I like walking around Nairobi early in the morning. I have it to myself. No bustle yet. It’s easy. This morning I occupied my simple mind by taking pictures of signs. I can’t get enough of them.

The first two are for you traveling nudists out there. Places where you are not welcome, like this one.

…and places designed just for you. I imagine the “Educational Tours” are quite popular. The Real African Adventure.

And for those shoe shoppers among you. Sometimes you want fancy shoes, or running shoes, or really special shoes. But sometimes all that exceeds your grasp and you just want some…decent footwear.

Now you know where to go.

And the next time you’re going to Yen Ching for some eggplant with garlic sauce, you might want to pick up some…

Although I can’t in good conscience recommend this one. I went in and it was a shoe repair shop packed floor to ceiling with repaired shoes. It looked like a movie set, and not a single pair remotely Oriental seeming.

It was, I had decided, hair cut day again. I was in Nairobi, coming home soon for a visit, and I passed this sign.

Why had I in Machakos squandered my time at the “Executive Barber Shop (and Mini pub)” when I could have been here, at the Amazing Executive Barber Shop. I climbed the three flights of stairs. As in Europe, they are always one floor behind here. Our second floor is their first floor, and so on. They never catch up. The slightly startled young woman looked up and greeted me.
How much for a haircut? I asked.
Just have a seat, she motioned right.
How much for a haircut? I asked again.
Just have a seat here.
I asked again.
She hesitated…500.
I looked at her as though she had just produced a dead animal from from under the counter. She faltered and asked the inevitable question.
How much do you want to pay?
I understand the dance, but every now and then I’d just like to sit one out.
I want to pay the real price, I said, not the mzungu price. I want to pay what everybody else pays. I live here.
OK, three hundred, she said.
I went in and sat down. Still about a hundred too much, but it was enough of a victory for now.

I think the barber was sick that day, because the guy who appeared had the nervous look of a cat burglar trying to convince the cops that, yes, in fact he did live here. He flapped out the neck apron and cinched it up.
Not too short, I said.
He produced a silver spray bottle and started blasting away with what I think was the fuel I used to burn in my Whisper Lite backpacking stove. Only this smelled worse. He went for the clippers.
Scissors! I said, with mouth and fingers.
He opened a few drawers and picked up a red handled pair with the same facility that a family at Kin Folk’s Barbecue and Rib Heaven, outside Pella, Iowa , would five sets of chop sticks. I cursed my luck.

He started slow, but warmed to it. Very soon he had all his left hand fingers, like the tines of a tiny corn harvester, in my hair and was attacking the spackled and spiked rows randomly from a series of obtuse and acute angles.
Not too short, I said, to no one in particular.
Watching him, in the mirror, using the scissors was like watching me crocheting. A lot of tangled up. He kept gaining momentum, I kept losing courage.
Not too short, I squeaked.
He took a short breather, and was coming in for the kill, when I slid out of the chair, mid-cut.
That looks good, I said.
He looked disappointed.
Do you want it washed? He asked.
I glanced at the girl. Her look said more money.
No. This is fine.
And symmetry and uniformity aside, it was.

Back in the neighborhood.

I bought a 1500 liter tank from Roto Mold. They delivered it to the property by truck. We rolled it the last two hundred yards, because the ground was too muddy for the truck. We need some water storage before we can get to drilling a bore hole. We got the ok to use some scrap lumber from the place where I stay to build a platform for the tank. We ran into the perennial problem–transport. How to get the heavy load of lumber to the property, about two kilometers away. I remembered Kitonyi. A fine man who works at the Getaway. He hitched up the solution and we were in business.

The cart was tired, the wheels very loosely attached by a lug nut or two and wobbled drunkenly. These two photos show their various angles of repose.

The one in the middle with the slighly bigger ears is inexplicably named, Boris.

Kitonyi, Wilson and an unemployed stone worker we picked up on the way. That’s the property and Wilson’s modest house in the distance.

The black cotton soil on the property after the rains is quite sticky.

Wilson and I set about to build the platform. Some of the wood was so hard it bent every five inch nail we tried. It was, I think the hardest lumber I have ever seen. I’m sure it would not float. The metal-shafted hammer bent and the saw was a dull finger nail file. We finally set the petrified stuff aside, and Wilson finished the redesigned platform the next day. You can see the bent-shafted, no handled hammer on the front right hand corner of the platform.

These are a few more of my neighbors. This is Joyce. I met her walking back form the property, about where you saw the cart a couple of pictures ago. She was sitting next to the path in the grass making a basket. Here she is holding Victoria, her grand daughter, whose mother, Joyce’s daughter, and father have died. That is Christina on the immediate right.

This is Agnes, with her baby Josephine. They live with Joyce. Josephine is a couple of months old. Since this picture she has gotten sick. It looks like it is not malaria.

This is the inside of the one room house where they live. That is the small wood or charcoal burning stove in the front. You can see the ugali stirring spoon on the top of the pot against the wall, and all the plastic gerry cans for water. The white one on the left with the braided sisal rope which goes across the forehead when the container is full of water and hangs down the back is the one Christina carries.

This is Victoria and the basket on the right is the one Joyce was making when I met her, out of sisal fibers and yarn. The bigger one on the left is an old basket/bag that I bought from Joyce. She supports the home by her basket making. It takes between two and three weeks to make one, depending on the difficulty. I have taken to buying them from her.

This is my favorite of Joyce’s baskets. Made entirely from sisal fibers. After some figuring, Joyce and Agnes told me Joyce was seventy-two, and learned to make baskets when she was very young.

This is Joyce and Miriam and yours truly with Josephine. Just after lunch.

Victoria was hamming it up with this shawl for a long time. Covering herself entirely and walking ghost style around and then snatching it off and doing it all over again.

A journal entry without insects is like a day without bugs, thin and incomplete. This jumbo jet is a dung beetle, and he is just as big as he looks. They make handball sized, perfectly round spheres of fresh dung and roll them by pushing backwards with their hind legs, their heads and front legs slanted down, touching the ground. Sometimes two of them roll the same ball, one pushing backward and the other pulling forward. I don’t know where they take them, but I cracked one open the other day and it was honey combed with holes, each of which held a little dung beetle, eating his way out apparently. Depending on the light they can show a brilliant, iridescent, dusty purple color.

For some reason these brightly colored and striped flies remind me of ornaments on this desiccated frog Christmas tree. You have to enlarge the photo by clicking on it to get the effect.

This grasshopper has her abdomen burrowed into the soil. I imagine she is depositing a wad of eggs. She looks covered in plated armor.

These are army worms, and with the rains this spring it is a very big army. These guys are everywhere. I have heard of some cattle getting sick from inadvertently eating too many of them while. Usually they are pretty inactive, but twice I have seen a literal river of them heading east at breakneck speed, in herky jerky electrified movements.

I am heading to the States this Wednesday for my daughter Allison’s graduation from Darden, the University of Virginia’s Graduate School of Business, and then to visit my beautiful grandkids, Boo Boo and Bubba, and Sarita and many of you in California. I will be gone about a month. The project, since securing the title deed has been in high gear. We have chosen an architect, gotten perhaps the foremost expert in our chosen method of construction, rammed earth, Professor Walter Oyawa from Jomo Kenyatta University, to sign on as the engineer, and are in the process of formally planning the integral agricultural component with the best, most innovative team of sustainable, permaculture land use experts in Kenya. The shape of the project has evolved beautifully over these four months, thanks to the amazing contacts I have been fortunate to make here, and the unseen late night work Greg has put in every single day, and most of all your prayers, unfailing and effective on our behalf. Thank you.

See you on your side of the equator,

David

Posted on May 12th, 2006 by david
Filed under: David's Journal