Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 17

9 February 2006 7:44pm

I heard a knock at the door and asked whoever it was to come in. The door swang slowly and there in the frame was a small kid. Now, it was already eight pm, which means it was really really dark. Quite surreal, this whole thing started. I said something like, "uh hey. who are you?" The small Kenyan boy just looked at me. I asked him his name and he didn't respond. I asked again but in swahili, "Umesema kiswahili? Unaitwa nani?" He said something almost inaudible. I just stared some more at him, wondering why he knocked on my door. "uhhh. wapi mama?" I asked. Again, nothing. "Tukuja mama," I said, telling him we should go to his mother. He had me follow him out the door and down the road. We turned down a path I hadn't seen or taken before and he kept leading the way. Somewhat distanced from the campus, the only thing that kept me from turning back was the fact that we hadn't left the compound. He led me down a slim trail to a group of houses. Here was a woman working outside a house in the pitch black. She called to him and he came to her. I only saw her because of the distant flood light. The house she was in had bare dirt floors and definetly no electricity. She laughed and thanked me for bringing her kid to her, though I imagine the gratitude was was more of a formality. I walked back home. Wierd little kid showing up at my door in the dark, leading me to his house. It was all sort of strange.

7 February 2006 7:55pm

This is my laptop.

Behold: The colossal Toshiba 100CS (yes you may tremble). I bought it from a tsunami aid fundraiser. The guy thought it was broken, so he sold it to me for 5 bucks. It simply needed to be reformatted, although this was harder than expected. It took about 2 months to find a ten year old parallel-port external CDROM on eBay, aquire equally old drivers, and get Win98/Word2000 installed. It's blazing fast (non-mmx) Pentium1 processor clocks in at a liquifying 73mhz. It was made in April 1996, and at the time of sale had a price tag of two thousand dollars. I was thirteen.

I call it 'The Econoline', because my father drove this ancient brown econoline for my whole youth, and it got so old he filled its rusted openings with spacer foam and welded doors shut. The spedometer just waved at you, and the floors had holes I dropped coins through. The Michigan winter made things interesting. I have a lovable memory of my dad driving to work one winter morning with his head out the window because of the van's slow heater. But it worked. A to B, right? Keyboard to printer, right?

This is my brown van.

6 February 2006 9:05pm

Walking down the main road, surrounded by the uber-green thick waxy plants, I glanced up and could not remember a sky being bluer. Just then I saw a big blue bird high up in a eucalyptus tree. About a foot long. Remarkable, of course, all the blue at that moment. The big blue sky and the big blue bird. Then it exploded in red. Real red. The ross turaco had taken flight, and its unfolded wings unleashed a violent storm of color. Color that stampeded the absolute limits of what is visual, almost making a sound. I imagine a thunderclap would have hit me less. And I jogged to find out what it was, this blue bird with the red takeoff.

4 February 2006 9:50am

A morning prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that

I may not so much seek

To be consoled, as to console;

Not so much to be understood as to understand;

Not so much to be loved as to love:

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in forgiving, that we are forgiven;

It is in dying, that we awaken to eternal life.

~ St. Francis of Assisi (1180-1226 AD)

2 February 2006 8:49pm

There is a story in the Old Testament where God is supposed to appear on a mountain, and so a great fire appears, but God is not in the fire. Then a roaring wind comes, but God isn't in the wind either. Then comes the silence, and here is where God shows himself. There is a silence that has been found here, and it has become one of the precious reasons why this has shown itself to be a perfect place to study the Creator. I haven't been in a car in a week, and there is almost no traffic on campus. I haven't seen a TV in longer. And without these things, there is a tremendous opening of silence. It is a silence so thick and tight you think its going to tear.

Soccer this evening was pretty good. I'm not quick, and my legs are somewhat uh spacey, resulting in a continuous stream of that checkered ball between my ankles. And soccer (futbol) was loud. Mostly Swahili is spoken, and the drum of the feet on the dusty ground adds to the quick unintelligible words to make a flow of noise. But, it was a good noise. There was no advertising for Serta, no blaring club beats, no roar of combustion, and no chatter of a printer. It was good natural noise, like the noise we players were made to hear. The sun dropped, and it was over, and I was more refreshed than all day. I have not played soccer in years.

Is it a health that has been found? I think so. I find a health in hearing a higher volume of noise that originates closer to the it's Creator. And I find health in this tranquility that is prodding me to more life than before, because in the silence is God. It is a silence so thick and tight you thick its going to tear.

1 February 2006 7:35pm

I may or may not have developed a mild chemical addiction to Ethiopian curry. I often find myself thinking about it for no reason.