Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 46

18 May 2008 2:54am

Passing a friend on the road to class, he threw me a passing high five. It was one of those good ones that leaves no room for doubt and sends the hand tumbling onward, ringing like a bell. I remember even now how his smile shook, how his eyes squinted as he laughed and swung up the fiver. The brevity of the motion and the fullness of its meaning sparked against each other for a moment. I realized that this thing was able, in a split second, to declare and enjoy that we both are friends.

I am done with loving humanity. I mean it. The need to somehow conceptualize the whole human tapestry as a single abstract mass, in all its colors and shapes and locations, has been revealed to be an impossible and ultimately distracting task. God can do it but not me. ‘Because he so loves the world’ from John 3:16 means he knows it pretty well. The more I have tried to know and love this concept, the quicker I become aggravated by people’s idiosyncrasies – the less patience I have for people who do not fall within the boundaries. And I find it hard to see in the bible where God asks us to love this sort of faceless person anyways. It’s relatively easy to love a concept of humanity, like how one might love an African face in a magazine or a Chinese face on television. It does not take a lot to people watch and remain in a good mood. Facebook is a hit.

But take that face and give it habits. Give it dreams and a family, body odor and birthdays, and all of a sudden the theory is exploded and a person emerges and begins invading your senses and looking to you for joy. All of a sudden it is inconvenient and demanding. All of a sudden one loses control.

But then something sensational occurs: it becomes sustaining to a person’s legs. It has for mine. When I live in friendship with my friends and spend time with folks in the nearby tinshacked neighborhood, I have a reason to look forward. I have a person who shares my frustration because he is in the situation too. I am able to get a solid feel of him and her and him, because I can feel their laughter mingle within mine. When I have a bad day, he can see it in my face because he knows me, and he knows the thing to say (or order) to soothe my angst because he’s done it before. He’s actually gotten pretty good at it by now.

12 May 2008 7:08pm

Recently some things have been different. My daily brushing routine has been pleased with an Arabic salt-flavored toothpaste. Yesterday I passed a van with its wheel on fire, while later watching a scurrying couple of mongooses crossing the road. Further still, the tuck shop on campus has been stocked with a locally cultured strawberry yoghurt. Most of all, these days are different from focusing on goals.

Yes, an individual who seeks to meander the foothills of existence must strike a list of goals, yardsticks by which successes and celebrations (failures and grumpiness) can be garnered. These goals can be common, such as running a half marathon or taking up the jaw harp.

Me myself, I have many of these goals. To name a few biggies: (1) a deep desire to own an African grey parrot, (2)a hope to ice sculpt. (3) I fancy but have yet to master the joy of ham radio. I am finally excited to (4) designate a future room of my future abode as a ‘creation cavern’ within which I will have bunson burners, robots, and schematics.

One such goal, success, and celebration was finagled last month. Yes, I am resting more soundly, eating more surely, and have overtly gained a greater self confidence in my own inclinations since I visited the birth house of a one Farouk Bulsara, wider known as the great bicycle-riding singer Freddie Mercury of Queen.

Somehow on an overcast day, a halfhearted city guide was regurgitating a long litany of Zanzibarian factoids. And I suddenly caught a small comment about this island as Mercury’s birthplace. Walking all over stonetown, singing I've paid my dues..., we finally got to a small alleyway on which was the house described by a badgered informant. I knocked, and a tranquil middle aged man answered. I eagerly asked him if this house truly was the infamous place of Mercury's 5th of September 1946 birth. He affirmed me. We stood there. He continued, "there’s nothing here though, like pictures or anything. (another long pause) It’s just my house."

"But you must really like his music and all, having the same house as him."

3 May 2008 2:31pm

I have been stumped at how to continue with this thing, because of what had to come next. A great terror was experienced a couple weeks ago, and I had to put this down, but it cut so deep to the core of my faith that I was trying to wait until it became clearer. Now, weeks later, enough else has piled up that I can't wait any longer.

We buried my friends baby boy just lately. Three hours after he was born he couldn't breathe, and so his body failed him and he was defeated. Not through justice of a lifelong corruptive history or through some terrible will of another. Rather, he simply was handed a physical form which was defective, and this gave him little room but to cry once when he was born and never make another noise again.

The casket was so small. It was carried by one person's two hands to the same site on Langata where we buried George over a year ago, but to a plot for children in the back where the sections are divided into smaller squares. The casket was closed with a simple screw hook-and-eye, like a cabin door. We sang songs and prayed and a reverend did his best to 'turn mourning into dancing', but it came off flat. The whole thing was just rough. Finally my stoic friend, the father, dabbed his eyes again, opened for a final look, and turned away. I saw the child then, a tiny child with a blue woven hat with little bunny ears, wrapped in a spotlessly clean white blanket and placed in perfect peace. It was strangely holy and beautiful. It looked, more than anybody else, completely at ease with what had happened.

And it was named Victor before it had all gone wrong. That was the beginning of what made the whole thing undefeating. They read the scripture, right before they cut the hole wider than it had been prepared, right before each of us threw handfuls of dirt on its top, they read scripture asking 'death' where its victory was.

Because we worship a risen God is why I do not weep for this child. The entire enterprise of things going wrong no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we fight it, is over and void. Where O Death is your sting? I could feel some sort of sting there. My friend the father told me they had spent months preparing a room and baby clothes and booties and toys in expectation, how the mother had not slept for nights of being kicked by what was breathing through her. He said the whole family was ready to burst into celebration, like a long prepared surprise party when the person outside closes the car door, quieting the room before the shout.

But the child, again, was the most at ease than anybody, and I rose up inside there how truly I believed in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting, and I knew then how deeply and dearly this belief is to being a human being who desires to avoid cynicism and remain flat-footedly stable amidst the tilt of a difficult world.

Mother and father, you decent broken hearts of this world, take courage in how alive he looks. He is still.

16 April 2008 9:08pm

I am breathing deeply, handsomely even, because (alas) it is the break betwuxt term two and three. Somehow there was a research/tutti-frutti excursion through the anthropology professor available on the shoestring, and so I'm in Zanzibar.

Now, there is a certain spunkiness about spending time in winding coastal African cities. First of all, there's a funkiness that emanates from your skin, because the humidity falls on one like a nicely warmed vat of vegetable shortening. Truly, waking is not a pleasant experience, because it involves the quick run for the bathroom to (among other runs) remove the 8-hour layer of face sweat (dubbed the 'fung' with a hard g) that has accumulated overnight. Furthermore, certain coastal parts of Africa, like Zanzibar, have been appropriately dubbed the white mans grave, because the innocent little mosquitoes which lazily mumble around the pasty white legs of a tourist are actually bloodsucking rancid parasites harboring festering malaria. One might be leisurely sitting with a local bearded man, complimenting his robe, when a pinch is felt hamside, and one spends the remaining days in bed as the walls become gelatinous and careening like a seaborne hall-of-mirrors.

Yet I must admit there is a certain charm about the place. Endless kabab and cous cous are available on the street, shuttered windows and minarets add character to the horizon, and men play checkers with bottle caps on the stoop of the post office.

Last night we (four Koreans and myself) were eating fish and things at a eatery with a local band. It consisted of a shaker (gotta have a shaker!), a clarinet player, and a guitarist. The clarinet player broke into a lilting syncopated rendition of No Woman No Cry by Marley and the Wailers. Soon the intro was over and the clarinet raised his instrument high in the air and let loose his other pipes. A proper somber solid baritone was revealed, pumping his clarinet into the air to accentuate his points. What oomph. But then the call to prayer split from the nearby rooftops, and the band quietly packed their things and left.

Aside from this, I continue to appreciate the heavy air and untucked candor of coastal Africa. It contains a sense of dignity and steadiness that has been pushed aside in the bustle of Nairobi. I find it easier, for some reason, to settle and rest in such a climate, and to prepare myself for the coming ten weeks until graduation.

In this bright future you can't forget your past.

So dry your teeeears - I say.

8 April 2008 3:46pm

The old city of Lamu is remeniscient of my father's memories of Marakesh and Fez. Its winding tiny streets are only shoulder width wide at times, which make for an interesting moment when your attempts to split the loitering sidelinders is hampered by a six foot wide donkey cart. Pole! Pole! he shouts, pulling an overflow of maize, bananas, or mattresses. Its just a beautiful city on the coast of the country, just about as Northeastern as one can get. The shore is lined with graceful pointed dhow boats, their captains egging on anybody alien for a trip to Shela! Shela!.

At one point of winding around the insides, a short fat man with a ankle length bubu, cane, and turban stopped us and would not let us pass until we honored him for his age. I knew him from somewhere, and realized with a laugh that he looked like Jamine's dad in Aladin. He called himself Ali Hippy and led us into a five minute litany on his rice cooking techniques. 'You must come to my house,' he says. 'You will soon say, Stop Ali Hippy - you're killing me with food!' So we thought why not and were led barefoot the next night into his linoleum floor to eat his Swahili fish, crab, and lobster dishes. Before we knew it, a host of people from his marriages had joined us shoeless on the plastic under an oil lamp, an albino man with no teeth struck up a drum beat, and Alli Hippy began crooning Arabic songs to an 80s Casio with fresh batteries. Drums were passed around, and we spent an hour clapping with his daughters to songs about peaceful sleep (Lala salama!).

Thankfully my parents have sequestered a cheap hotel for the night, built in the 15th century. Upon arrival the man said us to summon him for anything from towels to bottled water. He said, "My name is...", paused, and then gave a long hiuuu whistle. The building was fantastic. Its Arabic bulb windows gave barely a view because the building next door was so close it was touchable. We brought cold beverages to the rooftop the last nights and listened to the Maulidi festival finish up below us: Qur'an recicitation competitions, dancing and music, and lots of prayer. The different Sunni and Shia quarters of the terraced city below had different loudspeakers, and it mixed in the air around us like a shawl. Dog sized bats dove through the humid air, and we were awash in the strangeness of the land - its smell, and its sight and sound.

31 March 2008 3:40pm

Its funny watch a six month old baby elephant push my parents around with its trunk. We had gone to the local elephant orphanage and the little ones were going up to people and leaning on them and watching the people get all awkward with how to respond. Some people sort of playfully push back and some step back all unable to match them. It was hilarious. And when I got back I was on my way to an exam for this term and slipped on a pile of wings. They were from the termite moth explosion from two days ago. Major rains trigger something in the soil, like when water gets to boiling temp. Some threshold gets tripped and things go nuts. Two days ago termite moths were flapping all over the place. The entire store in the road from my house was filled with flying termite moths. Cereal, oil, rice, fruit, and everything was on the shelves but covered with termite moths. Eventually they lose their wings and crawl around. The funny part is that, for a couple days, wings are everywhere. On the way to the exam I stepped on a pile of them and almost slipped to the pavement.

Overall, its just great to have my parents here, to have people who ease my struggle for community and relationship. Plus all these normal things all of a sudden seem very strange and funny again. Its like hitting the wipers. Or something.