I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  ‘Discipline is a must for one to succeed,’ he says. ‘It’s not being faithful to the Ten Commandments alone. It’s being able to follow the training program as written, eat as required, and avoid what might make you perform poorly. Why do footballers camp far from their friends when preparing for games? There is a reason for that.’

  Through the bustle of the departing crowd, I spot a noticeboard at the back of the hall. On it, next to a UN poster of child soldiers titled ‘War Is Not Child’s Play’, someone has pinned up an email titled ‘What a Life!’ Its several printed-out pages feature a series of poignant photographs of human struggle: an old Asian man with one leg hobbling down a snowy road in bitter winter; a young Indian boy begging in the street; a small girl doing her schoolwork on a rock. Each is captioned, ‘If you think you’ve got it tough, look at them.’

  It’s jolting to see the sort of sentimental tosh I see in my Facebook feed hanging in the primary school of a developing nation most Westerners are conditioned to feel sorry for. A subtle reminder that people are the same the world over: no one prefers self-pity over agency and hope.

  By the time we get back from Kericho, each room has been installed with a new ‘smoke detector’, we’re told. Only, as I later discover, the devices don’t detect smoke at all.

  While we’ve been gone, Fiona orchestrated a day with Walt and Marguerite out of the house, brought in a team of fundis to fit the little white units to the ceiling, and hooked them up to the wi-fi network.

  Now, she can tune in from her home in the UK – from anywhere – and watch us all on her laptop.

  None of us know it, but the asylum has become a panopticon.

  Walt and Marguerite are fascinated by my bodybuilding photographs. I sort through them on my laptop in the living room, picking out the best shots of each category’s winner to send through to the Nairobi Star with my report on the event.

  ‘But what are they doing?’ Walt says, peering at my laptop screen as I flick past a shot of Ochieng holding his trophy aloft, then one of a change room full of oiled-up skin, then another of a man grinning while he does the splits. ‘Why aren’t they wearing any clothes?’

  ‘They’re showing off, darling! Like all men do!’ Marguerite says, leaning over my shoulder. ‘And my word, aren’t they right to. You would too if you looked like that!’ She elbows Walt, squeezes his bicep.

  ‘I certainly would not!’ Walt says. ‘But I do agree – they are very sturdy-looking men.’

  I can’t help myself. I show him a picture of the roving performers dressed up as colonial police.

  ‘What do you think of these guys, Walt? They’re playing at being cops.’

  He squints, then cracks up when he realises what the costumes are meant to be. ‘They’ve certainly got the tums right!’ He’s got a sense of humour, you have to grant him that.

  When the newspaper boy comes to the gate the following morning with the Star, Patrick races it over to the house. The staff all gather round the garage as I open it up to the sports pages. There’s my report – a double-page spread! But wait – no, oh fuck, nooooo – they’ve stuffed up the captions. The wrong names are under the pictures. And Meshack Ochieng – Mr Kericho himself – hasn’t been featured at all.

  I feel sick. When I check my emails, I find I’ve already got messages from some of the competitors pointing out the error. I reply to them all apologising, then let the Star know about the mistake. They promise to print a correction and to run a short profile on Meshack the next day to make up for it, if I can send through some text in time.

  Fiona pokes her head into my room and tells me I need to come through to breakfast. She doesn’t want me interrupting them halfway through.

  ‘I’ll be there in a tick,’ I tell her firmly. ‘I have to sort this out.’

  Walter Smyth can survive with one less carer for half an hour. After all the trust these men put in me, I need to fix this up right now.

  Fiona’s found us another flat. This one, we’re assured, is safe. It’s on the second floor of a new apartment complex, for a start. Much harder to break into. And it’s across the road from the Swedish ambassador’s house, so security in the area is top-notch.

  It’s nowhere near as nice as the Maharaja flat, and this one only has two bedrooms – so we’ll have to rotate through them depending on who’s on duty – but that’s fine. Any kind of private space is a welcome escape from the house.

  The new apartment is a great success until Ruby and I get home one afternoon to find the place has been ransacked. There’s stuff everywhere: cushions on the ground, vases knocked off the coffee table, smashed glass and a trail of muesli leading from the kitchen to the balcony door.

  ‘Ah, fuck!’ I yell, wondering what’s been taken. Then I realise something’s not quite right about the mess. ‘But wait, what kind of burglars would take muesli?’

  Monkeys, as it turns out. They’ve squeezed through the security bars and upended the kitchen in a hunt for sugary treats, and are now sitting on the balcony enjoying them, cackling at our expense from a pile of sucked peach stones and banana skins.

  Once we realise nothing valuable’s missing – aside from the sultanas and dried fruit from Ruby’s cereal – the whole thing seems kind of funny. I can sleep at night with monkeys at the windows. We just have to remember to keep them closed.

  16

  THINGS FALL APART

  It’s just after lunch when Ruby’s phone rings. It’s Jade. On the way home from her Kenyan boyfriend’s place, she’s been in a car accident. We can’t make any sense of what she’s saying – Ruby tells her to calm down, to speak slowly.

  Fiona, realising something dramatic has happened, sends us into the garden to take the call. ‘Not in front of Dad!’ she hisses. ‘He’s already asking what all the fuss is about!’

  A man ran across the road in front of the taxi Jade was in. He smashed into the windscreen on the passenger side – Jade saw his head crash into the glass before he bounced off the bonnet. Their car spun into oncoming traffic, missed a head-on with a truck by a millimetre after the taxi driver turned the wheel again, swerving the other way. They finally came to a stop when they crashed into a fence.

  Jade says she’s okay. Her neck hurts; she has some cuts on her arm. But the man they hit is lying in the middle of the road, bleeding and unconscious. Jade thinks he might be dead. ‘He’s not moving!’ she sobs. ‘He’s not moving!’

  A crowd has gathered; the police are there. She has to go to hospital with the driver and the maybe-dead man, to be checked out herself and give a statement about what happened. But the taxi driver is asking her to lie – to say that they’re friends. It turns out he isn’t a taxi driver after all, just a guy with a car.

  ‘I don’t know what to do!’ she cries.

  ‘Jade, listen to me,’ Ruby says. ‘Go to the hospital. I’ll meet you there. It’s going to be okay. I’ll see you there soon. Call me if anything happens.’ Ruby hangs up and orders herself a taxi, while I go inside to tell Fiona what’s happening.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I don’t want her taking the Peugeot – Dad will get all wound up if he hears it!’

  ‘She’s not driving,’ I say. ‘She’s catching a cab. It’s coming for her now.’

  Fiona looks around. Walt is gone. ‘And now we’ve lost Dad,’ she snaps, striding outside to find him.

  ‘Lost him?’ I ask. ‘What do you mean “lost” him? Where could he possibly be but in the garden somewhere? Jesus, Fiona, can’t you see something a little bit more serious is going on?’

  But she doesn’t hear me. She’s found her father. He is bending down to pick a grub off a rosebush.

  Ruby and Jade get back from the hospital just before dinner. Jade didn’t have to give a statement in the end, so the whole perjury business has been avoided. She doesn’t know if the man they hit has lived or died. He’s still lying in the hospital where no one knows his name or how to find out who he is – just another one of the thousands of pedestrian
s hit on Nairobi’s roads every year. Three or four people a day are mowed down by matatus coming too fast around corners or crushed under the hot-rubber weight of an eighteen-tyre semitrailer while trying to cross an eight-lane highway to avoid the thugs that loiter around the footbridge. Any one of these tragedies would be national news back home; here, they barely make the newspaper. Just another sad thing that happened. Pole sana.

  Jade has whiplash and is wearing a foam neck brace. When she hobbles back into the house, Walt looks her up and down in alarm. ‘Good Lord, what a bloody gimp you are!’ he exclaims.

  Jade laughs, but soon dissolves into tears. She’s clearly still in shock. But when Ruby suggests the two of them go to the flat for the rest of the evening to get some rest, Fiona is annoyed. ‘It’s really not ideal,’ she says. ‘Dad’s in a state and I need some time to go over a few things with Marguerite, and I want to talk with you girls about updating the job list too.’

  ‘I’ll watch Walt,’ I say. ‘You guys go.’ I’ve volunteered to take over their shifts even though I know it will mean being on duty for sixteen hours straight, which is its own kind of hell.

  ‘I can fill them in on the jobs list later,’ I say. ‘Jade needs a good night’s rest.’

  And I need to start making plans to return home. There’s a job to go back to: a new consumer affairs comedy program. A world away from Kenyan bodybuilders and demented colonials and monkey raids – but it’s starting to feel like the world I’m ready to return to.

  The salad is sitting on the kitchen bench, covered in cling wrap, ready to be served for lunch. Like all of Khamisi’s meals, it’s immaculately presented: layers of crisp lettuce, wedges of bright red tomatoes, sliced black olives and a ring of halved hard-boiled eggs circling the edge of the dish.

  I’m in the garage, putting the mangoes and pawpaws we bought at the markets this morning into the gauze fruit box where they’ll ripen for a few days, when I hear Marguerite in the kitchen. ‘Are those anchovies?’ she demands. I watch through the laundry lattice as she peers down through the plastic film over the salad.

  ‘Yes, memsahib,’ says Khamisi.

  She pulls a revolted face. ‘Oh, how disgusting! Why have you put those in there?’

  Khamisi is insulted. ‘It is a nick-oy-see salad, memsahib.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Nick-oy-see salad,’ he says, pointing at it. ‘You asked me to make nick-oy-see salad. That is a nick-oy-see salad.’

  Marguerite rolls her eyes. ‘Ni-swah, you mean, Khamisi. Ni-swah!’

  ‘Nick-oy-see!’ Khamisi insists, dragging out the menu notes he made yesterday and pointing at the word written there in his careful biro lettering: nicoise.

  ‘Well, whatever you want to call it, it shouldn’t have anchovies in it!’

  Khamisi isn’t going to let this one slide. ‘Nick-oy-see salad always has anchovies! A nick-oy-see salad has lettuce, tomato, olives, egg, green beans and anchovies. If you don’t want anchovies, you should have told me.’

  ‘It has tuna, not anchovies! And there should be potatoes in there. Why aren’t there any potatoes? You could use the ones left from last night. Here you are. Look.’ Marguerite takes out a plastic container of leftover potatoes from the roast dinner we had the night before and dumps it on the kitchen bench. ‘Now, take those horrid things out – they’re far too salty for Walt anyway – and put some of these lovely potatoes and tuna in there instead.’

  To classically trained and painfully proud Khamisi, this is sacrilege. He’s professional, a traditionalist, a perfectionist. Marguerite may as well have told him to serve up dishwater – she has offended his sense of identity. But he does as he’s told. He picks out the anchovies. He adds the potatoes and tuna to his corrupted salad. He leaves for his afternoon break.

  And he never comes back.

  Esther pulls me and Ruby into the laundry the next day to tell us that he’s quit. She seems sad – but not surprised. ‘He was having many problems here,’ she says. ‘With Marguerite and Fiona. He said there were too many people in charge.’ He texted Esther, asking her to say goodbye to Ruby, Jade and me, and to have his monthly pay given to her to pass on to him.

  ‘Great, now we have to find another cook,’ Fiona fumes, as though that’s the great shame here.

  ‘Yes, well, he could be very difficult, couldn’t he?’ says Marguerite, trying to deflect any blame from her own actions.

  I’m dismayed: from the day I first arrived, Khamisi was a warm and constant presence in the house. I loved watching him cook, having him talk me through his careful processes, how clear it was that he enjoyed his work – even if the people he worked for weren’t always easy. To see him pushed so far that he, despite desperately needing the job, should quit on principle, somehow bothers me more than just about anything else has so far.

  More bad news comes the following morning.

  Marguerite turns on the TV, and we learn that Kenya is at war. ‘Oh nooo,’ she moans. ‘What a silly thing to do!’

  Walt and I come in from the patio, where we’ve been laying out the mango skins and bird seed, to see the head of the army announce that Operation Linda Nchi – ‘protect the country’ in Swahili – has been launched in response to the recent spate of Al-Shabaab kidnappings and murders.

  ‘Oh, deary me,’ says Walt, lowering himself into a chair in front of the TV, chewing on the end of a finger.

  Esther stops clearing the breakfast table to come through and watch from the doorway.

  A map on the screen shows the plan for Kenyan troops to invade the southern conflict zones of Somalia in order to destroy the Islamist group, apparently with the consent of the Somalian government and the cooperation of their military. Though then there’s a clip of the Somalian ambassador to Kenya saying they ‘cannot condone any country crossing our border’. It’s all very confusing, clearly a mess. The taking of the two Spanish MSF workers from Dadaab was ostensibly the final straw, but according to some reports this plan has been in the works for a while and the kidnappings are just a handy excuse. One of the experts says that Western powers – including the US and France – have been scheming to intervene in Somalia since 2010. The coverage makes Walt even more edgy.

  We follow the news more discreetly from then on. I don’t know how wars in Africa normally play out, but I suspect it’s not something you stick around for if you can help it. As the days go by, and the Kenyan tanks get bogged thanks to a fortnight of heavy rains that have turned the desert into mud, the truth gets even murkier. There are unexploited oilfields in southern Sudan and northern Kenya. There is ten billion dollars’ worth of Chinese investment waiting to fund a rail and road network to transport that oil to the coast. And there are the ports of Kismayo and Lamu, where that oil could be loaded onto tankers and shipped across the Indian Ocean … you know, if only the security of the region could be guaranteed.

  Al-Shabaab retaliates by sending an operative to lob a grenade into Mwaura’s Bar, an after-hours pub in the city, injuring thirteen people. The following day, they blow up a matatu at a busy bus stop, injuring ten and killing one.

  The Kenyan police respond by ordering raids on Eastleigh, home to many Somalian migrants and refugees. They uncover stockpiles of explosives and ammunition and round up ‘terrorist suspects’.

  Security tightens across the city. Western embassies issue travel advisories warning Westerners not to visit places where Westerners congregate, which doesn’t leave Westerners with many options. Sarah and Jack aren’t allowed to go to their local bar anymore; it’s just home or the office for them. Even the Club has taken extra precautions – now, when you pull into the driveway, you have to weave around hi-vis barrels as you approach the security gate and wait to be cleared by sniffer dogs. Marguerite feels it really ruins the whole VIP vibe.

  Fiona has to go back to England – I get the sense her husband, Jonathan, has had just about enough of her absence. But she makes us promise not to go anywhere public other than the Club and shops, when
we really have to.

  Nairobi is nowhere near as fun when most of the city is out of bounds. I’ve realised my time in Kenya is nearly up anyway, but it’s a shame to leave on a sour note, knowing things here have turned ugly.

  And they get even uglier in the house.

  Someone’s been stealing money from the brown envelopes of cash that are poorly hidden all over the house: in the liquor cabinet, in the storeroom, in Walt and Marguerite’s bedroom.

  For a while we’ve suspected that money was going missing, but it’s hard to keep track of it with so many different people dipping in and out of the reserves to run errands and get groceries and pay for Walt’s doctors’ appointments and pills. A missing hundred bob here and there – it can easily be innocently overlooked. Ruby and I set up a ledger from which cash had to be checked in and out, and receipts and change – to the shilling – provided for all purchases, in an effort to clear any suspicion that we are trying to rort the system.

  Then we discover we were under surveillance all along. Fiona has been sitting in the UK watching a live feed of the house coming in via the ‘smoke alarms’. Perhaps she was hoping to catch Marguerite trying to kill her husband, but instead she’s caught a thief. Esther.

  She flies back to Nairobi to fire her. There are a lot of tears. Marguerite is livid to discover there were ‘eyes’ in the ceiling, and she has them removed.

  Ruby, Jade and I take Walt down to the Club, to keep away from the drama. When he dozes off in a chair by the fire in the reading room, we steal a moment to get our heads around everything that’s happened.