september 2007
Even at four P.M. the relentless Kenyan sun pelts down. I look at my phone, willing it to ring. I’ve been waiting at this makeshift bus stop for more than an hour and a half. Old minibuses, called matatus, pull up, packed to the brim with people. The haphazard, battered public vehicles are in sad shape, their bumpers irreparably bent or about to fall off. The people crammed within look at me with barely veiled questions in their eyes. I feel suddenly self-conscious, obtrusive.
Where is he? More buses and matatus come and go—but still no sign of Kennedy. How many times is too many to call someone I’ve never met? My family always says I’m way too pushy. I take a deep breath, but I just can’t help myself, I dial again. I ask if he is still coming. He replies, “Almost there.” I hang up unsatisfied—he said the same thing when I’d called more than thirty minutes ago. I survey the landscape, looking for a place to settle in. I’d had to ask where the “Adams Arcade bus stop” is—and an old man wordlessly pointed to an unmarked curb. There is a gas station, what looks like a strip mall called Adams Arcade, a kiosk painted bright Coca-Cola red, and the curb where the buses swing in and out in loose coordination. Another matatu screeches by and I feel the Nairobi dust seeping into my pores. I wish there was a way to fix myself up a bit, but there’s nothing to do but stand here and wait.
It is my fifth day in Africa. And my first time outside of the United States as an adult. When I told my parents that I wanted to go to Kenya for a semester abroad, they’d looked at me as though I were speaking another language. Wasn’t Europe “abroad” enough? What happened to the daughter who hated camping, disdained dirt, and overpacked for a weekend trip to the mountains? My grandparents warned my parents it would be crazy to allow me to go to Kenya. While my parents might have wished they could forbid me to go, they knew better. Once I set my mind to something I am doggedly determined.
I hadn’t originally planned to go abroad. I’d come from a public high school in Denver, and Wesleyan University woke me up to the possibility of all there was to learn. I didn’t want to waste a second. But my best friend, Daphne, decided she was going to spend the fall of junior year in Italy, and I didn’t want to be left at Wesleyan without her.
Daphne is tall, athletic, and beautiful, with a Canadian father and Greek mother. She grew up traveling, and she kept telling me that there was more to learn than what I would find in books and papers—there were foods to eat, the musical lilt of languages I wouldn’t need to understand to be moved by, late summer nights to spend sharing stolen kisses. The world was a big place, and she encouraged me to go out and see it.
I was scared to find out just how big the world might be. I lived under tremendous, self-imposed pressure, determined to make every minute count, terrified that time would somehow run out before I became “great” or realized my purpose. I’d set myself on a narrow path when, at seven, I fell in love with the theater. I decided then that I wanted to be a professional actress and was obsessed with putting myself on this route toward “success.” At Wesleyan I pushed the limit of what I could fit into a day; I didn’t sleep or eat very much. I’d become so numbed by my need for perfection I didn’t feel much of anything at all, always scared that enjoying something too much would pull me off my path. To distract myself from this tension, I started to date Joe, and I tried hard to convince myself I could love him. One day I took a study break that was not in my meticulous daily plan to sit with Joe on the floor of the library stacks and talk. Joe looked at me and said, “I wish I could be you. You’ve always known what you want.”
I realized that was exactly my problem. At twenty years old, I’d never seriously rethought the plan I’d made at seven.
I went to the study abroad office and spent an afternoon lost in the binders describing all the programs approved for Wesleyan credit abroad. Unfamiliar places roused my curiosity: a program in Ghana about culture and music, a theater program in Russia, and a program in Nairobi, Kenya, about health and development—two things I blissfully knew nothing about.
It was only after I decided to go to Nairobi that I heard about Kennedy. Two friends from Denver had visited Kenya for the World Social Forum—a big activist gathering. Kennedy had spoken at the forum, and his organization, called Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), performed a piece of theater. Upon hearing I was going to study in Kenya, my friends Bonnie and Becca gave me Kennedy’s e-mail, suggesting I try to collaborate with his organization on a theater project. Kennedy and I spent the summer exchanging short e-mails, with his always ending “welcome to mother land and peace be with you!” Kennedy exuded a confidence, an honesty, that was disarming. When I’d first said I wanted to do a theater project with his group, he’d replied, “Here in SHOFCO we do miracles by the power of nature, but we’d love to learn more.” But he didn’t just agree to my participation—he’d asked me to send over my résumé. I was so nervous, I spent hours working on that résumé, hopeful that Kennedy would allow me to come and work with him.
I’d been so excited to finally find out just how big the world was, how far I could go. Yet as I wait alone at this bus stop, I wonder if maybe Kenya is just a little too far. At my homestay this morning, breakfast was a sour millet porridge, which I couldn’t even fake eating. For the past two days Odoch, the academic director of my program, has been briefing us about cultural differences, safety, and expectations. He’s from Uganda and fled during Idi Amin’s rule. In his late sixties, he has a commanding presence, but there is a wisdom, a gentleness, and a youthful energy about him.
Odoch says that Kenyans will lie to foreigners all the time: they don’t see it as lying; the truth is just slightly more malleable. He warns us that Nairobi is nicknamed Nairobbery because of the frequency of bank robberies and carjackings, but that we will probably be fine if we just hide should one happen, and that men here think that when they ask you out and you say no, really you’re saying yes. According to Odoch, Kenyans invented the game of playing hard to get.
Donna, Odoch’s American wife who has lived in Kenya for forty years, often interrupts him. She is a force of nature: a tall, outspoken, fast-moving, fast-thinking, muumuu-sporting, white ex-Catholic New Yorker. She is an anthropologist who wrote her dissertation on Maasai beadwork and now paints multicolored zebras, makes black Christmas tree angels out of yarn, jewelry of her own design, and recently took up experimental glasswork—in addition to writing and teaching.
Donna has been married to Odoch for the past twenty or so years, and a more unlikely and in-love couple I have never seen. Donna moves fast and talks even faster. Odoch moves with deliberate meditation and chooses his words very carefully. He can tell you no in such a diplomatic way that you are never sure if he really said no or not—and he is so kind about it that you just can’t hold it against him.
“Do NOT get married while you are here. There is always a student who ends up married. Don’t be that student,” warns Donna.
I roll my eyes.
Odoch brings the conversation back from Donna’s tangent to talk about the frequent, often violent university riots. In his youth, he used to be a ringleader of such riots. In a few months, Kenya will hold hotly anticipated presidential elections, and Odoch warns us to stay away from political rallies or demonstrations of any kind.
Only a few weeks before my arrival, an infamous underground gang called Mungiki beheaded many people in the Nairobi slum of Mathare. My dad heard the story on NPR. I’d loftily told him that one incident doesn’t define a country and that, anyhow, the media was hungry for stories that fulfill white stereotypes about the violent Other. My dad told me to save the smart-ass theories for my Wesleyan classes.
Another bus pulls up, a bright blue KBS bus—more expensive and better regulated than the matatus. He’s the last person to step off, but without any words I instinctively know it’s him: Kennedy Odede. He barely greets me, says only, “Let’s go.” He walks fast. I have to run to keep stride. Unsure how to navigate the busy traffic and skinny curbs too thin to be called sidewalks, I teeter dangerously close to the tarmac road. Kennedy takes me by the shoulders and places me on the inside, away from the traffic, so that a reckless driver would hit him instead.
As we walk, the big skyscrapers of downtown Nairobi, several miles to the northeast of us, melt into the distance. We weave through markets with everything from chickens to chairs displayed for sale. Abruptly the paved road stops, and the buildings seem to shrink and huddle closer together. We continue on a dirt path. There are people everywhere. I have to push my way through the dense crowd, trying my best not to fall in the mud. There are so many people I can hardly make out individuals—people are going every which way, with determined strides.
Before us sprawls Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slums. Separated by a set of train tracks from the nearby lower-middle-class areas that enjoy formal provision of electricity and water, Kibera gives new meaning to the saying “the other side of the tracks.”* In Kibera, hundreds of thousands of houses made from sheets of corrugated metal and other recycled materials are piled nearly on top of one another. Garbage-lined paths thread the neighborhood instead of roads, and the terrain consists of hilly slopes and steep inclines that without paving are uneven, making it difficult to maintain balance. With its own markets and shops, Kibera is almost a city unto itself, except that inside of the slum there are no government schools or health services, running water or legal power services. No one knows how many people live inside the slum—estimates range up to one million people in a space about the size of Central Park, entirely marginalized.†
I can’t believe this exists just minutes away from the beautiful houses, roads, grocery stores, and shopping malls. The Kibera slum goes on for as far as my eyes can see—the sheer magnitude of it incapacitating. I can’t go on, can’t just keep walking as if this were a sight I see every day. I’ve never imagined that something like this could exist.
It takes Kennedy a few moments to realize that I am no longer keeping stride. My face flushes with embarrassment at my transparent shock. Kennedy just stands next to me, and for a moment we stand on a hill looking at it together, through entirely different eyes. When my legs finally work again, we continue.
There are piles of trash that look as though they’ve been collecting for years. Puddles of rank, standing water often block our way. Reggae music drifts through the air. Women line the roadside with their makeshift businesses; cardboard trays filled with cooking rest in their laps.
A group of about eight little boys, who can’t be older than six, walk past us, heading home alone from a local informal school. In their ragged uniform shorts and pullover sweaters, they gather around one woman cooking something that looks like french fries. One little boy proudly presents his money to the woman and buys one fry each for his friends, keeping only one for himself. I’m transfixed by this little brigade as they eat their treats, savoring each bite of their single fry. The selflessness, the generosity of that little boy cuts me to the core. I try to picture the same scene in America. Here, one child has precious pocket money and instead of buying a snack for himself, and eating it as his friends watch wistfully, this child takes obvious pride in his ability to provide for his pals. The boys run off along the crowded pathway until the bright red of their uniforms becomes a series of tiny dots.
Everyone greets Kennedy as we walk by with affectionate exclamations of “Mayor, Mayor!” I look at him quizzically and he just smiles—not offering any explanations. I guess he’s practically a legend in these parts. I don’t know much about him, but it’s clear from the greetings as we pass that at only twenty-three, he inspires enthusiasm in this desperate place. It feels a little like walking with a celebrity.
To me, children shout out “How are you? How are you?,” the one English phrase they apparently all know to use when they spot a mzungu, a white person. We turn off the main road, jump over an open sewer, and weave through several narrow alleyways, carefully avoiding the jagged, protruding corners of renegade iron sheets, to arrive at Kennedy’s house.
The house can’t be more than ten feet by six feet. It has a single plastic window and a door made from repurposed wood that barely closes. The walls are made out of corrugated metal and colorful cardboard milk boxes. A sheet hangs down the middle, separating the “living room”—a small table, battered couch, and metal chair—from the “kitchen”—a corner with big yellow jugs and a small camping stove—and the “bedroom.” There’s no power. The only source of water is the group of beat-up yellow jerricans stacked in the corner. There is a photograph of Marcus Garvey on the wall wearing an ornate feather hat. Hanging next to him, incongruously, is a poster for the movie Titanic. Kennedy has so few possessions—what there seems to be the most of is books: Siddhartha, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, and A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King.
He says softly, “Welcome to my home.”
My eyes stay transfixed on the books. He notices my gaze.
“There are two ways of escaping your poverty,” he offers quietly. “One, you can use drugs, get drunk—escape. Or you can escape into the world of books; that can be your refuge.”
I nod; books have often been my refuge, too.
“Do you want to know why I was late to meet you?” he asks with a gleam of mischief in his eyes, his tone shifting from serious to playful. His gleeful giggle would stand out anywhere.
I want to know.
“I had to walk!” He tells me that he had ended his shift at his current janitorial job in the city center, only to realize that, as so often happened, he wouldn’t be able to buy dinner if he spent his fifteen cents for the matatu. So he walked more than an hour to meet me. When he was getting close, he convinced a sympathetic conductor to let him ride the last five minutes, just so I would see him stepping off the bus—with the dignity of a paying customer. He laughs.
I’m not sure how to respond—taken aback by his ingenuity, his pride, and the fact that if he used fifteen cents for bus fare he wouldn’t be able to afford food. I’m stricken by a sudden understanding of what it would mean to him to have the thirty dollars I casually put in my pocket this morning.
We sit in silence for a moment, and I sense that my inability to laugh at circumstance the way he does—my obvious discomfort with my own privilege—has somehow let him down. Until now our conversation has flown with deceptive ease, and this moment reminds us that we are little more than strangers, from entirely different worlds.
“Do you want to see the SHOFCO office?” he asks, shifting the awkward energy.
“Of course.”
We make our way back through the paths of Kibera to the iron-sheet SHOFCO office that stands precariously on the edge of the slum next to the railroad. This humble shack is SHOFCO’s very first office, Kennedy tells me with pride. They still use it for meetings, theater rehearsals, and community forums and I hear laughter echoing from inside. Not wanting to interrupt, we go on to the second SHOFCO office in Olympic, a few rented rooms in the lower-middle-class estate that borders the slums of Kibera. A bunch of young people are hanging out, drinking tea, using a computer, and tending to the chickens and the small garden out back. As soon as I step through the gate, the energy of this place washes over me. These young people clearly love being here—it is their space. Kennedy’s organization is much more than just a theater group. SHOFCO also operates a slumwide sanitation and cleanup program, and a women’s empowerment program that educates and distributes sanitary pads in schools. There are also departments dedicated to communications, sports, and income-generating activities.
Kennedy introduces me to Anne, his childhood friend who runs SHOFCO’s women’s empowerment program, called SWEP. Her family owns the plot of houses where Kennedy lives and she lives kitty-corner to him. In a logbook, Anne records the number of beaded bracelets that the SWEP women have made this week. She explains the group is for women living with HIV, and they make bracelets to earn enough to feed themselves and their children. I learn that Kennedy started the SWEP project before SHOFCO, when he was only sixteen.
“I saw how these women were suffering. I used to buy them food with anything I earned. I guess that is how the group started.”
“The women all call Kennedy their husband!” Anne laughs and elbows Kennedy. “He takes care of them.”
Kennedy fends her off, chuckling, and says “Kuenda uko”—jokingly telling her to get back to work.
Next Kennedy introduces me to Joseph Kibara, nicknamed “Chair” because he has just been elected chairman of SHOFCO in their annual elections. Chair can’t be older than twenty-six, but something about him makes him seem like a regal old man. He is clearly proud of his distinguished title and sits drinking a cup of tea as he participates in a small meeting. He rises slowly to ceremoniously shake my hand in welcome. Another young man with a shy smile stands and introduces himself as Nicholas Masivu, the treasurer. They get back to their meeting, excitedly writing plans down on a large calendar.
As we walk out back to see the garden where the group grows vegetables to sell, I ask Kennedy, “If he’s the chairman, what does that make you?”
“I’m an adviser,” he says mischievously.
Kennedy’s best friend, Antony, hears this and laughs. “Don’t let him fool you. Kennedy knows how to make sure everyone feels like SHOFCO belongs to them. He makes departments and then everyone votes on the leaders. I’m the head of communications. Then there is theater, SWEP, sanitation, girls’ empowerment, soccer, and economics.”
Kennedy feeds the chickens, whose eggs are another income generator that supports SHOFCO’s activities. I can’t help but marvel at the carefully thought out structures he’s put in place, and I say so.
Antony tells me that Kennedy has helped to start more than a hundred small businesses with a philosophy he calls “pass it forward.” He gives out small loans from his meager earnings and then requires that instead of paying the loan back, the recipient designate a new person to receive a loan. The chain of loans has launched barbershops, water stands, vegetable stalls, and many other small enterprises.
“It was the great Jamaican leader Marcus Garvey who taught me that for a people to rise up they must be economically independent. He started many black-run businesses. The idea that SHOFCO and our community must be self-reliant is inspired by him,” Kennedy says, his conviction effusive.
A tall, skinny young man opens the gate. Kennedy jumps boyishly in the air and shouts, “Coaches!”
They shake hands and fist-bump and then come over so Kennedy can introduce us. “His name is also Kennedy, so we call him Coaches. He coaches the soccer teams—and they always win!”
I stand on the side, watching Kennedy talk with many of the SHOFCO young people. It isn’t hard to see why people call him Mayor. A girl named Mary comes over to me and confidently introduces herself as the person in charge of sanitation and girls’ empowerment. She goes right up to Kennedy and loudly starts giving him a hard time about something, which everyone clearly enjoys. I feel an immediate desire to become friends with these young people—to share in their sense of purpose.
Suddenly Kennedy sees the sun setting and jumps.
“Where did the time go?” he exclaims. “We better get you back to your homestay before dark.”
No! I think to myself—I’d rather stay here.
Again, I have to work to keep up with Kennedy. As we cross a busy street, Kennedy reaches for my hand—holding on to it well after we are safely across. I look down at my hand and then up at his face quizzically—and he quickly lets go.
“Sorry!” he exclaims. “In my culture, it is customary to hold hands. It is a symbol of respect and friendship.”
My mind spins from all I’ve seen as the day’s last beams of sunlight smile down.
I head back to Woodley Estate, the comparatively leafy middle-class gated community where my homestay mother, Mama Rose, lives. Now that I’ve seen Kibera, which is, unfathomably, only a fifteen-minute walk away, I’m discomforted by the discrepancies between the two places. Mama Rose’s place is a two-story house with running water, power, and a television. I realize that compared to Kibera, Mama Rose’s house is a palace. Yet just days ago, when I was first dropped off here, I felt very much in the middle of “Africa.” The house is small and outdated, with furniture and a feel from the seventies. Outside the community’s high black gate is a market with handcrafted stalls lining an unpaved road. From there a narrow alleyway runs into a bigger market called Toi, which merges with a part of Kibera called Makina. The part of Toi Market near my homestay is casually referred to as mzungu Toi because its prices cater to the middle class and are much higher than “real Toi,” which lies just a few meters farther away.
During the summer before embarking on my trip, I’d e-mailed Kennedy to ask if in addition to working with him at SHOFCO, I could live with him and his family in Kibera. I’d told him that I could pay him, as was standard for my program to cover the costs of host families. I’d told him he wouldn’t even notice I was there.
He’d replied saying, unequivocally, absolutely not. Foreigners never live inside Kibera. He couldn’t imagine my surviving without running water or electricity. You are an American, he’d written, and I live a very simple life.
I’d e-mailed back, saying, I’m a simple American. If you can live there, I can too.
Immediately upon arriving, I asked for a moment with my program director, Odoch, to discuss my living arrangement idea. Odoch gave his consent, noting that we probably shouldn’t inform the study abroad program, since its administrators likely wouldn’t approve. Later, another student asked if she could live in Olympic, the middle-class area just outside Kibera, and Odoch said no—it was too dangerous to live so close to Kibera with the upcoming elections. Instead of making me nervous, Odoch’s inexplicable consent made me feel special.
Ever since I was a child my reaction to the forbidden has been a stubborn desire to keep pushing: obstacles make something uncontrollably and deeply necessary. The words you can’t unleash a determination so intense that at times it even startles me. I want to know why—why can’t I? Because we said so!—an obviously insufficient reason—my parents would say when I was little. While they may have thought that this impulse would abate with time and maturity, they are still waiting.
That night, sleeping in a comfortable bed, the TV on quietly in the background, the contrast between this and Kennedy’s life in Nairobi is laid bare. My resolve to live in Kibera strengthens as this seems like the only way to even begin to break through the barriers that exist between me and the young people I’ll be working with.
A few days later, I meet Kennedy for lunch at the Nairobi Java House. Kennedy spends a long time considering the menu. I order a sandwich and salad, and after a calculated pause, Kennedy orders the exact same things. He eats awkwardly, the fork held incorrectly. We discuss details about the theater project and his efforts to recruit young people to participate, and the scheduled hours for rehearsals.
Finally, we get around to talking about my e-mail—when I bring it up.
Kennedy emphatically repeats that no white person has lived deep inside of the slums of Kibera for more than a few nights—a few weeks tops. It’s just not possible. Instead he suggests that I move into the SHOFCO office in Olympic.
I’m determined to prove him wrong, to show him that the differences between us aren’t as vast as he might think.