I spent that day and the next in Sr. MM’s home. The day after that, she insisted on escorting me the fifty kilometres over the dusty pot-holed dirt track to Nyumbani. My headache returned. Now I blamed it on the jolting brought on by the rutted track. It was not quite the Sahara, but we were driving further and further into the desert—an arid bush landscape, inches deep with fine red dust. There were a few seashells on the ground as well, which gives one a sense of its geological antiquity. This was the time-forsaken place where I planned to be volunteering for the rest of the year. Nyumbani means ‘home’ in Swahili. It had little in common with the homes of my native Donegal, I thought as we arrived.
In the middle of this desert was a vast thousand-acre building site. This was the Village project. I could see about a dozen houses (later to be referred to as Phase I), and a number of silver corrugated iron shacks that served as offices. But what pulled me up short was the sight of maybe five hundred people in this remote place, all busy digging trenches, clearing scrub or hauling clay blocks on ox-carts. It was like a rural African version of a Lowry painting. There was not a white face to be seen. I was feeling nervous, probably for the first time. Where and how could I possibly fit in?
A local Akamba woman named Nancy was the first to introduce herself to me in Nyumbani. She was a small but fine-looking woman in her late twenties. She also had more English than nearly any other African I had met so far. More or less the first thing she said to me was,
‘Bradan (as she pronounced my name forever more), there are baboons between here and my home, big big baboons, and yesterday they took my sister’s baby when I was here, and started throwing the baby among them. Oh, my sister cried and cried.’
Nancy illustrated her cautionary tale with appropriate gestures and arm actions to go along with every sentence.
‘Then they left her baby down beside her. But they are dangerous. Be careful of the baboons, Bradan.’
It sounded like good advice! I would recall her cautionary words later.
Nancy showed me to the spartan accommodation which I would share with around ten other workers. I would be working very closely with her, as she was one of the half dozen clerks in the corrugated iron office where I was based. She was quite tiny, much smaller than the other Akamba, who themselves are closer to the height of Pygmies rather than the taller Maasai. She could be very bashful, yet she appeared every Monday morning with a brand new hairstyle. At 6”2,’ I probably resembled the BFG, loftily winking down at her to make her blush when she pretended her hairstyle was the same as the previous week’s. I found her permanently in a good mood and joking, but she took no prisoners; if a worker tried a fast one, she would go through him or her for a shortcut. She was straighter than a die, not just by African standards, mind, but by those of an older generation in Ireland.
She was incorruptible, and tireless in her work.
The next day, Thursday, my headache returned with a vengeance. I could no longer blame jet lag, altitude or jolting jeeps. I doubted if it was a side effect of the malaria tablets. It was no longer a sort of tingling sensation in the back of my head; it had morphed into a stinging pain that pulsed through my brain every time I moved. I was comparing it to something like electro-convulsive therapy without the benefit of anaesthetic.
Whatever it was, it was sapping my body of energy, levels of which were already depleted by the African sun. I was embarrassed that I was ill so soon. I knew it was my mother’s worst fear. Sr. MM picked me up the next day, Friday, to spend the weekend at her house, and I confessed my condition to her. One or two lesions had appeared on my face, and were soon proliferating. She drove me to a doctor of Indian descent in Kitui village. He seemed baffled. After boasting that he studied in London—in an attempt to impress us, I think—he prescribed three different kinds of antibiotics that I had to take over the weekend. To be sure, to be sure, to be sure, I felt like saying. They did nothing for me. At least, I was not getting any worse.
On Monday morning, I insisted on returning to Nyumbani. Nancy called in the local herbal doctor, a grey-haired mzee called Mutinda. It was not very encouraging to be told he had a good reputation for healing sick animals. Hocus pocus, I was thinking. He appeared as I was sitting disconsolately on the step at the house. He muttered things in English that I did not take in, because I was wondering how he had acquired his shiny gold tooth. He had a gentle face, though, and a confident manner. He was a respected elder and community leader. Just as another electric shock buzzed through me, he promptly disappeared.
‘Am I cured now, Nancy?’ I asked, straining to be funny, and trying to disguise my fears.
She was throwing the bones left over from our lunch to the hungry pups.
‘Ah, no Bradan, wait, wait.’
She chuckled at the silly mzungu thinking himself cured.
Soon Mutinda returned with an off-white liquid mix in a wooden container and spread it on my cheeks and around my face.
‘It is a mixture of aloe vera, water, sugar, and garlic. Good, good, good,’ Mutinda enlightened me in a soft gravelly voice as he proceeded to smear it over my upper torso. By now, there were half a dozen spectators. My pale Irish body was a terrific source of interest, even amusement, to them all.
‘Were you in Nairobi?’ Mutinda asked.
I told him I had stayed with the Kiltegan Fathers in Nairobi the night I arrived off the plane.
‘It’s a Nairobi fly, yes; what’s it known as in English … a … a ladybird, yes. It walked along your face as you slept and urinated here and here and here.’
He touched the lesions on my face. Of all the African beasts that exist or that had starred in my parents’ imaginations, the creature that felled me turned out to be a ladybird!
Whether it was the delayed effect of the antibiotics, or Mutinda’s magic mix, I will never know, but within a few hours I started to feel slightly better. Later I discovered that every tribe has their own tried and tested herbal remedies made from roots and plant-leaves. There are cures for more or less every ailment (except the big one, of course—AIDS, which one dubious theory claims began when a man in the Congo had sex with a monkey). And here is the crux of one of Africa’s problems. They are beginning to lose these effective herbal remedies, but have only limited access to Western medicine. In essence, many African tribes are losing the best of their indigenous ways, but have yet to gain the benefits of Western ways in areas like medicine.
You always feel a lot better when you realise you are not going to die, at least not yet! Thanks to Mutinda’s remedy, I was feeling well enough the next night for some serious socialising. An affable twenty-one year old mechanic, Kimanze, had offered to take me to a hostelry in Kwa Vonza village. He thought himself quite the cool boy, did Kimanze. He had a wide mischievous smile, and darker skin more akin to the Luo tribe, and not the lighter hue of his own Akamba people. He had borrowed a motorbike, and he carried me and two of his African friends into the night, travelling at ten kilometres an hour—without the benefit of headlights. Later, when I told my Irish friends about four of us on a motorbike, they were incredulous. It can be done, but I would not recommend it!
Under a clear night sky, brilliant with stars, we suddenly came upon a security checkpoint. Two stroppy-looking policemen were pointing Kalashnikovs at us. Kimanze negotiated on our behalf. In this sticky situation, he opted for bribery rather than blarney, and asked me to pay the police the equivalent of five euro so they would let us all go. It is a fair amount for a policeman there. Forget South Armagh, I thought, this place is real Bandit Country.
That night was my first experience of a Kenyan pub, in the tiny village that is Kwa Vonza, about fifteen kilometres from Nyumbani. The pub was a remarkable place, a fifteen-foot square shack, but with the grand name of ‘The Paradise Hotel.’ It was lit by a single glowing tilly-lamp. There were two dogs scratching themselves in the middle of the concrete floor, and a few old men chewing miraa (a foul tasting legal African narcotic) on the shaky, plain wooden benc
hes. There were not any women, and the only choice of beverage was between a warm bottle of Guinness and an equally warm bottle of Tusker beer. Nothing else at all. The ‘toilets’ consisted of relieving oneself against the outside wall in the dark. Oh, and there were constant requests from the Africans for the rich mzungu to buy a round—which cost the equivalent of five euro for the whole house.
That particular night, one drunk had a call of nature and stepped on a snake. He was in screaming agony until a ‘black stone’ was brought.
‘It will suck the poison out,’ Kimanze explained.
A ‘black stone’ is a rare form of sedimentary rock that, when placed over a bite, will absorb the snake poison from the blood. Nearly every home has one in these parts, but it must be thrown out after having been used once.
‘Welcome to Kitui!’ Kimanze proclaimed, watching me view this process with fascination.
I stayed in his home that night—a round, thatched mud-hut of one, virtually furniture-less, room that was lit by a paraffin hurricane lamp. Boy, these Africans have nothing, I was thinking. I would discover in the year ahead how this was true only in a superficial sense. I had been in Africa for a week and I had a lot to learn.
The four of us squeezed into two single beds, malarial mosquitoes buzzing incessantly as I drifted off to sleep.
My head was teeming with impressions of my first extraordinary week in Africa. If my mother could see me now! My final thought before losing consciousness was of the headline if it ever made the Donegal News: ‘Letterkenny man laid low in Africa by a ladybird.’
CHAPTER 2
A DAY AT THE OFFICE
(LIKE NO OTHER … )
THE DIRECTOR OF THE NYUMBANI Village Project was a commanding figure. An architect from the Kikuyu tribe, Kiragu was a man in his early fifties, quite tall, with a shaven head and mobile features that suggested a quick intelligence, imagination and resourcefulness. He welcomed me to his humble office with a warm smile and, in perfect Queen’s English, acquainted me with what the Nyumbani Project was all about.
Speaking with passion, he began by outlining the devastation wrought by AIDS in Kenya and throughout Africa. There was (at that time) something like twelve million children orphaned by the pandemic across the Continent. In some Nairobi slums, the infection rate was close to 40 per cent. Kenya was facing an appalling crisis.
‘Nyumbani Village is our response to the pandemic’ he explained. ‘We want to establish a model settlement for HIV-AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. If we succeed, others can go down the same road. When we are up and running, we plan to house and nurture 1,000 orphans as well as their elderly guardians—in most cases their destitute grandparents. You see, Brendan, the middle generation of parents has died from AIDS; we refer to them as “the lost generation.”’
He became very animated when he got down to the details of the scheme.
‘The Village will include about 150 homesteads, a health clinic, a nursery, a primary school, industrial production and training centres, a multi-purpose community hall, a worship centre, a police post, and a guesthouse.’
I could tell that the man was a visionary. As well as the administrative centre and the necessary infrastructure, he was already looking ahead to providing an ecological management centre and recreational spaces. Glancing out the window at the primitive building site, I could not help but feel that Kiragu was a bit of a dreamer, maybe; but this proud Kikuyu was also one of the most thoroughly inspiring people I met in Africa.
‘The whole project,’ he continued, ‘will have to respect our African culture and traditions. We would hope to create a strong social fabric among the villagers themselves, and between the village and the existing population of the area. Nyumbani is labour intensive, and there will be a lot of employment. We hope to train people in useful and traditional skills such as woodwork and woodcarving. There’s a market out there. We already employ around 500 local men and women in a place with no other employment opportunities at all. We will be progressive too. Women will hold many leadership positions, just as they already do in the development of it right now, which—as you probably know—is unusual for Africa.’
Kiragu was wearing a sleeveless jacket and waved his arms a lot as he spoke, as if expending some of his boundless energy. He pushed a folder of documents and plans across the table. With this visionary at the helm, I felt, this dream might just come true. Having drawn breath momentarily, he was off again.
‘One of the major principles in the Nyumbani village concept is self-sustainability. This can be achieved on our 1,000-acre commercially viable organic farm. We will grow subsistence food, cash crops, and medicinal plants. Much can be done through using solar energy. Water for irrigating the farm will be sourced from the construction of dams, boreholes and wells. You’ll have noticed that the work has already begun.’
Through the office window, I could see hundreds and hundreds of busy people scurrying around like ants, heavy loads being moved by ox-carts, and lines and lines of workers digging foundations and irrigation trenches. I was looking at the biggest building site I had ever seen. Kiragu attracted my attention again and said, almost pleadingly,
‘We are desperate for an accountant here, Brendan. Can you start right away?’
He told me that anyone from Kitui District who qualifies as an accountant moves straight to Nairobi, and never returns. It would be impossible to persuade any educated Kenyan to live at Nyumbani unless they were paid extortionate amounts of money. And that, in short, is how I became the management accountant of the whole Village project.
On later occasions, my initially favourable impressions of Kiragu were confirmed. In conversation with him, the simplest thing would spark him into a mesmerising monologue. A vague idea would turn into a detailed plan as his thoughts poured from him, perfectly articulated. He was a good listener too. I told him about self-help projects in Ireland and he listened intently. He was fascinated when I described how the setting up of Credit Unions in rural Ireland helped so many ordinary families to take advantage of developments in the country during the 1960s.
Kiragu’s vision and effortless inspiration added fuel to my innate enthusiasm for volunteering.
Over the next few days, I acquainted myself with the systems in place. My immediate challenge was simple: the faster I could make the project run, the more costs I would manage to save, the more homesteads would be built, and the more people would live there. Who would have imagined that all that auditing and management accounting I had studied at college would actually be so useful so soon? From the start I was immediately stimulated, and threw myself at it, becoming a real part of the management of the project.
Everything was being constructed by hand. There was practically no machinery because there would be nothing to run it on. Most wells were developed by men lowering themselves fifty feet or more down into a dark hole using an ordinary rope tied onto something, anything, even a nearby tree. Then it was a matter of chip, chip, chipping away with a hammer and chisel—some wells could be more than one hundred feet deep. None of the labourers ever thought to ask for safety equipment, not even a helmet. At least, we did not have the crazy scaffolding consisting of tree branches of all shapes that are lashed to buildings several stories high that you see around Nairobi. Health and Safety means something different in Africa.
One of my first tasks in September was counting a month’s wages in cash for 500 people. I was counting over one million Kenyan shillings in total, one note at a time. One shilling is known as ‘a bob,’ twenty shillings is termed ‘a pound’—a throwback to British rule—and ninety shillings roughly equalled a euro. The average Nyumbani wage was the equivalent of two-euro per day, an excellent wage for Kitui, or indeed anywhere in Kenya. Even to have steady waged employment is rare enough.
A mêlée very nearly erupted that first week because the wages were very late. Apprehension was increasing, understandably so. Delay meant the workers’ children could go hungry, and they could not buy
seeds to take advantage of the rains that were due and expected any day soon. However, Nancy and I were finally handing out notes to people as they entered our tiny tin office. Towering over us were two burly men with Kalashnikovs, and another two were standing guard outside the door. I found out later they were special military police with shoot-to-kill orders if anybody caused trouble.
The house where I was staying was only a few hundred yards away. It was one of the spartan village homesteads that had been constructed with clay blocks and roofed with red corrugated iron sheets. I shared it with a fluctuating number of Project workers who lived on-site, three of us to a room. It became congested at times. We were the dozen or so non-locals: the Kikuyus, the Luos, the mzungu, the Nairobi professionals. We tended to work in management, or were otherwise required to be permanently on-site.
I was glad to discover that there was at least one other mzungu living there, a Rasta from Munich named Leo. He was equally delighted to see me. I think he had been going a bit out of his mind in the previous month in Nyumbani because there had not been another Westerner to see things as he did. Leo had dreadlocks to his shoulders; he had a proper goatee but was generally unshaven. He dressed raggedly, yet was the stereotypical German in so many of his mannerisms. Despite his bedraggled appearance, he was very logical and very methodical. He was a kind of living paradox. The Rasta exterior concealed an orderly German soul.
‘The African way of doing things is so unlike the German way,’ he complained.
Leo possessed that element of fun that Bavarian people have; he was fond of a beer as well as the occasional joint to relax him when things proved too much. He had been going round the bend of late because his name sounded like the Swahili word for ‘today,’ and he was forever thinking people were calling him over or talking about him. He was already a good friend of Kimanze, as they worked closely together in trying to build an irrigation system in the sterile land that is Nyumbani. He possessed a restless energy.
No Hurry in Africa Page 2