No Hurry in Africa

by Brendan Clerkin

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are so many people I feel deserve acknowledgement for their help and encouragement, both during my time in Africa and in the making of this book. I began writing this during a few rainy days after I came home, so that I would not forget it all in a few years’ time. I intended to spend only a few days at it so I would have something for myself to look back on. Then a few people along the way told me it was a good read, but that I should improve it in various ways.

  I would like to thank in particular Pat Close who probably guided me through its progression more than anyone. I must also express my gratitude to the O’ Donnells of Ardara—Cian and Fionntan, my brother Aidan, Fr. Liam Kelly, Wambua Singa, and Seamus Murray.

  I am very grateful to Pat Cullen for his generous backing; also to Mike Hartwell, Gerry Keating, Marianne Leonard, Claire Quinn, and those in Deloitte for their terrific support for this project.

  The writing of this book owes much to my parents Séamus and Pauline for inspiring my love of learning and adventure, as well as for their valued advice while composing it.

  I would like to thank my editor Cleo Murphy, and the people of Original Writing for the opportunity to publish this account. Jean Spindler deserves a special mention for her marvellous animations and the front cover. Bartley Sharkey did me a huge favour by creating the maps of Kenya and Kitui, and Michael Hig-gins also in creating the website.

  I must express my appreciation to Fr. John Gilligan of DCU, as well as Margaret Murtagh and John Murphy of Gaisce.

  There are many people whom I knew in Kenya who are not even mentioned in the pages of this book, but who warmly welcomed me wherever I went. I would especially like to express my deepest appreciation to the Irish missionaries throughout Kenya for their unfailing hospitality, and for making my time there so enjoyable, and also to the African people of Kitui for their friendships and the terrific welcome I received from every one of them.

  During my time in Africa, there were many people who sent donations for the people of Kitui. I think nearly all of them are far too modest to want to be named, so please know your wonderful generosity is making a difference. Finally, without ever even asking any of them, Brid and a whole army of friends from college (and even some of their friends) were busy raising a huge amount of funds in Ireland for projects around Kitui. Again, I know many of them are too modest to want to be mentioned, but I have to congratulate them on their superb work.

  This book is dedicated to Packie Ward who passed away only days before I left Kenya.

  It is also dedicated to ‘Nana’ Clare McGarrigle who passed away a few months after my return to Ireland, but always encouraged me to write it all down

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Whites have watches, blacks have time’

  (Kenyan proverb)

  I can remember the moment very clearly. I was sitting at my desk in the PricewaterhouseCoopers offices in Dublin during the college holidays in the summer of 2003. An e-mail arrived from a good friend who was on a J1 summer work visa in New Jersey, USA. His message was not so much, ‘Wish you were here’; it was more along the lines of, ‘I bet you wish you were here!’ It set me thinking.

  It was a pleasant sunny day. During lunch-break, I ambled down to the Grand Canal to eat my salad sandwiches on a bench, sitting beside the statue of Patrick Kavanagh. As I sat there, two thoughts crossed my mind. The first was—what am I doing here working in an accountancy firm in Dublin? The second was—I am going to Africa.

  This second thought, which had come from God knows where, was quickly forgotten. Later that summer, some friends and I went inter-railing around Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, for over a month. Halcyon days of innocent mishaps and harmless mischief, hours spent trying to chat up the stunning blondes of those countries, hardly being able to spend our money because everything was so cheap, and taking a last glimpse before the EU would transform the eastern bloc once they all joined the following year.

  I did the J1 visa gig myself the following summer. I worked as a lifeguard at a summer activity camp in Maine, with a month at the end for the classic American road trip. It was only after that summer that Africa came back into my head. Of all the places in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States that I had visited, the region that most appealed to me was Transylvania in Romania. The scenes I had witnessed there remained fixed in the album of memory: horses pulling wooden carts stacked with hay, everybody going about their business on foot or on bicycle, forty or more workers cutting corn in a field … It was the sedate way of life which appealed; it seemed that things had not really changed a great deal since the days of Vlad the Impaler. I did not know it then, but that step back in time was in some ways a preparation for Africa.

  Any seasoned traveller will tell you that the real characters and the friendlier locals tend to be found in poorer regions not yet in the viewfinders of coach loads of Japanese tourists. There is an appealing innocence and spontaneity amongst people unused to tourists. I like that, though it is not to everyone’s taste. Most of those who travel after leaving college in Ireland spend a year working in bars in Australia and socialising most nights with other Irish, maybe having spent a while in Thailand or South America beforehand. They all have a fantastic time on Bondi Beach or in Byron Bay.

  But Australia just did not appeal to me. Everyone comes back with much the same stories. I wanted more of an adventure, to go somewhere that entailed some risk, to experience places that did not have McDonalds and Irish bars, places where few of my generation had ventured before. It would have to be somewhere in the Developing World. The idea of voluntary work was taking shape in my head. I really wanted to live the life of the place, not just observe it. That might prove to be adventure enough. A bit of sun would be a bonus!

  However, I was contracted to train as a tax advisor with Deloitte & Touche for three years immediately after college; they were sponsoring the Masters in Accounting that I was studying at Dublin City University. So, with some trepidation, I rang them up in late 2004 and told them of my desire to volunteer for a year in Africa. They got back to me a few days later.

  ‘No problem,’ they said, to my great delight and gratitude.

  The next decision was what exactly I would do for the year. One by one, those friends who had expressed an interest in joining me pulled out. One spent all his ‘Africa’ savings during rag week in Galway! It became clear I would be going on my own. Then there was the problem of expense. Some voluntary organisations were asking for thousands of euro for me to volunteer with them for a couple of months. I drew up a tentative plan to volunteer in Ghana, travel on to East Africa, then the Middle East, and catch the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing. Well, things fall apart.

  One particular day in college, still pondering what to do, I remembered being at a Mass in DCU a few months previously, where the chaplain gave a sermon about a recent visit of his to a friend who was a Kiltegan missionary in Kenya. It had struck a chord with me at the time because some of my relatives had worked in Africa. I went to talk to the chaplain about it. Through him, I contacted a missionary in Kenya called Fr. Paul. He suggested that I work at a project in his Diocese, in a region called Kitui. They could use someone with accountancy skills. And that was it; Kenya it would be …

  … Which is how I found myself on a plane bound for Nairobi in September 2005. I was leaving behind a family deeply concerned about my safety. I was leaving behind the hustle and bustle of city life in Dublin; leaving behind life in Celtic Tiger Ireland and one of its ideological bastions, DCU. I was taking time out from all that. Time for possibly the last great adventure of my youth. Time, perhaps, to ‘give something back’ and, however briefly, to ‘do some good in the world,’
as the volunteer literature puts it. Time would tell.

  And there was a further complication. Some time before the end of college, but after I had made my plans, I had fallen in love with a girl on my course. It tore me to leave Brid behind for a whole year. Looking ahead, it seemed like a very long time. But maybe I could learn patience, like the Africans in the Kenyan proverb: ‘Whites have watches, blacks have time.’

  CHAPTER 1

  NOT LIONS, LADYBIRDS!

  PEOPLE WORRY ABOUT YOU WHEN you tell them you are going to Africa. For a start, they worry about all those nasty tropical diseases. They have seen films and documentaries on television in which the intrepid travellers and explorers were laid low by something viral, horrible and occasionally fatal. Mothers, understandably, worry more than most.

  ‘Look, Mammy,’ I explained again, ‘I’ve had all the injections: yellow fever, tetanus, diphtheria, rabies, cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, B, C, and probably X, Y, and Z as well. I have arms like a junkie!’

  ‘They say malaria is the worst,’ she observed nervously.

  ‘I promise to keep taking the tablets.’

  ‘And there are all those wild animals. I read somewhere that buffalo are the most dangerous, worse than the lions, the hippos, the crocodiles …’

  ‘I’m told hyenas are fairly treacherous!’ my father interjected.

  Yes, they were all rather worried. Nobody, including me, was worried about ladybirds, though. I should have been.

  I spent my first night off the plane as a guest of the Kiltegan Fathers in Nairobi. I had been met at the airport by a member of Fr. Paul’s lay staff named Stephen, who explained that Fr. Paul had recently left on a fund-raising trip to Ireland. Fr. Paul was the administrator of the Kitui Diocese, in effect the acting Bishop. It was through him that I had been assigned to a role as an accountant on the Nyumbani Village Project. Before I retired for the night, Stephen, a middle-aged man from the Akamba tribe, told me to get a good sleep because we would be up early to travel to ‘base camp’ in Kitui village the next day. Kitui District is in the Akamba heartlands, about three or four hours from Nairobi.

  There is nothing quite like a nine hours plane journey to ensure a sound night’s sleep. I regained consciousness around 8am, quite late by African standards, and within half an hour, we were on the road. It was to be my first sight of Kenya in daylight. I remember being overwhelmed by the scenes that morning as we made our way to Kitui. From the front seat of the battered old jeep, I tried to take in the endless straggle of the Nairobi suburbs, the crazy kamikaze drivers, the corrugated iron shacks, and the deteriorating roads, rutted and pot-holed. Beyond the city, the road traverses the Nairobi National Park, and I had my first excited sightings in the wild of ostriches, gazelles and warthogs.

  The Park eventually surrenders to a parched barren landscape, sparsely populated, studded here and there with isolated round, thatched mud-huts. After Machakos, a disorderly tangle of a town, the road twists and clambers up a terraced mountain. The countryside is more fertile now, with lots of tiny villages and scores of pedestrians strolling or striding along under a sweltering sun. Across the mountain, the brown barren bush returns, with an occasional acacia tree or tiny roadside hamlet. Classic African landscape. Near the village of Kwa Vonza, the soil becomes noticeably redder in colour and tiny fields show traces of valiant attempts at cultivation.

  Several more kilometres further on lies the decent-sized village of Kitui—my destination and my base for the foreseeable future. The capital of Kitui District, it consists of three or four interwoven streets and is home to a few thousand people. The village appears a bit anarchic, and at first glance has very little of note to distinguish it. In the months ahead, I would get to know it well, and to appreciate its intriguing people.

  Apart from the sensory overload along the way and a slight headache (which I attributed to jet lag and to altitude), I had enjoyed the dusty, bumpy, shake-rattle-and-roll of the journey to Kitui with Stephen. He had answered patiently my endless questions. My first impression of Kenya was that it was a bit like the down-at-heel Ireland of the 1920’s newsreels—though obviously a lot hotter. I knew it would take me some time to process all of these new sensations.

  ‘The Akamba are the fifth largest tribe in Kenya,’ Stephen told me with discernible pride.

  However, they inhabit a very arid region; Kenyans take pity on you, as I discovered later, when you tell them you live there. It is an undeveloped backward area even for Kenya, and populated by a very traditional community. The people of Kitui are cut off by the mountains on the western side, and wedged in by the desert to the east.

  Seven kilometres further up a dirt track into the hills above the village, our jeep pulled up outside a modest cream-coloured bungalow opposite what was obviously a school. A woman of about sixty years of age dressed in a bright blouse and long skirt emerged to meet us.

  ‘Karibu sana,’ she said in very proper tones as she grabbed my hand.

  ‘Huh?’ I replied, confused.

  ‘Oh … yes … welcome, come in. I’m here since the 1970s. Swahili becomes a habit. You must be starving, will you eat?’

  This was Sr. Margaret Mary, an impressive-looking Irish Ursuline nun. She had rosy cheeks set in a face that suggested a jolly disposition; it was lightly tanned by decades spent in the African sun. She came from Thurles in Tipperary originally, and still retained something of the accent. I would discover later that she also retained the selfless generosity of spirit that had brought her to Africa as a teacher all those years ago. During my time in Kenya, she would become like an aunt to me.

  She summoned her cook in Swahili, an Akamba man of indeterminate vintage, who brought in some rice and a small bit of chicken on a bone. I was famished and I tucked in with relish after the long journey. As I gnawed on the bone, I resolved that I must make learning Swahili a priority. Sr. MM (Margaret Mary), with the curiosity of the exile, proceeded to quiz me for ages about recent events in Ireland.

  ‘I go home as often as I can, Brendan, but I hardly recognise the place anymore. I suppose this is home now.’

  That evening, Sr. MM told me about the Akamba people to whose welfare she had devoted her life. As she did so, the cook listened and nodded regularly as if to confirm her story.

  ‘It used to be the Maasai people who held sway here in this part of eastern Kenya,’ she began. ‘The Maasai were pastoralists. Their neighbours to the south, living around Mount Kilimanjaro and the Taita Hills, were the Akamba tribe. They are one of the many Bantu tribes in this part of Africa. Kitui was endowed with an abundance of wild animals such as lions and elephants, far more than there are now. The Akamba were hunters, experts at using bows and arrows. Later they became successful traders, selling ivory to the Arabs who sailed along the coast.

  Anyway, when the elephants around Mount Kilimanjaro were becoming scarcer, the Akamba coveted the land around Kitui where the Maasai lived. As the Akamba hunted the dwindling elephants stocks, they edged ever closer to Maasai territory. Eventually the two tribes clashed in a ferocious battle. The Maasai warriors relied on the spear to defend their lands; the Akamba easily overwhelmed them with their bows and arrows. The Maasai migrated south to where they live today along the Kenyan/Tanzanian border. The Akamba moved north.’

  I was getting my first lesson in the complex patterns of tribal conquest, settlement and rivalry that bedevil African affairs to this day.

  ‘There’s another darker side to the Akamba story,’ Sr. MM continued. ‘They sold ivory to the Arabs and grew prosperous while elephants were in plentiful supply. However, when the elephants in Kitui became scarcer as well, a number of the Akamba collaborated with the Swahili traders and found something else to sell to the Arabs apparently—slaves. Most of the Akamba tribe fiercely resisted those people. But that was a long time ago. Anyway, you must be tired after your travels, Brendan. You could do with a good sleep and a bit of rest before you start work at Nyumbani.’

  I slept late the next mor
ning and woke up with a slight headache. To shake it off, I went for a long exploratory stroll in the afternoon. It had rained for the first time in months in Kitui during the night. The rich earthy smell of parched soil disturbed by rain after prolonged drought is powerful and unforgettable. I breathed it in deeply as I strode along. I met people walking in groups—or was it gangs?—with axes and machetes, and I wondered were they about to murder me. I had been listening to the horror stories people told me in Ireland before I came out to Africa. I need not have worried; the axes and pangas were for nothing more sinister than clearing scrub. I greeted them, and told those who understood English that I had come to Kenya to volunteer on the Nyumbani project. I told them I came from a place where it rains all the time. They could not have been more welcoming.

  They told me joyfully I must have brought the rain from Ireland, and loved me for it. A woman beamed widely and boasted how she had set out all her seven buckets to catch the rain. It would save many a trip to the dry riverbed several kilometres away, where they dig a hole in the sand to extract groundwater. Sadly, every day after that brought cloudless skies and scorching temperatures. The longed-for late year rains in Kitui never came. In fact, no prolonged rains had occurred since the worldwide El-Niño rains of 1998—and those were so strong they washed away the soil.

  That first day, the children mobbed me and made such a hullabaloo that the local chief got one of his three wives to call me over to be introduced. He, in turn, introduced me to his ‘royal’ family who shyly shook my hand. It was not everyday that they had a visit from a tall mzungu (Swahili for white person, with some of the connotations of a derogatory term like ‘nigger’ but not really meant in a hostile way). We then had an impromptu thirty-a-side game of football with a ball made from plastic bags and string on the ‘highway,’ as they called it. In reality, it was a narrow dirt track. The children were shouting ‘how are you, one, two, three, I love you,’ over and over and over. Their parents must have taught them to say that whenever they saw a mzungu. Clearly most had no idea what they were chanting.