Our children are precious to us. So when our 23-year old daughter, Anna,
announced to us in the Spring of 2012 that she had been accepted to a two-year
stint in the Peace Corps in Kenya, Beth and I were filled with a range of emotions – excitement,
concern, joy, grief. But most of all we
felt pride, pride that our 23-year old was willing to put the rest of her life
plans on hold for the next two years and venture into the unknown to make what
she hoped would be a difference. We also
felt certain that we would use Anna’s presence in Kenya as an excuse to pay the
African continent a visit. Because of an
often unstable political climate, the tricky logistics of traveling in third
world countries, and fear of the unknown, most Americans will never travel to
Africa. Those that do normally stick to
the standard tourist fare. Having Anna
on the ground off the beaten track gave us an opportunity for a more unique,
and perhaps more genuine experience. In
the following paragraphs I hope to convey some of our experiences and
impressions from a trip that Beth, our daughter Nellie, and I took to visit
Anna during October 2013.
Anna arrived in Kenya with 35 other fresh Peace Corps
recruits in June 2012. They spent the
first three months together in training, part of which was learning the
universal Kenyan language of Kiswahili.
English is still the official language of Kenya, a leftover from the
period of British colonization that ended in 1963 (it was known as British East
Africa until that time). While most
educated Kenyans know English, they generally converse in Kiswahili, a
relatively recent language with Arabic roots.
To further complicate things, there are roughly 40 tribal languages in
common use. When you get into rural
areas, it is these tribal languages that predominate, followed by Kiswahili,
and then English. Kiswahili is typically
the common language that allows the various tribes to talk with each
other.
At the end of their three months of training, the day came
for the Peace Corps volunteers to get their assignments – Anna was assigned to
a village called Orinie, which was about 60 miles southeast of Nairobi, and 12
miles past the nearest town of any size, Kajiado. You won’t find Orinie on any maps. You also won’t find any signs to Orinie from
the main road. That’s because it is a
place that almost no one wants to go, and even if they wanted to, they would
not be able to get there. It is located
six miles down a rutted track accessible only by four-wheeled drive
vehicles. The route includes a
hair-raising crossing of a usually dry sandy river-bed that involves a steep
descent and climb. When it rains, which
is twice a year, the crossing becomes impassable, completely cutting off access
to the town. Orinie has no electricity,
no plumbing, no police services, and nowhere to buy anything that you would
want to buy. Anna’s parents, always the
optimists, decided that she had gotten this assignment because the Peace Corps
supervisors recognized that she was the one volunteer that might actually be
able to pull this assignment off.
Anna’s assignment is with a health clinic that operates in
Town. She nervously arrived in Town on a
day in September 2012, and met her Supervisor for the next two years,
Timothy. He shook her hand politely and
then unabashedly announced, “We thought we were getting a man”. Villages in Kenya have the opportunity to
apply for Peace Corps volunteers, and often have unrealistic expectations of
who they might be getting and what they might be able to accomplish. Several years earlier, Orinie had a
much-loved volunteer named Brian who had managed to secure a grant to drill a
community borehole – providing much needed clean water to a community. Even seven years after his departure, Brian
maintained his rock star status with the village, and Anna had a hard act to
follow. After informing her new
supervisor that gender modification was out of the question, Anna dug in her
heels and started to figure out how to make herself useful. A surprising fact we learned about Peace
Corps assignments after Anna joined up is that the role of a Peace Corps worker
on assignment is only very loosely determined at the beginning of their
assignment. It is primarily up to the
Peace Corps worker to assess the situation in their village, evaluate their own
skills, and then determine how they are going to spend their time. If you’re not a self-starter, it’s going to
be a very long two years and you’re not going to get much done.
Orinie is a “town” of about 500-1000 people. “Town” in this case is a rather loose
description, as the people are spread out over miles, and when you are in what
we considered the town center you only see the health clinic, the adjacent
concrete volunteer house where Anna lives, the church, and a handful of mud
huts with tin roofs. The other houses
are spread out over miles. The town has
a school which serves students through Grade 8, and children walk up to four
miles each way to get there. There’s no
public education here, so parents have to cough up the money they need to have
their kids attend school, and many are not able to afford it.
The people that live in Orinie are almost all from the Masai
tribe, which has a proud warrior tradition and feeds themselves primarily
through their livestock, which consist of cattle, goats, sheep, chickens,
donkeys, and dogs, although we are pretty sure they don’t eat the dogs. They were historically nomadic herdsman, but
after the British left in the 1960s, land was given to the Masai people and
they settled across southwest Kenya in an area loosely referred to as
Masai-land. To a very large degree, most
of the Masai people in Anna’s village still exist as they have for
centuries. They live in small huts made
of sticks and plastered with mud made from cow dung and wood ash. They cook either outdoors or with an open
fire in their poorly ventilated huts, creating interior atmospheric conditions
that would alarm any health care worker.
In most cases sanitary facilities consist of a visit to the great
outdoors, although perhaps a third of the homes have a pit toilet. Anna’s
house has the deluxe version, which has a door, four walls, a roof, and a slot
in the concrete floor about the size of a legal envelope. No toilet appurtenance needed – if squatting
was good enough for your grandmother, it’s good enough for you.
As is so common in third world countries, the Masai have
lots of children. Women typically have
anywhere from six to twelve children each, and it is common for men to have two
or even three wives. We were curious
about why there were not more single women if men are marrying two and three
women each. The reason it works (so far)
is that the men marry much younger women.
It’s typical for a 30-year old man to marry a 15-year old girl. Since everyone has so many children, each
generation is substantially larger than the last, so the math works. It is, however, a pyramid scheme, and Beth
and I wondered aloud whether eventually practices will need to change as the
Masai begin to overgraze the land to support their growing numbers.
Anna has had the opportunity to join in the celebrations
that occur regularly in Town, including marriages and the male right of passage
into manhood – circumcision, which occurs when boys are about 15 years old and
is a very big deal. Less publicized is
the ongoing practice of female circumcision, a more controversial procedure that almost anyone from the West would like to see halted. During their bigger celebrations, everyone
gets all dressed up in their brightly colored shawls and bead work and jumps up and down a lot – a Masai tradition.
We arrived in Nairobi on October 11th after an
endless 22-hour flight from New York through Amsterdam. Nairobi has had a tough year – first their
international airport terminal burned down in August and then their flagship
western shopping center, the Westgate Mall, got shot up by Somali terrorists in
September. The lack of the airport
terminal was immediately evident to us on arrival, as they shuttled passengers
by bus to a new makeshift terminal they had constructed in the parking
garage. I also got to personally
experience their lost baggage system, as my duffel was in the process of taking
an independent vacation somewhere in Europe.
Anna found us at the airport, and then we got our first
taste of urban Kenyan traffic. We had
not driven much in third world cities previously, and it is something to be
experienced. Because of its British
roots, everyone in Kenya drives on the wrong side of the road, and because of
its less than robust traffic enforcement practices, there is no apparent concern
about obeying any of those pesky traffic signals that traffic planners seem to
erect everywhere. The only time there
seemed to be some semblance of order was at the large traffic circles, where
multiple police guide people in and out of the whirling vortex of cars, bikes,
buses, motorcycles, trucks, three-wheeled taxis, and the occasional donkey cart. Emissions controls don’t seem to exist in
Africa, and the exhaust plumes from the larger vehicles are impressive. Drivers are extremely aggressive, but
amazingly, no one seems to be angry or uptight – the traffic is a part of life.
While in Nairobi, we spent a day in the town of Karen, where
Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame spent her years before her generous
husband gave her syphilis. To get to
Karen you pass what we were told is the largest slum in the world, with over
one million residents. Karen is just the
opposite of a slum, with big fancy houses sequestered behind large security fences with armed guards at
every gate and a few mean dogs thrown in for good measure. The dichotomy felt very strange to us, and we
wondered how we would fit in if we lived in such a place. Nellie, Anna, and I went for a morning run in
the ungated part of the community, and were told afterward that this might not
have been such a good idea.
After Karen we made our way to Anna’s village by a variety of
means, and arrived in time for a late afternoon walk around the village. The village of Orinie has exactly one white
face, Anna’s, and it has always been a major conversation piece in Town, with
the kids pointing and giggling and people asking to see the blue veins in her
skin. For some of the kids she may be
the first and only white face they have ever seen. When we put our four white faces together and
headed out on our walk in our distinctively Western clothes it must have looked
like a carnival freak show, and all sorts of people came out of the woodwork
(or mud-work as the case may be) to either watch us pass or, if they knew Anna
(which most of the villagers do) to introduce themselves.
Our first morning in Orinie was a Sunday, and Anna announced
that we would all be going to a 2-hour church service. Virtually all of the residents of Orinie
consider themselves Christian, another by-product of the European Colonization
of Africa. There are two churches in
town and an active religious community.
Normally I would not be a big fan of listening to two hours of hellfire
and brimstone, but this was different.
From the start of the service the congregation made a point of welcoming
us. To start the service, they had four
groups sing boisterous gospel-based hymns to the congregation – the youth
group, the young women, the older women, and the men. They then asked us if we’d like to address
the congregation. Anna perked right up
and offered to have us sing be the fifth singing act. Not since first grade had I sung in public at
a volume that is perceptible to the human ear.
So when Anna offered to have us sing Amazing Grace to the congregation
the dagger of fear pierced my heart. I
looked over at Beth and she seemed similarly daunted. Nevertheless, the four of us got up there and
belted out our personal rendition of Amazing Grace. I realized after the first verse that I did
not actually know the words to the second verse. Since I had really let it fly on Verse #1, my
lip synching on Verse #2 was not too hard to spot.
We spent much of the remainder of that first day visiting
people and making introductions.
Everywhere we went we were met with cries of “Ann, Ann” (they don’t seem
to grasp Anna’s full name there and she now just rolls with it). We were welcomed into several small homes,
and at each we were given tea which had a sweetness approximating what you’d
get if you mixed 40% tea with 60% hot Mountain Dew soda. I loved it.
Beth and Nellie politely consumed it.
Some of the folks spoke relatively good English and we could converse as
long as we spoke “Kenyan English”, which required that we slowed down and
carefully annunciated. Many others spoke
little or no English, and Anna would jabber away with them in Kiswahili. Her apparent gift for this language amazed
us. While those in the village are used
to her speaking their tongue, it turns heads in the urban areas. Near the end of our trip we passed a couple of boys on motorcycles
talking about us in Swahili, who assumed that we couldn’t possibly understand
them. Anna spun on her heels and let
them have it in Swahili, leaving them wide eyed and wondering whether she might
be a Kenyan albino.
At the end of our first full day, Anna facilitated a
Town-wide meeting to discuss the process of getting grants for the town to help
them improve their living conditions.
Beth and I watched on as proud parents as Anna worked to get grow a
consensus on how a grant might be used. By
the end of the meeting it was agreed that important projects might include: 1) getting a bridge built over the stream, 2)
forming a dairy cooperative so that people could get their milk to market, 3)
setting up a system to sell beaded products and other crafts to the outside
world, and 4) establishing another borehole water system so that people did not
have to travel miles to water their livestock, and building a suitable nursery
school to replace the hot metal shack that was currently used. One of Anna’s biggest challenges is to engage
the women of the community, who are exceedingly shy and are not used to having
much of a voice. We were struck when we
went around the room introducing ourselves that the women had a hard time even
uttering their names, and a couple of them could not do it at all. It was later explained to us that it is
traditionally considered inappropriate for Masai women to introduce themselves
by name – go figure.
We were also struck during our visit with the dichotomies
that exist between the traditional Masai lifestyle and the 21st
century influences that are creeping in from the outside world. While most of the adults, particularly women,
wear the traditional Masai dress – colorful printed wraps and shawls, many of
the children wear clothing that has come from . . . Goodwill. Apparently Goodwill ships enormous quantities
of left-over clothing to the third world, which is then either given away or
bought for a pittance. It creates
interesting some interesting scenes, such as the 8-year old sandal-clad boy I
saw herding goats across the dry dusty landscape wearing Frosty the Snowman
pajamas . . . or the traditional Masai man Anna saw wearing an “I’m with
Stupid” shirt . . . or the reserved Masai woman who proudly sported an “I’m
Horny” shirt with no recognition of its meaning. And then, my favorite . . . Anna witnessed a muscular Masai warrior in a tight
Winnie-the-Pooh pink pullover.
On Day Two of our visit with Anna we walked to two separate
family huts, separated by a distance of about five miles, to build brick and
mud ovens. During her training, Anna had
learned to build these ovens using material that was available locally –
hand-made bricks and mortar made from cow dung, ash, and water. The Masai have traditionally cooked inside
with open fires. These fires are
inefficient and create extremely smoky conditions in the poorly ventilated
huts. The idea behind the mud ovens is
to get the fire to burn hotter and in a more controlled manner so that there is
less smoke. The villagers have now seen
a few of these stoves, and they have become all the rage. All you need to get one is the ability to buy
yourself nine of the locally made bricks.
The other materials, wood ash and cow dung, are readily
available. By the time we got there,
Anna had trained a few of the villagers to make the ovens and others were
learning quickly. Shortly after our
arrival the women were enthusiastically mixing the cow dung, ash and water with
their bare hands until it had reached a nice slurpy consistency. It was then into the hut where a small pit
was dug in the dirt floor using a machete.
Bricks were placed into and above the pit in a geometry that Anna had
learned from the Peace Corps and the whole thing was cemented together with a
bucket of the good stuff that the women had mixed outside. The end-result was an attractive appliance
with an opening at the front for stoking the fire and an open top for cooking
and smoke passage. Everyone was beaming
with the accomplishment and we were rewarded with lunch and more of the
Mountain Dew Tea.
Conditions in the hut were exceedingly dark as there were
only two windows. To help illuminate
things during construction, a Masai man named Moses reached into his pocket,
handed me his cell phone, and turned on the flashlight feature. Another time warp dichotomy, and I was really
struck by this one – the use of 21st century technology amid a scene
not much different than you would have seen 500 years ago. I continued to see this during our
visit. We’d be out talking to some goat
herder, who wearing his tribal gear and walking through the bush with his
animals when his cell phone would ring and he’d jabber away. Don’t expect land lines to come to the Kenyan
countryside – ever. They have managed to
skip that whole unnecessary evolutionary step in modern communication.
Our time in Anna’s village was all-to-short, and after two
days of introductions we were already starting to say our goodbyes. We were American tourists after all, and the
requisite safari was in our future. We left the village knowing with certainty for
the first time in a year that our daughter was in good hands. The village is safe, the people are
welcoming, and they universally love our daughter. We heard some version of the following
statement from at least half a dozen people during our visit: “Your daughter Ann, she is Masai, yes”. As we said our goodbyes the beaded gifts
began to emerge, and we all left town well festooned in jewelry and other forms
of bedazzlement. One of Anna’s better
friends gave me a traditional beaded shirt that might have taken a hundred
hours to put together. We were humbled
the kindness and generosity of everyone we met.
As we look back on our trip, our time in Anna’s village is what we will
all remember with the greatest fondness.
But now it was on to the safari . . . We got a lift out of
Town with Anna’s supervisor and were deposited in the Town of Kajiado at the
Matatu station. The Matatu is the spine
of Kenya’s public transportation system.
A Matatu is a Toyota mini-van or equivalent, generally capable of holding
a driver and 10 passengers. They are
everywhere in Kenya and serve as both local taxis and longer distance
transport, particularly between the towns and cities. To catch the Matatu you go to a place where
they stop and you get on one that is going to your destination. You then sit there and wait for all the seats
to fill up. The driver will not move
until every seat is occupied with fare-paying passengers. That
may take two minutes or it may take two hours.
You wait. To minimize waiting
time, the strategy is to get onto a Matatu when it is almost full. However, the drivers know this, and know that
no one will get in their van unless it is almost full. A technique they employ to address this
awkward situation is to employ sitters – people that will sit in their van and
pretend they are going on the trip only to get out of the van as it begins to
reach capacity. Our Matatu ride back to
Nairobi was uneventful from Anna’s perspective, but a wild ride from our perspective,
with the underpowered vehicle passing trucks on a two-lane road as oncoming
traffic was flashing their lights and diving into the breakdown lane. When the oncoming traffic got too heavy to
allow passing, our driver made efficient use of the breakdown land and passed
the vehicles on the other side.
Throughout the ride, our gregarious
daughter chatted away happily in Swahili to the other passengers,
interrupted only occasionally by her sister and parents asking for a
translation.
We met the safari company in Nairobi, and they loaded us
into a four-wheeled drive souped up version of a Matatu, complete with a nifty
roof that popped up to allow you to stand in the vehicle and watch wild game
without fear of getting head butted, trampled, or chewed on. Our safari destination was the Masai Mara
game reserve, which is the Kenya portion of the much larger Serengeti Park that
extends well into Tanzania to the south.
It was a four hour ride to get to our lodging on the outskirts of the
park. The first two hours were on good
tar roads, including a breathtaking descent from the eastern highlands down
into the East Africa rift valley. A
little geology here – a rift valley is a place where plates in the earth’s
crust are spreading laterally apart away from the axis of the valley. The end result is that the part in middle
drops vertically downward and you’re left with a deep valley with walls on
either side. The East Africa rift
continues to be mildly active and is one of the world’s best known and longest
rift valleys, extending north-south across most of the continent. It is also where a lot of the big game hangs
out.
The second half of our trip to Masai Mara was on a
horrendously bumpy dusty road. Our
driver/guide, Nathaniel, was unfazed and bashed over the rocks with the Toyota
at a high rate of speed with a large dust plume trailing out behind us. He explained that they control the number of
visitors to the park by making access very difficult. I expect it works. As we continued to punish the vehicle I
wondered whether and when we would be breaking something. The answer came five miles from our
destination when we broke a tie rod in the front end. Now I don’t know exactly what a tie rod does,
but I think it has something to do with the steering and it sure makes a lot of
noise when you are driving with a broken one.
Still unfazed, Nathaniel rolled on, with terrible clunky noises coming
from the front end. When we arrived at
the outskirts of our destination Town I was not optimistic. The town consisted of dozens of ramshackle metal
shacks separated by dusty potholed dirt roads.
Vast amounts of litter and cast-off human detritus were everywhere you
looked. Not a Toyota dealer in
sight. Nathaniel pulled up in front of
one of the shacks. Five kids came
rushing out, and then a guy sauntered up to see what the problem was. He took a look under the vehicle and then
got on his cell phone and went back inside.
He then returned with another guy who came our dragging a welding
machine. A third guy appeared from down
the street with a jack and they boosted the vehicle up off the ground. A generator was then hauled out, and a kid
came out with two clear coke bottles of what we presumed to be gasoline to get
the generator going. They rigged things
up, and the guy who at least pretended to be a mechanic crawled under the
vehicle, fired up the welding rods, and went to work. After about 5 minutes he emerged from beneath
the vehicle, they dropped it off the jacks, and we all got back in. Total time for repair – about 25
minutes. They don’t need no stinkin’
Toyota Dealer in Masai-land.
We stayed in a village at the edge of the Masai
Preserve. There were eight or so
“eco-lodges” in the town. Ours was
billed as “Semi-Luxury tented accomodations”.
The luxury part was that we had real beds, a real toilet, light bulbs,
and a shower. The “Semi” part was that
we were in a canvas tent, the shower was cold, and the light bulbs only worked
from 6:00 to 9:00 PM each night;
however, all of these amenities were major improvements from Anna’s situation, so
we reveled in the luxury part of the semi-luxury. The camp was patrolled by a troop of baboons
that took a liking to the lodge’s dump and three Masai gentlemen whose job it
was to sit all night in chairs in close proximity to our tents, fending off critters
and local n’er do wells. We had an
extensive conversation with one of our guards, Samuel, who told us that he had
been classically trained as a Masai warrior, a full one-year program where you
learn the tools of the warrior trade. I
have since read that the Kenyan government strongly discourages the training of
warriors as the days when it was acceptable practice to beat up on your
neighbors and steal their livestock are mostly over. Nevertheless, we felt better having Samuel
outside our tent at night with a machete on his hip. Nellie asked him what he would do if a wild
animal such as a lion came into the camp.
He indicated that he would kill it with his machete or have his
compatriot kill it with his bow-and-arrow.
When Nellie pointed out that hunting was illegal in Kenya, Samuel said
“Good point. I will just wound the lion
with my machete and it will walk away”.
We were glad to hear that he had a plan, and that there was no reason to
be worried if we encountered a wounded lion walking around our camp.
We did not know exactly what a safari was before the
trip. We were pretty sure that it no
longer involved elephant guns and returning home with trophies, but the actual mechanics
of the safari alluded us. Beth and I
realized that we, like most Americans, formed our opinions of Africa early as
we sat in front of the TV watching Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild
Kingdom.
Here’s how it works: Early
each morning the Toyota and Land Rover safari vehicles roll into the Masai Mara
preserve. As you leave the over-grazed
landscape outside of the park behind, you immediately enter an area that looks
like a scene from a Doctor Doolittle movie.
Big game was almost everywhere we looked. We spotted zebras, wildebeest, gazelles,
impalas, giraffes, and elephants almost immediately. To help them find the more elusive animals, the
guides communicate with two-way radios.
Nathaniel was frequently chatting away in Kikuyu or some other tribal
dialect getting the intelligence on where to go. The vehicles are required to stay on the park
roads, but the roads go almost anywhere you need to go. Each time a new photo opp presented itself,
the van would stop, we’d pop our heads out through the roof on top, and the
cameras would start whirring. For the
most popular wildlife, such as napping lions, up to a dozen vehicles might end
up at a viewing location, similar to the “Bear Jams” that happen at
Yellowstone. Although there were these
occasional traffic convergences, the park is big enough that the vehicles get
fairly spread out. Getting out of the
vehicles is prohibited, and based on the size and genetic traits of the
critters roaming around, we were happy to comply.
The wildlife highlight for us in Masai Mara was when we
witnessed 500 or so wildebeests and zebra crossing the Mara River into
Tanzania, the tail end of the annual migration of over a million of these
animals to their southern feeding grounds.
A close second to this was our close-range spotting of both a leopard
and a cheetah, both relatively rare sitings.
Following a couple days at Masai Mara, we drove a couple of hours to
another park, Lake Nakuru, where we added the extremely endangered white rhinoceros
to our list.
The final safari wildlife list, recorded here for posterity
(and so that we don’t forget):
Yellow baboon, Vervet monkey, Black-backed jackal, Spotted
hyena, Cheetah, Leopard, Lion, Serval
(smaller version of the Cheetah), Rock hyrax (like a woodchuck), African
elephant, White Rhino, Burchell’s Zebra, Warthog, Hippo, Giraffe, Cape Buffalo,
Red Hartebeest, Topi (big deer), Thomson’s Gazelle, Impala, Waterbuck, Dik-Dik
(little deer), Suni, Eland (oryx), Ostrich, Flamingo, Wildebest (Gnu)
With regard to the final listing, we learned during the trip
that “Gnu Dung” is spelled the same way backwards and forwards (a
palindrome). File that away in your
brain somewhere, it could be useful later.
After we’d had our fill of big game, we spent an additional
day in the Town of Nakuru, Kenya’s third largest city after Nairobi and
Mombassa. Anna introduced us to the town’s
artisan shops – a rag-tag assemblage of about 80 individual booths piled high
with wood carvings, beaded jewelry, and anything else they think a tourist
might buy. We seemed to be the only
customers. Word quickly spread that
there were gullible Americans making their way through the shops. The vendors were on us like jackals and we
were being physically pulled this way and that and being assaulted with offers
of “really good prices”. A guy with the
suspiciously familiar moniker “Nelson Mandela” learned my name, which he then
dutifully passed down the line until all the vendors seemed to know me
personally. As my more savvy daughters
and wife shook their heads no-no-no, I felt paralyzed and unable to
escape. My first strategy to get them to
leave me alone was to buy something. It
didn’t really matter what, and it did not really matter how much I paid. Buy something, buy anything and then they
will leave you alone. This backfired
badly, as now I was not just an American, but an American with money willing to
buy, and an ineffective negotiator at that.
Anna tried to rescue me, and made an effort to fend off the vendors by
speaking their native Kiswahili. This
resulted in temporary relief, but then they were on me again. My backup strategy was to spend all of the
Kenya shillings I had on my person, so that then I could claim I was out of
money. Over the next 10 minutes I made a
series of poorly negotiated deals for next-to-worthless trinkets, but I was totally
successful in achieving my goal of spending all my Kenyan money. Once that was accomplished, I was able to
claim to the merciless vendors in a truthful and unyielding manner, that I was
completely out of Kenya shillings.
I should have anticipated the next question – “Then do you
have any dollars”. Any well-respecting
American would have flat-out lied at that point and responded in the
negative. Not me. I pulled out a 20-dollar bill, and made one
additional purchase after a half-hearted and largely ineffective attempt at
negotiating. A 20-dollar bill is a
denomination that exceeds the largest unit of currency in Kenya, and is an
obscene amount of money to spend on anything short of a new vehicle. Anna was visibly embarrassed by my
performance, although I have to say that the vendor that I handed the 20-dollar
bill to seemed quite pleased and I had a new friend for life. After my tremendous gaffe, the jackals again
began gathering, and I resorted to the only remaining tactic – running away. My family caught up to me a couple of blocks
later and we went to look for an ATM machine so we could afford dinner.
From Nakuru we hopped on another Matatu and made our way
back to Nairobi and our return to the comfort and security of the American way
of life. We won’t soon forget the beauty
of the African countryside and the kindness and generosity of the Kenyan people
we met. Our precious daughter is in good
hands and will return in another year with an experience that will no doubt influence
her perceptions of whatever comes next.
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