Bill Bryson's African Diary

by Bill Bryson

  Thus it was that we were to be found an hour later at Malindi Airport, kicking the tyres of, and otherwise closely examining, the single-engine aircraft that was to convey us to CARE’s refugee camp at distant, dusty Dadaab and thence, at the end of the day, to Nairobi.

  The plane, I’m pleased to say, was quite new and looked sound, and the pilot, a man of great calmness named Nino, was unquestionably sober and reliable looking. Under questioning he pointed out that he wanted to crash even less than we did since he would have to pay for the plane. I found this immensely reassuring. Best of all it was a beautiful day for flying, the air still and almost cloudless. We were flying into the desert, after all, so the chances of storms were practically nil.

  The flight itself proved blissfully uneventful. The engine purred steadily the whole way and no one took a shot at us. By the time we landed in Dadaab I was almost calm.

  Dadaab is bang on the equator, in the middle of a dusty orange nowhere, about sixty miles from the Somalia border. There has been a drought there for years, which is evident with every dry scrape of wind. In the early 1990s, refugees from the fighting in Somalia began to stream over the border into northeastern Kenya, and a camp was hastily put together. Nearly a dozen years later it is home to 134,000 people.

  The camp consists of three compounds, each a mile or two apart, and when traveling between any two you must be escorted by a truckload of Kenyan soldiers, just in case. The camp has become essentially a city in the desert, with schools and markets and permanent habitations. It has been there so long now that a generation of children has grown to adult-hood without knowing any life other than being behind razor wire and heavy iron gates, and a sense that all the world beyond this snug perimeter offers nothing but danger or indifference. CARE has 175 employees on site. Forty-five percent of its spending in Kenya goes to the camp. Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don’t end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can’t go back to Somalia because it isn’t safe and they can’t go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn’t-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do.

  We spent a long day doing all the things you would expect to do at a refugee camp—toured the food distribution centre, visited schools, talked to administrators, learned how water was extracted from the ground and sanitized—but there was a curious lack of urgency about it all. The camp occupants weren’t dying or malnourished or in desperate need of medical attention. They were just normal people like you and me who wanted to be somewhere where they could have a life.

  Nearly everyone I spoke to complained of shortages of one kind or another—of work, of food, of teachers, of things to do. There are 28,000 pupils in the camp’s schools, but only 807 desks. There is only one textbook for every 20 students, one classroom for every 75. I talked to a bright young man named James Makuach, one of 357 students preparing to take the Kenyan Schools Certificate exam, a prerequisite for going on to higher education. He told me the school didn’t have the facilities, in particular the scientific equipment, that would allow them to pass the test.

  “You have no hope at all?” I said.

  “Not much,” he said and gave me a heartbreakingly shy smile.

  I couldn’t understand this at all. I asked Nick—demanded really—why conditions weren’t better than this. He looked at me with patient sympathy.

  “There are 20 million like this all over Africa, Bill,” he said. “Money only goes so far.” Besides, he went on, dispensing aid is much more complicated than most people realize. It is, for one thing, a fundamental part of aid protocol that you cannot make conditions notably better for refugees than they are for their hosts outside the camps. It wouldn’t be fair and it would breed resentment. “Everybody would want to be a refugee,” Nick said. “In practical terms, you can only do so much.”

  “But the kids,” I said. “They have no future.”

  “I know,” he said sadly. “I know.”

  Later, as we walked through the camp, Dan pointed out a nifty self-closing tap on a standpipe in the school grounds and told me that Nick had designed it, though he was too modest to say so. Nick, it turns out, is a water engineer by training and the tap was one of his first projects in Africa. You can find them all over Africa now, Dan told me.

  Interestingly, nearly all the field workers for CARE were trained to do something else. David Sanderson was an architect before he became an aid worker. Adam Koons, whom we would meet in another day or so, was formerly a photographer on Madison Avenue in New York. A fellow working in Uganda for CARE in a previous life designed the round tea bag.

  “People who work in the field are different from most of the rest of us,” Dan said as we strolled along. “They live far away from their friends and families in places like this that are generally difficult and often dangerous, trying to help people they don’t know to have better lives. Pretty remarkable really. Could you do that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Neither could I.” He was thoughtful for a minute. “But then I’d never have thought of the round teabag either.”

  Late in the afternoon we returned to the airstrip for the 90-minute flight to Nairobi. I asked Nino what the weather was like there.

  “I’ll let you know when we get closer,” he said vaguely, as if he weren’t sharing all he knew.

  Ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why he was being coy. Ahead of us was a storm. It looked big. The thing about sitting near the front in a small aircraft is that you can see everything—to left, to right and straight ahead. None of it looked good.

  We were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi and some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence—and it wasn’t too bad. It didn’t feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything. But then the rain came—suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion. It was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets. Maybe it’s always like that in cockpit and you just don’t know when you are in a separate compartment further back, but this was most assuredly unnerving. Worse, after a minute it became evident that Nino couldn’t see a thing. He began to move his head from spot to spot around the windscreen, putting his nose to the glass, looking for any tiny bit of visibility. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t put the windscreen wiper on, then looked more closely and saw there wasn’t a windscreen wiper. I glanced across at Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought: There’s no windscreen wiper!

  Actually two thoughts: There’s no windscreen wiper and we’re all going to die!

  Nino was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who is trying to land an airplane while being attacked by fire ants. It appeared that from looking out the side window he could get a very rough fix on our location, but only very rough evidently because twice he banked very sharply, as if swerving out of the path of a big building or something. This was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare.

  But still he pressed on. For one long minute, nothing much happened. We just flew forward in a seemingly straight line, continuously descending. When we were some small distance above the ground—70 or 80 feet, say—and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us, I was pretty comfortably certain that we were going to die in the next few seconds. I remember being appalled, peeved even, but nothing more than that.

  And then bang—and I use the word advisedly, of course—right before us, rushing at us at a ridiculously accelerated speed, was a runway. Nino tilted the plane and dropped us with the sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads. We landed hard and decidedly off center, and for a long moment—the one truly frightening moment of the whole episode—it seemed that he wouldn’t be able to keep control, that we would hit the grass and somersault into a thousand pieces. But he managed to hold
us steady and after a small eternity we came to a stop just outside a hangar.

  “I’m naming my first child Nino,” Dan said quietly.

  Nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage that he seemed to have pulled off in the course of the landing.

  Nino took off his headset and turned around beaming. “Sorry about that, chaps,” he said. “Had a little trouble spotting the runway.”

  “W-w-why is there no windscreen wiper?” I asked with difficulty.

  “They’re no use with a single engine,” he said, pointing to the propeller directly in front. “Best wiper in the world couldn’t keep up with the spray off that thing.”

  Somehow this didn’t seem an entirely satisfactory explanation, but I was happy to leave it at that. Besides, I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol.

  And I can tell you this for certain now: however many years are left to me and wherever fate takes me, the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me.

  Thursday, October 3

  And So to western Kenya. We set off bright and early to drive to Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu is only about 300 kilometers west of Nairobi, but the roads are potholed and slow for much of the way, so we had to allow five hours to get there. I didn’t care. None of us did. We were four feet off the ground and wouldn’t get any higher all day.

  The countryside was gorgeous—green and grassy with long views to the rugged Mau Escarpment in one direction and to the green hills of Aberdares National Park and central highlands in the other, all beneath vast blue skies and baking sun. Here and there along the heights overlooking the Rift Valley there were roomy laybys where you could pull off to take in the views, each with 15 or 20 forlorn trinket and souvenir stalls waiting for customers who these days mostly never come. There was wildlife, too—families of baboons dining on road kill along the shoulder, herds of impalas and zebras dotting the grasslands, soda lakes carpeted with thousands of bright pink flamingoes. There was no question that we were in Africa now.

  Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on 50 cents a day or less. Curiously, it looked more prosperous than many of the other places we had been. It had a trim, modern central business district and quite a lot of nice housing. There seemed to be more bicycles along the roads and fewer street urchins.

  We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank— micro-finance institution is the formal term—that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they would apportion among themselves, to help them expand or improve their businesses. The idea of having a club was to spread the risk. It seemed a slightly loopy idea to many to focus exclusively on females, but it has been a runaway success.

  “Our ladies are very shrewd and very hard working,” laughed Peres Oyugi, Kisumu’s branch manager, as we drove to Kisumu’s Jubilee Market to see some of Wedco’s money in action. Ten years ago, she told me,Wedco had loans on its books of 18 million Kenyan shillings—about $250,000. Today its loan portfolio has increased nearly tenfold to over 175 million shillings and it is helping more than 200 groups in Kisumu alone. There are seven other branches spread across the region.

  Jubilee Market is an extraordinary place—crowded, noisy, extremely colorful—with large, open-sided halls specializing in wet fish, dried fish, vegetables, nuts and other farm commodities. I had never seen such luscious produce more beautifully arrayed. Every stall was a picture of abundance and sumptuousness, every peanut and tomato and chili more neatly arranged and more richly colored than any I had seen before anywhere. It seemed impossible that people so poor could enjoy such plenty. I asked Adam Koons, CARE’s chief of operations for western Kenya, if it was as good as it looked. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “My wife and I do our own food shopping here. Kenyans haven’t got much money, but they are very particular about their food.”

  Beyond the main food halls was a sort of bazaar of dark alleys containing tiny shops—cubicles really—selling everything from bolts of cloth to small electrical items. There I was introduced to several of Wedco’s happily prospering clients, among them a genial but weary-looking woman named Consolata Ododa. Ododa makes a living selling small oddments—batteries, torches, plastic wallets, key rings, playing cards. Like all the women in her group, Ododa works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then goes home to cook an evening meal for her family, so it’s not exactly a life of luxury. Every two weeks she makes an overnight trip to Nairobi by bus to acquire new stock, returning in time to reopen the stall late the following morning. She had just returned that day from her latest trip, and it was for this reason that she was “a little tired,” she told me. For all this her turnover averages about 3,000 shillings a day—roughly $30—from which she must pay rent, electricity, taxes and interest and principle on her loan. Typically she will clear $6 or $7 for her 12-hour day—hardly a princely sum, but more, she told me, than she had ever dreamed of having before Wedco stepped into her life. And so by such means do people’s lives improve, little by little.

  Friday, October 4

  Fifty miles or so south of Kisumu is Homa Bay, a listless small city of potholed streets, baking sun and an inescapable air of being at the wrong end of a long road. Most of the drive from Kisumu is along an exceedingly rough and bouncy dirt track. Interestingly, all road maps show it as a first-rate highway. This is because some years ago the World Bank gave money for the road to be paved. In the event, however, some government official or group of government officials decided to spare Kenyan workers the wearying toil of laying tarmac under a hot sun, and pocketed the money instead.

  This sort of thing happens quite a lot in Kenya. Once a model of probity and rectitude, after 23 years under the increasingly reviled Daniel arap Moi, Kenya has become a case study in mismanagement and corruption. A group called Transparency International, which monitors global corruption, now ranks it as the sixth least trustworthy nation in the world, ahead of only Bangladesh, Nigeria, Paraguay, Madagascar and Angola. In one year, according to the BBC, $10 billion of public funds went missing in Kenya. Ten billion dollars! In one year! And it didn’t even top the list!

  Why institutions like the World Bank and IMF, not to mention our own slumbering governments, allow this to happen is a question I cannot answer, but it has unfortunate consequences for groups like CARE. First, it means that they are left to provide many of the services that any decent government would itself provide. It also means that donations for these services are harder to secure because so many people think that any money sent to Africa goes into the pockets of despots. If anyone ever, ever, ever tries to suggest to you that this is the case, you must poke them in the eyes with something at least as big as a snooker cue, for it just isn’t so.

  Money given to aid agencies like CARE—and Oxfam and Save the Children and others beyond enumerating—doesn’t pass through corrupt intermediaries. It goes straight into projects.

  Incidentally, Moi is to step down in December 2002 when elections are to be held. The universal hope, it appears, is that things will get better with a new government. “They can’t get worse,” I was told several times.

  “It’s not about spending huge amounts of money, but about spending smaller amounts intelligently,” Phillip Makutsa, one of CARE’s project officers in the western province of Nyanza, told me as we bounced over more rough roads en route to the village of Ogongo Tir on the edge of the Lambwe Valley. He was explaining to me CARE’s new philosophy with regard to aid, which was essentially twofold— to make a little go a long way and to help people to help themselves. “It can be as little as narrowing the mouth of communal water containers so that people don’t dip their hands into the water and ac
cidentally contaminate it,” Phillip said. “That one small step alone has produced a 58 percent decline in diarrhoeal outbreaks where implemented,” he added, beaming. We were arriving at Ogongo Tir. “You’ll see what I mean here,” he added.

  Ogongo Tir was a scattered village in a green valley, which, thanks to CARE, boasted a new well. It was this that we had come to see. The well, it must be said, wasn’t one of the wonders of the world. It was just a simple long-handled pump of the kind still commonly encountered at camp-grounds. My grandfather had one just like it, dating from about 1900, on his Iowa farm, so this was hardly cutting edge technology. But what a difference it has made to Ogongo Tir’s 32I households.

  Before this, one of the village elders told me, during droughts and dry seasons women gathering water had to make a seven-hour round trip to a spring atop a steep and distant hill, setting out from the village at three in the morning in order to be back in time for the day’s other chores. Because of the distance, none could carry more than a single five-gallon jerry can.

  Now villagers have only to stroll to a clearing on the village edge to get safe, clean, adequate supplies of water. This was such a big deal to the community that the entire village turned out to greet us. Children sang us songs and their elders made speeches. Long speeches. Impassioned speeches. Speeches in Kiswahile and speeches in English. These were seriously grateful people.

  “There’s been a big change in how these things are done,” Nick told me as we were taken on a tour of a nearby vegetable garden, which blossoms even in the dry season thanks to water from the well. “It used to be that we’d build a well for a village or make some other improvement and then move on. Eventually, the pump would break or something would go wrong and the people wouldn’t know what to do. They’d come back to us and ask us to fix it because they thought of it as our well.

  “So the idea now is that we help them build the well, but then the village takes complete responsibility for it. They form a committee and run it as a kind of business. They make a small charge for anyone who takes water so that they then have a reserve fund for when they need to make a repair or eventually dig a new well.”