by Kirsten Koza
“I’ll find a key,” Simon shouts, and he runs back inside.
The air is humid. I lean on the side of the shed and drag myself around it. Movement is essential. Hold, sphincter, hold! There is a field of grass. It is dark. A mosque rises above the wood shacks that surround the field. It is illuminated and ostentatious. Its crisp clean spires rise towards the black heavens. The cars and voices of the city beyond the clinic are barely audible. I look to the sky. Bubbles below. There is no strength remaining. Simon has not returned in time. The bus will soon leave. All is lost. There is no hope. I can hold no more.
The lights of the mosque cast deep shadows on the grass. They flicker and shake. Holy crap, it’s everywhere. Everywhere. “Simon,” I groan. “I…I didn’t make it.” Simon, who had obtained the key, sees my predicament and sprints back inside. It is me and the wind.
I look around and take inventory of the situation: my pants cast off a couple feet to my right—my boxers inside them. I have my favorite tan polo on top and nothing on my bottom. I crawl over to my trousers and dig through the pockets to get my phone and wallet and keys. It’s tricky. There is much to avoid. I hear a sound. I look up.
A woman in a hijab stands five feet away. We make eye contact and both freeze. A couple seconds go by.
It’s unclear how long she has been standing here but it doesn’t take long to deduce that this is her yard. In calculating my next move, I consider the situation as she must see it. To her, I am a naked cursing white man crawling in and around his own shit just outside of a perfectly suitable bathroom. She sees a pale white ass gleaming in the darkness and smells a damp combo of fecal matter and Old Spice deodorant—If your grandpa hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t be alive!
I defer the first move to the woman. A few more seconds of silence, and then she makes her play, a high-pitched and extended shriek, “AAHAAAAHHAWAAR! AAAWWTTSAAAA!”
I stand, exposing a horrifying segment more of my pale frame. The shriek morphs into words but they are not in English.
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry,” I sputter, throwing myself into a crouch.
She doesn’t let up.
Her little girls come out, all in hijabs. They cover their mouths and giggle. The woman continues to scream
I cover myself. “It was an accident! Can’t you see!?”
A horn honks on the other side of the clinic. There goes the bus. There go all of my belongings, again. The screaming continues. Another woman comes out and adds her screams. Outnumbered, I retreat into my own head and think of a time, weeks in the future, when (unless I get deported) this will be an amusing memory.
Simon rounds the latrine in a full sprint. He has his bag. He has my bag.
He evaluates the situation and dives into his backpack for some jeans. “Put these on!” He hurls them my way. I wrestle into them. The waistband is huge. It slips down around my ass but, still, one dignity is reclaimed.
Simon assumes a power stance directly between the woman and me. He speaks a calm confident Swahili. I cower behind him. I don’t want to make eye contact with anybody so I stare at the ground, but then I have to look at the shit that is between my feet because in my terror it didn’t occur to me to move. I have a firm grip on each side of the jeans. Now a girl, maybe fifteen, emerges from the house. She looks at the ground around me, then at my skin, then places her hand on her hips.
“Hey! Where you from?” she demands in English. She pops her hips to the left.
I don’t respond.
“Hey! I’m talkin’ to you. Where are you from?”
“The U.S.,” I mumble. I can’t just ignore her. I did, after all, just take a shit in her yard.
“Is this what you do in America? Huh? You just go around and feces in other people’s yard?”
I stare blankly at her. The scent of digested goat-ugali-bean-banana begins to waft outward. Simon and the mother continue to do battle in Swahili on the side.
“Huh? Is that what you do over there? Well, welcome to Africa, welcome to Kenya, we don’t do that here.” She is quite pleased with herself. She’s doing that thing with her hand where you twist your wrist in a circle, and then thrust the hand out towards the victim, palm first. She does that repeatedly. Her other hand, the left one, still rests on her hip.
I try to explain that in fact we don’t feces in other people’s yards in America, that this was an honest mistake, that I’m on a trip to visit some motherfucking kids we sponsor to go to school, thank you very much, but I only get about five words in before Simon turns and glares and warns me not to speak to her.
The father comes out. “Mzungu!” he booms. “Sit. Down!”
I obey, terrified.
“Don’t sit down,” yells Simon. “Do. Not. Sit. Down!”
“MZUNGU! SIT, DOWN!” yells the man again. He has positioned himself opposite to me.
“NO!” yells Simon. I’m in a partial squat. I maintain a firm grip on the sides of my pants.
The dad demands a thorough cleaning of the entire impact zone. Simon scrambles to find a receptacle and I just half stand there, mute, surrounded. After an eternity, Simon returns from the clinic with a yellow plastic grocery bag. He throws it to me. On knees, I begin with the pants and the underwear. The belt is still salvageable, but there is no time. Christ, this smells bad. All of it goes in the bag. Then it’s on to the real stuff, no denim to shield my hand this time. I hold my breath and go for it: grab, throw, grab, throw. The rabble around me is furious. It is not clean enough.
The father aggressively shakes his head. He bellows something at Simon, and Simon runs off and brings back a stick. “I’ll dig, you shovel,” he says, and he repeatedly jabs his stick into the impact zone. I scrape up the stick’s end products with my now-black right hand and toss everything into the bag. Stab, dig, stab, dig. I’m ripping up grass. No remains.
The shouting hasn’t abated. “What about there?!” yells the English-speaking girl. “Hapa. Hapa. HAPA!”
It’s all in the bag. Lights flicker from the mosque. I can hear my heart beat.
Curious onlookers materialize out of the darkness. Now there are a dozen more spectators. Simon explains and explains. I keep hearing the world “polezi.” I keep hearing big numbers followed by “shilingi.” The 15-year-old continues to spit sassy vitriol. She keeps using “feces” as a verb. This irks me.
Her anger turns to Simon. “This is the man you choose to be your role model in Kenya? Him?” She looks disgusted. “Maybe you should make better choices about who you hang around with, don’t you think?”
Simon remains stoic. He appears to be making progress in his negotiation. The conversation becomes more subdued. No longer will they call the police. Then no longer do they want money. Mostly now they just want me out of their sight. The breakthrough, I learned, resulted from the culturally prominent tribal structure of Kenya. They were speaking Kikuyu amongst themselves, and Simon responded in kind. They could work with him.
Simon turns around. “Let’s go.”
I follow without saying a word. I hear the voice—that goddamn girl’s voice behind me. “What? You’re not even gonna say thank you? That’s real polite.”
I mumble a “thank you” and trudge behind Simon into the clinic. Everyone inside knows. Everyone stares. The bloated yellow bag swings in the grip of my black, crusted hand.
The town is dead except for the glue fiends and the corn salesmen. We walk in silence at the side of the road. Cats and rats dig through garbage. We walk. What am I going to do with my bag? What are we going to do?
“Simon,” I mumble, “I don’t, I don’t really know what to say. I owe you so many Tuskers. I’m sorr—”
“You owe me nothing. It was an accident. You are my brother.”
We walk in silence some more.
“Simon, why didn’t you want me to sit down?”
“Why should you sit down? You did nothing wrong. Why should you be shamed like that?”
There are a good many reasons why I ought to have been shamed like that, but I just nod and smile. At this point I have known Simon for around ten days. He’s been wonderful to me. I have done nothing in return. I may have bought him a few Tuskers here and there to even the score, but already the scales were so tipped in his favor. It’s the sort of generosity for which forward payment, as opposed to individual repayment, is required.
We decide the best thing to do is just to find some way to get home, back to Nanyuki, back to Wama, back to a place we know. Simon spots a private matatu across the street.
The minibus driver, a man with a flat cap, a cigarette, and a black leather jacket, nods at us.
His voice is a Freeman-esque legato. “There’s a shower in that hotel over there. I’ll wait outside.”
The hotel owner sees me and the bag. He understands. He directs me to a corrugated metal shack, not unlike the pit latrine. I enter dirty. I emerge clean.
The owner laughs. “Karibu Isiolo,” he yells happily as Simon and I walk away into the night. “You’re welcome back any time.”
The cab is waiting outside. Simon goes to find some gin, and I take a seat on the right hand side behind the driver. He strikes a match and the interior of the matatu glows orange. His silhouette deepens. Distant mad cries outside heighten the empty silence inside. He lights his cigarette, takes a drag, and then cigarette in hand, rests his right arm on the open windowsill. He exhales. His breath is slow and deep and thoughtful.
“My friend,” he asks, “where did it all go wrong?”
Andrew Schwartz recently worked for a small CBO in Kenya during his gap year. His writing experience consists of such works as “In-N-Out Burger and the American Dream” and “Fear and Loathing in Suquamish” for his high school newspaper.
MELANIE HAMLETT
I Had a Passion for the Christ
She wasn’t a Jesus freak until she freaked for Jesus.
AS 50 OTHER TOURISTS AND I ENTERED THE CAVE, A MAN DRESSED IN A pharaoh’s outfit handed us each a cracker and a teeny-tiny wooden cup of grape juice, which looked like a shot glass from biblical times. It was The Last Supper and we’d be breaking bread with Jesus himself in T-minus five minutes.
I wasn’t Christian and I didn’t believe in Jesus anymore, but I thought it might be kind of fun to visit the Christian-themed amusement park in Orlando, Florida. One of my favorite things to do is immerse myself in a culture that I usually make fun of in order to understand it better. I figured spending the day with Bible thumpers at a Jesus amusement park might help me see religious folks in a new light.
After exploring Noah’s Ark, which had nothing but a cardboard cut-out of Jesus and an arcade game, I took a stroll through a giant plastic purple whale, where I found my man, Jonah, floating around. I tried to show off my vocals at “Celebrate Jesus Karaoke,” but people didn’t respond well to my performance of the only non-gospel tune in the book, “I Believe I Can Fly.” I even endured a frighteningly patriotic show, the only one at Holy Land not based on a Bible story, called “The God Bless America Show,” and applauded along with the crowd as the man in uniform on stage proudly announced he didn’t mind being crippled for the rest of his life because getting shot in war was God’s will for him.
At first it felt disrespectful being a non-believer among all these good Christian men and women, like a Russian spy wandering around the Pentagon. But then it occurred to me I’d always felt this way. Even as a kid I thought Jesus was a load of crap. Sure, I’d attended Sunday school, prayed a lot, and sung in the church choir through my sophomore year in high school, but only to make my mom happy.
As soon as I hit sixteen, though, I decided to do what I darn well pleased, mostly drugs. While all my peers spent Sunday mornings studying the Bible in church, I was always hot-boxing a joint in the parking lot or rummaging through the church kitchen with a bad case of the munchies. My mom finally dropped her good-Christian-daughter agenda after I was busted drinking and smoking on a choir tour and sent home in a van two days early. Here I was though, a non-believer standing in a cave elbow to elbow with a crowd of Gentiles.
Once the disciple guy finished his little speech, Jesus entered the stage, cave left. I’d expected him to be the typical, distorted white version of Jesus from my childhood, or maybe even the Mel Gibson version from that terrible movie about torturing Jesus. But never in my wildest dreams had I envisioned a young hippy fella so h-o-t, hot. Dear God! With long dirty-blond hair, blue eyes, and a beard, he was a Legends of the Falls version of Brad Pitt. Having been a raft guide and ski instructor for most of my twenties, I’d always dated rugged, mountain-man types. Since moving to New York City a few years earlier, though, I hadn’t been able to find such earthy-type guys. Until now.
After we listened to Jesus’ painfully long monologue about cannibalism, ate our tiny crackers, and downed our shots of grape juice, Jesus finished the show by coming out into the crowd and touching people. He made it a point to lay his hand on all 50 of us saying, “Bless you my child” to adults and children alike. While I knew he wasn’t Jesus-Jesus, only the actor playing Jesus, I couldn’t help but catch the Jesus fever in the cave, now looking at him almost as a force larger than life.
When it became my turn to get touched, I was a nervous wreck. I’m sure I must have looked like someone straight out of a snake-slinging tent revival since my knees buckled the moment his strong manly hand connected with the spaghetti straps on my shoulder. Blood instantly rushed to my neck and checks, making me blush, and goose bumps popped up all over my arms. Unfortunately, our little moment together was ruined by the sound of my empty wooden shot glass hitting the floor. My poor hand just couldn’t concentrate on holding it anymore. When I came back up from retrieving the shot glass, Jesus had already moved on to touching the kid beside me.
I couldn’t figure out what in Jesus’ name was happening to me. It’s not like I was looking for God. I’d already found a new one years ago, one that didn’t create a hell or send people like me to it just because we once stole a thousand dollars worth of merchandise from Disney World as a teenager. I honestly didn’t care about this Jesus guy or the Bible, and yet here I was falling under his Christian spell.
Just as I was finally starting to pull myself together, Jesus came up from behind and touched me. AGAIN! Now, I don’t mean to brag, but I’m the only one in that entire cave who got touched more than once. Not even the children in front of me or the two women beside me in wheelchairs got it twice. After it was all over, I went to follow him out of the cave, but I was told Jesus had to go “pray in the gardens now” (i.e. costume change in the green room). The people around me chanted “Thank you Jesus! Thank you Jesus!” over and over as we were escorted out another door by the pharaoh-looking guy who’d dealt out the crackers. I know this is a bit of a stretch, but at the time, part of me thought perhaps this Jesus dude had been flirting with me. He was just a man after all, and men can’t help themselves sometimes.
Now that I had the Jesus fever, I was on a mission to see as much of him as possible. I went to several shows, including “The Women Who Loved Jesus.” It only seemed appropriate. The stars of this show included his mom, a pissed-off hooker, some woman who was almost stoned to death by a crowd of angry men, and a lady who’d been bleeding for twelve years due to some strange, unexplained disease. You’d think after all my training I would have known my Bible stories a little better, but I was totally lost for the entire show.
If I hadn’t been there to see Jesus, my feminist self would have been highly insulted by the content. One pathetic woman after another gave a long-winded speech about how no man cared about her. Then, like a superhero, Jesus would swoop in, she’d cry, he’d save the day, they’d embrace, then she’d give another speech after he left about how obsessed she was with him. They all said phrases like “I’ve never loved anyone the way I love that man,” and “I think I love him in a…different way,” or my personal favorite, “No man has ev
er touched me in that way.”
Whenever Jesus wasn’t saving some damsel in distress, he was hanging out in the streets of Jerusalem with his homies. Like John Travolta’s character in Grease, he was the guy every man wanted to be and the hunk every woman wanted to screw. Things took a turn for the worse, however, when out of nowhere a bunch of Roman guards ran on stage and started flogging their hero. At the end of the show an announcer came over the intercom and told us not to miss the follow-up grand finale called “The Passion of the Christ” outside in 20 minutes.
Given the sexual overtones in this last show, one might assume “The Passion of the Christ” was going to be some sort of soft porn, but I had a sneaky feeling it would be a live version of that awful Mel Gibson flick. I usually have a pretty weak stomach, but I couldn’t get enough of Hot Jesus.
After all 2,000 of us were herded outside and situated behind ropes like kids awaiting a Fourth of July parade, Jesus came out into a crowd wearing a white robe and hippy sandals. Sweaty, with a bad case of bed head, his mood was somber as he walked around giving another one of his long-winded speeches. Afterward, a group of Roman guards tackled him to the ground. They were pretty hot themselves, each wearing gold-plated six-pack covers and flowing skirts that showed off their soccer legs.
They dragged Jesus over to some fake rocks, where Satan awaited him. Sporting a black robe with a hood, like a character out of a Harry Potter novel, Satan now had his chance to make a speech. Everyone boooo-ed of course, which pleased him greatly.
Once the guards ripped off Jesus’ robe, leaving him in an ancient Depends diaper, they bound his hands to a wooden post with rope. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was some sort of old-timey S&M porno. Each time a whip hit his back, the loudspeakers belted a “crack” sound and fake blood magically appeared. With every lash, Jesus violently arched his back and moaned, sometimes even making the O-face. This amused Satan, who laughed hysterically like he was at a taping of Saturday Night Live.