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.)