In The Margins
Trip Start
May 27, 2005
1
6
14
Trip End
Aug 19, 2005
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Nakuru, Kenya
Friday, July 1, 2005
· Bouncing and side-slipping our way into the area, diesel SUV engine revving fast in low gear, we avoid the worst section of "road" and try to pick our way through a eucalyptus forest only to get stuck. It quickly dawned that AAA was not coming to get us. Kimani, from the ministry of Ag, and I jump out, as the inexperienced driver jams the gas to spin himself even deeper. We start grabbing branches of lovely menthol smelling eucalyptus branches to jam under the tires. A farmer came out of nowhere to help, startling me. Not long afterwards the truck is backing out of the friction-less yet impossibly sticky mud. With the farmer, a complete stranger, trotting ahead of us to show us the best route, we low-gear it through the forest and slip and slide our way to MJ's homestead, our new home. (That would be the last car I would see on the paths/"roads" of the interior.)
· Yards in the area are still kept as bare earth (as opposed to nice grass which sheep easily keep perfectly manicured) which was originally to dry pye but is now just habit, as hardly anyone is growing pye for sale
· Was sitting against a fence writing when the calf in the pen behind me snuck up on me and licked the back of my shirt with her rough tongue, startling the crap out of me
· Safari ants like you've only seen in nightmares, attacking and killing a field mouse by the borehole, forcing us to move our meeting with community leaders, covering an entire corner of the house and yard (they are swiftly killed/dispersed by some chemical mix MJ spreads with a rag)
· Mud tells so much: tractor tire to make the rut, child's bare feet leave their mini-imprint on their way to school in the early morning, little sharp hoof prints from sheep grazing on the roadside, cow's big clumsy hoofprint sliding on the dark glue-mud.
· Gentle tinkle of soft rain on corrugated steel carries me off to sleep knowing my friends' fields are drinking their fill
· The areas government offices in Keringet are housed in the old colonial main-house across a courtyard from the police station, in another colonial home, and the old stables, now inhabited by squatters, one family per stall with kitchen, living room and, surely, toilet outside. The only thing these squatters have in abundance is poverty and hope. Hope that perhaps someone will employ them as a beast of burden, like the ghosts of their decaying stalls, colonial echoes, modern squalor.
· In Keringet, the seat of government in the area, ministers and officers plod proudly through the mud of the road, puffed up in pressed suits not unlike the impossibly clean rooster announcing himself with jutted chest from a mound of partly burnt refuse.
· It got so I could tell when it was going to happen (though it was not very common)...the shift from proud farmer and father, happily showing off his few farming successes and 13 children, to dramatic supplicant, keen to show pathetic poverty and need in case a handout may be possible
