by Ted Neill
It’s all right, I tell myself. There will be other opportunities to take pictures of Anika.
In the morning staff meeting the next day, Ruth, the nurse on duty with the sing-song voice gives the names of children who are sick and not going to school. There is always a headache, stomachache, or a case of conjunctivitis. This morning she announces that Anika is ill. I go to her cottage (purple) and find her stretched out in bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin while her house mother brews some tea. I offer to keep Anika company, read to her, drink tea with her, whatever.
“No,” Anika says, an impish grin on her face. “You are stupid.”
Randolph, the teenage boy whom I noticed weeks before who had become so emaciated, continues to wither, his flesh melting away. He refuses to eat. Kenyan staff members take turns in endless progression, holding a bowl of porridge or fruit to his face, telling him to eat. He doesn’t. He withdraws further from everyone, except one volunteer nurse. Her name is Monica. She is visiting from Germany. She does not tell him what to do, she simply keeps him company and asks him what he wants.
He wants to die.
I’m not close to Randolph, so I don’t crowd him in the sickroom. I feel bad for him, with endless visitors cajoling him to eat when he has clearly made a decision. I do note the light on in the sickroom each night indicating that someone is on the nightshift with him.
It is perhaps overly romantic but I picture Randolph in the warm light of that sickroom on a journey towards death, his body existing there as well as on some subterranean path towards a river you only can cross once, turning more and more skeletal as he nears some border between whatever life is and whatever is after. No one has accepted his choice to go willingly except Monica and so it is she whom he chooses to accompany him to the end.
I am placed in charge of all the foreign volunteers at the home. Doctors, nurses, social workers, recent college grads, anyone that has decided to come and stay at the home, driven by some desire to help sick kids, must answer to me. It is a relief to the Kenyan staff that uniformly profess frustration in dealing with the wazungu and their strange ways. Bonaventure, our chief manager and my boss, is a thoughtful and intelligent man. We call him “Bonava” for short. I ask him if he finds me as strange as the other wazungu.
“Yes and no,” he tells me. “Yes, you must be strange because you want to live in Kenya and not in America which is your home. And no, it is easier to understand you and communicate with you because you understand us Kenyans.”
Some of the volunteers are helpful, others more of a hassle. One thing they all have in common is that they leave. There is no one that has pledged to stay on for two years like myself. As a result, I have no permanent companions. Any friends I do make end up leaving me behind.
With so many foreigners coming and going I am increasingly in downtown Karen emailing prospective volunteers. I try to screen the bad ones out. I try to inform the good ones which shots they need.
I am the internet café’s most regular patron. After a while the two young women who work there know me by name and I them.
There is Jossy. After finishing high school she came to work at the internet café because she had some computer skills and she thought it would be decent money—especially since it was located in Karen where there were many wazungu that were willing to pay the café’s exorbitant price of five shillings a minute (in downtown Nairobi it is only one shilling a minute).
The other employee is Eve. She is strikingly beautiful, enough that a number of volunteers remark upon it to me. Having attended a strict boarding school in rural Kenya where there was often no electricity, Eve did not have any computer skills when she applied for the job, but she learned them quickly. Industry is in her character—days she spends at the café, evenings she spends in night school taking classes towards her BA in business management.
One day while surfing in an international chatroom at the café, Eve mentioned that she lives in Kenya. One of the chat participants remarked, “That is in Africa, right? Where everyone has AIDS.” Eve clicked her tongue and closed the window.
Shortly after that incident she sees me at the shop nearby trying to buy phone credit. I’m wearing a floppy hat to block the sun, a shirt that does not fit me, and patched cargo pants. I think I look like I’m set for whatever adventure Africa is about to throw me. Eve thinks I look ridiculous. I’m speaking in broken Kiswahili, even though the girl at the counter speaks fluent English. But I am trying to practice. Both she and Eve are dressed in jeans and blouses that fit them better than my shirt fits me. Eve interrupts, completes the transaction in English, then leads me outside into the hallway.
“I think it is time we adopted you, Ted.”
Being that all my volunteer friends eventually return home, leaving me lonely for the company of peers my own age, I’m not against Eve’s offer to adopt me. I ride the matatu to Ngong with her, walk down a few narrow dirt lanes, and arrive at a gate that leads to her house. Inside waits a beautiful white and blue house with terra-cotta tiles, balconies surrounded by a lush garden and fuchsia bougainvillea waving in the breeze. Her house is about the size of the home I grew up in but it feels more solid. Lumber and sheetrock walls are replaced by smooth brick walls that are cold to the touch.
Inside I meet her younger sisters, Chiru and Chloe, both students at college and living at home, as well as her older sister Meredith who works downtown at one of the many mobile phone shops popping up all over Nairobi. The sisters are beautiful, affable, and cosmopolitan. They read Vogue, Newsweek, and O magazine and listen to Coldplay, Jay-Z, and Rihanna. They are dressed no differently from any college students or young working women I might meet in the States—if anything they are a bit more formal. Eve introduces me, slipping a few times into Kiswahili wherein she replays some of the ugly stereotypes that she feels whites have of poor, sick, warring Africans. Chloe snorts while Chiru laughs. In the kitchen is a dried coconut husk sliced in half. Chiru puts a half on either breast and says smiling, “Ted, is this what your friends think we are dressed like here in Kenya?”
“Well, minus the jeans and replace them with a grass skirt and you might be getting close,” I admit.
Eve’s mother, a police officer, arrives home after dark. She is doting and welcoming, insisting that the girls make a good dinner for me. Her father, a matatu company operator, arrives home and is similarly gracious, even if he is not as confident with his English. We have a dinner of chipatis, vegetables, and potatoes and we watch episodes of The Young and the Restless and Smallville on television. The living room is not so different than living rooms I’ve been in back in the States, with throw rugs, fluffy couches, and easy chairs. Pictures on the walls depict high school graduations, family portraits, and outings to parks and tennis courts. The women tsk and huff at some of the characters in The Young and the Restless and Eve and Chloe sing along to Coldplay’s “In My Place,” which plays during the credits of Smallville.
Eve and her sisters are all so striking, beautiful, and sophisticated, I feel a bit self-conscious hanging out with them in the raggedy clothes I usually wear around the orphanage—something that is not lost on Chiru. One evening after dinner and TV at their house, Chiru pinches the edge of my second-hand shirt while examining my floppy hat, patched cargo pants, and dusty hiking boots. She turns to her sister. “Eve, can I take him shopping?”
In one trip with Chiru I am transformed. A few visits to vendors downtown and booths at Toi Market near Kibera, with the aid of her furious negotiating tactics, and I’m outfitted with an entirely new wardrobe. My shirts fit and are professional looking, my cargo pants are replaced by respectable trousers and slacks. Chiru even finds just the right shoes for me, they are durable and thick soled, but look somewhat dressy. The clothes are not so nice that I’ll be afraid to walk on a dusty lane or jump on a greasy matatu—required if you are a resident of Nairobi—but they are nice enough that I feel some pride in my appearance and I notice people, especially Kenyans, treat me dif
ferently. I look less like I’m about to go camping and more like, well, a Kenyan.
“You see the people coming out of Kibera,” Chiru says to me, Kibera being one of the largest slums in Africa. “How do they look?”
I reflect upon it. “Actually pretty neat, clean, and polished.”
“That is right, because most of the working population of Nairobi lives in a slum. It’s like the apartment complexes that you’d find on the edges of a big city in the States, just not quite as . . . permanent.”
Considering that most of the houses are made of sticks, mud, and corrugated metal, she’s right about the permanent part, but she is also right about the industry, ambition, and professionalism of the people who live there. Not just a place of misery, disease, and despair, Kibera is a place of hope for people coming from the countryside to find work and improve their lives. It’s not as if the privation, injustices, and humiliations of poverty do not happen in the slum—they do. But both realities exist side by side in a more nuanced community than many outsiders realize.
And in the end, it’s a good place to buy a shirt too, especially with Chiru negotiating on my behalf.
Judy—who had drawn with me on the porch of her cottage who was afraid if she missed her dead mother, she would come for her—looks as if she has gained weight. This has caused some people to remark that she looks more healthy.
It is otherwise. She is in heart failure. Her lungs have not been able to clear her infections. Clogged as they are, her heart cannot produce sufficient pressure to force her blood through them to be re-oxygenated. As a result, when her heart beats, blood flows backwards. She has a pulse in her veins. In her capillaries, where arteries break into thousands of tiny branches and then turn into veins, fluids are backing up.
A Belgian film crew has come to the orphanage. They are doing a documentary on children orphaned by AIDS. The producer tells me that she would really like to speak to the children about their parents.
“A lot of them don’t remember their parents,” I say.
“What about the ones that do?” she asks.
“Why do you want to talk to them about that? It’s traumatic.”
“Well, if we could get a child to cry on camera, it would be really powerful.”
I feel sick, but the powers above me have given these people permission to interview the kids. I look around at the kids on the playground and call over Sofie Waceera. I ask her to tell them her story.
She does. When she finishes, the camera crew is weeping. Sofie is bright and chipper. She is resolute. She adds in English, which she has picked up quickly:
“Me, I try to be a good girl. Me, I take my medicine like the nurses tell me and do my chores and read in school. I hope that if I am being a good girl I will see my mother again.”
I tell her she has done a very nice job telling her story and that she can go play. The producer says she probably has enough footage. I’m relieved. She asks me how Sofie’s mother is.
I tell her that Judith Waceera is dead.
Chapter 16
Psychic Injury
Kenya was a place to stop believing in God. I had gone there somewhat religious, but after seeing so many children die, so many children pray for relief only to suffer, I had let go of the notion of an all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent God. It was too much like Santa Claus to me.
My therapist suspected I had a certain level of “psychic injury” that had put me at higher risk of depression, anxiety, and suicide. I asked him what that meant. He explained that psychic injury was a loss of hope, security, and trust in self or others, often as the result of close experience with injustice or wrong doing. It was often associated with, even mistaken for, post-traumatic stress. After witnessing traumatic events it was not unusual for a patient to abandon his or her religious beliefs. I told him how I had stopped believing in God because of my time at the orphanage and a litany of children whom I had sat next to while they wasted away in a crib or bed. I had seen too many small graves, the red oxidized soil shaped into a short pile, as short as a child’s coffin. I had heard too many children pray to a God, any God, to stop the pain, that pain only stopping after an excruciating process of dying.
And weren’t psychic injury and post-traumatic stress for rape survivors and war veterans? I could understand if some of the kids I had worked with had experienced trauma themselves, but I had never thought of it affecting me. I didn’t think what I had gone through could be characterized as such. I had a hard time accepting any of it until my boss from my work study position at Georgia State came to visit me at the hospital. He was a professor of ethics in the business school and widely admired as an expert in his field as well as a charismatic teacher.
He told me that he had worked with a number of students who were veterans and had their own version of psychic injury. He also participated in a group called Veteran’s Heart, wherein civilians work with veterans to try to help them readjust to civilian life. Psychic injury, even post-traumatic stress, were problems of personal narrative, he said. Oftentimes either condition can result from having to kill others or watch others die. A person can’t reconcile their self-image of being a “good” person with that of having killed or let someone else be killed. I see his point. I have struggled with the fact that I left the children behind, that after my two years, I returned to the States. Just another two-year wonder on a jaunt of voluntourism. Meanwhile after I returned to my life of privilege after “slumming” it, so many still suffered.
“You can still be a good person though,” he tells me. “Even if you did not save the children from dying. Even if you are not saving them from dying this very instant.”
It sounds like a bit of a contradiction. I feel guilty. I just feel unable to accept their suffering especially from my place of comfort.
“I can’t find a way to reconcile it all,” I said.
“You never will.”
Chapter 17
Family
Harmony and her mother had just been arrested. She and her mother had been hawking sweets and cigarettes, which they got from a church for selling on the street. Actually only Harmony’s mother had been hawking; Harmony had Loraine’s baby Michael on her back and was begging for shillings. There were lots of wazungu around Moi Avenue, especially around the queue for the Kenya bus. They felt more sorry for children than most wafrika and they had more money. They felt even more sorry for children with other children on their backs. But they were the most sorry if you were crippled or blind. Harmony had pretended she was blind once but nobody believed her. Her mother said next time she would have to wear a blindfold over her eyes if she wanted to be convincing. Instead Harmony had tried singing. This actually worked well, as people would stop, stare, and listen, telling her that she had a beautiful voice. Her mother had always told her this, but she was surprised when other people said so. So she made a point of singing often and earned more than most children did begging for change.
There were now new laws forbidding hawking on Moi Avenue, so the police had come and confiscated her mother’s candies and cigarettes. Then they put her in the back of a dump truck with other hawkers they had picked up. With all the hawkers gone, Harmony had never seen the pavement along Moi Avenue look so clear.
Harmony had been lucky. She would not have even noticed her mother had been picked up if she had not been following a mzungu that had gone into Kenya Cinema. When she saw her mother being led away she ran up to her. Loraine was there too. She had avoided being arrested since she had been around the corner hawking on Uhuru Way. Harmony stood next to her watching as the police led her mother and other women caught in the round up into the back of a truck they were using to transport them to the police station.
Harmony’s mother yelled at her from the truck, where the other hawkers were all sitting quietly as if they were asleep. She told Harmony to stay with Loraine until she came back. Then she asked a policewoman—one wearing army clothes—when they would be released. She replied that since th
is was a Friday and that there was no one to process them on weekends, they would not be released until Monday. Suddenly all the quiet hawkers became very angry. Harmony knew that other children had lost their mothers when they had not seen them in over a day. Harmony knew that she and her mother had remained together a long time because Harmony did not let her mother out of her sight for long, so she took Michael off her back and returned him to Loraine, then she climbed into the back of the truck.
Her mother clicked her tongue.
“They are taking us to the jail,” she said. “We will be there until Monday.”
“Then I will go with you,” Harmony said. She would rather be in jail with her mother than lose her forever. Her mother said she was foolish, but she said it in such a way that Harmony knew she was happy that they would be together. Harmony knew she would never have let her mother go without her. They had made it this far by sticking together.
The house seemed empty. Miriam and Evelyn still slept in the front room. Neither of them went into what had been her parent’s room, even to change.
Miriam felt sick a lot of the time now herself. She stayed on her sleeping mat most of the day. Evelyn took her to the doctor who had one of his nurses stick Miriam with a needle and fill a tube with her blood. A few days later, Evelyn left Miriam alone in the house while she went back to get the results of Miriam’s test. When she returned, Miriam asked if she had passed the test. Evelyn said she had done fine.
Miriam watched the children walk by her house on their way to school each day. She could not imagine walking so far now, as tired and weak as she was. One morning as she woke up she touched her face. There were bumps there. She kept fingering them throughout the day but Evelyn told her not to. As time passed Miriam tried to ignore them but she felt more each time she checked. When Evelyn left for the new market one morning, Miriam went into her parent’s room to find their mirror.