Adventures in Narok and More

1/21 & 1/22/12

Kristin and I spent part of Saturday exploring Narok Town. Pauline, the eldest here at Siyiapei Children’s Home (she is 19 and soon to leave for high school in Maai Mahui) was our escort. We rode into town in a rickety Toyota ‘taxi’ packed with 7 of us (we are definitely learning to travel the African way—no wussy private cars this time around!) and spent the morning and early afternoon wandering the jammed, dusty streets. Pauline got me a good price on 5 leshus (sp?) the colorful cloths the Maasai women use for everything from baby harnesses to dress-up skirts and shawls. And then Kristin and I took Pauline shopping for pens, pencils, notebooks, a book bag and a pair of black shoes—things that she was in great need of for her start at a new school 80 km away. Pauline has been here at Siyiapei Children’s Home since 2001 and her younger sister, Sarah, will remain here. I can’t help but believe that Pauline will be very sad to leave this place next Thursday.

We again bought groceries for Everlyn, as she continues to insist on including Kristin and I in her family dinners. Today we had the experience of buying ½ kg of beef from one of the Narok butchers. You know, one of those butchers I’ve told you about before? The ones with the window in which hang entire sides of skinned cow, often dangling in the presence of a swarm of flies? Our accommodating butcher first carved a nice strip of meat from the skinned cow’s haunch, then he brandished his hack-saw and put some muscle into sawing through the skinned cow’s femur. Lovely. However, I’m here to tell you it turned into a very tasty dinner—the first time we’ve eaten sukuma wiki mixed with little chunks of meat.

After a hair-raising 7-person taxi ride back to Siyiapei, during which the driver nearly had 3 head-on collisions, one with a semi-truck and two with 2 fully loaded matatus, I decided for sure that Graham’s piki-piki is a far safer mode of transport from Narok. He’s definitely on my ‘to call’
list for Monday.

Saturday afternoon, the kids insisted we go swimming. It was hot today, and beautifully clear, and a swim would have felt awesome were it not for the fact the swimming hole was in the Siyiapei River, the functions of which range from cattle trough to Laundromat, to tractor wash to latrine. No way were Kristin and I going to risk getting that water in our mouths. Instead, we found a lovely shady spot in the green grass and watched the boys do flips off the river bank and the girls horse around in the water. Pauline got a hold of my point-and-shoot camera and
took, like, 80 photos of the kids in different poses (it is almost impossible to get candid shots of these kids. Every time the camera appears, they immediately drop into the most elaborate poses.) Great fun was had by all! The remainder of the afternoon was spent playing dodge ball and then lounging in the shade watching as Caroline (one of the many delightful girls here) tried to
keep the itinerant cows and goats from trampling the wet laundry laid to dry on the grass.

Today (Sunday) we all went to church up the road on the Africa Inland Church compound (this is
where the clinic is that I worked in last time I was here.) The church is a T-shaped, pumice-block structure with a tin roof, long arched windows with a few colored panes of glass and a red and white-draped altar. It was so beautiful in its simple way and though Kristin and I couldn’t understand a word of the 3-hour long service, the whole place resonated with the universal truth
of God’s love and grace and mercy. Being the only wazungu in the packed building we were, of course, asked to introduce ourselves—into the mic, in front of the altar (talk about sticking out like a sore thumb!)-but the entire congregation was so receptive. Afterwards, outside under the acacia trees we were welcomed again by all the matriarchs of the church—a group of delightful,
funny, very colorfully dressed women.

It was really hot this afternoon—close to 90, I’m sure (LOVING IT!)—and the kids insisted we go to the river again. Again, Kristin and I declined to enter the water but after the kids had their fill, we all walked down the river to the waterfalls. There, the kids got a huge kick out of being
taught how to skip rocks and we ended up constructing a contest to see which kids could skip the most rocks across the pool and hit the base of the cliff on the opposite side. Then they discovered my telephoto lens—one boy asked to look through the camera and once he figured out he could zoom in on his buddies, there was no turning back. Every single one of them had to try it out. The
delight of discovery on their faces as they pushed and pulled that lens back and forth was priceless. And finally, the inevitable question: how many shillings did your camera cost? How to tell 21 kids in rural Kenya, all of them wearing torn and worn hand-me-down clothes, some of them without parents and none of them with more than a tin box to their name, that my camera cost the equivalent of 800,000 ks? It is such an enormous sum I was embarrassed to even
utter the words.

Some photos from the last couple of days can be found on the next post.