No Hurry in Africa (22 page)

He did not disappoint. Dawn was truly spectacular. As the darkness of night withdrew, a deep-gold sun rose over the forested valley. Our vantage point atop a high cliff gave us a panoramic view as fluffy white clouds tinged with gold ascended from below. The exotic sounds of the forest fauna started up all around us. It was unforgettable. After that, everything else would be a bit of an anti-climax. We played at being Tarzan for the rest of the day—swinging on vines, climbing out onto branches, and falling into a stream. A couple of times, Amy called out, ‘Is that a monkey?’ when she spotted something rustling the vegetation. It only turned out to be shy local children collecting sticks.

‘Proof you’re from Alabama anyway,’ I teased Amy.

Amy had heard of a place that she said would be worth a visit.

‘It’s not far from the rainforest,’ she began. ‘Apparently there is an odd looking thirty-foot high vertical cylinder of rock protruding from the ground with water gushing from a big boulder resting on top. It is known as the “crying stone,” because in some ways it resembles tears seeping from the head of a person. They say it never stops weeping, even through droughts.’

Top Cat, who had actually seen it, interrupted.

‘It looks more like a particular male body part!’ he said, lowering the tone.

Amy ignored that one and enlightened me with a bit of background on the stone that she had heard from the local Africans.

‘The Nandi tribe south of Kakamega even tried to knock it down when they ransacked the place during a raid a long time ago. They failed in their attempt. It’s pseudo-sacred to the locals now. They revere it as a symbol of defiance against their enemies.’

I simply had to go and see it to satisfy my curiosity when I was this close. Bidding farewell to the Americans, I struck out on my own. Well, I thought I was close, but I ended up walking for two hours to get to it. Apparently, it only ‘cries’ in the wet season, or so a local informed me when I reached the spot at last. I ended up just staring at a tall grey column of rock. I suppose it was mildly impressive in a way.

Often in Kenya I was told, ‘No, it is better in the dry season, come back then.’

Or else, as that local told me, ‘No, no, no, you must see it in the rainy season. Fly back from your country then to see this rock.’

Worth seeing, yes. Worth going to see? No—as Dr. Johnson famously said about the Giant’s Causeway.

After that episode, it was another few hours on the bus heading south through green hills and down a steep valley to be surprised by the sudden appearance of Kisumu City on the shores of Lake Victoria. Lake Victoria is bigger than Ireland. Since the lake’s formation 400,000 years ago, it has dried up completely on three different occasions, the last time being around 15,000 years ago. Water levels have again been dropping over the last century. At first sight, the main occupation of people in Kisumu appeared to be backing their cars into the water for a wash… and their bicycles, and really just about anything else that needed washing.

I ordered food in a café near the Lake. After my earlier exertions, I was famished. It was going to take a while, though; once I made my choice from the limited menu, the waiter set off down the street to buy the ingredients for my meal at the outdoor market! The running joke among the Irish was, if you ordered chicken, you had to wait for an egg to hatch first. I was in no rush. After that, I bought some sizzling corn-on-the-cob from a woman along the roadside, and was all set to go again. I was not intending to stay overnight in Kisumu.

As I strolled down to the bus depot munching on my corn-on-the-cob, I spotted the ubiquitous crazy man dancing around.

He had bright eyes and a wide toothless grin, and was shouting a passage from the bible to me while he grasped my arm, smiled, and patted my shoulder. Then he jumped around dementedly. There was always one in every Kenyan community. So I was glad when, moments later, I encountered a group of a dozen or so Americans of mixed ages. They greeted me in a friendly manner, and offered to give me a lift in their own private bus onwards to Londiani, where I was heading. Some of them reminded me of the Peace Corps at first, so we began to chat. I should have known better. To my complete lack of surprise, within five minutes, one teenage lad piped up,

‘We are members of the MCCB representing the CAAC, which is sponsored by ACBM,’ as if I was supposed to know what any of that stood for, though by now I suspected some of the ‘C’s were for ‘Christian.’

I did not really get a chance to ask, because they immediately launched into a tag-team monologue for my benefit.

‘It is sooo great to be in Africa, helping people find God through the person of J.C.’

Jeez, I sighed to myself, irreverently, for I knew full well where this was leading. It had dawned on me that I still had to be ‘saved’—in their eyes.

‘And you know the really aaahsome part,’ a young woman around my own age quickly swooped, ‘is that it is also helping
me
to find God when I help
them
to find God. We are all Christ’s children. It’s truly aaahsome! God wants each of us to share his love with others.’

They were waiting in vain for me to engage with them on this. I was not about to.

‘Are you one of Christ’s children?’ a middle-aged man who was a dead-ringer for Senator Ted Kennedy chimed in.

‘Yes,’ was my one-syllable honest response, hoping that would placate them.

It did not. After several more minutes, by which time we had reached their bus, I piped up,

‘No, I really think I might stay in Kisumu tonight. Change of plan. Thanks anyway for the offer of a lift.’

Just over an hour later, the service bus I was on painstakingly overtook them at just about the same pace as their own bus. The result was that all the Americans had a good long clear view of me sitting in a window seat heading for Londiani. They stared; one or two of them gave a nod and a wee wave of recognition— before the expression on their faces suddenly altered.

After travelling over 100km east of Kisumu, I reached the village of Londiani just as it was getting dark. Londiani is a former white settler village, sitting right on the equator line. No settlers live there now, and it is long past its heyday. The village has a distinctive look, consisting of clusters of wooden huts with rusty tin roofs, and a bumpy cobbled road that crosses some very suspect wooden bridges. The road itself was built by Italian PoWs during World War II, and is still in its original condition. I only intended to stay one night there with three Irish missionaries whom I had met some weeks earlier, when I was travelling up to Turkana with Fr. Tom. They were a good laugh, as we say, and I ended up staying several days.

Londiani is not far from Kericho, which is well known as the heart of the Kenyan ‘tea country’; this is where a lot of our tea in Ireland comes from.

‘Only the Irish drink more tea per person than the Kenyans,’ a plantation guide informed me as the two of us strolled around.

However, Kenyans tend to make their tea in a flask of boiled milk with a few tea leaves and as much sugar as they have available thrown in. It occurred to me that Kericho, founded just after 1900 on the edge of the ‘White Highlands,’ resembled many of the plantation towns of Ulster; it has a central diamond and a large grey-stone Anglican church dominating the main street.

At the same tea plantation in Kericho, I was given samples of nearly a dozen different types of tea. The differences in how each type is grown, picked and processed were explained to me in intricate detail. There were teas of various colours, and teas with all manner of herbs, flowers, spices and fruits added. They all tasted much the same to my uneducated palate. Outside on the tea plantation, I was really struck by the dozens of women, visible from the waist up, working among the dense tea plants, like animated figures in a dark green carpet. They were busy picking leaves by hand and dropping them into creel-type baskets carried on their backs. Only months after my visit did they begin to automate the picking process; this was strongly opposed by the workers who feared losing their incomes. Fortunately, local people with small landholdings run many of the tea plantations around Kericho as co-operative ventures.

Even this area was not well-off, however. In the middle of this attractive tea country, amongst tidy uniform fields covering the gently rolling hillsides, children were on their knees, scooping water into their mouths a foot from where their cow was also drinking. I might have felt sorry, but Kenyans could sometimes bleed my goodwill dry when I was travelling around the country, unlike the Akamba people back at base.

‘Mzungu,
give me money because my wife has to go to hospital,’ said one man.

I donated a few shillings. It was not much; I found it hard to turn people down outright.

‘Mzungu,
I need money for my wife’s funeral,’ he pleaded the next day.

The day after that, he needed money again.

‘My wife, she has given birth to my son.’

I had no difficulty identifying him; he was wearing a Bellaghy GAA tracksuit-top! Second-hand clothes like that are sent over from charity shops in Ireland. A Kenyan buys them for a few shillings, and then sells them on again at a roadside stall for a few shillings extra.

I had long ago learned to be wise to some of their hard luck stories, but I still found them exasperating at times. Even if one does some Kenyans a favour, they
expect
another favour instead of seeing it as a once off. There is a great saying in East Africa that goes, ‘Teach Ugandans Swahili, teach Tanzanians English, and teach Kenyans manners.’ Kenyans are quick to forget a favour (but, to their credit, they are equally quick to forget an argument). I realised the Akamba are different in that way; tribal differences can be really pronounced. The Akamba are a proud people, nearly always smiling, really laid back, something rather Irish about them—and they would tend to conceal from me the fact they were starving. I was looking forward to living amongst them again in Kitui.

On the way to Kitui in the middle of February, I had to make another trip to the immigration office in Nairobi. After being in Turkana and other remote places, entering Nairobi seemed like entering New York. The big city, as always, positively throbbed with life. Miraculously, I was informed that I actually had got one of the rare approvals the government gives for a work permit. The only problem was the permit would cost a small fortune, and I was not even receiving a stipend at Nyumbani. So I sat a while pondering my next move in the city’s equivalent to London’s Hyde Park, called Uhuru Park (which means ‘Freedom Park’). It is the focal point of every demonstration or celebration in Kenya, and is a park of dusty paths bordered with barbed wire; and there are sizable gaps in the wooden footbridges over the streams.

Later on that afternoon, I got my hair cut at ‘The Hure House’ (not at all what it sounds), and stayed overnight at the ‘Blessed Hotel & Butchery.’ I was not butchered, but I was not sure what meat I was eating! The next morning, rather surreally, I walked by and said hello to a Maasai wearing a red blanket, herding his cattle under Nairobi’s glass skyscrapers; like many others, he had come into the city to find water for his herd during the drought. Towards dusk, I was chased down Kenyatta Avenue, the main street of Nairobi, being loudly denounced as a devil worshipper—all because my t-shirt read ‘Daredevil Show,’ with an innocent picture of a cartoon dog wearing goggles flying a looping airplane. Where else would it happen but Nairobi? A big deal is made at any hint of devil worship in Kenya, as there have been incidents of children being sacrificed in caves just outside Nairobi—if the press were to be believed.

The same day I made a five-second appearance during the news on Kenyan television. I was a spectator observing a colourful political march on Kenyatta Avenue, a noisy protest over the government raiding the offices of the country’s independent media. At the rallying point in Uhuru Park, the opposition politicians were throwing off their shirts on stage. Getting shirty, you could say.

Bright and early the following morning—it was Sunday—I boarded the ironically named ‘Safety Bus’ back to Kitui. Here and there along the way, giraffes and impala risked their lives by crossing the road. When I reached Kitui, I called in to see Fr. Paul and let him know how I was getting on. He was still working himself to the bone trying to resolve Kitui’s longer-term difficulties, as well as fire-fighting the myriad requests for assistance that came his way on a daily basis. But he was in good spirits as always, and made time for everyone.

I cycled back to Nyumbani from Kitui village, stopping along the way at the mission house of Fr. Frank and Fr. Liam. I was looking forward to their company again. They were out. With no access to the house, I fell asleep under a purple-flowering jaca-randa tree in the late afternoon sun, taking a siesta while waiting for them to return. By the time I woke up it was dark, and the two of them evidently would not be returning that night.

Darkness falls suddenly on the equator, like the dropping of a curtain; bright sunlight to darkness in about half an hour. When darkness falls in Kenya, sinister elements emerge from behind the curtain. One stays where one is for fear of snakes, hyenas, bandits and the like. I sought sanctuary in the nearby church as it had been left open, and slept the night in the back corner on the concrete floor.

After an uncomfortable sleep, I woke early and set off cycling while it was still dark, before the sun had a chance to wake up.

There were not even animals on the dirt tracks at that tranquil time of the morning. At first light, one young barefoot boy gazed at me as if I were a cycling ghost he had seen at this unholy hour. He accepted a lift. I propped him on the bar of the bicycle, told him to grip the handlebars tight and we proceeded down the dirt track towards Nyumbani. I was eager to return. Most of all, I was excited about meeting Nancy, Kiragu, Mwangangi, Nyambura, Kimanze, Nzoki, and all the others again. Nyumbani was my
raison d’être
in Kenya. I arrived before anyone had started work.