Try as I might to convince her that I really could wash my own clothes, she wouldn’t take no for an answer, calling in the troops to bring more buckets—apparently anything less than four was unacceptable. Before I knew it, Mama Sandra and her helpers were rigorously scrubbing, plunging, and twisting my “unmentionables” along an assembly line of plastic pails, as methodically and gracefully as a choreographed ballet.
Mouth agape, I immediately scanned the farm for a tree or cow to hide behind. Luckily, my mortification was short-lived. After I offered up the magic words “My Kenyan experience would be far more rewarding if I learned to do laundry the way you do,” Mama Sandra gave in. Reviewing the proper procedure one more time, she allowed me to reclaim my clothes, but eyed me like a hawk every scrub of the way.
Maybe I was delirious from squatting in the hot sun for so long, but after washing side by side with Mama Sandra for the next hour, I thought I saw nods of approval from neighbors and other passersby. My laundry skills were finally up to the strictest local standards; everything from here on out would be a drop in the bucket. Or in this case, many buckets.
Now, crouched in the same spot two weeks later, a more highly evolved laundress, I couldn’t believe our time at Common Ground was almost over. Since my inaugural underwear wash, we’d witnessed the birth of a calf (which Joshua had named HAJI after Holly, Amanda, Jen, and Irene), planted hundreds of baby saplings in the garden, perfected our chapati-rolling technique, and held Dr. Seuss readings in Pathfinder classes.
But by far our most rewarding experience and contribution was our A Tree Grows in Kenya play project, during which we had witnessed even the shyest boarders bloom into brave and talented actresses. Timid Barbara had chucked the “slow and steady wins the race” fable right out the classroom window, sprinting out of her shell and into the spotlight. Whereas some girls merely memorized and recited their lines, Barbara cloaked herself in the President Moi character, delivering emotions and mannerisms that broadened the script’s horizon. Like proud parents, Amanda, Holly, Irene, and I pushed back tears, cheering and clapping along with the rest of the cast.
With each play practice and evening danceathon, we’d grown closer and more connected to our little women. Our hut soon became a dedicated space for them to escape and unwind from their rigorous class and chores schedule, providing a friendly forum to express their preteen sensibilities. Whether it was a DVD screening or a homework tutoring session, our time with the boarders turned out to be the greatest reward we’d received as volunteers. Although we’d been a bit skeptical at first, as the Village Volunteer site suggested, it seemed that our presence alone had made a positive impact on them. And as a final token of our appreciation, we’d planned to make goodie bags for the girls and cook a special dinner for them and the entire staff.
Since it was now the morning before our departure, it was a race against the clock to get everything done in time. We had to hightail it to Kitale, blitz the grocery store, beat the daily afternoon thunderstorm back, and prepare the food—all before nightfall.
The last of my laundry washed and Holly back from her morning run, we grabbed Amanda and Irene and the countdown officially began. Now black belt masters of the matatu schedule, we made it to our favorite Kitale supermarket in record time. Grabbing a jumbo cart, we reviewed the list of ingredients we’d need to make our surprise meal. Though there was an ocean between us and Taco Bell, the generous supply of avocados we’d received from Sister Freda made our mission clear: to introduce our Pathfinder family to the joys of guacamole and Tex-Mex cuisine.
Given our limited grocery selection, the girls and I had devised a strategy: thinly rolled chapatis would double as tortillas, kidney beans and rice would serve as burrito filling, tomatoes, onions, avocados, chili sauce, and limes in various combinations could make both guacamole and salsa. We even planned to create dessert using banana slices with ground cinnamon and sugar, cooked over the fire until it was golden and bubbly.
For the boarders’ gifts, we wanted a mix of fun and practical items, so we grabbed everything from hair ties, lollipops, plastic bracelets, and modeling clay to colored pencils, crayons, and small sets of silverware. The four of us blasted through the aisles in less than a half hour and made it back to Pathfinder just as classes were dismissed. Knowing the boarders would be occupied in study hall for at least another hour, we spread their treats on our beds to sort and separate. After wrapping each girl’s gift in pink cellophane paper and securing it with white ribbon, we tucked all fourteen bags out of sight and set out to commandeer the kitchen.
Soon after our arrival at Common Ground, we had noticed that the staff would disappear for hours on end into dark, smoke-filled huts, which we learned were the food prep and cooking areas. With only a wood-burning fire and steel cauldrons full of well water at their disposal, they’d have to work tirelessly all day long just to get lunch and dinner on the table for everyone. Knowing that, we couldn’t in good conscience have our meals served to us on a (tin) platter without pitching in to help.
While we’d each eventually mastered the art of rolling dough and slicing mangoes, we’d never attempted to cook an entire meal until now. Neither Mama Sandra nor the chefs were fazed in the slightest by our inexperience. But the menu we’d suggested…well, now, that threw them for a loop. From the looks on their faces, you’d think we were speaking pig Latin as we explained why we were mashing up the avocados and adding spices to the mixture.
“Just wait, Mama Sandra. You are going to love guacamole,” Amanda said as she chopped and blended the ingredients.
“Yeah, and Amanda’s recipe is the best too. She makes it all the time back home. Although the amount she has in that bowl contains about twenty dollars worth of avocados, if you can believe it,” I added, which was the biggest shock of all to her, as an avocado could be purchased at the Kiminini produce stand for about ten cents.
“Jen, chapati cockroach alert,” Holly interjected, glancing down at my workstation.
“Oh, thanks,” I said, brushing a few wandering critters off the table near the dough I was rolling. They hit the dirt and skittered back to the wall to reunite with their relatives. I scanned the plywood table with my headlamp to make sure the roach coast was clear, then went back to the task at hand.
Not too long before, such an incident would’ve sparked a fit of spastic convulsions and shrieks and sent us bolting for the nearest exit. It’s not that I was suddenly thrilled to have the planet’s only plausible nuclear fallout survivors crawling across my hands or swan diving into my meals. But since cockroaches were as much a part of the landscape as mud or grass, our bug-induced breakdowns started to seem foolish. Sure, Amanda and Holly had continued sleeping head to toe with Irene and me to avoid the bugs in their assigned beds. But when every kitchen wall and most available surfaces teemed with troops of cockroaches on 24/7 patrol, a few stowaways in the food weren’t the end of the world.
Although the boarders normally ate dinner in their dorms, our Tex-Mex experiment required a different course of action. Setting up a buffet in the food prep area, we constructed a sample burrito so they could see how it was done. After that we asked them to proceed down the line, while we took individual orders and heaped food onto their plates like lunch ladies. Moving outside, we all sat on plastic chairs to eat. Like students nervously waiting for the results of our final exams, Amanda, Holly, Irene, and I watched with bated breath as everyone dug in. Would they like our meal? Would Mama Sandra think our avocado concoction was gross?
Soon our worries were squelched as even the most apprehensive boarders were smiling and scooping spoonfuls of food into their mouths. Mama Sandra practically fell out of her chair when she tasted her first bite of guacamole, and the cooks were already helping themselves to second portions.
“So do you like it, Miss Naomi?” Amanda asked, giving the little girl a hug. “We did not fail?”
“No, you did not fail. We very much like all of this that you have prepared. Thank you,
Miss Amanda.”
After the last of the guacamole had been scraped from the bowl and the burrito station broken down, we all headed up to the main house to say our final good-byes before bedtime. In preparation for our departure, Joshua had coordinated another special performance so we could see our girls in action one last time.
Opening with the name game, which by now we knew by heart, we twirled around the room together, a symphony of little voices sewn onto our own. When the boarders showed off moves from Amanda’s dance routine, we laughed. When they recited poems we’d helped them write, we cheered. And when they grinned for our cameras, we grinned too. But when they opened their gift bags, we cried. Not just because it finalized our good-bye but because out of all the items we’d included, it was the spoons, knives, and forks they held most dear. Not the whimsical trinkets. Not the candy. But basic utensils. Eyes sparkling, the girls clutched the silverware to their chests and thanked us for their very first sets.
Since our arrival at Pathfinder, we had constantly been amazed by how courageous and cheerful the girls were even though they had so little, but I had never anticipated how difficult it would be to leave them. Hiding my tears in the shadows of the kerosene lamps, I watched them smile and squeal over their goodies, honored to have been in the presence of these remarkable young women even for a brief while.
Back in Manhattan, the personal problems that had once plagued my life had seemed all-consuming. Yes, in theory, I’d known that compared to most people in the world, I was pretty well off. But in reality, I’d had no idea how extraordinarily lucky I was. It’s not that I would never again stress out about my career or get annoyed at a friend or shed tears over a relationship. In fact, I could almost guarantee that I would. But if those were the worst of my woes, I was blessed and could no longer turn a blind eye to those less fortunate around the world or back home. And even though our time as volunteers was almost up, I vowed to take those lessons with me.
Glancing over at an equally emotional Amanda and Holly, I was hit by an overwhelming sense of pride and gratitude to have them by my side. Without hesitation or complaint, they’d wholeheartedly adopted my lifelong dream to visit Kenya as their own, encouraging me to turn it into a reality. And not only did they go along with my desire to work with children in a poorer, rural part of the country, but they’d flourished as mentors themselves, which made the experience so much more meaningful and beautiful than I ever could have imagined.
As we bid tearful farewells to Joshua, Mama Sandra, Irene, and all the boarders the next morning, Amanda, Holly, and I promised to stay in touch and to continue our efforts to find sponsors for the girls. Our backpacks loaded into a van bound for the Maasai village of Oronkai, we waved furiously out the window until Pathfinder faded from view.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Holly
NORTHERN INDIA
OCTOBER
I wanted to close my eyes to avoid seeing the accident, but my lids felt glued open. The jeep in front of us swerved to avoid hitting a cow that seemed to think a highway teeming with rickshaws, motorbikes, and cars was a fine spot for an afternoon nap. Cows are considered sacred in India and often roam free. The frenzied scene morphed into slow motion as I watched the jeep crash into a man, woman, and baby all perched atop a motorbike.
The crash catapulted the mother and child, who’d been riding on the back, off the bike. Rather than using her arms to break her fall, the woman instinctively wrapped them around the baby swaddled to her chest. She did a somersault before landing flat on her back on the pavement.
Almost as soon as the woman’s body touched down, she miraculously sprang up, peeling away the layers of fabric used to bind the infant to her chest so that she could inspect it for harm. The baby seemed to be unscathed. The man, however, didn’t fare so well. The bike lay on its side with the wheels still spinning, and his legs were pinned underneath the smoking metal.
Traffic halted, the cow wandered away, irritated that her nap had been disturbed, and I grasped the door handle to jump out.
“Stay inside! It’s dangerous,” ordered Sunil, the driver and guide for our Golden Triangle tour, which covered Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. His black eyebrows resembled two fuzzy caterpillars and twitched uncontrollably, making him look like an Indian version of Groucho Marx.
“Dangerous? But the accident is over,” Amanda said, and Jen nodded in agreement, ready to spring out of the car to see what we could do to help. Not that we had any idea of what to do exactly—we didn’t have a cell phone to call for assistance, and, even if we did, we didn’t know the Indian equivalent of 911.
“Don’t get out,” Sunil repeated firmly. “The driver of the jeep will now be beaten.”
Having Sunil as a tour guide was kind of like viewing India through the reflection in a fun house mirror: we had no way of knowing which explanations of his native culture were real and which were distortions. We were pretty sure the majority of Sunil’s caveats—from warning us that women shouldn’t wander alone after dark due to the high risk of rape to banning us from eating at hotels because owners often poisoned guests so they’d stay longer—were exaggerations.
Suddenly dozens of men materialized to form an angry roadside mob. They’d abandoned nearby wooden shacks, food carts, or their vehicles to ball up their fists and bang on the perpetrator’s jeep door. At the same time, a smaller crowd surrounded the injured family, lifting the motorbike to free the man pinned underneath.
The vigilantes kept on coming. If the hodgepodge of vehicles fighting for space on the roadway struck me as anarchy just moments before, the swelling mob and haphazardly abandoned bikes charged the air with utter lawlessness. The men succeeded in opening the driver’s door and pulling him from the vehicle even as he tried to clutch the steering wheel like a lifeline.
I strained my eyes to see what was happening, and Amanda quickly started her video recorder to capture the drama. “We just witnessed our first traffic accident in India and—” SLAM! A man’s fist pounded on the window near her face, blocking the lens.
“Maybe you should put the camera away,” Jen said as another fist slammed into the thin glass, rocking the car. My own hands gripped Jen’s arm, fear freezing my heart and confusion clouding my brain. I had no previous experience with traffic accidents in India and no idea of what was going to happen. Not knowing made the scene seem all the scarier.
Beep! BEEEEEP! Sunil honked the horn like a man possessed, trying to inch the car forward despite being blocked by a crowd. He honked louder and hit the gas. The noise made the men disperse slightly so Sunil could drive around them. He sped away, leaving behind the acrid scent of burning rubber.
Since our car lacked working seat belts, the three of us could only grab the “Oh shit!” handles for dear life. We watched Sunil steer between trucks headed straight for us as well as the occasional cow idling on the highway—not one of them cognizant of the concept of separate lanes.
When we finally regained control of our vocal cords—hoping the same could be said of Sunil’s grasp on the steering wheel—we asked why anyone would leave the scene of an accident.
“If you hit people, you drive away fast. If you don’t, the men will beat you in payment. You only have five seconds in India,” he said. “If you don’t drive away fast, people will hit your head until you must go to the hospital.”
That sounded like a tall tale to me. “You mean you’re supposed to hit and run?” I asked.
“Yes! If you’re too slow, the crowd will beat you,” he explained.
I didn’t believe for a second that a driver responsible for a crash would hit the gas in order to escape roadside vigilantes. In any event, logic dictated that the police would both arrest the driver and protect him from the angry mob in question. Jen, Amanda, and I exchanged more skeptical looks.
“Will the driver be beaten to death?” I asked, deciding to play along with Sunil to see how far he’d take this.
He gave me a look in the rearview mirror that illustr
ated that he thought me extremely uncivilized. “No, he just has a lot of blood. And he has to pay in cash at the hospital for the family’s medical bills and broken bike.”
“But what if he doesn’t have the cash?” Amanda asked.
“Then they keep his jeep as payment and he has to take a bus home.”
Too incredulous to respond, I watched the world turn into a blur outside the car window. It rolled by in waves of women wearing jewel-toned saris and puffs of curry-laced smoke from cooking fires near the roadside. Families piled atop single motorbikes like some kind of circus act. India made me feel more alive, with competing sights, scents, and sounds putting me on sensory overload until I felt hyperaware. The country was more different from my own than any I’d ever visited before. It struck me in everything I saw: small stuff like eating masala dosas instead of pancakes and bacon for breakfast, and big things like seeing a society built on the caste system, in which people are born into certain roles, so totally different from the Declaration of Independence’s notion that “all men are created equal”—even if the idea wasn’t always practiced in reality back home.
In India, the caste system lives on—despite being outlawed—in traditions such as arranged marriages. Parents searching for a match for their child typically look for someone from the same caste, barring other deal breakers such as age, height, and education. Sunil’s parents, for example, had arranged his marriage to a woman who, like him, was a member of the highest caste, known as Brahmins.
When I first learned about arranged marriage while on Semester at Sea, I was just twenty-one and idealistic, and the idea struck me as painfully unromantic. But after listening to countless girlfriends in New York stress about dating, I could see how having someone else make the decision for you might be a relief. Plus, arranged marriages actually last longer—love marriages in America are more likely to end in divorce than Indian marriages. Of course, the lower divorce rate could stem more from women’s rights than from matrimonial bliss. Since Indian women seem to depend on their husbands for social and economic standing more than their American counterparts do, maybe divorce wasn’t such a feasible option.
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