No Hurry in Africa (3 page)

They told me joyfully I must have brought the rain from Ireland, and loved me for it. A woman beamed widely and boasted how she had set out all her seven buckets to catch the rain. It would save many a trip to the dry riverbed several kilometres away, where they dig a hole in the sand to extract groundwater. Sadly, every day after that brought cloudless skies and scorching temperatures. The longed-for late year rains in Kitui never came. In fact, no prolonged rains had occurred since the worldwide
El-Niño
rains of 1998—and those were so strong they washed away the soil.

That first day, the children mobbed me and made such a hullabaloo that the local chief got one of his three wives to call me over to be introduced. He, in turn, introduced me to his ‘royal’ family who shyly shook my hand. It was not everyday that they had a visit from a tall
mzungu
(Swahili for white person, with some of the connotations of a derogatory term like ‘nigger’ but not really meant in a hostile way). We then had an impromptu thirty-a-side game of football with a ball made from plastic bags and string on the ‘highway,’ as they called it. In reality, it was a narrow dirt track. The children were shouting ‘how are you, one, two, three, I love you,’ over and over and over. Their parents must have taught them to say that whenever they saw a
mzungu.
Clearly most had no idea what they were chanting.

I spent that day and the next in Sr. MM’s home. The day after that, she insisted on escorting me the fifty kilometres over the dusty pot-holed dirt track to Nyumbani. My headache returned. Now I blamed it on the jolting brought on by the rutted track. It was not quite the Sahara, but we were driving further and further into the desert—an arid bush landscape, inches deep with fine red dust. There were a few seashells on the ground as well, which gives one a sense of its geological antiquity. This was the time-forsaken place where I planned to be volunteering for the rest of the year.
Nyumbani
means ‘home’ in Swahili. It had little in common with the homes of my native Donegal, I thought as we arrived.

In the middle of this desert was a vast thousand-acre building site. This was the Village project. I could see about a dozen houses (later to be referred to as Phase I), and a number of silver corrugated iron shacks that served as offices. But what pulled me up short was the sight of maybe five hundred people in this remote place, all busy digging trenches, clearing scrub or hauling clay blocks on ox-carts. It was like a rural African version of a Lowry painting. There was not a white face to be seen. I was feeling nervous, probably for the first time. Where and how could I possibly fit in?

A local Akamba woman named Nancy was the first to introduce herself to me in Nyumbani. She was a small but fine-looking woman in her late twenties. She also had more English than nearly any other African I had met so far. More or less the first thing she said to me was,

‘Bradan (as she pronounced my name forever more), there are baboons between here and my home, big big baboons, and yesterday they took my sister’s baby when I was here, and started throwing the baby among them. Oh, my sister cried and cried.’

Nancy illustrated her cautionary tale with appropriate gestures and arm actions to go along with every sentence.

‘Then they left her baby down beside her. But they are dangerous. Be careful of the baboons, Bradan.’

It sounded like good advice! I would recall her cautionary words later.

Nancy showed me to the spartan accommodation which I would share with around ten other workers. I would be working very closely with her, as she was one of the half dozen clerks in the corrugated iron office where I was based. She was quite tiny, much smaller than the other Akamba, who themselves are closer to the height of Pygmies rather than the taller Maasai. She could be very bashful, yet she appeared every Monday morning with a brand new hairstyle. At 6”2,’ I probably resembled the BFG, loftily winking down at her to make her blush when she pretended her hairstyle was the same as the previous week’s. I found her permanently in a good mood and joking, but she took no prisoners; if a worker tried a fast one, she would go through him or her for a shortcut. She was straighter than a die, not just by African standards, mind, but by those of an older generation in Ireland.

She was incorruptible, and tireless in her work.

The next day, Thursday, my headache returned with a vengeance. I could no longer blame jet lag, altitude or jolting jeeps. I doubted if it was a side effect of the malaria tablets. It was no longer a sort of tingling sensation in the back of my head; it had morphed into a stinging pain that pulsed through my brain every time I moved. I was comparing it to something like electro-convulsive therapy without the benefit of anaesthetic.

Whatever it was, it was sapping my body of energy, levels of which were already depleted by the African sun. I was embarrassed that I was ill so soon. I knew it was my mother’s worst fear. Sr. MM picked me up the next day, Friday, to spend the weekend at her house, and I confessed my condition to her. One or two lesions had appeared on my face, and were soon proliferating. She drove me to a doctor of Indian descent in Kitui village. He seemed baffled. After boasting that he studied in London—in an attempt to impress us, I think—he prescribed three different kinds of antibiotics that I had to take over the weekend. To be sure, to be sure, to be sure, I felt like saying. They did nothing for me. At least, I was not getting any worse.

On Monday morning, I insisted on returning to Nyumbani. Nancy called in the local herbal doctor, a grey-haired
mzee
called Mutinda. It was not very encouraging to be told he had a good reputation for healing sick animals. Hocus pocus, I was thinking. He appeared as I was sitting disconsolately on the step at the house. He muttered things in English that I did not take in, because I was wondering how he had acquired his shiny gold tooth. He had a gentle face, though, and a confident manner. He was a respected elder and community leader. Just as another electric shock buzzed through me, he promptly disappeared.

‘Am I cured now, Nancy?’ I asked, straining to be funny, and trying to disguise my fears.

She was throwing the bones left over from our lunch to the hungry pups.

‘Ah, no Bradan, wait, wait.’

She chuckled at the silly
mzungu
thinking himself cured.

Soon Mutinda returned with an off-white liquid mix in a wooden container and spread it on my cheeks and around my face.

‘It is a mixture of aloe vera, water, sugar, and garlic. Good, good, good,’ Mutinda enlightened me in a soft gravelly voice as he proceeded to smear it over my upper torso. By now, there were half a dozen spectators. My pale Irish body was a terrific source of interest, even amusement, to them all.

‘Were you in Nairobi?’ Mutinda asked.

I told him I had stayed with the Kiltegan Fathers in Nairobi the night I arrived off the plane.

‘It’s a Nairobi fly, yes; what’s it known as in English … a … a ladybird, yes. It walked along your face as you slept and urinated here and here and here.’

He touched the lesions on my face. Of all the African beasts that exist or that had starred in my parents’ imaginations, the creature that felled me turned out to be a ladybird!

Whether it was the delayed effect of the antibiotics, or Mutinda’s magic mix, I will never know, but within a few hours I started to feel slightly better. Later I discovered that every tribe has their own tried and tested herbal remedies made from roots and plant-leaves. There are cures for more or less every ailment (except the big one, of course—AIDS, which one dubious theory claims began when a man in the Congo had sex with a monkey). And here is the crux of one of Africa’s problems. They are beginning to lose these effective herbal remedies, but have only limited access to Western medicine. In essence, many African tribes are losing the best of their indigenous ways, but have yet to gain the benefits of Western ways in areas like medicine.

You always feel a lot better when you realise you are not going to die, at least not yet! Thanks to Mutinda’s remedy, I was feeling well enough the next night for some serious socialising. An affable twenty-one year old mechanic, Kimanze, had offered to take me to a hostelry in Kwa Vonza village. He thought himself quite the cool boy, did Kimanze. He had a wide mischievous smile, and darker skin more akin to the Luo tribe, and not the lighter hue of his own Akamba people. He had borrowed a motorbike, and he carried me and two of his African friends into the night, travelling at ten kilometres an hour—without the benefit of headlights. Later, when I told my Irish friends about four of us on a motorbike, they were incredulous. It can be done, but I would not recommend it!

Under a clear night sky, brilliant with stars, we suddenly came upon a security checkpoint. Two stroppy-looking policemen were pointing Kalashnikovs at us. Kimanze negotiated on our behalf. In this sticky situation, he opted for bribery rather than blarney, and asked me to pay the police the equivalent of five euro so they would let us all go. It is a fair amount for a policeman there. Forget South Armagh, I thought, this place is real Bandit Country.

That night was my first experience of a Kenyan pub, in the tiny village that is Kwa Vonza, about fifteen kilometres from Nyumbani. The pub was a remarkable place, a fifteen-foot square shack, but with the grand name of ‘The Paradise Hotel.’ It was lit by a single glowing tilly-lamp. There were two dogs scratching themselves in the middle of the concrete floor, and a few old men chewing
miraa
(a foul tasting legal African narcotic) on the shaky, plain wooden benches. There were not any women, and the only choice of beverage was between a warm bottle of Guinness and an equally warm bottle of Tusker beer. Nothing else at all. The ‘toilets’ consisted of relieving oneself against the outside wall in the dark. Oh, and there were constant requests from the Africans for the rich
mzungu
to buy a round—which cost the equivalent of five euro for the whole house.

That particular night, one drunk had a call of nature and stepped on a snake. He was in screaming agony until a ‘black stone’ was brought.

‘It will suck the poison out,’ Kimanze explained.

A ‘black stone’ is a rare form of sedimentary rock that, when placed over a bite, will absorb the snake poison from the blood. Nearly every home has one in these parts, but it must be thrown out after having been used once.

‘Welcome to Kitui!’ Kimanze proclaimed, watching me view this process with fascination.

I stayed in his home that night—a round, thatched mud-hut of one, virtually furniture-less, room that was lit by a paraffin hurricane lamp. Boy, these Africans have nothing, I was thinking. I would discover in the year ahead how this was true only in a superficial sense. I had been in Africa for a week and I had a lot to learn.

The four of us squeezed into two single beds, malarial mosquitoes buzzing incessantly as I drifted off to sleep.

My head was teeming with impressions of my first extraordinary week in Africa. If my mother could see me now! My final thought before losing consciousness was of the headline if it ever made the
Donegal News:
‘Letterkenny man laid low in Africa by a ladybird.’

T
HE DIRECTOR OF THE
N
YUMBANI
Village Project was a commanding figure. An architect from the Kikuyu tribe, Kiragu was a man in his early fifties, quite tall, with a shaven head and mobile features that suggested a quick intelligence, imagination and resourcefulness. He welcomed me to his humble office with a warm smile and, in perfect Queen’s English, acquainted me with what the Nyumbani Project was all about.

Speaking with passion, he began by outlining the devastation wrought by AIDS in Kenya and throughout Africa. There was (at that time) something like twelve million children orphaned by the pandemic across the Continent. In some Nairobi slums, the infection rate was close to 40 per cent. Kenya was facing an appalling crisis.

‘Nyumbani Village is our response to the pandemic’ he explained. ‘We want to establish a model settlement for HIV-AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. If we succeed, others can go down the same road. When we are up and running, we plan to house and nurture 1,000 orphans as well as their elderly guardians—in most cases their destitute grandparents. You see, Brendan, the middle generation of parents has died from AIDS; we refer to them as “the lost generation.”’

He became very animated when he got down to the details of the scheme.

‘The Village will include about 150 homesteads, a health clinic, a nursery, a primary school, industrial production and training centres, a multi-purpose community hall, a worship centre, a police post, and a guesthouse.’

I could tell that the man was a visionary. As well as the administrative centre and the necessary infrastructure, he was already looking ahead to providing an ecological management centre and recreational spaces. Glancing out the window at the primitive building site, I could not help but feel that Kiragu was a bit of a dreamer, maybe; but this proud Kikuyu was also one of the most thoroughly inspiring people I met in Africa.