I cry over my hurting legs as I walk home and wait for my mother. When she sees what has happened, she is furious. The next morning we wake up very early and she takes me by the hand back to the school, where I watch her yell at the teacher, saying that she cannot do this to a little boy. I am grateful, but I do think it is a little funny, because my mother has done this very thing before.
Early one Saturday morning my mother sends my brother to buy mandazi, the Kenyan doughnuts we all love. He is taking forever to come back, and eventually I walk over to the factory where they make the doughnuts to ask if anyone has seen a small boy. The man tells me they’ve seen a lot of small boys this morning, so how is he supposed to know which one I’m talking about?
I go home and my mother sends me to the mandazi store, where I ask the same question. “Have you seen a little boy who came in to buy six mandazi?” They also tell me the place has been full of little boys!
My mother is starting to get very worried, and a few hours later she calls her friend, who tries to calm her down. At midday, when Muriithi still isn’t back, my mother gets a group of friends together to start looking for him. We also go to the police station, where my mother cries as she begs the officers to help her.
All day we search for Muriithi, but we cannot find him. That evening, we come back home and everyone stands in the house praying together for his return. As we are praying, we see Muriithi walking slowly up to the house, leaning on a stick. He seems exhausted and says that he had been taken and beaten by bad men. My mother is very worried but begins thanking God again and again. She gives Muriithi a bath and some food and we all go to bed. My mother doesn’t stop praising God for his safe return.
A few weeks later one of our cousins comes to visit. After we greet one another and give her some tea, she asks how Muriithi is doing. We didn’t think she had heard about what happened, so we are confused why she is asking. Then she explains that one Saturday several weeks back she found Muriithi asleep in the town’s stadium. He told her he was tired and not feeling well and that he had stayed in the stadium all day.
Later that night Muriithi tells my mother the truth. After he bought the mandazi doughnuts that Saturday morning, he lost the ten shillings in change he received. He was scared of my mother’s reaction—the last time he lost change, she beat him badly—and decided to pretend that he was kidnapped and beaten.
My mother listens calmly and tells him she is sad he lied, but he doesn’t need to do what he did. “If anything ever happens to you, you shouldn’t worry,” she says. “We are a family, and you can come back and we can always talk about things. Yes, there might be consequences, but I would never do anything really bad to you.”
My mother doesn’t get a new job, but over the next few years she does get new friends. These are people I have never met before, and some of them are very pretty. They dress very well and always look good in their short skirts. Around this time, my mother starts getting male friends as well.
I remember her first one, Boniface. He seems to always be in our house, especially on Friday nights. The first Friday night that he comes, he doesn’t leave when we go to bed, and on Saturday morning he is still there. When we get up, he gives us money to go buy Blue Band, the margarine we love, and bread and tea. It is the best breakfast we have had in a long time, and we don’t think anymore about where he slept the night before.
We all adore Boniface. Muriithi especially loves him, and that’s when he decides to take his name. Since that day everyone but me has always called my brother Boniface.
One day Boniface comes by with a car and teaches my mother how to drive. Another day he comes and brings us mandazi doughnuts. On a different day he gives us twenty shillings each, and we could not be happier. But then Boniface stops coming, and my mother doesn’t say what has happened to him.
After Boniface leaves, there is another man, Jimmy, who I don’t like at all. One Monday morning I oversleep and don’t wake up in time for school. I am in the second or third grade at the time, and when I do finally wake up, I see that Muriithi is already gone. My mother, who tells us she has to leave at night now to go do the work she has found, still isn’t home. I take a shower in the yard in a bucket, as usual, and am getting ready for school when I realize how late it is. Given the time, I decide not to bother with school, and instead I leave the house and spend the day walking around the streets, not wanting to go home in case my mother finds me there.
I am waiting for Muriithi to get out of school so I can walk home with him and my mother will think I have been in school, when I run into Jimmy on the streets. He asks how I am and then asks after my mother. I tell him she is good and that she went to work the night before.
When I say that she went to work, his face falls. I don’t know what that means, as I thought work was a good thing, but then Jimmy asks if I want a soda. He buys me one—and a piece of cake!—and I eat it all up so happily. Meanwhile, he walks over to the phone booth nearby and puts some coins in. When the person on the other end of the line picks up, I hear him start singing a famous Swahili song, and then he hangs up.
When I am done with my soda, I thank Jimmy and go home.
At home, I find Muriithi already there, and he immediately asks where I have been. “I was in school,” I lie. “I just stayed in the classroom so you didn’t see me.” But he doesn’t believe me and tells me he came to the classroom to check. “I was in school!” I swear in a louder voice.
When my mother comes home, she also asks me questions. “Where were you today?”
I tell her the same thing I told Muriithi and expand on my story. “We had math, we had English, and all the other classes.”
Then she tells me her friend Jimmy called her. “Why were you with him?” she asks. I tell her I met him on the way home, but she doesn’t believe me. “Sammy, he said he saw you before school got out. Did you go to school today?”
I don’t know what to say, and so I finally tell the truth.
She gets a pipe and tells me to lie down. She hits me with two strokes on my backside. I don’t have pants on, and it hurts very badly. She gives me another two strokes, and then two more. Then she tells me to never, never skip school again.
Since that day I have never skipped school.
The first time my mother is jailed, she spends two days there. She tells the police it’s not her fault and that if they don’t believe her they can go talk to her husband. “If you want to speak to him, you can go to his grave,” she says.
They let her go.
Then she is jailed a second time, this time for four days.
One morning I wake up and my mother hasn’t come home from whatever work she does at night. We go to school as usual, though, and there is a big footrace for all the students. I win the race that day, and they give me an orange jacket as a prize. It is a little too big for me, but I am happy.
After school, Muriithi and I go to pick up our sister from the nursery and then go home. We watch TV until the lights turn off. That is when we realize that our mother must not have paid the light bill. But the jacket they gave me at school came with a candle inside! So we use it to get ready for bed. And even though we go to bed that night without eating and aren’t sure where our mother is, finding that candle makes me feel that God is up there looking out for us.
The next day, since we have no food in the house, we ask to borrow food from the shop near our house.
We are worried about our mother and don’t know what is happening, so we stay home from school. For three days we stay home, waiting for the lights, borrowing food from the shop, and looking for our mother. On the fifth day our mother comes back, and we are so glad to see her we want to cry. She tells us what happened, but I don’t understand her words, and I only hear when she congratulates us that we thought to borrow food. We feel smart and happy.
I know things are getting hard for my mother when she starts staying up all night, asking me to sit and pray with her, putting our hands on the Bible. The w
orst days are the days when the landlord comes around asking for payment. Sometimes she hides. “Tell him I’m not in the house,” she says. And we say she is gone.
Every now and then I see my mother crying for no reason. Even though we are hungry, I am glad we are together.
One Tuesday night we are all sitting together with our hands on the Bible, praying. Even my four-year-old sister’s hands are on the book as my mother says that she has finally found a good job in the capital city of Nairobi. She is leaving the next day, she tells us.
The capital! I am amazed. We cannot contain our happiness. I truly believe we have never felt so happy. All our problems will go away! We can go to school every day without getting kicked out and eat every night!
After she tells us she will leave tomorrow, she mentions that she will be visiting us every Wednesday. We are so thrilled that this doesn’t register with us. We don’t ask how we are going to live by ourselves, or feed ourselves, or do everything without her throughout the whole week.
The next day she leaves early in the morning, and we go to school as normal.
That first Wednesday she leaves us with two hundred shillings, and that first Thursday we use one hundred shillings without thinking. And then on Friday, like normal kids, we waste the other one hundred shillings. On Saturday we don’t have any more money, but we don’t worry because she is coming back on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, though, she doesn’t come.
When we start to get worried, we tell ourselves that maybe she couldn’t come for some reason, but she will be back the next Wednesday.
It is only one week more, we say to ourselves.
By the next Wednesday our mother still hasn’t returned, and our neighbors begin to ask us, “What’s happened? Where’s your mother?”
We say, “Oh, she has work in Nairobi, but she’ll be back next Wednesday.” We say it again and again and again to everyone who asks.
But she never shows up. Not once does my mother ever again appear.
Claire
Chapter 2
By the time I finally got to Africa, I had the notion that I already knew her. Years of thumbing through thick memoirs and ratty guidebooks extolling her magic had given me the sense that I understood the secrets held in her heavy air and fierce green trees. But when I did arrive and saw how the red dirt seeps into you in ways that will never leave, I realized, of course, that I never knew anything at all.
But this story is getting ahead of me.
First there was Mexico.
I went to Mexico because a bad book told me to.
While spending six months studying in Italy during college, I developed a perhaps unnatural love for a particular bookstore and frequented the place on a near daily basis. One day a colorful book about Mexico caught my eye, and I bought it without even reading the back cover.
Months later I began to read. The book chronicled the story of a middle-aged Californian couple’s experiences living south of the border. Lots of typically quirky things happened that I found mildly inane. They had trouble with contractors. They started talking to each other in Spanish. They learned to love the local dogs. Although I found little common ground with the writer, I made the decision to go.
It would take two years to tie up loose ends—friends, family, and school—in California, and I looked forward to the change.
I had been born and raised in Northern California’s Berkeley and had spent my high school years at the enormous Berkeley High School, where the drug deals that took place in first period, and the bathroom monitors who ensured we didn’t use our bathroom breaks to add to the school’s virulent problem with arson, always ran in sharp contrast to my summers spent at a placid Christian camp. College at Stanford University was another shock to my system, and I remember stopping in wonder when I heard the rumor shortly after arriving that each of the hundreds of palm trees dotting Stanford’s Palm Drive had cost the university fifty thousand dollars to fly in from a far-off place.
I loved the incredible academic environment and opportunities at Stanford fiercely, and when I finished my undergraduate studies in just under three years, I decided to stay on for four to complete a master’s degree and graduate with my dear friends and boyfriend. In the process, though, I pushed myself too hard by doubling up on classes and holding two part-time jobs, and for more than a year I was ill. An autoimmune disorder appeared to be the culprit, leading me to sleep thirteen hours a day and regularly retreat from the world with unbearable migraines.
I longed for a place and time where my life could come to a standstill—at least for a while. I want to be bored, I said.
By going too fast for too long, I had worn myself out and knew that I needed to make a drastic change to attempt to begin anew. Somehow I felt that by physically leaving California, I could give myself the space to find open air again. I needed to breathe.
The month before I left, another book invaded. This time I specifically remembered a particular Mexican travelogue I had read years ago, and I went hunting for it to learn more about this country I was off to. When I found it, in a dark and smelly section of a California library, I could tell it was the exact copy I had taken out years before. As I opened it, the first sentence startled me. It really wasn’t even mildly jarring, but I can be a little too excitable. “There are only two ways to get to San Miguel,” it read.
I had already decided to move to San Miguel.
One month later my plane lands in Mexico, and although I had attempted to pack light, the number of add-ons to my luggage had grown enormously in the past few weeks. As I drag my suitcases through customs, the official asks me what a muffin tin is doing sticking out of the side of my bag. Fatigued from two days of travel—a remarkable feat considering it should have been only a four-hour flight—I look at him quizzically. “It won’t fit,” I explain.
The airport shuttle is full of American tourists coming to San Miguel for various purposes. A woman behind me explains she had a midlife crisis at twenty-seven and became a flight attendant so she could spend all her weekends in San Miguel instead of Philadelphia. An overweight woman in town for a wedding explains the upcoming procedure she will have when she returns to Texas—something one step short of a gastric bypass. An L.A. comedian is here to study with a prominent teacher of humor.
When they ask what I am doing here, I explain as vaguely and as well as I can. “I am moving here,” I say.
“Really?” they ask, intrigued. “Why?”
“I’m not entirely certain,” I say, and then the questions come screaming in like those of other people’s parents at a bad college graduation party. What will you do? Where will you live? How long will you stay? The comedian discusses what an inspiring thing it is to pack up and just go somewhere, and she begins talking about a book she read on some woman who moved to Africa at the turn of the century.
I want to tell her that I have read nearly every book that exists about Western women who run off to live in Africa, and every single one of those women had something strong in them that I do not have. Instead, I say simply, “I am not that person.”
The thin roads wind in and out of the hills, and I massage my wrists to keep the nausea at bay. I know little about San Miguel de Allende, but what I do know has much to do with the strange international crowd it has coerced into living there. It is a favorite artsy getaway for expatriates, and the American population has soared in recent years thanks to a large expat retiree community.
But I am not coming to San Miguel to retire. Instead, I am coming to work as an anthropologist with international volunteers at an organization that has offered me a cubbyhole to try out a new model I developed in graduate school. In the particular field I study, I am interested in international volunteer programs, where Westerners embark on excursions to save the world only to realize along the way that they are learning far more from the experience than the locals, who are often confused about why the Westerners came in the first place.
This is the premis
e of my work: very little can be accomplished in short-term English teaching programs (which usually involve unqualified teachers) and passing-out-toothbrush health programs (which usually involve unqualified health workers). Instead, the way to enact true social change in the world is to acknowledge that the biggest impact at work is often not in the conversational English skills or hygiene needs of the local populations but rather in the volunteer’s own transformation. If it was really all about the locals, after all, many times we’d be much better off sending our money to organizations that employ locals on the ground to do the English teaching and the health work.
However, by having one cross-cultural experience, then another and another, these volunteers—if given the right tools to recognize the importance of what they themselves are actually learning—have a good chance of one day doing something that can hopefully make things a little better. The volunteer’s value to the local is not in that single three-month stint building a church or two but in the possibility that those three months can transform the volunteer into someone who gives for life. My work is about helping organizations see this and making their programming more sustainable in the process.
In Mexico, I hope to use these skills.
I will always remember the moment when I realize the van has crossed into San Miguel. Still rubbing my wrists to stave off nausea, I watch the flight attendant point excitedly down a mediocre-looking street and say something monumental like, “That is where I lived for four months!” Meanwhile, I am looking around and thinking that this place is not at all what I had been envisioning. The streets seem too small, nothing looks very charming, and there is a lot of unnecessary, suspiciously Mexican-looking dust. I had planned for several years to come here, and I am now officially underwhelmed.
To add to matters, my carefully carved-out professional plan lasts exactly eleven days. Long enough to determine that the organization I had hoped to work at is a mess of interpersonal politics I do not want to be anywhere near. I’ll find other places to use this work over the years, but not in Mexico.
Hope Runs Page 2