No Hurry in Africa (15 page)

‘I need a break,’ I told him, ‘I want to explore other parts of Kenya. I will return when my enthusiasm comes back. I promise you that.’

He knew the causes; I had no need to explain, he had no reason to ask. He wished me all the best, and assured me he looked forward to my return. I did not really let on to anyone else what I planned to do, but gave a few hints to Nancy, Nzoki, Kimanze, Mwangangi, Nyambura, and a few others. When the time came I would prefer to slip away unnoticed.

As with everything in Kenya, internal politics and splits had become rife, often running along tribal lines. I somehow managed to stay out of it, as I always instinctively tried to do; everyone still got along with me. However, on some occasions, the atmosphere was poisoned. Like many young volunteers whom I met in Kenya, even those working for organisations like the American Peace Corps, idealistic notions were sometimes swamped by disillusionment. The pity was that only a couple of short weeks earlier, I had been so passionate about the Project; it had such wonderful potential.

It was around that time that I began to suspect that a financial accountant in Nairobi was either incompetent, or—as more often than not is the case in Kenya—guilty of fraud. My hands were tied. I could not start whistle-blowing, because I was on a tourist visa and would have risked being deported. Of course, I also did not know how many others, if any, might have been involved. Though having learned a bit about auditing, and through sheer intuition, I had my suspicions.

The most obvious red flag was the late arrival of the wages every month. I had nothing at all to do with this delay, but I was the accountant they saw around everyday, and I suspected many workers presumed I had a hand in them not being paid on time. A young engineering volunteer from Letterkenny named Niall McMenamin had been shot dead in southern Kenya in the mid-1990s for much the same thing—something that was beyond his control. A teacher told me his tragic story one day, when I was reading the caption under his picture hanging in St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny. The worry of a similar incident happening to me sometimes lodged itself in the back of my mind. One is automatically the outsider for being white. Anyway, the whole project was also being held up because the government would not officially release the land deeds. Apparently, some senior official in Nairobi was looking for a bribe.

Leo, still universally referred to as ‘Jesus Hitler,’ had decided to leave the week before Christmas to work on a project in Mombasa. He had originally intended to go there before he left Germany. I became lonely as the only
mzungu
remaining in Nyumbani. Then a good friend from College committed suicide back in Ireland. I received this news by text message, of all ways. There was nothing I could do but pray; I had nobody to talk to. Mutinda was also dead. Suddenly, after nearly four months in Nyumbani, I felt really alone. I was punctured. The isolation had finally got to me. Sometimes, the only way to communicate a message was to wait until someone was cycling in the right direction to pass it on; and then you had to wait on a reply until someone was cycling back. It could take days. That, and surviving on plain rice every meal of every day. Frustration all of a sudden became exhaustion.

That was also the week that Mwangangi and I became stuck down a thirty-foot deep well, when we were trying to collect water. The rope that was tied onto the bucket broke, and we climbed down the ladder to fetch the jerry-can resting in the water. One of the well-spaced iron rungs fell out as we were climbing down, and we could not reach the one above it to make our escape.

‘Here we go again,’ I laughed ironically.

While we were patiently waiting to be discovered, Mwangan-gi slipped into conversation.

‘Could you loan me a few shillings for a new dress for my baby girl?’ he asked.

‘Sure, no problem, how much do you need?’ I replied before wondering, ‘Wait a minute Mwangangi, how old is your baby?’

‘About one week old,’ he replied, matter-of-factly.

He had not even bothered to tell anyone he had become a father. Mwangangi could be secretive that way, just as he had been about his wedding. It took over an hour for us to be found down there, and another hour to fix the replacement rung into the concrete to enable us to clamber out. That incident further fuelled my intention to escape.

Coming up to Christmas, the famine was becoming acute. Some farmers had planted two or even three crops of maize— but with the rains so disappointing, they had harvested nothing. The other tribes always say that only the Akamba could survive in that region. The famine had also made life uncomfortable for me. In my own mind at least, I was now a sitting duck for bandits who might mistake me for a rich
mzungu,
as I cycled alone the four hours through the parched bush to Kitui village at the weekends. The only consolation was that there was no longer any need to wade up to my waist across swollen rivers to get there.

However, my situation was far from being as dire as that of the local people. Some families now went from three to seven days between meals. The Catholic Diocese of Kitui was feeding over 250,000 people at this point. The situation deteriorated so badly that in one village, when relief food was being distributed, a troop of baboons ambushed children and grabbed their relief food. Some children had to attend hospital after the assault. The baboons were starving as well, and attacked the humans in an effort to survive. I recalled Nancy’s warning.

It took two trips to Nairobi just before Christmas to have my visa sorted out at Nyayo House—an infamous government building where the public were interned and tortured in the basement during President Moi’s periods in office in the 1980s and 1990s. It is still fairly infamous among the white people, but for a different reason nowadays. Each time I entered, various immigration officers would tell me to do something different; they would contradict each other. I was sent from counter 9 to 1 to 5 to 2 to 7 to 3, up to the fifth floor, round the back, and back down to Counter 9 where we started all over again. I told them that I was still touring. Eventually they took my fingerprints, stamped my passport, but computerised none of it.

One is supposed to receive an alien’s card after this process. Its main use to me would be for much cheaper entry to the country’s game parks (it was finally ready for collection three months after this!). At least I did not have to endure the requests to slip a few shillings to the officials that Leo experienced when he went looking for a visa. It was astonishing the amount of bureaucracy and corruption one encountered.

The real stroke of luck on this trip to Nairobi was that, by pure chance, I found out about an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro planned by an Irish organisation known as Childaid. An ascent of ‘Kili’ had been top of my wish list long before I even landed in Africa, but up until now, I did not really have a group to climb with. I had ‘met Fr. Jimmy absent’ (as they say in Kenya), an industrious Irish Kiltegan priest with whom I stayed on occasions when I was in Nairobi. To pass the time whilst waiting for his return, I went for a cup of tea with some Irish Mercy sisters living nearby. It was there that Sr. Mary (not to be confused with Sr. MM) told me out of the blue about Childaid’s sponsored climb to raise funds for her Nairobi slum projects. When I pricked up my ears at this information, she encouraged me to get in touch with them. Everything happens for a reason, as the Africans believe.

On my last day at Nyumbani until I would return from my break, Mwangangi introduced me to another distant relation of his whom, as it happened, I had found myself sitting next to on a bench outside the offices. He turned out to be a former minister in President Jomo Kenyatta’s governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Now a weather-beaten elderly man, he lived near Kwa Vonza. He was sporting a big brown trilby hat and was resting his arms on an artistically carved walking stick. He rather resembled a fading mafia godfather, I irreverently thought. With great pride, he told me his story.

‘I was originally a freedom fighter at the end of the colonial era,’ he began. ‘Back in 1960, I flew to London as an Akamba representative for the independence negotiations with the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. Macmillan had recently delivered his famous “Wind of Change” speech, signalling Britain’s intention to withdraw from Africa.’

Mwangangi interjected at this point,

‘He helped draft the “Lancaster Constitution,” you know, the one that the referendum this year was trying to supersede.’

I could see a touch of the politician in the retired minister yet, as he emphasised points with his hands and spoke with pride and conviction.

‘Kenya’s population has risen from eight million, at the time of Independence, to thirty-five million now.’ He paused briefly. ‘Name me one country in the world that has the capability to keep up with that,’ he challenged me.

Nancy and a few others ushered him away on a tour of inspection. He had come to Nyumbani to have a look around and see for himself what was going on. It was these random encounters that happened when living in Nyumbani that I would miss, as well as the camaraderie and close friendships I had with many Africans working there.

Because I was preoccupied with other things, the only reason I was even aware Christmas was nearing, was because Ilsa and Yvonne asked me to dress up as Santa Claus for the street-children of Kitui at their Centre on Christmas morning. I was delighted to agree, I loved that kind of tomfoolery. We went searching for anything that could be cobbled together into some manner of costume, but without much success. Around Kenya, there were no decorations to be admired, no Christmas tunes to be enjoyed, no exchanging presents, certainly no snow—absolutely nothing of a seasonal nature. The street-children did not even know who Santa Claus was. Most Africans had never heard of him. Reluctantly, we scrapped the idea.

The Diocese threw a big outdoor Christmas party (probably the only one in Kitui) on the 23rd. We passed the night dancing, or in my case, trying to. All the young African nuns and priests were moving around a lot more rhythmically than I was. Fr. Paul struck up a few songs on the guitar towards the end of the night. My friends in Ireland, I was to learn later, were speculating that I was not coming home for Christmas because I had a few black babies on the way. The story was that I was too busy starting a tribe of my own.

I spent the afternoon of Christmas Day with the street-children. It was comical to hear me talking with the children of Kitui village, making full use of my limited Kikamba. There were lots of misunderstandings. It was not always just a matter of language. One young boy told me he was eleven years old, and when I asked him the same question a while later, he said he was nine years old. Half of them can only guess even the year in which they were born; indeed nobody knows for sure. What these children do know is how to survive—by whatever means. I sometimes paid a street-boy a few shillings (around ten cent) to keep my bicycle from being stolen on the street in Kitui. Of course, it was himself I was bribing not to steal it!

I had my Christmas dinner in the shade of a mango tree at the street-children Centre, eating with a spoon out of a bowl as I sat on a shaky wooden bench. It consisted of goat’s liver—a ‘specialty’ they had reserved for me. Slaughtering a goat for Christmas dinner was a big deal in these parts. In truth, I was utterly tired of having tough sinewy goat meat by this stage. (The Irish missionaries slaughtered some scrawny chickens for dinner that night, the only alternative to goat, and not much more appetising.) All afternoon, there was dancing with the two Dutch girls, six young African nuns, Fr. Paul and fifty very excitable street-children—every one of them outside gyrating rhythmically to the lively modern ‘bongo flava’ music of Kenya’s favourite singer, Mr. Nice. Not in person, of course, but on tape. It was shaping up unlike any Christmas I had ever experienced or was likely to experience again.

The missionaries’ Christmas dinner was being hosted that evening in the Mercy convent where two long-serving Irish nuns called Sr. Nora and Sr. Helen ran a school and a dispensary near the mission house. Eighteen of us were gathered. After praying grace at the start, the craic was like something out of
Father Ted.
The missionaries were animatedly reminiscing about funny things that had happened over the last forty years. Any yarn I could tell paled in comparison. We were all in stitches throughout the stories; sometimes there were several narratives going on at once. They were spraying punch lines thick and fast, like bullets from Al Capone’s machine gun. I really wish I had been able to remember some of them or written a few down, but I had consumed slightly too much whiskey for the details to register. It had been a Christmas dinner to
try
to remember.

At the time, it struck me that life in Kitui District was much the same as it was in the Nativity story; the same desperation many families suffer, and the way their farm animals are omnipresent. The people’s empathy with the Nativity story was obvious in their sheer joy at celebrating the Christmas Vigil Mass. However, in every other respect, it was just another day to them.