“Asante sana” I thanked the Kenyan man who had given me a lift to Nairobi and stepped onto the sidewalk. 

           It was at least fifteen degrees warmer in Nairobi than Kinale, my worksite and home. I pulled my wool sweater over my head and stuffed it into my backpack. Buses and cars belched fumes alongside small eateries burning charcoal. Billboard ads for orange Fanta and Sportsman cigarettes surrounded me. 

           I turned the corner and nearly walked into the outstretched legs of an old woman. She sat with her back against the building, shaking coins in her beggar’s jar with only two fingers. She had stubs where her other fingers and her feet should have been. My rearing told me to give her a wide berth. She could be dangerous. 

           At twenty-three, I still felt the constant presence of my mother even when we were 7,500 miles apart. It was 1989 and I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya for a year. Soon my parents would visit so I could show them the country. 

           I jogged up the steps of Nairobi’s Telecommunications Building to stand in line with other expats waiting to make a call. The line to the international calling room moved pole pole—slowly. Last month, when I called home, my parents told me they had their plane tickets. Through onionskin letters my mother and I planned their trip to visit me. 

           Spaced evenly along all four walls of the calling room hung gray metal pay phones. I lifted the handset. Held it against my cheek. A slim, neatly dressed Indian guy next to me shouted into the receiver. A poor connection. I looked around at all the faces. I smiled at a white girl my age, and she smiled back but then turned away to face the drab wall. Like me, she wore a smock dress that came below her knees. The female thigh was considered alluring and offensive, so we were instructed as expats to keep our thighs covered. 

           The phone rang a dozen times before the answering machine clicked on. I hung up before I heard my mother’s recorded voice. I kept the handset against my face and my head down, avoiding eye contact with those still waiting for an empty phone. I didn’t want them assuming I was done. 

# 

           Eight hours earlier, at Kinale, I had woken to the sound of roosters near and distant. I had opened my back door and breathed in the cool, fresh air. I could see my breath. How big the sky was. The rains had finally stopped and the clouds puffed up their chests. Moisture glistened on the hills of indigenous grass. Small shambas—farms—and traditional mud huts with thatched roofs dotted these green hills. 

           I had decided to go to Africa to search for meaning. What was this gift of life and how should I be making the most of it? When else, other than in my unfettered youth, would I get to do charity work and see the world? Realistically, I should have been in therapy for phobias and severe anxiety, but my parents weren’t believers. My father said that every psychologist he knew had at least one gay kid. And, well, you didn’t want that problem. Plus, Dad’s first two 911 calls as a New York City cop, when he was twenty-three, were each a suicide of a psychiatrist. The profession couldn’t even help itself. The only viable solution, I concluded, face the fears head on. Therefore, hell-bent on doing good work, seeing the world, and curing myself, I joined the Peace Corps. I would finally be a person who took things lightly.

           After three-and-a-half months of intensive Swahili lessons and cross-cultural and teacher training in Naivasha, my sixty-two cohorts and I were dispersed throughout Kenya. I was assigned an English teaching position at a high school in the Kinale Forest, northwest of Nairobi. 

           The outhouse I shared with neighbors obstructed part of my panoramic view. A dense cedar forest towered just beyond the hills. Elephants lived in this forest. I knew because the Peace Corps volunteer before me had written me a letter and said that she’d been lucky enough to see them. Volunteers shared stories, which I, in turn, shared with my mother, including the horrid yarn of the girl in the training group before us whose choo—outhouse—had been rickety. Maybe it was termites. Or maybe over time the wood just rotted. Those details don’t matter as much as the girl went into the choo and the wood floor gave way and she plunged into the depths of human excrement. She screamed for too long before someone found her. Peace Corps medivacked her home, and rumor was she was still under the care of a psychiatrist because no matter how many times she showered she never felt clean. And I knew, from my father, those quacks were useless. 

           I slipped on gum boots to head to the rain tank where I filled the sufuria. As the aluminum pot heated over the kerosene stove, I returned to the tank to fill my blue plastic basin three-quarters of the way. I failed at preventing the water from sloshing over the rim as I carried it inside and placed it on a wooden chair. 

           When I first moved to Kinale, I had written to tell my mother how nice I had made the house. It was a wooden duplex, with cement floors. After I had moved in, my first project was to turn the neglected shack into a home. I swept the floors, walls, and ceilings to remove the cobwebs and dirt. With a rag, a bucket of water, and Omo laundry detergent, I scrubbed the dirt off the walls. It took two days before my work revealed orange paint. I hitchhiked to Naivasha—a four-hour excursion—and returned with a gallon of white paint. My mother had written back to say I should also bleach the floor. I made the even longer journey to Nairobi where I bought bleach and a squeegee which was an ordeal to get home. The headmaster quoted, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” when he saw the transformation. For a moment, I felt superior to everyone for renovating my shack. Then I realized it was my mother who was superior. Every weekend, the bathrooms at home smelled like bleach. And every few months she would scrub away the grease from the kitchen stove and tile backsplash with ammonia. 

           When the water on the jiko was scalding hot, I poured it into the basin and swirled my hand in it to even the temperature. Steam rose. I had mastered a sufficient bathing experience with a basin of water, even washing my long hair. 

           A knock on the door rushed me into pulling my dress over a t-shirt. A small barefoot boy in a tattered t-shirt and shorts silently pushed a glass bottle of milk toward me. For a small fee, milk was delivered to my house each morning from one of the school’s cows. I took it and thanked him in Kikuyu. “Ni wega.” The milk still held the cow’s warmth. I poured it into another sufuria, lit the jiko, and watched it until bubbles formed around the edge of the pot and the milk began to rise. I turned down the jiko, stirred the tea leaves into the pasteurized milk, and added a little water. I drank the chai with a slice of white bread slathered with dry bottom-of-the-jar peanut butter. 

           I stepped onto the mud path outside my house wearing my large backpack containing only a change of clothes, plenty of room for victuals only available in Nairobi. Since I didn’t have a refrigerator, leftovers weren’t an option. And while I had plenty of time to cook daily (one could only read by lantern or sooty candle for so long), once a month I went to Nairobi to stock up on jars of peanut butter, jam, Cadbury bars, and Cornflakes—and to call home.

           Kinale High School was four-and-half kilometers from the tarmac—the paved road that runs from Mombasa to Kisumu. To get to the high school, you took a mostly untraversable road, dug out from the land but never paved. Eighty percent of the year, gullies formed in the soupy mud, making it impossible for cars to gain traction. I had often experienced the slippery conditions and glue-like qualities of the mud. More than a handful of times I had been surprised to feel my socked foot sink into cold slime because one shoe had stuck while I continued walking. In the dry season, the road poofed, blew, and whipped dust every which way. Timing was important at Kinale. You needed to get where you were going before sunset because once darkness fell, you had only the night sky to guide you. So many stars the sky held in the dry season, but never enough for a safe journey. And if anything went wrong in the night there was no way out. Almost every night when the sun set I thought of that a little bit. Looking back, my mother probably did too. What if a snake bit, cerebral malaria struck? Writing, reading, and drawing by candle light could barricade catastrophic thoughts from fully entering my mind so long as I deployed these tools before panic invaded my body. 

           Along the way to the tarmac, I avoided the puddles that stood over the mud. The two tiny storefronts I passed were typical for a Kenyan town—slabs of weathered wood running vertically and coated with dirt on the bottom. Mules carried goods to the town’s small duka—shop—that sold these few staples: cans of Blueband margarine and cooking oil; dried beans and rice; warm Fanta and Tusker beer; Omo laundry detergent; Kenyan tea leaves; and, occasionally, pineapple and loaves of bread. Men in threadbare jackets and tattered trousers hung around drinking outside the doorway of Mpesa Neema Hoteli. The duka’s blue Dutch door was open on the top. Inside the shop, the mzee owner stood in darkness. 

           The damp road smelled of earth. I passed women hunched over, carrying wood on their backs, wearing Western shirts and skirts from past decades, with mismatched kangas wrapped around their waists. Some wore gumboots. Others were barefoot. We greeted one another in Kikuyu. “Wimwega.” “Niwega.” After about my fourth month in Kinale, the mob of elementary school kids finally stopped following me every time I left the school compound, yelling “mzungu”—European—and trying to touch my hair. 

           At around the three-and-a-half kilometer point, I veered off the mud road and followed my newly discovered foot path to the tarmac. A woman, maybe twenty-five, hadn’t noticed me approaching. She was digging with a hoe, bent forward at the waist. A red, black, and white kanga tied in the front secured a lump on her back—her sleeping infant. A small boy ran to this woman’s side and tugged on her blue and yellow skirt. Something felt genuinely kind about the way the woman acknowledged me. Her smile warm. “Karibu”—”Welcome”—she said, waving me forward. 

           She called out, excitedly, in Kikuyu, and a man emerged from behind their home. Her husband shook my hand firmly, not like when my headmaster held out limp fingers that felt moist and soft. Perhaps it was the wide smile he first shared with his wife and child that made me think this man, too, was kind. He had lean hard muscles and seemed capable of, if needed, running for hours through the forest with his children in his arms. 

           The woman said something to her husband, and he walked away. In broken English and Swahili, she and I conversed about my job as a teacher, their farm, and America. I am no longer surprised how much can be understood between people who do not share a language. The husband returned holding a head of cabbage and a bunch of scallions. They sold these to me for three shillings—10 cents. I asked what else they grew and if I could come back to buy more.

           They were happy to have me as a customer and told me that peas and carrots would be ready in a few weeks. 

           “Come in. Come in. Nauandalia chai,” the woman said, so I, still with plenty of time before my call, followed her into her mud home. Her house was one big room, but strips of plastic divided it into sections. Two naked children seemed to appear out of nowhere and ran to her either side. The baby was stirring. Gitau, whom I had met first, brought me a stool and Mama Gitau insisted I sit across from her. She squatted and stoked the flames on the fire in the center of the main room. She had strong healthy-looking teeth. Her feet were wide and flat, cracked and dry like clay. She rinsed three enamel tin mugs with water from an old yellow jerry can and set them on one of the large stones circling the fire. She spoke quickly in Kikuyu to Gitau who ran out of the house, returned with a handful of dirt that he dropped into the sufuria, and ran out again. She added water from the jerry can to the sufuria and scrubbed and rinsed it until the aluminum shined. She then said a few words to me in Swahili, and I knew them to mean that she needed her husband to milk the cow. 

           I asked her the rest of the children’s names. She asked in broken English about my family and when I would marry and have children. Her toddlers giggled and sidled up to their bigger sister, Wambui. When the baby began to whimper and Gitau returned with the milk, Wambui helped her mother untie her kanga and took the infant. Mama Gitau poured the fresh milk into the boiling water and added tea leaves. The liquid came to another boil and, from a small brown paper bag, Mama Gitau poured at least a cup of sugar into the pot. She stirred it with a plastic strainer. 

           Mama Gitau nursed the baby and Wambui brought her father tea. In Kenya, I had come to love chai time. It was a break in the day and a sweet, creamy treat. I looked away when the baby’s lips fell off his mother’s breast, thinking of a neighbor at home, Mrs. Malloy, who had once answered her front door to my mother with her infant on her breast. My mother came home appalled at her lack of decency. I did not tell my mother that I thought she was too judgmental. 

           “Nimeshiba,” I told my new friend. I was satisfied. Before I left, Wambui returned with a small bunch of carrots her father must’ve just pulled from the earth. Mama Gitau exchanged with Wambui the baby for the carrots and rubbed the soil off with her calloused hands before handing them to me. 

           I asked her how much they cost, but she wouldn’t take money. She waved her finger, “No. And you come for lunch on Sunday.” 

           I cinched the hip straps on my backpack and continued my journey to Nairobi, walking among the towering cedars. Once I had walked far enough into the forest, I squatted to relieve myself. The ground cover was soft and green, almost bouncy. It wasn’t too far until I arrived at the tarmac. 

           I stood on the side of the main road, moving my left hand up and down, palm-side up—the Kenyan equivalent of sticking out your thumb. When a Mercedes pulled over, I jogged to the passenger side—clothes, loose carrots, and a head of cabbage jostling around in my backpack. The driver, who looked to be in his fifties, wore a crisp white shirt and black suit. I climbed in, keeping my backpack at my feet. 

           “I can put that in the boot, if you’d like,” he said in perfect English. 

           “I’m fine. Thank you.” 

           Statistically speaking, for a mzungu hitchhiking in Kenya was far safer and more efficient than taking other forms of transportation. I’d recently ridden a bus from Mombasa to Mambrui because no private vehicles were heading that way. The bus driver munched on miraa, a stimulant similar to amphetamine, and sped through a torrential downpour without any working windshield wipers. I didn’t panic, but I prayed. Similarly, riding a matatu, a jalopy truck with a cap on top, usually missing lugnuts and often with bald tires, was a death-defying act. A vehicle  designed to seat six typically carried twenty. “Squeeze a bit,” says the matatu conductor, as he stuffs as many humans as possible into the cab and then bangs on the roof to let the driver know to take off, before passengers are settled. The conductor and, if needed, a few male passengers stand on the truck’s fender, dangling like pairs of trousers on a clothesline. We wazungu were privileged; we could wave down privately-owned vehicles and enjoy a comfortable free lift, usually with someone whose level of prestige far surpassed our own. 

# 

           I dialed home again, in case my parents had been outside or vacuuming and didn’t hear the first call. To my surprise, my mother answered. The connection was fair, though I struggled to hear her over the many voices in the crowded calling room, in particular the scruffy blonde man to my left speaking a harsh German. He reeked of booze. 

           “We just walked in.” My mother’s voice was faint. I pressed the handset closer to my ear. “Did you hitchhike again?” 

           “I did,” I told her. “It’s so safe and I got here in just one ride.” 

           “Who was in the car?” 

           “A Kenyan man and his wife,” I lied. 

           “Were they preachers too?” 

           She was referring to a short ride I’d gotten from Kinale to Kimende, where I shopped on some Saturdays. A Kenyan man had rolled down the window of his Volvo and said in English, “Praise the Lord. Come in. Where are you going?” He asked if I was from America. And when I said yes, he said, “Oh thank you God. God is on our side. Thank you Jesus. I was in your country in 1986. The Lord Almighty permitted me to visit your country. Thank you, Jesus. I started off in Ohio, then went to Florida and up to Detroit in Canada.” 

           “No, he was a lawyer.” 

           When my mother didn’t say anything, I realized there was a delay in receiving one another’s replies. Nevertheless, I kept talking. “And before the couple let me out they gave me their phone number in case I needed anything.” Another fib. Though that had happened on another occasion. 

           Mom called out from the family room (I could tell from the way her voice traveled) to my father. “John, Kerry’s on the phone.” 

           He picked up immediately from the kitchen line. 

           “What’s that banging?” I asked. 

           “John, stop making a racket.” 

           “Sorry,” my father said. “I was putting away groceries.” 

           How progressive of my father to take on a nontraditional role. “Yum, tell me what you bought.” 

           “Bananas, Macintosh apples, cheddar cheese. I’m grilling steak tonight and your mother is making mashies and green beans.” 

           “What else is going on there?” 

           They reported two successful college drop offs. My brother was a freshman. My sister a sophomore. And my mother had enrolled at SUNY Purchase to, at forty-six, begin college. My father said, “Your mother signed up for an African Studies class.”

           “Did the toads return?” was my mother’s second question, which meant she had received my letter about the rainy night when I sat at my kitchen table grading student work, having just cleaned up dinner. The rain was torrential, clattering my roof. The lamp’s kerosene was running low, the light dimming. Even though I didn’t hear or see anything, I sensed a presence, an invasion in my space. I grabbed the lantern by its metal handle and moved through the small kitchen looking for what I felt. And there they were, amphibious visitors—small toads hopping onto my kitchen floor through the gap under the door. Already more than a dozen occupied the space. I grabbed the dustpan and caught one at a time, opened the back door, felt cold rain on my face, and flung each toad back into the yard. Legs stretched out like crooked wings. 

           Since she seemed concerned about the toads, I didn’t tell my mother about the swarm of bees that migrated over my head last week as I walked to the duka. A sound not unlike a small airplane preceded them. They made up a thick, dark cloud that brought my eyes upward, causing me to lose my balance and brush against the stinging nettles that encroached the path. “Are you eating well?” my mother asked in a faraway voice. 

           “I am. So are you getting excited to see Kenya?” I asked my parents. 

           A long pause. 

           My heart beat more quickly. It wasn’t like my mother or me to be direct. We’d always danced around truth, avoiding difficult conversations. I didn’t ask why her voice felt small. Instead, my hands trembled. 

           “Ker, I had a lump removed from my breast and it was cancerous.” 

           I held my breath. It seemed all of the walls of the room were tilting. I looked at my fingernails. I wanted to put down the receiver and walk away. Conceal my fear from her. “I’m probably going to have a mastectomy. I don’t think I’ll feel depressed after because of Dad. I’m so lucky that he loves me so much. We won’t be able to come. I’m not sure if I can get my money back from the airline. Truthfully, I’m not that interested in traveling in Africa anyway. I just want to see you. Why don’t you come home for Christmas.” I don’t remember the walk back to the ratty hotel I stayed in. 

# 

           During my first few months in Kenya, I lived with a Kenyan family just outside of Naivasha and attended full days of training with the other Peace Corps volunteers in my cohort. Our instruction included daily language lessons in Swahili taught to us by native Kenyans. The instructors, young educated Kenyans, lived on the Training Center compound, so we Peace Corps Volunteers often hung out with them after our classes. One of our language teachers, Otieno, began to flirt with me and I didn’t mind it. He was a Luo from western Kenya. Very dark and athletically built. He spoke beautiful English and Swahili and was an excellent soccer player. 

           Occasionally, we had parties at the training center as a way to unwind. Guitars came out. Beers were drunk. We sang. Someone would stick a cassette tape in the big boombox and we’d dance. Those nights most volunteers brought their sleeping bags to crash on the Center floor. 

           I knew HIV was uncontrolled in Kenya. I’d also learned that Kenyan men didn’t like to use condoms. But I was so hungry for human touch. For hours Otieno and I sat outside side by side drinking and talking about our different countries, politics, and travel (he had lived in London for a year). Our legs barely touched. When he took my hand, I got up with him and we walked through the dark over the grassy lawn. Moonlight lit up his room. He kissed me and his tongue melted something in me. But despite the need, I heard my mother’s warning and pulled away.

           “Una wasiwasi?” Otieno asked. “Ndio.” Yes, I said, I am worried.

_{(From The Hemlock’s Issue 6, Winter 2024)}

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