Finally & Forever (13 page)

A little rhyme danced in Katie’s thoughts.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a mud hut in an African village
.

No, definitely not feelin’ it. She and Eli had some serious discussing to do. Somehow he seemed to think the conversation was going to happen either on the way or after they arrived in the village.

The next morning, Katie was ready for the road trip and stood waiting by the administration office with her duffel bag packed with layers for hot and cold weather as well as her hiking boots and her pillow. She had a collection of pillow cases that she had purchased at Bargain Barn while she was in college, and she had brought the assortment with her. Each pillowcase had a different animated character that conjured up fond memories of her youth. Today the Little Mermaid was about to accompany Katie on this adventure.

Eli’s dad pulled up in one of the small, well-used, and thoroughly bruised cars that were shared by the residents at Brockhurst. As he got out and took a look at Katie’s huge duffel bag, Eli and Cheryl arrived down the path with little more than knapsacks.

“Let me guess,” Katie said. “I overpacked.”

“It’s fine,” Cheryl said. “It’ll all fit.”

Katie noticed that the three of them were wearing several layers of clothes and had sweatshirts tied around their waists. She knew then that she should have at least left her pillow behind if she wanted to appear suited for village life.

Taking the backseat behind the driver, Katie turned so that her legs were at an angle. There wasn’t enough space to put them straight. Cheryl settled into the backseat beside her, and Katie tried to hide her surprise and disappointment that Eli wasn’t sitting with her. She had come to the conclusion last night after their talk in the dining room that if she was going to be telling Cheryl and Christy and anyone else who asked if she and Eli were taking things nice and slow, she needed to allow their important conversations to come at their own pace as well.

After all, how could she be a true “Princess Hakuna Matata” if she kept worrying about everything?

T
he first hour and a half of the journey, it didn’t matter who Katie was sitting beside. All her interaction was with the beautiful scenery in the Kenyan highlands. She had her window open and kept the camera on her phone busy.

The town they drove through was packed with people on foot. The car was slowed down on the narrow road when they got stuck behind a local man on his way to market. He and his harvest of what looked like sweet potatoes were on a cart made of flat wood planks that was hitched to a skinny donkey. The man stood on the cart with his legs apart and his hands gripping a length of frayed rope. It seemed to Katie as if they were watching an extra in a movie about the Middle Ages. Nothing here had changed in hundreds of years.

Nevertheless, the shops that lined the main street of town showed evidence of the influence of Christianity on Africa over the past half century as well as the technology of the twenty-first century. Most of the shops had their names painted somewhere out front, and most of the names hinted at some sort of biblical reference. Katie saw the Guardian Angel Beauty Shop, the Alleluia Grocers, the Holy Ghost Laundry, and the Shekinah Glory Mobile Phone Store.

The Shekinah Glory Mobile Phone Store had a bright logo for the cell phone service provider painted across the entire side of the building, and they had a line of people waiting to get in.

“Are they having a sale?” Katie asked.

“Probably not.” Eli’s dad glanced to the side of the road and kept driving.

“Then why are so many people at the cell phone store?”

“Nearly everyone in Africa has a cell phone,” Cheryl said.

That surprised Katie.

Jim added, “The number of people here who have computers or even laptops is very low. More Africans use mobile phones per unit than any country in the world.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“In other words,” Cheryl explained, “an East African village might have one hundred twenty people living in huts and have a generator to produce limited electricity. They have no televisions or computers. But they have a mobile phone.”

Katie wondered if things were more advanced in the villages than she had assumed. She never pictured cell phones in any of her mental images of life in Kenya’s remote regions.

“It doesn’t mean the cell phone service is always reliable,” Eli added.

“A lot more things here make sense than you think at first glance,” Jim said. “People are quick to adapt. Kenya has moved ahead of most African countries with their school program, for instance. The government pays for eight years of school for children and includes lunch. In many rural areas the parents send their children to school so they will be fed that day. In the past they kept them home from school so they could work in the fields. This started in 2003 and has been quite successful.”

“I have noticed lots of children walking along the road. I thought it was unusual that they were all in school uniforms,” Katie said.

“The parents pay for the uniforms. It’s worked out well.”

As they motored through a more rural area with hills and fields, the road became bumpy. Katie braced herself, but Cheryl didn’t. She bobbed and swayed along with the bumps as the scenery continued to spread out before them with fantastic vistas. Cheryl pointed out groves of papaya trees and banana trees. Katie noticed that the small herd of
cows they passed looked pretty skinny. What surprised her most was that the entire time they had been driving, she saw people walking along the side of the road. So many people. All of them coming and going on their own two legs. She saw some people on bikes but not many. A young Kenyan man passed them on a motorcycle.

They came to an immediate halt when a young goat strayed from the pack of five that an older man was herding along with a stick. The wayward goat stopped in the middle of the road, and Jim nearly hit it.

“That was close,” Cheryl said, as soon as all was clear, and he drove on. She said it with the same tone that someone would use to tell the time.

Calm and unrattled, Cheryl reached into a woven basket next to her feet and pulled out a book to read. Eli settled into one of his sleep-anywhere positions with his head against the side of the door. No surprise there.

Katie knew there would be no space for personal conversations for any of them on this long drive. She didn’t like the unsettledness that came from not knowing who had said what to whom about which topics. Katie realized that every family has their own communication dynamics. If it were up to her, she would bust open all the hot topics and get them out there for all four of them to discuss.

She had a feeling, though, that it would go better all the way around if she used this as an opportunity to learn some patience and let Eli take the lead on when he wanted to talk and how he wanted to approach the unsolved topics.

As the car sped down the road, Katie congratulated herself for improving in the area of being a “big blurt.”

The silence was soothing after the excessively busy week. Katie found herself dozing off for short stretches of time. Each time she awoke, the magnificent landscape soothed her senses all over again.

When the sun was high above them Jim turned into the small, dilapidated gas station in a clearly British-influenced town called Nyeri. After filling the tank, they drove about a half a mile and parked
near a large hotel that had a restaurant Cheryl said was one of her favorites.

Katie soon discovered why it was a favorite place to stop. The restaurant was outside on a terrace under umbrella-covered tables. Katie would have thought they were eating at a California restaurant except for the peacocks walking around on the large grassy area that stretched out past the terrace. The view beyond the grass was of rolling hills and jagged rock formations. In some ways it reminded her of the sort of background seen in an Italian painting from the Renaissance.

They ate fish, potatoes, and a green vegetable that looked like zucchini but tasted different. It could have been the spices used in the preparation. Or it could have been some other vegetable and not zucchini at all. She had learned it was best to gratefully eat what was offered to her, and say an extra little prayer that even if she didn’t like it that her stomach would. Fortunately this mystery vegetable made her stomach quite happy.

After they ate, the four of them strolled the grounds, talking about Kenya and how gorgeous it was and how surprising and exciting.

“I’ve never grown tired of the beauty here,” Cheryl said as she pointed out the red ginger plants.

“There’s a Swahili saying for all of this,” Jim said. “It’s
Uzuri wa Afrika
, which literally means ‘the beauty of Africa.’ When you can’t find a way to describe what you’re seeing, you just chalk it up to the beauty of Africa.”

They walked a little farther, and Katie quietly asked Eli, “How do you say, ‘I’m smitten’ in Swahili?”

He gave her a funny look and didn’t attempt a translation.

Leaning closer to him, Katie playfully said, “You see, you thought I was chasing you when I got on the plane, but now the truth is out. My big crush is really on Africa. I’m smitten. Sorry to break it to you this way, Lorenzo.”

With a straight face Eli said, “I should have seen this coming. How can I compete with an entire continent?”

Katie grinned. “You don’t have to compete. I think you know that.”

He smiled back and took her hand. “I’m glad you love it here, Katie. Really glad.” The path they were walking on had brought them back to the lobby entrance to the Aberdare Country Club.

Katie was reluctant to leave. Everything was so civilized and proper.

When they returned to the car, Eli was selected to drive. Katie ended up in the backseat with Jim. As he put on his seat belt, he said, “Cheryl, you should tell Katie the Treetops and Queen Elizabeth story.”

Eli started the car and slowly backed out of the parking spot. Katie thought about the way he had driven around campus last year in a golf cart that Katie referred to as a “clown mobile.” That was a different sort of vehicle than this one, and it was a different sort of terrain. She certainly wouldn’t want to be handed the keys and invited to drive the rest of the way to the village.

Eli did great, though, and within a few minutes, Jim was asleep in the backseat, demonstrating where Eli’s genetic disposition to sleep on the road came from.

“Mom, what about the story you were going to tell Katie?”

“Oh, yes. Queen Elizabeth. When she came to Kenya for a visit in 1952, she and Prince Philip stayed at Treetops. It’s a hotel not far from here. The rooms are at treetop height. She sipped tea on the open veranda while the elephants and other wild animals came to the watering hole below. Her father, King George IV, had been ill but seemed to have recovered, so the trip to Africa didn’t pose a conflict.”

“Was he the one who stuttered? I remember seeing a movie about him,” Katie said.

“Yes, that was the same king,” Eli answered for his mom.

“What happened is that he took a turn for the worse and passed away while Princess Elizabeth was at Treetops. Since communication between England and Africa was so slow, she didn’t know her father
had died until after they had left Treetops, and they stopped for lunch at the Aberdare Country Club, where we just ate.”

“Really? The queen of England ate at that same restaurant?”

“Yes. Only she didn’t yet know she was the queen of England. Word hadn’t reached her. The great statement about Treetops is that Elizabeth went up the stairs to her room that night as a princess, and when she descended those same stairs the next morning, she was the queen of England.”

“I love stories like that,” Katie said. “I mean, it’s sad that her father died while she was in Africa, but what a rite of passage that moment was. She was doing what was on the schedule for that day, and by the time she put her head on her pillow that night, everything had changed.”

As Eli drove, Katie thought about the story of Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis. One of her Bible professors had taught on that particular story with a lot of added details. Katie remembered how Rebekah had gone to the well one morning as always, and by the end of the day, everything had changed.

Rebekah offered to draw water from the well for the camels of Abraham’s servant, who had been sent on a mission to find a wife for Isaac. She was singled out at the community well and returned with the servant knowing she would become Isaac’s wife.

Katie remembered how her Old Testament professor had paraphrased Rebekah’s comment on first setting eyes on Isaac and the two of them met halfway in the field. The Bible records that Rebekah said, “Who is that man?” Katie’s professor jokingly said, “And Rebekah exclaimed, ‘Hubba-hubba, who is the hunk with the Weedwacker?’”

Aside from that bit of professorial humor, the part Katie remembered most and had underlined in her Bible was the passage that said Rebekah became Isaac’s wife and he “loved her.” Her professor at Rancho had pointed out that while the Bible tells a lot of stories about how couples met and married, the word
love
rarely is mentioned.

That’s what Katie wanted. She wanted to be loved. Was Eli a man who would love her for the rest of his life? Or would his work come first? It was an important question for Katie to consider.

Katie was grateful when they stopped again for gas at a petrol station in a remote area. They climbed out of the car and stretched their legs while Jim filled the gas tank and Eli filled a large, red gasoline container.

“How much farther, do you think?” Katie asked.

“A couple of hours. Are you road weary?” Eli asked.

“I’m doing okay. How about you? Is all the driving getting to you?”

“Not yet. I don’t mind driving. I like it more than my dad does. What about you? Do you want to drive for a while?”

“Ah, that would be a resounding no. Thanks for your generous offer, but I’ll pass. You’re doing just fine.” She patted him on the back.

Eli turned his back to her. “Scratch right there.”

She scratched his upper shoulder, and he continued to curve his back, rounding his shoulders forward and making happy sounds as if Katie’s fingernails were ministering angels.

“A little closer to the middle. There. Now down.”

Katie got going with both hands and gave Eli’s warm back a good scratch. She laughed at how he seemed to crumple at her touch.

“I didn’t know my sawed-off fingernails could have such a soothing effect on you.”

“You have the golden touch, Katie. This feels great.”

She scratched some more and realized the local people as well as Cheryl and Jim were watching them. Katie patted Eli on the shoulder and said in a low voice, “I think we have an audience. We probably look like a couple of monkeys.”

Eli made monkey sounds and scratched his armpits.

Katie cracked up. Eli never stopped surprising her.

“Katie, why don’t you take the passenger’s seat this next stretch?” Cheryl suggested, herding them back into the car.

Katie got in gladly and pulled the seat up as far as it would go so Jim had lots of leg room. He had bought some bottles of water at the
filling station, and as they took off, they had music, bottles of clean water, and a wide view out the front windshield that was spotted with dirt and dead bugs.

“Katie,” Cheryl said gingerly, “how do you feel about being in a village for an extended period of time?”

“I don’t know. I’ll tell you tomorrow after I’ve been in a village for an extended period of time.”

“What about living in a village? For weeks at a time or longer?”

Katie could see where this was going, and her guard went up. Had Eli talked to his parents last night about their conversation in the dining hall? More importantly, had he talked to them about his father’s expectations of his role within the ministry? Was Eli set on living in a village?

“I don’t know,” Katie said, trying to sound as lighthearted and breezy about the topic as possible. She really wanted to have this discussion with Eli before chatting about it with his mom. “I have to be honest; I do like having my own bathroom.”