No Hurry in Africa (43 page)

One of the speakers at the
‘fleadh’
kept telling me, ‘The King of Germany is here.’

If he was, I did not meet him. I did not have the heart to tell him that the
Kaiser
was no longer with us for nearly a hundred years. However, I did manage to get within a few yards of President Kibaki and the entire cabinet at a different event a few days later. I even got to shake hands with the then main opposition leader, Raila Odinga. He looked very distinctive in his black and red polka-dot suit and oversized cowboy hat.

The occasion was the funeral in Kitui of the husband of the Minister for Health, Charity Ngilu, who was the local MP. She was leader of one of the government coalition parties. In his sermon on the Grim Reaper, the Archbishop of Nairobi referred respectfully throughout to ‘Mr. Death.’ After his sermon, the funeral effectively became another huge political rally, with the bigwigs addressing the wildly cheering multitudes gathered in the middle of the field where the funeral service was taking place. I chuckled when one of the government ministers stood up to address the crowd in English and began,

‘A speech should be like a woman’s dress—long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to retain your interest.’

The old jokes are best, I was thinking, but maybe not so appropriate at a funeral.

Even during the funeral, light aircraft kept landing and taking off beside it at Kitui’s tiny airstrip, which was really just a flat field. As the planes taxied, hundreds of people kept delightedly racing along after them. It was a comically chaotic scene, like something out of Ken Annakin’s film,
Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines.
It was such a novelty for them to see the planes. They were enjoying the funeral hugely. Deafening roars of excitement erupted when the President’s fancy helicopter took off at the end. One Akamba among the crowd turned around to me.

‘I work in the Office of the President, you know,’ he boasted.

‘Oh, what do you do there?’ I enquired, impressed.

‘I sweep floors,’ came his reply.

One weekend in late July, I cycled back out to Nyumbani for the last time. I had a live kid goat inside a box tied on to the back of my boneshaker as a gift for my friends. Along the way, I met two men on bicycles each carrying a wooden chair over his head. Further along the rutted dirt track, I passed a donkey and cart, and as I did so, the kid and I were nearly run down by an old Volkswagen beetle beeping me out of the way and smothering me in a cloud of red dust. How the memories of so many other bicycle rides came back to me.

I got a great reception in Nyumbani, quickly surrounded by familiar smiling faces. Another new manager had been appointed since my previous visit. He was a friendly well-groomed man called Francis, an Akamba from Machakos. When Nancy told him of my computer skills, he roped me into giving him a bit of advanced training.

‘I am a bit frustrated, Brendan,’ Nancy later quietly complained to me. ‘I am now very good at the computer but I have not been given any extra responsibility.’

Perhaps the reason was that nothing much was happening. I was sorry to see the whole place was pretty much at a standstill. The AIDS orphans and their carers were now not expected to arrive until the end of the year (they did so in 2007).

Nancy insisted I visit her home one last time, and I was pleased to be invited. I managed to hitch a lift on an ox-cart carrying hay, in the direction of the mud-huts where she lived. There was the usual warm welcome from Nancy, her extended family and her neighbours. I had to tell her of all my adventures since last we met. Once again, her five children ran away from me at first, still scared of the
mzungu.
Nancy laughed out loud, rolled her eyes and escorted them over to me. I was sorry to say goodbye to this remarkable woman, her family and friends. I had to promise that I would return some day and visit them again.

When I left Kitui for the very last time in late July, Sr. MM took me to Nairobi Airport. She insisted on driving me there, despite the fact that she was recovering from yet another dose of malaria at the time. As we drove along, the pure randomness, diversity, and unpredictability of living in Kenya hit me yet again.

In the few hours that it took to reach Nairobi, we met Fr. Frank in his small jeep, passed a wayside hyena, drove past the ‘Sea Breeze Motel’ (500km inland) and the ‘Saint Josephine’s’ shop (she never existed), overtook buses called ‘Secret Admirer’ and ‘King Judah I,’ then got a speeding fine from a policeman who was hinting at a bribe, became stuck behind a barefoot man pulling an overloaded rickety hand-cart named ‘Moscow Express,’ declined to buy a six-foot high hat-stand being sold through our car window from the centre of the road (the man chased after us with the hat-stand when we sped off again), and encountered a crazy old woman dancing around in circles at the next junction. The day ended with audible gunshots from the slums nearby as we retired to bed that night in Fr. Jimmy’s home in Nairobi. Where could you find the like of it? These were vivid memories to be filed away for future times.

My parting from Sr. MM was an emotional one. She had been like an aunt to me for the best part of a year. I would always appreciate the welcome she had given me, and her support and advice and encouragement throughout, as well as her parties and the craic we had shared. We promised to meet again next time she returned to Ireland. Then my flight was called.

I was finally leaving ‘home’ in Kitui to return home. The end of time, African time, was approaching on the ‘dark’ side of the world; the ‘real’ world was beckoning again, and I had to bid farewell to this misunderstood and compelling continent. Geographer George Kimble once mused, ‘The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.’ At least now, I was a little less ignorant than before.

In one sense, I had lost time in Africa; my parents had both retired while I was away, my youngest brother left home, and a treasured relative died just days before I flew back. I dreamed about bonfires being lit on the hills of Donegal to welcome me back to the shores of Lough Swilly on my return home. I was just longing to see everyone again.

One month before I left for Africa in 2005, I had spent three days on a penitential pilgrimage on Lough Derg in County Donegal, praying that I would come back safely from Africa. Now I was grateful that I had returned unscathed. But for all my mother’s sleepless nights when I was away, it was within weeks of returning to Ireland that I fell off a ladder, suffered a bout of food poisoning, and got lost descending the wrong side of an Inishowen mountain after the mist came down. It did not happen on Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya!

Once in a philosophical moment, that wise old medicine man Mutinda said to me,

‘Life is part of a greater story, Brendan. We are all part of a bigger picture—we are just too close to it to see it right.’

If I had to sum up my year in Africa, I would say that it opened new perspectives. Africans were fond of saying that everything happens for a reason, and I had come to an understanding of what that means. It is meant to be, they would say, whatever happens—so what’s the rush? No hurry in Africa. In Africa, there is daytime and night-time—people seem largely indifferent to tracking the smaller fractions of the day or night. Life is for living in the present. People happily wait for ages, laughing away the whole time; the bus will leave when it is full, and get there when it arrives. And whatever happens, it is all meant to be.

‘Whites have watches. Blacks have time,’
as the proverb goes.

They do not know how blessed they are in some ways.

O
N THE FLIGHT BACK TO
I
RELAND,
and many a time since, I found myself thinking over my year in Africa and on how volunteers can best help that continent. From my experience as management accountant at Nyumbani, and later working with the street-children, I could see that there is more to volunteering in Africa than simply a matter of flying out to ‘do some good’ for a few weeks and flying home again. Nor is donating money to poor families
willy-nilly
much help, though I always found it troubling when a barefoot child would stare at me with hungry eyes, hoping I would give. ‘Doing good’ in these ways can be counterproductive. It breeds a dependency culture, and can be generally wasteful of resources that could be more beneficialx if properly and more precisely targeted.

My first piece of advice to anyone thinking of volunteering in Africa is: be prepared to embrace their culture and their very different ways. Leave your preconceived Western notions, attitudes and expectations at the airport. One has no monopoly on understanding what is acceptable behaviour. Polygamy may not be to your taste, but it is still a fact of life. A man might work away from home for two years at a stretch without returning to his family, but this may be out of sheer economic necessity, not indifference or neglect. It may seem to you that many Africans treat their animals rather cruelly, but this may be down to survival or the stage of agricultural development at which they find themselves. You do not have to approve of any of these things, but as a volunteer, you should usually accept that it happens.

You will be surprised that some very intelligent and well-educated men have three wives, paint their fingernails, or wear polka-dot suits. It is different, but you get used to it. There are valid reasons for most of the differences, serious or trivial. For example, Bríd gave out to me in Kwa Vonza for throwing the remains of a piece of fruit onto the ground. It is called littering in Europe; in Kenya, it is called feeding the goats.

Secondly: many people arrive with only a vague desire ‘to help.’ This may be fine for short-term emergency work. But for your efforts to be of long-term value to the people, you should have a skill—preferably one you can pass on. Otherwise, you might simply be taking a manual job from an unemployed African who would be delighted to be paid less than two euro a day to do the same work. A skill, on the other hand, is more durable and can be left behind. For that reason, I saw it as being more important for me to train locals like Nancy in basic management accounting and a variety of computer skills. I saw how Nancy and the others grew in self-worth by acquiring skills that they in turn can pass on. It is all about empowerment, to use that overused word.

Thirdly: any voluntary work should be for three months’ duration at the very least to make any significant difference, and ideally much longer than that. Also, some of the organisations that ask you to raise €4,000 so that you can volunteer with them for six weeks as a radio presenter in an exotic sounding country may not be using all that money to help local people in the developing nation—instead, they will more likely plough money into keeping their organisation running, and thus gaining a greater share of ‘the volunteer market.’

Fourthly: do your homework. There is the well-known story that the fuel for your flight to Madagascar probably would do more harm to the environment than your four weeks trying to save the endangered Madagascan tortoise will benefit it. So it is important to choose carefully, if you have good intentions and a desire to do voluntary work. Read up and ask questions, and do not immediately fall for the story of a charming sales rep who tells you all the ways you will be helping, and automatically assume your money is going directly to a good cause. If you do find an organisation with worthwhile projects, you can make a valuable difference, and if you donate your money to the right places, it can be of huge benefit.

Finally: any cash donations to individual Africans should usually be given to pay for such things as education or to help start a small income generating enterprise. It comes back to empowerment and breaking free of the cycles of poverty and ignorance (in the sense of lack of schooling). Africans make a go of it if given half the chance. Many are naturally enterprising. It could be as simple as buying a bicycle for someone: this could enable him to find work further afield; he could hire it out; he could even charge a few shillings for giving someone a lift—simple ideas which obviously would not apply in Europe. It is about helping people to help themselves. I sometimes speculated that the people in some of the larger administrative towns of Kenya could benefit hugely from a facility like our own Credit Union.

I have noticed that, in Ireland, many people often contribute to trusted missionaries on the ground, rather than to some of the well-known charities or aid agencies operating in Africa. This is despite the fact the charities are audited and the individual missionaries usually are not. Many people appear wary of the amount spent by some of the best-known charities on general administration, and things such as taking the plane across Kenya instead of a car, being chauffeured around, or staying in four-star hotels. Many people are aware of the frugal lifestyles of the missionaries I met on my travels and know that they prioritise the people they serve.

In fairness to the charities, they often need to spend money on these things in order to attract quality professionals to work for them. But I still have reservations about some of them. I recall being at lunch once with the ‘country director’ for Kenya of one well-known charity. The bill came to only a few hundred shillings. I insisted on paying for my own lunch, but she was happy to put everyone’s lunch on expenses.