Saturday, January 28

Last evening, after a very important and productive meeting with several folks , I wanted to walk west. A hundred steps down the dirt road and it is completely open land. It slopes gradually down to the valley formed by the Athi River.

Just as I came out of the gate, Daniel was there walking home to Kinani, about ten kilometers away. He always greets me with parts one and two of the standard three part handshake. We fell in together. He has been working at Lukenya one month. We passed the temporary camp where the Masai herders have come trying to find grass for their goat and cattle herds in this unseasonably dry time. Their flocks were ranging south of where we were.

Here’s the goat I tried to show earlier

We were talking and keeping that effortless but effective pace that people keep when they walk to cover distance. After a quarter mile I saw a giraffe a long way off to the southeast. I had my binoculars and found him and six or seven others, moving slowly eastward, browsing leaves from the tops of acacia trees. I handed Daniel the binoculars which were new to him. He looked with one eye and then the other from about four inches away. I coaxed him to use both eyes up close and — boom! there they were. He asked me a couple of times,”Shall I take them” and squeezed the focus wheel before I realized he assumed he was holding a camera. I didn’t get to see the giraffes again. He knew a good thing when he saw it–up close.

He is one of my teachers here. Kind, happy, full of faith and knowledge. A lovely man.

Sunday, January 29

I woke up about 6:00am and since it was Sunday I thought I’d take a walk and see if what happens early in the open spaces. I grabbed my binoculars and a water bottle and headed out the door. Well, almost out the door. The skeleton key that locks the door from the inside spun and spun when I tried to open it. One of the big teeth had broken off and it was pretty useless and I was pretty locked in. I unscrewed the plate and the door handle, but no good. I was incarcerated. AlI the windows have heavy metal grids around the small panes. I was paroled about two hours later when I managed to catch the attention of someone walking out back. He was actually the second person I made my case to. The first, a young woman I hadn’t seen before and who didn’t speak much English, promptly left and didn’t returned.

Monday, January 30

One of the great things about language is how you get to crack people up when you are trying to learn theirs. My Kiswahili is, well you can’t even say it’s bad yet. It doesn’t have enough substance to be bad. But I’m trying to change that. People here are much too polite to laugh, but I know I must be tickling them inside, giving them my version of greetings like the one I got the other day in one unbroken phrase,”Hello thank you good-day evening.”

I was in Nairobi all day, meeting with lawyers, getting a cell phone, a bank account, getting photos taken (for the bank account) and changing money. For some reason bills from 1996 are traded at a slightly lower rate than newer bills. So Joseph and I left the currency exchange thinking we could do better than 69 Kenya schillings per dollar. We made our way to the city market. It’s in a cavernous old ware house or dirrigible hanger or something, and is filled with stalls. Produce, baskets, clothes, carvings, flowers. You name it. Tucked behind a vegetable and fruit stall was a money changer Joseph knew. It is not a place you would want to go unescorted to change money.

Joseph and I stood in a space, a corridor of sorts about three feet wide and six feet long. With three other people, waiting to do business. When someone would come out, we turned sideways so that they could pass, and that with a lot of body contact. The “office” was so small the three of us barely fit. But, 71 schillings per dollar. I’m historically pretty claustrophobic. Less so now, but I’d still rather eat glass than have an MRI. But here, I am finding a different sense about being so close to people I don’t know. I kind of like it. Maybe I’m alone too much, and the contact is, well, contact. But I think it has more to do with how Kenyans act in tight spaces. They are so calm and unaffected and pleasant in a very understated way. We’re all in it together is the feeling I get.

Matatus are the small vans that transport people who live outside of the city back and forth. Crowded takes on a whole new meaning in these flying sardine cans of death. On the road to Nairobi from Lukenya, they are everywhere, passing slow moving and fast moving trucks and sanely driven vehicles with complete abandon. If there is a blockage of some sort, they head overland snaking along the uneven side of the road over ruts, cement chunks, etc., until they find some way around the stall. All this with fourteen or so people wedged in what in the U.S would be a five or six passenger vehicle.

The unfunny part is that they are so dangerous. Fourteen people died in one wreck last week. I had thought trying them to save transportation costs, which are steep,and paying a little extra and getting the shotgun seat where it could only get so crowded, but Joseph and Tony seriously discouraged it, and told me about all the wrecks, etc. I didn’t really need much convincing.

They do have fabulous names, though, each one hand painted on the side and back. Here’s a few: Scandal, Rhapsody, Everlasting God, Vanessa, The Furious Five, Romantic, Undertaker Senior, Hullabaloo, Ghetto Jam, Bugs Bunny, and my current favorite, Patmos, the island where John the apostle received the Revelation, no doubt after a particualrly hair raising ride.

I tried to add a picture of a goat for visual appeal, but something went haywire.
The goat picture made it 2/10/06

Don’t forget those comments, and email whenever you like.

David

Posted on January 30th, 2006 by david
Filed under: David's Journal