I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  ‘I cannot believe those things were cameras!’ Jade says. ‘I just – I cannot believe she did that.’

  ‘I can,’ I say. ‘Pretty much nothing can shock me here anymore.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell us!?’

  ‘Probably thought she’d catch us doing something, too,’ Ruby says.

  ‘I’d say so,’ I say. ‘I don’t think she really trusts anyone. But I can’t believe Esther was stealing, either. I mean, I get it – it would be bloody hard not to. It just sucks. This all sucks so hard.’

  ‘I’m so glad I’m outta here,’ Jade says. Her time is just about up – she’s leaving next week, just in time to miss Christmas with the Smyths.

  17

  PAMMY

  When Pammy, Jade’s replacement, pulls up in the driveway, I have to wonder whether she’s a practical joke.

  Pammy is from East London. She’s in her fifties but young at heart – she’s wearing a nose ring and a pink zirconia belly button ring that is proudly displayed on the fleshy fold between her singlet and trousers. Fiona recruited her through a vaguely worded advertisement for a ‘dementia carer/companion’ on Craigslist. She screened applicants via Skype interviews to ensure they weren’t black, fat or dreadlocked. (One candidate was eliminated because of her ‘ratty hair’ – Walt won’t have a hippie in his house.)

  It’s my job to take Pammy around town to show her where everything is and how things work. A Nairobi induction, of sorts. When I tell her she’ll need to wear something a little more conservative for the Club, she protests. ‘Bugger me, that’s all I’ve got! It’s stinkin’ ’ot over ’ere!’ Ruby lends her a white cardigan to cover her shoulders, and we get her to tuck her singlet into her waistband.

  I begin with a tour of Village Market. As we walk through the food court, past the high-end fashion boutiques and the luxury travel agents, Pammy tells me, at great volume, the following autobiographical facts:

  -She used to do ‘close protection security’ at a swingers’ club with her ex-husband.

  -She’s been celibate for two and a half years, so one of the perks of working at the swingers’ club is ‘getting to watch’.

  -She hasn’t brought any of her ‘toys’ over but does have a ‘nice little clit-tickler rabbit gizmo’ at home that she thinks she’ll miss, and she might need to buy a replacement while she’s here.

  -Her son is a ‘dirty boy’ with a ‘big willy’ who used her credit card to buy a hundred extra-large Durex condoms off the internet before she left.

  -She really needs to do a big shit: ‘It feels like the kick of a baby!’

  At one point, she whips around to stare at a Kenyan man who just walked past and exclaims, ‘Corrrr! He’s horny!’

  ‘What, did he have a boner?’ I whisper in disbelief.

  No, it’s not that. ‘Horny’, I learn, is just Pammy’s word for ‘attractive’. ‘He’s the best lookin’ bloke I’ve seen since I got here!’ she says.

  Pammy excuses herself to empty her bowels after chugging a coffee ‘to get things moving’. She returns from the public bathroom expressing deep satisfaction about her recent defecation. My poker face is exquisite; I tell her I am very happy for her.

  Later that afternoon, we go down to the Club with Marguerite and Walt for afternoon tea. Over slices of sponge cake and scones, Pammy tells us – and everyone else in the garden room – how she hasn’t been able to stop farting since she landed. ‘Dunno what the heck’s goin’ on – must ’ave been the air pressure on the plane or somefin’!’ she roars, as a Kenyan couple at the next table stare, mouths agape, tea going cold. It’s the first time I’ve seen Marguerite lost for words.

  Pammy’s flatulence continues back at the house that evening. Leaving a room in a hurry as I enter it, she mutters, ‘Sorry about that!’

  About what? Then it whacks me in the face: a pungent, fruity steamer. I hurry back into the hallway, gasping for fresh air, and hear her telling everyone in the living room what she’s done.

  ‘I left a whoofy one for her in there – haha!’

  There’s a small part of me that wants to stay on, just to see how the Pammy-era pans out.

  I don’t get to say goodbye to anyone in Kenya properly. I’m struck, two days before I leave, with a horrific bout of food poisoning.

  I’d planned on racing around Nairobi, saying goodbye and thank you to Claire and Robert and the girls, to Magda and Suzanne. Ruby and I had arranged to have lunch with the staff at the Smyths, under the jacaranda tree behind the house. Instead, I spend thirty-six hours hugging the toilet bowl at Sarah and Jack’s place, having moved out of the carers’ flat so that Pammy can take my place. Day and night becomes blurred, vomit and diarrhoea simultaneously explode from my body, over and over and over again. My bowels and stomach twist and cramp and spasm, expelling everything within me. The agony is beyond comprehension. There is no way I can fly home like this, I can’t even stand up. I lie naked in the bottom of the shower with a folded towel for a pillow, and seriously wonder if I might be dying. What if it’s cholera? I think. How have I managed to live here for nearly a year and only get sick now? I’m one retch away from calling for an ambulance when I start to feel the worst is behind me. Six hours before I’m due at the airport my insides finally settle down enough that I can walk without shitting myself if I clench tight enough, but I have Sarah get me some heavy-duty maxi pads to wear on the plane, just in case. It’s a most undignified departure.

  I sweat and rumble the entire way. There’s a touch-and-go moment in the transit lounge in Dubai. But I make it to Sydney with a clean arse, and I have never, ever, been so happy to be home.

  Not long after that touchdown, I receive an email from Marguerite. She says she fired Pammy after discovering she was in cahoots with Fiona, who had hired a Nigerian to ‘get rid of me’. It seems, even by the Smyth’s standards, too preposterous to believe. But then I receive an email from Jack, who says they’re upgrading all the security around the Smyths’ house and he’s heard there’ve been death threats against Marguerite.

  It seems I got out of Africa in the nick of time. And I have one decent thing to show for myself: my feature article on the East African bodybuilding scene – complete with photographs – which is published by the Global Mail.

  In 2015, I go to Kenya again.

  Not – you’ll be relieved to know – to work for the Smyths. I’m not quite that insane.

  This time, I go for a holiday, with the man I’ll later marry, Chris. I want to show him Africa, and the very strange world I spent a year in.

  I organise a two-part itinerary. First, we tick off all the standard tourist-trail stuff. We take a trip to Amboseli National Park to see the elephants and gawp at Mount Kilimanjaro rising through the clouds, its snowcaps now even smaller than when I first saw them five years ago.

  We go on safari in the Masai Mara, where we have the astonishing good luck to see a leopard – the most notoriously shy of all African game – drag a fresh kill up a tree. He slings half a zebra corpse over the bough, bright red entrails dripping and dangling out of the black-and-white-striped rump, then sits beside it slowly licking his paws and claws clean.

  We go to the Giraffe Centre in Lang’ata and stand dead still while the fantastical creatures crane their impossible necks over the railing of the viewing platform, blue tongues probing ahead of long-lashed orbs, gently taking pellets from our own mouths.

  We go to the David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage and watch dozens of baby elephants chase their handlers around until they give up the five-litre bottles of milk they’re holding. The baby jumbos wrap their tiny trunks around the plastic containers and pour the milk down their throats, then toss the empties aside and stumble and tumble and roll around in the mud, splashing, flapping, their tangled trumpets blasting in what has to be one of the most boisterous displays of pure, unbridled joy on the planet.

  And once we’ve walked the beaten track, we spend part two of our trip reliving my time in Nairobi: we go to City
Market, where I show Chris how to haggle for avocados, and where in the picnic area out the back I used to go with Peter to feed the monkeys, and where, across the road at the Aga Khan Hospital, I spent many hours in the corridors with Walt, waiting to hear whether his heart, his kidneys, his liver were holding up.

  Chris and I go to Village Market. We go to the grocer and Nairobi’s Sarit Centre. I show him the stationery store where Marguerite sent us to buy the staff’s children’s schoolbooks. We visit Suzanne’s Clinic and see how far the project has come. Suzanne isn’t there: the clinic – just as she’d hoped it would – runs itself now. There are four nurses on duty now, enough to make sure no one will be left unseen on the verandah.

  We have dinner with Marguerite and Magda at their local Italian restaurant. I’m surprised by how much I’ve missed them and how happy I am to hear their voices – even if what they have to tell me isn’t wonderful news.

  Marguerite says that Walt is still alive, but his condition is worse than ever. He’s rarely able to leave the house anymore and has very few lucid moments. Fiona has said he can’t have visitors anymore, so if Marguerite wants to see any of her friends she has to go out to do so. Of course whenever she does, Fiona accuses her of abandoning Walt.

  But the very worst thing Fiona has done of late – the thing that seems to upset Marguerite more than anything else – was to tell everyone in town that Marguerite ‘murdered Chiku’.

  ‘What a thing to say! I didn’t kill her! Chiku committed suicide. Silly little thing.’

  ‘She what?’ I ask. How does a dog commit suicide?

  Magda lends her support to Marguerite. ‘Well, you know when you think about it in a way that is true, Marguerite, she did! I mean, Chiku runs behind the car while you were reversing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes! She topped herself!’

  Chris and I meet up with Peter one afternoon at a nyama choma joint in Karen. Over a few moto Tuskers, he tells us he doesn’t know what ended up happening to Esther, and that Khamisi got another job with a good family in Karen. That the Smyths have a new cook, that Patrick is still the askari, and that David now works in the main house, taking over Esther’s role. He says at least fifty carers have been through the house since I left. Fifty! Some of them didn’t last a month. One young girl hooked up with the Navy SEAL bodyguard Marguerite had hired to protect her from the Nigerian hitman – and they both absconded in the dead of the night.

  Peter tells me the women looking after Walt now are South African. He says they’re rude to the Kenyan staff and to Marguerite, that the house is a quite unhappy place. ‘And the mzee is so very sick now. He’s worse than when you were here. He doesn’t remember anything much anymore. He doesn’t know even who the memsahib is anymore!’ He clicks his tongue and shakes his head. ‘Pole sana.’

  ‘Pole sana,’ I say. It really is all so very pole sana.

  Chris and I meet James in his hometown of Machakos on a Sunday after church, and we go with him and Rebecca and little William to the People’s Park – a new public space built beside a man-made lake, featuring gardens, restaurants and a pool. We sit near the amphitheatre where children dance on the stage, eat barbecued kuku and drink moto Cokes, and tease William and Rebecca about whether they have boyfriends or girlfriends. William is only in Grade Five but doing very well in maths. Rebecca is in her final year of college and soon to graduate as a teacher – she uses computers all the time in class. James is very proud of them both. We eat ice creams while William rides a paddleboat around an inflatable pool, squealing with delight, and James reiterates to us how sick Walt is and how difficult life in the house has become.

  ‘Bwana Smyth cannot go out much now. Not even to the Club. He only goes out for the doctor, now.’

  Chris and I go to the bar and catch up with Claire and Robert. At a braai in their new house, their girls – now so much older and taller – play in the garden while the adults chat on the patio.

  One of their friends was caught up in the 2013 terror attack at the Westgate Mall, when Al-Shabaab militants stormed the shopping complex killing sixty-five people and leaving almost two hundred wounded. The news coverage was horrifying: footage showing bloodied bodies lying among scattered chairs at the café I’d once sat at with happy families sharing milkshakes and donuts. Claire’s friend had hidden underneath a supermarket freezer with her kids while bullets and blood flew around them. The mall is reopening in a few days – it’s a traumatic time for everyone. Claire looks out at her girls running around the yard.

  ‘This is the thing about Africa. It’s magic. Nobody wants to leave. Then you have children and your perspective changes. You worry about what their future holds. Hell, it must have been hard for your parents to go. But I admire them. You’ve no idea how lucky you are to live in a place like Australia.’

  Two years later, I’m in Africa again. This time I’m sitting by the fire at a bush camp in the middle of Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. My entire family has gone over for a three-week trip. We’re on safari with one of my dad’s old school friends, Eric, who now runs a walking safari company based in Victoria Falls.

  Eric is telling us stories about some of the interesting clients he’s had – American film stars, Middle Eastern oil sheiks … and a Zimbabwean woman, Lindsay, who was working for ‘a mad family in Nairobi’.

  ‘They were looking after some demented old fella there. He was totally cooked. Wanted to grab his guns every time he heard a dog bark. His wife had a personal bodyguard to protect her from the daughter, who was apparently trying to knock her off!’

  After I tell Eric that there’s only one family this can be, he arranges for me to meet up with Lindsay when we all return to Victoria Falls.

  Over a bottle of red wine, she and I swap stories about the very strange world of the Smyth family.

  Lindsay joined them a few months after I left, along with another friend of hers from Zimbabwe, Glynnis. She worked with Pammy-from-London for a time – who, when she wasn’t conniving with Fiona about ways to ‘bring Marguerite down’, was buying hard drugs off the street and getting high in the carers’ flat in her time off.

  Lindsay tells me about the best night they had there: she and Glynnis organised a party to celebrate Walt and Marguerite’s fortieth wedding anniversary. They decorated the house, arranged for a huge feast and cake, played music and danced all night in the living room, kicking legs up onto each other’s shoulders, singing by the fire.

  Lindsay and Glynnis knew Fiona could never find out about it – she’d have thought it too risky, too dangerous, too stimulating for his condition, but Walt was so happy he cried tears of joy. He went to bed smiling for the first time in months.

  Epilogue

  RECKONING

  It’s taken a while for me to work out what, if anything, I gained from this strange time in Kenya. Any lessons feel a bit like they’re from a parallel universe.

  I suppose I’d been curious to get a sense of the world my parents were from. To know the sights and sounds and smells of it, to experience it in a visceral way. But I think a part of me was also curious to understand how a system that we can now see is so patently unjust could have existed for as long as it did – how otherwise good people could have tolerated it. I think I get that now, a bit. Though I’m left with more questions, really.

  Would, I wonder, we still be living in Zimbabwe (or ‘Rhodesia’) if the ruling white minority had taken the path Kenya did – had embraced a peaceful transition to independence, rather than bitterly fought a losing battle? What would I have done, had I been around at my parents’ time? Would I have been brave enough, clear-eyed enough, to stand up and say, this can’t go on? Or would I have just accepted things, as just the way the world was? Is there anything I can do now, beyond acknowledging the wrongs of the past, and understanding the advantages I’ve been lucky enough to be born into, and supporting moves to undo any of the structural inequities that remain?

  Guilt is not a helpful emotion when it comes to grappling w
ith these things. I do, though, feel personally responsible for accepting the racial privilege that led to my time with the Smyths in Kenya. There are small and private things I have done and continue to do in an effort to make up for this. Things that are within my power, and that I know will make a difference to people who deserve better. I have also come to realise that Africa – Kenya, at least – should not be defined by its colonial past. Its history is much longer and richer than that. Its people have agency and capacity and visions of their own future that they’re busy pursuing. The rest of the world should know more about that than it does.

  Despite the unpleasantness of these colonial reckonings, my love for Africa more generally – the feeling of connection I have to it – was further cemented by my time in Kenya. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where a white descendant of colonials chased off the continent belongs. Australia is and probably always will be home for me now – but even here, I’m reminded that it’s stolen land.

  As for Walt – well, as far as I know, he’s still going. I feel the urge to say ‘against all odds’, given the state I first found him in 2010, but it’s not ‘against’ the odds at all, is it? If the odds are in anyone’s favour in this world, they’re in Walter Smyth’s. At least, purely in the sense of his physical survival. Whether he would, if he could, appreciate the efforts being made to prolong his existence will forever remain a mystery. Would he consider the extra years he’s had on this Earth to have been worth it? Is this what he would have chosen for himself? Would he have been on Marguerite’s or Fiona’s side, when it came to deciding which risks were worth taking to improve his happiness and wellbeing in the short term? If there is a lesson in his story, I reckon it’s this: make your end-of-life wishes clearly known to those who will be responsible for carrying them out. Make sure they understand what your idea of quality-of-life is. WRITE AN ADVANCED CARE DIRECTIVE. Seriously, do it. Do it now. Especially if you’ve got a lot of money. Wealth might make life easier in material ways, but it can really screw with people’s heads.