It is here, in Nairobi, Kenya, that I finally make amends for the egregious transgression in my cinematic choices, which I feel is incredibly appropriate. It also gives me a great excuse from now on when I have to tell people that I didn’t see The Lion King until I was in my thirties.
“Yeah, I know, it’s weird. But I didn’t want to see it until I was in Africa and could fully appreciate the emotional weight of the story’s underlying metaphors and powerful symbolism.”
My nieces insist on watching it with me before we go on our first safari. From what I can gather, a safari is supposed to be exactly like The Lion King, only more animals and less singing.
My nieces, of course, didn’t move here on their own, since seven- and nine-year-olds rarely switch continents without the express permission and accompaniment of their parents. My older sister, Tamar, moved here in July with her husband, Cam, and their daughters. Cam works for IBM, and they relocated him to Nairobi to manage the company’s projects in Africa and the Middle East. He spends most of his time on the road, often visiting places like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
They live in Runda Park, an expat community on the outskirts of the dense city center. It is a Western bubble in an African country. Inside my sister’s house, it’s impossible to tell the difference between Kenya and America. This offshoot of the Liebermann family tree has every modern amenity here. Flat-screen TVs and high-speed Internet. A maid and a gardener. A car and driver. But the similarities end there. Outside their house, security guards keep watch around the clock. The overnight watchman brings a guard dog. An electrified fence surrounds the property, and the house has its own security system.
My sister’s precautions are in no way paranoid or excessive. Every house in the community has its own electrified fence and security guards. The entire compound has an additional electrified fence and another team of security guards at each entrance. All of these guards come from one or two private companies. My sister tells us the cops won’t respond unless you offer them a bribe, so you have to make your own private security arrangements.
Karibu Kenya. Welcome to Kenya.
Traffic laws exist only so drivers can ignore them. The local buses, called matatus, resemble VW vans, yet fit as many people as London double-deckers. Rumor has it the drivers bribe cops so they have free rein on the roads. Our friends were held up at gunpoint and forced to hand over all of their money and valuables. Foreigners are pulled over and ticketed for violating mystery laws. The tickets “go away” for a sum of Kenyan shillings that the police officer finds acceptable.
This is Africa.
This is Africa. A simple phrase, often uttered with a shrug, that is supposed to both explain the continent’s problems and alleviate the tension of whoever is experiencing those problems. From broken-down buses to tribal wars, power outages to genocide, blood diamonds to famine. Why does all this happen here? This is Africa. It is almost a warning to foreigners. Keep your expectations in check. Forethought and planning be damned. Every time I hear someone utter these three words, I get the distinct feeling the continent has given up on itself.
We are the first family members to visit Tamar, and she starts crying when she sees me at the airport. She has close friends here in a tight-knit expat community, but there’s nothing quite like seeing family. We tell her all about the trip, showing her pictures of the different cities and countries we visited in Europe, while she tells us all about life in Nairobi. She has no job here but has become incredibly active with her daughters’ classes and after-school activities. We take Rachel and Kaila to school every day, and I help Tamar prepare dinner every night for the family. Since the girls have two banana trees in the backyard, I teach them to make banana bread, which becomes a staple in the house.
At some point during my time in Africa, the single most significant event of our entire trip happens. Neither Cassie nor I have any idea that something has irreversibly changed, but my body picks up a virus somewhere. I won’t show any symptoms for a few more days, but a medical time bomb has started its relentless countdown, slowly at first, picking up speed in the coming weeks. It will lead me into the hardest days of our trip and the darkest hours of my life. But I don’t know it at the time. Instead, Cassie and I settle into our surroundings on a new continent for a few days before it’s time for our very first safari.
The rain wakes us up long before my niece knocks on our door. The exact sort of downpour we’re hoping to avoid, and here it is, pounding away at Nairobi in biblical proportions. It is the “short rains” season in Kenya, but what the precipitation lacks in duration, it makes up for in unabated intensity. If this doesn’t let up, we’ll have better luck reaching the plains of the Maasai Mara in an ark. In this part of the world, it would be exceedingly easy to populate the floating wooden domicile with two of each animal. Wildlife thrives here, especially if it hasn’t been killed yet for its ivory—a chemical compound no different from human fingernails, which, for reasons that don’t make sense to my Western mind, fetches about $1,500 a pound on the black market.
But no, we will stick to our four-row, seven-seat Jeep with not one, but two spare tires. AAA hasn’t quite made it to Nairobi yet, let alone the open country outside of Kenya’s capital city, so self-sufficiency is of the utmost importance. Nairobi’s roads aren’t known for drainage or, for that matter, road markings, traffic signs, or any semblance of order. They are, by American standards, complete chaos, but they’re the only way for us to get to our destination.
The Maasai Mara is the Kenyan equivalent of Tanzania’s somewhat more famous Serengeti. They are essentially the same ecosystem, divided only by an artificial boundary between two neighboring sovereign entities. Kenya has one name for it; Tanzania has another.
We set off on our drive to the Maasai Mara in western Kenya early in the morning—or at least we’re about to until a leak renders two-thirds of the rear seats useless. One of the rivets in the roof allows a steady drip of water to seep in and drench the back seat. The subsequent splash soaks the middle seat too. Of course, this is where I’m supposed to be sitting. Evans, our driver and safari guide who looks exactly like Eddie Murphy, pulls a MacGyver and plugs the leak with a toothpick, Mentos chewing gum, and a bit of orange-and-black-patterned duct tape. This is Africa.
For two hours, we drive southwest, away from the crowds of the city and toward the packs of wildlife. Kenya doesn’t have speed limits (or at least none that are taken seriously), so they regulate the flow of traffic with speed bumps on even their largest highways. Instead of building pedestrian overpasses, people cross the streets right behind a speed bump, so drivers are at least going marginally slower in the likely event of a collision. Since, if I remember my high school physics class correctly, force equals mass times acceleration, reducing the acceleration appreciably reduces the force, which, in this case, would be taken from a solid metal vehicle and applied to a malleable human body. The human bodies are thankful for this, even if they don’t express it as often as they should. Some speed bumps are short and high, others are wide and low. Our driver hurdles these at a variety of speeds that shows no concern for the suspension of the jeep and no correlation to the size of the bumps.
We turn off onto what Evans calls “an African highway,” leaving behind the last bit of pavement we will see until the end of our safari. I can’t tell if he’s being humorous or sarcastic or both, since “African highway” apparently means crater-filled dirt road. Judging by the condition of the road, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may very well have hit somewhere along this stretch of dirt. The road into the Maasai Mara—which means “spotted plains” in the Maasai language, Maa—is considered one of the worst in Africa, which, one might assume, makes it one of the worst in the world. Evans slows down every few minutes to circumnavigate another ditch or patch of mud or overturned tractor-trailer. His expression remains unchanged. Nothing here surprises him. For us, this is a foreign world. For Evans, this is home.
Along the way, we see poverty as we have never seen it before. Even the poorest person in the poorest county in the poorest state in America wouldn’t trade places with the children we see in towns like Seyabei and Ntulele. Clean water is a luxury. Plumbing is a dream. Medicine relies more on ancient herbal remedies than modern scientific research. In one town, the hospital is connected to the butchery, which gives me unpleasant thoughts about both the surgeon’s success rate and the butcher’s filet du jour. This truly is Charles Dickens’s best-of-times-worst-of-times juxtaposition. Living in Runda Park or one of the expat communities near Nairobi is residing in luxury. Living anywhere else in the country is a daily battle with poverty.
My nieces miss the life lesson entirely, burying their attention in their iPads. The next day, mid-safari, one of them will decide seeing two cheetahs eating a zebra is boring, while I think it’s one of the most badass things I have ever seen (yes, badass is exactly the word to describe it). Instead, my niece watches Madagascar 2, passing up the real wild for the animated facsimile. Don’t get me wrong. I love animated movies, notwithstanding my failure to see one of the most famous movies of my youth, but this doesn’t feel like the time or place to watch one.
The towns, though incredibly poor, are also wonderfully colorful, and I suspect the people living in these towns are far happier than we could ever imagine ourselves to be if we found ourselves in similar conditions. The homes are bright reds and blues and yellows, made even more striking by the gorgeous countryside in the background. Upon closer examination, each home is made of a metal shipping container, which forms the largest component of the makeshift structure, with additional sheets of metal propped up to expand the living area. Some homeowners have repainted their containers Coca-Cola red or Pepsi blue, complete with each soda’s ubiquitous logo. The irony is that these families can’t even afford the products for which they offer free advertising.
Google says the drive will take four hours and five minutes. Apparently, Google has yet to visit this part of the world. After six hours on the road, we reach the entrance to the Maasai Mara. The rangers greet us in Swahili with a friendly “Jambo!” and an “Asante sana” after we pay our entrance fees.
A few years ago when Cassie was studying abroad in Mexico, her class visited a local zoo. Inside this zoo was something you would never see back home: an exhibit dedicated to squirrels. Growing up in the United States, this seems absolutely comical, but that’s purely a function of how many squirrels we have. There are few, if any, in Mexico, so the squirrels they do have become a tourist attraction. Any American visiting the zoo would laugh at both the squirrels and the people staring at the squirrels.
I suspect that’s exactly how Evans feels watching us take hundreds of pictures of zebras. Though certainly more impressive in size and stature, zebras are the African equivalent of squirrels. There are lots of them, and they’re not particularly special. They are also, unfortunately for them, at the absolute bottom of the food chain. As Evans tells us all sorts of fun facts about zebras—such as zebra stripe patterns being comparable to fingerprints that uniquely identify each one—Cassie asks, “How long do zebras live?”
Evans doesn’t hesitate. “Until the lion finds him.” Zebras hold dominion over no one. They are Animalia Soylent Green, eating grass until they are eventually recycled as fertilizer for the grass that will feed more zebras.
Within minutes of entering the Maasai Mara, we spot a black rhino in the distance. Rhinos are solitary and shy, avoiding any real interaction unless you give them a reason to charge. They avoid humans just like they avoid everything else, although our race’s propensity for slaughtering them for their horns probably hasn’t improved relations between the two species. Our rhino stands alone in a large field, slowly grazing on the grass at his feet at his own pace, oblivious to anything farther away than three feet. I say “our rhino” because no one else is around us to disrupt the moment, and we are left alone to stare at our mammalian friend enjoying his herbivorous lunch.
We have found our first of Africa’s Big Five: rhino, lion, elephant, water buffalo, and leopard. These five animals are supposed to constitute the pinnacle of safari excitement. Seeing any one of these is cause for popping open some expensive bubbly and laughing merrily at your good fortune. Instead, we simply snap a few pictures with our telephoto lenses, even though they don’t have a long enough zoom to get a really good photo of the rhino. Evans says the rhino is male. He proves to us over and over again how good his vision is, spotting animals with his eyes before we see them with binoculars.
Over the next two days, we see three more of the Big Five, as well as countless other animals that didn’t make the final cut, like cheetahs, mongooses (mongeese?), and giraffes. The leopard, however, eludes us. “You only see a leopard if the leopard wants to be seen,” Evans explains as we stare up into yet another tree, hoping to glimpse a hanging tail or animal carcass that would indicate the presence of our evasive friend. We never do, but that doesn’t stop us from basking in the breathtaking glory of the Maasai Mara.
We crisscross the wide-open plains in search of animals, and we see wildlife as we have never seen it before. There is no cage here, no veterinarians or staff to care for these animals. They are free here, coexisting in a beautiful balance of teeming life.
On the second day of our safari, we see a pride of lions fighting with a pack of hyenas over a zebra, or rather what’s left of a zebra, which consists of most of its head and one hind leg. The lions killed the zebra and are trying to figure out how much more of it they want to eat before allowing the hyenas to take over. The hyenas, which resemble the three, shall we say, “unintelligent” hyenas in The Lion King to an extent I would have thought impossible, run around in circles, occasionally trying to snatch a dismembered segment of the zebra. They really do laugh while they’re running around in geometrically nonsensical patterns, though it’s more of a mad cackle as they are being chased by lions, so the emotional gist of their elocution is probably something other than mirth. A jackal, smaller and far cuter than the other animals, tries to make off with a scrap of the meal. It is a game between the carnivores, and we have a front row seat. I ask Evans if he wants the binoculars. He politely turns me down. He is happy because we are happy. He is showing us the beauty of his homeland. The beauty of Africa.
Occasionally, we have trouble finding something other than zebras and waterbuck. Evans flags down a passing tour group, and the guides chat in Swahili for a few minutes. I’m never quite sure if they’re discussing the location of wildlife or the Kenyan soccer team’s inability to qualify for the World Cup. Then Evans smiles at us, crosses his fingers, and starts driving. Sometimes we find nothing. Sometimes we find exactly what we’re looking for.
I don’t take a picture—I take hundreds of pictures. I don’t snap a photo of a cheetah—I snap thirty. Later, as I’m looking through pictures from the safari, I find myself asking, “Did I really see this?” I never knew how much a baby elephant clings to its mother. Or how bloodshot a cheetah’s eyes look after a kill. Or how tiny a dwarf mongoose really is. You cannot know these things from textbooks or educational videos. You must see them in person to truly understand.
We see the beauty of the Maasai Mara at sunrise and sunset. We see the rains that bring the land to life, hydrating the soil and renewing the earth. We see the Kenya-Tanzania border, and the wide open plains of the Serengeti stretching to the horizon and beyond. We have lunch under a lone tree, surrounded by zebras and waterbuck and giraffes, far away from any sign of other people. We eat our prepackaged meal in the silence of the spotted plains. Sitting here at the edge of the Maasai Mara, farther from home than I have ever been and completely at peace with the world around me, I can’t help saying to myself, “This is Africa.”
This is Africa.
Chapter 7
December 25, 2013
31°42’15.5”N 35°12’21.6”E
Bethlehem, West Bank
I expected Christmas to b
e more … Christmas-y, especially here in Bethlehem. I didn’t think there would be snow or anything like that—this is the Middle East, after all—but I certainly thought there would be a much greater atmosphere of celebration and joy. But standing here in Manger Square, a few feet from the Church of the Nativity where Jesus was born (I would say a stone’s throw away, but here in the occupied West Bank, that statement has very different and far more serious implications), I am struck by one thing above all others: how many kids are selling bubble gum.
There are hundreds of them, scampering around Manger Square, greeting tourists briefly before launching into a well-rehearsed sales pitch about the minty flavor of the gum, the delightfully affordable price of a pack, and their need to sell it to maintain an adequate standard of living. I’m not sure if they practice together or if they all learned from the same teacher, because every spiel is nearly identical, from verbiage to intonation.
“Hello! Welcome to Bethlehem. Happy Christmas. Would you like some gum? One shekel. Only one shekel!”
They’re offering a really good deal. One shekel for a pack of Doublemint gum works out to about twenty-five cents for five sticks of delectable chewiness. If I have an obligation to accept a good deal, it’s certainly here in the Holy Land. You can’t get that price anywhere back home. The offer is so good that my Middle Eastern instinct to haggle doesn’t kick in immediately. If I invest in their bargain bubble gum, I could make a killing on Doublemint back in the States. I may have hated my finance classes in college, but I certainly understand the concept of buy low, sell high. The only problem is I didn’t come here to buy gum. I came here for Christmas.
Cassie and I decided a long time ago that it would be really cool to celebrate Christmas where Christianity began. Forget the fact that I don’t celebrate the holiday. That’s almost completely irrelevant. You don’t need to believe in something to sense the spirituality around it. That’s why I’m here, to see some of the most devout Christians in the world making a pilgrimage to Manger Square for the holiday. But the ratio of pilgrims to boys selling bubble gum isn’t quite what I expected. This is supposed to be a significant religious event, not a makeshift flea market. Half of the five hundred or so people here are trying to pray, focusing on the liturgy. The other half are doing everything in their power to sell bubble gum to the first half. And so there is a constant drone of prayer, competing with the annoying rattle of sales and marketing. This is, using one of those terrible puns I strive so hard to avoid, a bizarre bazaar.
The Insulin Express Page 7