No Hurry in Africa (40 page)

However, the circumstances of his re-election at the end of 2007 were hotly disputed. The worst street violence in decades erupted over this, and resulted in hideous tribal massacres that left over 1,500 people dead and around 600,000 people displaced. My friend Sr. Cecelia, whom I stayed with in Turkana, fled along with her mother with only the clothes they were wearing when they were burned out of their home near Londiani in the Rift Valley. The Kiltegan missionaries with whom I stayed in Londiani, were attempting to feed and care for at least 3,000 people who sought refuge in their compound. In the process, they were endangering their own lives. At the time of writing, it is unclear how this sorry chapter in Kenya’s history will conclude. A fragile all-party government has been formed, but the longer-term fallout may last decades.

After Bríd left in the middle of June, I arranged to meet in Nairobi a Dublin student whom I had met in Tanzania. He had suggested the possibility of both of us travelling for the following six weeks in Ethiopia. To explore that ancient land was certainly tempting. But the other option I was considering was to return to the missionaries of Kitui to volunteer with the street-children. In the end, my Dublin friend went back to Tanzania to chase after a woman he had left behind. It was not the first time that I had struck up a friendship with a love-lorn Westerner, only for him to prioritise his love life.

My decision was effectively made for me. I would be returning to living with candles, fetching water from wells, and eating
ugali
everyday in dusty Kitui until my return to Ireland. The often-delinquent street-children would be a tough assignment. But after all my travels, I relished another challenge.

B
EFORE
I
RETURNED FROM
N
AIROBI
to Kitui in the middle of June, I spent the weekend in and around Mukuru slum, at the invitation of a missionary I had met on a previous visit.

I had not been in Mukuru since April, in the immediate aftermath of the devastating fire that had left about a tenth of the slum’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless. By now most, but not all, of the hovels had been rebuilt from the charred wood and buckled corrugated sheeting which survived the flames. I spotted one elderly man ankle-deep in an open sewer picking out scraps of wood with his bare hands, probably trying to source material to re-build his shack. It was in this unlikely setting that I watched the World Cup, in a small makeshift tin hut described locally as ‘the cinema.’ Regardless of who was playing, every kick and tackle was watched with noisy excitement and intense interest. For ninety minutes, these people were transported far beyond their miserable surroundings.

Outside there were inescapable foul smells emanating from the rubbish heaps and sewers, blending with the not unpleasant whiff of smoke wafting from the numerous outdoor charcoal fires. The people seem inured to these odours, the inescapable miasma that envelops everything. Theirs is an enclosed world, relatively self-contained; many do not step outside the slum for weeks at a time. The whole of Mukuru is smaller than a square mile, but it is teeming with tiny shops and businesses and is, in its own way, a community throbbing with life.

Rent in Mukuru equates to about two euro a week for a room for a family of four or five or more, and note how it is
one
room for a family. In comparison, a home with two or three small rooms (again they are rooms, not bedrooms) in Kwa Vonza village in Akambaland can be rented for less than a euro per week. Neither home has running water nor electricity or anything Europeans would consider essential.

From what I observed, and from what the missionaries and Africans confirmed for me, the social dynamics of Mukuru are quite different from a longer established slum like Kibera. One cannot, as one might first imagine, consider all slum communities to be the same. As Kibera is much longer established, for instance, there exist extended family networks that are not present in a newer slum like Mukuru. In Kibera, people are also more likely to help themselves, and be more resilient in the face of common tribulations like disease. The people of Mukuru are a bit more dependent on help from outside. It would be farcical to speak of infrastucture, but Kibera is much better organised and, indeed, cleaner than Mukuru.

Mukuru is home to vast numbers of people from all over Kenya who have been displaced in recent years by famine and drought, and who have come to Nairobi in search of jobs and a new life. I spotted cows and goats wandering the alleys in the middle of the slum, animals that the pastoralists had brought with them. Territorial disputes are common in Mukuru, and sometimes turn murderous. This is partly because of the density of population, and partly owing to cultural and tribal differences in what is a more disparate and less settled community. In both Kibera and Mukuru, however, it is all too often a case of dog eat dog.

And yet, the sense of menace I had experienced on earlier visits was now lessening as my familiarity with the place and the people increased. Most people living in the slums have great dignity. They are particular about their hygiene and appearance despite the lack of facilities. The women dress in vividly coloured clothes, the children smile shyly at strangers, and the men are rarely less than welcoming. Not once during any of my visits to the Nairobi slums did anyone ever beg off me. This was in marked contrast to so many other places I had been to in East Africa, especially in Tanzania. It is ironic but true that you are more likely to be pestered by beggars in those places where people are relatively better off because of the income generated by tourism.

My thoughts on beggars and begging were inspired by a man I encountered in the bus station where I went looking for a return bus to Kitui. He was scrounging money off people waiting in the queues, claiming he came from Kakuma UN Refugee Camp. The Akamba people beside me, with little enough money for themselves, were emptying their pockets for him. This simply confirmed my feeling that the very poor and the destitute were more likely to get assistance from the merely poor than they were from the richer elements of society. It also confirmed my sense of the Akamba as a very generous people. I was glad to be back among them.

On our way back to Kitui, somewhere past Machakos away up in the mountains, an elderly Akamba man somehow managed to pull the door straight off its hinges when he was alighting from the bus. So much for vehicle maintenance, I thought. The conductor immediately shouted that we were stopping to ‘take a short call or a long call’—and he was not referring to phone calls!

So, as some women on the bus took the opportunity to relieve themselves in the middle of the road, I aimed for a bush by the roadside. Seconds later a police car appeared from around a bend. They targeted only me. They may have been looking for a bribe from the only
mzungu
on the bus, without ever putting it into words. A second police car followed a couple of minutes later. They stopped to chat to their colleagues. I recognised one of the cops from Kitui; indeed, I had become quite friendly with him, so the charge of indecent exposure was dropped before it had even been properly pressed.

Once the door of the bus had been re-attached, the man seated next to me began to tell me about how people become victims in the most random of accidents. In Kenya, stories of these accidents were always told in an entertaining manner by people who enjoyed having an audience; I often found myself laughing—until the punchline arrived.

‘An oil tanker crashed off this road a while back, near my own village,’ he began. ‘People headed for the scene and began siphoning off the oil into jerry-cans. After some time, one man decided he had collected enough oil and went for a rest under a tree. He lit his cigarette and dropped the match. The match lit a bit of oil that had spilled on his trousers. He danced around, trying to put the fire out, but the fire spread to one of his jerry-cans.’

I was amused, picturing a
Laurel and Hardy
situation, or maybe the hapless
Mr. Bean.

‘The jerry-can exploded, and it spread to the oil tanker. Eleven people who were still siphoning oil were killed. One of them was my cousin.’

Most accidents in Kenya are the result of human error, negligence, or ignorance—just like everywhere else. But the one area where Kenyans seem to be out-sprinting the rest of the world is death on the roads. I met Mwangangi in Kitui village the day I returned. We greeted each other warmly and, after exchanging stories for a while, he told me matter-of-factly that he needed to go to the market to buy a new shirt.

‘Oh, is it for a special occasion?’ I enquired.

‘My older sister died in a bus accident coming from Mombasa. I have to be at the funeral in an hour,’ he replied resignedly.

I felt devastated for him; he was a good friend but I really did not know what to say to him. Painful memories of Mutinda’s death came flooding back to me. Mwangangi’s sister had been on a Kitui-bound bus that crashed near Kwa Vonza when the driver fell asleep. Rumour was that the driver had been awake all night, chewing
miraa.
Sixteen people were killed. Most people passed off this accident with little more than a shrug of resignation. Carnage on the roads of Kenya is an unending horror story.

What pleased me though on my return to Kitui was that the horrors of drought and famine had eased, at least for the time being. There was still sporadic rain into the middle of June; it would normally have stopped at the end of April, but there was nothing normal about this season.

I passed my second day back in Kitui in the shade of a redflowering bougainvillea tree at the mission house. I was reading the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and enjoying the nearby angelic voices of children singing in unison in the inimitable African style. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the local school principal approach; he was relatively new to the school and did not know me. He was looking for Fr. Frank.

‘At last they have sent us a young priest,’ was his parting shot to me. ‘Those Irish are always sending us old priests!’

By coincidence, and as proof of the second part of the teacher’s statement, an elderly Kiltegan missionary had recently returned to Kitui to fill in for a priest who had gone back to Ireland for a break. Fr. Eamon, a jolly character with a moustache, had served in Kitui during the 1960s. He was one of a group of us who went together into the village to cheer on Ghana against Brazil in the World Cup. We shared the Africans’ disappointment at the result. There was further excitement on our way back. Fr. Eamon nearly crashed our small pick-up into the car of an African priest who lived beside me.

The Irish threw a party to mourn England’s exit from the World Cup. As we were driving back in the dark that night along the dirt road, Sr. MM frightened me when she revealed,

‘Last night about twenty young men attempted to hijack my car. I put the foot down and raced straight through them. They would definitely have robbed me if they had managed to stop the car … and perhaps worse … ’

Whilst I was thinking about the courage of people like Sr. MM, we came upon a police checkpoint further along the main road. The presence of armed police was indicated only by a paraffin hurricane lamp planted in the middle of the road. We came close to driving over it—which could have been a fatal mistake.

When we arrived back safely at Sr. MM’s home, she ran up the hall shouting,

‘Come quickly, Brendan, there’s a big monitor lizard in one of the bedrooms!’

It turned out to be a relatively small and perfectly harmless yellow lizard. He was reluctant to leave, though; we had a job finally brushing him out of the house.

‘You amaze me,’ I joked, ‘you’re not afraid of twenty African bandits, just scared of a wee lizard.’

‘Could have been worse, I suppose,’ she replied. ‘It could have been a spider!’

In fairness, her home had witnessed its fair share of insect and animal attacks over the years. Scorpions were a perennial problem; they can deliver excruciating stings. There were large black moths that can be very unpleasant indeed if provoked, as Fr. Paul mentioned quite casually one day. Many of the feral cats have rabies, and some pass it on to unlucky humans. A rabid dog viciously attacked one of the boarding students at Sr. MM’s school while I was staying at her home. The student would probably contract rabies from the bites. This meant an emergency trip to Kitui village searching the place for a vaccine, and would also require lengthy follow-up treatment later on. Fortunately, the student made a good recovery. Students and children are particularly vulnerable because they are less alert to potential dangers.

The most vulnerable children of all, of course, are the street-children. My last six weeks in Africa during June and July were spent volunteering with these orphaned and abandoned children in Kitui village. They are housed in a purpose-built building known as the ‘Saint John Eudes Rehabilitation Centre.’ It is run by several African nuns of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, and is yet another project of the Diocese of Kitui. Ironically, the Centre is situated in the Muslim quarter of the village. That end of Kitui is dusty, dirty and over-crowded; it is said to be populated by descendants of the nineteenth-century Swahili slave traders.