Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 43

8 January 2008 11:40pm

So much sorrow, such widespread sadness. We went to Mathare today to the Army base where people have moved for refuge. The army had tried to control the mobs, and in doing so had tear gassed the entire area. Kids, babies, parents, and elders had all been affected by it. Tear gas indeed...

The road to the refugee point is littered with burn marks. I couldn't understand why thin wire spools were everywhere, why they were spread around the road, bent and twisted by the fire. We realized they were wire insides from tires, and the rubber had completely burned away. The road was absolutely paved with charred burn marks, tire wires, and autoglass shards, and a gas station on the way was completely burned out. The plastic elevated price board with its removable numbers was melted to a blob.

Friends of mine witnessed PNU and the ODM youth converge in front of Javahouse and Nakumat Junction, where my father and I had coffee last April. They cursed and swore and threw stones, and eventually rushed at each other face to face with machetes. You can see who won by the destroyed opposition flyers. Entire roadside billboards of ODM were shredded and marked with holes by thrown rocks. In Mathare, however, it was the other way around; the opposition had intact posters everywhere.

Around the refugee camp was islands and islands of moved belongings. Some of the groupings were tiny, only some blankets and a jiko stove and some yellow plastic oil jugs filled with water. Some were bigger, with wooden shelf boards or a couple of lanterns. The biggest groupings of stuff had a couch, or had a tarp made into a crude shelter. A man said that they had been blessed, because it had not yet rained there. It rained at NEGST the previous day, but Mathare, with its displaced masses sleeping outdoors, was spared the mess. The Red Cross was handing out rehydration solution to infant bearing mothers, but this was a huge task considering the vast majority of the hundreds of refugees were women. I suppose the men were out still measuring the situation. "When will you be able to move back in?" I asked a group of teenage girls. "When the leaders get this figured out," they said. "There is no security inside Mathare," said one named Beatrice. "I don't even know if my home was left unburned."

I am struck, square in the face today, on how quick things are destroyed and how slowly they are restored. The election was barely announced and columns of smoke appeared above Kibera. In less than four days the country has seen an estimated 800 deaths and over 200,000 displaced people. And I thought of this as I watched an aid worker unbox an ORS packet and show a mother, slowly and methodically, how to dissolve the powder in water and give it to the baby to drink in order to stem its salt and sugar loss during diarrhea. The worker took at least two minutes to write down all the mother's information, to demonstrate the process, and to build a package the mother could take with her, and a hundred mothers were queued up behind her. Its like how the roads will take weeks to clean, how the burned out matatus will still be on those roads in three days, and how the gas station owner will have to completely gut out his store to sell gas there again. It may take a decade before these new tribal lines are returned to the unity they had in 2002. The restoration of this entire horrible tragedy will take so long, despite the chaos lasting only days (with hopefully no more in sight). But I saw the aid worker mimic tearing the plastic pouch of ORS for the mother to do later, and I knew in my heart that she was doing what was right and noble and solid.

7 January 2008 5:32pm

Its amazing how the violence is so minimally targeted at the government. Some thousands of people did indeed march on the downtown park, as evidenced by the throng of feared GSU soldiers crowded in Uhuru Park today. But many of these wore bands of white signifying peace, waving branches and leaves and singing the national anthem. They were halted and often did not attempt to push through the line.

No, the violence has instead been through the license that throngs of young men have felt to terrorize the business areas and the homes of opposing tribes. I have yet to hear of a single soldier lost, but the weak defenseless people of the slums of this city and those living in near-Western areas are a different story. My friend Mike Berube (who took these pictures) came across massacred infants in Kibera during the post-election period. As if the ethnicity itself is to blame. This is all the infants possessed. Just ethnicity.

Anger is not to blame. Truly we are made to be frustrated at evil, we are conditioned to have problems. To hate evil is holy, to be angry at wrongness is a product of loving what is right and good. But evil again finds itself a way to run within the veins of such a noble response. Corrupted, the anger turns itself in mimicry of the violence, and the world gains in its wrongness. Eden is levied farther down the road.

The hatred of corruption must never be watered down. To be angry at thoughtless lifetaking, at thoughtlessness even, is as holy as morning prayer. But how long will the world respond with the blade? How long must antagonism between competing Hells reign the surface of this planet? If we are bringers of the kingdom until He comes, then truly we must insist to fight evil while retaining our identity of love. Love is mightier than the panga blade, quicker than the bullet, more potent than the recent firestorms that consumed Kibera and Mathare slum. It has no rise and fall, it does not fail in the face of death. It burns with a holy strength that this world cannot match, and all who witness it are stilled and as full of admittance as the Centaurian below the cross. Take courage in the face of this boil, God says. Don't fight evil with evil, but fight, and fight evil with Good. Let Kenya be consumed this week with such a witness!

6 January 2008 11:33am

CNN was showing video of angry riots behind burning road blocks, screaming with all their strength, "NO RAILA NO PEACE!". In the background was Prestige Plaza where I go for groceries or the food court on Sunday afternoons. Karen shopping center, where I go for bread and vegetables, was only pictures of bare shelves.

Needless to say: the leaving was done while intently looking, measuring the wire for any rise. None until it was time, so I went. Only a dozen or so departed the airport into Nairobi from the 737. Some friends came and we drove through the 6am city watching for anything, but it was absolutely normal. It all looked as if nothing had happened. But I returned to the campus and was innundated with story after story of terror. "We live in Kawanguare, and stayed up all night Thursday," she said. "We heard only gunshots and screaming. I'm Luo and my husband is Kikuyu, so we just locked ourselves in our house and awaited daylight."

The graffiti is everywhere: "FISH EATERS GO HOME" "RAILA FOR PRESIDENT" "PNU" "ODM"

Such hatred. Such malice for another. And it tears me up to see such division where previously it was unity. The Western province, who voted 95% against the incumbant, has forced thousands of Kikuyu to flee into Central Province. Luos and Luyas are leaving Central, who voted 95% against the opposition, because they too have been hunted. They are returning to the Western Province, returning to the area around Lake Victoria. The country is dividing into two opposing sections, and the coast is caught in between.

Back on campus there is a soft sorrow over everything. People walk around less brash, and I am still the only one on my floor. All others have yet to make it back, so the school pushed the opening date a week. I am praying so hard that they make it back, because many of them, my closest friends, are from Western Province. To return will require a delicate movement around police checks, and there are stories of people having their national IDs checked at these stops. They are looking for Luos.

4 January 2008 12:36am

I wanted to end this reflecting on difference, the way that the West is so distinct and yet similar to the East. Eagerness also to relate the story of the monastery we attended. They played the kora harp, the wooden xylophone, and drums while chanting Latin hymns; their robes and cleanliness and attempt at passivity failed to mask the fervor. I saw it in the young twenty something monk giving sideways glances to his kora player friend, just out of the gray headed superior's view. They were masters of being alive beneath their appearance, like an undertow. Yes. A good metaphor. They walked and swayed and had the belt end hanging just right. They played the studded drum very carefully to avoid cutting loose. But I swear, knowing I cannot prove this, that they left that echo and tranquility, banged open the door, and burst into their living quarters to wrestle each other for bragging rights.

But I can't end talking about that, nor the foosball table games, and not even the final ataya ceremony we had tonight. I do not even have time to mention that night last week where I saw the most magnificent dusk over the water off the coast while we tented near St. Louis. That night, when the we lit a bonfire and used a carried ember to catch alight fused fireworks. We sat on the sand and jutted our faces parallel to the sky, watching the rocket sparks being thrown within the tapestry of stars, and I was at ease and felt so truly blessed in that midst.

No, because the phone is ringing off the hook at my parents house of people wondering about the violence in Kenya. Its reeling from its past election, and the nationwide anger has created mobs of men aligned with specific tribes who are seeking justice in their own hands. Somehow these groups of people have entered impoverished homes and businesses and attacked and killed hundreds of innocent people (the elderly, women, children) as either (1) retaliation for their entitled but unmet political outcome (or 2) as retribution for the retaliation. People of weakness are being brutally attacked by people of power: hacked by machete, hit with stones, and even burned alive for no reason other than their ethnicity. There's a word for stuff like that...

So this is how it will end, I see: girded and measuring a prickly journey. Headlines of the different newspapers across the nation I return to are unified on the same cry: "Save Our Beloved Country!" I go while praying the leaders of both political parties call for peace and venture into dialog. Blame will only inflame the rioters, who truly need no encouragement. Instead, let peace settle on the burned land, and let true heartfelt forgiveness and reconciliation be the credo of the people birthed from this horror.

26 December 2007 2:10am

The wind moves all the time in this land. It sweeps down from the north, from the Sahara, and brings a haze which clouds the horizon and covers all surfaces. It is called the harmattan. I am feeling it now. I leave my two windows open in the bedroom and allow the dust to cover everything, because of the breeze’s delightful heaviness and ocean smell. I wake to this, and so have yet to wake wondering where I am.

I keep forgetting to write things down. Yesterday was something else I saw which I tried to mentally note, but now I have forgotten what it was. I try to begin writing sometimes, but the quantity of images seems too broad. I will try again today.

I saw the way Ahjaad looked at his guests on Tabaski, how excited he was to serve us goat and French bread and onion sauce with chips. He found us places in his bedroom, places where we were fixed and from where he could approach with the form. Another clear glass half full of tea, not plastic like Kenya or ceramic like home. Three rounds eventually. Ahjaad turned on his television and we watched people do Sabar dances. He brought around his photobooks, another and another still, and they were filled with only still people. There was simply no scenery, like all the photos on my classmate’s bookshelves at NEGST. There were only endless people waiting, often madeup and adorned with the brilliant colors of some formal event, but just sitting or standing and really just waiting for a picture to finish. Every face is set and still towards a picture being taken. And it is beautiful to me because it is people alone he is purporting as he hands us these plastic binders. He is showing us his favorite things.

But I forget to mention the swarms of sturdy-faced goats being absent from the roadsides, replaced with the occasional leftover piles of slick skins. We went out the day after, and nothing was open, like after a wedding when the place is trashed but nobody has the reserve to start cleaning up.

Or how Ahjaad looked fondly at his family that day, each dressed so elegant for this yearly evening out. We were leaving his house, but first his daughters came in with their matching pounded-shiny boubous and their dear faces glitter dotted. And then his wife came, an amazing draped figure of green and gold, so silent and shined and pleased at our pleasure of the sight. We took pictures and they posed like a picture was taken. I tried to get an action shot, I tried to get laughter frozen out of a joke, but I failed and didn’t mind anyways. Then the sun was getting low and the daughters were granted leave ahead of the parents, exiting the metal door to join more adorned kids outside on the dirt road. We shook hands and went back to home.

My God, let me never forget the fact that all the world is thrilled about such things.

15 December 2007 12:12pm

I met a part of my family in the Gambia that I had never seen before. I have a HUGE extended Lebanese family that is my Gambian uncles mother's side. They had me sit down at their long table and introduced me to everybody including a grandma and hyper cousins and mustached uncles and madeup aunts. They fed me and we spoke about whatever and it was all quite surreal.

12 December 2007 10:57pm

Number until Jan3 (221) 77 514 3216

I ate a kola nut this week. What beautiful things. Cream white and deep blood red, strawberry shaped and mottled with dirt and woody splotches. They are stimulants and hunger suppressants and mildly carcinogenic, but used here in parts of West Africa as gifts and almost as a currency. Before eating it, I brought the clear plastic bag with the tied top to one of the women here, tore the corner and asked and she told me that it is eaten raw. So thats how it was. I was prepared for something like an almond or a walnut, and it was tender like an unroasted peanut, but possibly the most bitter thing I've ever tasted. Nothing prepared me for this. The first bite was jarring. "It makes water sweet," she told me in her lovely accent as I was bunching my cheeks and spitting. "I believe you," I said.

This (thinking christmas.mp3) is a small song I made while meditating on what a Christmas swing would sound like. My favorite part is the harmonica blare at minute 4.