Nyumbani

It was in the matatu on the was to Ol Kalau in the Central Highlands that I first saw the Great Rift Valley. I’m not quite sure what I expected – perhaps something in the nature of the Grand Canyon, maybe just an enormous crack in the surface of the Earth. It was so green and so vast and there were peaks that rose up from within the valley. Dormant volcanoes. As we descended down the road carved into the escarpment, there were baboons on the side of the road, lazily watching the Friday afternoon traffic go past. The winding road finally spread out across the floor of the valley. As we passed Lake Naivasha, I saw zebras grazing alongside cattle and trees whose branches reached out toward each other. Although the road was only barely tarmacked, thinking back I feel myself gliding along the bottom of the valley. It’s all a euphoric haze that cannot be matched.

Don’t think I haven’t been paying attention. Rafiki zangu, don’t think I haven’t been watching.

I wrote the above on the Great Rift Valley some years ago now. It was my first trip out of Nairobi on my first trip to Africa. My first zebra sighting. And the beginning of what can only be described as life-altering infatuation. In short, I fell in love the way you do when you are 20 and seeing the world beyond your doorstep for the first time.

I lived with a Kenyan family and ate ugali and tried to speak Swahili on a good day. I drank Pilsner baridi (being sure to throw a few drops from my glass to the ground for the ancestors) and stayed out at Carnivore til all hours. I tracked rhinos with the rangers in Nakuru Park. I attended NGO meetings in Kibera slums. I went down River Road.

Daniel arap Moi was in power. Kenya was a post-Embassy bombing multi-party democracy. World Bank was still trying to reform the civil service. No one had cell phones yet and internet cafes were still expensive. Raila Odinga was the main opposition leader.

Watching Kenya’s elections and stability unravel over the last five weeks has been heart-breaking. Kenya was my first home in Africa and I still consider the people I lived with there to be jamaa yangu (my family). I have sat down many times to write this blog post, combed through horrifying and depressing newspaper articles, spoken with Kenyans and I knew then and now, and wondered how to begin.

If you ask me whether I saw this coming, I could tell you that tribalism was alive and well when I was living there (I could have easily written a post similar to this on Kenyans). I could tell you that crime and corruption has shaken the credibility of what should have been a model African government. I could tell you that two years ago, I learned that the US government was watching Kenya for signs of political fragility.

But none of that really matters, because I would have told you that I did not believe Kenya would be willing to let herself collapse like this. Even now, watching the country crumble, I still can’t believe it. M, an award-winning Kenyan blogger whom I admire greatly, has seen it with his own eyes and it is well worth reading his thoughtful and sage words.

As for myself, ‘euphoric’ is no longer the word that comes to mind when I think of Kenya.

In search of…

I’ll admit it. I’m not that well- adjusted semi-integrated expat that reads the local paper every morning. In fact, I’m not even sure I could name the local paper without taking a pause to rack my brain. So when a friend mentioned the fuel shortage the other night over a glass of wine, I hadn’t the foggiest clue what she was talking about.

But sure enough, she was right. When I pulled up to the trusty BP after work, there were bright orange cones in front of all the pumps and I heard from a colleague that there were lines of cars stretching down the road outside the gas station at Crossroads (Malawi’s answer to a shopping mall).

There seem to be several theories about exactly what has caused the crisis. The first story I heard was that the tankers with Malawi’s regular petrol supply were being held in Zimbabwe and that the Malawi Revenue Authority had flown down to Harare in an effort to rescue them.

Then I was told that the sad troubles in Kenya has stopped ships from coming into the port at Mombasa, creating a shortage of supplies all the way down to land-locked Malawi. But that too was dispelled when I was told that Malawi’s petrol supply usually comes into the port at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania or Beira, Mozambique, notably closer than Kenya.

All I can tell you for the moment is that the Total station at Foodworth shopping plaza has petrol. And they haven’t even jacked up the price. Yet.