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.