blackout

From 2pm to 1am last night.Thankfully, we had a tank full of hot water at home, from earlier in the day. So I could shower by candlelight, and go to bed at 9pm with no sense of guilt. Just a certain amount of worry over how I’d recharge my cellphone and laptop if the power wasn’t back by morning. And the bigger worry of the basement flooding in my parents’ house. There’s a generator in the compound that pumps ground water away, but when the power fails, the generator can’t run. Water fills the basement, along with a contingent of frogs and other small liquid-dwellers of the insect and amphibian world.

I was wide awake at 1.30am – body clock still confused. The power was back – yippee! – so I plugged in phone, laptop, and got 4 hours of work done before my melatonin tablet kicked in and put me back to sleep.

Nairobi long rains

Are supposed to run March to May. This year, they're late. The rainy season is just hitting full momentum.

Heavy showers. Silver drizzle. Thunderstorms. For the past 48 hours, it's either been raining, or about to rain. Or it's just rained, and you pick your way through craters filled with water, gasp at sudden splashes from trees, gutters, awnings.

I love the rain. I love the pre-rain and post-rain scent of the air and earth. But the rains in Nairobi slap you in the face with the realities of urban poverty. Schoolchildren pick their way through roadside ruts of sticky mud and running water, under cheap, flimsy umbrellas, trying to keep their uniforms clean. You know they will shiver in their damp clothes half the day, in draughty classrooms. The slum areas are knee deep in water. The dirt roads that are the only way around them are rushing rivers.

Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and main port, has had 5 continuous days of rain. The town centre is waist-deep in flood water in some parts – cars have been buried, houses have collapsed.

This morning, we drove past a man carrying a sick woman on his back, stumbling through the mud.

You daren't stop, says my mother. However sorry you feel for them - you can't take the risk.

I want to protest, fiercely. But what do I know? Everyone in Nairobi tells me I'm naive, lulled into a sense of security and trust from the luxury of living in the west. Everyone has a carjacking story, a mugging-at-gunpoint story, a rape story.

I'm angry. At the 40 years of abuse, corruption, neocolonial kleptocracy, that have left Nairobi without infrastructure or the most basic support systems for most of its population. There is NO FUCKING REASON this city should not have functioning drainage systems, efficient affordable public transport. NO reason most of it's residents shouldn't be earning decent livelihoods. No reason anyone should live in a shack which floods every rainy season, walk miles to work or school through mud, raw sewage, pools of mucky rainwater.

breathe

I have to make peace with things not working when I'm in Nairobi. With the slow, slow download times, even here at the Java Junction, Nairobi's most popular wireless cafe.

With the frustration of no laundromats, with dryers, except in the Central Business District (more on this later).

With the logistics of transport - factoring hours of sitting in traffic into my daily schedule.

With my laptop browser suddenly opening in Hebrew! WTF????? I know that Israeli companies own a giant slice of Kenya's retail, service and tech sectors, but the blatant imperialism of it - not to mention the invasion of my privacy, on MY PERSONAL LAPTOP, leaves all my nerves jangling.

Aaaargh. OK. Time to breathe, and start a new blog post.

turning points

I leave for Kenya in 4 hours. I will be there for 6 months.

This is the longest spell of time I'll spend in Kenya since I first left home. The longest trip I'm making out of America since I moved here. I think it heralds a new bi- or tri- continental phase of my life, where I go back and forth between East Africa, Europe, America. Learn the skills of a nomad - how to welcome each new season and the migration it brings, how to be at home while in motion.

On my birthday last year, I thought:

It's getting smaller. The number of years before I'll have lived outside Kenya longer than I lived in Kenya.

My friend, the brilliant Roger Bonair-Agard, wrote a poem I love, called The Sadness of Migration. It begins:

is when you realize you've finally spent
more years in your adopted country
than you've lived in your own.

and ends:

and all of a sudden you belong to no-one
and no-where belongs to you.

Despite my ambivalence about belonging, I remember thinking on my birthday:

No WAY is that going to happen! I have to find ways to work in Kenya!

And lo and behold - the Kenya tour of Migritude. It's a little scary when the universe delivers so powerfully, in response to an appeal you didn't even make out loud.