The truth about Kisumu, uncut

This has been a bad year for the improbable, comforting illusions we hang onto. We had convinced ourselves that David Sedaris was a genius, capable of teasing the ridiculous out of the mundane events of true life; this year, we found out that he fabricated those events. We had convinced ourselves that NBA refs, while bad at their job, were at least doing their best to call a fair game; this year, we found out that at least one was fixing matches. So it was with trepidation that I went to Kisumu, the heart of Luoland. The Maasai find the Luo fascinating, and I’d heard some fantastic things about the Luo: that they all drive Hummers, that even the street children speak English amongst themselves, that they subsist exclusively on tilapia. They sort of sounded like American suburbanites, and I was afraid a trip to Kisumu would ruin the image in my mind of a little bit of Monmouth County along the shores of Lake Victoria. Indeed, just like David Sedaris and Tim Donaghy, the Luo let me down.

As it turned out, the Luo do fry themselves up a mean tilapia, but it’s hardly a staple (especially now that Lake Victoria is running out of fish) and they eat the same pilau, ugali, chapatti and goat stew that the rest of Kenya eats. The English skills of the Luo were similarly overstated. Most conversation is in Dholuo, a Nilotic language closely related to Nuer and Dinka. Certainly, though, you hear more English and less Swahili than you do in other cities in Kenya. The Luo think that this is because, as Nilots rather than Bantus, they find Swahili particularly difficult to learn, though this hasn’t stopped the Nilotic Maasai, Samburu and Kalenjin from picking up Swahili. Maybe a better explanation is the close historic and economic ties Luoland has to neighboring Uganda, where English predominates over Swahili. All the same, I had more difficulty communicating than I would have in, say, Keyport. Finally, I failed to see even a single Hummer during my time in Kisumu. The city does have, however, a lot of motorcycle rickshaws, bicycles with extra seats on the back for passengers, and at least one matatu with a checker-board ceiling, neon decals of hip-hop stars from the early part of this decade, and a DVD player and surround-sound system to play pirated rap videos.

There are two more distinguishing characteristics to the Luo, attributed to them by actual, published reports rather than drunk Maasai: that they are the only major tribe in Kenya not to circumcise their males, and that they are fanatically devoted to perennial presidential aspirant and bona fide Hummer driver Raila Odinga. Kisumu bucks the trend of Kenyan towns by relegating Jomo Kenyatta’s name to a secondary street and naming the main drag after Oginga Odinga, Raila’s daddy and a prominent Luo politician of days past. People love their Raila in Kisumu, and since the Luo are the second or third-largest ethnic group in Kenya, Raila rode this support to national prominence. It appears likely that Raila will win the nomination of the major opposition party to run against Kibaki in December, but few people think he’ll beat the president. It’s funny to note (just not to a Luo) that Barack Obama’s father came from a village near Kisumu, and it’s therefore likely that America will elect a Luo president before Kenya does. It’s not a perfectly fair comparison, however, because one of the main criticisms lobbed at Raila is that an uncircumcised man is unfit to govern the country, while I don’t believe that particular litmus test has been used in American politics yet, except perhaps by Lyndon Johnson.

All of that said, I really liked Kisumu. It has a relaxed feeling of slow, tropical decay, perhaps the consequence of its process of slow, tropical decay. Once a prosperous, bustling lake port, Kisumu has been decimated by three imports: sugar, water hyacinth, and HIV. The dumping of European sugar on the East African market has nearly killed off the Kenyan sugar industry, which was centered on the Luo villages surrounding Kisumu. Water hyacinth, a hydrophilic weed, was introduced a few decades into Lake Victoria, and spread rapidly to the point where it choked off ports and made shipping between Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda impossible. HIV arrived from across the lake in Uganda, and quickly found a home in polygamous and frequently promiscuous Luo society. Nyanza province, and its capital Kisumu, now have the highest infection rates in Kenya, nearly 30%. The only thing that belies this economic decay is the presence of a large and wealthy South Asian community, whose members live in large Mediterranean-style houses on the lakeshore south of the center and whip around town in silver Mercedes sedans. They do lend an exotic, Oriental feel to the city, with ornate mosques and temples dotting the city, and good Indian food on almost every menu in the city.

Also in Kisumu’s favor is its lack of tourists. Remote, far from the elephants and mountains of central Kenya, Kisumu is way off the tourist-circuit. You can tell by the quality of the nature guides. Guides tend to be very good in Kenya, frequently encyclopedic in their knowledge of plants and animals. Our guide at the Luo fishing village of Dunga, where we took a boat onto Lake Victoria to look at the big, goofy hippos, was a bit different. He quickly admitted that he didn’t have much experience with tourists, since few came to Dunga, but that would have quickly become evident anyway, as rather than provide us with information about the animals, he told us in great detail about his dreams of mating with hippos, and his lingering fears that he may be inadequate, anatomically speaking, for the task.

The next day we were in Kakamega, north of Kisumu, a land populated by the Luhya, proudly Bantu-speaking and circumcised. At the beautiful rainforest there, we were guided around and told the scientific names of all of the plants and trees, their life cycles, and how the bark of one could be used to treat malaria. The guide did not say a word about his bestial desires for the black-and-white colobus monkey. Ah, here we were. Safely back on the tourist trail.

A good day for the peanut vendor of Kericho

One of the values that Kenyans like to identify in themselves is resourcefulness. And so when a bus drove off the Kericho-Kisumu road, tilted on 2 wheels, and wedged itself at a 45 degree angle into the mud of a tea-field, someone sensed a business opportunity. He dashed from town with a tray of peanuts, which he sold for 30 shillings per bag to the jumpy bus passengers milling along the side of the road. It took two hours of digging, pushing, and pulling to get the bus back on the road, so the vendor was able to sell of his whole stock. Of course, there was nothing noteworthy about this event, bus crashes and hawking being two prominent beats in the rhythm of Kenyan life, and I wouldn't have mentioned it except that I was one of the passengers.

I really have no one to blame but myself. Sure, the driver was talking to his friend, eyes off the road, when we slowed down and drove down the ditch, but that's what Kenyan bus drivers do. No, I should have known better- the warning signs were all there. I had convinced Vivien that we should take the bus from Nakuru instead of the matatu on the grounds that the bus was safer. Of course, Kenya likes to confound reasonable thinking and logical planning. If you cut a vacation a day short to get to a meeting, you'll find the meeting has been postponed a day. If you walk a mile across town just to get a plate of your favorite pilau, you'll find that the restaurant has just run out. So of course, if you take a bus for safety reasons, it will crash. I should have known.

The second cause for concern was the pastor. He came on-board as the bus was filling up, and delivered a long sermon about the importance of prayer. Once, he told us, he had asked people on a similar bus to join him in a prayer of appreciation for God, and after being rudely turned down, the bus left Nakuru and was promptly hijacked. He asked us to bow our heads and join him. After the story we had heard, what choice did we have? The passengers all prayed, and afterward, the pastor left the bus telling us that because of our prayers, God would guarantee a safe and easy passage. As we stood, four hours later, looking at our listing bus sinking into the deep mud, someone mumbled "That pastor was really the devil in disguise." I don't know. I just think God doesn't appreciate having words put in His mouth by a two-bit bus station minister. I empathize with Him.

A new book about wizards

I've been told that the newest (and last?) Harry Potter book is coming out very soon, and I figured this was as good a time as any to take up the magic literary mantle. I mean, if J.K. Rowling makes millions and millions of dollars writing about fictional wizards and witches, I ought to be able to make even more writing about the very real ones that live near me.

Of course, when I write the book, maybe I'll leave out the story about the cursed family of Kimanjo. Too sad, especially for a teenage audience. Kimanjo is a wild sort of place, in the forests west of Dol Dol, with no school but lots of leopards and lions. One family there has had a run of bad fortune over the past year that, I'm told, cannot be explained by natural circumstances. The patriarch of the family died of AIDS, and upon finding this out, his wife killed herself. One of the children died in an automobile wreck shortly thereafter. Last week, the patriarch's first wife, quite drunk, tried to cross a swollen river and was swept away to her death. All that's left of the family is two children, and the hunt is on in Kimanjo for the witch who administered the curse.

I think the story of Jackiline is cheerier. She was once married to a man, my neighbor, and quickly had a child with him. They divorced and married others, and she tried unsuccessfully to have another child with her new husband. After a few years of trying, the husband divorced the wife, on the grounds of her infertility. She married a third man, and again tried to have a child- once again, the efforts were futile and her husband divorced her. Despondent, she went to her first husband and asked him what was wrong with her. The problem, he responded, was the magical power that the men of his family have. As far back as anyone can remember, there's been something special about the men of this family. Once one of them has slept with a woman, even once, she will be unable to conceive a child with another man. Pragmatist that she is, Jackiline arrived at a solution: one weekend when the man's wife was away, she seduced him. That was eight months ago. The delivery date for her new child is sometime next month.

Then, of course, there's the case of the Akamba. At some point a few weeks back, I realized that most of the women I've found particularly beautiful, charming or interesting here have come from one tribe, the Akamba. I thought this was a little weird, because the Akamba aren't a particularly large tribe, come from the other side of the country, and are thin on the ground in this region, but I chalked this up to a quirk of personal preference, the same way one might favor Italian women to Irish women, French to Finns, Thais to Taiwanese. After talking to my friends in Dol Dol, however, I have a much better explanation: witchcraft. The Akamba- and the Akamba alone- possess powerful love potions, which they give to anyone they fancy and want to bewitch. The potion can be slipped into a drink- sometimes Akamba witches seem a lot like American fratboys- or applied topically during a handshake. I haven't caught any of these women red handed, but you know, the circumstantial evidence adds up to a strong case.

There's more I can add to the book. There's the man in town who walks backwards past a certain house because he thinks the occupant is a witch, and there's the herbal potion I took which was supposed to make me immune from cold weather but really just made me break out in hives. When it comes to the supernatural, there's always more. So somebody find me a literary agent; I think the movie rights will be big.

Buy a goat, fight HIV/AIDS

After a long, dusty matatu ride from Dol Dol, I like to head to the Mt. Kenya Cyber to catch up with the world. Yesterday, when I logged on and surfed my way to the Drudge Report, I found a Financial Times article titled “UN warns it cannot afford to feed the world”, which described the World Food Program’s trouble in maintaining the amount of food it distributes. The growth of the Chinese and Indian consumer markets, as well as the world’s new interest in turning corn into electricity rather than tortillas, has meant the price of staple foods has skyrocketed in much of the world. When I got back from the internet café, I opened up the Daily Nation, which ran a large article on its third page titled “Maize farmers count blessings and cash.” It’s a good time to sell food, and a bad time to buy it. As if I needed to be told.

For all the thought I’d put into the AIDS training and mobilization, all the strategies we’d discussed for the daunting tasks of getting stubborn elders to use condoms, teaching illiterate women about antiretroviral drugs, and testing proud and promiscuous morani for HIV, most of my work revolved around the equally daunting task of feeding dozens of Maasai. In Mukogodo, you can come up with the perfect plan, the perfect project, but if you don’t provide the perfect meal, it will fail.

Such is the spirit of volunteerism here. Very, very few are the people who will do something for nothing, even if it’s for their own benefit. People attending workshops, trainings or anything like that usually expect cash payments. This is especially galling when the same people complaining yesterday about having nothing to do are asking to be paid today. The blame lies with the NGOs, including the one for which I work. They throw money around to boost the attendance and thus impress donors, and now everyone has come to see the NGOs as cash cows. It’s gotten so ridiculous that people demanded payment before they’d watch a play about HIV or be tested. Crazy. If you’re in Mukogodo, work for an NGO and see someone on fire, be prepared to pay him an “allowance” before you tell him to stop, drop and roll, or else he won’t budge.

Of course, because of our principles (by which I mean our meager budget) we did not make any cash payments. I know for a fact that we lost attendees and mobilizers because of this decision. In order to keep the rest, we had to at least feed them. And the Maasai like to eat. I’ve seen four of them eat their way through a full-sized goat in half an hour- and I mean all the way through, including the organs, the blood and the bone marrow. One of my friends explained the speed with which the Maasai eat by saying, “We used to have to compete with the hyenas.” Trying to satisfy these appetites is not the sort of thing I wanted to get caught up in, but as many, many people here told me, “No eating, no meeting”. So we bought seven goats, a huge sack of rice, 10 kilos of sugar, the state of Idaho’s quarterly potato yield, enough cooking fat to supply a La Belle Province franchise for a month and an amount of flour suitable for covering the surface of Lake Huron in chapatti. We spent lavishly, because I was told that if we fed the people “cheap rice”, they’d all quit. Even still, it wasn’t enough. Part of the problem was that someone took a fair portion of the food, especially the cookies, out of the locked office where we kept it. The bigger problem was that random people turned up to eat with trainees and mobilizers, so instead of the forty people we budgeted for, we were feeding sixty. In this anti-Hanukah, the food was designed to last eight days but only lasted five. Worst of all, we had to sell two of the goats.

This is not to suggest that the problems were only culinary in nature. The medical officers, who spoke at the training, wanted to be paid for their work, even though they were already getting a government wage to promote the health of the community. The teacher who holds the keys for the community library hall where we were to have the training refused to hand them over unless we paid her a bribe. We found an alternate venue at one of the churches, but the pastor, who was one of the trainees, refused to let us use it unless we paid 500 shillings. The problem was resolved only when we got one of the town’s Big Men to threaten the teacher into giving us the keys. I don’t think we had to pay him a bribe.

Despite all that, the project has been judged a success. The VCT counselors are seeing a lot of clients, the community is buzzing with talk of HIV, and a few leaders have emerged to plan a sustained community HIV program. I just want to be far, far away from the kitchen when that program is launched.

Celebrating Some Uhuru in Nakuru

Exactly 231 years after John Hancock and company signed their John Hancocks and company, I made my own declaration of independence- "Uhuru in Nakuru!". Uhuru, in addition to being the very, very cool name of Jomo Kenyatta's son, is Swahili for "freedom", and freedom is exactly what Vivien and I needed. As much as I like Nanyuki and Dol Dol, they're the smallest, most stifling places I've ever been. We set foot in Dol Dol, and we're mobbed by our Dol Dol friends, as well as the Dol Dol drunks and the Dol Dol beggars. As soon as we get back to Nanyuki, our cell phones start ringing: someone's spotted us getting off the matatu, word has spread, and everyone we know in town is calling us. Even strangers track our movements: when I talk to someone in Nanyuki for the first time, he or she can rattle off eight or nine places I've been and what I was doing at each one. Apparently, there's no anonymity for the token white people in a small Kenyan town.

So we went someplace bigger. After seven weeks in Dol Dol and Nanyuki, Nakuru felt huge. When I walked into one of the big, modern supermarkets, my jaw actually dropped (so I guess my reintegration into North American society may be rougher than I predicted). It was nice to be someplace bustling, however, and to be in streets filled with all kinds of people: Kikuyus and Maasai, yes, but also Luhyas, Luos, Kalenjins, Somalis, South Asians and wazungu. More than that, it was nice that all of these people brought their cuisines with them to Nakuru. After seven weeks of variations on corn, beans and goat, I can't describe the pleasure with which I consumed Chinese food, real Indian food (my God, cooked in a tandoor!) and a tall, frosty milkshake.

Of course, Nakuru's fame doesn't come from its supermarkets or its cuisine. It owes its fame to the national park, Lake Nakuru, in the outskirts of town. At 15 square km, Lake Nakuru is usually home to several million flamingos. Seen from up on the Baboon Cliffs, it looks like there's a pink band running around the whole circumference of the lake, with several other agglomerations of pink in the middle marking the sites of highest crustacean density. The mud flats around the lake play host to lions, leopards, warthogs, rhinos, giraffes, gazelles, kudu, and so many zebras and buffaloes that after a few hours you wish they'd go away so you could get a better view of the other animals. Or at least I did- I have several pictures where zebras jumped in front of whatever I was trying to photograph. It was a good time despite the zebras, however. We went around with two Nakuruites who couldn't tell the difference between a buffalo and a rhino, but they made up for their lack of animal knowledge with a willingness to take their old Toyota Celica everywhere the safari Land Rovers were going: on mud tracks, across rivers, over the grass. Their ignorance of wildlife was only really a problem when Wes decided to throw banana peels at the baboons and we found ourselves surrounded by two dozen very hungry monkeys.

Nakuru also has a bit of infamy attached to it, at least by the Maasai, because of Menengai Crater. The crater, towering 1500 feet above town, is supposedly the site of a nineteenth century battle that the Laikipiak Maasai lost to another Maasai band, with hundreds of the losers tossed over the rim to the smoky bottom. The Maasai identify it as a site of evil and refuse to get near the rim. They're really missing out. The view is amazing. There's an almost sheer drop to the bottom, 1000 feet below, and as you look across the crater, 15 kilometers wide, you can see the path the lava took, the ripples it left on the crater floor. Just like the Gilani supermarket, it was a breathtaking thing to see.

Well, now I'm back in Nanyuki, and in a few hours we're off to Dol Dol. The HIV workshop starts tomorrow, and we still need to iron out the logistics. The biggest issue is that we bought seven goats for the lunches, and now we have to find someone to slaughter and butcher them. That's what it comes down when you run a workshop in Laikipia- finding someone to kill a goat. Ah, it's good to be home.

Chariots on Fire

I think to date I've only tangentially mentioned matatus, which is a serious oversight on my part considering the large share of my time given over to waiting for them, riding them and recovering from riding them. Swahili, I think, for "death by suffocation", matatus for the backbone of Kenyan public transport. The vast majority are white Nissan vans with 14 seats packed together very, very tightly. They sit at a town's matatu stage waiting to fill up with 17 or 18 people, then race off. Matatus also serve as the main mode of local shipping, and because most goods sold in Dol Dol have to be brought in from Nanyuki, I usually find myself crammed among Maasai warriors, bundles of qat, vats of cooking oil and tanks of paraffin. Because the vans are in a bad condition, the roads in a worse one, and the drivers in a worse one still, matatus have a horrendous safety record. In fact, if you ranked all the means of transport on their mortality rates, matatu travel would fall right between hydrogen-filled zeppelin and riding on the back of a hungry tiger.

A few years ago, the government actually tried to reform the matatu sector. It introduced laws requiring that every passenger have his or her own seat and seatbelt, enforceable at the police checkpoints along each road, and mandated the installation of speed governors in the matatus to cap their speed at 80 km/hour. Very quickly, however, the matatu drivers discovered that the practiced use of a cigarette lighter could disable the speed governors and the practiced use of a bribe could disable the police. And so the madness continues. This weekend, I had my worst matatu experiences, which is saying something because the best you hope for when you board a matatu is that you'll survive and that you'll regain feeling in your legs within 72 hours.

Even without the speed governors, most drivers on the Dol Dol-Nanyuki route are kept under 80 km/hour by the road conditions. Because blown tires come out of the dirvers' pay (and even at low speeds, a tire punctures a quarter of the time), drivers fight their qat-addled inclination and go slow out of self-interest. Not so our driver on Friday. The brother of the MP and local a Big Man, he not only has a spare tire, he has a whole spare matatu. So, throwing caution into the wind and rain that enveloped us, he whipped the matatu around the rutted and muddy roads of Laikipia, ignoring the chorus of "Pole pole! ("Slow down!") and snapping vertebrae. The Somali woman in front of me got sick and vomited. The two people sharing my seat kept themselves busy: the momentarily pious Vivien crossed herself and mumbled Our Fathers while Joseph read aloud the Ken Saro-Wiwa story "Africa Kills Her Sun", which I thoughtfully suggested be retitled "Africa Kills Her Public Transport Passengers."

As it turned out, we did not crash and die. This was a mixed blessing, because while I cherish my time on this earth, it meant I had to take the matatu home to Dol Dol on Sunday. I was one of the 25 passengers on the 14-seater van, with a 5 year old boy and and 50 year old man sharing my lap, but even this overloaded matatu did not meet demand. When we stopped to let someone off at Jua Kali, there was a rush of prospective passengers, and the conductor had to kick and punch people to keep them off the van. At the next stop, a full-fledged melee broke out. On one side, a group of drunks attacked the driver, and someone swung a rungu, the traditional Maasai club, at his head. Just as the driver safely shut the door, another groups of drunks attacked the conductor. They tried to slam the sliding door on his face- luckily, the door on this matatu did not close, and we sped off before anyone was lynched. People have told me that the end of the month, when everyone gets paid and (consequently) very drunk, is the worst time for matatu travel, and I think there's some truth to that.

Anyway, I'm off to Nakuru for a few days. It's a big town in the middle of the Rift Valley, and part of my plan to see Kenya's four largest cities (watch out Kisumu, you're up next). It has a lot of things Nanyuki doesn't, like flamingos, movie theaters and Indian restaurants, so I'm pretty excited. And how, you ask, am I getting there? By matatu, of course.

Here's wishing you all a happy 4th of July, and a grudging happy (belated) Canada Day.

Flashing a Gender and Other Adventures in the English Language

Gentlemen, let's say you're at the Agricultural Society of Kenya show, dancing in an overcrowded mess-hall built for the British airforce, the DJ interrupting every song 3 times to yell "Mo' fiyah!", and the girl you've been dancing with bats her eyelashes and asks you to flash her. What do you do?

The correct answer is that you take your cell phone out, call her number and quickly hang-up before she answers so that she gets your phone number without you getting charged. That's all she was asking you to do. This, after all, is Kenyan English, where the double entendre has yet to be discovered. The motto, repeated at every commercial break, for the leading TV station is "Turning on Kenya". I guess it's possible that re-runs of late 90's American sitcoms elicit a different response here than they do back home, but more likely, the executives at NTV have no idea what they're saying.

The evolution of words, and word use here, would delight a linguist. English is usually introduced by the church, the school, the office, or more recently, the NGO. Once the words are set free among the population, though, there's really no predicting how they'll be used.

Take the evolution of the word "gender". At some point, the youths in Dol Dol must have been educated on gender equality. This came to be abbreviated as "gender", as in "Make sure there's gender at the HIV training." However, because in this relatively misogynistic society gender equality really means inviting more women than you otherwise would, the word "gender" has come to mean "women", so "Make sure there's gender at the HIV training" can be read as "Make sure there's women at the HIV training." When Mwenda and Joseph go cruising for ladies, they say that they're "Off to find gender", and when they think they've found someone for me, they say that they want to introduce me to "a gender named Ruth".

Similarly, "mobilize" must have been introduced by NGOs, but now it's bled into everyday English. If you want to go out at night, you mobilize your friends. If you want to organize a party, you mobilize your resources. The nadir for this came when girls "mobilized" themselves to go to the bathroom together.

Other linguistic quirks come from the fact that English is the last language people learn. Because Kenyans are taught in school that the only greeting in English is "How are you?" (which follows the pattern of Swahili, Maa, and a lot of other tribal languages), if you say "Hello", you'll usually get "Fine, fine" as a response. The limited vocabulary probably accounts for the constant use of the phrase "So many" in response to quantitative questions, even ones that really require a specific numerical answer. How many times have you visited Dol Dol? So many. How many banks are there in Nanyuki? So many. How many fingers are there on your hand? So many. How many ways can a Kenyan answer such a question? Just one.