“Avaseet” says Catherine, with a big smile and a graze of a hand against her smudged purple apron. Her aura is heavy with sweat and dust but she smiles with teeth that have been brushed. Catherine is the wife of Frances, who is the brother of Mutinda, who we found on couchsurfing.
Catherine is always saying this the moment we get to the hotel, which in Kenya means only a small restaurant. All day, Catherine makes three things from leaf-and-flour scratch. Tea with milk and sugar which is poured from tall red, insulating thermoses for 10 cents, chapati (sort of like a crepe) for 20 cents and undazi (sort of like a doughnut-no sprinkles or frosting) for 10 cents. Sometimes I help her by pouring molasses-colored oil onto the dough and then rolling them into cinnamon bun shapes. Catherine fries them over a small coal fire, her back bending toward what will one day be a permanent curve. Yesterday, as I sat with Michael ignoring the stares of other patrons, she brought me a Parents Magazine article: Relationships: Dealing with Change for the Working Woman. The magazine date was 1995.
The hotel is very popular. Villagers, mainly men, Africa’s most idle individuals, in their third-hand sports coats, frayed trousers and shiny dress shoes come to fill the fifteen seats, eat, drink and play checkers with bottle-caps. Some, particularly those living on less than 100 shillings ($1.50) a day, can’t cook in their own homes. This village is without electricity—the power lines end in Kangundo, but soon, the people say, soon, we will have electricity, too. They say we’re one of the lucky ones—the house where we stay has a generator, which is used to watch local news, Everybody Loves Raymond and 70s-style Colgate commercials.
Along the red “market” road, a few feet from Catherine and Frances’s hotel, there are two small, dark general stores, one which sells avocados (10 cents) and tomatoes (15 cents), one selling only cow’s milk, a carpentry shop and a more general store with toilet paper. There is also a bar with bottles of Tusker, Pilsner and Kenya’s own version of Guinness behind a massive cage, but we don’t go there much. The kerosene light is blinding and buzzing and too many tipsy Kenyans ask us for money.
But this is a regular thing. And it’s the hardest thing. Arabs tend to overcharge tourists. Africans just come out and ask for money with a rude sense of entitlement all over their face, while our curiosity about their lives and their culture disappears into the dust. They will ask us for anything—breakfast, a bus ticket or a mobile phone. It’s maddening.
Of course, I have come to think about it this way: what if I was living on a planet with very little water. And a person from another planet arrived with her very own truckfull of water. And I thought, we’ll can’t she give me just a cup? Surely, she can spare just a cup.
It’s tough. But strategies develop over time. We’re still only calf-deep in Africa’s waters.
One day we go to a funeral. I am wearing my only real dress as we hike up and down dirt paths which divide plot after plot of maize and beans. Our entrance behind Catherine and Frances is not quiet, but we keep a straight face to ensure that mourners eyes do not linger long, that their shriveled faces and dish-towel-style wrapped heads swivel back to the coffin as they struggle to keep their balance on old logs and tree-branch chairs. Still, children form a small crowd to stare at our skin, which is closer to the color of their milky morning tea than any human they’ve ever seen. They whisper “howayoo” with all their might. We eventually look behind us, where rows of matching royal blue jumpers sit fascinated by our backsides.
The voices of the choir, like their arms which have been mashing corn, and their legs which have been carrying babies and buckets, are robust. Yet, I do not hear them. The generator-fueled blow-horn they use—technology for the sake of technology–is like a colander, sending each and every note through a hole much too small and then scattering it into the fields of cattle, snakes and acacias.
I watch as the spirit of this old woman fades back into the universe.
It would be easy and romantic to wish away the approaching electricity—power lines which pencil scratch the valley view, more speakers to dull the sweet sound of the church choir and the blare of a dozen new black and white television set to disrupt the evening cicadas.
But there are reasons for it. I understand that. One day soon, they’ll be proud to have a wire-strung sun.
