First Impressions

My First Week in Kakamega

Just as you can never be a virgin again, you can never recapture exactly those first impressions of a country. My very first trip to Africa was as a volunteer teacher working with teachers in Swaziland in 1992. I was fifty-two years old and had traveled very little before that trip.

That was the trip that caused me to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about flies laying eggs under my skin, scorpions nesting in my shoes and snakes ready to attack everywhere. Every sense was heightened by discomfort and fear.

I kept a journal for myself and a doll my art student daughter sent with me. I had difficulty choosing a voice and I eventually called it Wish's journal. "I" , "we" and "she" simply blended into Wish, and, since everything was viewed through my lens, I wrote in the first person singular.

Wish's impressions encompassed the freshest view I will ever have of Africa or of travel in the developing world. Unfortunately that journal disappeared, and all my later impressions have been tinged by memories of other places and dulled by familiarity and comfort. Each new experience becomes part of an on-going and ever-growing understanding of the world.

The following is an excerpt from the journal I kept my first week in Western Kenya in 2002. I was to be the new agent for a Canadian NGO. By then I had traveled and worked in Malawi, Namibia, Jordan, and Mongolia. Africa exerted the strongest tug on me and I was looking forward to working and living in Kakamega for the next six months.

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November 1, 2002

The drive from the airport to Kakamega was a trip down memory lane.

How quickly and easily I return to Africa with its red earth, brilliant green foliage, surreal purple jacarandas and vibrant red bougainvilleas. We even had our obligatory flat tire which Joseph fixed with alacrity. Lots and lots of bicycles and boda bodas ... and matatus and the vans I've forgotten the name they give them here. Women carrying everything from wood to bananas on their heads. The landscape here is spectacular ... hills and valleys ... people working tiny patches of garden along the roadside. A beautiful wall of flowers that hides a depot for large machines. Lots of schools ... and a hospital ... and a mortuary with the sign "cold rooms available". Lots of drumming, singing and yelling as convoys cheer for their political parties. Karen, the outgoing agent, tells me that two people were shot dead by over zealous police during a demonstration near Kakamega a couple of weeks ago.

The buildings range from grass and mud huts to corrugated iron dwellings to solid brick houses.

Huge ads decorate many buildings and AIDS Awareness is well advertised through billboards.

Goats everywhere, and Brahmin cattle with their great humped necks. A cow lives close by and grazes near the fence within sight of the wall embedded with glass.Tonight the dogs howl and bark to one another and the guard sits outside my livingroom window protecting me.

I am really beat ... Karen asked me to go out for a drink with her to meet the CHES people at 5:30 and out dancing at 9:30 ... but I am just too too wiped out to consider partying today. I was awfully glad to eat the grilled cheese sandwiches she prepared for lunch and the chicken she made for dinner.

I want to get my own stove and oven working properly and start getting myself organized tomorrow ... banking and shopping ... it is market day. All I have done all day is unpack and sort out the kitchen.

The apartment is certainly habitable now ... under furnished but spacious and clean ... and I will do things to make it homier. I think I shall just take it one room at a time ... and start with the essentials like kitchen and bath necessities.

The living room is a hodge podge of mismatched chairs and couches that are neither comfortable nor attractive. Brown striped drapes almost cover the front window and a telephone that I cannot access sits on a small table, a world radio that doesn't work is on a stool, and a book shelf sits in another corner. The whole thing is a challenge and one I am not up to just now.

There is a master bath ensuite and one of those split bathrooms as well ... a shower room and a toilet and wash basin room. Doesn't this sound grand? In reality neither is very attractive.

(... and I was to find out later, prone to malfunction... )

The kitchen is large but has its own set of anomalies. Cupboards are designed for 8 foot tall giants, but there is plenty of drawer and counter space and lots of lower cupboards. The stove is not yet hooked up to gas and is not completely put together.

I am too tired to give this the kind of attention it deserves. More tomorrow.

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The next day: Boda Bodas and Banking:

We arranged to have the signatory changed at Barclay's Bank this morning ... my first boda boda ride. Lots of speed bumps and nothing to cling to ... and young men shouting and laughing about the msungu's hands on the boda boda driver's bum!

At the bank we waited in a sealed off little room and dealt with Ruth through a glass grill. It was a laborious process and since their photocopy machine had broken down we had to leave to get copies of relevant pages in my passport. We stopped to pay the phone bill (a sign in the outer office reads: "No hawking in the office or corridors" and Karen said there are signs around town admonishing drivers not to "hoot".

Then we went to the post office. I think one of the most unnerving things about Kakamega so far is the crush of humanity. Everywhere you must ease your way through a crowd. We got our photocopying done there and returned to the bank where we left everything in Ruth's hands, hoping that all would be done before Karen left in a few days.

On the way home I stopped at the second Foto store to buy chicken sausage and javex and at the second Mama Watoto's to buy yogurt, toilet paper and a capon. My butcher had forgotten my fillet so I have to go back tomorrow. I was laughed at in the butchery ... and felt a little ill from the smell ... reminded me of the smell when the goat was butchered in the ger in Mongolia.

The children answer, "Fine, thank you" no matter what you say.

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Day 4

I am always amazed by what crippled Africans manage to accomplish. I watched a man crawl on hands and knees down the road the other day, and at the choir competition I saw a few people with severe disabilites managing very well. One was a tiny woman on two aluminum crutches. Another was a badly crippled man who sang the solo parts for his choir as he played the litungu, a green painted handmade banjo. Throughout the performance, he stood like a heron on one leg, the other one stuck straight out the side at a sharp angle from his body.

I am seeing interesting instruments I have either never seen before or only in Eleuthera at Junkanoo when the hardware and plumbing stores are the source of most instruments. A metal pipe set on the floor is hit with a second iron stick makes a metallic drumming sound. Another metallic instrument I saw for the first time was a tinkling ring and stick. There were several kinds of drums. Many of the larger ones are made from old steel drums. A deep throated drum of leather and steel sounded like my drum when both skins were beaten with his hands. I can only get that sound with a stick padded with soft chamois. One woman had one that looked like mine, but much bigger, slung around her neck by a sisal rope. I saw one shaped like a vase with skin on the wide mouthed end and the narrow end of the funnel left open. Another set was painted green red and white to match the choir gowns with wide frilly collars that made the men look a little like grannies in nightgowns. Each drum has a different sound. I am going to have to learn and listen a great deal before I choose my drum.

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Mumias Sugar Factory .... November 7, 2002

My first visit to a company town of any kind ... and a real insight into Kenyan reality. Not because it was representative of the area ... but because it was so unrepresentative in some respects and alike in others.

This was an oasis of unreality ... management had homes set on three acre lots ... Kenyan houses ... cinderblock and concrete construction ... but set in an idyllic fairyland of tall trees and flowering plants, reached by following a serene red dirt road through checkpoints of saluting askari. We visted two schools attended by the children of management ... beautiful locations ... wonderfully appointed. We ate dinner at the club ... excellent meal ... swimming pool, tennis courts, beautifully kept grounds ... and then we learned that this was just one of many clubs. Each level of workers from apprentices to management had its own club.

I asked whether there was a sense of neighbourliness here and was told about the segregation that makes that impossible. We learned that there is an Asian section, a clerical workers' section, a factory workers' section, etc. etc. ... and then the row of shanties where the houseworkers lived ... still better than the homes of such workers outside the company town ... but decidedly different from the other homes around them.

At the plant I learned how sugar cane is weighed, ground up, washed with hot water once the sugar is exposed to release the sucrose. Then it goes through different sections of the process until as much sucrose has been extracted as possible and the squeezed out baggase is dried and used for fueling the steam furnaces that create power for the entire town ... and then some. The sugar water is spun centifugally (I think) and then evaporated until the sugar, molasses, then brown sugar are extracted. We even saw the packing plant.

Everywhere were safety notices ... when I asked about safety I was told that the company was very aware ... it cost them money to look after hurt employees ... but there were still accidents. I am surprised more don't succumb to the heat and fall ... often three stories. My own vertigo kicked in when I began walking along iron grill catwalks and ascending and descending iron grill stairs that over the years had been worn to a concave shape. By the time I emerged at the end my palms were black from holding tight to the thin pipe railings.

The workers work seven 8 hour days and then get a day or two off ... no more than two or three a month, and they have a union!

I have some notes on the history of the plant ... and on the decor of the man giving us the information ... a stern faced Moi ... the official photograph one sees in every office and public place ... and a large poster of a sexy broad wearing a silver jump suit by a motorcycle ... courtesy of some car company. On a bulletin board was a newspaper clipping headlined "The Idi Amins of this World."

Afterwards we had a very good chicken meal at the club and then toured the schools. Still later we went to Wycliffe's home with Catherine, his fiancee. Wycliffe's art consisted mainly of calendars hung at ceiling height. She served us cafe au lait and bananas and when we left gave us wonderful onions and sukumo wiki from the garden.

I cooked it last night but need more practice, I am afraid!

I think my most lasting visceral memories of the sugar plant will be the smells ... first of corn silk drying or of corn cooking ... and then later, as the sucrose is extracted, a stronger smell ... like molasses ... like what I imagine bootleg rum smells like as they make it. A close second will be my vertigo.

My memory that is a composite of everything sorted and analysed by my brain ... is of the class distinctions and of the company town mentality.