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Flashback Friday: Kibiwott

March 25, 2011 in Flashbacks, Poems with 0 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Kibiwott.  He was one of my neighbors in Kenya.  I miss him.  I miss his brothers, Micah and Manu.  I miss his sister, Priscilla.  I miss his parents, Salome and Mombosi.

There are so many stories I could tell you about him.  His little laugh that made me laugh every time he laughed.  His little voice that asked for fish.  The time he was sick with malaria and he slept in my arms and then threw up all over me.  The time he ate mango after mango after mango; his face and hands a sticky, stringy mess.  So many.  Too many.

Time marches on.  He is 6 or 7 now.  But not to me, not inside my head.

Kibiwott

I close my eyes and I see you.
You come to me frozen
as if you stepped outside into the snow
and it covered you kabisa.
There is a distance I cannot cross
and you are forever.
I cannot let go of the statue of
you in my mind;
the one that keeps you safe;
the one that keeps you alive.
There are moments,
like thousands of ordinary days,
that shine and last forever-
frozen.

Flashback Friday: Arduous

March 18, 2011 in Flashbacks with 0 Comments

ar·du·ous

1. requiring great exertion; laborious; difficult: an arduous undertaking.
2. requiring or using much energy and vigor; strenuous: making an arduous effort.
3. hard to climb; steep: an arduous path up the hill.
4.hard to endure; full of hardships; severe: an arduous winter.

Now that we have the definition of arduous in mind, let me tell you a little story.

15/16 June 2007 -

Jo (my roommate) and I were going to be traveling to Northern Kenya with Ray and Jill Davis and Edith. And like all good travel adventures this one started at 4am. We were going from Eldoret to Lodwar, a distance of 220 miles and it should have taken us about 10 hours.

There had been heavy rains and part of the bridge in the town of Kainuk that one needs to travel over to get from Eldoret to Lorwar, had collapsed. With the main road cut off we were going via another route. I’d say road, but it was not a road; it was a track in the dirt. Ray, who has lived his entire life in Kenya and is 3rd generation missionary in Kenya had heard of this “road” so we were off.

 

 

 

Around noon that day we came to a ditch filled with water up to Ray’s thigh. We decided to have lunch and wait it out to see if the water would go down. Instead, it rose slightly as we waited. And as we waited we were joined by two lorries and eventually a very large lorry with a canvas top that had quite a few “military” personnel. (I put that in quotes because that is what they told us they were.  There were no uniforms but lots of guns so I was a little bit suspect). What turned out to be “let’s eat lunch and see if the water levels drop” turned into 7 hours of waiting under a tree.

Just as the sun was starting to set we somehow decided that we should all try to cross the ditch. The first lorry made it across safe, second one got stuck and had to be pulled out by the first one, then it was our turn and we made it across safe. Phew! We all decided to travel together in a convoy. Remember I mentioned there were heavy rains and that is why the bridge was out? Well, the heavy rains made parts of our “road” m.u.d.d.y. with a capital M!

This part of the journey became a continuous pattern of … drive a little way, have one of the lorries in front of us get suck in the mud, wait for them to be dug out while a few of the “military” guys came and stood around our landroaver with their guns drinking beer. This pattern happened over and over and over and over. Did I also mention it’s pitch black outside and that it just kept happening like this for hours?

Then around 12:30am we just stopped. I thought it was just another one of our many stop and waits. But there didn’t seem to be anyone trying to dig any of the trucks out. Turns out there was another landroaver heading in the opposite direction to us that was dead due to electrical problems. At this point the “road” was a one way “road”, surrounded by thick bush directly on either side. So we had to cut the bush back enough to get around the lorries we were traveling with to get to the dead landroaver. Ray tried for about an hour to help William get his car started, but it didn’t work. So eventually we squashed William in the car with us and off we went.

There were parts of the “road” that were extremely muddy and we saw stuck and abandoned vehicles one after another after another. William told us that some of those vehicles had been stuck for more than a week. All was going much better at this point, we had left our convoy and were making decent progress and thankfully had not gotten stuck in the muck.

All was going well until around 4am (24 hours after we had left Eldoret).

There was a river to cross. A pretty decent size river. And no, there is not a bridge. We made it about 3/4 of the way across before we got stuck. So at 4am, in the middle of a river, in the middle of I-don’t-even-know-were, Kenya we had to get out of the landroaver into the river – and try to push the car it out.

There were several attempts and it didn’t budge. And to top it all of, we could watch it sinking little by little. We had to unload everything. Loads upon loads carried from the car to the bank. All the while trying not to think about what could be in a dark and mucky river in the middle of Kenya in the middle of the night. By the grace of God the car didn’t sink any further and it didn’t get swept away in the current either. We scavenged the banks for logs and grass while Ray and William jacked up the car. The logs and grass were put under each of the jacked up wheel, one by one, in the hopes that we could provide more traction and our pushing efforts would be successful. But they were not.

So, with the car stuck and relatively safe (it wasn’t sinking and the current wasn’t taking it away) we built a fire on the banks and made tea and toast for breakfast instead; while the car sat there in the middle of the river.  Then, from the direction we were headed, came another landroaver. Do you know what this landroaver had? A winch.

So just as the sun was coming up that morning around 6:30am this landroaver was able to pull ours from the river! What a great feeling to have it free!

 

 

 

Our rescuers were on their way to help others stuck along the way. On their first attempt to cross the river that we had just been stuck in, yep, you guessed it, they got stuck. So we rescued our rescuer. They were successful on their second attempt , but it was iffy there for a moment.

We still had 4-5 hours of travel time to get to Lodwar. We dropped William off at his village so he could get supplies and then somehow manage to get back to his vehicle to fix it and continue on to where ever he was headed in the first place.

31 hours after leaving Eldoret we arrived in Lodwar with a pretty great travel story, tired bodies, wet shoes, but non the worse for wear.

I’ll save the weekend in the village outside of Lodwar with the Mombosi family for another time. And also the trip back home was it’s own crazy, unique experience. But those will be for another day.

*Sorry for the quality of the photos.  I didn’t have the original digital images so I took photos of photos from my journal.  Thought it’d be helpful for you to see them though.*

Flashback Friday: Cockroaches

March 11, 2011 in Flashbacks with 0 Comments

In the Center of Attention post I mentioned perhaps doing flashbacks later on.  Well that bounced around in my head and came up with the idea of having Flashback Fridays.  They won’t be in any sort of order and they won’t all be about or from Kenya.  Why I’ve decided to start with this one, I’m not sure, but here we go!

Flashback Friday: Cockroaches

I do not like cockroaches.  I live in the Pacific North West so I’ve never really had all that much experience with said cockroaches, thank goodness.  But they are one of those things that even if you’ve never seen one in person, you know you don’t like them.  I think my first experience with them was the summer I was working at a camp in Hawaii with my friend Andrea and it was there that I learned that when one kills a cockroach they make this horrible (and yet somehow slightly satisfying) popping sound.

In my little house in Kenya there were lots of cockroaches.  It’s not like they were everywhere all the time, they were just everywhere all the time!

Examples:

We were blessed enough to have a little refrigerator in our house because we had one electric plug and some times you’d find them in there.  So aggravating.

One night I woke up to Jo (my roommate) flipping on the light to our room and standing at the foot of my bed doubled over and moaning.  I asked if she was ok.  No answer.  I started to untuck my mosquito net and get out of bed so I could see what was happening.  Then there was the constant whacking sound of a shoe on the concrete floor and Jo started to cry.  The trauma?  A cockroach had been in her ear.  It’s amazing she was able to get it out so quickly.  We slept with earplugs for like a month after that.

One afternoon I came home from teaching lessons and was looking for a snack to eat.  While doing so a cockroach started climbing up my leg.  I flicked it off.  A few moments later I felt that same sensation.  This time, with much more dramatic flare, I ripped my skirt off and gave it a good shaking out.  Then much more calmly and civilized put it back on and found a cracker to eat.

And then there is the Pièce de résistance cockroach story.  (although, maybe that title belongs to a cockroach being in Jo’s ear).  It was quite typical to clean the kitchen and then give a good spraying of DOOM around the door and window and up toward the ceiling where it was just wood beams and corrugated metal sheets.  So that is what we did and in doing so a mother load was discovered.  At first a few dead ones dropped down from a hole in the wall up toward the ceiling and Jo and I looked at each other with an expression of Ewww on our faces.  Then Jo very nearly sprayed the entire canister into that hole in the wall and cockroaches literally rained down.  I’m serious it was a stream of cockroaches raining down.  It was disgusting.  At least most of them were dead already, but they were every where.  The majority landed, of all places, in our dish rack, which yes, was full of freshly washed dishes.  So we boiled water and washed them again, this time with lots and lots of bleach!

Of the many things I miss about Kenya; cockroaches are no where near that list.

Hope you enjoyed the first Flashback Friday.  Next week I’ll try to stay away from cockroaches.  And since those are pretty much all my cockroach stories, I think we are safe.

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