It Happened on the Way to War (9 page)

For security reasons I made a habit of concealing my identity in Kibera. News of who I was and what I was doing traveled quickly in the slum, and I thought it would be safer if casual acquaintances didn't know too much. While I didn't usually go so far as to create cover stories, I was often deliberately vague with information or said preposterous things in Swahili that made people laugh and distracted them from their own questions. Yet something about Salim and his quiet confidence was reassuring. I felt I could trust him. Plus, I was in Mathare, not Kibera. So I opened up. I even told him my most guarded secret about training to be a Marine.

“I hate war,” Salim cut me off.

“Me, too.” He looked intrigued as I explained how I believed that the military fundamentally promoted peace. Salim didn't ask follow-up questions, though as our conversation progressed he made allusions to a sense of suffering from hunger and other physical duress to which he assumed I could relate because of my chosen profession.

We had been talking for more than three hours and gone through three double-sided miniature cassettes when Salim finally exclaimed, “Okay, enough, mista!”

“Just one more question, please?”

“What?”

“Can you tell me about Mama Fatuma? Is she alive?” She was the founder of the well-known children's home that had adopted Salim.

“She passed away in 1997. Man, I really loved her. She was tough. She walked with a cane, but if you did something to upset her, she would drop that cane and run to get you. She liked me because, you know, I'm social. If she didn't see me one day, she would ask where I was.”

“How'd she find you?”

“When the police cracked down on hawkers, we were separated from my grandmother. I was processed through the courts, and my grandmother, she was forced to let me go. She really hated it, and she fought. But how can a hawker fight the courts? The courts processed me to Mama Fatuma Goodwill Children's Home, and my grandmother, she didn't know how it was.”

“You became Muslim when you went there?”

“That's right, but you know it was my choice. Mama Fatuma, she didn't force that on me.”

“She sounds amazing.”

“She was. Let me tell you, she was amazing and tough. One day she interviewed me. I remember she asked me these funny questions. One question was ‘What is it you want to do with your life?' I told her I wanted to find a home for all the kids in the streets.”

“That's a big goal. How old were you then?”

“Around ten years.”

“Wow,” I had fallen through the ice at my pond and dreamed of doing something with lasting significance when I was around the same age.

“Yes, and I still want to do that thing.”

“In Mathare?”

“In Nairobi.”

“How about Kibera?”

“Kibera, too, but that's a conversation for another day.” He laughed.

I had walked into Salim's office without an appointment and taken up his afternoon. “Salim, I'm sorry, man, but please, just one more question?”

He sighed.

“Why's there no MYSA in Kibera?”

“Good question.” He shrugged.

“Maybe we can do something?”

“Maybe. Sure.” He glanced at his watch. “If you come back, I can help.”

“So you'd be interested?”

“Maybe, but now I'm tired, mista, so forgive me if I have some work to do.”

SALIM AND ALI struck me as men of integrity whom I could trust, perhaps because of their deep faith, about which I didn't know much but respected. They were somehow able to stay on righteous paths. I wanted to befriend them, to help them, and to learn from their wisdom. If I were in their situations, I doubted I could remain focused on anything except myself. Yet, they were making significant contributions to their communities. Through them and others I was beginning to realize that residents in places such as Kibera and Mathare had sustainable solutions to the problems they faced. With a few opportunities, many of which I had grown up taking for granted, young people could rise above even the most desperate situations.

As I returned to Kibera that day, another of Salim's comments from our long interview kept surfacing in my mind. We had been talking about Kenyan politicians, and I had remarked with the platitude that youth are the future leaders. “No,” Salim had objected, “Youth aren't the future leaders. They're the present and the future leaders.”

*
  The Kibera survey report by Deverell and Colchester, Kenya National Archives RCA (MAA)—2/1/3 ii, 1944, p. 2, as quoted in Johan de Smedt, “Kill Me Quick: A History of Nubian Gin in Kibera,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies
42, no. 2 (2009).

CHAPTER FOUR

“Because I can”

Kibera, Kenya

JUNE 2000

ALONE IN DAN'S TEN-BY-TEN, I CLENCHED my buttocks and prayed for the sensation to go away. If only I could hold on until morning. Then I would have daylight to help me navigate the muddy path, and I wouldn't have to wake Baba Chris, my neighbor at the front of the compound who kept the key to the
choo
and was recovering from his bout with malaria. I might even make it to Fort Jesus to use Oluoch's commode. I dreaded the
choo
I shared with Dan and his fifty neighbors and always tried to time my long calls to occur when I was outside Kibera.

The sensation mounted. It could have been diarrhea, perhaps caused by bacteria in the lukewarm chicken I had for lunch earlier that day at a roadside shack. If I had diarrhea, it wouldn't wait until morning. I reached for the roll of toilet paper and slipped on my flip-flops. Boots would have been preferable, but I couldn't risk bending over to lace them up.

I knocked on Baba Chris's door. “Sorry,
choo
please.” It was almost midnight. The door cracked and a naked arm hung out, dangling the key.

The treacherous forty-foot journey took me less than twenty seconds. It felt like a Slip 'n Slide, and I barely made it without falling. I unlocked the padlock and hung my paraffin lamp on a hook in the ceiling. I was so pressed that the noxious fumes didn't affect me, nor did the flies or the cement floor covered by feces that had missed the head-sized hole. I squatted on two cement steps above the hole and felt an incredible sensation of relief as my body expelled its liquid waste. Diarrhea.

Flies circled around my rump and landed in uncomfortable places. My flip-flops lost traction as I swatted at them. I thumped onto the floor. Other peoples' feces squashed into my bare butt. Horrified, I shouted and vomited into my lap. I wiped myself maniacally, churning through the entire roll of toilet paper, then raced back to my shack to wash. Along the way, I slipped and fell in the mud. My pants were so nasty that I took them off and left them crumpled outside the front door to Dan's shack. With a sock and a bar of soap, I scrubbed myself raw in a plastic bucket of cold water. By the time I returned to bed I was freezing and traumatized. It might have only been sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but the damp, wet air seeped through my skin. All I could think about was being caked in feces.

My ROTC training taught me how to pack lightly, and I had fit all of my clothes, including three pairs of cargo pants, into my dad's old duffel bag. I had already tossed one pair of cargo pants in a dump after having slipped and fallen into a sump of sewage. When I told Salim about the incident, I expected him to laugh at the thought of a
mzungu
slipping into a sump, but he didn't. Instead, he told me in a serious voice that I should have cleaned the pants and given them to a street child if I was too squeamish to wear them. I thought about the crumpled pants outside and decided I would clean them up later.

Too cold to sleep, I got out of bed, dressed, and made my way to the Mugumeno Motherland Hotel at five A.M. with one thought on my mind—hot chai and warm, deep-fried bread called
mandazi
, the East African doughnut. Hotels in Kibera were for eating, not sleeping. The Mugumeno, a tin shack on the main alley above Dan's place, opened well before dawn. I sat in my favorite spot, a bench next to the hole in the wall that served as the only window. It was an overcast morning, and I thought about rain. Rain made Kibera all the more miserable.

A handful of patrons sat silently sipping chai. There was only one breakfast option. The matron, a large woman with a wide gap between her two front teeth, greeted me with a warmth and familiarity that reminded me of Southern hospitality. “Good morning, Omosh,” she said glowing, handing me a cup of hot chai and a plate with two steaming
mandazi
.

The chai soothed my shivering body. I dipped a
mandazi
into it and devoured half of the triangle-shaped doughnut in one bite while reading hand-painted signs that decorated the walls. At first, the signs reminded me of bumper stickers. They were prosaic, funny, and seemingly random offerings. However, with time, I saw that they revealed insights about life in Kibera:

OUR CUSTOMERS ARE SPECIAL, SERVICE IS FREE.

KUKOPESHA NI KUPOTEZA WATEJA
(TO GIVE ON CREDIT IS TO LOSE CUSTOMERS).

BEHOLD, NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME,
NOW IS THE DAY OF SALVATION.

Later that morning I traveled to the other end of Kibera for a meeting with Jumba, the founder of one of the few locally led NGOs, a micro-credit program called Ghetto Credit. A gangly man, Jumba had two swollen scars shaped like fingers that sliced down his cheeks. We met at his office near Kenyatta Market, a cluster of ugly, cream-colored multistory buildings with an open-air marketplace famous for its
nyama choma—
roasted meat.

Jumba was one of my most talkative sources. He could speak for long stretches without interruption. He began our meeting that day with a long-winded monologue about why he believed access to credit was a human right. By midday I could smell the savory
nyama choma
wafting through the window. On my suggestion, we carried our meeting into the marketplace. As we sat down at a butchery that doubled as a restaurant, a waiter slid us a wooden chopping board topped with chunks of roasted beef, diced tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and a small pile of salt. Kenyatta Market's reputation was well deserved. We tore into the
nyama choma
as a butcher chopped at a fresh carcass. Not a word passed between us until we had devoured the meat.

Finished with our feast, Jumba began talking me through the basics of micro-credit. I was intrigued by the concept of giving loans to small groups of residents without collateral and then holding those groups accountable for repayment. Jumba charged 10 percent interest to cover administrative costs, which sounded reasonable. He explained that his organization gave most of its loans to groups of older women in Kibera because women were generally more responsible than men.

While targeting older women for loans made sense, my research was focused on youth and ethnic violence. Jumba told me that he had dreamed for many years of starting a micro-credit program for youth. He quoted the adage “an idle mind is the workshop of the devil” and suggested that creating jobs was the most effective way to prevent ethnic violence. I hadn't given that perspective much thought before I arrived, though the longer I stayed in the slum, the more intrigued I became by it.

At the end of our four-hour meeting, Jumba told me that he would be interested in piloting a micro-credit program for youth if he could access start-up capital. I assumed that running a pilot project would cost a few thousand dollars. To my surprise, Jumba said he could do it for as little as $400. It was such a small figure.
Perhaps I can help him raise that money?
I thought to myself as we parted ways.

THE RAIN HELD off that afternoon while I walked along the railroad tracks from Kenyatta Market to Dan's shack. The forty-five-minute walk offered views of many of Kibera's eleven villages. I stopped to photograph one of Kenya's most jarring contrasts, where a ten-foot cinder-block wall separated Kibera from the Royal Nairobi Golf Club, the city's oldest golf course. Every day, tens of thousands of residents walking to work passed this two-hundred-yard stretch of manicured lawn with its dapper golfers. A playground for Kenya's elite, the course came with a sweeping view of extreme poverty. Its sprinklers sprayed the fairways while Kibera's residents paid more than five times the city council rate for water that was often contaminated.

I had come to Kibera with the belief that knowledge and awareness could make an impact. Surely if people knew about this place things could change. If I could help expose Kibera to the world, I thought the world would respond. Yet, Kenyan elites were aware. I snapped a panorama with my disposable camera and walked on, remembering that I still needed to clean my filthy pants. It was the last thing I wanted to do.

MY PANTS WERE nowhere to be seen by the time I returned to Dan's shack.

“Excuse me,” I asked my first neighbor, a mother with four children, “I think I've lost my pants. Do you know where they are?”

The woman tried to contain a giggle. “Sorry, Omosh, I don't know.”

I stepped to the next shack and I received the same reaction. Little did I know that the expression to
lose your pants
was also a popular way of saying “gone nuts.”

The last shack was in the least desirable location. It sat adjacent to a small area used by all of the compound's residents to shower and urinate. I was curious about who lived there. A neighbor had told me there was a fourteen-year-old girl named Vanessa, though I had never seen or heard her. Whoever lived in this final room was unlikely to know where my pants were, but I knocked anyway.

An old, wrinkled grandmother cracked the door open. She stood a little over four feet tall and had a thin patch of curly white hair. Her face looked like leather. She didn't move as I greeted her and explained my predicament. After a long pause, she opened the door fully and gestured for me to enter with a slight movement of her hand.

The grandmother's ten-by-ten was even barer than Ali's shack. Two faded
kangas
divided the space into halves. My half had nothing but a stool and a paraffin lamp.

“Vanessa cleaned your pants,” the grandmother said in Swahili. “The pants, they are here.”

When she pulled back one of the
kangas
, I thought I was seeing a ghost. A girl stood motionless with my folded pants in her stick-thin arms. She was missing chunks of hair. Her skin clung to the bones in her face as if she were a skeleton. A dark, sleeveless slip hung between the bend in her slight shoulders and slender neck. The grandmother took the folded pants from her and handed them to me.

“
Nimeshukuru sana
,” I said. “I'm grateful.”

Vanessa slowly lowered her arms.

“I'm Omondi but people call me Omosh.”

Her mouth twitched as if she wanted to smile but couldn't. I extended my hands and took a step forward, cupping her palm into mine. Her skin felt like a hot iron. Every movement must have caused her pain. I didn't want to be the source of any more discomfort, though I had to ask why she did it. Why did she go out of her way to clean my pants? What motivated her?

The words came softly. Her lips hardly moved.
“Kwa sababu naweza.”

It knocked the wind out of me. “Because I can.” Vanessa didn't expect anything in return apart from perhaps the good feeling of having done something that was appreciated. There were no more words. I fought to hold back tears as I stood there looking into her beautiful eyes, eyes that conveyed everything as they rose unnaturally from her sockets—the fear and the pain, the love and the hope, the hope, the hope despite it all, the hope despite her body losing a battle against a silent thing they called
dudu
, “the bug.” It was an invisible curse that she did nothing in her short life to invite, that no child ever did, but that came and could not be stopped.

“Because I can,” she had said.

A week later Vanessa died of AIDS. Her body was removed from Kibera in a wheelbarrow and buried in a communal grave in Nairobi.

That night after Vanessa's body had been taken away I sat on the edge of Dan's lumpy mattress and tried to ignore the sounds of Kibera: piercing ululations of night funerals, rats squeaking, babies crying, coughing, wheezing, snoring, the wind whistling. I was wearing the pants she had cleaned. My head throbbed. The rubber band sensation pulled my chest apart. I cried. I craved silence.

AT DAWN I made my way to the Mugumeno Motherland Hotel. I needed to warm my body with chai. I was an emotional wreck. The normally jovial matron was subdued. She poured my chai and slid me a plate of
mandazi
without saying hello. A drunk man stumbled through the door.

“Mzungu, mzungu.”
He pointed and wobbled my way. “Give me something small.”

It was always what they asked for,
kitu kidogo
, something small. A blast of rage shot through my body. Who was he to beg? Vanessa didn't beg. She asked for nothing.

“He's not a
mzungu
.” The matron stepped up and smacked the man across the face. “This is Omosh from Gatwekera. Now you get out of here.” She shoved him out the door. It was rare to see a woman with the audacity to assault a man in public. The matron nodded at me. “Sorry. That man, not a good one.”

That was when it struck me. I was in Kibera for only five weeks, but I was there, and I had unique access to remarkable people such as Ali, Dan, Taib, Jane, and Jumba. These people impressed me with their actions as much as their words. I approached many of them as sources, but they could be partners, too. No other white people were spending their nights in Kibera. I was lucky to have been born with great parents and in a land abundant with opportunity. I could do something. I could reach out and support those who were stronger and wiser than I was.