Sunday and Monday

I met Fr. Kilonzo at the Catholic church here, Mary Mount Chapel, at 7:30 am. I had arranged with him to go to Kimogo 1 to the mass he says there in the small school house room. We got in his small, older Nissan sedan and headed out for the five kilometer ride. What starts as a reasonable dirt road quickly turns into a mule path, winding over rock escarpments, dry gullies and an assortment of lunar terrain. About half way there we were stopped by a man who had obviously run to intersect us. He jumped in and we changed course to pick up his wife and kids, waiting back at their place, a neatly laid out arrangement of sheep pens, goat pens, a farm house and some out buildings. Soon we were eight in the car, and some large bundles. Only Fr. Kilonzo and I in the front. The back was crowded, even by tuk-tuk standards, so I motioned and a ten or eleven year old boy climbed over the seat and plopped his bony haunches on my lap. We bumped and rattled and scraped our way to church, unfolded ourselves out of the car and reassumed our true sizes.

People were wandering in and a group of dancers was rehearsing outside, and others were just carrying on their Sunday morning business in the area just outside the classroom/church meeting room.

The blue structure in the background is the community toilets.

This little cowboy was on his way, with the rest of his family, in the next photo, to get water, about five kilometers away.

Riding away on his horse.

This is the group of dancers that was practicing outside before mass started.

This is the back side of a house that borders the open area outside the church room.

Fr. Kilonzo heard confessions down at the far corner of this building for about twenty minutes.

And then we all went in for mass. Fr.Kilonzo gave me the run of the place and told the congregation that I would be taking pictures to show my friends in the U.S. I video taped a good deal of the mass. The service was lathered with spirit and the Spirit. It had better singing and cooler dancing than the last Stones’ concert I went to.

The celebrity readers’ lineup wasn’t bad either. If you click on these two photos to enlarge them, you’ll recognize, I’m sure, a philosopher you might not immediately associate with Sunday services (this one’s for you, Jim) and a maybe still famous celebrity sharing the gospel reading duties.

Fr. Kilonzo spoke only in Kiswahili, so my translation was gesture and cadence and some other indefinable shared understanding. All in all, I judged it a fine sermon.

About that time a very drunk man came in. He was received and given a seat.

He was, at times, disruptive and someone would sit near him and whisper to him or gently cover his mouth. He took a shine to the camera and came lurching over after a while, but was intercepted short of his target. I found out from Fr. Kilonzo later that he had drunk too much local brew, which in the worst batches can kill you, and even the non-immediately lethal stuff often undertakes a permanent scramble in pretty short order. These are his feet.

Here are some faces of your sisters, worth a click.

Later that afternoon I walked back to Kimongo with Peter, whom you have met earlier. He has lived in Kimongo 2 for about fifteen or twenty years — his own reckoning, and knows everyone and their history. His knowledge will help us a good deal when we start accepting orphans to live at the Children’s Home.

These are the sisal stems that are harvested and used, with mud, to build the houses in Kimongo 1 and 2. Since they are not wood, the log-like stems last only four or five years and then they begin to break down and the structures slowly collapse. The building technique we are going to use for the project, rammed earth, could eliminate this problem once the folks here learn to use it.

These guys are dragging two dead and dried sisal stumps home. The spiky branches are used for cooking fire fuel. You may recognize the one on the right. It’s Martin (pr. Marteen) from an earlier journal entry when he was gathering scrap metal and had only one shoe. Now he’s splitting a pair of flip-flops with his pal.

Even with his front teeth grown in, it’s hard to mistake Muthiani’s grin.

The last time we saw this guy he had a big sack of scrap metal slung over his shoulder.

My protection in the mean streets of Kimongo 1.

These two girls were in the group that danced for Peter and I in the bush between Lukenya and Kimongo in one of the early journal entries. My cousin, John, made some hard copies of the pictures from that entry and sent them to me (that was the other piece of mail I have received here). Peter distributed them for me, and now, six months later they are still prized possessions, and John is something of an unseen local legend.

This girl, selling vegetables in the kiosk is an orphan.

My expanded entourage. Muthiani at my side.

Peter and I left Kimongo 1 and walked the kilometer to Kimongo 2, Peter’s home, where the next group of pictures was taken.

Peter’s mom having lunch.

This is as calm as this group got. I was taking video footage and Bethe, the young woman, was running in and out of the picture like Lucille Ball and the two guys were staging a kung fu battle.

Kristine, Peter’s wife, and I. This was taken inside the cooking area of the new “cafe” she and Peter had opened that day, the Parapet, I was one of the first customers. Tea and chapati, fifteen shillings.

After visiting there for awhile, I headed for home, and back through Kimongo 1 on the way.

My old pal.

These two sent me running for the ““Wet Ones”” I stash in my backpack.

This is Simon. His father is very ill, and his mother is gone.

He lives in the house behind us, whose roof is also nearly gone.

The posse from Kimongo says, “Adios.”

This footlong pumpkin head greeted us on the way home.

And so did these gorgeous, interplanetary aloe plants.

I took a cross country route to the property and happened into Elizabeth and her grandson. The fence you see marks the northern edge of our five acre plot.

MONDAY

Having gotten the registered letter from the architect I hadn’t hired presenting me with a bill for 281,000 kenya shillings, I added a trip to the lawyer’s office to an already full schedule for Monday in Nairobi. I called Masa, the driver I use when I need to go into Nairobi. His mobile phone wasn’t working Sunday night. I called him at 7:30 am. “The Safaricom subscriber is unavailable.” So I called John, driver in waiting. “Can you be here by about 9:00” “It all depends on the jam.” It always depends on the jam, the traffic jam. Going into and out of Nairobi mornings and evenings is like any other city of four million, and throw in scattering of rickshaw-like carts loaded with everything imaginable, and pulled by the most intrepid souls, and you have the beginnings of a picture.

I was scheduled to meet Felix of the Daraja Project at a coffee shop at 10:00 am. He was running late because of the matatu shortage brought on by the crackdown. Result: fewer matatus, higher prices, lots of chaos. I had to get to Barclay’s bank to drop off a passport photo so Patrick could open a Kenya shillings checking account for me. The photo was a little scary, taken much closer to sick time as it was. Now I can withdraw money in dollars from my U.S. dollars account, stuff it in my hidden waist pouch, exchange it down the block at Forex, return to the bank and deposit the Kenya shillings into my new account and avoid the bank’s dismal exchange rate.

I called Felix to meet me at the Simba Mbili at 11:00am. On the way to meet Joseph and Tony at “the office”, I stopped at the Book Villa on Standard Street. I bought a book exchange membership there and for the price of about one hardback book, I can borrow, read and exchange as many books as I like for one year. A very nice find. I got Joseph and Tony memberships, too. I turned in Mark Twain’s, Following the Equator for The Poet of Tolstoy Park, by Sonny Brewer.

Joseph, Tony and Gabriel, the guy who is working on getting power from the national grid to the property, and I showed up within a few minutes of each other. Felix came right after us. We are having the small shack on the property wired so that the grid folks will have a destination for the power. Actually getting the power can be a very long and maddening process. A woman I know here paid over 500,000ks and it still took over a year for the installation. Gabriel, working on a time structured incentive plan from me is getting it done in a few weeks. He is very good at this.

We had a list of all the electrical apparati we needed for the job. After a brief meeting, Joseph went to Uganda electric to get a quote. I gave Gabriel some money to hasten his process, and he was off. And Felix and I were off to Umoja, to pick up the very simple furniture I had made for Gabe’s unfurnished room. A small table, a chair, and a small food cupboard for Wilson’s place. Used furniture doesn’t exist in Kenya. These three pieces cost about thirty dollars all together. Felix checked yesterday and was assured they were ready, so we could pick them up in John’s taxi, and get back to Museum Hill in good time for a last minute meeting at the lawyer’s office to settle on a response to the nasty architect letter.

When we got to the furniture maker’s we found a table with no top, a chair with no seat and a cupboard without hinges and the doors leaning against it. And nothing had been varnished. Felix was mortified, I was squeezed for time and not so happy.

Here is the shop. That’s Felix on the right and the owner, Steven in the middle.

Transport is always the issue here. Without a vehicle of your own, it can cost as much to get something somewhere as that something is worth. The furniture is a perfect example. To hire John to get me from Lukenya and bring me Nairobi and back to get the furniture costs more than the furniture. So I pack the trips into Nairobi with meetings and appointments and business cheek to jowl. After a frustrating and then pretty hilarious ten minute conversation/negotiation session, I agreed to give them 500 shillings so they could buy the varnish they needed to finish –the real hold up it seems– and all three of the guys there promised to work to get the job done in thirty minutes. This firm time commitment was understated by a factor of three, at the very least, I knew, and so Felix and I went to his project nearby.

We ate some beans and maize, kiderthi, that was being served to the street kids there, and he filled me in on the really awful details of some internal financial difficulties that had borne down on them in the past week. We talked and I sympathized and not much changed as a result.

I needed to get to a cyber cafe and let folks know my internet connection had been down for the last week. We found one. I went upstairs to a small room with the oldest computers I have seen outside of a tech museum. I managed to get to my e-mail after a while but every time I hit the return key while I was typing, it would stick and rattle off about fifty returns like a machine gun before I could wrestle it back. We came back to the shop about an hour later and they had made some progress. The chair had an upholstered seat, the table top was taking shape and one of the doors was swinging on new hinges. I grabbed a brush and started varnishing, Felix was supervising the table top operation and there we were, like the seven dwarfs, whistling, and muttering while we worked.

Here are a couple more shots of the place. The furniture in the photos is the fancy kind, ours was much plainer.

With the quick drying finish still drying, we crammed the load into John’s little Toyota sedan, the cupboard sticking straight up in John’s trunk with the lid tied down on it, and took off like the Joads, praying that the jam would be kind. I had to get across town to see the lawyer in a hurry. I dropped Felix near the Simba Mbili, ran upstairs to give Joseph the money for the electrical stuff — he had found it cheaper at Gambon Electrical, a mile or two away.

I made it to Museum Hill, read The Economist for a few minutes in the waiting room, had a good meeting and began to formulate a plan. I got a call from Joseph. He needed more money for the electrical stuff, and the shop was closing in about fifteen minutes. We had good traffic karma again, picked up Joseph on the street and made it to Gambon and the matronly woman proprietor there. She was a delight.

Back to the Simba Mbili for a little dinner, and then all that remained was to get a foam mattress for Gabe’s bed. We found one at Nakumat, a kind of all purpose store, they rolled it up and tied it with twine and in the downtown bustle and darkness and with “help” from two or three interested bystanders managed to get it tied to the only open space on the car, the roof.

John and I said so long to Joseph and Nairobi and headed for Lukenya, about twenty five miles down the Mombassa Road. So that was Monday, and that about wraps up magical mystery tour.

I want to include an update on the progress of the project here. I don’t always talk about it in the journal, but that’s what I spend virtually all my time on. Here’s what’s going on.

We are buying three more acres of land, a total of eight now. This became available unexpectedly and we snatched it up, about $11,000.00. This will give us a big boost in making land available for the perma-culture, agriculture, bird banding station, etc., which will give us the self-sustaining income we want for the Project in three years.

The revised proposal for the expanded agricultural effort and all the stuff necessary for that, including consultation fees, is $19,000.00

I’m looking into getting a small used pick up truck, about $7,000.00 or so.

We need to fence the new three acres. About $1,500.00

We need to dig the borehole and get a three stage pump. About $17,000.00

We need to get registered as an international NGO (non-governmental organzation) $1,500.00 to $2,000.00

We need to make the access road passable in all weather $7,000.00 to $10,000.00

We need to bring power from the national grid to the property. About $5,000.00, add another $20,000.00 if we need to buy a transformer.

We need to build the Project out. Everything from a septic system, to the buildings, to the landscaping. About $200,000.00

There are lots of other things, and we are ready to do them. All the leg work and planning and organizing and decisions over the past eight months or so are in place. What we need is the funding, and folks are working very hard on that.

We’ve raised about $80,000.00 and need a couple hundred thousand more to get it built. Some of you have asked about being a part of this aspect of the project. Here’s what I have to say about that. This project isn’t for everybody. Some people don’t see the sense putting so much effort so far from home. Fair enough. But some of you think differently. For you, without really trying, that ten thousand miles compresses into an insubstantial thing, and your learning about the need here has gotten to be a burr under your saddle. It affects you personally. I hope you pay attention to that, it’s a gift that doesn’t come to everybody.

If you have questions, you can contact me at dwsaunders@gmail.com, if not, you can go to the website www.rrop.org to the How To Help Link and let your check book do the talking. Either way, it will be good to hear from you. Your money will find trustworthy hands to put it directly to use, and not a shilling of it will be wasted.

Yours from Kenya,

David

Posted on September 26th, 2006 by david
Filed under: David's Journal