Kenya

I couldn’t sleep.  This was unusual given the long day I’d had but my head was buzzing.  I had never felt so strange.  

I had signed up to go on a 7 week summer mission to Uganda to administer  much needed immunizations to the many new orphans that were a result of Idi Amin’s reign of terror.  Our trip had to be changed to Kenya at the last minute because of new dangers to foreigners there, so tonight I found myself in the nicest building in Tharaka, Kenya, a remote outpost where most folks still lived in stick huts.  I was sleeping or rather lying awake, in a cinder block house with no electricity, no plumbing and no glass in the windows.  Our mission group was split into two groups.  The adult leaders had taken half of the group to work in a hospital in a completely different part of Kenya.  The fifteen folks in my group had gotten on a colorful bus headed for Tharaka.  Our student leader who had grown up in Kenya and spoke Swahili was bringing a van and would meet us there.  That’s how this day began.

Most of our group were from Westmont college, an elite, expensive liberal arts college in Montecito, California.  Montecito boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation at the time.  My fellow compadres and I were children of government leaders or wealthy businessmen. Westmont had stiff entrance requirements so we were collectively smarter than the average bear.  Among us were many team captains, valedictorians and my personal crowning glory, prom queens. This was the early eighties, the height of the preppy years, so many of us had leather top sider shoes (for Sunday afternoon sailing), pastel izod shirts and perfectly feathered blond hair.  These facts combined with our average age being just over twenty made us the most beautiful, rich, competent, arrogant, know it alls on the planet.  The next 24 hours would seriously challenge my good opinion of myself.

The bus to Tharaka had to have been one of the most alien places I had ever been.  The tinny music coming from the bus radio was completely unfamiliar to me, the chickens in the overhead compartments, breast feeding toddlers, bright clothes, smell of body odor combined with smoke and constant stares reminded me I was not in Kansas anymore.  Food venders would climb aboard at every stop and shout at us to buy their strange wares. I had no idea what the fried triangles were or what they contained or how much they cost.  I was still so unfamiliar with the money that I didn’t know if they were fifty cents or ten dollars.  They smelled good but I was determined not to eat or drink anything at all on this full day trip because of the whole bathroom situation.  I had seen women pee in the street in Nairobi and some of the other girls and I had peed in a drain we found when we could not find a toilet anywhere, not something I wanted to repeat.  At least I was traveling light, I was hauling a full sized suitcase, a sleeping bag appropriate for Everest, a cot to keep bugs and snakes at bay and a baritone ukulele. The uke seemed like a good idea in the states.  I was wearing a baby pink skirt and white peasant blouse perfect for singing ‘do re me’ on my ukulele with adoring children surrounding me but surprisingly impractical for an 8 hour dusty, sweaty bus ride.  After a very long day of not understanding what people were saying to us or about us we arrived at the bus stop with the handpainted wooden sign that read THARAKA.  We all conferred and agreed that this was, in fact, the stop we were to get out at. We piled out with all of our stuff and the bus driver laughed as he closed the door and drove away leaving us in a cloud of red African dust.  The initial relief of being off the bus was soon replaced with the niggling doubt that this was maybe the wrong stop.  There were no buildings, no people, nothing.  Just a scraggly tree that offered minimal shade from the searing, equatorial sun.  This was before cell phones so if our Swahili speaking companion did not find us, we would be lost forever.  I don’t remember much talk as we waited for the others to arrive.  We sat on our hard, samsonite suitcases in silence unwilling to voice what we were all thinking. No cars passed.  I was so thirsty but more than that I was wondering if I would ever see a toilet again.  Then the blue van could be seen cresting the hill on its way to pick us up. I remember the surprised look on Peter’s face when he pulled up.  We must have greeted him as if we had been shipwrecked for weeks.  We were so happy and relieved to see him.  

We drove to the cinder block house where we would spend the next 7 weeks.  The villagers had brought a live goat to prepare a feast for our arrival.  We were to build a church building for our fellow believers in this desolate, desert village.  When they saw us, the local children began to throw rocks at us and yell in fear because they had never seen white people and thought we were ghosts. The folks from Tharaka spoke english so we could explain that we were in fact not ghosts.  Everyone wondered if we had been in a severe fire because their black skin turns white when it is burned.  After assuring them we were just fine they still looked skeptical.  Why did we cover our feet with shoes and socks? Was something wrong with our feet?  Did they bleed easily?  Why did we all have such baby skin on the bottoms of our feet?  Could we even walk without shoes?  Again we had to assure them that we were not deformed.  They asked us to help dress out the goat they had just slaughtered and were again surprised at our ineptitude at this fundamental skill.  Did we not have goats of our own?  What did we eat? This was harder to explain.  I eased away from the goat butchering and tried to help out with the outside cook fires the women were making. They shook their heads at our feeble attempts.  We used way too much wood and made generally lame fires.  I saw in their eyes that now we were not only deformed but slightly retarded.  Their small children had more practical skills than we did.  When the boiled goat was done I was feeling a little sick.  It could have been the 8 hour bus ride, dehydration, or my physical reaction to the gutted goat hanging from the tree in the yard.  I put some rice on my plate and gently refused the meat.  Now they thought I was either sickly or unappreciative, retarded and deformed. This was not at all how I imagined this would go.  We sat around the fire and the villagers sang like only Africans can sing.  They sang loud, joyous and effortlessly. It was spectacular. They asked us to sing and we squeaked out some lame noises we used to think was music.  All I wanted to do was lay on top of my minus ten completely incorrect sleeping bag and hide from the so very correct judgement of these folks I had come to help.  My skills of knowing how to dress, knowing how to do my hair, and knowing the difference between and salad fork and a dinner fork now seemed, for the first time in my life. like the most ridiculous skill set in the world.  To them I was ugly, useless and stupid and what was keeping me up was that they were right!