The Last 48 Hours

The warmth and hospitality of Moses and the housemothers is palpable. We arrived with small gifts (colorful rubbish bins for each of the children’s bedrooms), and the housemothers were surprised that we would bring something for them when it was we who were guests. We are served hot, sweet chai regularly throughout the day, and our plates are heaped with food at mealtimes. Norman, when we stayed in our room previously, has equipped it with a handful of modern conveniences: a mini-refrigerator, a small microwave, some scented candles (there IS a pervasive dampness here that a little vanilla scent goes a long way to disguise) – but it’s the welcome of the people here that is most comforting.

That said, there are few of our usual comforts here. One is never free from the dark red mud after the rains, for example, but that inconvenience is compensated by the gratitude everyone feels that the rains came just in time to fill the emptied storage tanks. We don’t shower here, but we now have plenty for our basic needs, and that is enough.

We were invited to Moses’ house for dinner last night, and as we walked up the path, we passed the plots where his two brothers also farm and live. Moses talked about the land once belonging to his father, and about his 110 year old mother who passed away just this year. Moses and his children proudly welcomed us into their home, a permanent structure just finished this last February. It is yards away from the corrugated aluminum structures where his brothers live, and even from the structures that house his three cows (one of whom was harassing the others because she’s in heat… Moses wasn’t able to reach the vet by telephone while we were there, so he had to excuse himself to go out and wrangle his misbehaving livestock!). The life Moses has created for his family is basic but comfortable, and we gratefully ate the mukimo and cabbage we were served, while we talked about the day’s news that was broadcasting from the small television on the counter. As we walked back to the Home together, nibbling on roast maize, we could smell the cook fires of various other families who were closing out their day in a similar way.

Since we knew we’d be spending the night, I brought some glow-in-the-dark bracelets to play with before the children went to bed. Distributing them was a chaotic and noisy process, but then the courtyard was filled with neon bracelets, earrings, halos, spears… At one point several children went into a single room, turned off the lights, and managed a techno-rave with all of the day-glo blues, oranges and greens!

Many of the children were still holding on to the bookmarks we had made earlier in the day...

The stickers were a big hit, though I’m not certain whether even one of the bookmarks will ever mark a place in a novel. The children love the library and the books there, though much of even the older children’s interaction with the materials there is limited to admiring pictures. It’s something, but it would be wonderful if words could inspire them as much as pictures do!

There is a lot of learning happening here, of course – and in several languages, which is the most impressive part. The children all speak Kikuyu, their mother language, but instruction in school is in Kiswahili and in English. I sat for a bit with Henry yesterday (he’s the only child at the Home who is still in pre-primary classes, so he has a lot of free time!), and we took turns placing seeds into an upturned Frisbee, counting in both English and Swahili. The reward for his excellent mathematical and linguistic performance? Actually PLAYING Frisbee with Greg!

I notice that I’m taking fewer photos this year of the daily experience in Cura – not even of adorable Henry. I think it’s because the things I am most wanting to absorb this trip can’t be captured. This makes for a less visually interesting blog record, I realize, but if I could I would link you to: the impressive size of the spiders who also live and work here, the sound from across the playing field of the pre-primary students reciting their lessons, the press of hands and bodies as the children greet visitors (and the particular urgency of their questions about when we’ll be back), the sensory overload from hearing ones name repeated hundreds of times a day (calling for your attention, but also wrapped in a sentence in a language you don’t understand), the tug at your scalp of ten pairs of hand braiding and unbraiding your hair, the weight of the wheelbarrow that contains an enormous pot of githeri for lunch (not to mention the solid strength and balance of Grace as she maneuvers it from the kitchen to the Home, the pace of life and work that requires the older children to get up at 5am to begin their studies and keeps them busy at school until after 5pm…

It is not only the children who are working hard to improve their own lives here. The adults are in constant physical and psychological demand, doing the work to raise these 50 children while they also have families of their own. Since we’ve been here, I’ve been called to act as the librarian, a tutor, a computer tech, a security monitor, an art teacher, a financial consultant, a confidante, a storyteller… I know I fell into bed exhausted last night, and I did only a fraction of the labor the house mothers did.

Today’s mud quotient was lower than yesterday’s, which made everything seem a bit easier – planning every ingress and egress in order to minimize the muck-distribution is an intellectual challenge on its own. We accomplished other things, too, though:

--I distributed art work from the HiLife kids in Texas, which the children added to their individual collections of other masterpieces from Lockwood Elementary over the last two years;

--Greg mapped the whole Cura compound, using such high-tech instruments as graph paper and his approximately-one-yard-in-length stride;

--I met with all of the children currently participating in the pen pal program, getting feedback from them about their experiences and answering questions about their US counterparts;

--Greg launched a walk-about clean-up campaign, and he and the children filled four garbage bags with scraps and trash and recyclables from around the compound;

--We both met with the headmistress, Mrs. Mwathi, to receive the list of needed textbooks she and her faculty compiled. (We matched the education-restricted donation we recently received to a segment of the need, and we’ve got an order placed for science textbooks for ALL of the class levels. Delivery on Friday – yay!)

There were notes placed in our pockets all day, expressions of love and appreciation that are unnecessary… but incredible mementos to keep us going when we get back to the US.

For now, back in Nairobi, the next step is a shower and maybe even a martini… we’re children of our own culture, after all. Keeping the ability to be effective in both worlds is key to eventually calling our work here a success.

H