Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 39

27 June 2007 12:47pm

The term began how it ended, with a celebration. The students gathered again in a rowdy group and another goat was roasted and more music pumped through the speakers. Its quite a thing to behold, and I'm learning my student status at this school extends beyond the classroom, because I am learning how to party.

The beginning of the term has a different one than the end. The nyama choma (roasted goat) is a necessity, and its outside around a bonfire. Of course the power failed, so car batteries were huffed all the way from the parking lot and used to power the stereo, because the show must go on. People bring their own plates, and we all get greasy fingered from the ugali, nyama choma, chicken, and sekuma wiki. Nobody is using silverware, and kids run around the chairs that people brought from their homes holding hunks of goat and bottles of blackcurrant Fanta soda. The music beats till late.

But the party on Saturday was truly something grand, because this time it was in the chapel. The nyama choma was handed with beans, carrots, and chapati. Families sat around tables and the student leaders gave out awards for people who were the most helpful all year. We reminisced about when George died, and the president of the school washed the feet of two students to plead us to serve the world's brokenness. And after the plates were cleared, tinny music came over the speakers and the whole chapel became filled with dancing students, celebrating their graduation by grooving to African beated worship songs. It was rowdy, rambunctious, joyful, and I could not help looking at the jiving thirty represented countries as one of the most holy sights I've ever seen.

27 June 2007 11:59am

My Greek exam is tomorrow, so I'm trying to cram today. I returned with my friend Nathan from distributing goats, blankets, maize, and feed to some very poor villagers in a slum called Kipsongo near Kitale in West Kenya. It was a successful and life-altering experience. Nathan and I sat in a circle with the elders and by the end of our talk it was almost friendship. At one point an elder said, "This has never happened in the history of our village." The village itself grouped and also sat circled with us and they described how much they appreciate sitting with us foreigners. They felt so respected, and this made me feel so good. And the youth wanted a meeting with us, and they discussed the riot last time, how they felt excluded from all that was going on.

As Nathan and I sat afterwards, I asked him what shocked him the most about their destitute condition, and he said that he had seen poor folks in videos his whole life and there was not so much shock as actualization, but one thing did blow him back. He saw the rain pouring on the village when we were there, and the plastic garbage huts became swamped, the dirt turned to mud, and everybody slid around. He said it was hard to believe that none of the villagers have refuge from dirt, that there exists no clean sphere in their whole lives, since even inside the houses the mud was treacle like.

I brought back a stool that married men sit on, just basically a wooden seat with a thick five-inch post to the ground. I realized that stooping on this seat gives them freedom from the mud, and I guess this is what we dispersed: freedom. The goats and sheep are freedom through having an income from selling the babies and the milk and the wool, the blankets freed 60 old people from freezing in the July/Aug/Sept winter months, the food freed from hunger, the 3 houses freed from the elements.

With this all was the purchase of a casket, that an elderly woman (who we were going to purchase medicine for) died just before we got there and they were going to bury her in a rolled mat, and instead they were able to buy a cheap eucalyptus casket and her husband was freed from shame.

22 June 2007 9:06pm

I was walking down a two track when I encountered, for the first time, the phenomenon which is siafu. Safari ants. The video can be found here (right click save-as). Basically it was a stream of ants unlike anything I had ever seen, but thats not true completely. I had seen the siafu before: on the discovery channel. I remember the discovery channel special as I bent down to look at the swath the insects were cutting through the forest.

The smaller ants were streaming like liquid, barrelling down a path in the forest, across the two track I was on. Larger ants with huge biting heads stood (like a military guard) flanking the rush of the workers. They bent their heads slightly towards the flowing swarm and stood and stood at ready for the whole time I stooped to watch.

I remembered on Discovery that they were blind, so I tested it out. Over the millions of rushing ants and attentive soldier ants I waved my hand, but nothing provoked a reaction. I also remembered the Discovery channel dude blowing on them, saying that the ants communicate by pheramones, and the his breath on the television created a stir. So I puffed a breath of warm air onto the flow where my hand had just been, and they exploded in such a maddening frothing frenzy that I instinctively took a step back.

I don't want to know what would have happened if I hadn't been looking down when I was walking down the road.

19 June 2007 3:36pm

At some point, life grinds to a halt. I think its often when God looks at what we've made of ourselves and decides we need a unoptional vacation. Well, as soon as Daylan and Steve and all those good folks took off I got really sick. Really sick, with a cold. I was bed ridden for about five days, only getting up for dinner and a shower if the solar heater had been built enough. Its strange that these sicknesses often come in points of transition, when I've been building and building for a point to come and it passes (like friends taking off) and I'm so hazed that I can't begin to focus on school. So I get sick in these times, and my chemistry and soul take a breather and I am stuck surely to asking for healing from the God who maintains the condition of the universe.

Pseudaphedrine and ibuprofin and 25 gallons of water later, I've had an exodus back to above 90% capacity, and I raise my lids to see a bit of the academic hole I've dug into, and this is with exams coming in two weeks. So, I made a list above (hit refresh if it doesn't pop up) of what needs to happen before I can happily board the plane on July 8. I believe it was through being bedridden that I am so full of promise right now, that I have the fortitude not the bored-itude. And now: let the accomplishments begin.

6 June 2007 7:10pm

When its hard is when it's made: yesterday I hugged goodbye to SteveT and jumped off at Adam's Arcade, though I don't know why it has such a name. As if that intersection has Tekken and the game with the biting alligators and the hammer on a string. Well, I said goodbye, and it was difficult because his exit is the last of a string of them, a line of good friends gone home for the summer. Though this time they're coming back, which is dreamy, because these transient Nairobi friends usually do not return.

But I took a matatu at night from Adams though it was so late. Its a difficult dance of avoiding the crime and violence of afterdark crowds, while still needing to be where they stop. So I sort of hung to the side until I saw a bus for the route I needed, then slithered skinny through the hands and hips until I was at the front. The people behind me laughed at my dexterity. Then we were off, a Toyota van full of 16 people, faces bathed green from the fluorescent lights, the man in front with a plastic earring. "Seet een thah back," he told me. I went farther back and there was no room but the aisle, so I hunkered there. We stopped for petrol and the money collector got out and danced a lean hopping thing to the reggae that poured loud from the van. The station attendant joined him, and they both tipped back their heads and held out their arms like stretching and laughed and loped to Marley and the Wailers.

We were then tooling along, and I knew a police stop was coming - and this matters because you have to be belted or the cops have a reason to extort money from you, and I was still hunked in the aisle. So I prayed and panicked and the van stopped to let a guy off at the front and I crawled forward over yet more hands and hips to get this seat before it filled. I got it, belted, and the policeman with his machine gun shined a light at my lap for naught. Jiminity crickets Simon, I thought, I believe you're in the swing.

And I have gotten sick lately. Not a good time, because its nigh the end of the term. Get better man.

But I know that it is hard things which make progress at all. Forgive the river metaphor: the easy float comes from a slow smooth wide pace - rapids are only where the river is shallow, thin, fast. Well its rapids time. I feel the flow and I feel God's breathe on my nape with such comfortability like an embrace.

Olé...

1 June 2007 10:59am

If it can be proven in one object that the creation at its rawest form is the opus of anything ever fashioned, that the ecosystem and interplays of its biology outside are as high as things are makable, and our creative efforts as human beings are merely sordid attempts of mimicry, this object just may be the banana I ate yesterday.

You see, yesterday I blushed, and it was from a banana. 1080i flatscreens, Blackberry phones, solar powered pulmonary respirators, the mars rover: these objects, down to their most basic and molecular levels, were unequivocally dominated by the splendor that was beheld within this banana.

I need to backtrack a second. The Western/Gatesian conception of all that is bananaesque simply does not match with what I held, for the fruit was half the size of those imported, and yet was ripe for consumption. Despite being only sized like to cellphone, it was beginning to show the browning of good taste. Like a mallow. So erase the idea of the longish nana, disregard the lengthy and edged contour of the imported halfripe, and replace it with a small and plump. Then picture peeling the skin, thinner than the longer genre, and taking a bite of such opulence that it brings blood swishing to the surface of your cheeks. For it was there, in my kitchen before the gas stove, that I was baptized in the truth of what 'banana' really is. Suddenly a choir was heard, the door to the hall slammed shut from nothing, windowed dust danced in the light of the morning sun, and I gained such a radiant and violent understanding of goodness that my new mouth and its buds needed a veil to leave the room.

The definition of anything, Lewis said, is only a shadow of what is reached after this is all over, that heaven is simply a world of completion of definition. In this, I know that the bite I had was an illusion to how a banana was and will be, and if this is the case, then perhaps Adam chose to name it thus - because one bite and he could only stutter ba-na-na-na...

28 May 2007 4:33pm

I wandered out of a building Wednesday to be greeted outside by a barrage of cameras and microphones. I wandered out before who followed me, the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, a criminal defacto. He is rated by the UN and Amnesty Int as one of the greatest violators of human rights worldwide. His corruptive policies and economic legislation have resulted in Zimbabwe having the greatest inflation in the world - currently around 2000%. My friend here was just there for a dinner, and his friend has to bring a brick of $100,000 Zimbabwean bills to pay for the meal. Think post-WorldWar2 when Germans were buying bread with wheelbarrows full of money.

Economics aside, Mugabe has used his police force to torture or kill any political dissenters, while establishing the nation under a media blackout that only allows governmental newspapers and TV to discuss the nation's condition. Multiple BBC/Time/AP journalists who have secretly entered the country have been beaten or killed.

After his successful destruction and acquisition of white Western-owned farms and estates, the economic sectors of Zimbabwe completely collapsed, resulting in a complete end of commerce with other nations who had established mineral and agricultural trade relationships with Zimbabwe. Then Mugabe began Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, which destroyed 700,000 slum homes in the name of ending "illegal housing", though valid land and housing titles do not even exist in the country. 2.4 million people have lost their homes. But as the saying goes, kill one man and it is a tragedy - kill 10 million and its a statistic.

To say I have hard feelings towards Robert Mugabe is an understatement, but I did not chastise him when I saw him. Why? First, because criticizing people outside an actual conversation rarely does anything, but mainly it was because I was scared. Being a political nuisance could easily get my student visa revoked, he was surrounded by 20-30 armed body guards, and was only in view for 45 seconds while he jumped in a black Benz and rode off in a long train of speeding Mercedes towards the airport.

But afterwards I sat in the back seat of my friend's car and mildly mulled over not interacting with a man who has singlehandedly ruined the lives of ten million people. I also prayed for Mugabe, because he is my enemy, and he really needs Jesus.

22 May 2007 8:20pm

Today the weather was again brilliant. No clouds, just sun. Puts a skip in my step.

When I visited my cousin and aunt in Arusha, Tanzania, I was put up in the Pink Flamingo Hotel. I love staying hotels for some reason, even crummy $7 ones like the Flamingo. I think its the void of responsibility coupled with the fact that I don't have to make my bed. Oh, and hot water with a real showerhead, yesss.

In Arusha my hotel was outside a mosque in the area. And a call to prayer began as I was falling asleep. It looked like this:

It sounded like this: Arusha Mosque.mp3 (right click - save as)

I remember that night, April 3, how the voiceover of the call to prayer, using the wavering Arabic sing-song but added with an African tone, mentioned Hassan and Hussein and Mohammad. The loudspeaker, curiously uncrackled like usual, echoed clearly over the tin rooftops and throughout the fluorescent lighted cityscape, remained monotone, meditatively slow, and allowed calls to prayer from other distant mosques to be heard in the distance. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, the speaker finished his practiced litany and the city returned to its night sounds. Car horn sporadically blared, insects chirpped, here a clanging pot, there a distant disco bass, distantly people talking.

People who try to follow Jesus by being really really religious will always be outdone by Muslims. Its the equivalent of having a massive loudspeaker on top of your church which calls you away fives times, and you go and bow. Oh, and Christians would start reading the bible only in Greek/Hebrew, despite not knowing what it would mean. I could go on. I'm just thankful Jesus isn't such a thing, that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed which spreads like a breeze.