The sun, unusually orange, begins to set, and I remember Kennedy’s warning.
“Makina? Are you crazy—Makina isn’t even safe for me, for black people, for the people who live there. You can’t spend the night there. People get killed, Jessica. There is a mosque there where a group of boys wring people’s necks like chickens, in broad daylight. Makina, it’s no joke.”
And yet, here I am, at Alice’s place in Makina, the Nubian area of Kibera. The first inhabitants of Kibera were Nubian—Sudanese soldiers—and the British colonizers “gave them” Kibera as a token of gratitude for their service in World War I. Kibera is the Nubian word for “jungle.” Alice works for my homestay mother as her “house girl.”* She smiles at me shyly, I smile back from behind a well-loved coffee mug filled with the instant coffee she’s proudly prepared, having heard that Americans prefer coffee to tea. Kennedy’s half-finished coffee sits on the small stool that serves as the room’s only table. He left in a rush, anxious to leave before dark settled, and it seems he took the easy conversation with him.
Alice’s eyes flicker every so often to the door, to the hook and eye that are all that keep it closed. Over her shoulder, I peer out the small window to see people scurrying to finish errands and get inside before the last bit of daylight—safety—vanishes for good.
When Alice heard that I was moving into Kibera, she pleaded with me to come spend one night with her in her house. Unaware of the nuances of the neighborhoods, I’d accepted. It gave me satisfaction to see my host mother shake her head with disapproval—she’d never go to Alice’s house. Alice and I couldn’t be too far apart in age. If we could sit on my host mother’s couch and talk, why couldn’t we do the same on Alice’s?
When I’d told Kennedy my plan, he’d refused outright, explaining Makina’s infamous reputation, insisting I back out. The more he’d resisted, the more adamantly I’d pushed—I had made a promise that I didn’t want to break. A twinge of doubt twisted my stomach, but I didn’t dare tell him, didn’t dare answer the question that flashed through my mind: What am I trying to prove?
Seeing that he wouldn’t change my mind, Kennedy had begrudgingly walked me the forty-five minutes it took to reach Alice’s—his popularity made the walk longer. When we arrived, Alice came rushing out, proud to greet her visitors, eager to show me off. She wanted everyone in the neighborhood to know that a mzungu came to see her. All the attention made me suddenly shy, my presence converted into an uncomfortable personal trophy.
Alice served coffee and told us her story. Her husband was in jail, accused of armed robbery, and she spent most of the money she earned on food and supplies for him. She blames him for leaving her alone and without enough money to feed their children; she’s had to send them upcountry to live with her mother.
“That’s African men,” she lamented.
“Not all,” Kennedy replied. His eyes held mine for a moment.
Now I wish he’d stayed, or maybe that I’d gone back with him. Darkness falls. I realize I came here in part to prove my openness, to be able to say that I survived it, but that is not what Alice needs. She needs to get her husband out of jail, and to bring her kids home. It’s not altogether unreasonable that she hopes I might be a pathway to that. I feel a faint disappointment—in us both.
Alice lights a kerosene lamp and pushes the couch against the door for extra protection.
“Has anything ever happened?” I ask, trying to conceal the concern in my voice.
Alice just laughs, and I’m too scared to repeat the question. Her frame is frail, but tough—it has already endured so much. She cooks dinner, a small portion of beef stew that I can tell has cost her dearly. Her generosity touches me; she’s put a lot into this visit.
I eat the stew—it’s tough and without flavor. I miss Kennedy’s spicy, fragrant version of the dish, but I exclaim loudly and ask for seconds.
“I can’t believe you can eat what I eat,” she muses, genuinely astounded.
I smile at her, trying to be a gracious guest. In these simple expressions of shared humanity, I’m reminded of all that we do have in common.
Suddenly I’m overcome by a deep fatigue. It hits me so fast that I feel like I might fall over just sitting up.
“I think I need to lie down,” I tell Alice. She pulls back a sheet to reveal her small bed and fixes the blanket for me. My body feels strange, like I no longer control my bones, and I can’t help but fall into the bed.
“Jessie, are you ill?” Alice asks, startled by my quick transformation.
“No, just tired,” I say, desperately hoping that this is true.
Two hours later, or maybe more—time passes strangely—my joints throb, my body is on fire.
“Water,” I say, barely able to get the word out, “please.”
Alice sits on the wire chair watching me nervously. She’s been rocking back and forth, calling upon God and Jesus not to let the mzungu girl die in her house. This does little to reassure me. I sit up to drink and retch deeply. I look around and see an empty basin. There is no time to ask; I grab it and begin to vomit. The heaving racks my frame so violently that I let forth a cry for mercy—anything but this. Alice starts to pray even more fervently, and I curl up in a ball on the floor. Alice touches my forehead and recoils.
“Hot, you are so hot,” she moans.
“Alice, I have to go to the bathroom—real bad.”
“You can’t, we can’t go outside, not at night; it’s very dangerous. There is no place to go.” She pushes a yellow jerrican toward me. “Use this.”
I take one look and shake my head.
“Alice, I have to really go, not that kind, and I have to, bad.”
I’m overcome by urgency. Without another thought I frantically pull the couch away from the door, unhook the eye, and find myself outside alone in the pitch-black night. Alice follows me and grabs my hand and pulls me along a corridor of houses to a dark corner in the middle of the plot surrounded by a thin fence. I can tell she’s afraid, and I start to shake uncontrollably.
“Hurry, please,” she begs, looking around fearfully.
I look at her, wondering what she means. Am I just supposed to go right here? Out in the open?
“Where?” I whisper urgently.
“Here, this is the only place. I told you, nowhere else to go.”
There is no time to think. Images flash in my head—Kennedy’s warning—two women, outside alone. I pull up my skirt and squat, and I’m overcome by release, until the retching takes hold again. I’m too weak to stand, but somehow Alice lifts me and pushes me back the way we came, back inside the house. She latches the eye and pushes the couch back in front of the door and stands in front of it breathing heavily. It’s two in the morning, but I reach for my phone and dial Kennedy’s number.
He answers groggily, “Hello.”
“Ken,” I rasp, struck by the daring intimacy of a two A.M. phone call, the imposition. “Something’s wrong. I’m sick, really sick. Please, come get me.”
“I can’t now—it’s too dangerous. I’ll come as soon as it’s light. Let me talk to Alice.”
I hand her the phone and there is a flurried exchange, but nothing stays in focus. My head too heavy to hold up, I lie down again on the floor, pressing myself against the cold, chipped cement. Everything hurts. I call Kennedy again, one, three, five more times—begging him to come rescue me. The morning is too far away, every minute excruciating. Night never seemed so long or so ruthless.
Finally there is a rap at the door, Kennedy stands outside. I see in his reaction how bad I look. My legs buckle when I try to stand, but the nearest place a car can reach is at least fifteen minutes away. Kennedy carries me most of the way—and the vendors setting up their small outdoor shops in the harsh morning light ask him as we pass, “Will she make it?” Others murmur, “Pole”—sorry. Odoch’s battered blue jeep awaits us as we emerge from the market. Kennedy opens the back door for me and jumps in the front. I lie across the backseat, and I can tell by how fast we drive that it’s serious.
We arrive at a clinic, and everything suddenly feels blurry. A doctor presses my stomach, and I hear him say to Odoch, Spleen, could burst. I don’t remember anything else.
When I come to, I take it all in: the slightly faded white sheets, the mint-green tray with food untouched, and Kennedy, sitting hunched over in the one chair, hands covering his face, like he hasn’t moved in some time.
I’ve never been hospitalized before. I lick my dry cracked lips, my head fuzzy, struggling to piece together thoughts and words. My arm has an IV in it. I don’t remember that, don’t remember so much.
“What day is today?”
He looks up, startled. “You’re awake!”
He jumps up from the chair and rushes out of the room, returning moments later trailed by two nurses. They take my pulse, my temperature, then connect a different pack of fluid to the IV. I have so many questions, but no words leave my lips. I never noticed how much energy it takes to sit up, and I feel my weight sink back into the hard bed frame. It’s bliss when my eyes close.
When I wake up again, he’s still there.
“It’s been like this for two days,” he says gently. I shake my head, trying to process this.
“I’ve been asleep for two days?” I ask slowly.
“You’d wake up, toss and turn, but it was like you were still asleep—you never remembered waking up. You’d shout and talk, but they said it was the fever dreams. They’ve been really worried. You have malaria. Undetected, the parasite got far enough along that your spleen almost burst.”
I remember now. Alice’s house, the unrelenting heat, calling him, putting him in danger.
“I’m sorry.”
“Your mom—you should call her. She called and I answered your phone; she’s pretty upset. She made me get the doctors to list every medication they’ve given you. I can see where you get your determination from, she must have tried to call me almost thirty times.”
“You talked to my mom?” My face flushes trying to imagine their exchanges, and I wonder what she said on those calls. And equally important, what did he tell her? I’m desperate to ask more, but the door opens, and Odoch and Donna walk in, arms filled with cartons of juice.
“She’s alive!” Donna exclaims. “Here, we brought you this. Absolutely horrible stuff, but it’s what Kenyans always bring when someone is in the hospital!”
I’m so happy to see them.
“You gave everyone quite a scare,” Odoch says in his kind, fatherly way. “Ken bwana, it’s like you’ve been stuck to that chair.”
“I’m leaving now,” Kennedy says, tired. “I need to get back before it gets dark. Feel better. They say they might let you out tomorrow.”
“Very nice young man,” Donna observes as he leaves. “He’s been very concerned, been here most of the days, and brought a slew of visitors with him.”
I shake my head—I don’t remember any of this! I wonder who else came. . . . I try to piece things together. Something comes back to me in a white flash. Kennedy’s face hovering close; he wipes the sweat from my brow and whispers the words I love you. I shake my head, unable to distinguish between memory and fever dream.
My strength returns slowly. Walking small distances consumes tremendous effort; the smallest tasks leave me despairingly drained. The sickness brings with it newfound gratitude for health, for all the things I did before without thinking twice. On the day I’m discharged, the October sun shines brightly, and I stand in the parking lot, eyes closed, savoring the heat as it sinks into my pores, the beat of my heart more noticeable than ever before.
Odoch pleads with me to call my mom. When I do, she reads from her copious Internet research about the different strands of malaria. Exactly which one did I have, and should I come home, and is that hospital in Kenya really able to deal with it? I insist that while it may surprise her, malaria is actually much more common here in Kenya than in Denver. I hand the phone to Odoch, who promises that the program will take very good care of me, and when I take the phone back from him, I pretend that the connection is very poor. I hang up to preempt further questioning.
Odoch begrudgingly drives me to the SHOFCO office in Olympic, muttering as his jeep sputters across the potholed road. When we get to Olympic, I take a breath before opening the door, and Odoch, sensing my momentary hesitation, asks again, “Sure you won’t rest, just for a few days?”
“Not a chance.” I open the door and spring out before he can stop me.
Malaria has taught me to take nothing for granted: not time, not health, and not Kennedy.
The SHOFCO office is busy, and as I walk in Anne runs up to me and envelops me in a hug. I ask her where Kennedy is, and she points to the small room upstairs. I stand for a few minutes outside the door, nervous to knock. I finally rap twice, and he opens the door, surprised to see me.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” he asks, glancing back at the several young men sitting in his office. I’ve interrupted a meeting.
“I’m fine.”
He asks me to wait for a few minutes while they finish. When he emerges, he seems distracted, his brow furrowed.
“Are you sure you’re strong enough for a walk?”
“I’m fine, only annoyed by everyone treating me like I’m made of mzungu glass.”
We leave the office and walk in silence along the road that snakes around Kibera. I keep searching his face, wondering what did and didn’t happen in the hospital.
Kennedy interrupts my thoughts: “I got a job offer yesterday, a good one.”
It dawns on me that while all I can think of is my delirium in the hospital, he’s consumed by something else.
“They want me to help with the elections.”
The picture that pops instantly into my head is of my dad canvassing our Denver neighborhood, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Kennedy means. The foreboding in his voice gives me the chills.
“Will you be helping people vote?” I ask.
The way he looks at me after this question, I feel I must be the stupidest person in the world.
“More like helping them not vote,” he mutters.
“What does that mean?”
“In the morning I got a call. The mzee [big man] wants to see me. ‘Me?’ I thought. But they are insistent. They say they will send a car, but I refuse. I tell them I can take the matutu. I don’t know what they want—I don’t want to owe them anything. When I get there, I see a huge office—big rooms with glass windows and stacks of paper, lots of people furiously typing. I’m ushered into a private room, and then two important-looking men arrive. They ask me who I support in the election. I’m scared and take a minute before answering. I realize there was only one answer: the president, of course. That was what they were looking for. They smile; they say they need my help, my influence to win votes here in Kibera. They ask if I heard the story last week about an official caught stealing voting cards.”
I nod. I’ve heard about this voter fraud; it was all over the national news. Machetes, commonly used to cut the grass, started to sell out in supermarkets as soon as rumblings about the election began. People are afraid, preparing for the worst. Apparently, in opposition strongholds such as Kibera, the ruling party has been paying people to surrender their voting cards, which allow people to cast their ballots.
Kennedy continues, “These men explain that they can’t just buy the vote cards anymore, because it’s bringing trouble. So they have a new idea. Then they ask me again if I am really with them. I say yes, since I know there is no other answer that gets me out of this room. They tell me that they want me to find opposition party supporters in Kibera and pay them in exchange for their names and identification numbers. These opposition supporters keep their cards. I am then expected to bring back the names and ID numbers of each individual. Next, someone goes on the computer, and changes the places where these people are allowed to vote. On Election Day, the opposition supporters will arrive to find they can’t vote because they have been registered for a different location. These men already had stacks of paper in the office containing people’s names and ID numbers. I was told that in this election, even the dead will vote.”
I’m dumbfounded, entirely out of my element.
They’ve given Kennedy twenty-four hours to make a decision and offered to pay him in a day more than he’s ever made in an entire month. These men can’t even imagine that Kennedy could say no. If he says yes, Kennedy compromises everything he believes in—but perhaps he lives. And if he says no?
Overtaken by the seriousness of this, a nervous giggle escapes—my reflexive response to fear or discomfort. I try to stop. I know this is one of my terrible habits, but soon I’m laughing uncontrollably.
I blurt out, “I’m so sorry—this is just very different from what I thought was on your mind!”
The bewilderment on Kennedy’s face is clear. “What did you think?” he asks, intrigued.
“I thought you were upset about the hospital—about what you said. I thought you were avoiding me—that you didn’t want to talk about it—”
Kennedy starts to laugh too. The sound of his distinctive, mirthful high-pitched giggle sets me off again, and soon we’re laughing so hard we can barely stand, doubled over in the middle of the road.
Suddenly, Kennedy takes my hand and pulls me off the main road, into a narrow alleyway between houses, a private corner. He takes my face between his hands, and I gasp, caught off guard by both the tenderness and determination of his grasp.
I see it in his eyes, but I want to hear him say it.
“Did you mean it?”
“Yes.”
My heart has never beaten so fast, my breath has never come in shorter gasps.
“Say it then, tell me.”
He doesn’t flinch. “I love you, Jessica.”
His lips are soft and cool, his features so close and so precious. Our first kiss leaves me nearly as dizzy as the malaria.
“They could kill you—” I break away, my hands press against his chest, pushing him gently away, unable to contain that thought as it arises.
“Shhh—” He kisses me again, this time with more force. “Now you say it—”
“I . . .” The words feel stuck in my throat, but he looks at me with that knowing look and I finish softly, “I love you too.”
Wordlessly, he takes my hand and we walk down the road, past the railway, along the main path. He doesn’t stop to talk to anyone along the road, a first. I feel my heart pounding. I know exactly where we are going—to the bed we’ve been sharing so chastely. I’m scared of what the world might look like on the other side of this moment, of the way everything might change. The way Kennedy looks at me, it’s as if he sees things in me that I haven’t yet discovered.
Kennedy takes the key from his pocket and opens the padlock, holding the door open for me. Standing together in his house, I blush, unsure of our new intimacy. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined this moment a million times. I’ve imagined what his mouth might feel like. I’ve imagined what his skin might taste like. But I’m not sure I ever thought this would really happen.
Slowly, reverently, Kennedy begins to unbutton my shirt. His hands shake, and he makes no attempt to hide his nerves.
He kisses my bare shoulder and asks me gently, “Are you sure?”
“No—are you?”
“No—I’m worried. I might expect too much from you, more than you can give.”
“Later,” I say, kissing him back harder. “Let’s worry about that later.”
His hands trace the outline of my frame, finding the small of my back, resting on my hips. I pull his T-shirt up over his head, my fingertips skimming along his back, tracing his midline, his skin so soft. He pulls me close to him, and I feel his weight pressing against me, tethering me to this earth. Finally, there is only him and this moment, and our small single bed.
Afterward, I draw the threadbare sheet close to my chest, and we lie on our sides, just looking at each other.
He says exactly what I’m feeling.
“You bring me peace.”
For one of the first times in my life, my mind stands mercifully still. I feel the fibers of the fabric as they touch my bare skin, savor the space I take up in the bed, and feel like life has unexpectedly chosen me.
“Do you think this—what we have—that anyone out there will ever understand it?” I ask quietly.
“Honestly, I don’t think so,” he says matter-of-factly. “In reggae, we say ‘overstand,’ instead of ‘understand.’ Between us, we have what I call jessken culture. We just overstand.”
I move closer, cuddling into his chest, both elated by this new secret world we share and devastated to think the outside world might never “overstand” it at all.
Normally before bed, Kennedy talks to his street dog, Cheetah, scratching his ears and giving him a scrap of meat. Tonight, I talk to Cheetah myself. I give him some choice pieces of meat saved from my own dinner and bend down to whisper in his ear. I don’t want Kennedy to hear the worry in my voice.
“Take care of us tonight, Cheetah. Protect us,” I say softly.
Several times through the night I’m awakened by sounds I thought I’d grown used to. The sound of rats scuttling on the tin roof, a dog barking far away.
Finally, the weight of Kennedy’s arms around me, holding me, lulls me back to sleep.
The next morning I wake up early, but Kennedy is already awake; he’s probably been lying that way for hours.
“What are you going to do? About the elections, I mean?”
“Just don’t worry about it,” he says, combing his fingers through my hair. “It will be fine.”
“Stop saying that!”
“I’m sorry. It’s just when I was growing up, a lot of things would go wrong, but I’d always pretend to my mom and my sisters that they would be fine. Can’t we pretend?”
“No”—even though a part of me wishes we could.
He looks at me, gently, but with resignation clear in his eyes, his breath heavy.
“If I say no, I’m a liability, they’ve told me too much. But if I say yes, then I betray my values, my dignity,” he says slowly. “But maybe if we come up with a good enough reason why I can’t, maybe they will leave me alone.”
We lie together in silence.
“Are you ever scared? You always seem so sure . . .”
“Sometimes. Mandela has a favorite poem. I read it when I’m afraid. Do you want to hear it?”
“Of course,” I say intrigued.
He leans over to grab a tattered book and opens right to the page he seeks.
“‘Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley,” he begins, formal as a schoolboy, becoming impassioned as he goes.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
He puts the book neatly back from where he got it.
“Unafraid.” He smiles. “The menace shall find us unafraid, just as we found each other.”
Kennedy spends most of the day seeking out his closest friends and asking for their advice about how to handle his “job offer” helping to rig the elections. One friend suggests telling them that Kennedy was accepted and given a scholarship to a trade school abroad and will be leaving in the next month. Kennedy feels he has no choice but to try this approach so he calls his contact. They seem to accept the story.
Nothing in me is as it was before. When I came to Kenya, I had certainty. I viewed this program as playing a clear role in my larger plan to make me a more cultured person with broadened perspectives: a better actress, dramaturge, director. Coming to Kenya wasn’t supposed to make my life plans seem insignificant. Can so much change in so short a time? Only weeks ago I regarded love as a distraction that would prevent me from achieving my goals. Now I’m questioning the very substance of those goals, my master plan itself.
When I share my thoughts, Kennedy just says, “You have to find your place in the world.”
As though finding my place in this quickly enlarging and complex world were simple and obvious. I wish Kennedy would tell me how. His place in the world is so certain, so linked to a cause larger than himself.
I can see in his eyes that he loves me, but I also know that love isn’t new to Kennedy. I’ve never really been in love before, not if this is what it feels like. But Kennedy—he is in love with this place, with Kibera, with SHOFCO.
They say love is supposed to set you free, but I think love binds you. It’s only once you’re so full of joy that you can imagine the devastation of loss.