It was “lights out” for Tenwek yesterday. The electrical power was off for forty minutes. This compares favorably to our home in rural Alabama in my estimation but it brought home to me some truths. Moreover, as yesterday (January 30) was the first day I had off since the 17th, I took the opportunity to walk to town (Bomet) and back, about 10 miles.
The day was clear, bright, warm and the road was macadamed wide and welcoming. At the gate to the hospital however it was a major traffic jam. Motorcycles, maduka (meaning shops, kiosks, patches of ground where a blanket may be spread to display the wares, duka is the singular) and matatus all crowd the roadway making even pedestrian traffic come to a halt.
The matatu is an interesting vehicle. It was originally an unlicensed private vehicle whose driver would promise to get you someplace, sometime, for a fee (typically very cheap). It is now a bit more regularized, going from set place to place. The name derives from the Swahili for three, “tatu.” The average matatu is seen sitting by the roadway, while the driver shills for more passengers; “Just three more, just three more and we leave!” They are indispensible, ubiquitous, gaudy, idiosyncratic and many unsafe at any speed. As it was, I had to deny I was walking to Bomet in order to get through the scrimmage line.
Once free of the “matata ya matatu; the tangle of matatus” I stepped out with vigor, the road rising slowly over the next two miles to the junction for Silebwet. The country side, opened up in the slow revelatory way it does when one is moving on foot. Green hills checker-boarded with chocolate-colored cultivation, drying the soil before a second harrowing before planting. The homesteads remind me of Appalachia in the 50’s but without the washing machines on the front porch: unpainted clapboard, split rail or barbed-wire fences with withies of branches woven through the strands, goats, dogs and cattle wandering about, tended by small boys.
Walking anywhere leaves you open to the drama that is happening “beneath” your notice in a speeding car. As a major distraction, this “mzungu mzee” (old European) probably created at least as much additional drama. A heifer, momentarily untended as her keeper was marveling at me, took the chance to start grazing on a young banana plant she spied through the fence. Loud recriminations in Kulani (which I do not understand) were visited upon the young boy as I rounded a bend.
I made a point of walking on the right (against traffic) as the motorcycles routinely cut their engines and hurtle down the grade at speed in order to save gas. The approach is almost silent so I wanted the hazard to my front. The number of RTA (road traffic accidents) from ‘cycles is daunting. Since they a usually carrying at least three people, the carnage is impressive. Most of the foot traffic was coming back from Bomet, as I left after 2PM and smart shoppers hit the shops on market day as early as possible. Saturday is also a school day and the crowds of students in their distinctive uniforms (a different striking color for each school) made a palette of primary hues along the long steady slope.
I am yelled to from time to time usually by small boys asking “How are you?;” but have no clue as to what I say when I answer. There are a large but yet limited number of ways to respond to the question (Swahili is taught in secondary school so many of this age speak only Kulani; English is the language of instruction in elementary school). I am not infrequently approached by young men who make a point of welcoming me to Kenya and asking me the “who what when where” they have undoubtedly learned in class. Frequently there seems to be a shy smiling young lass about with looks of admiration for this evidence of sophistication. Of course, this just might be my imagination.
Bomet is a town evidenced by radio towers, a prison, long blocks of maduka, highway construction, and banks as well as red dirt streets, feral dogs, sidewalk (I mean the entire verge of the road) vendors of shoe shines, roasted corn on the cob, cell phone charge-ups, nyama choma (grilled meat)shops, a ramshackle dark windowless corridor with “Mountaintop Resort Hotel” in hand-lettering over the door, a man inside a steel container (turned kiosk) banging on it loudly with a sledge. It is dirty dusty, smelly, gaudy, crowed industrious and noisy. I stopped and bought four pens, a handkerchief, some “Obama Chewing Gum,” and a Coca Cola. Kenyan sensitivities are different. The sidewalks are narrow, crowded and the locus of many heated debates. I paused to allow a procession of ladies to negotiate a particularly narrow slalom around some idlers only to have a young man walk around me and squeeze his way through the press. Not infrequently, I receive an elbow as I stop to decipher a sign. It is not Kenyan to say “excuse me” in these circumstances but should you drop something accidentally, anyone near murmurs “Polay Polay!” (excuse me excuse me” as if they were the cause.
The trip back is a long slow climb at a mile every 20 minutes. As I approach Tenwek, the quiet of the countryside is shattered by the hubbub of matatus.and motorcycles, maduka and mankind at the gates of Tenwek.
Building a hospital here was dictated 50 years ago; it was a demon-possessed site and considered useless otherwise by the Kipsigi elders. Three girls had died during initiation rituals on the same site, no doubt from malign spirits.
Building a hospital here is a bit more complicated than state-side. Consider: you have to secure a clean reliable water source and protect it from contamination, process it, filter it, settle and then pipe it into the hospital as well as your home, get a generator for electricity until they build the “grid” close enough to you, build housing for yourself as well as all your staff, provide security around the hospital compound (meaning a big high fence manned by mazamu (gueards)) for the hospital, your families as well as your people and their families, build a road, get the equipment that allows you to function, build a kitchen to feed the patients, plant gardens to give you and your staff fresh vegetables, and lastly build the hospital buildings themselves as well as the labs, X-ray, pharmacy and the surgical theatres. Then see if people will come.
I am reminded daily that God works his miracles not with the strong, confident, and forceful but the weak, flawed and hesitant stuff. We are not asked to be successful merely faithful.
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