Totally Trivial Tidbits

Three Kinds of Floss. Yup, there were only three kinds of floss at Sun City Supermarket (formerly Uchumi) in Kisumu. I don’t think flossing is a regular part of oral hygiene here, although using toothpicks is, judging from how ubiquitous they are in every eatery joint and from the fact that they’re found next to the toothbrushes at the store. Needless to say, I didn’t find my favorite floss, the Johnson&Johnson woven mint flavored floss, and the floss I ended up buying was expensive and shreds under normal use despite claims on the packaging that it doesn’t. Most ironically of all, I floss more here than I ever did in the U.S.

Kalenjin Runners. You might have heard that the winner of the recent Chicago marathon fell on his arse right after crossing the finish line. The guy is from the Kalenjin tribe that lives in my area, and some of my co-workers know him way back when he owned a barber shop in their village. “Imagine, he used to be a humble barber and now he’s a millionaire.” A millionaire who nearly cracked his head on the finish line. The male and female winners of last weekend’s Nairobi marathon are also both Kalenjins. I’m so proud of my tribe.

One thing I won’t miss about Kenya. Having black boogers all the time.

Wisdom. We were watching Out of Africa last week; it was the first time any of us – Tony, Neetha and me - had ever seen it. A lot of the scenes are set to crisp, clean classical music (Mozart, mostly) and the Kenyan countryside is portrayed as pristine wilderness teaming with wildlife and Kikuyu warriors happily going about their lives in traditional dress, some with full time jobs as pleasant, mild-mannered servants to British colonists. Idyllic and unrealistic.

“I find it ironic that the movie sets Africa to Mozart. It’s so incongruous,” I said.

“But that’s basically what the British did to Kenya,” Tony said.

FOUND: FREE WIRELESS INTERNET IN KENYA!! Now that I have a cool laptop, I’ve gone in search of wireless internet. Java House at Adams Arcade and at the Junction in Nairobi both have free wi-fi, and there is a university about an hour’s bike ride from my town that has wireless for 1 shilling a minute. Life almost feels normal again! Happy meter = high.

Should’ve Bought the Fourth

I took the night train to Nairobi a few weeks ago with Shinita and Tony. When we tried to book a sleeper cabin for ourselves – two women and one man – we were advised to buy the fourth space (a cabin sleeps four) if we wanted to stay together, because putting a stranger in our mixed-gender cabin might make that person feel uncomfortable. If we didn’t pay for the fourth spot, they would put us in different cabins and we would have to stay with strangers, albeit of the same sex.

“It’s just a trick to make the mzungus pay more,” we said. “There’s plenty of space and we’ll be able to move into the same cabin after we leave the station.” It was kind of like the stadium seating mentality for a losing baseball team. Wait a few innings, then move from your cheap nosebleed seats to the more expensive empty seats on the first baseline.

“No need to buy the fourth spot.”

Shinita and I went to put our luggage down in the cabin we were sharing. There were already two large mamas, a nine-year-old boy (kids are never counted as people on transport vehicles), tons of luggage and a heavy layer of ripe, rather putrid body odor in there. Shinita and I looked at each other and heaved a mutual sigh.

We hurried out and went to Tony’s cabin to assess whether we’d be able to stay there. There was only one other passenger in his cabin, a respectable-looking, unscented older man with one small bag. Sweet. We were both thinking the same thing – we’d be staying in Tony’s cabin tonight.

The cabin mate immediate struck up a conversation with us as the train pulled out of the station in Kisumu. He was a university professor in Nairobi, obviously well-educated, but with that weird inferiority complex that compelled him to want to have deep, philosophical conversations with any mzungu he met.

Sometimes Kenyans who have traveled or studied abroad exude this nervous eagerness to talk to mzungus, and it always has an undertone of needing to prove that they’re educated. It’s like they’re saying, “I know you white people think Africans are ignorant, but don’t assume I’m just like all the rest.” It often leaves me feeling awkward and guilty, because I’ve suddenly been cast as a dual agent of someone’s inadequacy and subsequent self-affirmation.

And tonight we just didn’t feel like discussing The Evolution of Gender Roles Among the Nilotic Peoples: From the Pre-Colonial Era to Post-Modernism with this man who was obviously more intelligent than all three of us combined. We just wanted to eat crackers and cheese and quote lines from American movies.

“Maybe we should have bought the fourth spot,” Shinita said. Tony and I nodded, our mouths full of turkey cold cuts.

Several hours later, the conductor brought two more men into the cabin and announced that they would also be staying in there. The two men eyed us suspiciously. Shinita and I were beginning to lose hope for an odor-free night of sleep. We didn’t want to go back to our two-mamas-and-a-boy sleeper cabin.

“Are you sure there’s no room for them in any other male cabins?” we asked. The conductor nodded, but we weren’t so sure. Shinita and I decided to conduct our own investigation by walking the length of the sleeper car and peering into each cabin.

It was no use. All the cabins were full.

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” Shinita said.

The three of us went to the dining car to review our alternatives, which were dwindling to nothing, and because some of Tony’s cabin mates were looking sleepy. We also wanted some privacy from the hyper-philosophical professor, who didn’t seem to be getting sleepy anytime soon. Strangely enough, he seemed to materialize out of nowhere as we were sitting down at a table in the dining car.

“I’ll join you,” he said, with a look on his face like he was eager to ask us what we thought of The Role of Christian Thought In Traditionally Animist Societies and Its Impact on the Legacy of Female Genital Mutilation.

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” Shinita muttered.

5am. I was jolted awake by a familiar yet disturbing sound. I was too groggy to remember what it was right at that moment, only that whatever it was woke me up. I looked out at the blackness and tried to catch glimpses of the room I was in. Where was I?

The train began to move and it came back to me. I looked across the cabin at the Shinita-shaped lump of blanket, then noticed how certain odors can have physical weight in tightly-enclosed sleeper cabins. Should have bought the fourth.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

Um.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

I looked across at Shinita again to see if she was hearing the same thing. “There’s a cock outside the window,” I mumbled, to everyone in particular.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“There’s a cock outside!” I said again.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“No,” Shinita said, finally awake. “It’s in here. It’s in our room.”

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

She was right. It was in bed with the mama sleeping in the bunk below me.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

It was also in bed with a second cock. “Not the kind of cocks we’d like in our beds,” Shinita would later say.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“Ma’am,” Shinita said to the mama. “You’re gonna have to take that outside.”

I grinned into my pillow. Good old Shinita, telling it like it is.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

The mama below me started to move around, and the two roosters started clucking indignantly, protesting being stuffed into a bag. “BAWK! BAWK BAWK BAWK!” Oh, God, she’s going to break their necks, I thought.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO. COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

Apparently, being tied up, stuffed into a bag, and thrown into a corner of a sleeper cabin on a moving train doesn’t stop a rooster from crowing. “Bok bok bok bok bok,” they said, in between crows.

“Bok BOK bok bok bok bok,” I said, and Shinita snickered.

COCKLE DOODLE DOO.

“COCKLE DOODLE DOO,” I said, proud of my unusual talent for imitating chickens. It was only funny until the fourth time, so they crowed for another hour, unaccompanied by me.

“Look, ma’am,” Shinita said, an hour later. “This is completely inappropriate. Remove those chickens from this room right now, please.”

“They’re not my chickens,” the mama said. “They belong to my friend and I don’t know where she’s sleeping.”

Oh yeah, I left out one part of the story. While we were trying to stake a claim to the two empty bunks in Tony’s cabin, a third mama tried to stake a claim to one of our bunks in the cabin we were originally assigned. The conductor had to chase her out, after he chased me and Shinita out of Tony’s cabin. It turned out that this third mama had only paid for a third class ticket (sleeping upright in regular train seats), not a more expensive sleeper car ticket, and was trying to sneak into the sleeper car.

“I don’t care whose chickens those are,” Shinita replied. “You let her leave them here, so you need to get them out of here.” The mama slowly rolled out of her bed, gathered up the chickens, heaved the door open (FRESH AIR! FRESH AIR!) and went to find her friend, the attempted bunk thief and chicken abandoner. Peace and quiet at last.

8am. “Good morning,” Tony was standing in the doorway of our cabin, looking well-rested. “How’d you guys sleep?”

We glared at him through puffy eyes and he started laughing. “What happened?” he said.

“Did you hear a rooster last night?”

“Yeah, it was outside the train.”

“No, it was in here. Two of them, in this room.”

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” he said.

8:15am. “Gawd, something STINKS in here,” Shinita said.

9:30am. “Excuse me,” the mama with the little boy said. She seemed annoyed with us in general, but spoke to me timidly. “I’m going to change him now. Is it okay?”

Change his clothes? I thought. A nine-year-old boy can’t change his own clothes? But I gave her a friendly shrug and said, “Sure, go ahead.”

The mama laid the boy on his back and yanked down his pants. Suddenly everything became clear. The odor whose fetid warmth we had been enveloped in all night as we tried to sleep through crowing roosters, and whose intensity had been growing for the last hour, was coming from the boy. The boy’s diapers, to be exact.

“Should’ve bought the fourth,” Shinita sighed.

Surrounded by Petty Criminals

Pickpocket Receives the Gift of Life. This morning I noticed a big slash at the bottom of one of my daypacks. I thought maybe I’d caught it on something somewhere, but upon further inspection I realized it was a pretty clean slash. Someone apparently had tried to cut open the bottom of my bag so that they could steal whatever dropped out. I don’t know where or when it happened, but I’m thinking it was someone sitting next to me on a matatu. The cut only penetrated an outside pocket, where I don’t usually store anything valuable, but I did notice that a condom was missing.

Why am I carrying condoms in my daypack, you ask? To hand out to people who ask me for money, of course. It’s a trick I learned from Eric, a PCV who finished his service in July.

“Chinese, you give me 50 bob.”

“Oh, I’m SOOOO sorry. I don’t have 50 bob today. But how about a condom?”

“You give me 50 bob.”

“With this condom I’m offering you the gift of life—a life free of AIDS, STIs and unwanted pregnancy. Surely that’s worth more than any amount of shillingies I could give you.”

Somewhere out there, there is a pickpocket who has inadvertently received the gift of life from me as well, probably along with some used Kleenex and old bus receipts. I wonder if he realizes how fortunate he is.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Prison Workshop, Day 2. I went back to the prison a few days later for the second part of the workshop, with Godi as my sidekick again. We opened by asking everyone whether they had talked to anyone about AIDS since our first meeting.

The prison welfare officer said he had spoken to some of the inmates and found that a lot of people had heard of AIDS but didn’t know much about it.

One woman talked to her kids and found out that they knew a few facts about AIDS, but not much about the sexual aspect of it. (At this point I thought, “Like the part about unprotected sex being the leading cause of HIV transmission?”)

Another woman talked to her husband, who was “impressed” with the conversation and who decided he wanted to visit a VCT for an HIV test. (At this point I thought, “It’s none of my business why a married man who should theoretically have had only one partner for years now thinks he might have been exposed to HIV.”)

She also talked to her fourth grade son, who she found out had been taught about AIDS in school. This actually surprised me, that a parent doesn’t know that most primary and secondary schools in Kenya incorporate HIV/AIDS topics into the curriculum. In even the most remote bush schools that I’ve visited, there is at least one teacher who is trained to be the school’s designated HIV/AIDS educator. The exact quality of this instruction is another issue (many teachers are trained through organizations like Education for Life, a Catholic-sponsored, “abstinence-only-because-condoms-have-holes” program), but it’s safe to say that students in every grade, in nearly every school, have been taught the basics.

The other participants said they hadn’t run into anyone they felt they needed to talk to about AIDS. I was thinking, “You haven’t run into your kids, your spouse or your neighbors? You been under a rock or something?”

I didn’t have to say a word. Another participant replied, “I disagree with my colleagues who say they didn’t meet anyone to talk to. You all have husbands, wives and children. You all know other staff who have families. These are the people we should be talking to about AIDS.”

Good on ya, sister.

The day’s agenda was pretty heavy: identifying the roots of the AIDS problem in Kenya, breaking silence and cultural stigma, understanding the importance of communication. I passed out a graph showing AIDS prevalence among men and women of various age groups, then asked people to talk about why young girls between 15-29 and men between 25-40 tended to be the age groups most vulnerable to getting HIV.

It wasn’t an easy discussion to facilitate. I kept wanting to launch into an angry rant about what a deeply misogynistic society I thought Kenya was. I never did, which is a testament to how far I’ve come in a year and a half here. As Westerners we need to listen to what Kenyans have to say about their own culture.

This is what they had to say:

“Well obviously I will not marry a 60-year-old lady. That is why young girls get HIV more than older women.”

“Women tend to marry around 15-29 while men will wait until they are 30.”

“Women are often forced to have sex.”

“Women will be beaten if they refuse sex, especially if the man is drunk.”

“Women will not say no to their husbands because they fear divorce.”

“It’s time for women to stand up for themselves. Men want women to speak out, too.”

“If a woman is too busy with the kids and the home to have sex with her husband, the man will go find someone else.”

“If you want to show your wife you love her, why not offer to help her with her work, then she can give you sex after.”

“If my wife denies me my rights as a husband, don’t I have every right to look for someone else? If she’s not satisfying me, she is denying me my rights.”

“There is a saying in Swahili, that no cock can have only one hen.”

Godi came through again, saying things I wanted to say, but in a Kenyan voice. I’m hoping to make him a permanent addition to my workshops. I can learn a lot from him about how to talk to Kenyans about things that are probably none of my business as a foreigner, like how men and women relate to each other in this country. In the end, even if I say everything he says exactly the way he says them, as a Kenyan he will always be a more effective advocate for the ideas I’m trying to teach.

“We must begin to weigh human rights versus our own culture. As women, you must say no to men when you mean no, as an example to our girls. If our girls grow up seeing that Mami never says no to Dadi, she will not learn to say no.”

“Communication is the most important thing. If your partner is not satisfying you, talk to her. She will not know unless you tell her.”

“Let us expect the same things from both partners in a relationship. Don’t let one partner’s expectations be sidelined.”

Road Rules

We were driving back from a meeting in a neighboring village this afternoon when a matatu overtook us on the right, honking and swerving impatiently. It cut in front of us and swerved across the lane to the curb, stopping suddenly to pick up some awaiting passengers. Our driver patiently slowed down, then went around the matatu, which was still loading passengers. A few seconds later, the same matatu caught up to us and swerved hard towards us, trying to run us off the road. The roads here are full of crap drivers, but this was all so sudden and unprovoked that even I could tell this wasn’t just incompetent driving. It was intentional harassment.

“God, WHAT is that guy’s problem?” I said indignantly, a hard edge in my voice. We had been chatting in our vehicle, but the incident had stopped our conversation in mid-sentence.

My two co-workers just shrugged and continued talking to each other as if someone deliberately trying to run other vehicles off the road were normal. I pulled out my notebook and pen and took the license plate of the offending matatu, and was about to announce it triumphantly. Then I decided against it, feeling like they would just wonder why Americans get so worked up about little things, and then feel the need to punish someone who has wronged us.

It was one of those incidents that first highlights a Kenyan peculiarity, then upon further thought highlights an American peculiarity. My first reaction to my co-workers was, why do they let people do rude or dangerous things to them, and seem resigned to it? I interpreted their nonchalance as learned disempowerment: a lifetime of being treated unfairly and no longer getting worked up about it because they know they can’t do anything about it.

I fully acknowledge that this is just my skewed and naïve Western perspective. I have no idea why my co-workers didn’t seem to mind that we had almost been driven off the road, and that there was still someone out there driving a matatu who has little regard for the safety of other people. I’m sure the idea of taking the matatu’s plates and reporting it to the police never crossed their minds, and if I told them I had a mind to do so, they would have just laughed at me. Report it to the police, one of the most corrupt institutions in the country? What’s that going to accomplish?

I think that Americans take things very personally. We’re a bit narcissistic. To me, it wasn’t just some idiot endangering other people on the road. It was some idiot endangering ME. We also have a deep sense of justice – this idea that every action has a consequence, and everyone must be rewarded or punished in a way that fits the action. We are not a forgiving culture the way Kenyans are. Instead we need closure. You can see this in the way nearly every American movie has a conclusive ending. They get together. They get the bad guy. They survive hardship.

We are big believers in fairness. Then we step outside our borders and see what our moms have been telling us all our lives: Life ain’t fair. Maybe Kenyans have just accepted this fact. And maybe Americans have never understood this fact. We are constantly trying to impose our idea of fairness on a world that doesn’t play by those rules.

Kenya Prison Days

Day 1. The welfare officer from the government prison in my town wanted my organization to train their staff and inmates on HIV/AIDS. They requested that we come twice a month because of the high inmate turnover. I’ve seen those prisoners before; they wear black and white striped uniforms, trudge around with their hands and feet chained together and always have a small crew of armed guards following them. They embody every stereotype of prison inmates there is, and I didn’t really feel like going there twice a month to entertain each new batch of dirt-encrusted petty criminals.

Instead, I agreed to do a training of trainers (TOT), where I would train a few staff members to become HIV/AIDS educators for the prison community. The prison houses over 300 prisoners at any one time, and has a staff of 170. The staff lives on the prison compound with their families, so the “honest” portion of the prison community numbers around 500 to 600. It seemed like a population that I could talk to without cringing and getting heebie-jeebies.

Interestingly enough, the prison dispensary has a VCT for staff members only. I guess the government of Kenya thinks VCT services for prison staff is a noble investment, but as of now they’ve left prisoners to fend for themselves as far as VCT services go.

I prepared a six-hour workshop for four staff members, that has turned out to be a three-day workshop for nine staff members, and multiple requests for additional workshops. It has been quite a sleeper success due to a number of fortuitous circumstances that were originally kind of annoying.

The first annoying circumstance was that I suddenly felt lazy and overwhelmed at the last minute. I really wanted to do a TOT, rather than the standard biology lesson on HIV/AIDS and the “ABCs: Abstain-Be Faithful-Use a Condom” sermon that puts everyone to sleep. But I had never actually done a TOT before, so three days before the workshop I still had nothing prepared, and was feeling like I had been too ambitious. How was I supposed to come up with six hours of material on how to educate other people on HIV/AIDS? I needed to focus on teaching these folks how to teach other people, but I don’t even know how to teach, much less how to teach about teaching.

I decided that instead of thinking about it, I would go biking with Adrienne. When I got to her house, she had a pile of notes on TOT from a Health Education manual put out by Peace Corps volunteers of years past. It was perfect. And I realized that no PCV should really ever have to create her own lesson plans from scratch, because almost everything has been done before. Sometimes when you’re all alone in the bush, it’s easy to forget simple PCV truths like this.

Wednesday morning, the day of the workshop, I went to the office to meet my co-worker who was supposed to teach the workshop with me. We had agreed to start the workshop at 9am (the unspoken rule being that we were on Kenyan time). At 9:30 she still hadn’t arrived. I asked my supervisor if he had seen her yet. “She will come,” he said, Kenyanly.

At 11:30 she still hadn’t arrived. My supervisor chose that moment to finally tell me, “I talked to her yesterday and we agreed that you will teach the workshop with Godi.”

Godi and I had both been in the office all morning. Why were we both being told NOW that there had been a change of plan that was decided yesterday, without consulting either of us? Why weren’t we told when we first arrived in the morning, so that we could be on our way? Why was something that seemed so obvious and logical not done in an obvious and logical way?

I set off to the prison with Godi, who is a trained VCT counselor with no experience teaching in the community. I briefed him on the teaching outline I had put together, and crossed my fingers. By the time we arrived, everyone had gone to lunch. By the time we started the workshop, the sun was starting to drop in the sky.

One of the biggest frustrations for PCVs who teach about AIDS is that we are often told not to talk about condoms. Instead, a lot of schools and churches insist that the only behavior-change we should be teaching is abstinence. After having so many of my three-hour presentations instantly invalidated by teachers and principals who stand up after my lesson and say to a roomful of high school boys, “You students, you do not need condoms, because you are not having sex. I don’t want to see you having any condoms, they are not for you,” my definition of behavior change had become “tell people ALL their options, so they can make an informed decision.” In other words, I will always teach about the C of the ABCs of preventing HIV transmission: condoms.

But the focus of the TOT workshop I put together was on the one behavior change that I usually forget about in my eagerness to promote condoms, but that I think is far more important than using condoms. It’s called talking.

It seems so simple, but HIV is a taboo topic in Kenya because sex is a taboo topic. So I opened the workshop by asking everyone to write down every word they could think of related to sex and HIV/AIDS that made them uncomfortable. There was a chorus of giggles, and sporadic embarrassed snickering throughout the activity, but in the end we were able to write a long list on the board.

Then I asked the group to name people who they would feel comfortable saying these words to, and whom they wouldn’t. The answers weren’t surprising: you can use words like penis and vagina with agemates and sexual partners, but not with parents, polite company of the opposite sex, pastors or your children. Given these answers, I was impressed that this group of men and women, who were all workmates, and considerably different in age and job rank, were beginning to open up and speak freely, especially the women. A rare, healthy group dynamic was beginning to form, because I had forced people to say “penis” and “vagina” in their mother tongue.

Then I asked the group if they thought it was important to talk to any of the people they felt uncomfortable talking to about sex. Suddenly everyone was talking about their kids.

“I don’t know if my 9-year-old boy has had sex yet. But I don’t want to talk to him about it because then he’ll go and have sex.”

“There’s so much sex on TV that sometimes I have to turn it off when I see my kid watching. But that just makes him want to watch more, because I don’t know how to tell him that sex is bad and that he’s not supposed to watch it.”

Sometimes it got kind of weird.

“There is a problem if I try to tell my son and daughter about sex. If I strip them both naked and say, you have one of these, and she has one of these, and if you put this into that, then it feels really good, then how do I then go back and tell them, but you must go outside to find a partner, you cannot be partners with each other?”

Um, yeah.

As the group shared their concerns, it was hard for me not to blurt out my personal opinions about what they were saying. But I knew that anything I said would be interpreted as a Western mind telling Africans to change their ways without understanding why Africans are they way they are.

Instead, I let Godi talk. And he shined. All his experience counseling VCT clients came through.

“It’s important to create an atmosphere of openness with your children, so they’ll feel like they can talk to you about things.”

“If you act like sex is a shameful thing, like flipping off the TV with no further explanation, your kids will think it’s a shameful thing that shouldn’t be talked about.”

“You need to empower your kids with all the information about sex, so they can make choices for themselves.”

Exactly what I would have said. The group was really receptive, but I think if I had said the same thing, they might not have accepted it as readily as they did when it came from Godi, a fellow Kenyan.

The next day of the workshop, half the group reported that they had talked to their partners and kids about HIV with great success, and one woman’s husband even wanted to visit a VCT.

[Next installment: Day 2.]

Peace Corps Bi-Polar Disorder

Depressive. I’ve been a crankypants for about two months straight. Last night seemed the worst, although everything that happens here is one big superlative, so it’s hard to say when something outdoes something else.

One of my co-workers passed away last weekend, and yesterday we all went to Eldoret to fetch the body. It was a day-long event, packing 15 people into two vehicles, driving to the hospital, waiting for the paperwork, loading the body into the back of the Land Cruiser, bringing it back to the morgue in our town, viewing the body, going to visit the surviving family.

Death rituals in the Kalenjin tribe are very subdued, and this one was no exception. I wasn’t sure if it was because that’s the way you’re supposed to carry yourself, or because everyone felt understandably somber, or because people go to so many funerals that it just becomes another obligation to fulfill.

We spent most of the day patiently staring off into space, waiting for something to happen. We drove to Eldoret in silence. We waited for the paperwork in silence. We watched the body being carried into the vehicle in silence (although some women were singing a quiet dirge as they brought it from the morgue). We drove back to town in silence. We sat in the family’s house in silence. We were served lunch in silence. There were a few speeches (of course), several long prayers, and a song, and then we all went home.

To someone from a Western country where people don’t die that often, there is something unsettling about the way people relate to death here. Or maybe it’s not so much the WAY people relate to it as much as it’s that I don’t really know how they relate. I just see a lot of matter-of-fact expressions on people’s faces, and I don’t know if it’s stunned grief or boredom or a healthy acceptance of death as a phase of life.

A lot of tribes are very comfortable with death and their rituals are very lively, emotionally intense affairs, with lots of screaming, crying, dancing and drumming into the night. The Kalenjins are traditionally very fearful of death, and before the Christians told them to stop acting like such sinful Pagans, they would simply dump sick people in the forest to die, sometimes tying a long rope to the person’s leg so they could yank on it every once in awhile from the village to see if he was dead yet, because the presence of death among the living was such a taboo. But even the Kalenjins seem more comfortable with death than the average Westerner. My conversations with people in town about my late co-worker often went like this:

Person in town: Sorry to hear about the loss of your colleague.

Me: Thanks. It’s very sad. He was so young.

Person: It’s not bad. It’s just natural. BEATRICE!! CUSTOMER WANTS CHAI! BRING IT AND HURRY!

A few months ago we were trying to develop some HR policies for our organization, and the topic of funeral leave came up. People disagreed on the appropriate number of days to grant each employee. How many days of funeral leave do you think a person might need per year? I was thinking, oh, five. They finally agreed on something like 20, which was a lot fewer than originally proposed. The argument was that giving people “only” 20 days would force them to only attend funerals of people who are close to them, rather than those of distant relatives and neighbors, whose funerals people might go to just to get free food and vacation days. My supervisor said he has lost four close family members in the last year, so 20 days (5 days per funeral) seemed reasonable to him.

I’d never been to my late co-worker’s house before, so I was surprised when we went to visit his family that the house was large, clean, and brightly-painted, on several acres of rolling farmland. There was even a stone-terraced flower garden in front of the house, something I’ve never seen before in a village home.

“Koskei loved flowers,” one of my co-workers told me.

“What? You’re kidding.” Koskei was not the kind of person you’d expect to love flowers. He was a former policeman, edgy all around, a persistent chain-smoker with stained teeth, chapped lips and a scowl.

“He could go somewhere and see a nice flower, and he’d buy it and plant it at home.”

Tough packaging around a gentle heart.

There was no coffin, so my co-worker’s body was wrapped in a thin sheet that hugged all the sharp contours of his thin shape. When the morgue worker uncovered his face for viewing, I saw that instead of a toe tag, they had glued a label to the deceased’s forehead. His widow looked exhausted and shellshocked.

I got home and felt awful. There were still two hours of daylight left, so I decided to dig in the garden a bit. Except I decided to lie on my bed and rest first. When I woke up, it was dark outside, and my nose was cold. I kicked off the sleeping bag I had somehow managed to cover myself with, stumbled out of bed and wandered through my house, wondering why it was pitch black. The electricity was out on the compound. I couldn’t even see my neighbors’ houses. I fumbled around for matches and candles, sifting through my thoughts trying to remember what was real and what were remnants of the dream I’d just had.

Fetching a body from Eldoret, real. Failing to work in the garden, real. Zafar coming to visit, not real. Feeling miserable about the world outside my door, real. Neetha and I going camping, not real. Canvas tents pitched on a university campus, wandering through a maze of corridors getting lost trying to find the library dim lights through windows losing track of time it’s night it’s evening in my dream even right now.

I carried a candle to the living room and set it on the coffee table. I was still groggy, and stared for a long time at a wet brown splatter across a piece of notebook paper. What the hell IS that? What the HELL is that? WHAT the HELL is THAT?

Poo?

I looked up. There was a slug on the ceiling. There was a trace of poo a few inches behind it. The rest of it had plummeted onto the notebook paper, on my coffee table.

I contemplated ETing. Early Termination of service. Weird, emotionless funeral rituals. Weird, merciless invasions of slugs with very active bowels. Spoiled, screaming neighbor’s kid destined to be the next dictator of Kenya.

I woke up this morning at 6:48am. Then again at 7:09. Then again at 8:11. Lazy lump of protoplasm bolts out of bed, puts on a kettle of water for a bath, and sighs. Can I really take ten more months of this?

Manic. While I wait for my water to boil, I inhale the sun radiating through the windows. The sky is clear blue. Suddenly my heart is light and my soul is open. I’m not sure why. Yesterday sucked, but today I feel fine. In fact, I feel great. I haven’t felt this calm and present in months.

An hour later I board a matatu to Eldoret and don’t feel a single hint of impatience, anger, or neurotic defensiveness. I wander through the city, shopping for a belt and a black shirt that I’ve been needing for a long time. I make friendly conversation. I banter good-naturedly with vendors who quote me outrageous mzungu prices. I’m at peace; nothing can touch me.

Depressive. I’m at war with Kenya once again. The internet was so slow that I got nothing done. Three hours of my precious, limited life, wasted on waiting for pages to download. For files to upload. For logins to be authenticated. The cyber cafe staff gave me the familiar refrain. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

It continues to baffle and impress me how many people don’t mind waiting for hours on end for nothing to be achieved. I mean, it’s kind of silly, really, that Westerners should measure the quality of time spent throughout their life through achievements and money. Once you’re dead does any of that matter? But I have no other framework for conceptualizing my life, so my answer is yes. Three hours of constantly being PAINFULLY aware (watching the green squares at the bottom of the browser window slowly creeping across the white bar) that I’m not getting anything accomplished reversed the mysterious bout of calm I’d had in the morning. I was tense, agitated, and ready to clobber the next person who crossed me.

And I did. I emerged from the cyber café, and a bunch of boys suddenly converged behind me. Hm, that’s not obvious. I felt a heavy tug on my backpack. I turned around and found one pocket unzipped, exposing a wad of toilet paper and a Clif Bar, neither of which I’d be too upset to lose. But it was the principle of the matter. The boys suddenly split in different directions, and I followed one of them. When I caught up to him, I gave him a hard shove and he stumbled.

“What problem?” he shouted indignantly.

“You tried to steal from me,” I sneered. “Thief.”

“No,” he said, then tried to defend himself to everyone around us.

“I saw you,” I said. “Mwizi! Mwizi!” Thief, thief! People stared and the boy tried to defend himself more desperately. I walked away, satisfied that I had made him nervous but let it go before people around us cared enough to organize a thorough thief-whooping.

Manic. Give it another two months and maybe I’ll have something to write here.

Home Is A Nice Blackhead

Rusinga Island Is a Remote, Underdeveloped, Poo-Dotted Paradise. There is a group of PCVs COSing (Close-of-Service) in two weeks, so Rob decided to have a going-away party at his site, a small island in Lake Victoria. From my site I had to take three matatus, a ferry and (theoretically) a boda boda across a causeway from a neighboring island. Fortunately one of the party-goers was an Irish NGO employee visiting from Nairobi, with his 4-wheel drive all-terrain pickup, so we nixed the boda boda for door-to-door service from the ferry
dock to Rob’s house, including a complementary in-transit beer. It was a perfect, drama-free ending to seven hours of dusty, sweaty, brain stem-jolting, jaw-clenching, I-will-not-strangle-this-rude-jerk-who-reeks-like-a-goat travel. We arrived with lobotomy grins and a small buzz growing in our heads.

Oddly enough, the island is arid and dotted with cacti even though it’s surrounded by water. Maybe that shouldn’t seem odd. There’s no electricity or running water at Rob’s house, and the beach is a ten-minute hike away. Basic vegetables and fish are available nearby, but not that nearby. There are giant cockroaches in his choo, which offered an interesting opportunity to observe the habits of Americans. ALL Americans are afraid of giant cockroaches, so all the Americans at the party decided to pee NEXT to the choo at night.

Because Rob is Rob, his house looks like an artist’s studio in San Francisco. He built an easel, tables and counter space that are all color coordinated. He designed a Zen rock garden in his back yard. His house is full of sculptures made from locally-available garbage like rusty steel wires, shells, and sticks. He made sconces for his walls out of tomato sauce tins.

His neighbors are the standard-issue dusty, snot-encrusted kids who hover at the edge of his compound staring for hours, except that because Rusinga is Luo country, they speak neither Swahili nor English, which made it interesting when he asked them to fetch water for us. “Bring pee,” he said. “Pi” is the Luo word for water.

The beach near the house has actual waves. Good news for people who don’t want schistosomiasis, those little snails that burrow into your skin and set up camp in your liver, eventually expelling tasty trails of parasitic eggs in their wake. We hiked out to the beach in the middle of the day, when the heat got so oppressive we couldn’t even sit in the shade without panting. Half the kids in the village followed us. The other half was already stripped naked and waiting for us when we arrived.

Swimming in Kenya is a culturally revealing activity. Nowhere else do boys and girls publicly expose every part of their body that is a taboo to reveal, and yet it’s all completely devoid of sexual meaning. It was just a bunch of butt-naked kids yelling and playing like they couldn’t believe their luck to be tossing a football and paddling an inner tube with six grownup mzungus. There was nothing on that beach except pure, child-like joy. There was even a mama washing clothes on the beach, wearing nothing but a half-slip around her waist, boobies wobbling to and fro. She could tie them in a knot she could tie them in a bow she could throw them over her shoulder like a Continental soldier…

How Many PCVs Does It Take to Extract A Guinea Worm? The second morning on Rusinga Island, one of the volunteers discovered a huge blackhead on another volunteer’s back.

“Oh, let me squeeze it,” she begged. Girls love to squeeze things out of people’s backs. Why is that?

Mr. Blackhead had just applied sunscreen, so she couldn’t get a good squeeze in. People with dry hands lined up. People with dry hands squeezed. Mr. Blackhead winced. Some black stuff came out. People with dry hands squeezed some more. Some yellow stuff came out. Someone started giving a running commentary.

“EEWWW,” she’d say. “EEEEEWWWW.”

Tweezers came out. More people squeezed and more people tweezed. Mr. Blackhead’s eyes glazed over.

“Wait!” said the volunteer wielding tweezers. “I think there’s a worm in there.”

“Whatever,” we said.

“No, really,” she said. “Hold these. I’m going to squeeze some more.”

“Doesn’t squeezing just spread the bacteria?”

Mr. Blackhead rolled his eyes and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. “What the hell is going on back there?” he said.

“OH MY F***ING GOD!!” said Miss Running Commentary. “OH. MY. GOD.”

“Wait! I see it,” the blackhead huntress said. “Oh, wait. It went back inside.”

People lined up. People peered into the hole where the blackhead had been. It was a worm all right.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEKK!”

“Hey guys?” Rob said. “I just found something in my med kit called The Extruder. Or The Extractor. Something like that.” It was a plastic yellow pump with a suction cup at the end. It was used. Repeatedly. Mr. Blackhead breathed through his mouth.

“I thought you were just supposed to use a matchstick and wrap the worm around it.”

“Medical is not going to be happy about this.”

An hour later Team PCV had extracted a centimeter of the worm. The rest of it went back inside. Mr. Blackhead looked exhausted.

“What now?” someone asked. After a few moments we shrugged at each other, swabbed the wound with vodka and went to the beach for a swim.

Happy Birthday To Me. On Tuesday I was still tired from my trip to Rusinga Island. I barely remembered my own birthday, until I started getting birthday SMSes. (Thanks Mom and Dad! And thanks Nick for the phone call!) Around mid-afternoon I finally got my act together enough to invite a few volunteers to go out to dinner.

It started out with a sampling of Tony’s experimental batch of mead (like apple juice with no sugar and no acid, not bad for the first try) and good gossip about American politics and misbehavin’ PCVs. It ended up being way too much bar-hopping in my town, something I will never do again. Why would I go to a place designated for drunk, idiotic men peeing all over themselves when I spend most days avoiding them everywhere I go? By midnight I was exhausted, mostly from being irritated at drunk bar patrons bursting through doors and asking us for money, but Tony and Neetha still wanted to watch a gladiator movie, so we went back to my house.

“Your chickens are fighting. Their house is too small.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Ow! That brown one just bit me.”

“It wasn’t the brown one.”

“Yes, it was.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Intelligent conversation was futile, so I put on the DVD. We munched popcorn and squinted at Russell Crowe on my laptop screen until we fell asleep. Four hours later, the sun was beaming through my curtains. I heard Tony wheeling his bike out the door, while Neetha slept like a log next to me, dead to the world.

“I’m going home to start breakfast. Come over in a bit, and bring some eggs,” he said as he passed by, inexplicably chipper and not hungover.

Thirty minutes later Neetha and I hopped on a matatu to Tony’s house. Four drunk idiots sitting in the back row harrassed us loudly in slurred mother tongue, while the rest of the passengers stared and snickered. It was too early to deal with this crap, and I still had a short fuse from the night before, so I turned to the drunk next to me and said, “Unalewa.” You’re drunk.

A simple, obvious statement but such a direct, honest and audible observation of un-Christian behavior that a sober person would have been shamed into silence. “Nani?” he said, as if he didn’t know. Who?

“Wewe,” I said, pointing at him. “Na wewe, na wewe, na wewe.” I pointed to each of his friends, who all laughed at me.

“How can you know?” he said.

“Because you all stink kabisa,” I said. “And you talk like drunks.” I started making slurred jibberish sounds to demonstrate, and the entire matatu burst into laughter, mumbling to each other about my moronic behavior, and doing nothing to improve my perception of alcohol abuse in Kenya. It was only 8:30 in the morning and I was already feeling my fingers tingle with a desire to snap someone’s neck.

Tony served up his signature breakfast hash, a lovely Mexican-themed concoction of potatoes, tomatoes, bok choy, and egg. Adrienne came by, and I had a thought as I was shoveling food into my mouth and washing it down with non-instant coffee that we were four Peace Corps volunteers doing nothing together on a Wednesday morning and if we stepped outside the house we would be in the U.S.

I have those moments occasionally, usually when I’m engrossed in a movie or a book, or a conversation with other volunteers in a place where there’s no one staring at us, when I’m convinced that the world beyond my immediate senses is the comfortable, welcoming and safe place that was all I ever knew before I came here. And the inevitable disappointment that follows when I remember that it’s not. That when I open the door, step outside, and walk as fast as I can with my head down, I’m back in a strange, infuriating place that has become my reality, a reality that everyone else around me finds to be normal, and yet there’s nothing that will ever be normal, much less acceptable, about it to me, which in turn is even more infuriating and disorienting.

So I spend a lot more time seeking cultural refuge these days, both actively and with the help of my odd subconscious, which will convince me in those moments of intense fixation that my physical environment resembles home. I’ve shut down a lot of the little pores that used to occasionally let Kenya in, the ones that I used to keep open because everytime I braved the frustration or discomfort just a few seconds longer than I wanted to, I was rewarded with a new personal connection, or a new cultural insight, or just a smile. Now I no longer have the energy to be an open-hearted cross-cultural ambassador, even for a few seconds. Now I walk head down, with long strides, and ignore everyone who doesn’t greet me by name. I spend my free time with Americans, and old Kenyan friends. I don’t try to make new friends in my community. I’m burned out by so many social and cultural gaps in understanding that I won’t even start to list them.

It goes in waves. It used to go in more extreme waves, where I could be completely shut off one week, then the next week be perfectly happy to play with kids and shrug off ignorant, well-intentioned remarks from strangers. Now it’s a flatter wave of varying degrees of closedness. It’s for sanity and for survival. I wish I were a bigger person than this. Maybe one day I will be. But not today.