No Hurry in Africa (16 page)

O
N
S
AINT
S
TEPHEN’S NIGHT
Ilsa, Yvonne and I enjoyed a memorable bus journey down to Mombasa on the coast, where we were planning to take a break for the next week. We were aboard a bus called ‘Bush Senior,’ perhaps a clue to its age. Some passengers were singing along to the catchy African tunes on the radio and dancing in the aisle in amongst their goats and hens. Passing through Tsavo Game Park about half way to Mombasa, they fell silent; by now, it was dark and we were hurtling straight through a herd of elephants. Somewhere near the town of Voi, the driver knocked down a zebra. All the while, a number of passengers were sitting on the roof of the bus. It was like a night-time animal safari. Zebras up close, by the way, look just like stripy donkeys.

We were staying in a simple chalet at Tiwi beach, ten kilometres south of Mombasa. The accommodation was fine, although it came as a surprise to find
saltwater
flowing from the taps. Tiwi beach is everyone’s image of Paradise—long stretches of fine white sand, warm turquoise sea, coconut trees, and empty of people. We had it to ourselves; the big resort hotels are ages from Tiwi. To top it all, there was European food. It never felt so good to eat potatoes, pizza, and lobster. In the morning time, loitering monkeys stole breakfast straight out of my hand as I ate crackers on the porch with the girls. They were rampant colobus monkeys, whose most distinctive features are the bright sky-blue testicles of the male. By this stage, I considered them pests just as the Africans did.

Off Wazini Island, a small island an hour south of Mombasa down near the Tanzanian border, we organised a trip on an Arab sailing dhow. Hundreds of years ago, this island was the main centre in Africa for trade between the Chinese and Arabs. Our particular interest was snorkelling with the dolphins at the coral reefs. I loved it. The boatmen threw us overboard without bothering to ask could we swim. There were no life-rings on the boat, or lifejackets, or indeed any other paraphernalia remotely connected with safety. Swimming among all the varieties of exotically patterned fishes, and the tremendous coral formations themselves, was exhilarating. It was just the tonic I needed after recent days at Nyumbani.

The girls were eager to walk around some of the city while we were in Mombasa. So was I, for I had seen relatively little of it that weekend with Leo and Kimanze. The following day, Ilsa, Yvonne, and I had just finished touring the historic old town, and the fairly imposing 400 year old Fort Jesus (built by the Portuguese) when, directly below the Fort we spotted a place where some young locals were swimming in the narrow channel that cuts Mombasa Island off from the mainland.

‘You two should have a race across,’ I dared the girls, light-heartedly.

‘How far do you reckon it is?’ Ilsa asked, warming to the idea.

‘About half a kilometre probably,’ suggested Yvonne. ‘Come on, we’ll go for it!’ she said, to my surprise.

Of course, I had to join them. We dived off the wall into the inviting water. When we were some distance from shore, one of the ferries took a different course from all the other boats sailing up the channel that day. It was coming straight for us.

‘We’re about to get mowed down!’ I shouted a warning to the girls.

We swam like the clappers to avoid it, and just about got out of its way in the nick of time. I do not know if they had seen us before that, but one passenger gave us a friendly wave, apparently oblivious to the danger we were in. It was not the first time for me. Something similar happened to me once at Arranmore Island off Donegal, and once in Croatia as well.

Ilsa and Yvonne had decided to return to Kitui by bus on the morning of New Year’s Eve to ring in 2006 with the street-children. After waving them off, I set out to meet Leo at Bamburi beach, just north of Mombasa, where I would be spending the night. However, just then I ‘met the ATMs of Mombasa broken,’ as they say locally. So with my last few shillings, I bought a bus ticket home—to arrive in Kitui on the second of January—with just enough money left to purchase some fruit at the heaving markets down the backstreets. The place was full of dodgy-looking characters. Mombasa is a bit like Cairo, chaotic, bustling and raucous. In the narrow streets and among the crumbling colonial era buildings, goats were competing with the hand-pulled carts and getting in the way of the three-wheeled tuk-tuk taxis, whose incessant horns were drowning out the prayerful cries from the Mosques. The prevailing aromas were of exotic spices and goat droppings. It is certainly a bit different from Letterkenny on New Year’s Eve, I thought.

Then something rather unusual happened. I walked into a shop to buy a pen, only to be greeted by a man wearing a sarong-type skirt who had been kneeling on a mat, presumably praying to
Allah.
Having established where I came from, he began conversing with me in Irish! His grammar was a bit ropey, but this is roughly how the conversation went:

‘Ca h-áit a d’fhoghlaim tusa do chuid Gaeilge?’
I enquired, with a dumbfounded but pleased expression.

‘Blianta ó shin, bhi mé ag obair ar feadh tamaill le sagart Éire-annach. Táim liofa go leor go fóill, nach bhfuil? In aon chor, cad atá de dhith ortsa anois?’

Apparently, he had once worked for an Irish missionary priest who had taught him Irish.

‘Ba mhaith liom peann gorm le do thoil, má tá ceann agat?’

‘Fan bomaite, chifidh mé’

At this point he whipped out his own pen from his breast pocket (ever eager to spot an opportunity for a sale), and I handed him a few shillings for it.

‘Slán go fóill, chifidh mé aris thú,’
he concluded, as I left his shop.

With his long dreadlocks, Leo was easy to spot on the beach. I crept up behind him and gave him a gentle fright. He was in high spirits and we were delighted to see each other again. I had to update him on Nyumbani and on his good friend Kimanze. Leo was along with another young German volunteer named Torsten and, being Leo, a few Rastas. We just chilled out in the heat, and had great fun messing with a beach ball in the waves.

‘I have started at another children’s project near here, Brendan. It is starting from scratch,’ he told me in his concise German manner. ‘There is a lot of work. But I like it very much. Torsten though, he has just had his bag stolen this morning. His passport, his camera, and his wallet are all gone.’

He hit the closed fingers of one hand onto the palm of the other, clearly annoyed. Then he carried on matter-of-factly,

‘We will forget about that until tomorrow. Tonight, my friend, we will have fun.’

‘I’m up for that,’ I smiled, remembering our previous visit to Mombasa.

Nearby, local fishermen were wading in the shallows, casting their nets searching for fish. As the sun was going down for the very last time on 2005, I spotted a young Kenyan woman being swept out to sea, clinging onto an inflatable ring. She was drifting further and further out. Bamburi beach was packed with tourists looking forward to celebrating the New Year; they did not notice her. Her African friends were laughing at her from the shore and clearly did not realise the seriousness of what could unfold. Maybe they were from the interior. Having worked as a lifeguard on a beach while a student, I have a sixth sense honed over a number of summers for spotting potential danger.

I briefly looked around me. Mombasa had obviously never heard of hiring lifeguards. I pulled off my clothes, raced into the sea, and frantically swam out to pull her in. There was indeed a strong current, but finally I reached her, and towed her back to shore fairly promptly. She was clearly shaken by the experience. Looking both embarrassed and relieved, all she said was,

‘My name is Francesca, thank you.’

And we parted, just like that… By now, it was quite dark, and the sun was disappearing for the last time that year.

We spent the night of New Year’s Eve on the beach, at one of the many bonfires. Camels were sauntering on the sand. Fireworks shot up tumultuously all along the beach and for miles along the coast in both directions. Rockets were being launched at any angle, some whizzing dangerously past our ears. Children chased after one another gleefully, and hawkers praised their merchandise,

‘Looky looky is free. Good price my friend. You speak Swahili, local price for you.’

Leo, Torsten, and I were now the only
wazungu
amongst the horde surrounding the bonfire. The tourists had long since retreated to the safety of the hotels. As the stroke of midnight approached, everyone around me counted ‘one, two, three… ’
up
to ten, and not from ten backwards. The stroke of midnight released a blissful holler of welcome to the New Year, and the crowd proceeded to sing a chorus of… ‘Happy birthday to you’!

The three of us stayed awake for the first sunrise of 2006, and then we fell asleep on the beach. As I had paid over the last of my money to book the bus ticket back to Kitui earlier in the day, I had to spend the night outside anyway. I always do a New Year’s Day swim in the arctic-like waters off Donegal, and I continued that tradition in the Indian Ocean, having been woken up by the incoming tide soaking me. A bit more pleasant this year though.

Back in Kitui, the famine worsened. The morning after the night-bus from Mombasa, I was sitting alone in front of the mission house when a woman arrived carrying a baby on her back that was snugly wrapped inside a bright shawl. She addressed me in Kikamba.

‘Waja?
’

‘Aa,’
I responded telling her that I was fine, and asked in kind,
‘Uvoo waku?
’

‘Nimuseo,’
she replied, indicating she was well also, before launching full steam ahead into a torrent of indecipherable Kikamba.

However, I understood her message from her eyes. The baby possessed a disproportionately large head, and its ribs were showing. One has to be careful about setting a precedent in these situations, at the risk of sounding heartless. I did not want to bring every beggar from the village immediately down upon the mission house, which would inevitably happen. So I handed her twenty shillings (about twenty cent), enough to buy her and her child breakfast.

Suddenly she took off her skirt and began gyrating. It is heartbreaking what some are prepared to do for food. This particular woman may well have spent the money on drink; she came back to me every day I was near the mission house afterwards. Fr. Liam told me she had a history.

‘That same woman once dropped another baby of hers on the lap of Bishop Dunne from Westmeath some years ago when he was Bishop of Kitui, right in the middle of an ordination ceremony. As you can imagine, Brendan, the gesture wasn’t really appreciated.’

The problem was, as much as I wanted to give them what they wanted—and it was often only pennies in Irish terms—one can only ever meet a small part of their needs. Sadly, in many cases, their needs centre on the next bottle of Kenyan
poitin.
Yet I was always strongly conscious that, when weighing up whether to donate money, in genuine cases some people might really be close to death. The missionaries face such dreadful dilemmas every day, especially difficult when it is hungry mothers with starving children.

During that first week of January, I stayed for a couple of days in Fr. Paul’s cottage. Also staying there was a twenty-five year old Akamba friend of Fr. Paul’s named Katuta, whose family Fr. Paul had been supporting. A somewhat philosophical fellow with a neat moustache, Katuta displayed a worldlier outlook than most Akamba, having lived in South Africa for the previous two years. Fr. Paul set off at the crack of dawn each day, his labours taking him around the far-flung Diocese. So with the two of us at a loose end, we scrounged the loan of a motorbike off an Akamba priest without being entirely truthful about our destination.

Having filled the tank with petrol in the village, we embarked on an ‘easy rider’ motorbike trip over the high hills the other side of Kitui village, sending up clouds of red dust in our wake, the breeze in our faces, not a care in the world. The weather was perfect. We stopped now and again to admire the dramatic scenery. Our destination was a famous local landmark, a colossal yellow half-mile-wide rock sprouting 300 feet vertically up from the ground. Katuta explained the legend associated with it.

‘If you walk around this big rock seven times without blinking, or without looking behind yourself, then you will change sex. You will become a woman, Brendan,’ he chuckled loudly.

‘I think I’ll risk going around it fourteen times,’ I declared.

We clambered up to the top of it. Katuta was out of breath with the effort involved.

‘You’re just not fit,’ I teased him.

The view, however, was truly memorable. I could see for miles, even over to Nyumbani over four hours away. The small buildings of Kitui village seemed almost camouflaged, the ochres and reds mimicking the surrounding landscape. Once he got his breath back, Katuta pointed out something of considerable interest.

‘Do you see that orange rock face over there?’

‘Aye, what about it?’

I was straining my eyes, but it seemed a fairly routine rock face to me.

‘Look closer,’ he urged. ‘There is a home built into that rock. Can you see? Two people live in it with their two children. Their grandparents first hacked it out of the soft rock years ago. It keeps cool inside all day. I visited them once with a friend who is related to them. It is quite homely inside. What is the word in English for those people?’

‘Troglodytes,’ I suggested.

I could just about make out three miniscule figures milling around the cave entrance. They could have been figures in a Stone Age tableau; Katuta reminded me that East Africa is known as the ‘cradle of humanity.’

Katuta and I carved our names into the leaf of an aloe vera plant on the summit, and then rode back on the motorbike over dusty dirt tracks, edging through clusters of people and ani-mals—and in the process becoming downright lost. It was long since dark by the time we made it back. Our earlier bluff had been called, unfortunately, and we received a minor telling off from the Akamba priest.