The older guy I sat next to had his red plaid wraps covering an ancient suit coat, I imagine his “going to town coat,” his bare legs a little incongruous beneath. The Masai have their own system of medicine, so you don’t see many of them at hospital.

I motioned Peter over to translate. The man touched his throat with a slicing motion when Peter asked what was wrong. Said his throat hurt like it was being slit open. So we had that in common. Peter kept his own medical sorrows to himself. Then the conversation turned to the beautiful, to me, herding stick he carried. Thin, incredibly strong, straighter than most of the pool cues at the Avenue Inn, cured in a manure pile for three weeks to render the dark color and strength. I have had two of these selfsame staffs, but in keeping with my tenuous hold on most material things, they have gone off to herd someone else’s cattle. He was interested and bargained well. He met his hospital fees and some, and I got my third herding stick.

I wanted to take his picture, but there was no convincing him.

Finally Peter’s name was called. The surgeon with one wandering eye examined him and the -ectomy was confirmed and scheduled. I got Peter settled and headed back down the series of rooms and corridors. On my way in, people simply grew quiet and stared openly. Now, the herding stick, which every single sighted person there recognized as a Masai weapon, added an incongruity which created a small festival atmosphere, as though I were wearing a coon-skin cap and carrying a Kentucky long rifle. I just put on my shades and kept walking, plowing through the attention-dense air.

I washed off Peter’s side of the seat a little and drove the winding road back down the hill and passed these two signs. The gap between what is intended and what is written on some signs is a constant source of delight to me, and so, I probably incorrectly assume, to you. Here’s the latest, at the gate of the women’s prison.

I’ll leave the possible explanations to those with more courage.

And the second is for you, Monte. Finally something really useful from the internet. No need to come all the way to Kenya to satisfy those occasional cravings for bar-b-qued goat meat or a Tusker.

You can now, evidently, order them online. And that, my much missed friend, is real progress.

Peter is fine, if a bit lighter than the 56 kilograms he weighed in at.

So long for now. Stay in touch.

David

Journal Entry 21 October, Pt. 2

2007-10-23T08:43:00.000+03:00

My phone rang at 7:05 am. If you had been here you would have heard this:

Hi Beatrice.

No progress?

Joyce wants shoes?

Ok. Anything else?

Gilbert and I remade the truck bed,

got Joyce's shoes, and headed back to Kitengela

and a very tired Joyce and Mbini.

Needle disposal at the Kitengela clinic. Click on the photo and you
will see the green- tipped needle stuck in the IV bottle.

O2 tank in its upside-down stool stand

We could go to Kajiodo or Machakos, but Mbini needed a hospital.
Machakos is where Mary lives, a reasonable thirty kilometer trip in
the daytime, and a better road.

Last night I was afraid Mbini would have the bumpy-road-induced
delivery in the truck. Today I was more afraid she wouldn't.

We followed her part way.

and the jacaranda trees were waiting for us there.

Machakos District Hospital. Into the registration room. That's Gilbert
through the door grate.

With a minimum of wrangling and confusion, and several polite denials
of paternity by yours truly, Mbini was now in hospital, about to be
examined again. I went outside to see what I could find.

One of the hospital's laundry facilities

This is the classic and wondrous straight-legged-bent-at-the-waist-like-a-gate-swinging African
posture. This woman is doing laundry. Because the back is perfectly
straight Kenyans can bend like this for hours a day and even after
decades suffer no real back problems. They are champion benders. Of
course, a lot of stuff would pop out of joint or roll up like a lamp
shade before most of us could ever get in this position, but it is a
revelation nonetheless.

I met this dignified gent.

He had dressed a swelling in his foot, and made his way here as a back up.

Jennifer, a lovely third year nursing student and I exchanged
contacts. She proved to be the much needed point guard for our team,
calling with updates -- no progress yet -- we have given antibiotics
-- etc.

So we packed up the (non) delivery Toyota Hi Lux and headed for the
hardware store

and some more lumber.

Joyce rested in the cab while these 19 foot 2x2's were ripped for us and tied on to our new, very strong truck rack.

We paid Mary a quick visit,

and that room contained more grace, wisdom, beauty and genuine celebrity at the first meeting of these two women than all the runways of Paris in Fall.

This is the conversation you would have heard the next morning:

Hi Jennifer.

At 10:00 am?

2.8 kilos? (6 lbs. 2 oz)

A girl.

Thank you. Thank you.

The first shaky portrait

Angelina and Brad surprised by paparazzi on their recent trip to Kenya.

Madonna and child

The baby was released wrapped only in a small blanket.

Mbini had no clothes for her. A consideration that hadn't occurred to me.

But I knew who it had occurred to, and we found Mary and got some baby duds and a few supplies.

A few liters of hand pumped petrol and we were homeward bound. All of us, finally.

A better back-of-the-truck experience than Mbini had

Mbini, Joyce, myself, and little Anna, named by Joyce for my mother, Ann Saunders.

Anna was born on Friday, October 12th, her birthday, and was brought
home Saturday, October 13th, on mine.

Under slightly different circumstances it may have gone differently
for Anna. On her behalf, thank you for helping to change things here, one
at a time.

Now you have to stay and look at a few "since then" baby photos. These
are worth a click, and happily need no commentary.

17 October

20 October

So long for now.

For the kids,

David

Journal Entry 21 October 2007

2007-10-21T23:12:00.000+03:00

Gilbert and I went To Kitengela to pick up the lumber we needed to build our propagating shed. A wood frame 10'x15'x7' which will be draped with shade mesh and used as a place to turn seeds into seedlings. It's an election year -- November 23 is the big day -- and in addition to increased upheaval, you get lots of crowded trucks with crackling P.A. systems and overly enthusiastic (read -- paid) supporters having a high time.

We ran into this two vehicle parade raising a ruckus on the edge of Masai land.

We put our very modest carpentry skills to work sawing

and hammering

and toting and balancing

until early evening.

I drove home and met Joyce on the road.

She took me to her house. It's always pretty dark inside, and I could barely make out someone lying on the bed, moaning. I thought it was an old woman, sick, probably malaria. I was mostly wrong. It was a woman, and she was moaning, but she was very young and only sick if labor is a disease.

Gilbert came up from the property and helped put the pieces together.
Her name was Mbini, sixteen or seventeen years old, who had left school, she was only in the sixth grade, when she became pregnant and had come to Joyce's, her aunt, to have her baby. (Her only being in Standard 6, was, no doubt a function of lack of money for school fees, not ability). Her water had broken some time ago and she wasn't making any progress toward delivery. It was her first baby and Joyce was increasingly concerned about her, and really, the baby. Joyce doesn't speak any English. She pronounces my name "deaf-id."
"Deaf-id." She looked right at me, "Deaf-id." I am simply no match for Joyce. Having very little idea what exactly I was going to do, I coaxed the pick-up up the path to Joyce's shack and signed on. Mbini couldn't move much and couldn't sit at all. Joyce made a bed in the back of the truck.

and we gingerly hoisted Mbini in.

and got her settled.

We decided on the Athi River Health Centre, which I had never heard of, about ten kilometers away. The Mombasa Road which I normally take to Athi River is being rebuilt, piece by piece, and now it is this particular piece, between Daystar and Athi Rver. The two diversions(detours) are two or three kilometers each and are the worst "roads" I have ever driven on. Picture softball to football sized rocks, but jagged, upright, embedded roughly next to each other, in dirt so hard you could break a shovel on it. Then add an unbroken string of huge trucks, buses, matatus and cars all scrambling over this mess in a big hurry. Blind curves, nothing like lanes, and dust everywhere, always. It is madness.

I knew Mbini would never make this, so I tip-toed over a dirt double track through the bush for five kilometers to a bad, but better-than-the-diversion road along the Stony Athi river, and then the side way to the town. It was dark when we finally got there.

The guard opened the gate. It was pretty clear what we needed. He told me there was no doctor, as though we should go away. I said get one.

We waited.

About twenty minutes later a young man walked through the gate and across the compound. He had just attended to a Muslim farmer who had attempted to prohibit two Masai guys from grazing their cattle on his land. They whacked him on the head with a panga (machete) and pretty soon his clothes were as red as theirs, but, the young doc told us, he was going to be ok.We got this report along with the one that they don't take first deliveries here, or the sixth or higher. Two through five -- ok, fine. The doctor was a good guy, but there was nothing for it. The place looked more like a deserted grammar school than a clinic, so I figured we might do better. We reloaded. I don't drive out here after dark. It's a useful and prudent rule, but here we were bumping along with Mbini in the back with Joyce attending to her and Gilbert and I up front trying to find out where the other clinic was.

The response you get from Kenyans you ask directions of is inversely proportional to their actual knowledge. The less certain they are, the more detailed and lengthy the answer. They never say they don't know. You might as well be in Italy. We crept through the crowded dirt streets asking every few minutes and getting nowhere. We finally bumped into it by sheer accident and Gilbert went in. I had to stay put. The sight of a mzungu sends the fees skyrocketing.

Gilbert came out. Nothing. No first deliveries. I barely overcame my impulse to go inside, grab someone important looking, drag them outside and tell them they were welcome to go back inside just as soon as they were ready to take Mbini with them. Instead we headed for the next town, Kitengela, where Gilbert and I started the day, and a health center that Joyce thought she knew was there. Kitengela is crowded, dusty, and has a wild west feel, like a gold rush town
without the gold, or the misguided hope of opportunity, but a similar sense of lawlessness. If we had little idea where to go in Athi River, we had no idea here. Only the notion that there was a place, here...somewhere.

When it gets dark in Africa, it stays dark. No street lights, most homes with no electricity. We drove down streets with people gathered around fires, small shop/shacks barely lit by the dark orange glow of a single kerosene lamp. We actually found a sign and headed down a wide dirt road. Joyce told us to turn left, onto a much narrower, rougher dirt road. Squeezing past houses and shops, trying to navigate tire-eating potholes, people everywhere, and often only a couple feet of clearance on each side. I'm not sure I've ever seen another mzungu in Kitengela. We were a big draw. Here we asked directions every fifty meters or so, literally at every turn. And we had plenty of direction options to choose from. We were now nearly two hours in the truck. Frustrating for us, and what for Mbini? Unflappable Joyce was, I could tell, flapping a little inside. After a particularly unimaginable stretch of road, we found a sign, and this time, for the good of all, it was attached to the place. The guard opened the gate. Mbini and Joyce and I stayed in the truck. Gilbert went to arrange things. He came back with the news. I'm sure you have no trouble filling in the blanks. No first deliveries.

I did about ten seconds of deep breathing, "harm-no-thing" meditation, then headed in. I met Beatrice. A very nice young nurse, but firm. To round out the picture here, this was a very rudimentary "clinic." There was no doctor here. First deliveries are often problematic here,
as Mbini's was proving to be. Most very young women have had little or no prenatal care, so everyone is flying blind. And these places are simply not set up to deal with complications. They had no vehicle there, private or governmental to take her to a hospital if it came to
that. They had nothing to help induce labor, like pitosin or prostaglandin. And if Mbini's labor continued to delay with her water already broken, they would be without recourse to help her, and if something went really wrong they would be in the soup. It might be helpful to think in terms of a day clinic, better for distributing malaria drugs and suturing wounds, etc. than dealing with complicated deliveries.

I talked and talked to Beatrice. A sweet, firm, No. Finally I told her that it was here or Joyce's shack where Mbini came to have her baby, that her water had broken about twelve hours ago or so, and asked her where she thought Mbini and her baby had a better chance. "It's here or Joyce's," I told her. "You can just bring her in," she said.

I gave her my mobile number and told her she could call me if anything went wrong. That I would take her where she needed to go, if need be, but that this was our last hope for tonight. We brought her in. Beatrice examined her and said her labor was just starting. Mbini must have held a very different view.

Joyce and Gilbert and I were waiting outside and feeling much relieved. I took a self portrait of Joyce and I waiting outside the exam room.

Joyce wanted me to take a picture of her feet.

And then wanted a foot duet shot.

After Mbini and Joyce got settled and I assured Beatrice again, Gilbert and I headed our dark way home.

I'll do my best to finish the account of Mbini's story and get it posted tomorrow. I have to wrap up here for now.

David

Journal Entry 13 October 2007

2007-10-18T01:16:00.000+03:00

This should, I suppose, be titled, "What I did on my summer vacation."
I was "Back in the USSA" August and half of September, and have been
in Kenya now for two weeks. There is a fair amount of news here, but
it seems right to catch up a little first. I'll be brief, and you
won't have to wade through a slug of photos since my laptop where all
of them were living was stolen (along with most of my other stuff)
before I came back. The computer, however, through some fine, alert,
above and beyond the call of duty, work of the citizenry has found its
way back into the loving arms of Red Rhino.

So, here goes.

SF
I cleared customs just in time to see the long (Gabe) and the short
(Ray) of it shred Ocean Beach. I found the dahlias misbehaving

and the house on the cliff lovely and the window again full of dolphins.
I parked in the Mission, in the selfsame space up from the church,
held in Incanto reserve, evidently, for me this long month.

And walked the same flowered streets forty years later with my
compadre and his son, and saw the past and the bright future in the
late afternoon golden present.

San Diego
I saw the Monte you know, played basketball, poorly, Wilco-ed in fine
company under a full moon, and was scrubbed clean with showers of
late-night familial hilarity and quiet love at Old Heather.

Atlanta
I sat and talked with my Bug where Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell and the
soldiers of our own war now pass the non-time. Saw Barry launch one
deep into the Georgia night; rode the elevator to the twenty-third
floor and found my fully grown daughter keeping an eye on the world;
lived in a cotton mill in the place where Martin Luther King slept and
dreamt. And for one moment had all that mattered of the world in my
right and left arms, happy in the Everybody Fields.

Sur
I prayed with the monks who live on the mountain above the sea, and in
the canyon and at Sand Dollar Beach with my favorite writer, and with
the Bishop and the hope for our future under the wings of the
butterfly house.

Stockton, etc.
I made the Altamont just in time to help celebrate a great heart
finding another decade, and found the familiar path to the Fruit Bowl
with my birthday Boo, and helped my brave little man find his own
steps to the dentist's chair, and with each sat in the best seats of
the best ballpark of the year's worst team. I painted a shed roof with
my youngest uncle in the place where I am most at home, and settled
into the pure living room calm with my dearest aunt. I played
pre-surgery pool at the Silver Peso, and saw Lake Tahoe and south fork
of the American River with my blood, and ate red tomatoes and oil from
the earth where the Red Rhino lives. I was healed again there at the
lake chateau by my second family, my rock.

I sat at a royal table with the first string and drank full acceptance
and two hundred year old love, and was joined by my firstborn, and her
friends and her beautiful, strong, new life, and her mother's heart,
and I knew then everything I needed to know.

And that it was time for me to come back.

Talk to you tomorrow,

David

Journal Entry 14 August 2007

2007-08-14T22:48:00.004+03:00

Usually the series of flights from here to Nairobi or back follow a similar pattern for me. I get to the airport, buy a Rolling Stone magazine, get on the plane, sleep, get to the next airport (JFK, Heathrow or Amsterdam) sleepwalk through it, board the next plane, sleep, wake up, eat and so on 'til I’m “there,’ Nairobi or SF. It’s more like a waking dream sequence than anything else. A somnambulist’s holiday.

This trip back, which began at 6:00am, July 25 was different. I was the Jonah of air travel. Every plane I stepped onto was immediately pulled out of the departure rotation and benched for an hour of two. I had a twelve hour layover at JFK, 9:00pm to 9:00 am, so a train ride into the city to see friends was a no go. Instead it was short cab ride to Rockaway, where a week earlier Jeremy Blake, a brilliant young artist had calmly taken off his clothes on the beach and walked finally into the sea. I walked with less purpose and more hesitation into the smoke-infused corridors of the Comfort Inn and passed the night in the uneasy chill of conditioned air and a vending machine dinner.
But the biggest difference in this trip was that I stayed awake most of the time and I spoke with others. From Nairobi to Heathrow I sat next to a Kenyan woman who works for the African Union and now lives in South Africa, heading to her daughter’s graduation from law school. She has been a political activist most of her adult life and we spoke about the November elections in Kenya and Kibaki’s chances for reelection.

I met Bettina from Copenhagen at Heathrow when we shared a table in the crowded space for EAT, a takeaway restaurant there. She had a prepackaged sushi combo wrapped in cellophane on a dimpled black styrofoam tray. She heads up international clinical trials for a biotech firm for people with head and neck cancer. I almost choked on my prawn tom fun soup. We passed a very pleasant half hour and made only half joking plans for a future Nairobi rendezvouz.

Waiting at gate 37, I met Susan, a State Department employee who has spent most of the last four years living in the green zone in Baghdad. She is back now, and still glowing from a week in Livorno where her boyfriend lives. Like many of us, she is in media res , but thinking about a posting in Afghanistan... where it’s safer. We stood in the aisle a good deal of the flight and I learned of a new generation of IED’s (improvised explosive devices) from Iran which pays little attention to armor plating as it’s searing its molten way though to the softer stuff inside, and the drinking habits of those with little to do and a lot to lose.

In my non-aisle seat, I’m flanked on the left by three early teen-aged Jewish lads, skull-capped, felt-hatted, prayer-shawled, frock-coated and forelocked, and to the right by a professor of Mexican history from Duke, his peacock-blue comb-up mohawk partially concealing a God-given monk’s tonsure.

The young guy next to me is a rocker; that is, he rocks, back and forth, a 60 degree travel, while reading a book in Hebrew with the smallest print I have ever seen. The uninventable oneness of it all is that he’s keeping perfect metronome time to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” that I’m listening to on my borrowed Bose headset. He tired and fell asleep on a down stroke just exactly as Pursuance/part 4 Psalm finished its heavenly ascent, his arms triangulated around the book, his springy forelocks bouncing lightly on the tray table.

I know I have been gone a while, and am much more up on events in Lebanon and Karachi than Washington, but I could have sworn that one of the flight attendants on the London/San Francisco leg was Karl Rove. Has it fallen out that way?

To close this picaresque segment, mercifully, a couple of travel tips --for free.

1. If you take rolling carry-on luggage, pack a canvas bag in it and before the plane takes off put all the stuff you really need in it and stash it under your seat. No more opening the overhead bin and tip toe wrasslin’ around trying to get your book or Airbourne or warm socks.

2. Order one of the special meals when you make your reservations. I suggest the kosher meal. The three guys next to me were hunched over nice, large pieces of salmon on a big tray, while I was pushing away little cubed beef bits and watery pasta.

Under the heading, "Everything you really need to know you can learn from the back of buses in Kenya"

A. Everybody being star struck about David Beckham coming to L.A. is largely unnecessary. As you can plainly see from these lifelike images,

He's not as handsome as you might think.

He's evidently an angry person.

He looks a lot like a werewolf, minus all the hair.

B. Early cowboys in particularly dry areas rode tapirs before they switched over to horses and mules, as a quick click on this image confirms.

C. Your kids aren't the only ones who like to call other people "stupid." This bus screams it in Kiswahili to everyone dumb enough to be behind it.

D. When life in Kenya get a little dull or uninspiring

you can just hop on over to the "Coke side of Life" as this country-wide ad campaign promises.

E. I forget exactly what this means or what you can learn from it,

but I'm pretty sure it's not how to say, "Have a nice day" to your new neighbors.

F. And finally, for your spiritual edification

Who knew??

Good to be back on the equatorial upside for a while,

David

Monte

2007-06-27T15:51:00.000+03:00

This is a story about a young man named Monte. Like many other young men, many things, some of them sad, happened that made him wonder. Unlike most others, Monte set out for Africa, in part, to sort them out. As you might expect, many things befell him, in the daytime and the night, and in those complicated shadows in between where, for the most part, we live.

He ate ugali and sukuma wikki at Gilbert’s in a driving rain storm.

He went to the town of Machakos to find some children there, and on the way he met a man who lived here

named Ishmail

who kept his motto very close to hand.

He found the children there

and they found him.

Moses, Joshua, Michael, Rachel, Matthew, Stephen, Samuel and a whole host of biblical names became flesh for him. If he found another home it was here, at Mary’s, surrounded by the recently recovered, crawled over, mauled and reshaped by the heart bandits.

Monte returned here again and again to find everything.

And because it was Africa, he went to the Mara to find the animals.

who invited him to lunch,

but he was too busy pestering the nice Malasian girl who had found her way there also, but after her long journey was too tired to bother with the animals.

He went to the village of Kimongo 2 to visit Peter and Kristine,

and he gathered children all along the way

until finally there was no more room at all in the truck.

He bought chapati and tea to add to lunch.

and found himself there in questionable company.

The children all waited right where they were the two hours he visited and ate lunch.

Then he brought them sweets

and they all threw up their arms in celebration.

He went to Mathare

even though so many had just died there

and found these new friends in a small center there.

And then he went to a place where girls who had seen far too much now earned their living making sweaters.

He came to know Joyce and Agnes and Josephine and Duko and Annie

and warmed himself by their fire.

Joyce gave him this basket she made for him and he brought her three kilos of fresh goat meat the day he left.

He found an old an true love,

and bore witness to the changed world from the Oakwood balcony one Nairobi evening.

He made many friends on his journey.

Some shorter than he

some taller

some about his size

some faster

some slower

some prettier,

some prettier and wiser.

And then it happened that his time was gone and he had to leave Africa. So he said good bye to all his friends, old and new, packed his small bag, shouldered it, and took it all with him.

The End...

For now...

The Truck Chronicles

2007-06-21T11:33:00.000+03:00

We set out full of hope and ignorance. And a fortnight later, it was ours. Not the Jesus cup or the coordinates for Atlantis. Not even the Southern Pole by foot. Something more elusive and improbable -- a decent used pick up truck in Nairobi. I pestered my contacts here, rounded up info, and Monte and Masa, the finest taxi driver south of the equator, and sometimes Tony, and I teamed up and followed trails, cold and hot. It seemed a straightforward thing, but like the square root of two, it turned out to be a stumper.

Day one brought us this. A used car salesman named Kim who took us to see a guy about a truck... a shiny red truck, 2006, Nissan.

Looked good...bent frame.

The above photo Monte took put him in mind of this famous shot of Kerouac’s cohort similarly engaged.

But I get to be Neil, though, right??

This 1999 Isuzu Kim showed us sounded like an unoiled threshing machine.

Looked bad ...sounded worse

We drove down Thika Road to see a man about 2000 something Isuzu pick up truck

Looked good...too expensive

We went the other way, to Hurlinghum to ...Ya Ya Motors...to see a man about a 1996 Toyota pick up truck. No doubt the Sisterhood has claimed this lot as its own because of Kamau, the strikingly handsome salesman.

Looked good...wrong price

We split the border between Pangani and Mathare

and the street boys sniffing glue and sifting garbage

to see a farmer about a 2000 Toyota pick up truck. We felt particularly safe in this small enclosure, because as you can see, this space was...

Looked bad...wrong year

Even given Kenyans’ general innattention to dates and years, passing this 1993 off as a 2000 was Ocean’s 13-style daring. (There is a small, nearly impervious tag at the base of the seat belts that indicates the year of manufacture.) The owner, a nice man, offered the 600,000 kilometer reading on the odometer as clear proof of his honesty. It is true that all the others we looked at had been rolled back with vigor. A ten year old truck with a 42,000 kilometer reading, for example (something less than 30,000 miles).

These two identical Toyota pick ups had had their spirits and suspensions broken by life on a tea farm if I remember correctly. From their price you might assume they had been served tea every day on the tea farm.

Looked tired...were tired

This one’s cosmetics couldn’t cover its beleagured true self. Even the salesman, Gitau, admitted as much.

Looked fancy... acted plain

We were actually on the way to buy the other pick up in the above photo, just the right fender showing. A 1999 that had been a country rather than a city mouse its whole life. It was the pick of the very challenged litter that our saviour mechanic, Marzio, had checked out for us. We were all dulled and beaten down from the search and had decided to end it, like a lopsided fight, here and now. We got in a bit of a traffic jam on Muranga Rd. when I saw this beauty sitting there.

Masa knew of it, but it was more than we wanted to spend. OK. He turned around to avoid the jam and as he drove back by I asked him to pull into the lot. It was a 2001 Toyota, petrol (not deisel), automatic, just brought over from Japan. It was the only automatic we saw, and a big plus with all the wrong handed shifting, etc. It also hadn’t been broken by the unimaginably bad Kenyan roads for the last six years, and it had the only clean oil I had come across in a slough of dip stick removals.

Looked good...was good

The owner, Robert, came down a little on the price the next day and so we eventually did some business.

or became friends, if you adopt Robert's stance. Maybe that's why he thought it ok to start holding hands right off the bat.

Our first and last date.

To cement our new "friendship," Robert suggested we get some Kenyan girls and go camping upcountry. I demurred.

A few side notes:

We didn't change clothes off camera for dramatic effect. The chase took place on several long days in Nairobi over the course of a week and a half or so.

I don't know who snuck in and doctored the photos, but all of the trucks, like air brushed centerfolds, look so much better in the pictures than in person.

Finally, Monte, the chronicler of the this escapade, is almost invisible in the photos, but he was there through every grueling automotive interview, advising, encouraging and making the whole mess a lot less messy.

This photo was taken less than one minute after I began driving in Nairobi, and not more than two actual minutes before my first "ticket" driving in Nairobi.

Everything is reversed here, right? You drive on the opposite side, steering wheel on the opposite side, etc. I came to a red light, and wanted to make a left turn (the equivalent of a right hand turn in the US). I wondered if I could. I stopped, waited, no cars, conferred with Monte, deliberated further, decided to go. Five second later, a thinner, less friendly version of Panch from CHPS pulled up next to me and asked me why I had done the awful thing I did. I apologized, pleaded, accurately, ignorance on so many levels, promised never to do this again, but we were on our way to the police station, or more precisely, the back of the police station. After a long and very boring, parentally toned, and often incorrect disquisition on international and Kenyan traffic rules, came the punch line -- we can settle this without having to bother the important people inside for 5000 kenya shillings, clearly the mzungu price. I pretended to call my lawyer to check this out with him, "too much," I said. When the price fell to 2000ks (about $30 US). I ponied up, pledged my reformed behavior, and said good bye to my new friend who promised he would salute me when he saw me again. I continue to be be ticket free, and my only vehicular crime since is shortening Monte's young life by ten or twenty years from his spot in the passenger's seat.

The same night that we got the truck, Monte and I decided to dig deep into our moth eaten (mine, anyway) pockets and have dinner at the Trattoria, by any accounting, a good Italian restaurant. We met Kirby and Laura, our dinner companions, and walked there. A warm Nairobi night, a 2001 Toyota truck safely tucked in the underground parking at Nakumatt, a table on the second floor balcony, and lovely company. So many new things.

The steak Florentine was too rare. The first bite fussed and resisted going down. It began as a group experience. I remember telling the waiter, through and around the half-swallowed bite, to cook it more. I remember Monte saying, “Are you all right?” Then the little hunk of beef went further, but not all the way, down, and I was admitted to that private parlor of people who are dying, of those who have no oxygen. Like the death zone at the top of Everest, but with a lot less waiting around.

Here the drama plays out in pantomime. It’s not unlike chatting pool side with friends and then stepping off into the deep end. There is movement but no sound, and the experience at that moment becomes entirely solitary. I remember the wine taken to force the meat down, cascading with maybe a little risotto from my nose and the spreading stain on my white linen napkin. And I remember thinking how quickly things had turned and how unexpected all this dying was and how inconvenient. And how simple things had become. I didn’t need a 30,000 liter water tank anymore, or a new pair of shoes or dark chocolate, or even the love of my family. I needed a little shot of air. But it might as well have been a little piece of Mars.

The keener among you have already figured out the ending. The little engine that could, did. And that improperly chewed chunk was evicted by a desperate diaphragm from its snug new home. And I popped up out of the water and rejoined my friends: Monte, all athleticism and quick twitch muscle, a split second from a table leap and the Heimlich, Laura and Kirby still straddling stunned and relieved, and the waiter, thrilled at the averted fatality.

I chewed more thoroughly. We skipped dessert, sat and talked instead, and breathed in Nairobi’s polluted, lovely, night air.

On the maiden voyage of the truck, Monte and I brought about 1500 pounds of fresh produce, donated by a new friend, Christian, who owns a produce exporting business, to Mary’s.

Christain, Mary and I with the first load.

A few of the first beneficiaries of Christian’s generosity and the project’s new vehicle at Mary's.

Monte and his protector, Josephine

Matthew and Courage and a Giants' fan

In addition to Mary's kids, the bi-weekly deliveries will be distributed, through a network established by Mary to over five hundred orphans, identified in the Machakos area. She is confident that the infux of fresh, fruits and vegetables will result in a noticeable upswing in the health of the orphan population there.

So now we're in the produce delivery business. What could be better?

The green grocers,

Monte and David

28 May 2007

2007-05-28T16:24:00.000+03:00

Here’s an update on some of the local and Project news items.

Wilson

Wilson, the young man who is the first person I hired here and who used to live on and manage the property and oversee the work there is now in his second semester at Moi University, and has been accepted into the School of Medicine there. His considerable fees for tuition, living expenses, books, etc. are being met through the the generosity of an RROP donor couple. He visited me a few weeks ago and we had a great reunion. He has applied the same determination and energy to his studies that he did when he was planting trees and putting up the eight acre perimeter fence (still the finest and strongest fence in the area) and chasing hyenas off the property.
Wilson on the property, Halloween last year.

Here are a couple of recent Email excerpts from him:

“At first, dissecting was so scary and I didn't believe that actually God made us
in the same way, I would go round watching other cadavour specimens to make sure that really they were similar and I was amazed to learn that really they are, I have grown to love anatomy as I’m discovering ourself, I’m glad that I’m a vegetarian.”

Wilson and Gabe squeezing through the keyhole into cyberspace.

“...I am writing to say thank very much for your help David. You have really put me in a safe state for I have already settled school fees for this semester. I'm feeling so relieved for as some of my fellow college mates are struggling with the settling of school fees I am busy working on my objectives for this term.”

“...Thank you very much and may the almighty God bless all the works of your hands abundantly. You have really uplifted me since I met you. Be blessed!”

“...I'll forever live to cherish your heartful help, and from you I'm learning a lot of lessons; be forever blessed.”
Yours thankfully
Wilson

And of course when Wilson is thanking me, he is thanking us, you, everyone who is helping to make the project, and so, his education, possible. So thanks, all of you.

Mary

Most of you by now know Mary from Springs of Hope, her center for rescued babies in Machakos, either from seeing her on the DVD or reading about my and Gabe’s visits there.

Mary with some of her rescued children.

Gabe at Mary's doing one of the things he does best.

Mary has had a very difficult time the last several months, struggling financially as well as in other ways. When I returned to Kenya, just before Easter, we talked long and seriously about our respective visions for the work, which in every important way are exactly parallel. She and I, and her project and our project have been brought together in a way that is bound by common purpose and uncommon trust.

The end result of our discussion and many discussions with Greg is a commitment to work together, to become partners in our efforts. Mary’s kids have become our kids. Not just in the sense that they will eventually come and live at our children’s home when they are five years old or so, but right now, when they need our help as badly as they will later on. We will help to manage the financial burden that has often been crushing for Mary and her family, and will do our best to insure that the work will not only continue, but flourish.

Our obligation begins and ends with our word to her. We are in the process of deciding the best way to put shoe leather to our plan, and we will have something finalized in the next couple of weeks to share with you.

We don't want him ever to have to go it alone.

Christian

I met a Dutch man here, Christian, through a mutual friend. He owns a very large farming concern here and exports vegetables and some fruits by air freight to Western Europe. We are working out the final details of an arrangement which will deliver once a week a ton or so of fresh produce to Machakos, where it will be distributed through an already established network, with Mary at the hub, to about a thousand orphans living in the area. When I get a pick up truck, hopefully very soon, we will be able to increase the deliveries to twice a week. This will go long way to giving these orphans a reliable, nutritious food source.

Monte

Monte Macias, a former student (St. Mary’s ‘92) and good friend of mine is here to work on the project for a couple of months. Like the pilgrim of the Commedia, he is thirty three and nel mezzo cammin. He is smart and serious and funny. He has come to help and to see what is there in the helping. He is very good company and by his presence has eased me out of my too often solitary ways here. I am very lucky to have him here and grateful for his presence. Most importantly...he is a fine basketball player.

Here’s Monte in Uhuru Park in Nairobi, at the beginning of the great pickup truck search.

Trip

Gilbert has built a small chicken house, reminiscent of the drift wood sculptures that used to liven up the Emoryville mud flats.

We have a dozen or so chickens and have rented the services of Joyce’s rooster for a week to perk up our egg production.

The big boy himself

This is preparatory to our raising free range chickens in quantity for sale to local restaurants. Trip, our faithful, if off kilter, dog, ate one of the chickens. Fearing the inexorable rising of blood lust in her veins, I sat her down, looked hard at her and quoted the portentous last line of Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” to her...”You must change your life.” Trip returned my gaze but held her own counsel.

Trip the chicken killer and the new guy, Mohawk.

The very first eggs.

Gilbert

Gilbert, who lives on the property and manages the work crew, is getting married in May, to Mildred, his fiancee. Gilbert will go back home for about a week and a half, and have a memorial service for his mother who died last year, and then have the wedding ceremony. We are giving him as a wedding gift one of the cows he will present to Mildred's parents as part of the marriage contract.

Gilbert, the fence builder, the groom.

Yours truly before Stanley the barber got a hold of me again, signing off for now.

I will be making shorter more frequent entries to try to keep you updated until our new website is up and operational. It has eluded capture so far, and is still running loose somewhere out there. So brace yourself.

Your pal in Kenya,

David

PS Tell my daughters to email me

PPS I sent out an email to everyone on my list a couple of weeks ago and that would have missed many of you. I'll include it here. Same offer. If you're in, you get a jersey and some playing time.

Hello again,

It seems to me a good idea to coordinate the efforts made by those of
you who pray for the project or who would like to start. I'll make an
email list of only those who ask to be on it, and send a weekly note
of specific things to pray for and will update the progress on those
items in subsequent weeks. We've got other teams working on stuff for
the project, none more important than this.

So, if you want to really help, and you pray, this is the horse to ride.

I'll compose the list on May 14th. (Date extended now) If you email me at dwsaunders@gmail.com
before then...you're in.

Lots of love from Kenya,

David

17 May 2007

2007-05-15T21:15:00.000+03:00

A reminder for some and maybe new info for others: you can enlarge any of the photos by clicking on it, click the "back" arrow to return. If you want to feel better about how your own day is going, a click on the photo of Julius and me standing in the road should do the trick.

Well, there were 2.5 winners to last entry's love fest, smarty pants quiz.

What do Ecalogue X (10), part of a series of poems by Virgil, a first century B.C. poet (and Dante’s guide), The Prioress’ Tale by Chaucer, one of the lesser known paintings by the 16th century Baroque painter, Carravagio, and a song from Deep Purple’s 1990 album, Masters and Slaves, all have in common?

Here's winner #1's response

M Gleeson

Ferrari full o' chips?

Apr 26
The phrase “Love Conquers All” is in each.

Megan Gleeson, M.Ed.

Megan even had the added joy of pointing out her former teacher's misspelling of Caravaggio in the full text of her response. As you can see, a true smarty pants. Megan will be receiving this beauty for her efforts.

And in a generous gesture by the awards committee, to complete Megan's dream prize, the car will be filled with this wonderful assortment of Kettle chips

What do you say to that, Megan?

And the second full fledged winner is my own sister- in-law, Patti.

Who sent this on April 26
Lots of "love conquers all"!...
hope that's close!
Hope you are well! We're going to go cheer the Pads on this weekend while they take on the STINKING DODGERS...
Giants are doing much, much better too!!!
xoxo
Patti

Patti will be headed to future Padre's games in this sporty model,

passing out these, the best chips in the world

to everyone lucky enough to be seated near her and Bob.

The .5 winner is Jim Micheletti, who in a somewhat slothful but terrifically intuitive and insightful approach sent this in on April 10:

I can't recall the question, but he answer is love. Always love...

Peace and Love,

Jim Micheletti & Family

I wanted to enclose a photo of Jim, but he is, I think, doing time in a teacher's jail somewhere in the Sierras for believing and acting on the subversive belief that students in AP English classes should be engaged in reading literature and writing their young hearts out rather than simply preparing for the AP exam. His .5 of a Ferrari and a half bag of chips will be awaiting him upon his release.

So, well done to all the contestants, and to all of us who were reminded where the real juice is.

Last Wednesday I was headed into Nairobi. Because it is expensive for
me to get there, I try to fill up the day. Masa, the driver, showed up
at a quarter to eight. It had been raining hard the last couple of
days, and the five kilometers of dusty, suspension busting, molar
loosening bull ride road, had, let's say, softened. Masa and I and a
young local woman who was onboard after giving us the universal Kenyan appeal, the roadside arm bent 60 degrees at the elbow, palm upturned and rotated slightly laterally, part plaintive plea, part humanitarian decree,

"you've got room, we're all in this together, have a heart brother,
transport is very expensive, you know I'd help you, c'mon mzungu,"

were making our sloppy way toward the main road.

Four kilometers later, a Daystar bus was angled across most of the
road, settled in like a wooly mammoth in a tar pit. Heaving and
groaning, but stuck hard.

There was maybe enough room to go around and be just a little bit in
the ditch to the left. We crept by but got a lot in the ditch. I got
out to push and see if we couldn't right the listing ship.

The steps downward look like this.

Step 1 - you try not to get your shoes too muddy

Step 2 - you try not to get too wet once it starts raining again

Step 3 - you try not to get mud "all over" your pants

Step 4 - you try not to slip and drown in the morass

Julius, a regular worker on the property and his friend came along. He
pitched right in, and his friend, too, after a while. Over the next
fifty minutes or so, we got soaked through, made about fifty meters
progress, but couldn't get the left side of the car out of the ditch.
No matter what.

A group of guys came by, including the bus driver who caused all of
this hullabaloo, and told Julius in Kiswahili they would help, but
wanted money to do it. He passed the info on to me. There was about as
much chance of that happening as my pulling a spoon out of my pocket
and eating a pound of the mud inside my shoe. I gave them a different
universal gesture, and, umbrella-ed, they moved on. We pushed and
yanked and wedged and generally had a fine time without at all
improving our position. After completely giving over to being swimming-pool wet, and covered in mud, my spirits improved, and I settled into the experience. The normally unflappable Masa, (right Gabe?) when he occasionally poked his head out the driver's side window would only say, "This is tay ree bool. This is tay ree bool."

The mercenaries cruised up again and, full of nobility and purpose,
announced they were here to rescue us. Evidently the sight of a
drowned, mud covered rat of a mzungu slogging and grunting in the mud for an hour pricked their seared consciences, and they pitched in--sort of--for free. They positioned themselves in spots where they could stay relatively clean while Julius and his friend and I hunkered down in the ditch like swamp creatures. But, rescue us they did, and we got Masa's beloved Toyota mid-road again, and we were off.

I was sitting in the pile of mud I had brought in with me, enjoying
the slimy, granulated goodness under me like a toddler with an extra
full diaper.

I had meetings scheduled with our lawyer, an engineer, our architect,
a guy troubleshooting a sticky problem for us, and Sister Mary, the
head of Nyumbani, since Fr. D'Agostino's sad and sudden passing last
November. We couldn't go back and change. The road was blocked. So we drove to Nairobi, heater blasting and feeling like we had just busted out of jail. We stopped at a kind of gas station in Mlulongo. I got out and Masa asked if there was someplace we could get cleaned up.

No, just the bathroom.

I found a five gallon bucket and took it with me to
Gehenna. There was a spigot there. I took off each piece of clothing
in turn and washed it in the bucket. My clothes weren't muddy, they
were mud. The bucket silted up like an old dam. We filled it and
refilled it. I took off my shoes stuck them under the spigot and
washed them inside and out. I was standing there barefoot, with very
little on when a busload of Kenyan businessmen came pouring in to use
the urinals. I kept at it and they seemed quietly convinced that
nothing was out of bounds in mzungu behavior. Julius and I poured our
strength into the wringing out, and I flapped each article madly, then
put it back on wet, but considerably cleaner.

Exhibit A

The extra beautiful part of this particular scene was that even though the bathroom was in the top five disgusting places I have been in Kenya (I'll spare you those details), I felt I should tip the guy we asked to compensate for our further desecration of it. After we were done, you could have planted corn in the rich layer of topsoil on that bathroom floor, but there wasn't the time. I palmed him a "hundred" shilling note (a little over a buck), folded and muddy. I found out a couple of days later it was a thousand shilling note, and so now Masa gets his car washed there for free.

I missed the appointment with the lawyer, but made all the others,
warming in increments as the day wore on. My big break came across the street from the Terminal Hotel, where Masa was parked. The sun came out and these big industrial vents, where I stood for half an hour barefoot, my shoes and socks laid out on the curb, blow dried me--all except for the socks, which were a complete loss. I squished my way sockless through the rest of the meetings.

We got back late, after nine o'clock, and as it hadn't rained anymore
that day in Lukenya, were confident we could navigate the 5 kilometers. I was...
very tired. At almost the same spot, about 1 kilometer from the
Nairobi/Mombassa Road, monolithic in the dark, was another Daystar
bus, stuck as a duck, a goofy, unrepentant grin on its grill. Masa had
to back up the 1k to the main road where we were supposed to wait for
the bus to be moved, or for the earth to open up and swallow us, which
seemed both more likely and desirable. I was headed to the back of the
car to open the trunk lid so I could slam my head in it, when we
caught a break. A neighbor, whose wife was also stranded here had
driven his other car down to just the other side of the stuck bus. We
slogged our torch lit way to his car and so I was delivered to my door
at about 10:30 pm, almost dry.

The End

April 8, Easter Sunday, 2007

2007-04-09T22:53:00.000+03:00

Tuesday, April 2nd

It was Bubba’s fifth birthday on April 3rd, just a few days after my own third year anniversary of sorts. I got him a small Casio keyboard with a headset microphone. You can make the notes sound like almost anything--church organ, rock guitar, oboe...sort of... and set a tempo for he synth percussions--pop, classical, samba. Bubba took to it like a stylist to hair gel, and was very soon pouring his young heart out in an improvised, amplified croon “Baby, I wish I was here,” (the ultimate Zen love song?) to a perky bossa nova beat.

Bubba giving directions by walkie-talkie to the rest of the alien invasion force.

If the rechargeable batteries in my camera hadn’t taken a powder, you would find here pictures of the day I brought to Boo Boo’s class some African stuff and they sat on the floor of a darkened classroom, huddled around my lap top and the changing photos like it was the source of fire, Boo Boo leaning against me and whispering logistical directives to me. “We should show them the giraffe you brought me,” or lining up her classmates for their brief squat on the small, carved wooden stool, or cautioning Julie and Philip to be sooo careful with the Maasai spear. But since they did, you will have to take my word that it was the sweetest and best thing I did this time home, and that leaving grand kids is worse than a trip to the dentist after your dental insurance has expired and hearing that the best possible scenario is a root canal, and not getting that.

Thursday, April 4th

Yesterday found me, in the best of company, at the ball park, Giant’s opening day. Then Il Fornaio for dinner, and a late last minute foray to the Stonestown Galleria to try to find a pair of running shoes, and inspite of my mall phobia--mission accomplished. Today it’s row 21 seat A, to Chicago and then London and some reflective peripheral moving glint that had me turning quickly to look out the window and imagining that furry wing gremlin from Rod Serling’s world doing bad things at 33,000 feet. And tomorrow, Nairobi, with its cruelest roads and kindest people, and an eight acre parcel with ten thousand acacia trees in four perimeter- hugging rows, waiting for the now overdue long rains.

Chicago/O’Hare Airport

I’m padding around O’Hare, where I will spend exactly 1/6 of this day, in my new flip flops and an ancient cashmere sweater, among women in cardigans and the overpowering smell of baked goods. I’m writing with my new pen, a gift from the woman who sat next to me on the flight here, an Ohio State fan in mourning, and an employee of Hilman, the name engraved on the blonde wooden body of the pen, off to meet her husband and then to Singapore. The travel alert has ripened from yellow to orange today. A festive color. Tibetan prayer flags. Monks robes. Slight snow flurries on the other side of the floor to ceiling glass panes, like self-propelled super gnats, buzzing every which way.

Friday, April 6th

If there is an opening for the 2008 Olympic airplane sleeping team, I may have to put the project on hold and try out. I was up most all of Tuesday night packing, and Gabe woke me at 3:00am Wednesday morning to take me to SFO. I slept about two and a half hours of the SF to Chicago leg, exactly half of the eight hours from Chicago to London, and finished strong, logging a solid five of eight London To Nairobi.

I got a taxi at the airport, 2000ks, and was finally within reach. Just past Mlulongo, in a haze of midnight dust and diesel fumes, the traffic was stopped. Both ways. Dead. I got out. Two machine gunned soldiers, back lit in the headlight dust, walking towards us pointed to an overland route. A new crush of stopped cars, but some hope in the hilly dirt path. It’s hard to describe the scene. Pitch dark African night, dust everywhere, the headlights’ gleam dimmed as through murky water, huge trucks, all old and patched together, cars, matatus...stopped, no consensus direction, all trying to crawl over uneven hilly, soft ground. People out of vehicles walking every direction, diesel motors idling, absolutely no one in charge. We sought the narrow passage in the hourglass jam and were one car away from what seemed substantial progress when the small, old Mercedes in front of us got center pointed in the soft dirt hillock, the two left side tires completely free from earthly contact, the back one spinning like a gyroscope, the right rear burrowing like an aardvark, and soon safely buried. We got out and with a half dozen others jammed stuff under the aardvark wheel and rocked and pushed and tried to avoid the magnificent rooster tail arc of powder-fine dust. Our twenty year old Nissan with its inch and a half clearance was no match for this route. The summit attempt was a no go. We conferred with the half dozen cars on the Hillary Step behind us and we waddled and backed our way down in search of a passable route. I reached home sweet home just before midnight Nairobi time Thursday April 5th, having left the City at 6:15am Wednesday April 4th.

I spent the next day, Friday, in a dozen happy variations and repetitions of this conversation:

“Hello David!! How is it that side (In the US)?”

“Very well. All of your friends there greet you, and my family sends their greetings to you and your family”

“We have received them. Thank you very much.”
“We have missed you and can now be happy you have returned.”

“Thank you. I am happy to be here with you.”

“You are most welcome. Karibu.”

All this with generous hand shaking, sometimes hugging, and the European three-kiss howdy.

Saturday, April 7

I saw Joyce and Agnes yesterday, and, of course, the children there: Victoria, Christina, her sister, Kasavu, her brother, whom I had not met, Little Joyce, Annie, Josephine, and Kuvu, a new addition about Victoria’s age, and a charmer. I brought small gifts, laundry soap, protein powder for the youngster’s milk, a few clothes, and a pair of used shoes. I sat on a very low stool with a bad leg in the always darkened hut, most often in comfortable silence, broken by peek-a-boo induced laughter and the small news we could communicate. The unfiltered impulse I feel when Joyce looks right at me is to propose marriage, though she is seventy and much too pretty for the likes of me. So I resist.

The long rains have not yet come. They are now nearly a month late. The ten thousand acacia seedlings on the property are hanging in there, though if the rains don’t come this weekend we will begin to water them by hand, bucket by bucket on the eight acre perimeter. Gilbert, Wilson’s cousin and replacement in the project, has managed well in my long absence. Holding the fort. Julius, Peter and the other workers are well. Now with the dry weather, antelope are eating the leaves of the tiny trees nearest the fence at night. We will put the three acre plot under woven wire up to a one meter height in addition to the existing barbed wire to keep them safe. Julius trapped an antelope, and in the predawn hours our acacia thorn-in-the-side neighbor, David, trespassed and stole it from the snare. These are very small antelope, smaller than Thompson’s gazelles, but the meat is a prize. I found Julius and David arguing and settled the matter by telling David that he could keep the meat as an Easter present from me, and reminded him as I looked hard into his liar’s eyes and shook his antelope bloodied hand that Easter, on every calendar, comes only once a year.

Sunday, April 8

I awoke this Easter morning at 3:30am with thoughts of rebirth and love. It is exactly three years now since my diagnosis and the onslaught of treatments, and looking straight at odds that chase smart gamblers from the table; from the interminable vomiting and the months without eating or even swallowing, from the ICU and other things not fit to mention here. And for all of those nightmare layers piled on top of one another, the most vivid memory I have of that time is of being loved, by my family and friends, and those with me, and cared for in ways it is impossible to expect, but in your secret heart you might hope for.

And on top of that, I’ve been experiencing random moments of deep happiness for the first time after a very long dry spell. So I’ve got a big, fat, full Easter basket, and hope you do, too.

Why don’t we wind up this love fest with a little quiz on that subject. You can email your answers to me at:

dwsaunders@gmail.com

and the winner will get something very cool ...like a Ferrari or a huge bag of Honey Mustard potato chips, and his or her name(s) published for all the world to see in the next journal entry, and probably a job offer from Harvard or Google for being such a smarty pants.

Here goes:

What do Ecalogue X (10), part of a series of poems by Virgil, a first century B.C. poet (and Dante’s guide), The Prioress’ Tale by Chaucer, one of the lesser known paintings by the 16th century Baroque painter, Carravagio, and a song from Deep Purple’s 1990 album, Masters and Slaves, all have in common?

Feel free to collaborate. There are plenty of cars and chips.

And inspite of this cup-overflowing goodness, the blog site where I post this questionable material is in the crapper, or at least our relationship is. I can’t upload the rest of the photos that make this fare palatable. I’ll try to have them up in a day or two, and will send a note to those of you on the notification list. If you want to get on that list, email me.

Pray for rain, or at least that a chunk of the polar ice cap, which seems to be heading south in installments, will come our way so we can cool the trees with it.

Yours in Kenya,

David

February 16, 2006

2007-02-08T03:06:00.000+03:00

Well I’m back with a tiny little journal entry. I’m still in California, getting antsy to return to Kenya, and working hard to enable that to happen. I’ll catch you up on the developments later.

In the last entry, I mentioned that you were more than welcome to help with the project in whatever way you might want. Some of you since then have asked for suggestions as to what might be the most effective way to do just that. Well, here’s my two cents worth.

For the couple of months before I returned, I was working to produce a DVD for the project.

With Gabe, my godson, who was then in Kenya, at my side a good deal of the time, we edit and reedited and chopped and cut and pasted and inserted and deleted and cursed and prayed and fainted and wept. I brought the nearly completed version back with me and with the generous and invaluable help of Barbara Daly, a videographer in Stockton, put the finishing touches on it...all eleven minutes of it. We left out the chariot race scene so it wouldn’t be mistaken for Ben-Hur, The Sequel. Inspite of my shaky film making debut, it manages to some degree to convey the situation, the vision, the plan, and the aching need.

We have made lots of copies, and you can have one if you want. And then you can gather people that you know and love together, show the DVD and give them the opportunity to give to the project. The DVD does most of the work. If you’d like Greg and/or I to be there, you need only ask, and have extra cookies.

This little video tupperware party is one very effective and relatively painless way to be a part of the fundraising effort that is so crucial for the project at this time. The results of small gatherings like this has been amazing. So be the first on your block! And give the kids in Kenya a late Valentine’s present.

If you have any questions at all or want some snack suggestions--don't hesitate.
My email address is: dwsaunders@gmail.com

See you at the movies,

David

24 January 2007

2007-01-17T06:28:00.000+03:00

Hello again,

If, as Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. Then perhaps by extension, family are those who, when they tell you to come home, you have to come there.

I got sick in November, a bacterial infection and probably a little malaria. I got prompt treatment and have recovered well, and hearing the clarion call from mi familia, came back to California a little earlier than I had planned, and have been back now for for about eight weeks, visiting and eating and working on the project and eating and playing a little basketball and eating. I apologize for the long absence.

Things Africa-side are cooking along. We have a thrice revised site plan, very close to a final rendition and we have the plans for the buildings, drawn and revised. The five acres and the three acre addition are all fenced and we have planted 10,000 acacia seedlings (two varieties) in four staggered rows along the entire perimeter.

We will train them into a very thick, impenetrable hedge, and then, as a natural component of our self-sufficiency and sustainability model, we will selectively harvest trimmed branches to provide the wood fuel needed for cooking everyday. We can also, when the hedge matures, produce ecologically friendly charcoal to be used and sold for cooking fuel. The non-sustainable production of charcoal is one of the main reasons that so much of Kenya has been deforested in the last few decades, with devastating ripple effects.

Wilson, the young man who has been living and working on the property is off to Moi University to study medicine. I have written about him a number of times before. He is the first person to benefit in a life changing way from our efforts. He was completely without resources to pay the university tuition and fees, and through specific generosity, that situation was remedied. Wilson will be a fine doctor and healing arts he learns will help keep the orphans at the Red Rhino Children’s Home in fine fettle for many years to come.

Here's Wilson on the property last Halloween.

Wilson and Gabe just before the fateful pumpkin toss and subsequent pumpkin tragedy.

Our friends and neighbors are mostly well, although Joyce, the seventy year old grandmother of Victoria and Christina, both of whom live with her, got very, very sick just before I left. After her third day in bed, I was afraid she was going to die, so I took her and one of the other babies who lives with her, Annie, who had a very bad respiratory infection, to Nairobi Hospital to see my doctor there.

Joyce the day before I took her to the hospital.

Annie on the same day

He treated them both. Joyce was doing much better by the time I left, but Annie’s respiratory infection, so common among the children there, particularly during the rainy season, has proven more stubborn. The rattling, labored, shallow breathing of one or more of the babies there is a backdrop to every visit to their little shack.

The short rains this December were very heavy around Christmas time, making the always nearly impassable roads completely so for days at a time, and turning Nairobi into a grid of brown rivers flashing through potholed streets forded by Land Rovers, ancient Isuzu pick up trucks, wobbly bicyclists, and umbrella-ed Kenyans, pants legs rolled, slpashing through street-rivers throughout city center.

Christmas at home was what in a moment of unguarded optimism you might hope for--a big sack, smudged with chimney soot, filled with new bicycles and old friends and gathered family and Boo Boo and Bubba and enough love and hilarity to swaddle the pain of loss in genuine comfort.

Boo Boo and a favorite present

An incomplete police line up of the usual suspects at Christmas at Aunt Rosie's

Watching "Little Miss Sunshine" with little miss sunshine.

A quick pep talk...

Bubba the daredevil in footies.

Boo Boo setting the land speed record on the Michigan Street Salt Flats.

I spent a few days between Christmas and New Years’ in San Francisco, in a lovely apartment in the Mission District, offered by friends of mine and the project who have moved to Brussels and have plans to come to Kenya and work on the project this Spring. Janine organized a Friday afternoon get together where she works and showed the video to her colleagues and raised money for the project. So thank you Migdalia and Janine.

Mornings I’d walk to the Nervous Dog coffee house and sit in an overstuffed chair and read the “Onion” and the Chronicle with a latte and a croissant and then roam the Mission afoot. I remember a young man, a boxer’s face, on the corner of Mission and Highland smoking a cigarette, his foot-long white shoe laces trailing up the sloped sidewalk like tide-pulled seaweed; and a small market down the block with a garrote draped over the shoulders of a fuse box on the wall behind the cash register, perfectly bowed, thin piano wire, two round four inch wooden handles grooved to accept the the wire; and a ketchup packet that I had passed on the sidewalk on the way down, now flattened, an arc of red on the cement, a miniature crime scene for Dexter to decipher.

Stockton hasn’t been without its little observational gems, either.

Standing in the pick up line at the Stockton Kaiser pharmacy, these two names appeared alone on the LCD screen which announces whose prescriptions are ready:

Wright,J

Wong,J

So, in this case anyway, it makes no difference whether you are Wright or Wong, you can get what you need.

At the same time, on the soundless , subtitled T.V. mounted above us, an animated feature was playing. A young, horse-mounted Native American brave was leaping on his painted pony a Grand Canyon-like gorge to escape the cavalry’s pursuit. With head flung back and arms outstretched in exultation and cosmic surrender he flew...while the black-boxed text silently announced “stirring theme music playing.” I was appropriately stirred, and armed with my medicine, I leaped across the parking lot, and even though there was no cavalry in sight, I figured I wouldn’t take any chances.

I spent a lovely, frigid weekend in Lake Tahoe with my family, a few days in Reno visiting Billy, and a quiet, prayerful time in Big Sur with my dear friend Chris.

Sweet, cold Boo Boo

The starting gate.

Bubba in full flying penguin mode

JuJu and a cold mzungu

I’ll be headed back to Kenya as soon as we raise the 200k necessary to begin construction. Yes, you are more than welcome to help in any way you want.

So long for now, and let’s talk soon.

From sunny, freezing California,

David

God be with you, Larry, my dear brother.

Sunday and Monday

2006-09-26T21:39:00.000+03:00

Sunday and Monday

I met Fr. Kilonzo at the Catholic church here, Mary Mount Chapel, at 7:30 am. I had arranged with him to go to Kimogo 1 to the mass he says there in the small school house room. We got in his small, older Nissan sedan and headed out for the five kilometer ride. What starts as a reasonable dirt road quickly turns into a mule path, winding over rock escarpments, dry gullies and an assortment of lunar terrain. About half way there we were stopped by a man who had obviously run to intersect us. He jumped in and we changed course to pick up his wife and kids, waiting back at their place, a neatly laid out arrangement of sheep pens, goat pens, a farm house and some out buildings. Soon we were eight in the car, and some large bundles. Only Fr. Kilonzo and I in the front. The back was crowded, even by tuk-tuk standards, so I motioned and a ten or eleven year old boy climbed over the seat and plopped his bony haunches on my lap. We bumped and rattled and scraped our way to church, unfolded ourselves out of the car and reassumed our true sizes.

People were wandering in and a group of dancers was rehearsing outside, and others were just carrying on their Sunday morning business in the area just outside the classroom/church meeting room.

The blue structure in the background is the community toilets.

This little cowboy was on his way, with the rest of his family, in the next photo, to get water, about five kilometers away.

Riding away on his horse.

This is the group of dancers that was practicing outside before mass started.

This is the back side of a house that borders the open area outside the church room.

Fr. Kilonzo heard confessions down at the far corner of this building for about twenty minutes.

And then we all went in for mass. Fr.Kilonzo gave me the run of the place and told the congregation that I would be taking pictures to show my friends in the U.S. I video taped a good deal of the mass. The service was lathered with spirit and the Spirit. It had better singing and cooler dancing than the last Stones' concert I went to.

The celebrity readers' lineup wasn't bad either. If you click on these two photos to enlarge them, you'll recognize, I'm sure, a philosopher you might not immediately associate with Sunday services (this one's for you, Jim) and a maybe still famous celebrity sharing the gospel reading duties.

Fr. Kilonzo spoke only in Kiswahili, so my translation was gesture and cadence and some other indefinable shared understanding. All in all, I judged it a fine sermon.

About that time a very drunk man came in. He was received and given a seat.

He was, at times, disruptive and someone would sit near him and whisper to him or gently cover his mouth. He took a shine to the camera and came lurching over after a while, but was intercepted short of his target. I found out from Fr. Kilonzo later that he had drunk too much local brew, which in the worst batches can kill you, and even the non-immediately lethal stuff often undertakes a permanent scramble in pretty short order. These are his feet.

Here are some faces of your sisters, worth a click.

Later that afternoon I walked back to Kimongo with Peter, whom you have met earlier. He has lived in Kimongo 2 for about fifteen or twenty years -- his own reckoning, and knows everyone and their history. His knowledge will help us a good deal when we start accepting orphans to live at the Children's Home.

These are the sisal stems that are harvested and used, with mud, to build the houses in Kimongo 1 and 2. Since they are not wood, the log-like stems last only four or five years and then they begin to break down and the structures slowly collapse. The building technique we are going to use for the project, rammed earth, could eliminate this problem once the folks here learn to use it.

These guys are dragging two dead and dried sisal stumps home. The spiky branches are used for cooking fire fuel. You may recognize the one on the right. It's Martin (pr. Marteen) from an earlier journal entry when he was gathering scrap metal and had only one shoe. Now he's splitting a pair of flip-flops with his pal.

Even with his front teeth grown in, it's hard to mistake Muthiani's grin.

The last time we saw this guy he had a big sack of scrap metal slung over his shoulder.

My protection in the mean streets of Kimongo 1.

These two girls were in the group that danced for Peter and I in the bush between Lukenya and Kimongo in one of the early journal entries. My cousin, John, made some hard copies of the pictures from that entry and sent them to me (that was the other piece of mail I have received here). Peter distributed them for me, and now, six months later they are still prized possessions, and John is something of an unseen local legend.

This girl, selling vegetables in the kiosk is an orphan.

My expanded entourage. Muthiani at my side.

Peter and I left Kimongo 1 and walked the kilometer to Kimongo 2, Peter's home, where the next group of pictures was taken.

Peter's mom having lunch.

This is as calm as this group got. I was taking video footage and Bethe, the young woman, was running in and out of the picture like Lucille Ball and the two guys were staging a kung fu battle.

Kristine, Peter's wife, and I. This was taken inside the cooking area of the new "cafe" she and Peter had opened that day, the Parapet, I was one of the first customers. Tea and chapati, fifteen shillings.

After visiting there for awhile, I headed for home, and back through Kimongo 1 on the way.

My old pal.

These two sent me running for the "“Wet Ones"” I stash in my backpack.

This is Simon. His father is very ill, and his mother is gone.

He lives in the house behind us, whose roof is also nearly gone.

The posse from Kimongo says, "Adios."

This footlong pumpkin head greeted us on the way home.

And so did these gorgeous, interplanetary aloe plants.

I took a cross country route to the property and happened into Elizabeth and her grandson. The fence you see marks the northern edge of our five acre plot.

MONDAY

Having gotten the registered letter from the architect I hadn’t hired presenting me with a bill for 281,000 kenya shillings, I added a trip to the lawyer’s office to an already full schedule for Monday in Nairobi. I called Masa, the driver I use when I need to go into Nairobi. His mobile phone wasn’t working Sunday night. I called him at 7:30 am. “The Safaricom subscriber is unavailable.” So I called John, driver in waiting. “Can you be here by about 9:00” “It all depends on the jam.” It always depends on the jam, the traffic jam. Going into and out of Nairobi mornings and evenings is like any other city of four million, and throw in scattering of rickshaw-like carts loaded with everything imaginable, and pulled by the most intrepid souls, and you have the beginnings of a picture.

I was scheduled to meet Felix of the Daraja Project at a coffee shop at 10:00 am. He was running late because of the matatu shortage brought on by the crackdown. Result: fewer matatus, higher prices, lots of chaos. I had to get to Barclay’s bank to drop off a passport photo so Patrick could open a Kenya shillings checking account for me. The photo was a little scary, taken much closer to sick time as it was. Now I can withdraw money in dollars from my U.S. dollars account, stuff it in my hidden waist pouch, exchange it down the block at Forex, return to the bank and deposit the Kenya shillings into my new account and avoid the bank’s dismal exchange rate.

I called Felix to meet me at the Simba Mbili at 11:00am. On the way to meet Joseph and Tony at “the office”, I stopped at the Book Villa on Standard Street. I bought a book exchange membership there and for the price of about one hardback book, I can borrow, read and exchange as many books as I like for one year. A very nice find. I got Joseph and Tony memberships, too. I turned in Mark Twain’s, Following the Equator for The Poet of Tolstoy Park, by Sonny Brewer.

Joseph, Tony and Gabriel, the guy who is working on getting power from the national grid to the property, and I showed up within a few minutes of each other. Felix came right after us. We are having the small shack on the property wired so that the grid folks will have a destination for the power. Actually getting the power can be a very long and maddening process. A woman I know here paid over 500,000ks and it still took over a year for the installation. Gabriel, working on a time structured incentive plan from me is getting it done in a few weeks. He is very good at this.

We had a list of all the electrical apparati we needed for the job. After a brief meeting, Joseph went to Uganda electric to get a quote. I gave Gabriel some money to hasten his process, and he was off. And Felix and I were off to Umoja, to pick up the very simple furniture I had made for Gabe’s unfurnished room. A small table, a chair, and a small food cupboard for Wilson’s place. Used furniture doesn’t exist in Kenya. These three pieces cost about thirty dollars all together. Felix checked yesterday and was assured they were ready, so we could pick them up in John’s taxi, and get back to Museum Hill in good time for a last minute meeting at the lawyer’s office to settle on a response to the nasty architect letter.

When we got to the furniture maker’s we found a table with no top, a chair with no seat and a cupboard without hinges and the doors leaning against it. And nothing had been varnished. Felix was mortified, I was squeezed for time and not so happy.

Here is the shop. That’s Felix on the right and the owner, Steven in the middle.

Transport is always the issue here. Without a vehicle of your own, it can cost as much to get something somewhere as that something is worth. The furniture is a perfect example. To hire John to get me from Lukenya and bring me Nairobi and back to get the furniture costs more than the furniture. So I pack the trips into Nairobi with meetings and appointments and business cheek to jowl. After a frustrating and then pretty hilarious ten minute conversation/negotiation session, I agreed to give them 500 shillings so they could buy the varnish they needed to finish --the real hold up it seems-- and all three of the guys there promised to work to get the job done in thirty minutes. This firm time commitment was understated by a factor of three, at the very least, I knew, and so Felix and I went to his project nearby.

We ate some beans and maize, kiderthi, that was being served to the street kids there, and he filled me in on the really awful details of some internal financial difficulties that had borne down on them in the past week. We talked and I sympathized and not much changed as a result.

I needed to get to a cyber cafe and let folks know my internet connection had been down for the last week. We found one. I went upstairs to a small room with the oldest computers I have seen outside of a tech museum. I managed to get to my e-mail after a while but every time I hit the return key while I was typing, it would stick and rattle off about fifty returns like a machine gun before I could wrestle it back. We came back to the shop about an hour later and they had made some progress. The chair had an upholstered seat, the table top was taking shape and one of the doors was swinging on new hinges. I grabbed a brush and started varnishing, Felix was supervising the table top operation and there we were, like the seven dwarfs, whistling, and muttering while we worked.

Here are a couple more shots of the place. The furniture in the photos is the fancy kind, ours was much plainer.

With the quick drying finish still drying, we crammed the load into John’s little Toyota sedan, the cupboard sticking straight up in John's trunk with the lid tied down on it, and took off like the Joads, praying that the jam would be kind. I had to get across town to see the lawyer in a hurry. I dropped Felix near the Simba Mbili, ran upstairs to give Joseph the money for the electrical stuff -- he had found it cheaper at Gambon Electrical, a mile or two away.

I made it to Museum Hill, read The Economist for a few minutes in the waiting room, had a good meeting and began to formulate a plan. I got a call from Joseph. He needed more money for the electrical stuff, and the shop was closing in about fifteen minutes. We had good traffic karma again, picked up Joseph on the street and made it to Gambon and the matronly woman proprietor there. She was a delight.

Back to the Simba Mbili for a little dinner, and then all that remained was to get a foam mattress for Gabe’s bed. We found one at Nakumat, a kind of all purpose store, they rolled it up and tied it with twine and in the downtown bustle and darkness and with “help” from two or three interested bystanders managed to get it tied to the only open space on the car, the roof.

John and I said so long to Joseph and Nairobi and headed for Lukenya, about twenty five miles down the Mombassa Road. So that was Monday, and that about wraps up magical mystery tour.

I want to include an update on the progress of the project here. I don't always talk about it in the journal, but that's what I spend virtually all my time on. Here's what's going on.

We are buying three more acres of land, a total of eight now. This became available unexpectedly and we snatched it up, about $11,000.00. This will give us a big boost in making land available for the perma-culture, agriculture, bird banding station, etc., which will give us the self-sustaining income we want for the Project in three years.

The revised proposal for the expanded agricultural effort and all the stuff necessary for that, including consultation fees, is $19,000.00

I'm looking into getting a small used pick up truck, about $7,000.00 or so.

We need to fence the new three acres. About $1,500.00

We need to dig the borehole and get a three stage pump. About $17,000.00

We need to get registered as an international NGO (non-governmental organzation) $1,500.00 to $2,000.00

We need to make the access road passable in all weather $7,000.00 to $10,000.00

We need to bring power from the national grid to the property. About $5,000.00, add another $20,000.00 if we need to buy a transformer.

We need to build the Project out. Everything from a septic system, to the buildings, to the landscaping. About $200,000.00

There are lots of other things, and we are ready to do them. All the leg work and planning and organizing and decisions over the past eight months or so are in place. What we need is the funding, and folks are working very hard on that.

We've raised about $80,000.00 and need a couple hundred thousand more to get it built. Some of you have asked about being a part of this aspect of the project. Here's what I have to say about that. This project isn't for everybody. Some people don't see the sense putting so much effort so far from home. Fair enough. But some of you think differently. For you, without really trying, that ten thousand miles compresses into an insubstantial thing, and your learning about the need here has gotten to be a burr under your saddle. It affects you personally. I hope you pay attention to that, it's a gift that doesn't come to everybody.

If you have questions, you can contact me at dwsaunders@gmail.com, if not, you can go to the website www.rrop.org to the How To Help Link and let your check book do the talking. Either way, it will be good to hear from you. Your money will find trustworthy hands to put it directly to use, and not a shilling of it will be wasted.

Yours from Kenya,

David

September 24, 2006

2006-09-24T14:24:00.000+03:00

Some people have that fiber of curiosity that helps knit the world together for them. They’re the ones who finally break in through the neighbor’s back door and find her calmly decomposing on the sofa with the Price Is Right for company eight days after she was last seen. That heartland yearning for neighborly connection extends to the living, even those living far, far away, and has prompted some of you to want a peek behind the curtain into the day-to-day goings on in my little dot on google earth. So, always anxious to please, I’ll try, like Virgil, to lead you through a pretty typical couple of days, beginning Friday afternoon, last.

I walked to the reception area of the Getaway, where I live, and Eva gave me some mail, I think the second piece I have received. This was in a thin plastic Fed-Ex-like envelope, 8.5” by 11.5.” I sliced it open in that beautiful way that a very sharp knife glides through this stuff, and found two pages slathered with manufactured outrage, shock, litigious language and invective, and no homemade cookies.

An architect whom I had not hired and whose proposal I had not yet accepted or rejected, presented me with a 281,000 kenya shilling bill for his work, about $4000.00 US. I tossed it on the bed, grabbed my binoculars and stuck the camera in my pocket. I had a walk to take that I had been looking forward to for a couple of days. I fussed an fumed internally and if the hard truth is required, out loud for about the first mile of the of the walk. You know, rehearsing the imaginary encounter between us. Picking all the good players for my team: objective truth, common sense, ethical behavior, sanity, and leaving him to try guard my first string with fabricated indignation, bluster, peacock display and feigned disbelief.

I was a pretty good ways down the two track dirt road out back when I came to my senses and finally looked up. There were the zebras. Like many neighbors, they are nosy and mildly distempered. They show me their striped backsides in unison and then the stallions snort and fuss and I tell them I live here too so get over yourselves.

Before they could complain further the elands showed up. These magnificent cave paintings, calm and dove grey, tawny flanked, require good behavior wherever they are. These largest African antelopes, both sexes with spiraled horns, a stroke of jet behind their knees, are a tonic, a digestive for the unsettled.

I felt and kept the peace and moved on. A few wildebeests (“wild beasts” to Kenyans), some Thompson’s gazelles, a couple of antelopes and a distant gathering of hartebeests later, I rounded a turn and saw Ginger. She is one of the group of giraffes I have come to know, a little, from a distance, at their insistence. They are by my reckoning, eleven. Four adults, four teenagers and three preschoolers. Ginger is in the last group. She is almost as pretty as Boo Boo.

And since she isn’t allowed to go out on a Friday afternoon by herself, I smoothed down my cow lick, quietly renounced the zebra vibe, and made myself presentable. I think it worked. They were standoffish, but seemed to appreciate the effort I had made. (You can see one hiding in the trees on the far right).

The fewer words here the better, probably.

All the photos of the eleven were taken within a few minutes of each other, some back lit by the setting son, some away from it.

You know the “Foot Prints” poem/poster you see. Well if it was a sandy dirt road instead of a beach, and instead of Jesus’ foot prints next to yours you saw a giraffe’s, it would look just like this.

Here’s what the sky had to say on the way home about my fussing and fuming and acting like a zebra.

Saturday

I worked most of the day on the “white paper” for the project, and tried to nail down appointments and coordinate transportation and timing for the trip into Nairobi on Monday, and by the afternoon I somehow had forgotten much of the instruction of the elands and the sky, and so I was in a bit of a state, again. I decided after work to walk to Joyce’s. I had visited once since my return, but she was gone to Athi River at the time.

She and Agnes and Josephine and Victoria and Joyce Junior were all there. Joyce asked, through Agnes, if I had brought her the mobile phone back from America that “I had promised her.” I laughed so hard that she started laughing, and that was about all the answer any of us needed. We settled into our rhythm of sitting and talking and translating and laughing and catching up on the news. Yes, my daughter’s graduation was very grand. All my family greets you. Yes, I miss them so much already. The weather in California was very hot.

Miriam, little Joyce’s mother, got a job at Prima Rosa and she and little Joyce are living with Joyce and Victoria and Agnes and Kristina and Josephine. Joyce’s arm has been sick so she hasn’t made any baskets. Josephine has been well after a sick spell. Kristina is going to school in Athi River.

Joyce sang some songs and told me she wants me to come back when we can all sing and dance together. She has more than a little twinkle in her seventy years eyes.

Agnes and Josephine

Victoria, seeing herself on video camera, first time.

I walked from Joyce’s to the property where Wilson and David were busy clearing stumps, and the pugnacious scrub acacia. Wilson has been working hard for about five months on the land. He has slashed the whole five acres of thigh high grass after the spring rains with a machete-like tool, saved and bundled it to be used for mulch when we plant, removed dozens of stumps like this one with a pick, an axe and a hoe, wrestled the tough acacia from the land, planted about fifty trees, bottle brush and good acacia, protected the property from intruders and hyenas, looked after Trip, the best crazy dog in Lukenya, and done it with unfailing good cheer and equanimity. He earns more than than most laborers, about two hundred dollars a month and has sent three quarters of his earnings home every month to pay for his younger sister’s school fees. He has been accepted to Moi University in November to study nursing and possibly medicine, but the $1700 per semester fees are very far out of his reach, and ours, at this point.

This is Wilson’s house and cooking area.

I walked back home, had a late dinner and went to my room. I remembered that I had a bottle of Guinness in its third or fourth week of exile in my closet. I ferretted it out. Improvised an opener. Got my new paperback copy of The Brothers Karamazov and sprawled on the bed. A Guinness that has been bottled, traveled some thousands of miles, moldered in a warehouse, a store shelf and a closet, bares the same relationship to the original -- say a pint drawn at Waxy O’Connor’s or the Black Lion in Lampeter -- as a strawberry soda does to a strawberry. But I remember summer days in cutoffs in peach tree shade, when in my knowing, nothing was better than strawberry soda.

This has gone on longer than I planned, so I will give you all a reprieve here and will revisit with Sunday and Monday in a couple of days, but before I go, I want you to know that Gabriel, my godson, has joined me here, and will stay for three months to work on the project with me. So, the Mzungu scenery in the photos should improve dramatically.

Here’s Gabe and I riding out an unexpected downpour at Joyce’s.

and Gabe with some of Mary’s rescued kids in Machakos.

See you a little further down the road,

David and Gabe

There and Back Again

2006-09-02T21:14:00.000+03:00

A one month trip turned into three and could easily have been three years. California has so much to recommend it. Roads like glass, good wines, cheap, lovingly crafted patty melts, most of my friends, most of my family, dearly loved one, Entourage, fog rolling in over Twin Peaks late afternoon July, days at the zoo, Cindy’s Market, the dahlias, honey mustard potato chips. It’s no wonder so many of us live there and anyone could understand our reluctance to leave.

This is what I have to say about California.

When I was finally able to book a flight, the first leg, SF to JFK was a long nap, sleeping through the meal offerings and waking up to the announcement that we were preparing for our final descent. Part two, JFK to Brussels was a quiet party. I checked in at the gate to see if I could get an exit row seat. She checked and told me I had been given an exemption or something and that I would be joining them in First Class. Oh my. The seats, broad and leather, are islands, surrounded on all sides by deep blue carpet. Before I could nod knowingly to my new fellow club members, a very cold glass of good champagne appeared. It felt like morning, so I added a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice and made mimosas. A ramekin of warm cashews, pistachios and almonds followed.
“Which wine would you like from the list, sir?”
“Why don’t you just take me through the list over the course of the flight.”
“Excellent, sir, then you can tell me which you prefer.”
“I’d be happy to.”

There were hot, moist towels served on plates, nice long blankets, fluffy pillows in white linen cases, a toiletry bag with tooth brush, tooth paste, a sleeping mask, ear plugs, and other necessities, socks, a personal DVD player, Bose headsets, a book-like library of DVD’s to choose from, and some things I’m forgetting. I was too busy reenvisioning myself and my relation to air travel to compile a comprehensive list.

Dinner was, well, first class. A salad of frizee greens with cold chilled prawns, orange slices and a mild vinaigrette. Medallions of lamb, cilantro mashed potatoes, grilled asparagus spears and halved cherry tomatoes. Coffee, port, cheese plate, and “Oh, is that the pecan encrusted poached pears? If you insist.”

Just before settling in to watch The Italian Job on my cute little player...
”Shall I wake you for breakfast if you are sleeping?”
“Let’s play that by ear.”
“Fine, sir.”

I did, as I recall, awaken to fresh fruit, coffee, a brioche, yogurt, a large pressed linen napkin, and I think, a gold key to the city of Brussels.

So here’s my idea. To solve the airlines’ financial woes. Just treat everyone like they were first class fliers. People would rethink their leisure time. Instead of going to the Thursday afternoon Giants’ game, they would fly to ...Toledo. enjoy their pampering, take a lap or two through the airport gift shops, thank their God they live in California, and be back in the City and down to Battery St. in time for dinner at Piperade, completely refreshed. No, I don’t know why they haven’t thought of this either.

Back in economy class from Brussels to Nairobi. No manicure, no massage, just doll house pillows and a seat back tilted under your nose. I feel like a disgraced government official.

I picked up “The Standard” (the newspaper whose raid by the government troops I mentioned in an earlier journal) shortly after I got back, and thumbing through found this item.

Reuters:
Women Strip To Appease Rain Gods.

Fifty women stripped naked and plowed their fields in West Nepal, in Kapilvastu, 190 kilometers west of Katmandu Friday night to bring rain for the parched paddy crop. “This is our last weapon, we used it, and there was a light rainfall,” the Nepali daily paper Rajdhani quoted one of the women as saying.

It seems to me the response by the rain gods was open to much interpretation.

The next time you feel overworked and underpaid, this may help right the ship. While I was gone, the 1500 liter tank we have for watering went dry. We had stored 3000 liters that we purchased from a water truck at Mary Mount Chapel, the Catholic church I’ve shown pictures of here. That in itself is a long and funny, in a tear-your-hair-out kind of way, story. Wilson, who lives and works on the property, hired a guy to draw the water out of the church’s cistern by hand with a bucket and a rope, fill 20 liter plastic gerry cans and then transport them by wheelbarrow about a third of a mile, most of it over an uneven path that cuts through the land adjoining the property, and then empty the water into our tank. He could haul four gerry cans per trip (21.3 gallons-- think 20 gallons of milk from the supermarket, about 175 pounds). It took about twenty trips over two days to finish the job. Wilson pitched in and helped on the second day because the he could see the man was wilting under the task. He paid him the agreed upon amount--500 kenya shillings...a little less than seven dollars.

This is a picture of a wheelbarrow with four twenty liter gerry cans in it. These cans are empty.

A little more local news from the extended neighborhood. I ran into David Gitau, the ornithologist we are working with to establish the bird observatory and banding station on the property, at the Simba Mbili, the upstairs restaurant in Nairobi that we call the office. He had been working in the bush for a month or so, up at Lake Nakuru and Lake Elementaita. He said the flamingos are dying in very large numbers, and they can’t figure out why. It’s not the bird flu, and it’s not pollution, because lake Elementaita is spring fed. Bad news is always somebody’s good news. David says the Steppe eagles as they migrate down from Europe, funnel down through Israel, and fan out into Africa will amass in huge numbers at the lakes this winter, where they can live high on the flamingo.

Mary, from the Springs of Hope Home in Machakos -- I’ve shown you pictures of her rescued kids in the journal -- has been in desperate need of two 10,000 liter water tanks to be able to get free, clean water from the local government, and not have to buy water in very small batches like they have been at 10 to 15 kenya shillings per liter. Water for them means drinking, bathing, cooking, and doing all the laundry for the ten or so infants -- who use cloth diapers -- and for the rest of the kids, by hand. I happened to mention this at a small gathering to raise funds the project when I was in California. Here are a few pictures of Mary’s new water tanks, a gift from the Dentoni family. The company I bought them from threw in the pump and connectors needed, and built the two concrete pads for the tanks for free. Mary now has all the clean water she can use, and she believes that God is good.

Mary, some of the kids, the tanks, and yours truly.

This is Tom who delivered the tanks and the rest of us posing for Wilson, the newly appointed camera man.

This is Michael, whom I showed you after my first trip to Mary’s. He was tethered to his bed by an arm and a leg and given beer and an herbal concoction by his mother, a professional sex worker, to keep him and his older sister sedated all day long, while she left to go to work. He couldn’t walk or even sit up when he came to Mary’s at two and a half years old. Now he is walking and beginning to speak and generally carry on pretty well. He is now three years old.

On the way back from Nyumbani Children’s Home in Karen, Masa and I stopped in Kibera, the largest of several slum cities within the city of Nairobi. We walked and carefully took some pictures and I cranked up my new digital video HandyCam (Thanks Pat). I’m working on a way to get the video footage to you. In the meantime -- still life in Kibera.

If you enlarge the photo, you can see that this road leads not only to some kids playing, but also to the Herb Clinic. Most of these photos benefit greatly by being enlared (just click on them to enlarge them).

One of the difficulties is that over a million people live here, densely concentrated, with no infrastructure. No running water, no sanitation, no electricity, etc. So it’s hard for people to avoid diseases that are spread in these conditions.

The bag this man is holding and continually inhaling from is partially filled with glue. The very cheap means of getting high, which exacts a very high price from its users. It massacres brain cells at a startling clip and eventually debilitates much of the nervous system. It is the curse of the street kids.

I passed this woman cooking potato chips. I asked I I could take her picture. She said no. “Next time,” I asked. She nodded. I walked about twenty feet down the street and then turned around and came back. “Is it next time,” I asked. She laughed and said it was not next time yet. We settled on a picture thrown in with two bags of chips I bought for 5 shillings each. They were delicious.

Just in case you need a place to stay when you visit, the Bismilahi Hotel has vacancies.

Two days ago, Friday, I met with Felix of the Daraja Project. They have a small place in Umola, one of the Estates (outer neighborhoods) in Nairobi. They work to get boys off the streets by identifying their skills and giving them training in those skills. They concentrate on art, athletics, soccer and gymnastics, and several other areas. Felix and the others involved are dedicated and do good work. I went to see the center and took some video footage and these shots of kids he is trying to reach who are still living on the streets. Then we went to the local slum area where the street kids live.

This is Duncan, a former street boy who now teaches art and painting to boys who come to the center.

This is Monica and her six month old baby, Auma. They live on the streets, just a little way from here. Dutch is next to her.

The boy in the front of this picture is Samuel. He is seventeen and is an orphan. He has been sniffing glue since he was six. He entered the program at the Daraja center to train in acrobatics, but dropped out. Each of these boys has a bottle of glue in his hand as this picture was taken.

This is the leader of the group I was photographing. He raised a fuss about no pictures at first. There were a few minutes when it looked like things might not go so well, but he changed when he saw the images and then wanted me to take some photos of him. If you enlarge this photo by clicking on it you will be able to read the plaque and the writing on the wall, so to speak.

A footnote: I just tried to click on this photo and the one of the three boys and instead of an enlarged photo I got what looked like the world's longest cartoon swear word. I think this is because I cropped these pictures before I downloaded them, although the images shown don't reflect the cropping. Who knows? Anyway the small plaque hanging on the wall in the photo says "God Bless Our Home," and the barely legible writing says, "Only the dead person knows."

He wanted me to take a picture of him feeding Monica. Providing for her as I took it.

The no-hands technique for sniffing glue.

The white substance on this boy’s lips is dried glue.

That’s Samuel right behind Felix’s hand in this picture.

A particularly quiet member of Felix’s audience.

There are always, everywhere trash fires burning. I don’t know if you can see them, but a man and a woman are working here.

We went to a make shift dump/recycling place, just a hundred meters or so from where we were. This is where boys who had hauled away household trash for a few shillings would bring it.

This woman who works there is sorting through the plastic section.

The owner of these feet was waiting to get paid for his load.

I don’t know his name, but his image has stuck with me.

We will continue to work closely with Felix and the Daraja Project, and with Mary's Springs of Hope Home. They are both anxious to have a home like the one we will build to send some of their kids to.

Our project is moving along. We raised some money this summer and are looking to dig the bore hole soon, bring power from the National Grid to the property, buy a small, used pick up truck, and finalize the architectural plans. The job is fraught with all sorts of goofy twists and turns, and I certainly appreciate your thoughts and prayers on our behalf.

I’ll leave you with a couple these things:

You know how I can’t resist good signs. Here’s the latest installment.

At the Ocean Pub in Karen, a restaurant and bar Tony and ate at while waiting for the architect, who had forgotten our meeting, to return.

The goat meat ready for grilling at the Ocean Pub.

If you get the urge for good gizzard and have about a half a buck, swing by the T Tot in Machakos.

And some signs in the dirt.

This is what it looks like after a giraffe slips in the mud. This is one foot.

With some folks, it’s no mystery where they’ve been.

It's good to talk to you again. Don't be a stranger.

With love from Kenya,

David

May 15, 2006

2006-05-12T13:20:00.000+03:00

I like walking around Nairobi early in the morning. I have it to myself. No bustle yet. It’s easy. This morning I occupied my simple mind by taking pictures of signs. I can’t get enough of them.

The first two are for you traveling nudists out there. Places where you are not welcome, like this one.

...and places designed just for you. I imagine the “Educational Tours” are quite popular. The Real African Adventure.

And for those shoe shoppers among you. Sometimes you want fancy shoes, or running shoes, or really special shoes. But sometimes all that exceeds your grasp and you just want some...decent footwear.

Now you know where to go.

And the next time you’re going to Yen Ching for some eggplant with garlic sauce, you might want to pick up some...

Although I can’t in good conscience recommend this one. I went in and it was a shoe repair shop packed floor to ceiling with repaired shoes. It looked like a movie set, and not a single pair remotely Oriental seeming.

It was, I had decided, hair cut day again. I was in Nairobi, coming home soon for a visit, and I passed this sign.

Why had I in Machakos squandered my time at the “Executive Barber Shop (and Mini pub)” when I could have been here, at the Amazing Executive Barber Shop. I climbed the three flights of stairs. As in Europe, they are always one floor behind here. Our second floor is their first floor, and so on. They never catch up. The slightly startled young woman looked up and greeted me.
How much for a haircut? I asked.
Just have a seat, she motioned right.
How much for a haircut? I asked again.
Just have a seat here.
I asked again.
She hesitated...500.
I looked at her as though she had just produced a dead animal from from under the counter. She faltered and asked the inevitable question.
How much do you want to pay?
I understand the dance, but every now and then I’d just like to sit one out.
I want to pay the real price, I said, not the mzungu price. I want to pay what everybody else pays. I live here.
OK, three hundred, she said.
I went in and sat down. Still about a hundred too much, but it was enough of a victory for now.

I think the barber was sick that day, because the guy who appeared had the nervous look of a cat burglar trying to convince the cops that, yes, in fact he did live here. He flapped out the neck apron and cinched it up.
Not too short, I said.
He produced a silver spray bottle and started blasting away with what I think was the fuel I used to burn in my Whisper Lite backpacking stove. Only this smelled worse. He went for the clippers.
Scissors! I said, with mouth and fingers.
He opened a few drawers and picked up a red handled pair with the same facility that a family at Kin Folk’s Barbecue and Rib Heaven, outside Pella, Iowa , would five sets of chop sticks. I cursed my luck.

He started slow, but warmed to it. Very soon he had all his left hand fingers, like the tines of a tiny corn harvester, in my hair and was attacking the spackled and spiked rows randomly from a series of obtuse and acute angles.
Not too short, I said, to no one in particular.
Watching him, in the mirror, using the scissors was like watching me crocheting. A lot of tangled up. He kept gaining momentum, I kept losing courage.
Not too short, I squeaked.
He took a short breather, and was coming in for the kill, when I slid out of the chair, mid-cut.
That looks good, I said.
He looked disappointed.
Do you want it washed? He asked.
I glanced at the girl. Her look said more money.
No. This is fine.
And symmetry and uniformity aside, it was.

Back in the neighborhood.

I bought a 1500 liter tank from Roto Mold. They delivered it to the property by truck. We rolled it the last two hundred yards, because the ground was too muddy for the truck. We need some water storage before we can get to drilling a bore hole. We got the ok to use some scrap lumber from the place where I stay to build a platform for the tank. We ran into the perennial problem--transport. How to get the heavy load of lumber to the property, about two kilometers away. I remembered Kitonyi. A fine man who works at the Getaway. He hitched up the solution and we were in business.

The cart was tired, the wheels very loosely attached by a lug nut or two and wobbled drunkenly. These two photos show their various angles of repose.

The one in the middle with the slighly bigger ears is inexplicably named, Boris.

Kitonyi, Wilson and an unemployed stone worker we picked up on the way. That’s the property and Wilson’s modest house in the distance.

The black cotton soil on the property after the rains is quite sticky.

Wilson and I set about to build the platform. Some of the wood was so hard it bent every five inch nail we tried. It was, I think the hardest lumber I have ever seen. I’m sure it would not float. The metal-shafted hammer bent and the saw was a dull finger nail file. We finally set the petrified stuff aside, and Wilson finished the redesigned platform the next day. You can see the bent-shafted, no handled hammer on the front right hand corner of the platform.

These are a few more of my neighbors. This is Joyce. I met her walking back form the property, about where you saw the cart a couple of pictures ago. She was sitting next to the path in the grass making a basket. Here she is holding Victoria, her grand daughter, whose mother, Joyce’s daughter, and father have died. That is Christina on the immediate right.

This is Agnes, with her baby Josephine. They live with Joyce. Josephine is a couple of months old. Since this picture she has gotten sick. It looks like it is not malaria.

This is the inside of the one room house where they live. That is the small wood or charcoal burning stove in the front. You can see the ugali stirring spoon on the top of the pot against the wall, and all the plastic gerry cans for water. The white one on the left with the braided sisal rope which goes across the forehead when the container is full of water and hangs down the back is the one Christina carries.

This is Victoria and the basket on the right is the one Joyce was making when I met her, out of sisal fibers and yarn. The bigger one on the left is an old basket/bag that I bought from Joyce. She supports the home by her basket making. It takes between two and three weeks to make one, depending on the difficulty. I have taken to buying them from her.

This is my favorite of Joyce's baskets. Made entirely from sisal fibers. After some figuring, Joyce and Agnes told me Joyce was seventy-two, and learned to make baskets when she was very young.

This is Joyce and Miriam and yours truly with Josephine. Just after lunch.

Victoria was hamming it up with this shawl for a long time. Covering herself entirely and walking ghost style around and then snatching it off and doing it all over again.

A journal entry without insects is like a day without bugs, thin and incomplete. This jumbo jet is a dung beetle, and he is just as big as he looks. They make handball sized, perfectly round spheres of fresh dung and roll them by pushing backwards with their hind legs, their heads and front legs slanted down, touching the ground. Sometimes two of them roll the same ball, one pushing backward and the other pulling forward. I don’t know where they take them, but I cracked one open the other day and it was honey combed with holes, each of which held a little dung beetle, eating his way out apparently. Depending on the light they can show a brilliant, iridescent, dusty purple color.

For some reason these brightly colored and striped flies remind me of ornaments on this desiccated frog Christmas tree. You have to enlarge the photo by clicking on it to get the effect.

This grasshopper has her abdomen burrowed into the soil. I imagine she is depositing a wad of eggs. She looks covered in plated armor.

These are army worms, and with the rains this spring it is a very big army. These guys are everywhere. I have heard of some cattle getting sick from inadvertently eating too many of them while. Usually they are pretty inactive, but twice I have seen a literal river of them heading east at breakneck speed, in herky jerky electrified movements.

I am heading to the States this Wednesday for my daughter Allison's graduation from Darden, the University of Virginia's Graduate School of Business, and then to visit my beautiful grandkids, Boo Boo and Bubba, and Sarita and many of you in California. I will be gone about a month. The project, since securing the title deed has been in high gear. We have chosen an architect, gotten perhaps the foremost expert in our chosen method of construction, rammed earth, Professor Walter Oyawa from Jomo Kenyatta University, to sign on as the engineer, and are in the process of formally planning the integral agricultural component with the best, most innovative team of sustainable, permaculture land use experts in Kenya. The shape of the project has evolved beautifully over these four months, thanks to the amazing contacts I have been fortunate to make here, and the unseen late night work Greg has put in every single day, and most of all your prayers, unfailing and effective on our behalf. Thank you.

See you on your side of the equator,

David

April 28, 2006

2006-04-28T11:30:00.000+03:00

Whenever I go to Nairobi, usually once or twice a week, I at some point in the day wind up at “the Office,” the upstairs restaurant otherwise known as the Simba Mbili (Two Lions). It used to have a much better name, Eff. I don’t know what, if anything that means, but the new name sounds like a curio shop. Anyway, it is where I meet Joseph and Tony. “OK, see you at the office at 11:00.” It’s on Tubman Street between Koinange and Muindi Mbingu streets just next to the City Market, where among other things I change dollars into Kenya schillings, behind the produce stand. Every time we’re there, waiting in the tight space to do business, Joseph gets a carrot which he doesn’t have to pay for, and borrows my knife, Mr. Spyderco, to peel it.

There are always lots of guys sitting and standing around on the block outside the office. The stairway up is narrow and always darkened and screams “foul play” to tourists. Upstairs it is reasonably clean, airy, almost always pretty quiet, and never crowded. I have been there, going back to 1998, dozens of times, and it has never been more than half full.

There was once an Indian guy talking louder on his cell phone than I have ever heard anyone talk in public. He was arguing about something. He’d hang up, or they would, call back after the ninety second rest between rounds and go at it again. It was difficult to make myself heard to Joseph and Tony at the same table over this guy’s racket, and this in a country where you can go a fortnight without ever hearing a raised voice anywhere.

I got there a little early the other day and decided to take a few pictures.

The restaurant never looks this dark, it’s just back lit from the sun through the windows, but the staircase is every bit this black. More about the guy in the picture later.

This is the view from where I usually sit, right across from where the man is sitting in the last picture. The window is right behind me here. With the new ownership and the new name, the office added a little nautical theme to its decor. Note the ship’s steering wheels. A big, barrel-chested Indian guy owns it now, and he can be seen there every afternoon, bullying the staff and schmoozing with certain regulars.

This is the other side of the room. I wanted a close up of the giant wrist watch on the wall, but the batteries in my camera croaked as I attempted it. The watch no longer tells the correct time, unless you happen to be there for a late lunch at ten to four, so its real value now is decor enhancement, I guess.

I usually take pictures with as little fanfare as possible, but when I snapped a couple from the back of the room, the waitress on the right, who is probably about twenty and as cute as she can be, wanted in. She was a natural in these “action” shots. The cook and the kitchen are directly behind the bottles on the shelf.

My table of choice is under this splendid art piece. Two Indian paramours, palms and soles hennaed, anointed with fragrances, their posture languid, sensual. You can’t really see it in the picture, but there are two strategically placed “rubies” on her fully tested top which reminds me of nothing more than Rudolph and his heretofore unknown twin guiding you know who’s sleigh tonight.

The food is basic and good. Chapati (Indian tortillas), ugali (corn four staple), sukuma wiki (kale), fish, stew, etc. Lately I have been getting a fried, whole talapia (fish) about the size of one of those board-mounted singing bass, and chips, for about four dollars.

The serious man in the picture, like a number of other patrons, didn’t order anything. He looked over his “papers,” taken from a clear plastic envelope, yellowed with age, and studied them. I could see a piece of binder paper hand written in blue ink and a worn woman’s magazine, like Good Housekeeping.

A few minutes after the photo shoot this man approached my table. He spoke almost no English, which is uncommon. With both of us working at it, and with considerable difficulty I finally got what he was asking for-- Colin Powell’s address. At first it seemed like a stumper, but I didn’t want to seem uninformed, so after a few seconds thought I came up with:

Colin Powell
State Department
Washington D.C.
USA

and I thought it might actually work. They must know where to find him, at any rate. In his mind it was a start, but not a finish. The next push revealed this. He also wanted General Powell’s e-mail address and fax number. I didn’t see any course now but to admit my incomplete knowledge of U.S. famous person info and wrote on the paper under the address:

e-mail address ?
Fax number ?

This seemed like it would hold him over until he could manage contact with a real American.

Bicycles are the pick-up trucks of the people here. Almost none of the regular folks here have a motorized vehicle, and for a some even a bicycle is forever out of reach. Ninety nine percent of the bikes are of the same type. Black, putting the rider in a very upright posture, British seeming. You could imagine a bank clerk in a nicely cut but slightly worn dark gray suit and a bowler hat peddling to work near Paddington Station on one. They’re what Mary Poppins rides.

But here they are all-purpose vehicles, as often as not pushed rather than ridden by their owners bearing all manner of loads. Thirty gallons of water in several containers, a power lawn mower, a huge bundle of twenty foot saplings, stripped to poles, a twenty foot log, four people, crates stacked at least ten feet high on the rear rack, bushel bags of charcoal, twenty large canvas tarps folded and stacked, several crates of live chickens. You get the picture.

The ones used as taxis are usually fancied up with fringe trim on the seat, multicolored paint jobs, and gewgaws as various as imagination. They are held together with typical Kenyan ingenuity. Some wire here, a spot weld there, some rebar. And if you secretly yearn for immortality, but on this earth, in this life, search alchemical texts and get yourself transatomized into a bicycle tube here, and you will be as near your goal as never mind. They never give up on them. I have seen inner tubes with dozens of patches on them, more patch than tube, like Neil Young’s jeans at Winterland. When I was at Peter’s house in Kimongo 2, his brother was patching a tube with an inch and a half slit in it. Who wouldn’t want to be looked after so faithfully.

I watched some TV the other day. In line. First at Barclay’s Bank, Queensway Branch. Usually the foreign currency line is short, but the line is always slow. This time the line was long. Where you would imagine a security camera --up in one corner of the room facing out-- was a television. A full grown giraffe, a monstrously big creature, was (soundlessly) being attacked by four female lions. One would run up from behind and throw itself on one of the rear legs and get kicked or flung off end over end like a rag doll. Then another, and another. They must have been awfully hungry, because they were taking a beating. At one point each leg had a lion, fully upright clinging to it while the giraffe kept walking trying to toss them off. The giraffe was so big, so tall, they couldn’t get at anything vital. Finally they relented. The pursuit seemed to carry on to the next day, and my line was moving so slowly that I think I caught it all in real time. Two adult male lions joined the others, and before long had toppled the giraffe. From that point on everyone on the savannah but the giraffe was happy.

I was in line next at Safari com., paying my cell phone bill. This line is always so long and potentially contentious it is moderated by security guards. On their TV I saw that an albino wallaby had been displayed to a good deal of fanfare in some zoo, and then, without any segue, the part of Godfather II where Michael comes to Las Vegas, Fredo learns never to go against the family in public, and Moe Green catches one in the eye. I about doubled my total TV time here in those lines.

It’s a little late, but here is the Church, Mary Mount Chapel, dressed up in its Easter best.

Here’s the pulpit.

And the gift wrapped gift given to us.

A view with a room

The Next installment of A Bug’s Life:

I looked about a foot and a half to my left while typing away the other night, and in the fold of the drapes found this. The covering material, about four inches long, was so strong and tightly attached that I had to cut it with the point of my knife. I dispatched the mother, two and a half inch spider inside it, violating my usual live and let live policy for non-mosquito bugs. The bottom of the sheath was filled with clear sticky eggs, and I didn’t want a houseful of these monsters.

Here are the discarded wings of one evening’s termite debutantes not allowed entry to the ball.

Another column of black ants, one of my favorites. A discrete column, transporting itself and its treasures down the road.

And finally, this is a title deed. Our title deed. Almost three months work, laying quietly on the table now. None of its insane convolutions evident in the plain appearance. I thought at times J.D. Salinger may have penned his next novel on the back of it, for all the chance we had of actually possessing it. But here it is. And here we are. Maybe some time later when we both have a long afternoon, I’ll tell you its whole story.

"What! I don't believe it. You mean you finally did something useful and actually got the deed?"

This is me, with the deed in my pocket.

For all the glories of a clear title,

David

April 4, 2006

2006-04-04T14:42:00.000+03:00

A reminder: You can click on any of the pictures to enlarge them, just hit the"back" arrow to return.

Last Wednesday I rode with Maxwell up to Kitui, About two hours due east of here, through Machakos and up into the hills. We were headed for Nyumbani Village, the large project headed by Fr. D'Agostino and Sister Mary. In the last journal entry. I showed you some photos from Nyumbani, their home for HIV+ orphans in Karin, just outside Nairobi.

This is the second time I have visited the village. It is a very innovative and wonderful project. They were given one thousand acres just outside Kitui, and have had title transfer difficulties that dwarf our own, but it seems they are nearing the end of it. They are building a village to house one thousand HIV+ orphans, and three hundred elderly people, who will live together in small houses with one or two elderly people and eight or ten children. Both of these generations have, in effect, been made orphans by the AIDS epidemic. The adults, who would normally raise the children and help care for their elderly have died, and so the grandparents not only are left without the support they generally need in their old age, they are also left with the young children to care for. The village model is to reunite these two groups in a familial living situation.

The unique goal of this project is to make the village completely self-sustaining, and to make it an integral part of the surrounding community. Using very innovative and sustainable agricultural techniques, and creative land use practices, they plan to make Nyumbani Village financially and practically self-sustaining. Each house has a designated one half acre chamba (garden) attached to it, which will produce a good deal of the family's food throughout the year, and it is all done organically.

Here'’s an example of the creative land use practices being used. The area is semiarid. The expected rains fail regularly. The deforestation of the entire area over the last decades has contributed to the problem. The trees have been harvested for lumber, firewood and to make charcoal, the primary cooking fuel. They want to reforest the area, a very big task. So, in a one acre perimeter around the property, they are planting trees, thousands of them, and allowing the people who live locally and have no land or no water or both, to plant vegetables and other food crops among the seedling trees. The Village provides water from their well, and in cultivating the crops which will help sustain them, the local people are, at the same time, providing water and care for the trees which will in time reforest the area.

There are dozens of creative practices like this in place and more planned in order to create a real perma-culture system, which adds to rather than degrades the land, and therefore the ability of the land to sustain viable village life for decades to come. The village is more than half complete, and people will start living there as soon as the title transfer is complete.

I am learning a great deal from being around Fr. D'Agostino, Sister Mary, Maxwell, who oversees the “perma-cultural" aspects of land use and agriculture, Aldo, the current project manager and designer of the very elaborate water pumping, storage and delivery system, Nora, a volunteer from California who is working on the organic gardening techniques, and so many others. Quite a few of the ideas and practices are finding their way into the vision for our orphanage and five acre plot.

Here's Maxwell, offering a little advice at one of the growing plots.

The bricks used to make the houses were made on site of dirt and a little cement. They are called hydroform bricks.

Theses are the houses in which eight or ten kids will live with one or two "grandparents."

This is the nearly completed community center/church which will serve the whole village.

This building is going to be the hospital.

This is the entrance to the village, made of the same bricks as the houses and the other structures.

The traffic jam leaving the village.

After driving out to Jomo Kenyatta airport too meet with Mr. Chemwada, the seller of our parcel, in the pouring rain--five second exposure equals complete saturation--we had a quick lunch of sukuma wiki and ugali and headed for Kinani, where the Lukenya Farming and Cooperative Society office is located. If anyone ever asks you how to get there, tell them: Head southeast out of Nairobi on the Mombassa Road. At Athi River, take the left by the red, Sportsman bus stop, proceed on the dirt road until all of your molars are shaken loose, and you are covered in the powder fine light tan dust. When you come to the burned-down tree and the group of about eight bicycles parked, turn left, a hundred meters or so to the Joy Land Center, and you are in Kinani.

It's a little bit of a happening when a muzungu arrives and folks are unselfconscious about staring. By a great stroke of good fortune, the official of the society that we needed to see, but had almost no hope of finding there, was in a meeting with about a dozen very old members of the society. Bernice, the secretary, told us so. We thought we would just be dropping off the letter from Mr. Chemwada okaying the changes in the title transfer.

The office of the Lukenya Farming and Cooperative Society.

We waited about an hour and a half, maybe longer, so we had a little time to socialize. Directly across the dirt road from the office was the Joy Land Centre, a bicycle shop, a water selling shop and Hollyhood, a Barber Shop.

Things warmed up pretty quickly down at this end of Kinani, and very soon we were all having a high time. That's Joseph in the middle, the barber to the right and a couple of women who thought the whole matter pretty hilarious.

You remember the Executive Barber Shop and Mini Pub in Machakos, where I was shorn. Well, this is the Kwnozi (Barber ) and Battery Charging Shop. A little more creative business paring than you usually see.

This poster is very much like the one in Machakos, so it's easy enough to see why I had difficulty picking out the style that was "me." The entire inside of the barber shop was papered with news print. It was a little busy, but I thought it worked.

This pretty secret half-door led the stooping way to the battery charging part of the operation. I checked it out. A small battery charger and three or four batteries. A modest enterprise, but a source of real pride for the barber/owner, whose name, for the life of me, I can't recall.

This is Joseph, pretending to get a haircut. Pretending is the key here. Joseph hasn't cut his hair in eight years, and has very long, very uniform coiled locks. He does this in honor of his father, whom Joseph saw a picture of as a fighter in the Mau Mau rebellion, just after World War II, when the British, fresh off their victory over Fascism in Europe, engaged in a bit of their own in Kenya.

This little African Eskimo, endured the freezing 85 degree weather to come by and have a quick glance at the goings on before returning to the safety of her igloo.

These two look here like they may have been ready to serve up a whipping to Joseph and I for disturbing their peace, but they caved in and became part of the hootenany.

Fresh, pure spring water, bottled at the source.

The two reformed tough guys got what they came for, and a good look at me, and were headed back home with the goods.

Last Sunday, Wilson and I went to Kitengela to meet Maxwell and go with him to his ten acre plot with the solar powered bore hole (well) where he is using and inventing techiques and sustainable farming practices that are being utilized at Nyumbani Village. We learned a good deal from seeing things first hand.

On the way there and back, I took my first matatu rides. Fourteen passengers in a barely medium sized van, careening down the road like Neal Cassady on a seven day crank bender was at the wheel. Kenyans are so uniformly polite and decorous in public that it was a big surprise to me to find myself seated next to/on top of a middle aged man stuffing miraa leaves (a stimulant that packs a decent wallop) into his mouth and talking loudly, incessantly. I took my que from everyone else and just ignored him, which wasn'’t that easy because my entire right side was in contact with his entire left side. He sprinkled in a few English phrases meant for me into the Kiswahili verbal flashflood, but I adopted the first monkey's posture of hearing no-thing.

The cruel irony is that for all my fascination and reporting on the magnificent names of these white knucklers, neither of the ones I took that day had a name, just the route painted on the side. No Hot Stepper, Exodus, The Stomp, Ever Blazin', Roanhead, South Pole, Rapid Fire, Magic Moment or Forest Gump Int. for me, just Athi River/Machakos, in plain yellow letters.
This is the thing itself.

For the next leg of the trip home, we piled four of us and some baggage into the back seat of a thirty year old, very small Datsun. Only the right side of my none-too-large backside found its way to the seat. The unhappy left side was trying to find a little piece of mind wedged between the door handle and the window crank on the rear passenger'’s door. At least it was Wilson I was Siamezed to this time. I was half way through the trip from Athi River to Lukenya before I realized that the guy in the front seat had a small child riding on his lap.

They dropped us at the junction. Only five kilometers of rough dirt road to go. We rendezvoused with the Tuk-Tuk, a three wheeled, meter maid-like contraption with a slightly enlarged area for seating. We were again four in the back seat. This was a clown-car-in-the-circus trick. The upside was that for the fifteen minute, bone jarring, head banging trip up the road, I was bandaged to the side of a young Kenyan woman, and so temporarily, was relieved of my "failure to thrive from lack of physical contact" syndrome and may now make it a little longer before I succumb.

This is the only picture I have of the Tuk-Tuk, and I barely managed to get this one as it barrelled by.

Tony and I went downtown to buy a wheelbarrow (a Reliance), a spade, a pick-axe, a couple of handles, some nails, some fence staples, and a pair of wire cutters. This is a section of town where you have to keep your wits about you. There are no outsiders here, and the edge in the air is palpable. I managed to sneak this picture, standing in the doorway of the hardware store before Tony caught me. It wasn't safe to take any more, but I wish I could show you the energy and buzz of this scene more fully. We had been stopped in this street in the picture for fifteen minutes or so behind a big bus while people cleared a wreck that had just happened.

An update on the bug report. This large moth laid these beautiful eggs on the counter directly behind where I most often work, and stayed in the same spot on the curtain for several days. Not sure what became of mother or lovely ova.

Sometimes it helps to try to see things through other people's eyes, don't you think?

And if you ever feel the need to speak to the person responsible for the stuff you read here, no need to stop at my desk, might as well go straight to the source.

No more complaints about "life in general"... It's baseball season. I met a Giant's fan in Nairobi when I was there last.

Let's all hit for the cycle.

David

March 28

2006-03-28T21:14:00.000+03:00

This is the pot luck journal entry, a few casseroles, some jello, gooey desserts, the one really good thing gone before you get there.

I revisited Mary Musyaoka at Springs of Hope in Machakos. Met all the kids this time. We talked and took the cook's tour of the house. The children here are the victims of extreme abuse and/or neglect and have been rescued by the authorities and brought to Mary. 0-6 years old. I'm not going to use specific names here.

Part of Mary's crew, checking me out.

This little girl has an umbilical hernia, and may need heart surgery.

This little guy, right under the rabbit is two years old. He looks about four or five months. He was tethered by his right arm and right leg to a bed all day everyday, and left in the care of his three year old sister. His bones never quite formed right because of extreme inactivity. He can just now manage to sit upright, but that's it. I had a better picture of him, but for some reason, a number of the pictures I took here were very blurry, and I couldn't use them.

This is the picture I promised from last visit.

Here's a pretty peaceful face.

Mary has had this guy for a few weeks. He was even smaller before.

On the way to Machakos, I passed through Katelembo. The people were enlarging, by manual excavation and carrying, the water reservoir there. This basin catches the water from these hills to the west. At a distance this was like looking at a human ant farm, everyone carying a sack or basket of dirt up and over the ridge, dumping it there and returning in the never ending conveyor line.

The elevation here in Lukenya is about 6000 feet, and so the sun has real burning power even with the temperature almost always in the mid-eighties, not to mention the gaping rip in the ozone layer just below the equator where we are. I had been a little lax about my sun screen application, and a couple of small dark spots bloomed on my tribe two face. Given my carcinomatic tendencies I was about as happy as you were when your third cousins from Missouri announced that they were headed to Disneyland and Universal Studios and would make time to swing a little north for a nice long visit.

I got the name of a plastic surgeon, a distinguished, elderly Italian gentleman as it turned out.It was he who informed me that I was in tribe two of seven. Seven is the negroid tribe and tribe one is your albinos. I figured I should have made tribe three, but no. He examined every mole, blemish, brown spot, red spot, and gave them each their appropriate medical designation, thumbed through my scalp looking for any forested bad guys, talked of Ostia, his home region in Italy, Tuscany and Umbria, where we have both spent some time, quoted Dante to me in Italian, bemoaned his newly game leg (broken in the shower at the gym), and encouraged the orphanage effort. And so we passed a very pleasant half hour. The only real difference between us was that he had his clothes on and every stitch of mine was hanging on the hook on the back of the door. I think the only similar doctor encounter I have had was when Dr. Pulas spanked me into my then new life at the midpoint of the last century. I got a large straw hat that day and an all-over clean bill of epidural health.

Fr. D'Agostino and Sister Mary of the Nyumbani Project and I went the University of Nairobi to see acouple of acquaintances of theirs and to look into a method of construction called "rammed earth." Basically you mix soil with a little sand or quarry dust, a very small amount of cement, sprinkle it with water so it just gets damp, shovel about a 200 centimeter layer into a metal form, compress it with easy strokes from heavy mallets for a while, repeat the process a few times, release the forms, and you have a very strong section of wall. They are making their own buildings using this method. When plastered, it is indistinguishable from a plastered quarried rock wall. The Great Wall of China was made this way, so there is some expectation of permanence. That's Father D'Agostino next to the wall

Here are a few random things I have noticed about Kenyans in general.

They don't sneeze. Until yesterday I had never heard a Kenyan sneeze. There was one time at dinner here when I wheeled around just after the fact to see, but here was a muzungu at the table so it wasn't a confirmed Kenyan sneeze. It's no wonder that no one blesses me when I uncork one of my ground shakers. They just don't get any practice.

They also don't spit much. Only one verified sighting so far, and that was a woman carrying a swaddled baby.

I've been in a lot of crowded places where people were packed together for a good while, and not once encountered the olfactory evidence of beans for lunch. And Kenyans eat more than their fair share of beans.

People here do not talk to themselves--ever. Maybe it's from spending so much time in San Francisco, where solo speech is a fine art, practiced everywhere, and not just by those folks Reagan liberated during his stint as govenator and their progeny. I realized the other day that I sort of missed the the energy, the buzz of it.

I have never seen an African woman smoke. And relatively speaking, not all that many men. For one thing, most folks here simply can't financially support a tobacco habit.

I have come to envy African feet. Generally wider, flatter, leathery soled, so solid and functional. I feel like I have bird feet by comparison, fragile, tempermental, and requiring special treatment.

Kenyans are champion benders. All farming and gardening tools, spades, hoes, picks, etc., have very short handles. The kind that would send me hobbling to the chiropractorafter in fifteen minutes. And they use them all day, everyday, under no compulsion. They could use long handles, but choose not to. And as for squatting, forget it. There is no time limit. This spoon, fashioned with a machete (panga) was done in a single effortless squat.

I spent last Sunday morning and early afternoon at Nyumbani with Fr. D'Agostino and the kids. A beautiful mass in the school building with ninety seven kids belting out all the songs.

I was sitting alone outside afterwards and Moses came and sat next to me. We shot the breeze for a few minutes and then he took his leave. I had been in a bit of a funk for a while and got a good dose of de-funking being around the kids.

This is Moses who helped coax me out of my own personal wilderness.

This is Purity who had won a contest with her unicorn drawings. Her prize was a poster of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe movie. We had a discussion about unicorns and wings. I was pretty sure they always had them, but couldn't swear to it. She thought maybe just when they got older.

Here's Paul. He came and sat down next to me on the porch of one of the small houses.

We started taking photos of one another. You can see I had a lot more to work with than he did.

After that I asked Paul if he would draw a picture of me sitting there. I forget if I'm Beavis or Butthead, but I'm pretty sure it's one of them. You can get some idea of my recent haircut from the portrait.

Things are coming along at the property while we are awaiting the deed transfer. Wilson lives now in the small shelter there. Here he is digging the first of a million holes we will dig for planting trees.

The family at the property now includes this little troublemaker. Mr. Underfoot/Tripper/Trip. Formal name by me. Real, usable name by Sarita. I'm pretty sure now it's a girl, so the long name makes even less sense.

A rare non biting something moment.

For a couple of days we had this visitor. He declined to come out for the family photos. In fact he left the family moments after the shoot. He stayed around just long enough to pee all over me.

Wilson who has no fear of the hyenas that cruise around at night was very skittish near Grandpa Tortoise.

Here's a few things the sky has been up to lately.

I email everyone on a list when I finally get around to posting a new journal entry. If you don't have enough interruptions in your life and would like to add this one, you can.

Also, some folks have been wondering about emailing me, personally. You can.

To satisfy either or both of these inclinations you can find me at dwsaunders@gmail.com

Yours for bug free living,

David

PS I hear Uncle Junior shot Tony.

March 18, 2006

2006-03-18T23:27:00.000+03:00

I suppose you have begun to live in a place when you need a haircut. I looked in at the ReEunice Fine Touch Salon in the neighborhood, but the only person there was a young guy whose eagerness to have a go at muzungu hair was matched only by the lack of confidence he inspired in me. He held up his electric clippers, but drew a blank when I made the scissors motion. I asante sana-ed my way out.

I was in Machakos day before yesterday, Tues. 13, waiting for Leah from the Child Life Trust. I purposely got there early to look around. The countryside is beautiful. Red, red Kenyan soil, big hills, sides terraced like China or Nepal. I roamed into a barber shop and they shook their heads when I did my Edward Scissorhands routine. Finally I asked a couple of women siting outside a store. Near Barclay’s Bank. OK. Now we’re getting somewhere. I climbed an outside stairway to get to the Executive Barber Shop and Mini Pub. The combination seemed at once civilized and a little scary. Did I want a barber with his combs disinfecting in a pint of Tusker?

I entered the shop, a man sitting in the barber chair, a couple of people waiting. One business man, suited, a nine or ten year old boy, chubby, spoiled seeming. It was now in for a penny in for a pound. I knew I wasn’t going down those stairs unshorn. I took off my Giants hat and sat down. No scissors in sight. Five minutes later a man walked in and motioned for me to take the empty barber chair. I indicated that the suited man was first. He politely said he was waiting for the other barber. Great.

I sat down and started the scissors routine all over again. He at least produced a pair from a drawer. They looked more suited for construction paper than hair. I asked if I could get a beer. He said,”No, after.” OK, I figured I’d need it more then anyway. I told him what I wanted, and it wasn’t anything like the twenty five numbered photos on the sample poster. He said,”No problem. ”After a quick mental inventory of worst case scenarios, I began to relax. It was, after all, a renewable resource.

He buzzed away and clipped with the dull scissors and did OK. When he was done he indicated that I should head over to the hair washing sink. I tried to decline, he insisted. It was a package deal. An attractive young Kenyan woman sat me down and tilted my head back into the notch in the maroon sink and started the first of three successive washes, rinses and scalp massages. This was more like it.

There were three framed prints high on the wall all angled down so that my view of them while being scrubbed and rubbed was perfect. On the left was a picture of a white dove landing in a martini glass filled with green liquid, a green olive and a magic wand. Something special was happening, because the glass had broken and the liquid and olive were every which way. It wasn’t evident to me what was being advertised.

The one to the right was Beyoncee, dressed in a few silver beads. That one didn’t suffer any language or cultural barrier. The middle was a chimpanzee in a hawaiian shirt sitting on a makeshift crapper with his little leopard print chimp pants down around his ankles, reading the paper in what looked like the set of Gilligan’s Island. The caption said,”Don’t just sit there do something.”

After the ablutions, the woman took me to the now empty barber chair and started anointing my hair with various things and tracing the outline of my scalp and rubbing hard enough that I began to believe she thought she might be able to rearrange things a little. Not that my cranium couldn't stand some internal reconfiguration, I just wasn’t sure this was the time or place. I paid 300 schillings, about four dollars, and walked down the stairs of the Executive Barber Shop and Mini Pub feeling pretty darned good.

After a long delay, I met Leah and we went to Mr. Omolo’s office, the head man at the District Children’s Office in Machakos. He is a gem of an official, serious, dedicated, smart and effective. To my left was a side table stacked tall with folders and papers. The thick well-worn, legal sized manilla folder folder on top had “Abandoned Babies” written in blue ink across the front. We talked about the project for a long time, and he told me what I needed to do to get the foundation laid for our being able to care for children at our orphanage. To that effect I am in the process of creating an overview plan, complete with the specific elements we hope to incorporate, both in the physical setting, the academic setting and the psychological/spiritual aspects of our evolving vision of the orphanage to submit to him next week.

While the three of us were talking about the serious nature of the problems that exist and the work to deal with them, Leah happened to mention that the day before she had rescued three boys, ages 13, 10 and 8, who had been sold to coffee growers by their families for 70,000 Kenya schillings each. The money for one of the boys had already been delivered to the family when Leah intervened and threatened all involved with exposure and jail time, and probably a sound whupping personally delivered. She is a dynamo. Before leaving the office, Leah had Mr. Omolo give me his mobile phone number so I could contact him at any time. Wednesday, the day after we spent the afternoon together she was at the State House (Kenyan White House) with President Kibaki being honored with six others named to a National Advisory Board for Children’s Care.

After that meeting, I walked up the road to see Mary Musyoka who runs Springs Of Hope, a rescue center for very small children (ages 0 through 6) who have been seriously abused or neglected and referred to her by the authorities. You should meet Mary. Tall, big-boned, beautiful large hands. The entire time we talked, she was holding Peace, a baby in a bright yellow dress whose birthday is one day before mine. This year on my birthday, she was lying outside a factory in Athi River in the rain, her umbilicus and placenta still connected. A clot formed in the cord and kept her from bleeding to death, Mary said. A security guard noticed something the next morning in the heap of trash there and had a closer look.

Peace has been with Mary since then and Mary says she has been very peaceful. I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of them, but I will.

Neighborhood highlights.

Last Sunday, walking back from Mary Mount Chapel, someone greeted me from behind. The voice was Cyndi Lauper, but the person was Nadie, one of the girls from the Kilimanjaro Girls School who had seen me at church. We hadn’t met, but she took quick care of that and I was immediately answering questions about myself and California life. Nadie and her two friends, Janet and Sylvia, who had joined us, seemed certain that everything worth having and everything worth doing was there, in California, and that some day they would visit, in the U.S., America. When we parted, they called to me to send their greetings to two guys who work at the Getaway.

I stopped by on my walk to the property to sit with Purity for a while. She owns the clothing shop I showed your earlier. I asked her what she was reading. She showed me the cover. It was a book on preparing for marriage. I asked her if she was engaged. No. She was learning so that when God willed she would be ready. We talked for a long time.

Just before sunset, a couple of days ago, I was walking down the dirt road where I live with my Masai stick. I came across Esaiah and John, who were laboring down the road balancing a chicken coop upside down on a very rickety wheelbarrow. I joined up, taking the vacant position on the left side. It was heavy, well over two hundred pounds. We took turns at the wheelbarrow, and bumped the coop about a kilometer down the road.

On the way, Esaiah asked me these things:

“Theez reevah, Mee see see pee. Ees eet een Cah lee foh nee ah?”

“No,” I said,”It is in the middle of the U.S. Very far away.”

“Lowz Njellez, ees eet een U.S.?”

“Yes. It’s in California where I live, but still very far away.”

“Theez mahn, Hah neld Shots een aga, ees hee ded?”

“No,” I said, “He is alive. He is the Governor of California. Where I live.”

Disbelief and hilarity overcame him and we almost lost control of wheelbarrow and coop.

We got down and up the last ditch and deposited the coup at the right house. I didn’t have my camera then, but I came back this evening to get a picture of it.

Now that there is green grass, the Masai herders are making their way back home. A few days ago, I walked in the evening to the property to see David who is staying there and found a group of Masai herders overnighting there. They were coming from Thika, and were making their way back home about 100 kilometers away. A number of calves had been born the day before. Many to mothers who were still very weak, and at least one to a mother who hadn’t made it. The owner of the herd was Lante’. a dignified and friendly man who said he had been praying for rain.

Here are some pictures of them and the herd.

This is the path from the road to the property, looking quite different from a couple of weeks ago.

One of the two day old calves.

Part of the herd.

This cow is being urged to nurse the brown calf as well as her own blak one. This man was very patient with her, calling her back in cow language when she would move away from the brown calf. Finally he put his fingers in her nostrils and held her so the one day old whose mother had died could nurse.

This herder was very reluctant to have his picture taken. It took having everyone else's taken and shown to him on the digital screen before he wanted his spirit captured in that little box.

This is the campfire for cooking. The pot on the fire is tea, which they take before dinner. The big one on the ground has braised cabbage with tomatoe and onion. They will cook the ugali, the corn flour staple after the tea is boiled. The litte dog is Bobi, but for some reason I think of him/her(?) as Mr. Underhill. He has been staying at the property.

This is Lante, the owner of the herd. He has a son named David. We talked for a long time about the drought, how he had to sell over a hundred of his cattle, a very last resort for the Masai. He was full of dignity and courtesy.

I was at the property Saturday and David, who has been staying there, and his friend had gathered the inner shoots from sisao plants there and were stripping the fibers from the pulp of the plant. Here is Daniel doing that. He took one shoot, scraped it between the stick he is holding and a small piece of wood underneath it, which is just barely visible. He scraped one half of it four time, and then turned it around and scraped the half he had been holding on to, again four times, and then he had a perfect strand of off-white fibers. He tied a slip knot in the end, tossed it on the pile, and grabbed another shoot.

In a short time, he had this very beautiful pile of ready to use sisao fibers. To begin, you grab a strand put the short end near the slip knot in your mouth and tug hard to untie it. When one of the three strands starts getting short, you pick up another strand, tug it open, and braid it right in with the existing three.

This is David braiding the fibers into a three strand rope, to use for tethering a sheep.

This is also David braiding the fibers into a three strand rope. Mine didn't get long enough to tether a desmond. But it's hanging on my closet door handle nonetheless.

I wrestled with the download/upload powers again tthis morning and got most of what I wanted in. One small step for...

I'm getting killed in my picks for the NCAA tournament. My brother Bob lured me in. You would think that Iowa could beat Northwestern State in the first round, wouldn't you?

So long from the Lukenya hills.

David

Thursday, March 9

2006-03-09T20:51:00.000+03:00

Remember you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

I think, without conscious effort, I am developing a Kenyan walk. You know how different circumstances require different approaches to walking. When Greg and I are walking through the English walnut and cherry orchards along the north bank of the Calaveras River off of Alpine Road it is an entirely different matter from striding the gradual incline of Cole St. up from Haight St. to the patisserie for a loaf of organic walnut bread.

It’s the same here, I’m noticing, especially in the afternoons when it is almost always hot. The walk is more erect than usual, and it has dropped all excess motion. Glide isn’t a bad word to describe it. It has the effect of making you thinner in the sun, of slicing more easily through the air, with less surface area to absorb the heat. The pace is always just under the perspiration threshold, never forced or pushing. It’s like passing effortlessly through a crowd, only without the people. I don’t have a picture of it.

It has been raining most days for about week and a half. Maybe an hour a day, but in buckets. For the past few days, the rains have been coming from the west, making it to Athi River, about ten kilometers away, and stopping there. It is a matter of great debate whether these are the “long rains”, come a month or so early, or whether they will be short lived. In either case, the remaining sheep and cattle will survive, and get fat again on the new green grass that has come up everywhere, and Wilson and everyone else is busy planting maize and beans, seed by seed in the saturated soil.

Before the rains.

After the rains.

This is heavy machinery around here.

The rains brought the bug invasion.

A couple of hours after the first rain, I was sitting in the computer room, and I heard the deep throated whurr of a large helicopter approaching from a distance. Then the shadow of the helicopter passed over my head. And then the whole squadron. Thumping into the wall, into my head. In a few minutes there were hundreds of them. Termites. But these were termites like anything I had known only in the sense that Chihuahuas and Irish wolfhounds are both dogs.

Dragon flies is closer to the mark. Shorter, thinner bodies, but dragonflies, drunk dragonflies. Four wings, awkward fliers, living out their time of flight in light-drawn congregations. They didn’t seem to have romance on their minds, and within an hour most of them were dead or nearly so, their fairy wings left behind the only witness of their brief turn on the dance floor.

The helicopter squadron I heard.

The end of the road.

The next wave, a few nights later, was lady bugs, or at least I preferred to think of them as ladybugs. It helped ease the creep factor when they filled the “cyber cafe” in their hundreds and landed in my hair and crawled down my shirt. These little Philistines had their Goliaths. About as big as a milk dud, and weighing in about the same, they would hit me in the head like the smooth stone that felled their namesake, knock me off my psychic balance for a second until I fetched them out of my hair and sent them hurling across the room.

The third wave, one night later was, again, termites, but these must have flown over from California, because they were the familiar sort. By this time, Helen, the head housekeeper and I had a system. Turn off the lights, wait two or three minutes, sweep them out the door in the dark, put towels all along the gap under the glass front of the room and turn the lights on. This was about ninety percent effective.

This discrete column of ants was just marching across the road. They weren't connected to anything else that I could see, just the bunch of them cruising along.

I didn't know if this big boy might not just cut this tree down and drag it off to make some furniture for his place.

A few days ago, the offices of The Standard, a daily newspaper, and KTN a television station associated with it were raided by armed soldiers wearing balaclavas fully masking their faces. They damaged a good deal of equipment and burned copies of the paper. KTN was off the air for twelve hours as a result, and the paper was unavailable. The Minister of Internal Security, Mr. Michuki defended the raid saying that the paper and the TV station had been too critical of President Kibaki and his government, and for reporting inaccurately. Much of the country is a bit of an uproar over this outrageous action.

I was in Nairobi Tuesday, the 7th, when their was a huge demonstration careening through the city center streets, people running, shouting, chanting. Mercifully it was generally peaceful, and I was able largely to avoid the chaos and get what I needed done. The current government has been rocked by a number of problems -- the Anglo Leasing scandal, etc. The other day, a friend took me to lunch at Medeterraneo, a nice Italian restaurant in an upscale (read white) section of Nairobi, and at the table next to us, was the former Vice President in the Moi government, and the current Minister of Education, Mr. Saituti, who was forced to resign his office a few weeks ago as a result of one of the scandals. The fact that there can be demonstrations and forced resignations is a sign of enormous progress and hope. It is a very fluid situation and requires stable and fair leadership.

The lawyers and I have come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with disadvantageous zoning of the property we are buying. We are using an “off the shelf”company where the shares are held in trust, then converted to a public company where the shareholders can be non Kenyan, etc., etc. The end result is that we will be able to push forward once this process is fully underway and avoid the potential pitfalls of any other course of action. Very soon I will be talking more to architects and contractors and less to lawyers.

I met with Felix who runs the Daraja Project, A very inventive and good program that works with street kids in a number of ways, including identifying artistic and musical talent in the kids and getting them the training needed to help them find a way out of their situation. It’s focus is primarily to work with kids in their community, that is, not to rehouse them in most cases, but to work to provide an opportunity to get a different life. Felix is intense, sincere and has a quiet determination and power that can be counted on. A very good man.

I also met with Leah who runs the Child Life Trust, a multifaceted project that does very work both in Nairobi and Machakos, and since the property is registered in the Machakos district, her very good contacts there will be invaluable. She is also very knowledgeable about the ins and outs of registering non profit entities like ours. Getting properly situated with the various governmental agencies and District Commissions and the Ministry of Home Offices and getting up to speed on the brand new governmental policy for agencies in the field of child aid will be a big part of my work in the next few months.

You remember the babies in the cribs after W.W.II, I think, who were fed, kept warm, etc. but didn’t get picked up and handled enough, and they found that these babies were dying at a high rate. They didn’t thrive, was the word I think. I am afraid I may be slipping into the same state. The last person I hugged was Greg at the airport in San Francisco. I just realized this the other day, and have felt the deficit more acutely since then. And in one of the delicious ironies served up by the world to its slow learners, for the first fifty plus years of my life, I was largely indifferent to physical touch. It was great, but I could get on fine without it. In the last two years I have been making up for lost time, happily spending hours on end wrapped up in physical contact watching a movie or TV or reading or talking. Now I’m afraid someone is going to find me in my crib (not the MTV kind) incoherent, well fed, but refusing to thrive.

Here is a long overdue picture of Theopista from Taraja Boys Home.

Here's some of the boys playing soccer

Here's some other metal collectors, different from the ones in the last journal entry. I met them a few days ago not far from here. From left to right they are: Mwemi, Ndida, Mwema, Wambua, Mutuku, Mosioka, John. If you enlarge the picture you can see that while most of them are barefoot, Wambua has one shoe on.

The Masai camp right down the road has been abandoned now that the rains have come. The guys that I always waved to have packed it up and headed back to Kajendo two hundred plus kilometers distant, walking their sheep and cattle all the way. I went by the remains of the camp and took some pictures. I also found one of their sticks which they are never without left behind. Greg knows how crazy I am about that kind of stuff. So now I have it, and a picture for you.

This is the gate into the main pen area.

This is one of the side pens used to separate the sheep.

.This is the remains of the temporary house they built.

This is the Masai stick that I found in the abandoned camp.

The only difference here between this,

and

This, is a little bit of rain.

It’s probably time for an update on matatu names, the Nissan mini vans to the next life. In no particular order:

Snowline
Secret Admirer
Chicky junior
Purple Haze
Liz Warrior
Good Idea Ha Ha

One with a picture of Bart Simpson holding a fully drawn sling shot and below the words:
Praise God

And my two current favorites:

Vexation of Spirit
and
Au revoir Jersey City

And au revoir to you from just outside Nairobi city. Don't forget to write.

Love,

David

February 26-March 1

2006-03-01T15:01:00.000+03:00

February 27-March 1

Saturday, I went with Peter, the catechist at Mary Mount Catholic Church, to Kimongo, his village, or to be more accurate, Kimongo 2. Kimongo was settled by squatters in the early 1990’s and eventually, as a community they made a deal with the Lukenya Farming and Cooperative Society to purchase the land they were on. From Peter’s perspective the price was too high, and they are still paying it off. The Lukenya Farming And Cooperative Society is the entity which holds the title to our land, although we bought it from a private party who owns a forty acre parcel which has been subdivided. That arrangement is in part responsible for the delays we have been encountering.

Anyway, Peter lives in Kimongo 2, the second phase of the village, about .5 kilometers from Kimongo 1. I rendezvoused with Peter at the church at 2:00pm where he was working on a new building there. He cleaned up and we began the five kilometer walk to Kimongo. Everything is dry, parched really. We wound our way over some small hills and gullys, large rock outcroppings and barancas, following a winding foot path, Peter pushing his ancient bicycle and me following.

The pictures that follow are sequential, recounting our trip from the church near Daystar, where I live, through Kimongo 1 to Kimongo 2, where I had dinner at Peter's house, back through Kimongo 1, and back again to Daystar/Lukenya. I'll try to stay out of the way of the pictures as much as possible.

About half way, in a baranca, under the shade of two small trees, there were some kids sitting, talking and laughing. They got quiet as we approached. Not many mzungu out here normally. Peter, who knows most everyone, especially the children whom he works with teaching catechism and traditional dances. He is largely responsible for the dancing processions during mass. He asked me if we taught our children dances to do at mass. It seemed a little odd and sad to both of us that the answer was no.

We carried on and the children followed about one hundred meters behind. What they considered a safe distance. They were all carrying large irregular bundles or sacks, tied together. Peter told me that they had been out gathering scrap metal. That is, anything metal, in the bush, and were returning home. There is a man who comes through Kimongo and for a few schillings buys the scrap.

We stopped walking and let the children catch up, which they did pretty reluctantly.I asked Peter and then the children if I could take their picture. At first they wanted no part of it, especially thelittle girl in the dress. But that changed quickly and turned to hilarity when they saw their own faces on the small digital screen. Their names are Mwkali, Virginia, Mbithe, Walinya and Muthiani.

A click here and you get a good idea of the bundles, of the scrap metal, the fan casing, etc., and the crystal Lukenya sky, and the reluctant sister behind - see the shoes.

At first she was not at all sure about this whole business.

The reluctant one emerged.

And then she wanted a formal portrait.

This is Muthiani. You'll see him again.

Her name is Philistia, a click here will show more clearly that she has a braided sisao rope on her forehead attached to two plastic two gallon containers. She was just setting out to get water from a spring in the hills which is five kilometers away.
Sisao are the cactus-like plants you often see in the background. This whole area was once a huge sisao plantation, planted by British farmers for their fibers. You can still see in vast areas the endless rows, now many years later.

Peter at the Community building which is used for Church meetings on Sunday and teaching kids. You'll see the inside on the way back.

This man is stacking chopped sisao trunks to make charcoal.

After lighting it and getting it going, he covers it with dirt so it will become the charcoal, which virtually everyone cooks with.

Some kids checking out the mzungu in Kimongo 1.

This is the rose factory that Pablo saw from the satellite photos, and thought it was a solar installation. The picture does nothing to communicate how massive this thing is. A few very well-connected people have become fabuluosly wealthy from the proceeds. These complexes suck vast amounts of water from Athi River, their own bore holes (wells) and drain the Kilimanjaro pipeline. The roses don't know there is a drought. But they are the main reason that Wilson has no water for the acre plot he is working and that Philistia walks five kilometers each way to carry back four gallons of water. But it's not all bad. The struggling masses in Europe and the United States can keep romance alive with inexpensive roses. There are three rose factories in my view from Lukenya.

Peter on the path between Kimongo 1 and Kimongo 2 and his ancient bicycle. He made the trek for water early this morning on his bike, as usual.

Christine, Peter's wife, cooking ugali, the corn meal staple. The stick she is holding to stir the pot is exactly like the ones I saw and smelled at the Kigombe carver's market.

Peter and his daughter and his eighty-four year old mother. Very old for this area. Kenyans have a very interesting relation to age. Virtually no one I've asked can immediately give his/her age without some figuring, and then it's often a close approximation. The guy who usually drives me when I go to Nairobi, who makes his living from his car doesn't know what year his car is. But Peter was very precise about his mother's age.

Peter's compound. The building on the right is the kitchen, where Christine was cooking. It is very hot in there at meal time. Peter's mother also sleeps in the back section. The building on the left is the family's living quarters.

This is the bathroom. From the size of the target, I'd say without some practice it would not be a sure thing.

Yours truly at Peter's. He's got that Santa Cruz Mystery Spot lean going in this picture. Unfortunately, he didn't teach me the technique.

Peter's mother stacking a little fodder.

The family inside, where we ate, ugali, sukuma wike cooked with tomatoe and onion. It was delicious.

We're now on the way back to Kimongo 1.

Some boys who came running from where they were playing, stopped part way, too shy to come closer, then they tossed their soccer ball to me.

Here are the soccer players. The one holding the ball put on a fine display of soccer skill as we were walking away.

Some guys checking it out.

When we came back into Kimongo 1, there was an outdoor religious kids' meeting going on. There was a very scratchy loud speaker, and some music and all the kids were dancing like crazy. I tried to take a picture of them from a distance, but as soon as I took out the camera they all left the meeting ran over and mobbed me. The shyness had warn off entirely.

This is the mob. Recognize that toothless grin?

I felt bad disrupting the meeting, so I kept walking and tried to catch the kids dancing at the meeting from behind, but they were too smart for me.

Peter and the alley through the village.

Saturday night bath. But this looks like dry cleaning.

This is the inside of the Community building in Kimongo 1 that Peter was pictured outside of earlier. The slingshot-like thing is a kind of tambourine. It's made of a forked stick and bottle caps that have been flattened and burned and pierced with a nail and strung on a wire between the forks. It works great.

Sometimes, inspite of what circumstances might seem to dictate, you just wanna wave and pick your nose at the same time.

I can't remember a collection of eyes this bright.

This magnificent face is worth enlarging.

Peter and Christine and I were walking through the open land between Kimongo 1 and Lukenya. We were a few kilometers from anywhere when we heard singing in the distance. and the saw far off, a group of girls walking on the path toward us. They got quiet as they approached us, stopped singing, started talking quietly. They had just come from church, Peter knew, and when they got close he talked them into showing us the dances they knew. With very little persuasion they cranked it up.

They started singing, and the girl in the red dress put her flip flops on her hands to clap and keep rhythmn.

This is the only time so far I really wish I had a video camera and sound.

Things started heating up here.

These two girls started dancing together face-to-face. Everyone else was singing and or clapping. If you've seen the movie RIZE and wondered about the distant roots of Krumping, you may not need to look any further.

They were looking right into each other's eyes and locked in.

There was a sweet frenzy by this time.

Then it boiled over into a big love fest.

I made it the rest of the way home.

That's the news from the expanding neighborhood.

Keep on dancing.

David

February 23-24

2006-02-25T09:53:00.000+03:00

February 23-24

For the last three weeks or so I have been taking virtually all of my meals with George, the fifteen year old son of the new assistant manager here at Lukenya. He’d hunt me up whereever I was and tell me it was time to eat. He left for a new boarding school yesterday at Gil Gil, a mining town. George is smart, very funny, loves basket (basketball) and has been very good company. Typically, I eat alone, only occasionally joining a group that's here for a conference or a team building retreat or something. I don’t mind, but I got pretty used to hearing about George’s friends in Mombasa, where he grew up, how far out in the sticks this place is, how bad the food is at boarding school, all in the beautiful accent common to most Kenyans speaking English.

Bitter is "bee-tah", dinner is "dee-nah." Against becomes the three syllable "a-ge-nest." It’s not possible is "eets-note-poe-see-bl." And describing a particularly thunderous dunk he threw down on his NBA video game, "Dee-nah ees su-ved!" I miss him already.

My aunt’s funeral was Thursday the 23rd in Stockton. There seems to be a lot of parting and loss lately. The generations turn, the peeling away and the inexorable grinding toward the edge. It’s difficult to be apart from family now, and the feeling of isolation is always within easy reach here.

The work here has been beset with paralyzing delays in the search to establish clear title and exactly how the property we are buying is zoned, whether there is Land Control Board approval for the subdivision, etc.. Lawyer delays, clerk delays, filing delays, bureaucratic delays. You get the picture. It is at times maddening. At other times it’s just Africa. I have a meeting with the lawyer and clerk on Monday. I’ll keep you posted.

This morning just after my cell/only phone mysteriously quit working when I had seven or eight important calls that needed immediate attention, and I hadn’t heard from someone I was hoping to, I was walking back to my room looking for something to stick my head under, when a beautiful little yellow and brown bird flew onto the branch of a sapling not two feet from my eyes. He literally threw back his head and started singing his song. It didn’t seem like a particularly happy song, but he was letting loose. I stopped and we were eye to eye for a long while. He was a northern grosbeak canary as it turns out.

When you have one of those flying dreams and you wake up wishing you were a bird, before you make a blanket request and some up-to-no-good genie takes advantage of you, be sure to eliminate Marabou stork from your list.

Think of the ugliest person you know, your homliest relative. That tall, gangly great uncle, all joints and splotchy skin, a few long wisps of widely-spaced, nearly translucent white hair, a turkey neck, and a bad disposition to boot. Now imagine him at the moment of his expiration, having finally succumbed to consumption and the gout. Picture the death mask of that miserable soul, stick a few feathers on the body, and --boom-- a Marabou stork.

These giants soar over Nairobi, their stick legs trailing straight out behind them, like they weren’t really invited. There are a couple of trees on the outskirts where fifty or more of these ugly pteradactyls perch, standing straight up in the top flat branches.

And just so you don’t think this is personal with me, I’ll quote from the Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa , Stevenson and Fawshane, pg. 30, “ Huge stork with grey wings and white underparts (not underpants) naked head and neck pink or reddish showing scabby black spots at close range...Legs dark grey but often appear white as spattered with excrement (!!)...gatherings of hundreds are common...at rubbish dumps and predator kills.” And brace yourself for the worst visual ever “...breeding birds give a wide range of bleating, grunting and squealing noises...” Hey, I’m just reporting this stuff. These garbage- gulping, self-soiling monstrosities are definitely not who you want delivering the swaddling bundle to the chimney top.

Believe me, these are the prom pictures. They're less handsome in person.

I took my pants to get mended yesterday. Mary did it while I waited. Yes, I was wearing other pants at the time. Ten minutes and ten schillings ( about 15 cents) later I was gone. I tore the pants again in a different spot the next day taking this picture of a giraffe.

This guy was a lot closer than he looks here.

This group of zebras was down the road, just as the sun was setting. If you look carefully, there is a little head sticking out from the haunch of the third zebra from the right--it looks like a tail. I have seen this colt since he was about two days old, just like Ginger in Wales.

Look at the magnificent schnozz on this grey headed kingfisher. Another one of my neighbors. I have seen all of these critters, and a lot more I can't get pictures of--eland, antelope,etc.--on my before dinner walks. I have the fantasy that the giraffes are getting to know me.

I would have published his entry a couple of days ago, but we had a rare lightning storm and it took a big byte out of the internet here for a while.

I just found out that if you click on the pictures they get big. No doubt you wizards already knew this, but no one told me. The zebra picture is worth enlarging.

Keep those cards and letters coming.

David

PS Have the Sopranos started yet?

February 18-19

2006-02-20T10:07:00.000+03:00

Let this self-portrait stand as incontrovertible proof that while Africa can do many things for you, it can't make you pretty. This is the hallway of the house where I live at Lukenya Getaway. It's very nice and I am spoiled to be here.

Saturday, February 18

An update on the customs situation. I went to the airport yesterday, heavily armed: Medical records, use records for the past year for the light treatments, PIN# certificate, passport, pictures of the whole light apparatus, orphanage literature, survey maps of the property, and probably a few things I am forgetting. Masaa, the driver and I were set upon by “brokers” as soon as we entered the airport complex, guys who want to help you get your stuff for a fee. They were none too happy about my refusal, but, I wasn’t in the mood to be put upon. We found the Fed Ex office up a few dark flights of stairs and Carol, whom I had spoken to on Friday and gave me the estimate of the duty/tax costs. One of the brokers simply came with us as though I hadn’t been clear about not needing his services, and sat in the small office until even he saw that I wasn’t budging.

My case got turned over to David, a very nice guy who after hearing my story and a lot of uh huh’s and head nodding, got a very troubled look on his face. But he became my advocate, and over the next few hours guided me through the bureaucratic swamp with kindness and a good deal of proficiency. We went from office to custom’s cage to office to Head Receiving Agent to Fed Ex office to custom’s cage to receiving agent line...well, it just goes on. We eventually got an audience with the man who was going to make the call. I trotted out as much of my stuff as he could take and in short, he reduced the tax from well over 71,000ks to 730ks, about ten dollars. I shook his hand and he dismissed me in that benevolent monarch kind of way. I had my equipment, minus a cord which David assured me was waiting for me in the Nairobi City Center office. That was a minor adventure which isn’t going to make the cut here. The whole episode was a painful reminder that God is calling the shots, and that my getting my knickers in a twist doesn’t do anything except make sitting down uncomfortable.

I was pretty lighthearted when I went to Nairobi hospital to meet with Dr. H., my new physician here. A very nice man, cardiologist, a good listener. We went over my medical history. I didn’t really used to have one, and I liked that a lot better. He told me how lucky I was to be in America for my treatment, and for the first time I realized that things would have been very different for me if I had been in most other parts of the world two years ago.

Near the end of the visit I was telling him about some trouble I have been having with my ears. Since the radiation treatments they itch inside in a way that drives me crazy at times. I want to take a garden rake and stick inside my ear and scratch away. He said that extreme dryness was the culprit and he had just the thing for it. Wow! The first positive answer I have gotten for this problem anywhere. He wrote a script, which I took to a couple of pharmacies. Both said that the ointment hadn’t been available for about ten years. Oh well.

Sunday, February 19,

I walked the half mile down the dusty road to Mary Mount Chapel this morning to go to mass. When I got there the pre-mass choir rehearsal was in full swing, a choir director, wearing a tri-colored Nike wind breaker, and about a dozen choir members. Four or five females, seven or eight males. There were about thirty people scattered throughout the small church, all enjoying the proceedings. The director was taking them through their paces, at times in five or six part harmony. When someone would make a particularly good mistake, the congregation would crack up. No one seemed to mind. It was all good natured.

Mass started about fifteen minutes late, with the entrance processional. led by twelve female students from the nearby Kilimanjaro Private School. They were dressed in their school uniforms: light blue collared shirts, dark blue and white regimental striped ties, light grey v-necked sweaters with dark blue and white trim at the neck, calf-length black and white plaid skirts, and in this case, sarongs tied over their skirts, all predominantly dark blue in color, but all different. One very nice one had red camels on it. They were dancing the celebrant in, with slow, rhythmic steps while the newly tuned up choir accompanied by a djembe-like drum, sang beautifully.

The ceiling of the octagonal chapel was covered entirely in three inch slats formed into various designs, crosses, diamonds, squares in regular patterns. It reminded me of those crosses that are made entirely of burnt wooden matches, only this was quite beautiful. Parts of the mass were in Kiswahili and parts in English. The short sermon was delivered sequentially in both.

Just before mass started, a man came and sat down next to me. It was David who works at Lukenya Getaway, where I live. It was the first occasion of my ”running into” someone in the neighborhood. Well, the first human one . A few days ago, I was walking home from the property and I saw over a field, about fifty meters away, the unmistakable lilting flight of a black shouldered kite. Maybe my favorite bird in the valley. I was so happy to see him. I felt he might be like me, leaving to live in a new place, or maybe he is just a wanderer. I wanted to call to him and make him turn his head to see who was speaking to him in English.

This is the entrance to the chapel.

Mass was wonderfully paced. Two more dancing trips down the main aisle by the girls from Kilimanjaro, a few parts where everyone made coordinated hand movements, and throughout, the beautiful singing.

There was a seven or eight year old girl, her lightish brown hair all in straight rows, who was sitting well in front of me. She would turn and look at me in fifteen second stretches. I returned her gaze and smiled and she did too. She made her way back in my direction over the course of things until she was in the row in front of me to the left. I could feel her looking, and then we would smile, looking right at each other for a long time, repeatedly.

This was, I think, the baptistry. A separate small building to the left of the main chapel.

Here are some pictures I took on the walk to the chapel.

This is a clothing store owned by Purity, whom I met today while she was having her hair done inside. She is having a pair of my pants mended that I tore this summer on a hike in Wales when I got irretreivably lost. The shutter didn't open all the way.

This is Re-Eunice's Hair Saloon, Fine touch

The signs here are magnificent. One of the things I like best.

Albert's multipurpose Shoe Repair Shop

Albert. When I introduced myself to him he said, "So your the one with the Project." It's a small world here in Lukenya.

That's the neighborhood and the news. So long for now. Always good to hear from you.

David

Thursday, Febraury 16

2006-02-16T21:53:00.000+03:00

Thursday, February 16

Today nine or ten thousand miles might be just about the right distance to want to be away from me. I have passed a good deal of the day furious. And tomorrow I will go to the airport to do battle with customs agents over their position that I should pay about $1500.00 import tax, duty, declaration tax, filing fee to pay the declaration tax--and so on. That is probably more than twice the value of the ancient computer tower that they are holding there that has some specialized hardware in it to run a light that has been a big part of my regimen of staying healthy and keeping the internal bad guys at bay. I have been without it longer than I’d like already, due to shipping, etc. and now it is near but being held for an outrageous ransom.

See what I mean about the distance. Today I’ve probably been closer to creating a few more orphans (by ringing some adult necks) than I have to working toward building a home for them. In between hollering at the weaver sparrows outside to pipe down so I could hear yet more unbelievable stuff on my barely audible cell phone, and being transferred from Pricilla to Chastity--again, I did have some moments of lucidity. Really short ones most of the time.

About 5:30 I took a walk down the dirt track I’ve shown you a picture of, toward Athi River. It was more a stomp than a walk at first. Then I saw a few hedgehog burrows with plastic wrappers dragged down in them and that sort of lightened my footfall a little. Then I found a pretty white quartz rock. Then a Masai herdsman from far off raised his hand in greeting to me.

Back home I turned to music. The London Years,Vol. 3. Rolling Stones. Street Fightin’ Man, Brown Sugar, Sympathy for the You Know Who. Then the Jesus and Mary Chain, and I thought my student Rosie who gave me their music and wondered where her sweet, complicated path had taken her. Some live cuts from Marvin Gaye, very full of himself, but still helped with the healing. Oliver Mtukudzi, Tuku Music, finally danced me to the position that I should continue to obey the Fifth Commandment.

In a classic case of nature mirroring human psychic activity, a large fire swept through a quarter of a mile or so to the south. Huge wind whipped dark orange flames and light grey smoke. One person was injured, I don’t know how badly. We were on “high alert” here--I found out later.

I was able to let go a little bit the wasp’s nest of this day, the lawyer delays, the title questions, the customs situation, and pray for some peace. Baby stepping today.

I’m going to include some more pictures of the little heart bandits from Kibera, just to help remind me, and you, what in the world I’m doing here.

The names of the kids in the pictures are: Jack, Sylvester, Fiona, Baleigh, Evans, Eric, Braden. You can put them where you want.

Tuesday, February 14

2006-02-14T22:27:00.000+03:00

I went yesterday to Kibera (kee-bay-ra), the largest slum in SubSaharan Africa. It is about 8 kilometers (5 miles) long and fairly narrow. About 1.5 million people live there. This is one edge of it. I went to the Tea Loto clinic and daycare, run by the Nyumbani project folks, which serves children who are HIV positive. I met Paul who runs it, a quiet force, and the rest of the staff.

After a brief tour of the place, I went with Esther and Isabella to call on several women they have been working with. We walked at first through the crowded streets and then wound our way in some much smaller passage ways to each place. How they could find their way is completely beyond me. Nothing to mark the way. A maze with no solution for me.

Kibera has no running water, no indoor plumbing and no electricity, except for what is pirated from the grid and is very dangerous. There are lines of seven or eight "toilets" every so often, squat holes behind doors, which the people pay three schillings to use. They buy water by filling up their own containers, and the price has risen dramatically with the drought. And they buy charcoal or paraffin to cook with. The "houses" are rooms connected to dozens of others, about eight feet deep, and maybe ten feet long, filled with everything necessary for living. Chair, small sitting sofa, stacked beds, low table, pots, pans, cooking utensils, small charcoal burner, dishes, etc. It's pretty crowded.

This is the first house we visited, and since confidentiality is very important, I'll just use people's first initial. This is M and M. They live with their Aunt R, their mother's sister. Their parents both died of HIV/AIDS. They are both HIV+. R's husband doesn't work consistently and has been upcountry for several weeks. R. said he has given her an ultimatum, that she either get rid of M and M or he will leave for good.

He doesn't want M and M around anymore. The culture dictates that if the children were his deceased brother's, he would look after them. R. is in a very tough spot. She doesn't have money for them to go to school and she doesn't feel she can take them anywhere out of Kibera, even if someone would take M and M because they wouldn't be able to get the antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) they need everyday and get from the clinic. There is also the very real stigma still that faces children who are HIV+. She is uncertain what to do.

The second house we visited was M's. She is HIV+ and has three children, a nine year old, a one and a half year old who was asleep behind the curtain , and E, who is in daycare at the clinic. Esther and Isabella were trying to convince her to have her baby tested since the chance that the she would have the virus is very high, and so much in successful treatment depends on early testing. M said she was afraid to because she didn't want a bad result from the test. We didn't seem make any headway. M has no husband and no job. Her rent is 600ks per month plus everything else necessary to live with three children.

She plaits rows in neighbor children's hair, which takes hours, for forty schilling. This is a neighbor girl. Maybe you can see that her hair is about one-quarter done into rows.

This is her sister, hanging out in a makeshift playpen in the walkway to this row of houses.

Walking back to the clinic, a man, pretty drunk, asked me several times very loudly,"How are you?" "Are you fine?" And then hollered, "I am not fine," several times as we got further away. They make a home brew out of sprouted sorghum, which I saw layed out on seven or eight large tarps. I wanted to take a picture of it, but it just wasn't safe to take any pictures on the street. The brew is effective, but sometimes has the unfortunate side effect of causing the partaker to go blind.

This the back of the police station for the area. There was an officer sitting just to the right of the door with an automatic weapon.

This is a support group for the caregivers. The baby howled when I took the pictures. Everyone else was mostly fine.

These are some of the kids who come to daycare at the clinic. The boy in the striped shirt is M's son.

This little girl got a death grip on my camera after she saw her image on the screen. The outcome was in question for a while, but I prevailed with a combination of trickery and brute force.

He was learning to play catch with a tennis ball, and was quiet pleased with the prospect and himself.

I wanted to take this little man home with me.

More later, but it is late and I am tired.

David

Sunday, February 12

2006-02-13T17:36:00.001+03:00

Sunday, February 12

It was probably inevitable that I get around to the birds. When I was teaching at St. Mary’s, my classroom faced a pine tree and a couple of camphor trees, just a few yards away. I’d find myself standing there, the students taking a test maybe, staring out watching the birds. The usual cast of characters: Western mockingbirds, scrub jays, sparrows and blackbirds, a few resident doves, and every now and then a Merlin or a sparrow hawk. One day it dawned on me that they felt like good company. I missed them when they weren’t there.

Now I’m getting acquainted with a whole new bunch, and sorting through them slowly. African pied wagtails raising a ruckus outside the computer room, speckled mousebirds eating the popo fruit. Red cheeked cordon bleu, purple grenadier, grey capped social weaver. And some that are more like tropical fish than birds: malachite sunbird, superb starling. All these are just outside, in the trees and and the grass around my room. I haven’t gone anywhere to see them. They’re my new neighbors. There are plenty more, and with the Birds of East Africa book that Joseph loaned me, I am beginning to find my way, putting names to faces.

This guy is a red cheeked cordon bleu

You guessed it--a purple grenadier

A very noisy African pied wagtail

A couple of birds getting along

Yesterday I visited the Taraja Boys Home not far from here, walking distance actually. and met Theopista, the woman who lives there and cares for the boys. They are all from the streets and slums of Nairobi, and she currently has twenty one of them. The buildings are in need of repair, their vehicle is on its last legs,and the property needs a lot of attention. As everywhere, organizational funds are scarce.

I walked the land, dry like everywhere now, with this woman who is doing what she is called to do. She knows it and has made the sacrifices necessary to live it. Her husband, who lives here with her, works in Nairobi and makes the long, dangerous drive in everyday. They have created a home for these boys and many before them. Boys who have been abused, sniffed lots of glue, and somehow managed to survive on the streets until Theopista found them. Each boy made his own decision to come with her and each is free to leave. A few do, but not many.

When I was there some students from Daystar University, just down the road, had come and were playing games with the boys. Filling up glasses of water with spoons in a team race, howling, running, laughing. Having, as Theopista put it,”Crazy times with the boys.” Several of the Daystar students were from the streets and used to live at Taraja.

We sat on wooden benches in a cement shell of a room and talked about pitfalls, things to avoid in setting up and running an orphanage, about how to deal with the local officials, how to make the right kind of contact with the kids on the street, discipline, God’s grace, malaria, bore holes (wells) with three-stage pumps, nutrition, administrative structure, the scriptures, growing food, the tenuous nature of life in the drought. But always in her dark brown eyes and honeyed voice was love. Love of the boys, and the satisfaction of a life lived in its calling. At times I simply couldn’t speak, and turned and pretended to clear my throat.

The boys, in general, are much smaller than you would imagine. I mistook a twelve year old for eight. Poor nutrition, glue, and living on the thinnest margins in the slums and streets has shaped them. Here they are being re-shaped. Just as some of the children who are now on the streets and in Kibera will be re-shaped at the place we will build together for them.

I should have some pictures from Taraja in a few days.

David

February 8

2006-02-10T21:36:00.000+03:00

Wednesday, February 8

Today I went to Nairobi, another stimulating ride on the Nairobi/Mombassa thrill circuit. A very large truck, frontally smashed and the matatu casualties mount. Twenty one that I know of since I have been here. At this point, the only traveling I do is to Nairobi and its environs, so you get a big dose of road info in these journal entries.

The telephone poles are particularly lovely here. They’re trees, and haven’t had quite the same strict upbringing as those in the U.S. They don’t curve off to the left or right, but they undulate upward and so they are delicately and sensuously female in their appearance--a very welcome change from what we’ve been putting up with in the States.

VOTE NO VOTE NO

This painted with a brush in white paint on a grey cement wall on the south side of the road, without additional reference to timeframe or issue. The only graffiti I have seen anywhere. Closer to Nairobi, on the dirt and grass median, a shirt laid out perfectly flat on the sparse grass to dry, arms spread wide, and pants stretched out flat, legs spread, the waist lined up with the edge of the shirt. The immediate, startling impression was that the chute had failed.

Another thing I love here is that the windows on all the high-rises open. They push out from the bottom. I could never understand their being sealed everywhere else.

Here they drive on the, well, let’s not be so culture-bound as to call it the”wrong” side of the road. Let’s just say it’s the “incorrect” side. I can’t imagine I will ever assimilate it wholly. I’m always looking the wrong way before crossing the street and narrowly escaping senseless death. The only right pedestrians have here is the right to be run down by anyone in a motorized vehicle who can get you in his sights. Joseph has taken to holding his arm outstretched at a forty-five degree angle, his palm turned backward toward me exactly as you would to caution a group of inattentive, curbside preschoolers.

I visited the Nyumbani Project today outside of Nairobi in Karen, founded by Fr. Angelo D’Agostino, a Jesuit priest and M.D. He just turned eighty, but you would have to be told that. The project houses ninety three HIV positive orphans, mostly from the slums in Nairobi. They live by tens in smallish duplex housing, each with a mother who lives there also. The mothers are from the streets, and together they form a family, a permanent one, that they grow up in.

A large limb cracked and had to be cut from a very productive avocado tree there. The kids had gathered dozens of them, brilliant green, and were shaking them. I bent down, reached into a faded blue shirt front and pulled one out and shook it next to my ear. I could hear the seed rattle inside. It was ripe.

When the project first started, the tiny white-crossed graves in the hedged-off corner of the lawn were increasing by two or three a month. Now with the anti retro viral drugs, the most recent marker is 2002. So they are dealing with here with teenagers they never expected to have. A happy problem. They also have one of the very best laboratories in all of Nairobi for HIV testing, and monitoring HIV/AIDS patients against HIV infection. They provide the community and many of the local hospitals with these and many other laboratory testing services as well.

They struggle against widespread ignorance and the view that that resources used for HIV positive children are wasted because of their inevitable fate. The fact is that most of these children will never develop HIV/AIDS and can live out their lives with proper care, and that is with just current medical technology, let alone what is coming.

They are also under full steam with the Nyumbani Village, a beautiful project to create a village for one thousand kids and three hundred elderly in a functional model environment for HIV positive orphans.

On the way to Nyumbani, we stopped at Kigombe, on the back side of another rough area, where the wood carvers work. I was with Tony, and again the only mzungu for miles. We wandered from stall to stall talking to the carvers, gently deflecting entreaties to buy. I went to the back reaches of the area; men cutting slices of large logs with hand saws, and found a man roughing out of thin slats with a machete, stirring spatulas for cooking ugali, the corn meal staple, and smelled the incense fragrance. I squatted, got the nonverbal consent, and held one of the spoons from the pile at his feet to my face. “Cedar,” I said. He nodded. And I was in Uncle Jim’s den, a foggy Stockton Sunday morning, reading The Chronicle and smelling the cedar in the wood stove. Or on Jim and Lisa’s deck in Twain Harte eating a late summer supper, Buck and Spitz being very big dogs in the yard steepled with cedars. I held the flat, freshly shaped spoon against my cheek and closed my eyes.

You can just see the rounded ends of the spoons under the leg to the right

Justus, a giraffe in each hand, found me squatting there, and urged me to come to his stall. Six or seven men, all wearing another pair of reversed pants over their clothes to protect from the constant wood friction, carving with angled knife blades worn thin from use. Carving rosewood, ebony, and mahogany into animals, female figures, hair picks, shoe horns, canes, or polishing with a mixture of dark wood pigment and Kiwi shoe wax.

The carvers were cautious at first. Hesitant, shy. I squatted and could immediately tell that one of the younger guys, maybe eighteen, was poking fun at me in Kiswahili. He had a radiant face. A minute later he said that since I had seen the younger carvers here (this group), that I could now see the old (over the hill) ones there-- a head gesture to the guys just behind him in the next open stall. They half grumbled, his group cheered. “So you’re the trouble maker,” I said, and the preliminaries were over. Everyone, including the trouble maker, John, howled.

Someone handed me a short carved stool to sit on, and we spent the next half hour as pleasantly as any I can remember. I took some pictures, usually a pretty touchy proposition, but everyone wanted his taken, including Justus, the boss.

If you come I will take you there.

David

PS I've added some photos to previous entries, so you may want to take a photo tour!

February 4-6

2006-02-07T21:19:00.000+03:00

Sunday, February 5

Today is my daughter Allison’s 26th birthday. She is in Virginia finishing her MBA and will graduate in May. She and her husband, Dave, will be coming to Africa after that. Allison for the second time. Happy Birthday, Bug.

I have a small ceramic ghost that she gave me (a part of our Halloween connection), which travels with me everywhere. He is on my bedside table. For company he has a Thomas the Train engine (D199) and an airplane from my grandson, Braden, a pink pretty pony and some rocks from my granddaughter, Baleigh, a picture of my older daughter, Amy, a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi that my aunt gave me, and some smooth, flat rocks that Sarita and I found at Rockaway Beach.

Monday, February 6

Today I was in Nairobi with Joseph and Tony all day, finalizing the banking situation, providing documents to Safari com, the cell phone company I am using and attempting to get PIN #s (Personal Identification Numbers) for Greg and I. I have been working very hard to get the deed, which has been stalled for months, transferred to us and now, after much progress, the next stage of the process was halted until I could secure the PIN# for Greg.

Joseph and I walked across much of City Center to get to Nairobi’s tallest building. A government building. In order to get Greg’s number we needed a copy of his passport. Greg has spent endless hours in the last several days trying to fax us a clear copy. More effort than you can imagine. It’s a good microcosmic example of how difficulties can get multiplied exponentially over distance and culture. Things that you could take care of before breakfast can take days here.

In any case, Joseph and I, were armed with a copy of Greg’s passport so faint that at first glance you could mistake it for for a blank piece of paper. The passport number even under the closest scrutiny was obscure, almost invisible. After going through a hand held metal detector which allowed me to pass with the substantial pocket knife that I always carry, Mr. Spyderco, to all his friends, we spoke with a woman at a desk who told us that the clear copy of Greg’s driver’s license, which I had brought with me, would work fine.

We filled out the two forms in a very crowded seating area in the grand foyer, improvising when necessary. The real fun began when we proceeded to the PIN# processing area. There were two counters: one with four stations for PIN#s and one with three for VAT- I’m not sure what that is. There were about fifty people crowded around the PIN counter and five or six at the VAT counter. A security guard kept trying to arrange people into several lines but as soon as he would go to another area the melting together would immediately begin. There was only one person behind the PIN# counter and the fifty or so of us crowded around were a line only in the same way that, say , people running for the exit in a theater fire are a line. It was very close quarters. So much so that the man behind me actually had his right foot ahead of my right foot.

I waited for half an hour without a single perceptible movement in the “line.” There were also about forty people to the left of us packed together in a seating area waiting for something. Another half hour and still nothing but the security guard and his reinforcement, who looked very much like a miniature David Robinson, arranging people every seven or eight minutes into lines. It was like trying to organize the small bergs in an ice flow.

Finally, Joseph managed to insinuate himself in front of the only person at the PIN# counter and ask her a question about the signature on Greg’s form. He came back to me and we sorted out the info. A man came to one of the other desks at the counter and there was a crush toward him, people waving their filled-out forms with stapled copies of their IDs at him like traders on the stock market floor, only much quieter. Kenyans are not loud, even in these circumstances.

He asked Joseph a question about Greg’s form, which he had inexplicably gotten out of the huge stack. I squeezed toward him. He said the driver’s license copy would not work. We needed the passport--not a copy, THE passport. I told him my partner was in the U.S. and that we were told that we could get a PIN# for him. He said we needed the passport. I felt the moment slipping away. He would surely turn his attention to someone more prepared and we would be swallowed again by the crowd and slowly digested. We showed him the “copy “ of Greg’s passport. He looked at me like I was crazy. The only mzungu in the whole crowd and this is what I had? Joseph was lobbying hard and suddenly the man pushed the copy toward me and told me to write the name and the passport number clearly on it. I did. Joseph and I had agreed on what we thought the numbers were. I gave it to him and we were dismissed.

Another half hour, now in the “waiting line.” Joseph heard my name called, and a few minutes later, Greg’s. And in our hands, two printed papers with two PIN numbers for two Americans. I find it impossible to accurately communicate the unlikelihood of this result coming out of the situation. But there it is, the first minor miracle of the project.

On the way back from Nairobi, two trees in the land between the opposing lanes of the road, their crowns filled with very large black and white Sacred Ibises, Perhaps seventy of them.

Tonight back at Lukenya I am lonely and seeing everything through the filter of sadness that attends it. The plain that stretches out to the Athi River and Nairobi and Kilimonbogo and has given me so much joy to look upon, tonight seems filled only with what I have lost. And the the limitless sky serves as surety that I will not regain it. Tomorrow, or at least some of its successors, will, no doubt, unfold differently, but tonight I am sitting here.

February 1-3

2006-02-05T09:09:00.000+03:00

This is a view of the land facing the Athi River, where I walk very often. The two flat topped trees in the distance are acacia trees. The giraffes love them.

Wednesday, February 1

You know how packaging can drive you crazy. Open a bag of potato chips (if you’re Hercules) and it looks like someone beat you to it and ate about two-thirds of what should be there. It’s not like that with Aquamist bottled water. It’s only now, with about two weeks practice under my belt that I can open a bottle without spilling some. The half-liter bottle is filled to the very brim. To the very brim. The pressure of my hand holding it would cause it to overflow a little, no matter how careful I was. Only now can I just manage a dry opening. Its a case of a little too much of a good thing.

Mostly there is too little water. Everything is dry, so the Masai are seeking any grazing they can find for their cattle, including the median between the opposing lanes of traffic on the Nairobi/Mombasa Road. It’s a divided four lane road for only a few miles outside of Nairobi before it reduces to one lane each way and becomes the asphalt stage for the world’s longest running game of “chicken.” Everything draws to an impatient halt when the cattle cross, the Masai tapping them with their sticks. Trucks,matatus, busses, cars and motorcycles temporarily under the red flag.

That part of the road is relatively smooth, and the cracks, which follow their own wandering, ice crystal logic, and , I guess are slated for repair, are often outlined on both sides in white or pale orange spray paint. The result is very long, very thin figures on the road that look like the hauntingly beautiful pictographs found in Australian or Southwestern American caves, or else the crime scene of a vehicular massacre of alien beings who may have come in peace, but they made the mistake of trying to cross the Nairobi/Mombasa road and weren’t Masai cattle.

Thursday, February 2

I was walking with Wilson down the same dirt road where Daniel and I saw the giraffes. When we saw them I handed Wilson the binoculars and he had the exact same response as Daniel. Wilson is nineteen, very bright, and trying to find a way to study medicine at University. In the meantime he is husbanding the one acre plot by hand to “earn his daily bread” as he put it.

He was flabbergasted and delighted at seeing things so far off seemingly so near at hand. I started thinking about this. It seems to me their wonder isn’t just at using a new seeing device, but that the relationship between time and distance is still intact for them.

A couple of weeks ago, I boarded an airplane in San Francisco. Whatever the plane was doing, I was just sitting, sleeping and reading Rolling Stone magazine--a flying ritual for me, the only time I read it-- and , a few bad meals and a couple of otherwise unwatchable movies later, and I am in Nairobi. I don’t know, nine or ten thousand miles away. This has a way of corrupting the concept of distance for me. Let alone the whole, “One small step for mankind...” thing, or bouncing equipment-filled beach balls around on the Red Planet.

Daniel and Wilson and most of the rest of the world have still earned all the distance they have covered, most of it on foot, getting from one place to another. So when those far off things are brought right before their eyes its no wonder it seems like a miracle, an abrogation. In a poem by William Everson in The Residual Years, called “San Joaquin”, he is describing the beauty of the Central Valley and how it is almost always overlooked, unappreciated, because its nature is, I think the phrase he uses is, “neither freaked or amazing” (Chris, can you help me here). That it seems to me is what is happening here. The nature of time and distance is still manageable for Wison and Daniel, because it hasn’t been “freaked” by jet travel or Carl Sagan.

Friday, February 3

I watched the first television I’ve seen since I left California. Parts of two qualifying matches for the African Nations Cup soccer. I was watching with a group of CARE workers who have been here for several days from Somalia and had been teasing me about working all the time. Many of them live in Mogadishu, which with the continuing tension and unrest is no picnic. I saw the first half of the Senegal vs. Guinea match. Senegal came from behind to win I found out, and the second half of the Egypt vs. Democratic Republic of Congo. Egypt, whose goalkeeper looks exactly like Ray liotta in “Good Fellas,” won in a rout.

The work is going well, at this point mostly meetings and introductions and lots of behind the scenes stuff and setting up shop. I am meeting Wednesday with Mary Mshana who has been running a program for girls successfully for a long time. I am very encouraged with the progress and amazed at the difficulty. Keep the project in your prayers if you pray, please.

I'm also interested to know what you are reading these days. I'm about half way through a biography of George Washington called His Excellency, by Ellis. I've been on a little historical biography kick lately. I notice in viewing the published entry that none of the proper underlining or italisizing of titles comes out. I'm not sure why.

I think your shyness is wearing off and the number of comments is increasing. It’s kind of like asking a girl to dance in Junior High. It’s a little nervous, but it has its rewards.

Go on and do it.

David

28-30 January 2006

2006-01-31T19:45:00.000+03:00

Saturday, January 28

Last evening, after a very important and productive meeting with several folks , I wanted to walk west. A hundred steps down the dirt road and it is completely open land. It slopes gradually down to the valley formed by the Athi River.

Just as I came out of the gate, Daniel was there walking home to Kinani, about ten kilometers away. He always greets me with parts one and two of the standard three part handshake. We fell in together. He has been working at Lukenya one month. We passed the temporary camp where the Masai herders have come trying to find grass for their goat and cattle herds in this unseasonably dry time. Their flocks were ranging south of where we were.

Here's the goat I tried to show earlier

We were talking and keeping that effortless but effective pace that people keep when they walk to cover distance. After a quarter mile I saw a giraffe a long way off to the southeast. I had my binoculars and found him and six or seven others, moving slowly eastward, browsing leaves from the tops of acacia trees. I handed Daniel the binoculars which were new to him. He looked with one eye and then the other from about four inches away. I coaxed him to use both eyes up close and -- boom! there they were. He asked me a couple of times,”Shall I take them” and squeezed the focus wheel before I realized he assumed he was holding a camera. I didn’t get to see the giraffes again. He knew a good thing when he saw it--up close.

He is one of my teachers here. Kind, happy, full of faith and knowledge. A lovely man.

Sunday, January 29

I woke up about 6:00am and since it was Sunday I thought I’d take a walk and see if what happens early in the open spaces. I grabbed my binoculars and a water bottle and headed out the door. Well, almost out the door. The skeleton key that locks the door from the inside spun and spun when I tried to open it. One of the big teeth had broken off and it was pretty useless and I was pretty locked in. I unscrewed the plate and the door handle, but no good. I was incarcerated. AlI the windows have heavy metal grids around the small panes. I was paroled about two hours later when I managed to catch the attention of someone walking out back. He was actually the second person I made my case to. The first, a young woman I hadn’t seen before and who didn’t speak much English, promptly left and didn’t returned.

Monday, January 30

One of the great things about language is how you get to crack people up when you are trying to learn theirs. My Kiswahili is, well you can’t even say it’s bad yet. It doesn’t have enough substance to be bad. But I’m trying to change that. People here are much too polite to laugh, but I know I must be tickling them inside, giving them my version of greetings like the one I got the other day in one unbroken phrase,”Hello thank you good-day evening.”

I was in Nairobi all day, meeting with lawyers, getting a cell phone, a bank account, getting photos taken (for the bank account) and changing money. For some reason bills from 1996 are traded at a slightly lower rate than newer bills. So Joseph and I left the currency exchange thinking we could do better than 69 Kenya schillings per dollar. We made our way to the city market. It’s in a cavernous old ware house or dirrigible hanger or something, and is filled with stalls. Produce, baskets, clothes, carvings, flowers. You name it. Tucked behind a vegetable and fruit stall was a money changer Joseph knew. It is not a place you would want to go unescorted to change money.

Joseph and I stood in a space, a corridor of sorts about three feet wide and six feet long. With three other people, waiting to do business. When someone would come out, we turned sideways so that they could pass, and that with a lot of body contact. The “office" was so small the three of us barely fit. But, 71 schillings per dollar. I’m historically pretty claustrophobic. Less so now, but I’d still rather eat glass than have an MRI. But here, I am finding a different sense about being so close to people I don’t know. I kind of like it. Maybe I’m alone too much, and the contact is, well, contact. But I think it has more to do with how Kenyans act in tight spaces. They are so calm and unaffected and pleasant in a very understated way. We’re all in it together is the feeling I get.

Matatus are the small vans that transport people who live outside of the city back and forth. Crowded takes on a whole new meaning in these flying sardine cans of death. On the road to Nairobi from Lukenya, they are everywhere, passing slow moving and fast moving trucks and sanely driven vehicles with complete abandon. If there is a blockage of some sort, they head overland snaking along the uneven side of the road over ruts, cement chunks, etc., until they find some way around the stall. All this with fourteen or so people wedged in what in the U.S would be a five or six passenger vehicle.

The unfunny part is that they are so dangerous. Fourteen people died in one wreck last week. I had thought trying them to save transportation costs, which are steep,and paying a little extra and getting the shotgun seat where it could only get so crowded, but Joseph and Tony seriously discouraged it, and told me about all the wrecks, etc. I didn’t really need much convincing.

They do have fabulous names, though, each one hand painted on the side and back. Here’s a few: Scandal, Rhapsody, Everlasting God, Vanessa, The Furious Five, Romantic, Undertaker Senior, Hullabaloo, Ghetto Jam, Bugs Bunny, and my current favorite, Patmos, the island where John the apostle received the Revelation, no doubt after a particualrly hair raising ride.

I tried to add a picture of a goat for visual appeal, but something went haywire.
The goat picture made it 2/10/06

Don't forget those comments, and email whenever you like.

David

26 January 2006

2006-01-27T10:48:00.000+03:00

26 January 2006

I have been to Nairobi a couple of times in the last few days. It has changed since I was last here in 2000. The city center is much cleaner, safer and generally spruced up. Even a working signal light. The new government, Joseph says. It was nice to see. Saw a lot of the old haunts: the Terminal hotel, Mama Savuka’s office, Uhuru park, and so on. The street kids and other "undesirables" have largely been moved downtown.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the pollution. Seems like every vehicle belches out black diesel smoke. The million or so trucks that you nearly crash into in the roundabouts have thoughtfully positioned their unmuffled exhaust pipes on the side and at precisely car window level. We were stuck in an awful traffic mess caused when some streets were shut down because of the building that collapsed, and at times I thought we were following slow- swimming giant squid, plowing through the inky cloud while they tried to lose us.

Which reminds me. Nairobians are unimaginably adept at driving in traffic that would send even Californians running for a bus pass. It’s magical. It’s contrary to the law of physics about two things not being able to occupy the same space at the same time. It happens all the time here. I’m closer to the people in the cars next to me than I am to Tony in the front seat of my car. In the U.S. it’s like cars are bricks. Sharp edges, hard, self contained. Here cars are like fish, swimming in schools, fins touching, turning together as precisely and inexplicably as the ones on the DVDs they use to show how cool plasma TV pictures are. And in the midst of it is a guy straining at a two-wheeled cart with Buddha-like calm. It’s a good metaphor for a lot of things African seen from a western view; they’re different but they work.

Africa, it seems, is fraught with unexpected dangers for me. Today I was taking a handful, literally, of the supplements that I take everyday (thanks Pat and family), all of them large gel caps. Now, after a very slow post-treatment start where I couldn’t swallow anything, I consider my self something of an expert pill taker. Black diamond stuff. Only my brother Bob is better. Anyway, just as I took a swig of water, I coughed, rocketing one of the pills into the back door of my left nostril and wedging it tight there. I thought I was going down, but I managed to dislodge it and save myself from a very embarrassing end. God be praised.

And, we’re working hard on getting things squared away for the project. Making progress and getting the picture clearer. Thanks for your prayers. And if you’re reading this you have Charbel to thank (or blame) for his heroic effort in picking things up very late in the game and mounting a Red Sox ‘04-like late inning rally. And it will be completed soon. Asante sana, Charb.

Yours for improved pill taking safety,

David

January 21 - 24

2006-01-25T11:43:00.000+03:00

21 January 2006

I’m on the first leg of a very long flight. Just after four this morning Greg picked me up and we headed to the San Francisco airport. It didn’t exactly seem early to me since I hadn’t made it to bed last night. I was busy packing my life into a refrigerator-sized rolling suitcase and a duffle bag so big you could crawl in and take a nap, if you had the time, which I didn’t. To round it out, I loaded a wheeled carry on bag. My only brush with moderation was my shoulder bag -- plenty of breathing room in there.

Check in.

The luggage allowance for international travel is two fifty pound bags, a forty pound carry on and a brief case. Seemed generous. I was pretty sure I had made it...
Is eighty seven pounds a single bag record? Does a $150 weight penalty seem excessive? A few minutes later after my whining about orphanage project literature to deaf ears one of the ticket agents let out that the fine was $25 if the bag is under seventy pounds. Seventeen pounds of books stacks about a foot and a half high. Right there on the terminal floor. Don Quixote, Discoveries by Alan Lightman, The Fall of Baghdad, A Poet’s Dictionary, etc., etc., you get the picture. Minus the stack, fatty was a trim 70.5 pounds. Close enough.
Greg and I retired to an uncrowded seating are and crammed all but three of the books and a still-boxed camera into the unweighed rolling carry on and my now very chubby shoulder bag.

On the plane.

I’ve traveled a couple of hours now and the only things missing are my favorite water bottle and the carrot juice I guess I left in Stockton. Not bad.

In the Amsterdam airport looking at the departure board, I asked the man standing next to me what time it was here.
8 o’clock, he said.
A.M.? I asked.
Yes. Where are you going?
Nairobi.
Ah, India! he said.
I nodded.

Amsterdam to Nairobi.

KLM. Better food, more attentive staff, bigger blankets, and an open invitation to come to the galley for whatever you might need. I slept deeply and often.

In Nairobi.

Tony met me at the airport. A breeze through customs, and a forty kilometer drive to my new home in Lukenya. I have a very functional, clean room in a quiet place. It’s 2:30 a.m. Nairobi time and I can’t quite calculate how long I have been traveling anymore. But I’m here now.

22 January 2006

I am at my new home, for now the main the main house at Lukenya. Later I will move to one of the cottages. I have electricity and outlets, but the wrong voltage for all of my stuff. I will need to get this sorted out.

24 January 2006

It has taken me until now to solve the power problem. So now I can begin to post journal entries.

This morning I met Wilson, tall slender, soft spoken in the manner of nearly all Kenyans. He tends one of the nine individual acre plots at here at Lukenya. His plot is right behind my room. He is growing bananas, passion fruit, onions, some thing I didn’t recognize and a large field of beans. The rains which should have come in November and December were largely absent, and so the field of beans is mostly dried up. He has two water sources, the pipeline from from Kilimanjaro, and the well at Lukenya. In spite of this he is facing a real shortage as the drought comes into its second year. He carries large plastic containers from the well to water the fruit trees, both of which grow very small here. They look out of place in this dry landscape. We would think of this land as high desert. Scrub brush, small tough trees, some cacti and the ground cover which should be green and plentiful at this time is sparse and mostly brown.

I walked down the dirt road toward the Athi River and a small herd of Masai cattle grazing there found an opening in the fence surrounding the cultivated plots. A few of them made their way in before the young Masai herdsman came running to bring them back. He scolding them, rapping them with his long, slender stick, his short just visible under his thin blanket wrap.