Hakuna Matata

Friday, July 13, 2007

Awesome, I’m only one month behind! I think the day-by-day reports will have to get shaved down a bit, no? Here we go.

Voi: In the Beginning

Looking back and remembering my first bus ride down to Voi, I wish I could have seen the look on my face when we finally arrived. Stunned/having received a board to the back of the skull would probably best have described my impression. Understandably so: Voi is practically a frontier town, coated with the red dust that blows all around, six blocks from one end to the other of the “central business district” with the main through-way as the only paved road, and not a mzungu in sight. Before I left Nairobi, my friend Laura had said she was sure there would be a video store in town. I wasn’t even sure there were toilets (I later would find out that technically yes, there are toilets in Voi, but whoever invented the “Eastern” toilet ought to be shot. Toilet my ass [so to speak]. Squatting over a whole in the ground with no toilet paper in sight makes Miriam a sad girl.)

Those first few days when Mkaya was there were spent meeting people from the hospital and local HIV/AIDS public health program—contacts that would be important for me later—and looking for a place for me to stay. We stayed with Mkaya’s sister and her husband and then with his parents for the next two. Since Emily and Julius live in a town roughly 20 minutes west of Voi in the Taita hills, and the Mwamburis Sr live in Wundanyi, the headquarters of the Taita-Taveta district set high up in the hills another 25 minutes or so past Mwatate, I got my first real experience with the roads in Kenya and the distances people routinely travel by foot and by matatu. Never, ever, ever again will I complain about the roads in the US. Never. Take the worst road you can imagine (potholes a few feet deep and wide, washboard when driving, mud, narrow, no signs anywhere—ever—for anything, be it a curve or a town or a 75% grade) and that’s the best road in the district. Seriously.

Needless to say, everyone even distantly related to Mkaya is a saint. Having since seen Mkaya's sister often in town and gone back to stay at her house, I am so grateful that they are close by! I always feel better just remembering that. The people I met at the hospital were also welcoming and lovely, and they seemed excited for me to be there to help out. Everyone spoke Kitaita or Kiswahili most of the time but assured me that they would be happy to speak in English when I was around. (Aside: it is still amazing to me that even the poorest people in the most rural areas of Kenya that I have visited usually speak 3-4 languages.)

I’m not usually such a skittish person, but I was flat out panicked for those first few days. I think Mkaya could sense it, and he tried his very best to reassure me and make sure that I was settled and well-connected before he left. Nonetheless, the thought of being left by myself in this tiny little town where everyone stared at me with gaping jaws no matter where I went scared me. By the end of the first day I had set my internal countdown: only 7 more weeks in Kenya…The days before he left were punctuated with the small natural disasters that I have come to recognize as my trademark bad luck: my digital camera left on the bus from Nairobi (apparently it miraculously showed up on the bus hours later when the driver threatened to take the remaining passengers to police station), flat tires, bad weather, misplaced keys, cell phones, and money, and downed servers at the cyber café. I fretted at the thought of what would happen once Mkaya left, and visions of malaria danced in my head (it is endemic in this area).

Mkaya left on a midnight bus to Nairobi on Monday, June 18th. Tuesday I spent doing…nothing. No, seriously. I was supposed to meet the HIV/AIDS guy (Innocent Mjomba) in the morning to travel with him to some of the local clinics and dispensaries, but he first called to tell me that he would be delayed by 3 or 4 hours, and then that the public health vehicle he used needed repair and would not be ready until Thursday. I had not yet learned about Kenyan “time” and had sat waiting patiently in my hotel room for the first few hours and then at the cyber, thinking that I should be ready at the drop of the hat to rush out the door, jump into said 4x4 vehicle, and zip off to save the people of this cheerful, developing country from the scourge of HIV. Ha ha.

By the time I found out he wasn’t coming after all, I had spent a few hours at the cyber trying to arrange some way to get out of town that coming weekend. I was also looking for something to do for my birthday the next day. I was gloomy and sulky and BORED. As I was leaving the cyber, I met Khadija, the woman who owns the cyber and the stationery shop next-door. She was very friendly and sympathetic, and rather than smacking me and telling me to “Snap out of it!” a la Moonstruck as I deserved, she told me about nice people in town that I would surely meet and befriend. When she asked what I was going to do for my birthday, I told her that I would probably go to Voi Wildlife Lodge, a safari lodge just outside the entrance to Tsavo East, to swim and have a nice meal and just relax. She agreed that this was a good idea.

After a quick walk through town (it usually takes about 10-15 minutes to walk at Kenyan pace from end to end…Kenyan means slow, by the way), I went back to my guest house. Oasis Guest House (‘Oasis’ is pronounced to rhyme with Onassis otherwise no one knows what you’re talking about) is clean and charming, and the people there are, of course, extremely friendly and welcoming. I went into my room that night, lay down on my bed to read and freak out some more around 7 PM…and got out of bed at 9 AM the next day, my birthday.

To be continued...

M