I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  ‘Sawa sawa,’ replies Guard Number Two, never breaking eye contact with us.

  We stare back for a moment. ‘Do you need to see our ID?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says, before breaking into a massive grin. In an instant, the surly facade evaporates. He holds his hand up for a high five; I obediently deliver one. Laughing, he clasps my hand warmly and mutters something in Swahili. The gates open up, and he stands aside to wave us through. ‘Karibu! Karibu! Say hello to Miss Sarah and Jack for me, please!’

  I follow the paved road to Sarah and Jack’s building.

  Alice laughs. ‘That fucker was fucking with us!’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ I say. ‘White girls are so easy to scare.’

  Sarah and Jack’s ‘apartment’ is enormous. Bigger than most houses back home. Four huge bedrooms – each with its own ensuite and walk-in robe – over two sprawling levels of vaulted ceilings and polished wood and parquetry, with external iron bars caging in the huge bay windows, blighting the view of lush communal gardens.

  ‘Well, la-di-da!’ I say. ‘All this just for a couple of scrubbers from Mackay?’ This is much more the kind of splendour I’d expected from the Smyths’ place; it seems new diplomats are outliving the old guard. A dozen or so people are sitting around, drinks in hand, talking, laughing. Normal people. Young people. White and black and brown people. Very un-Clubby people.

  ‘Yep!’ says Sarah. ‘I know it seems like overkill. But it’s much easier for the office to just keep a roster of properties that are suitable for whoever might be posted here next – usually it’s a family. Besides, it’s a third of what you’d pay for a two-bedroom apartment in Sydney.’

  ‘What kind of family would need all this, though?’ says Alice.

  ‘Well, it’s got to be suitable for “entertaining”. Part of the job is hosting dinner parties and soirees for visiting dignitaries, all that bullshit,’ says Jack. But today it’s just their friends: a mix of expats, Australian development workers, and a few locals.

  We make our way out to the verandah where I see Sauti – the rapper I’d met at the Marine Ball – and introduce him to Alice.

  ‘So, what are you guys doing here in Kenya?’ an Irish girl bringing a tray of meat out asks us. ‘Are you with the High Commission too?’

  ‘Ahhh, no …’ says Alice. ‘We’re, ah …’

  ‘These are the girls looking after that old man with dementia!’ Sauti tells her.

  ‘Oh man, that’s you guys!?’ she shouts. ‘With the crazy old guy? And the scheming wife or whatever?’ She calls over some friends: another Kenyan guy in a preppy get-up, and a bunch of Aussies. They’ve all heard about our … situation.

  They press us against the barbecue and pepper us with questions: ‘Who is this guy?’ ‘Are you nurses?’ ‘How did you get the job anyway?’ ‘Do you have to wipe his arse?’ ‘So, wait – he thinks you’re his granddaughters? Or his mistresses?’ ‘Oh my god – we’ve been dying to get into that Club!’

  Eventually we manage to turn the conversation around to everyone else. Most of them are AYADs – Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development – here to help control diseases in chickens, or to provide contraceptives and sexual health counselling to women, or to set up microfinance loans for rural villagers. One guy, Alex, is a freelance journalist from Melbourne. He’s currently working for an organisation in a refugee camp in the north of the country, helping the residents publish a community newspaper. When he hears I work in television, we swap details – there’s a video project he’s trying to get off the ground there, I might be able to help.

  The preppy guy, Eric, is Kenyan-Australian. Having recently graduated with an economics and science degree, he’s returned to Kenya to put his knowledge into practice, working on a local energy project. ‘Oh man, I know exactly the kind of guy you’re working for,’ he says, rolling his eyes. ‘One of those old-school colonial types from my parents’ day.’ He understands what we’re dealing with better than any of the white Australians do. ‘I find it very hard to feel sorry for those people!’ he tells us.

  ‘Yup,’ I say. ‘I get it.’ Then I’m hit with that weird feeling of generational guilt – like I need to apologise for my ancestors, while at the same time feeling a bit defensive about it. I wasn’t there – I know colonialism was fucked up. And so do they now. How much personal responsibility should people bear for what they’re born into? Still, it feels like a confession of sorts when I tell him, ‘My parents are from Zimbabwe – well, it was Rhodesia then. They left a long time ago.’

  ‘When Mugabe came in?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah, pretty much.’

  ‘Man, he’s a bad dude too, though.’

  ‘Yep.’

  Someone changes the subject: this isn’t the time or place for an armchair analysis of Africa’s political history.

  One of the group, Meg, is stationed in a small town called Kitale, a few hundred kilometres north-west of Nairobi, close to the Ugandan border. She jokes that her middle-of-nowhere town is very exciting now that it has two tourist attractions: in addition to the Kitale Museum, there’s the recently opened Kitale Nature Conservancy – a ‘sanctuary for deformed animals’, which apparently features a cow with two heads.

  I’m as intrigued by this place as they’ve all been by our job with Walt. I just have to see it – I have to know who’s behind it and why they’ve felt the need to collect the country’s four-legged freaks and put them on public display. I make a mental note to add the KNC to my itinerary, for whenever I finally get a chance to do some travelling.

  At some point in the afternoon, Alice gets a text message from Fiona:

  Stay as long as u like. Dont need u back until tomorrow.

  It’s the green light to let loose.

  Someone suggests we go to a bar where they’ve got a live DJ playing tonight. It’s not too far to walk, and safe enough around these parts before it gets dark. We set off out the gates, past the prankster security guards, past the used car lots that line the main road, past the Masai tribesmen grazing their cattle on the verge, and into a shady beer garden filled with sweet shisha smoke and a dance hall rhythm. Bend-over-bend-over-bend-over, the music intones. Now wibble, wobble, wibble, wobble, wibble!

  One of the AYAD girls sees how shocked Alice and I are by the moves being pulled on the dance floor. They are borderline pornographic: women bend over to touch the floor, pressing their butts into the crotches of men who grind and thrust against them, in time with the heavily syncopated beat.

  ‘Yeah, this is pretty much the most massive song in Kenya right now,’ the AYAD girl shouts over the volume. ‘We call it the “fuck-miming” song. You may as well join in – it’s actually pretty fun once you get into it.’

  The last thing I remember is being sandwiched in the middle of a conga line of fuck-mimers, getting dry-humped and bumped along the bar.

  I wake up in a four-poster bed shrouded by mosquito netting. Shit, the bed alarm. Where is it? Did I sleep through? Is Walt up yet? I feel for it under my pillow – nothing. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking on old socks and my head feels like a tin full of rocks. I can only see straight out of one eye. Wait, which room am I in?

  Oh, right, I’m at Sarah and Jack’s place. I stagger into the ensuite, lean down to drink some water straight from the tap, and feel a sharp pull on the back of my legs. Why are my hamstrings so tight? The reggae beat comes back: Bend-over-bend-over-bend-over. I bent over way too hard last night – that much is clear.

  ‘Alice! Alice?’ I plod through the house, squinting like a pirate, and find her in the next room in a similar state.

  ‘I’m dying,’ she moans.

  ‘I’m dead,’ I say.

  ‘You’re out of practice,’ says Jack, appearing at the door. ‘Come on, get up! We’ve got breakfast for you. And coffees.’

  ‘Oi, mole, come in here – I’ve got Bridget on Skype!’ Sarah calls from the living room. I stagger in and see my sister’s face on the laptop screen
.

  ‘Biddy!’ I squeal. She’s sitting at home on the farm, on the verandah. I suddenly feel very homesick.

  ‘I hear you had a big night?’ she says.

  ‘Sarah and Jack’s fault,’ I say. ‘They busted out the Bundy Rum.’

  Bridget has just got back from a year overseas. She was working as a carer in the UK and is now living at home in Mackay, trying to find a job, without much luck.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Through the brain fog I have a brilliant idea. ‘Why don’t you come here? Take over from me when I finish? If Walt’s still alive, that is. I’m gonna have to come home in January and they’ve asked me to help find someone to take over.’

  ‘Piggy, don’t make your sister come and scrub an old man’s balls!’ says Sarah.

  ‘We don’t scrub his balls. But in any case, Bridget actually has experience scrubbing balls,’ I say. The care work she was doing in England was much more hands-on than this: feeding and bathing quadriplegics, that sort of thing. ‘She’d be perfect.’

  ‘I dunno, it sounds hectic,’ Bridget says.

  ‘It’s not that bad!’ I say. ‘And looking after Walt will be a piece of piss after the work you’ve done.’

  ‘I guess so …’

  ‘Righto,’ I say. ‘I’ll ask the Smyths if they’re up for it.’

  I’ve just pulled an Alice on my own flesh and blood.

  It takes us until lunchtime to recover from our hangovers, and by the time we get back to the house Fiona has fired Millicent.

  ‘Dad can’t stand her. She’s simply too old to be a good fit for the circumstances,’ she says.

  It’s true that Millicent didn’t have the best rapport with Walt – he thinks he’s thirty years younger than her, and whenever she was on duty he spent most of the time complaining about the ‘old woman’ following him around. But it still seems harsh.

  Marguerite flies out for England the next day, so she’s going down to the Masai Market to ‘buy some lovely African trinkets for Cousin George, and the chubby chap who comes around to trim the hedges’. She takes Alice with her, ‘to help carry my baskets and shoo all the pushy buggers away’, but I’m on the afternoon shift, so I’m stuck.

  Fiona is again worried that Marguerite will try to whisk Walt back to England. She breaks into Marguerite’s safe and retrieves Walt’s passport and hides it in my suitcase ‘for the time being’. She’s going to use that to smuggle it out of the house later; a friend across town has agreed to look after it.

  Alrighty then.

  Then she realises Marguerite will apply for a replacement passport once she finds his is missing.

  That’s why we’ve got Walt sitting with us at the kitchen table with a notepad and pen in front of him, wondering what’s going on. Fiona wants him to write a note saying that he does not consent to having any travel documents issued in his name. Trying to explain this to Walt is impossible: he’s flat out writing his own name. He’ll have to copy it from a template – and Fiona reckons her writing is too hard for him to read. ‘You’ve got lovely neat writing,’ she says. ‘Here, you do it.’ So it’s my hand he goes over the top of.

  A few shaky takes later, and Walt’s made it official. And he’s right behind it now, too. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere, thank you very much!’ he tells us. ‘So don’t try to bloody well make me! I’m quite happy where I am, here in Hampshire.’

  ‘Yes … you mean Keen-ya, though, Dad,’ Fiona reminds him, slipping his oath into a folder and tearing off the practice pages from the notepad. Then she orders me to destroy the evidence.

  There’s a moment, while I’m huddled over the burn pit at the bottom of the garden, striking matches and blowing oxygen into the flames that are swallowing the ball of scrunched-up pieces of foolscap, that I turn to look for the hidden camera, for the whacky host to emerge from the hedges.

  But no one appears. It’s just me and the dogs watching the paper unfurl to reveal a pile of pills hidden in the middle. I singe my fingertips dragging the tablets out to see if they’re Temazepam. They’re not. They’re just multivitamins. Why Fiona feels the need to incinerate them, I’m not sure.

  Marguerite leaves for the airport the next day after breakfast, and as soon as she’s out the driveway Fiona’s calling me and Alice into action on the patio. Walt’s distracted, helping Esther scatter seeds and fruit skins around for the birds.

  ‘We need to sort out your pay,’ Fiona says. ‘Marguerite’s been telling the Trust not to pay you.’

  Say what now?

  ‘Why?’ says Alice, astonished.

  ‘Okay. Who or what is “the Trust”?’ I ask. I’ve been trying to avoid learning too much about ‘the Trust’, but it looks like I might have to enter the fray if I want to see my wages. I’ve been here more than two months and we still haven’t sorted them out.

  ‘Dad’s family trust,’ says Fiona. ‘I had him set it up a few years ago to protect him. Marguerite gets her very generous allowance paid out of that. And any expenses related to his healthcare need to be authorised by them.’

  Do Alice and I really need to know this information?

  ‘“Them” being …?’ I ask.

  ‘The Trust is administered by three lawyers. One of them is in Marguerite’s back pocket, but I think I can trust the other two. She’s been talking about getting rid of you all and having a local in to do the job, you know?’

  Nope. We did not know that.

  ‘But Marguerite is constantly telling us what a great help we are to her and Walt,’ I say, starting to feel like a bit of a fool.

  Fiona can see we need some convincing. She pulls her laptop out and Skypes her husband, Jonathan, in the UK. She has him recount to us a conversation he overheard between the two women. Jonathan seems a little weary and harassed; I get the sense he enjoys being brought into this about as much as we do.

  He rubs his temples, holding his head in his hands. ‘So, I heard Marguerite saying that Walt doesn’t like having the carers around because they’re, quote, “too noisy”, especially at meals.’

  Alice and I look at each other. Too noisy? Our table manners have been impeccable. Marguerite’s the one who’s constantly hooting and hollering as she tells stories, and taking phone calls at the table, and ducking in and out of the room to check the tennis score.

  ‘Tell them the other part, Jonathan,’ Fiona says.

  He continues as though he’s submitting evidence to a grand jury. ‘Marguerite also stated she’d prefer to have a “local girl” that Walt knew to help look after him. Fiona asked whether this would be Esther, and was told that it wasn’t, but this person remained unnamed.’

  ‘Thank you, Jonathan,’ says Fiona, ending the call. Then she turns back to us, as though her point has been made. ‘Well, Dad won’t stand for that. Having an African carer. I mean, if he was still “with it” it wouldn’t be a problem, but he’s not. It just won’t make sense to him.’

  I wonder whether Walt would stand for an African carer if he could remember the last fifty years – whether his attitude was tempered over that transformative time, and he came to accept the people of this land as his equals, or whether he stubbornly remained of the view that white people’s dominance over blacks was just the natural order of things. In his better moments he certainly seems a more decent man than I suspect he was in the past. But the past is where he exists, most of the time. A place where black people were only ever inside his house to wait on him – not to remind him to take his tablets and help him in the shower.

  ‘I have to make the lawyers understand that.’ Fiona pulls out a digital audio recorder. ‘It’s voice-activated,’ she says, pointing to the microphone. ‘We have to get Dad on tape making it clear how he feels about things.’

  After lunch, while Fiona puts Walt down for a nap, Alice and I join the Kenyan staff on their tea break under the jacaranda tree. Esther, Patrick, Peter, David and James all sit with Khamisi, sharing the ugali and sukuma wiki he has prepared. David had asked us to pick him up some ‘
maziwa lala’ with the groceries that morning, and we’re curious to know what it is.

  ‘Ahhh! Yes! My maziwa lala!’ he says, jumping up and taking the strange triangular shaped carton, clutching it to his chest. ‘Thank you, thank you, asante sana!’

  ‘So, what actually is it?’ Alice asks him.

  ‘It is like milk, but it is sour,’ David says, seemingly excited to tell us about this popular Kenyan drink.

  James eagerly joins in. ‘Maziwa, it means “milk”. And lala – it means “slept”. So it is “slept milk”.’

  ‘Like, it’s gone off?’ I say.

  ‘No no, it is not off. We just say, it has been left out to sleep overnight,’ James says.

  ‘Sounds like “off milk” to me!’ Alice says. The staff laugh at our apparent disgust.

  ‘You must try it,’ says David. ‘Come – I will prepare some for you. Come!’ We follow him into the staff quarters, where he sets up a jiko (charcoal burner) in the corner of his room.

  We sit on small crates and watch as David snips off the corner of the carton, and pours the milk into a saucepan, turning the flame down low. The rest of the staff hover at the door, watching our demonstration.

  ‘It is my favourite,’ he grins. ‘I cannot drink normal milk. It makes me feel no good,’ he gestures to his stomach. ‘But maziwa lala – no problem! You don’t have to have it warm – but I think it is better this way.’

  As the liquid starts to gently bubble, David pulls out a bag of sugar.

  ‘I like it very sweet,’ he says. ‘Maybe you will try first, before I put this in?’

  He pulls a couple of tin mugs out from a box beside him, pours a small amount into one for Alice and I to share, then fills the other up and passes it out to Peter.

  ‘Asante,’ says Peter, blowing the steam across the top and taking a swig before passing it on to Esther.

  Alice takes a sip from our mug, then passes it to me. It’s tangy, like yoghurt.

  David looks at us, expectantly. ‘You like it?’ he says.

  ‘Yeah, it’s not bad!’ Alice says.