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!