Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 41

30 November 2007 11:33pm

The first term of this final year finished, Christmas break is on again. A whole month of December to be spent with friends in Dakar, the capital of Senegal in West Africa and with my aunt and uncle and cousin YoYo in Banjul the capital of Gambia. It will be good to get out, the chill of this city's altitude is wearing me down however Christmasy the chill might be.

I want to peek over the edge of this year and see what will happen. Calvin Theological Seminary validated my NEGST degree, which is wonderful, so I'll be there in the fall, but until then I am here. One of my favorite authors once wrote that living in the future is as destructive as living in the past. Either hampers living here, now, here. And this is what I am looking for, as I make serious motions over the next eight.5 months to make this time count. Is it hard that I feel urgency already? I'm not eager to go home, I'm eager to go home finished. Finished, just a synonym for perfected in Koine Greek. Yes, perfected. That all I hope and dream for becomes real. Even if the motions swallow me under, I will to not finish or finish crazy than finish flimsy. Amen.

But for now its rest, peace, and holiday: slicing a mango for breakfast, reading 'Diet for a Small Planet' and Chaim Potok, talking with a boy named Olijawon, baking bread, singing carols, breathing.

26 November 2007 6:09pm

The cause is mine, but not alone. Nairobi is much to blame with its stifle. My friend told me yesterday, "Nairobi is a divorced child, a hand clasping both places but admitting neither. This is why there is so many suits and ties, so much tentativeness. Its because all your classmates are from the rural areas, and arriving here are in similar shock as yourself."

I have furiously tried so hard, but sinking within this people and this land is like a long distance relationship: bits and pieces are exchanged, a weekend visit, a wish against a commitment. But admitting the stifle of this trying rusted city and setting it aside, I am left admitting the justasmuch culpability in my own breath, my own face so older.

A professor and I are friends because we came at the same term. He was transferred from Mali and myself from Michigan, so we are familiar and it gives way to such gratifying liveliness. Sitting beside a fireplace with him, the electricy failed, it happened like this: he told me that my understanding of reciprocity within relationships in Kenya was ethnocentric and misguided. Just like that. Ugh. And I knew from his knowingness that he was right. There tapped on the shoulder by the Spirit of such truth, and I was looked full in the face. All the conversations I've had with friends about what I need from here was realized to be an inherently wrong question from which no right answer can result. Not 'What do I have to gain?' but 'What do I have to give?' The risen incarnation of God's words echo in my mind and also in a poem by Francis of Assisi

Car c'est en donnant qu'on reçoit,

C'est en pardonnant qu'on est pardonné,

C'est en mourant qu'on ressuscite à l'éternelle vie.

"for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

If two years of living is the cost of this lesson then I'm ready to start again, my God. I am ready to start.

23 November 2007 10:42pm

One of my closest friends sings while he cooks. We share the same gas stove, and for countless mealtimes I will be in my room and hear Swahili sung high pitched and high tempo. The pot he fills with water until it boils, and then he pours in ground maize flour. The white powder swells with liquid, steam pours around his face, and he shakes and shakes the pot with a long handled wooden spoon, hefting a stir to mix the flour before it scores. So this is how I know he is cooking our dinner: the fighting rattle of the pot on the burner and his song.

And this dinner call makes me so soft. It takes my billowed preoccupation and drains it, and I am remaining as one bashful, all by his rattle and song. I toe the floor, I examine my walls, and finally I walk into the kitchen as a lesser, and greet him a 'habari gani', and he grins. 'Safi!' he says huge, and forty five minutes later I am full.

17 November 2007 12:29am

Lillian is swatting a moth which has become trapped behind the library desk. Its massive too. It knocks against her binder, which she uses to attempt a waft of it towards the door. But Mothra is dexterous, and Lillian retreats. She gives me a pleading look. Sigh... I gird my reserve, though secretly I am wondering if it is a biting moth, or if there exists in the cosmos a biting moth. But I grab it, really grab it, and toss it into the night where it hits the pavement audibly. Unbelievable.

10 November 2007 5:37pm

Overhead hangs the cumulus bauble, gluttonous and pitched with sulk and lilt. A roadside rooster is preening on its own, and Joseph the cabby is craned on a skyward stare.

"I hope you get it," I said chinning the cloud, alluding how I know he is wanting rain because it garners fares from those not wishing to walk. He grins that he gets it. And I hope he does.

Monday is my friend's birthday, but I only know because of overhearing. I stopped her an hour ago, "its your birthday monday." She says yes, and I tell her I will be Kenyan, that I will greet her on that day with a dousing plastic tub of cold water. "Its a birthday, not a bathday! Hello!," she smiles and scolds.

Yesterday I was doing two things strangely. The first was grinding peppercorns in a mortar and pestle, pushing hard into the soapstone basin until the corns popped and the kitchen filled with the acrid aroma. The second was learning how currency has mutated indigenous reciprocal relationships yet has also provided relief during drought. Back before the shilling paved its way inland, my roommate's father had to visit all the neighboring villages to work the millet fields, hoping to draw the fancy of a single girl and thus get hitched. And when they got married, the extended family was given food and perhaps livestock in celebration, because marriage was everybody's gig. Now my roommate desires to get married, but can't afford it, because his wealth is his own alone, and all his uncles (who originally he would have lived with and thus been active in relationship with) will come looking for cash in envelopes, only to disappear again until some other event. But, its true, a monetary based society has given them less pain during drought, more shelter from the storm, because banks aren't needing food and water to endure.

But: interesting that Joseph the cabby still begs for rain.

8 November 2007 6:19pm

The corn here is uncanny. Seriously. Its like the yellow canned corn from back home went and spent a decade studying self-reliance in Siberia, Nova Zembla even. Everybody calls it maize, and I do too, because its not corn at all. It's got a cob and kernals and its shucked, but that's where it stops. The polite soft small yellow bobs have been replaced by bulging gummy white hunks.

I walk back to campus, like usual, when I spend an hour or two in town reading or perusing: often its a book shop. Today I snatched up a yellowed 101 Arabian Delights: A Book of Arabic Cookery by Margaret Joy Philippou, from the Arab book seller man, because it was almost free. Also, I do not possess a book on Arabic cookery. Additionally, I often hanker foods containing tahini and figs, not to mention mouloukhiyyeh. And I bought for 5ksh (8cents) a half cob of roasted roadside maize. The vendor recognized me which sort of made me feel good, and he turned and teased the cob over the coals, wafting it with the same blank of wood he's used since I've known his stand. Once inclined, he picks up a maize leaf and splits the cob in half with a flat ended nail hanging from the grill.

Peel it, cook it, wash it, or leave it. This is what people say about eating here. Well it was both peeled and cooked, but it still is handled, and wrapped in a moist leaf. But the danger is marginal, I surmise, and analogous to a delicious moment, so I travel homeward eating often, and its fills like a meal.

22 October 2007 8:35pm

Amesegenallo Yesus: Three cheers for free midterm break airtravel to Ethiopia, bunk beds, and friends. The 12th I arrived around 9:30am and was greeted by Alli and Mariam, a copt from Egypt. We then imbibed in what would become a common theme of the trip: coffee. Ethiopia is one of the few places on earth that independently domesticated wild plants, and one of these crops was coffee. Though it has a large coffee production, like Kenya, it uniquely has coffee drinking as a typical practice of the population. Result? Fifty cent machiatos!

After getting situated Bingham Christian school's dorms, the night was on, and we took bright blue cabs down a bumpy back street and were deposited at an eatery that served the traditional injera, a flat bread made from fermented-then-baked teff grain, another crop solely spawned from Ethiopia's heartland. The brown injera is poured over with chili (birbiri) sauces called wat, my favorite being shiro, a chickpea paste pleasing enough to bathe in. The injera is hence torn from the edges and used to scoop up the wat. As we were eating clustered around the reed-woven injera table, the band began to strike up the music. Strange instruments began to pour over music so typical to Ethiopia. One looked like a strange small harp played with a violin bow of some sort. Another man was backing a long wooden flute, and the drummers and keyboardist filled in the rest. A female singer decked in the pale white embroidered Ethiopian dress rose to the mic and began a lovely Amharic song on a pentatonic scale. Right when I was beginning to get used to the music, four singers pushed themselves through the door from the kitchen, two each male and female.

What followed was over an hour of traditional Ethiopian dancing of thrown palms and lifted knees and shoulder hefts and head tippings. There was a short lull once, and if patrons were so inclined, they could rise and challenge the pro dancers to a sort of strange mimic danceoff. One came to our table. I declined like a good Dutch boy, but one at our spread tried it out. His decent attempt at the shouldering was soon defeated by the pro dancer doing some sort of heron impression. Eventually the dancers returned to their spots and donned baboon hair wigs and did the most incredible spinning routines. The girl's long hair twisted from the rotation, and one male dancers movements were so dramatic that his wig was thrown to the front table. I was so captivated that I barely spoke to anybody that night, just sitting mesmerized in my chair by all the pour of sound and twirl of movement.

This is what you get for being a people that organized its nation long before the colonialism: a scent of oil and a dance which is unlike anyone anywhere. And like most artistry, like stars, it was good just because it was there and beautiful.