literary agent

I heard from my prospective agent yesterday. He said he was sorry for taking so long to read Birmingham; he assured me that he will do so and "soon." This encouraged me considerably.

Miscellaneous Happenings

Blog 1/28/09

So many interesting events and conversations occur each day it’s hard to keep up. Here’s a small sampling:

** Michael’s brother Marx came over on Monday night, accompanied by his wife Grace, just back from New York where she works for the UN on women’s rights. Grace has been there for four years, separated from Marx and their son Jimmy. Right now she has a two-month leave and is hoping to find a job in Nairobi.

Marx is Michael’s older brother and as such the man in charge of negotiations for the upcoming wedding. We have seen him quite a few times as lengthy meetings discuss plans. Marx named himself while in high school, becoming a fervent communist who would pour over Mao’s Little Red Book. He did his medical training in Britain and became considerably less radical. Like so many of us, he relates to those years humorously. He is a wonderful, friendly conversationalist.

Over dinner (which we always eat late at the Okonjis, often close to ten o’clock) the whole family carried on an uproarious debate over wife beating, with Michael posing as the African traditionalist who claims that traditional women actually appreciate being disciplined by their husbands. Grace, for her part, is no radical but of course she was scandalized by Michael’s opinions. Others chimed in. There was a lot of laughter.

** Tomorrow (Thursday) Popie and Risper will be out all day doing wedding preparations. High on the list is a visit to a tailor who will create a fabulous dress for Popie to wear. Next Saturday is the day for formal negotiations. Since this is a cross-cultural marriage, a Luo marrying a Kamba, there are some unknown factors involved. But certainly there will be a sizeable party, with somewhere between 50 and 100 people present.

**Wachira has gotten very excited by a book I brought him, a history of the British fight against Mau Mau that strongly indicts the British. He has been interested in this subject for a long time, and the historical account helped him put together some of the facts from his own family history. He and I have set out to interview some of the few surviving Christians from that time who were caught in the middle—persecuted by Mau Mau because they would not take a blood oath, persecuted by the British because they were not perceived as ultimately loyal to the government. I’m not entirely clear why Wachira wants me along for these interviews. I think it’s because he appreciates talking out the shape of the book with another writer. It’s fun for me.

**Yesterday over dinner and afterwards we got the full story of what was going on when Michael visited us in Santa Rosa many years ago—a drama that we had no idea of at the time. To explain takes some explaining.

Michael is one of eight brothers. During the time of the Mau Mau emergency Michael’s father, a young teenager, got trained as a lab tech. He worked in Nairobi where he met Dick Wijers, a Dutch doctor who was an expert in malaria, and who spent most of his adult life in Kenya. Dick never married, he was an extremely austere man who lived for his work, but he became attached to Michael’s father. Every Christmas he visited the family in Kisumu, and there he took a liking to Michael. He told Michael’s father that he had too many boys; why didn’t he give one of them to him? So when Michael was quite small he was “adopted” by Dick. Dick paid for his school fees, and Michael lived with Dick for long stretches of time. In fact, when Michael married Risper she moved in to Dick’s apartment. (We met all three of them at about that time, because they lived upstairs from our friends Dean and Wendy Hirsch.)

Dick was a man of vehement opinions. Among them was the belief that America was a bad place. So several years later, when Michael conceived of a plan to study for his MS in electrical engineering in America, Dick was completely opposed to it. Michael went ahead anyway, asserting the Dick had promised to pay for his tuition for further education, and it was none of his business where he chose to get it. The plan was put into operation. Michael got accepted to Howard University in Washington, D.C. Risper, a secretary for the Foreign Affairs Ministry, arranged to be transferred to the Washington embassy. Michael went to Washington on schedule, but Risper’s transfer got gummed up in office politics, so Michael spent the first semester alone. Risper was pregnant with their third child; the transfer got delayed even more; and Dick blew up. He wrote Michael a severe letter telling him to come home, and enclosing a plane ticket. He sent some friends to Michael, who underlined the message that he had to obey Dick’s demands. That is when Michael bought a Greyhound ticket across America to come and see us. He arrived in Santa Rosa and stayed I don’t know how long—a week or two, I think. We had no idea why he had come, apart from friendship, nor that he was completely broke, nor that he had no clear living situation to return to. But he told us last night that the visit was the only thing that enabled him to survive.

It was still several months before Risper and three kids arrived (along with a maid, who had never been anywhere before); things got much better. And Dick did pay for the schooling, and Michael was not spoiled by America.

Regular life

Wednesday will mark two weeks in Kenya for us. This past weekend we both began to feel as though we finally have our feet on the ground. Jet lag is over, we have mainly figured out how to navigate phones and SLOW internet, we can get from one place to another, and the nervousness and adrenaline that go with unfamiliar territory are mostly a thing of the past. Of course, last night we were both awake at 2 a.m., but that happens in California, too.

Popie has gotten off to a great start with her work. She can walk to Daystar University in 15 minutes when we are at the Okonjis, and there are lots of students eager to meet with her. This week she is doing a series of lunchtime talks on “relationships,” a subject of great interest among young people. She’s making appointments with students for informal counseling, and I expect the demands on her time will only grow as people figure out what an asset they have available. She brought materials to talk on familiar subjects such as “listening,” and it looks as though she’ll get plenty of opportunity to address small groups, without having the responsibilities of teaching a formal class where you have to grade papers.

My program is less defined. I’m making contacts for a couple of different articles, which will take considerable time later on. I’m also talking with Wachira about some publishing projects, and we are setting up meetings with various people. In the meantime, I have a chance to read and work on my novel Birmingham. Incidentally I still have no word from the agent I sent it to, and so this week I will send out some queries to see whether I can get some action going in other directions. Frustrating, but I have a lot of hope that when I finally get the right person to read the manuscript, matters will improve. It’s a lot like getting a company to look seriously at your resume when they are flooded with applicants.

Getting around

Nairobi is a big city—much bigger and traffic-plagued than when we left here 27 years ago. We walk quite a bit. This picture shows a not-untypical bit of the walk we take from the Okonjis’ house to Daystar through a middle class to upper-middle-class residential neighborhood. Notice there are a lot of people walking. These will vary from mothers in flowing African clothing, babies tied to their backs, to beautiful, fashionably dressed young women in spiked heels. Men go from ragged tee shirts to pinstripe suits. Everywhere in Nairobi, even in outlying areas with luxuriant gardens and small mansions, you will see this kind of foot traffic. There are no sidewalks, except in the downtown and other business areas, but there are always meandering dirt tracks worn by many feet.

Notice too several thorn trees in the photo, reaching pale green trunks into the sky for their sparse foliage to place a tabletop for the rays of the sun. In many parts of Nairobi we see beautiful trees and bushes, because everything grows and flowers abundantly. And there is always the sky, which at this time of year is a brilliant blue fleeced with white clouds.

We generally enjoy the walking, though dodging holes and cars calls for constant vigilance. Getting around by matatu is not quite so pleasant. Matatus are small buses or vans, often in a state of disrepair, that zoom around Nairobi on set routes. They are nearly always jammed full of people, and if you don’t like human touch they are not for you. However, they work, and there are plenty of people to ask where to get the matatu that goes to such and such a place. With patience and persistence and a sense of humor, transportation happens.

Many of our friends have cars. But traffic is so awful that we hate to ask them to take us places. They do anyway. We have some great friends.

The weekend

Friday night we took the Wachira family out to dinner at an excellent Lebanese restaurant. That was fun. Wachira is a very adventurous eater, but his family members were somewhat staggered by the profusion of dishes they could not identify. They were all good sports about it and we laughed and stuffed ourselves. Saturday Popie and I took a matatu from the Wachira’s house (in a very nice but remote neighborhood—here’s a photo of the house) to a grocery store where we bought ingredients for pizza. In our former days in Nairobi, groceries came from the open air market or from tiny, cramped stores, but now there are supermarkets where you can find almost anything we buy in the US. I went off with Wachira for an appointment I’d arranged, and the rest of the family (with Popie) set to work preparing a surprise 50th birthday for Wachira. Kenyans don’t usually celebrate birthdays, so this was a double surprise, and Wachira was genuinely astonished and pleased, I think. The pizza was reasonably successful, though I had trouble calibrating the oven. Some of the pizzas were scorched, others a trifle doughy.

Sunday morning we left the Wachiras’ home and took matatus to Nairobi Baptist Church, a church we knew in our former Kenyan life. It has grown into a megachurch. The service sprawled into two hours, the sermon looking at Exodus 4, the passage where Moses is attacked by God until his wife Zipporah takes up a knife and circumcises their son, thus turning God’s wrath away. This is very strange reading for us Americans, and we were reminded how interesting and illuminating it can be to read the Bible in Africa, where Israel’s customs are far from strange. The pastor rather easily interpreted the passage as an indictment by God of Moses’ failure to circumcise his son because he had married a wife from a non-circumcising group. Moses failed in family leadership in letting go of a Jewish imperative for his son; Zipporah’s angry response at having to “rescue” her husband by doing something repugnant to her becomes clear. The pastor went off into thoughts about family life, male leadership, female power, all reasonably grounded in a text that I doubt too many Americans would ever think to preach from.

We met the Okonjis at church (Nairobi Baptist is theirs) and went home to a very Luo meal of fish and ugali, joined by various family members. In the evening we watched a video of their son David’s graduation from medical school in Cardiff, Wales, an event that they take great joy and pride in.

Here are a few photos you might find interesting:

I mentioned in an earlier post the elaborate hairdos that women have adopted. They are created in places like this one, quite near the Wachiras’ home.

















This is an elementary school during recess. Notice the uniforms, the bare dirt playground, and the tin roofs.

We really miss our friends and family at home. Internet works but it is slow, so we don’t have as much email contact as we do usually. And of course, phone calls are pretty expensive. But we love hearing from people we love. News is greedily absorbed! (But files we have to download are not so great.)

Meet the Okonjis

We have moved over to stay with our friends Michael and Risper Okonji, so I thought I would introduce them to you. The Okonjis were our neighbors when we lived here 25 plus years ago, and we have seen them six or eight times in the years since. Their little townhouse is in Golf Course Estates, which sounds grand but isn’t. To an American eye it looks like slum housing. In reality this is a solidly middle class neighborhood, and behind each barricaded gate there is a well-kept household. We like Golf Course because it’s close to everything and unpretentious. Popie has just started doing a daily series of lunchtime talks on relationships for students at Daystar University, and she can walk there from here very easily.

Michael is an electrical engineer, and Risper is an administrator at ILRAD, which does agricultural research. (I don’t know what ILRAD stands for.) They are lovely, easygoing, terrifically hospitable people. They have four boys, all in their twenties, and as pleasant, polite and easy as you can imagine. Since there are no girls, and no maid (unusual in a middle class home), the boys do most of the cleaning and serving, and much of the cooking and washing and ironing. They do it well, with no complaining. A sort of Navy atmosphere, I guess. It has occurred to me that I ought to have sent my children here for an internship.

There are always young men at the Okonji home—I mean, young men besides the four boys. This is a male household where Risper stands alone. But this is about to change, as Dick Jan, the oldest boy, is about to marry. Jan is named after a Dutch doctor (now passed on) who spent his life here doing malaria research and became very attached to Michael’s father (who was his lab tech in Kisumu, on Lake Victoria) and then to Michael and family. The other boys are David, a doctor in UK, Tim (named after me), and Dean (named after our friend Dean Hirsch).

But I was saying. Jan has made plans to marry a delightful young woman who comes from a different community. She is Mkamba, the Okonjis are Luo. These are very culturally different. So there are some interesting negotiations going on, not only involving these ethnic differences, but also involving the different points of view of the generations. We are enjoying witnessing these discussions, and as a matter of fact we will be part of the negotiating team that goes to the young lady’s home on Feb 7 to agree on payment and finalize arrangements. As both families are Christian this should be a merely token agreement, but one never knows for sure. In the Luo community brides are bought with cattle, I am told, with no cash changing hands, but the Kamba do it differently. Stay tuned. The wedding is on March 14.

I don’t have a picture of the Okonjis but I’ll try to post one in the next few days.

Obama inauguration

We celebrated the inauguration quietly, but very happily, here in Nairobi. It took place at 8:00 p.m. local time, and truthfully people don't go out after dark much, so we were with our friends the Okonjis, good Luo people (from Obama's tribe) watching TV. Earlier in the afternoon we went looking for some celebrations pending at the Kenyatta Conference Center--it hadn't really become very lively yet--and attended a prayer service at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church. We thought it was great that somebody had organized and advertised a community prayer service--I wonder whether people did that at home?

Paul Gullixson of the Press Democrat had asked me to write some of my reflections, and they are posted online. Here's the link.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20090120/OPINION/901200243/1307?Title=MESSAGE_FROM_KENYA__Close_to_the_home_of_Obama_s_father

Church in Limuru

Yesterday we went to church at All Saints in Limuru, a small town outside Nairobi, in the beautiful tea country out toward the edge of the Rift Valley. Wachira was the guest preacher, a role he takes once a month. It was a glistening day, and after some hustling we arrived barely on time to a small stone chapel built by the British settlers who once lived there. The cemetery around the church is full of them—including the famous Louis Leakey—but now the church is full of Africans, with the exception of Popie, me, and a Korean couple who teach at the nearby St. Paul’s seminary. It was good to hear our friend preach—a thoughtful and practical meditation on the book of Ruth---and to participate in the solemn, joyful, hospitable life of an African church. It was a wonderful mix of traditional Anglican worship and informal African spontaneity, which can seem almost haphazard. There were actually two services, one in English—full to bursting, probably two thirds people under 30—and one in Kikuyu, not quite full. Between services we were invited into the vestry for tea and arrowroot. We greatly enjoyed people watching as well as worship. When we left Kenya in 1982, women almost never braided or straightened their hair; now they do amazingly elaborate things and hairdressers are making big money. The men do not seem to have upgraded.

Some of the music was familiar British hymns, sung in a distinctively Kenyan way, and on one number the choir sang, such polyphony occurred that Charles Ives would have been in ecstasy. When African choruses came along, the singing and dancing was a complete contrast—lively, energetic. And it was the same with the liturgy, which was more or less traditional but interjected with new elements, such as the pastor interrupting some singing to make us start over because we needed to up the tempo and sing with more life. This photo is of the choir singing outside the church as we exit—I think you get some sense of it.

Nobody who attended such a service could think for a minute that African Christians are merely imitating Europeans in their religion; they have taken on a lot of freight that came with the missionaries of an earlier era (and of today’s too, in the Pentecostal churches that are more typical in the cities) and used it to create something stamped with their own spirit. It’s hard to exactly convey this, combining friendliness and laughter and ceremonial gravity, but it is unmistakably its own thing.

The Wachira Family

We are staying with the Wachiras, some of our oldest and best friends, and I thought I would introduce them. Here they are: Wachira himself, his daughter Nyakio, a college student at Daystar University, and Margaret, Wachira’s wife. They have another daughter, Wanjeri, who recently married Bob. We have been friends with the Wachiras for 30 years, and I think we grow closer and more appreciative of them as the years go by.

Wachira himself is a businessman who does most of his work in IT, something he grew fascinated by in the early eighties when he found that nobody knew how to transfer his files from the Osborne computer to the Apple IIe. If you even know what both these are, you are either over fifty or a historian of technology. Wachira was not content to shrug his shoulders and accept that the transfer was impossible; he set out to figure out how to do it and in the process discovered the intricate and endless possibilities of computer programming. He took off from there, built a succession of businesses based on what he learned, and from there branched out into all kinds of opportunities. Wachira has his finger in a hundred projects in business, government, non-profit organizations, and churches. He comes and goes like a human hurricane. I know a bare handful of people who are so knowledgeable on so many diverse subjects. I can talk to him nonstop for days. If I tried to catch you up on all the subjects we have discussed since arriving three days ago, this would be a very long blog. In the course of the next few months I’ll try to bring you into a few of those ongoing conversations. (Many of them have been going on for twenty years; we pick up where we left off with new data.)

Did I mention that Wachira is a very good writer, who has published a novel and a book of short stories? We met in 1979, when I was trying to start Step Magazine and a young Kikuyu man, so countrified in speech he could not tell the difference between an R and an L, stood up in a writer’s workshop and read a story about the death of a wildebeest. It was so impossibly good and from such an apparently improbable source that I was stunned; I seriously thought it might have been an unrepeatable accident. Wachira ultimately joined the embryonic Step, learned how to type and edit, and eventually (like many writers) saw the potential in the first personal computers to make writing easier. Thus his interest in the Osborne.

We met Margaret years later, after we had left Kenya, on a return visit. She was very quiet then, and it took some time for us to get to know her. By now though we know her very well and we appreciate more and more who she is. As Popie told her last night, Wachira would be impossible without her. She is completely different from him—practical, solid, cautious, and very aware of her surroundings. Her care for people is deep and constant. You can’t help admiring the home she has made, the way she with Wachira have raised two beautiful and able daughters, and the hospitality she extends without a fuss. Honestly, there is a constant stream of friends and relatives in this house, and they all get fed and provided for as if the Wachiras had a very good staff of servants. Living in a Kenyan home, you have to learn to improvise, because you never know who will come or what emergency will arise. Add Wachira’s constant improvisations and you have a very interesting place! Margaret not only makes it possible, she makes it kind and lovely.

We feel very much cared for here, and that helps us cope with some of the inconveniences of Kenyan life. Getting from one place to another is probably the biggest: there is plenty of public transportation (small buses known as matatus) but it is very complicated to learn to use, and there are no guides or maps. Also the horrible traffic that has developed on Nairobi’s decrepit road system means that it can take hours to go ten miles. And generally speaking we don’t want to be out after dark, which comes promptly at 7:00 p.m. So we very much value the Wachiras who help us know how to navigate the system and help us get from one place to another by car whenever possible. For example, this afternoon we want to get to the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) where a weeklong writers workshop begins today. By matatu it would take somewhere between one and two hours, with several changes. And it is raining, which makes everything harder. Of course we will manage such things, but I can’t say I was saddened when Wachira told me this morning that they had arranged for his son-in-law Bob to take us there using the Wachira car. They are going (have left) for a nearby town where they are involved in negotiations for the marriage of one of Margaret’s brothers—twice widowed, and now marrying a never-married woman in her forties. There will be a complete representation of the older relatives from these two families to discuss the arrangements, including financial. I suppose forty people will be involved. Do you think American weddings are complex arrangements? Hah!

From Heathrow and on

Here are Silas and Popie in Cambridge.


Popie here wanting to reflect more on our time in England. We are in Heathrow terminal #3 at the moment, awaiting our Virgin Atlantic flight to NAIROBI— can’t believe it, can’t wait….

Here are some of the highlights:
We have managed our 3 large suitcases ,plus carry on bags, quite well on all the public transport we have taken.(something my beloved husband was very anxious about) Thankfully there are now baggage wheels (when we went to Kenya in the late 70’s there was no such thing, and we have vivid memories of wearily lugging almost 4 years of life from place to place.) Wheels on baggage is something we all take for granted these days….The London tube has ”lifts” so we were spared from a lot of extra lifting from platform to platform…Anyway, we have survived quite well, and my new knees are amazing—(except when I have to go through security and the alarm goes off, but I am used to that!) We have walked and walked and walked!


Seeing Silas was wonderful. He looks great and seems so adjusted to living in U.K.He certainly knows his way around Cambridge, and it was so delightful to walk for hours peeking into the gates of the various colleges, seeing the stunning green lawns which accented the grand architecture, and taking in the fact that our son has this incredible privilege to be there. He graciously allowed his parental unit to share floor space in his huge room, which from our vantage point, worked out great. We bought him a mattress, which he will be able to use with some of his upcoming spring guests. His rowing is going well and he seems to have secured his seat on the “blue” boat, as the stroke, but has been having a lot of back pain, which is troubling. He has a great physical therapist, but since this back thing keeps nagging, he will be seeing a specialist soon. Hopefully it will get figured out sooner than later..

We attended a campus Baptist church on Sunday with one of Si’s fellow rowers, and were able to see a Cambridge student get baptized (dunked) in the baptistery of the church—something I hadn’t seen since I was girl in my family’s First Baptist church of Tuscaloosa, Alabama days. The sermon was on the parable of the banquet in (Luke 14) and the service was very welcoming. It was good to be there.

The food in U.K. these days provides an incredible array of ethnic diversity. You can get just about everything, and I have read somewhere that curry in now the national food. Last night Silas took us to an Algerian restaurant which was outstanding. We did go to one pub which was traditional Br. Food.

Seeing and staying with our friend, Coreen, from our Stanford days of yesteryear was such a treat.. She is THE HEAD of the American School in London (approx 1300 plus students) so she is quite the big shot. She has a lovely home nearby which we stayed in the first night, and we plan to spend more time with her when we come for the boat race in late March. We also saw our friend, Chris, who founded an organization which focuses on human rights and business. We are so proud of these friends.

Cambridge apparently is the bicycle mecca of England. We saw a lot of oldtime looking bikes with baskets on the front, just like the one I ride to work! We only saw one person with a helmet, the whole time there, but police were nailing those who didn’t have lights on in the dark.…

CONSIDERABLY LATER, FROM TIM We are in Kenya, having a wonderful time with old friends, enjoying the marvelous skies and the warm, dry weather. We spent much of our first full day traveling around in matatus (small buses), getting telephones (without which one cannot survive in Kenya) and an internet connection (done through the cell phone networks) and immunizations and malaria meds. Getting reacquainted with Nairobi and gathering materials for survival, essentially. The traffic and the pollution are wearing, but it’s a great place and we do love our friends. More later.

Popie found these nestling sheepdogs in the train station at Cambridge absolutely fascinating, and insisted I share them with you.













Silas with his Dad, Tim the hobbit.

This is our welcome party at the Nairobi airport, 8:00 a.m. Note Wachira and his phone, always busy.

Silas with his Dad, Tim the hobbit.hhh

We are somebody

So, Silas's picture was featured in The Times today, with an article that mentioned his name. We are Somebody!  Here's the link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/more_sport/article5496852.ece

Tomorrow we train back to London, and then fly to  Nairobi. We've had a very good time with Silas.  We're excited about seeing Kenya.

Tales of Gandalf

So here we are in Cambridge with Silas, and it's freezing. Snowflakes fell. We strolled around the incredibly beautiful core of the university, walked the grounds of Kings College, and explored Caius, Silas's college. Quite a place. We are having a grand time. 

Made It to London

We made it to London without incident, and are staying the night with an old friend who is the head at the American School of London. Pretty nice. It's cold and clear. Tomorrow we head to Cambridge to see Silas. Very exciting to be on the way at last!

Getting ready!

We're in the middle of our last week in Santa Rosa, grinding away at our lists and piling up stuff that is supposed to fit in our suitcases. We needed an extra suitcase so I went to Walmart last night and got a deal, five for the price of one! If the news shows a photo of two American tourists face down in the London streets, exhausted from hauling luggage, that will be us.

It's started to hit us that we really are going, and we will miss so much our home, our friends, our family members.