Hock A Loogie At This One

Yesterday’s sunset was amazing. I was coming back from a community mobilization in a remote village that was hosting a 100th anniversary celebration of Seventh-Day Adventists in Kenya. In other words, it was a typical Kenyan event full of long speeches, long prayers, a cake cutting, and people clamoring to have their picture taken with the mzungu. As we sped along the winding highway, the sun dropped quickly behind purple hills, coloring the sky orange, pink and yellow, as tea plantations began shrinking into dark green shadows.

It reminded me of chasing a sunset over Malibu beach in LA, parking my car and sprinting out to the ocean only to realize the sun had already dropped below the horizon. But in the purple light that remained, I noticed something I’d never seen before – dolphins leaping in the surf, dancing just for me, laughing at the only idiot on the beach who thought she could catch a falling star.

“Wow, that sunset is beautiful,” I said to Salina. I was back in Africa.

“Hm,” she said, looking out her window in the opposite direction with no apparent interest. I thought she’d heard wrong, so I mentioned it again.

“Aren’t those colors amazing?” I said, pointing to the sky.

“Mm,” she said again, still staring out the window.

“Ben,” I said to our driver. “Don’t you think that’s a nice sunset?”

He mumbled a vague affirmation and fiddled with the radio, not even glancing at the sunset. It was like I had pointed out grass to him. I couldn’t understand why something so unique and breathtaking to me was essentially invisible to my co-workers.

I felt irritated, the usual irrational case of, “Why can’t people who are different from me stop being different from me?” that afflicts people living in other cultures. It was like they couldn’t appreciate what I was trying to show them because they’d watched the sun go down every day of their lives. I’ve seen lots of sunsets, but seeing a new one never diminishes the magic of any of the others, so shouldn’t it be the same for them?

I tried again. “Salina,” I said. “When you look at that sunset, what do you think?”

“I think that night is coming,” she said.

“But when you see all those colors like fire, don’t you feel like it’s something special, not just something in the sky?” I said.

“You know,” she said. “A long time ago the Nandis used to bless the sun by spitting at it because we believed it brings life. So in the morning we’d spit at the sun as it came up, and in the evening we’d spit at the sun as it went down.”

Finally we were getting somewhere.

"But what about now when you see the sun setting?” I said.

“I want to spit at it,” she said, and we all laughed.