Remember you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

I think, without conscious effort, I am developing a Kenyan walk. You know how different circumstances require different approaches to walking. When Greg and I are walking through the English walnut and cherry orchards along the north bank of the Calaveras River off of Alpine Road it is an entirely different matter from striding the gradual incline of Cole St. up from Haight St. to the patisserie for a loaf of organic walnut bread.

It’s the same here, I’m noticing, especially in the afternoons when it is almost always hot. The walk is more erect than usual, and it has dropped all excess motion. Glide isn’t a bad word to describe it. It has the effect of making you thinner in the sun, of slicing more easily through the air, with less surface area to absorb the heat. The pace is always just under the perspiration threshold, never forced or pushing. It’s like passing effortlessly through a crowd, only without the people. I don’t have a picture of it.

It has been raining most days for about week and a half. Maybe an hour a day, but in buckets. For the past few days, the rains have been coming from the west, making it to Athi River, about ten kilometers away, and stopping there. It is a matter of great debate whether these are the “long rains”, come a month or so early, or whether they will be short lived. In either case, the remaining sheep and cattle will survive, and get fat again on the new green grass that has come up everywhere, and Wilson and everyone else is busy planting maize and beans, seed by seed in the saturated soil.

Before the rains.

After the rains.

This is heavy machinery around here.

The rains brought the bug invasion.

A couple of hours after the first rain, I was sitting in the computer room, and I heard the deep throated whurr of a large helicopter approaching from a distance. Then the shadow of the helicopter passed over my head. And then the whole squadron. Thumping into the wall, into my head. In a few minutes there were hundreds of them. Termites. But these were termites like anything I had known only in the sense that Chihuahuas and Irish wolfhounds are both dogs.

Dragon flies is closer to the mark. Shorter, thinner bodies, but dragonflies, drunk dragonflies. Four wings, awkward fliers, living out their time of flight in light-drawn congregations. They didn’t seem to have romance on their minds, and within an hour most of them were dead or nearly so, their fairy wings left behind the only witness of their brief turn on the dance floor.

The helicopter squadron I heard.

The end of the road.

The next wave, a few nights later, was lady bugs, or at least I preferred to think of them as ladybugs. It helped ease the creep factor when they filled the “cyber cafe” in their hundreds and landed in my hair and crawled down my shirt. These little Philistines had their Goliaths. About as big as a milk dud, and weighing in about the same, they would hit me in the head like the smooth stone that felled their namesake, knock me off my psychic balance for a second until I fetched them out of my hair and sent them hurling across the room.

The third wave, one night later was, again, termites, but these must have flown over from California, because they were the familiar sort. By this time, Helen, the head housekeeper and I had a system. Turn off the lights, wait two or three minutes, sweep them out the door in the dark, put towels all along the gap under the glass front of the room and turn the lights on. This was about ninety percent effective.

This discrete column of ants was just marching across the road. They weren’t connected to anything else that I could see, just the bunch of them cruising along.

I didn’t know if this big boy might not just cut this tree down and drag it off to make some furniture for his place.

A few days ago, the offices of The Standard, a daily newspaper, and KTN a television station associated with it were raided by armed soldiers wearing balaclavas fully masking their faces. They damaged a good deal of equipment and burned copies of the paper. KTN was off the air for twelve hours as a result, and the paper was unavailable. The Minister of Internal Security, Mr. Michuki defended the raid saying that the paper and the TV station had been too critical of President Kibaki and his government, and for reporting inaccurately. Much of the country is a bit of an uproar over this outrageous action.

I was in Nairobi Tuesday, the 7th, when their was a huge demonstration careening through the city center streets, people running, shouting, chanting. Mercifully it was generally peaceful, and I was able largely to avoid the chaos and get what I needed done. The current government has been rocked by a number of problems — the Anglo Leasing scandal, etc. The other day, a friend took me to lunch at Medeterraneo, a nice Italian restaurant in an upscale (read white) section of Nairobi, and at the table next to us, was the former Vice President in the Moi government, and the current Minister of Education, Mr. Saituti, who was forced to resign his office a few weeks ago as a result of one of the scandals. The fact that there can be demonstrations and forced resignations is a sign of enormous progress and hope. It is a very fluid situation and requires stable and fair leadership.

The lawyers and I have come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with disadvantageous zoning of the property we are buying. We are using an “off the shelf”company where the shares are held in trust, then converted to a public company where the shareholders can be non Kenyan, etc., etc. The end result is that we will be able to push forward once this process is fully underway and avoid the potential pitfalls of any other course of action. Very soon I will be talking more to architects and contractors and less to lawyers.

I met with Felix who runs the Daraja Project, A very inventive and good program that works with street kids in a number of ways, including identifying artistic and musical talent in the kids and getting them the training needed to help them find a way out of their situation. It’s focus is primarily to work with kids in their community, that is, not to rehouse them in most cases, but to work to provide an opportunity to get a different life. Felix is intense, sincere and has a quiet determination and power that can be counted on. A very good man.

I also met with Leah who runs the Child Life Trust, a multifaceted project that does very work both in Nairobi and Machakos, and since the property is registered in the Machakos district, her very good contacts there will be invaluable. She is also very knowledgeable about the ins and outs of registering non profit entities like ours. Getting properly situated with the various governmental agencies and District Commissions and the Ministry of Home Offices and getting up to speed on the brand new governmental policy for agencies in the field of child aid will be a big part of my work in the next few months.

You remember the babies in the cribs after W.W.II, I think, who were fed, kept warm, etc. but didn’t get picked up and handled enough, and they found that these babies were dying at a high rate. They didn’t thrive, was the word I think. I am afraid I may be slipping into the same state. The last person I hugged was Greg at the airport in San Francisco. I just realized this the other day, and have felt the deficit more acutely since then. And in one of the delicious ironies served up by the world to its slow learners, for the first fifty plus years of my life, I was largely indifferent to physical touch. It was great, but I could get on fine without it. In the last two years I have been making up for lost time, happily spending hours on end wrapped up in physical contact watching a movie or TV or reading or talking. Now I’m afraid someone is going to find me in my crib (not the MTV kind) incoherent, well fed, but refusing to thrive.

Here is a long overdue picture of Theopista from Taraja Boys Home.

Here’s some of the boys playing soccer

Here’s some other metal collectors, different from the ones in the last journal entry. I met them a few days ago not far from here. From left to right they are: Mwemi, Ndida, Mwema, Wambua, Mutuku, Mosioka, John. If you enlarge the picture you can see that while most of them are barefoot, Wambua has one shoe on.

The Masai camp right down the road has been abandoned now that the rains have come. The guys that I always waved to have packed it up and headed back to Kajendo two hundred plus kilometers distant, walking their sheep and cattle all the way. I went by the remains of the camp and took some pictures. I also found one of their sticks which they are never without left behind. Greg knows how crazy I am about that kind of stuff. So now I have it, and a picture for you.

This is the gate into the main pen area.

This is one of the side pens used to separate the sheep.

.This is the remains of the temporary house they built.

This is the Masai stick that I found in the abandoned camp.

The only difference here between this,

and

This, is a little bit of rain.

It’s probably time for an update on matatu names, the Nissan mini vans to the next life. In no particular order:

Snowline
Secret Admirer
Chicky junior
Purple Haze
Liz Warrior
Good Idea Ha Ha

One with a picture of Bart Simpson holding a fully drawn sling shot and below the words:
Praise God

And my two current favorites:

Vexation of Spirit
and
Au revoir Jersey City

And au revoir to you from just outside Nairobi city. Don’t forget to write.

Love,

David

Posted on March 9th, 2006 by david
Filed under: David's Journal