Part One, Chapter One

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Their travels take them to Tanzania, the coast of Kenya and to nomadic desert tribes. Lorraine learns repeatedly that her anxieties are misplaced. Together, the author and reader discover it's the fears inside needing to be faced and vanquished - not the often imagined demons of the outer world.

Bursting from the wooden barn, a stocky African man runs to a faucet sticking up out of the ground, and hastily fills a pail with water. He hasn't seen me approach.
'I'm looking for Mr. Kimunya. Is he here?' I ask. The man wears dungarees made of blue jean material, cut in the same style you'd expect to see in a documentary about sharecropping in the South. Startled eyes look up from his round face rimmed with curly gray hair, and then to the barn. I follow his gaze. Inside the dark interior, I can detect a man standing at the rear of a cow, his arms buried deep inside the heifer's birth canal. The whites of her eyes bulge. From the rafters, hangs a heavy chain in readiness to wrench the calf from its comfortable haven, and onto the straw covered cement floor.

Torn between politeness and his task, the man stutters. I'm able to catch the Kiswahili words ndeo and la'a, for 'yes' and 'no', before the man is gone, water sloping over the sides of the bucket and disappearing into the burnt red soil. Wait for the owner of the rental property, I wonder, or investigate the place in private? I head for the house.

At the end of a small private lane, sheets of ugly black metal loom a few meters taller than my petite frame. The seemingly impenetrable obstacles are typical of gates all over Nairobi. Heaving my shoulder against the steel, I squeeze through the narrow opening. My heart sinks.
It's fine, let's take it, John said yesterday afternoon during the glow of magic hour. I wanted to check out the tiniest three-bedroom cottage ever built during the cold, cruel light of day.

A cottage yesterday, today it's a shack. With no telephone. In the eleven months we've lived at the Nandi House the telephone's been out for four. After endless hours spent at the exchange believing my polite but persistent presence would give me access to the outside world, I've learnt it's chi, a small token of money, not charisma that gets things done in Kenya. Bribes, are not in our budget. Cell phones, not yet affordable.

Unlike the lush but oppressive Nandi compound, the garden surrounding this house is small, flat and fenced. Though both are within a mile of what were once the coffee plantations of Karen Blixsen, neither abode remotely invokes for me the opening line, I once had a farm in Africa...

Morning sun should be streaming through the eastern facing windows covered with thin wire mesh. But the openings are small, and the black, cement, living room floor adjacent to wood wall paneling, sucks up light like a black hole.

All the other houses viewed thus far have been nixedÑthe result of our often differing, but equally finicky standards: too far from the school where my husband's been teaching the past year, gardens too densely forested for me, too open for John, or the rent too expensive for us both. This is our last option. I peer into the living room again.
'Maybe it's brighter when the front door's open...'

Copyright © 2007 by Lorraine Chittock
All rights reserved. No part of these writings may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.