Paigey

It has been two years, and it’s still hard to take in. Today I’ve been reading back in time, and writing about it, steeped in memories so clear I can nearly feel them, my sock feet padding along the smooth floor of the pediatric ward, her happy “num! nummy!” when she was still well enough to enjoy a popsicle, the heartbreaking sweetness of “want Aht Nah-Nah!” that she’d wail to cajole me into her adult-size bed, her blue eyes staring somberly into mine as we rested on the same pillow, the taste of salt on my lips when I kissed her sweaty head. I sang her Puff the Magic Dragon about a billion times. The memories are so vivid it’s like I’m still there—and then I lift my eyes suddenly and there is the blue flower in a wine glass on my windowsill, the bright orange blossoms of a flame tree beyond, and with a shock I realize I’m in Nairobi, and all of that happened two years and a lifetime ago.

Two years into the lifelong math lesson dead children teach: if she’d lived, she’d be this old. If she’d lived, she’d probably be this tall. The size of that girl over there, on the giant trampoline, pigtails flying, feet kicking, high thrilled squeal carrying to me across the parking lot as her father tosses her terrifyingly high and bounces on his toes before catching her again. Safe.

If I ever admit that she died—and I avoid this—I do so partly from trust for the person to whom I’m speaking, and partly from a need to speak it out loud one more time. I had a niece, and she died. I never say passed away. I hate that phrase. Passing away sounds like something you do in a game or on the highway. Dead people just are just dead. I always think I am used to the deadness; this year the span she’s been gone will overtake how long she was ever here. But sometimes I’ll tell someone about her and I’ll burst into tears. It startles me every time. I had a niece, and she died.

With time my losses are beginning to relax into more comfortable shapes, curved to my shoulders without gouging the way they did when they were new, when I needed them to hurt, and hurt, because there was no other way to grasp their reality, to bear the guilt of recovery or punish myself through the shame of survival, when I was still at war with the reality I could not control. Now, sometimes at least, I can say, “people die.” Now when I speak to my mother, it’s with an ache, but there’s triumph, too: I miss you so much, Mommy—but can you believe where my life has taken me! Even to Paige, if I talked to Paige, I could say, I miss you, baby girl, but the place you carry in my heart now is so much more sweetness than suffering. For so long the loss of them was fire in my gut, a constant unforgiveness: you could have let them live, you could have. Now, partly from the passage of time, partly from the way life shifts to cover over the holes, partly just from lack of any other option—now I sit more gently with the past and how its losses have changed the shape of my future. It’s a relief to shed the rawness of grief, though back when it was raw I dreaded this very time, when I wouldn’t pay them tribute with my daily rage and anguish. Even that rawness has a slight sweetness in my mouth now, when I remember. Because it was good, to miss them so viscerally, to participate so fully in the age-old process of flinging out my sorrow like a lariat I thought could actually tame my lost loved ones back to me. But it is good now, too, to walk through the world with the two of them as my unseen companions—oh, Mumma, wouldn’t you have loved this? oh, Paige, we could have thrown you so high!—as we all look at life with wiser eyes, one of us, the woman-child left behind, still figuring it out with the mental mind but catching glimpses, every once in a while, with their spirit eyes: everything has unfolded exactly as it was meant.

Her blue eyes laugh into mine from the photo by my bed. She was such a ray of light. I remember playing with her in a small fiberglass playhouse up at the hospital, outside David’s House, a couple months before she died. Ben and me, acting out the story of the Three Little Pigs, and when we’d huff and puff on her door she’d poke her head out boldly to repel us, giggling “chinny chin!” I wanted to keep that day forever. She was so adorable, so vibrant, so alive.

My mother said this to me once, in a dream. I say it too, on this day that is a blend of dream and reality, of purple jacaranda trees and the dim glow of IV lights reflecting the fluid-swollen face of a tiny girl:

You will never be separate from me.

Gatorade and other gifts

Three days ago, from nowhere: my first intestinal malady in months. Thank god for Gatorade! My little brother brought some mix in the summer, and the ladies in my businesswoman’s association in Connecticut sent some just recently. These are the small touches I really, really appreciate when I’m physically compromised in a foreign land. Twice this summer I cut myself—once with a knife at an orange seller’s stand, once when my bus rear-ended a matatu and I was thrown in the aisle—and both times I grew shaky and faint and had to sit down, which baffled me, because they were both manageable wounds, nothing requiring stitches or anything, and I’ve never panicked at getting hurt before. Steph was with me on the bus and she said, no, the same thing happens to her: she thinks it’s psychological, knowing that, if it WAS a serious wound, you’d be hard-pressed to get it treated well. And I feel somewhat the same about these intestinal maladies. One of my housemates in Lavington, after months of digestional distress, finally learned she has Bilharzia. You never know what it could be here. Hence, little taste-of-home comforts, like Gatorade when you’re pooping your guts out, really go a long way to making you think it’s all going to be okay.

Monday I went to Mlolongo to welcome two new volunteers, bringing my houseload up to three—hoorah, rent’s paid for one more month! I called Beautiful and Salome home from school for the night, just so there would be people around, and teen energy, when the newbies arrived—and so they’d see this really is a Kenyan homestay, not just mzunguland. After dinner I sat on the couch helping Salome remove her extensions, something at which I’m becoming adept—I’ll never be a good Kenyan mama when it comes to braiding black-girl hair, but at least I’m useful at taking them out. Later I combed out the tangles, and the sense of being a mom was overwhelming. That the girl protesting under my hands had thickly coiled black fuzz for hair was sweetest of all: it’s so much more INTERESTING. Secretly I am beginning to hope I never even have any white children. I’d kind of like to adopt my way around the world, wherever I live, and create a family of nations. Not TOO many nations, mind you. But, you know, a few.

Tuesday Austin and I pitched our girls’ football league plan to the principals of the day schools in Mlolongo. We were roundly welcomed: they think it’s a terrific idea. Anything that gives the at-risk girls of Mlolongo a community and encouragement to complete their education. Then, as we were leaving, the principal of the secondary school asked me whether we’d be giving the girls any other “message.”

Oh, great. Here comes the “prostitution is a sin” speech leading into a good Kenyan gospel message, which I am NOT about to deliver to the girls—my passionate belief that prostitution is exploitive and abusive in no way interferes with my determination to support these women in being the best, happiest prostitutes they can be (believing that only then will they be empowered and motivated to pursue other, non-exploitive work), and I’m already walking a fine line in garnering support from the majority Christian population while gently explaining to them that no, I’m not out to “rehabilitate” the hookers, and no, I’m not going to give them an anti-prostitution you’re-a-sinner speech, EVER.

So I hedged. Well… we just want to support the girls… it’s not really the venue for getting a personal message across to them… you know…

The principal shook his head. “You need to talk to them!” he insisted. “Teach them they are not tools to be used by men. Teach them they have rights that deserve to be respected. Tell them they are God’s best!”

I gaped like an idiot. Only barely was I able to refrain from flinging my arms around him. The principal of all Mlolongo’s teen hookers (those that are still in school, at least) is on their side, is their advocate, Christianity and all? Could they be any more fortunate! Could I!

Every time I meet an ally like this, my spirit soars: oh yes, we can DO this. Do what, exactly? Hell, I don’t even know—just do SOMEthing, rather than nothing. I can’t fix that the world is a desperate place, or that a woman’s body is her ultimate merchandise, or that dynamics of desire and control make the world go round. But a few deeply disadvantaged girls who’ve had no one rooting for them are about to have a team around them saying, it doesn’t have to be this way, not for you, not if you are willing to fight for something better. And doesn’t that count for something, at the end of a life?

I’ve been promised funding by my first donor, so the football program—smaller in scale than the entire process of opening the women’s center—is Weda’s first project. Austin of course will be the coach, since he’s pretty much the best in Kenya. And if the funding doesn’t come through, I’ll pay him myself—it means so much to finally SEE something, a tangible program, a piece of my plans and vision coming to life. It’s okay if the process is slow. I’m not going anywhere.

Particularly not since I have been bed-ridden with fever and mind-splitting diarrhea ever since. Oh Kenya. I am grateful that much of my weekly work can be done via laptop and cell phone, without anyone on the other end (except the longsuffering colleagues whom I feel compelled to inform) ever knowing that I’m peeing out my butt. Today my fever is gone at last so I dragged myself out to meet Andy and another friend, Grace, who’s a reporter. She’s going on a two-week road trip through northern Kenya into the Sudan with Andy’s nephews, and I could chew off my own arm with envy, but that’s okay, my time for such excursions will come, but not while there are teenagers needing their snarls combed, footballers needing footballs, clients needing to sign contracts, and scary African microbes wandering my digestive tract. Timing is everything.

The current timing is 3 a.m. and for no good reason I’m unable to sleep. So I’ve been designing a new business card. (Business cards still make me feel terribly grown up. Which, I suppose, only proves the opposite.) I surveyed the finished result, with my Kenyan phone number and address, and suddenly wondered, should I put my U.S. information on there too? But no—why would I. I live in Kenya. I live in Kenya! The thrill never ceases. It’s worth every microbe gallivanting through my intestines. But I hope they’re preparing to gallivant elsewhere, because I’m fresh out of Saltines and the Gatorade’s getting low.

the year of magical thinking

(written Sunday, Nov 1. then the power went out in the entire country so I couldn't send it.)


Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of coming to Kenya. For two weeks. Haaa. In celebration I went for nyama choma and Pilsner with my fabulous friends Austin and Morris, who are actually Steph’s fabulous friends but she was kind enough to share them with me, and they have become pillars of my social foundation (as has she, and I feel her four-week absence just now KEENLY). Austin has been a volunteer football coach to boys and girls in the slums for years, and is shortly, I hope, to become WEDA’s first paid employee when we start our girls’ football team in Mlolongo, which I’m SO excited about. Yesterday I joined him and Morris to watch their under-12s girls’ football tournament—ai, I fear me football will be a regular part of my life now, which does not make me jump for joy, but I’ve adapted to worse. Repeatedly pressed to declare loyalty to a professional football team during this past year, I finally yielded to Austin and Morris’ insistence that I pledge allegiance to Manchester United, their reasoning being that if we watch a match and Manchester loses, we’ll all be sad together. Given my utter lack of personal passion for football, this seems as good a basis for arbitrarily becoming a team fan as any. Manchester it is. So anyway, I went to the under-12s tournament yesterday, only I left late, sat in traffic, and wandered awhile looking for my connecting matatu, so I managed to arrive about a minute and a half before the last match ended. Which, naturally, the girls had won. So then there was nothing for it but to go get some goat and beer and start celebrating my anniversary.

In the end, I celebrated a little too well. Which is to say, I got drunk out of my gourd. I’m not sure how long I can keep making the “I’m still learning to drink” excuse—granted, I don’t drink that often, at least I didn’t till coming to Kenya, but it’s been the better part of a decade since alcohol first crossed my lips, and really, how experienced do you need to be before you know that chasing three beers with a glass of wine, several shots of whiskey, some coconut rum, and an unrecalled amount of vodka is a REALLY BAD IDEA?

Up till the part where I can’t remember anything, though, it was a great evening. Morris and I danced to a live Kamba band, then Austin came with me to a party at the Belgian embassy for a Couch Surfing friend who’s interning in Kenya. From there a whole gang of us piled into a taxi and headed over to the German embassy for a Halloween party, and sometime after a man in a devil mask thrust a bottle of vodka into my hands—Satan, indeed—my memory goes blank. Because I’m an idiot and I still can’t pace myself when I’m drinking. I have one, and only one, memory after that point: being in the back of a car, puking out the window. Yes. I am this glamorous. Better yet, and I do not remember any of this but Austin was the savior who called the taxi and got me home, so he witnessed it—I apparently vomited in the car as well. (Why would I do that? With the open window right there? It doesn't even make sense.) At my apartment he had to fight with the driver over the fare, given that the man now had puke in his back seat and was understandably upset. Then I threw up more once Austin got me upstairs. (My housemate affirms this: she heard me.) And he even says I threw up in my bed. Which is most horrifying of all, as people die that way, and when he told me that this morning, I had to hug him and say, thank you so much for taking care of me. Because my bad-decision-making drunk self would pretty much have been screwed without him. I guess if you’re going to celebrate a little too hard and get unsexily shattered and be virtually unable to walk, a friend who gets you safely home and even defends you from a pissed-off taxi driver with puke splattered down the side of his car is a pretty great friend to have.

His kindness reminds me of Josh. Who lived out the practice of nurturing me through ugly moments for three and a half years. Who I’m pretty sure I’m still married to—because you have to participate in your own divorce, right? it can’t happen to you without your involvement?—but I’m pretty sure not for much longer. This is the strangest change of all from one year ago when I arrived in Kenya, though by then the stark possibility of not being with my husband till death do us part was already rearing its head. It still seemed unimaginable. Now it’s long since concrete. Soon I’ll no longer be married to the man who personified kindness in my life. Josh held back my hair when food poisoning (not excessive drinking, back in those days) had me vomiting in the toilet, called me wife with quiet pride, held me while I cried a thousand thousand tears. He was unconditional love to me. I will always honor my husband for who he was and how he partnered me. I will always honor the deeply loving marriage we stepped out on in faith and released each other from in wisdom. But I don’t look back anymore. What we had was precious, but flawed. What I have now is the first truly authentic life I’ve ever lived.

One year later, I continue to marvel at what my life comprises—work I adore, independence that has proven my mettle, a community of friends I love, finally living in Africa after years of swearing I would. Sometimes when people ask me what I do, I answer, whatever I want. I am capable of all this, and so much more—who knew? I think this is why I’ve stuck with the new name, Anena, that I picked up in a bus station in Syria and carried into Kenya because, after all, I was only going to be here two weeks—yet life here, and my life overall, quickly became so full of changes, inner and outer, that it seemed only appropriate to re-name myself, marking my transition into the woman I’d always wanted to be that I was finally becoming. Anena is fearless, compassionate, resilient, and aware, living every day wide open to life. Anena speaks her truth and works consciously to live in love toward everyone she meets. Anena also pukes out taxi windows…but hey, I didn’t say I was perfect yet.

Just that I’m so, so grateful to be here, living the life of my dreams.

So? Happy one year of life in Kenya to me.

p.s. I’m NEVER going to drink AGAIN.

the things they carried

Water bottles. iPods. Backpacks. Camelbaks. Spare layers already stripped off in the heat. And once, surprisingly, a camera. Who would seriously want to run twenty-six miles clutching a camera?

The Nairobi Marathon was run Sunday morning. I was strolling through downtown at 8 a.m., a little hungover and running on one hour of sleep, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but blocked-off streets and light-flashing police motorcades. Normally this signals the President’s passing, or, as on Friday night, something random like the sudden release from prison of the leader of Kenya’s underground Mafia-style gang, which saw town shut down in expectation of riots and bloodshed. But this morning the hullaballoo was benevolent, a foot race in a land where running is an art, and I stood half an hour watching thousands of people in polyester promotional Standard Chartered Bank T-shirts gallop by. Japanese runners giving delighted thumbs-up to an ambivalent crowd. Hopelessly underprepared runners in flat-soled canvas shoes, cargo pants, or velour, even one woman in a long skirt. And the world champion Kenyan marathoners, darting by in a sudden pack, small and lean and intent, preceded by pace cars and a cameraman riding precariously backward on the back of a motorcycle. I listened, uncharacteristically, to rap music in my iPod, ignoring my post-alcohol sour stomach, riveted by the selection of human beings that run marathons in Africa. Every day here is some sort of education.

Saturday I rode out to Kenyatta University, where a massive athletic meet was being held, and watched my fabulous friend Austin’s girls’ soccer team kick some serious ass. Though high schoolers, they trounced the college teams they faced, and took home the girls’ football championship trophy. I sat on the sidelines and did what I do a lot of lately, relationship-building—I’ve been trying to make contact with these girls for months, as I want to supply them with Lunapads; they’re slum girls, high risk, and Austin coaches their youth league and mentors them to finish school, just the sort of group I envisioned this project assisting. Their ball-handling left me open-mouthed: I think they could probably have taken nearly any boys’ high school soccer team in the States. The cogs of my brain are already turning—we’ll need to get a girls’ team in place here in Mlolongo, to motivate the teenagers into other pursuits than prostitution…and so it develops.

At the match a little girl named Anne adopted me. In a shabby school uniform, shoes too large for her, teeth already stained brown at the age of nine, she was adorably gregarious and well-spoken. She latched onto me, chatting and following me, till at one point I found myself standing with her and Austin beside the football pitch, waiting for a game to finish, and Anne oh so casually leaned her head against me. I put an arm around her and she cuddled delightedly into me. Austin exclaimed over a play. I stood there, a child tucked against my hip on one side, a man who’s a dear friend talking to me on my other, sharing the iconically American activity of watching a high school soccer game—and suddenly I thought, this is how it would feel to be a family.

I was startled. It felt terribly sweet.

I went out with Da Girlz that night, except I managed to miscalculate once again, arriving at 3 a.m. to find the place still hopping: Saturday night. Duh. The dance floor was packed, the girls were still strutting their stuff, and I was once again pointlessly underfoot. I sat at the bar awhile, watching them work, marveling—the tall beautiful girl slapping an opportunistic hand off her breast, the large woman in the spangly silver top grinding herself against a potential client with a patently bored look on her face. I joined one group of girls who welcomed me warmly, but after just a couple minutes two men joined the circle and I fled, not wanting to interfere with their work, worried that one of the men was trying to pick ME up—and the last thing I need is to alienate these girls by making them think I’m competition!

I slept for one hour. I’m going to have to figure out a way of doing these nights out that does not involve being grotesquely overtired for the following four days.

Otherwise my week was fairly nondescript. A lot of back-and-forthing between town and Mlolongo. I drove up from the Mara last Sunday, sustaining my first breakdown (it was electrical; a new fuse finally fixed it) and my first flat tire (on the trailer, which requires special rims and has no spare—THAT was a three and a half hour headache). On Tuesday Stephanie left for a month in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, plunging me into girlfriend withdrawal. Friday Salome called to say she was being sent home from school because I still owed school fees, so I said, fine, come home and bring Beautiful too, and we’ll have a family weekend. Then I went and paid the dang school fees already. And now I’m broke, but this is a situation I’m being very attentive about: what really defines plenty? I’m learning to look at what I do have, rather than what I don’t, and lack of spending cash is not the crisis it once was, not when I live such an abundant life in such a desperate place.

Yesterday morning I sat in the kitchen with Salome, Beautiful, our housekeeper/goddess Salima, and our neighbor Jesinta, watching Salima make her heavenly chapatti for the girls to take back to school, practicing my Swahili—my friend Tony urged me this week to just start speaking it and I’ll learn faster, so I’m trying—and feeling the warmth and community that African women know how to create in a way I’ve never experienced anywhere else. I’m a bitch sometimes about African social standards when they crowd me (why should I be obligated to leave my work and sit in the living room for half an hour feeding and entertaining you when I didn’t even invite you over?!), but as a rule I have a great appreciation for the community-mindedness of Kenya. You never have to be alone here. (The only problem is when you WANT to be!) Yesterday morning, chatting and laughing with these four vibrant females, I wanted nothing else than to be where I was. I’m so blessed with community here.

This is the family I am creating, a community of people—schoolgirls, mamas, prostitutes—with whom I am engaging in the highly risky pursuit of love and wellness in our daily lives. We all have something to offer. We all deserve to be loved for who we are, not what we do. This is the passion that drives my work here. This is the anchor of my own journey into the woman I am meant to become.

It’s 11 a.m. and I’ve been working in bed this morning. (Something me and the sex workers have in common. Is that wrong?) My roommate’s new rescue kitty is leaping on me, and a shower—replete with heavenly new toiletries just received in a care package from the women of my businesswomens’ network back in Connecticut—beckons me. Then it’s off to the slum of Mathare, an hour-long trek across town that must be carefully coordinated around rush hour to avoid stretching it into two, to watch the girls’ football practice and talk about Lunapads. This morning I read: “Believe in the process of change, not just in goals already attained.” I love the work I do here, but more than anything else, I feel so grateful for the opportunity to invest in my own growth as I work with others. It’s good to know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

in full retreat

Ah! A long and exhausting week behind me, a job well done. I’ve run events before, enough to know I’m good at it (hell, I’m a Brown), but never professionally, and it was challenging and fun: 16 middle-aged Australian women on a one-week service/safari retreat at camp, under my care. Mornings I ran them around on service projects in the community: the clinic, the schools, a nearby Maasai village, real-life-Africa projects meant to be as educational for the women themselves as for the community beneficiaries. The week was a fabulous success. They loved it, and watching them love it was fun. I tapped into skills I haven’t used for a long time, hostessing, organizing, facilitating experiences—yet another way my African life has opened doors for me to do work I enjoy and am good at. They all wanted to know how I’d ended up here. I never weary of the story. “You’re so inspirational,” one said. Another, “You’re Wonder Woman.” And a third, after exulting over a wonderful morning at the clinic, sighed: “well, back to my boring life.”

Inspirational is well and good, Wonder Woman is even better, but most of all I thank God and all the universe for this, every day: that I never have to go back to a boring life again.

The gang left yesterday morning, universally delighted with their week, and I collapsed into my tent for a movie marathon—the Bourne Identity trilogy, then the Ocean’s 11 series. The first gratuitous veg-out day I’ve had in, I don’t know, many months. Heaven. What wealth, to take a day off on a whim when it pleases me.

Just now a herd of zebra and wildebeest stampeded past the office window. I went to the porch to watch them charge by. They do this every day or two, 60 or 80 passing in a frenzied gallop, always along the same route. Does something scare them in the same place, every time? Do they do it for kicks? A couple weeks ago a leopard killed a young wildebeest in camp one night and dragged its body up a tree. It’s still there, the withering carcass dangling by its head from a crook in the tree—quite a grim sight, positively screaming “consider yourself warned” in wildebeestspeke. Or gnuspeke. I only recently made the connection that wildebeest are gnus, which thrilled me: I’ve always loved that there was an animal called the gnu. I didn’t realize I was constantly looking at them.

Andy arrived today, returned from his woman-week exile to town, and we sat by the escarpment for hours, battered by the wind, the Mara green and lavender below us, swifts and eagles soaring on the updrafts along the edge of the cliff, the afternoon sun sinking at our backs. Catching up on the news: how the retreat went, what I learned, how I dealt with everything. A detailed story about the antelope with which I had a close-range staring match a few days ago, which I’ve finally identified as a male bushbuck. His new truck, and his old truck that I’m inheriting. Safari drivers and tent construction and the Maasai landlord’s latest gripes. The usual stuff. Tomorrow I’ll drive back to town and the readjustment to Nairobi life—taxis, prostitutes, power sharing, working out, meeting friends, climbing three flights of stairs to the apartment. Checking in on the house in Mlolongo, the volunteers, the Kitengela ladies. And then back to camp, a rotting carcass in a tree, black sky full of a thousand thousand stars.

Have I mentioned that I love my life?

























Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.



















The painting project at the clinic masterminded by one of the women in the retreat.



















Rural Kenyan traffic jam.



















One of the safari drivers giving birth to a wildebeest. Actually, he's rescuing it; it was stuck in a waterhole.



















The mamas dressed me in a leso and some Maasai jewelry-- they were thrilled. I enjoyed it too, as the discerning will denote from my unparalledly dorky expression.

lately

I can’t even keep up. It’s been a packed couple weeks. Stephanie has moved into the Lavington apartment at last, which is so nice; Rebecca announced that she understands why Steph and I are sharing a room, since neither of us spends hardly any time there, but the nights we do are such a treat—drinking wine, watching movies, hell we even giggle. It’s like a permanent sleepover. The other divine thing about the new apartment is it has an exercise room with an elliptical machine. I haven’t exercised in over a year, and it’s SO wonderful—I always sleep better and live more energized when I’m working out, so when I’m staying in town I scramble downstairs in the mornings to run awhile and then scoot back upstairs for a hot shower before the power (and thereby the water heater) cuts out for the day. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. Fortunately I have finally made peace with cold showers. My first week in Kenya I was sharing food with an HIV positive child, before I’d even educated myself enough on HIV to be sure you can’t get infected through saliva—but it took me six months to get the guts to take cold showers.

Most of this last week I was in Mlolongo, having quality time with Salome and Beautiful over their mid-term break, showing around my two fab new volunteers, and visiting old Kitengela contacts. I wandered into a crush on an old friend, dabbled with the idea of pursuing a relationship with him, realized all over again how important it is for me to be single and why, and wandered back out again, without the guy ever knowing he was part of such a complicated equation in my head. And I managed another night with the sex workers, during which I learned one worthwhile lesson about schmoozing with prostitutes: don’t show up early. Yes, it’s more practical for the do-gooder development-worker girl to hang out a couple hours in the early evening and then go home for her geezer sleep, but the problem is, early in the evening the girls are WORKING. They’re competing for clients. And I’m just sitting there, twiddling my thumbs, doodley-do, go ahead, girls, do your thing, don’t mind me. I felt very underfoot. Though they were very gracious toward me (if somewhat perplexed), and I learned some fascinating things. Like how they hide from friends, family, even their boyfriends, what they do for a living. Complicated stuff. I freaking love this field.

Oh, and I had another Travel Crises by Anna moment of fictitious drama when I caught a bus from Mlolongo to town one night this week. Just shy of downtown, the bus deviated from its usual route, striking off into the back side of beyond, where I’d never been. Everyone else got off and suddenly it was just me and the conductor and the driver in a very sketchy area of town at night, and I thought, oh great, it’s a setup. And there I was with basically every item essential to the function of my life in Kenya: my laptop, my phone, my notebook and my work folder, all irreplaceable. Most panic-inducing was the laptop with all my writing on it. The good news was, I’d just backed up all my documents on a thumb drive that morning; the bad news was, the thumb drive was in my bag too. (Clever.) Tales of recent theft and carjackings playing on repeat in my head, I convinced myself I was about to be robbed of everything I owned and left for dead on the wrong side of the tracks. I hid the thumb drive in my bra: at least, if I live to tell the story, I’ll still have my documents, without which I may as well curl up and die anyway.

Then of course the conductor dropped me off in one piece and very helpfully gave me instructions for getting myself out of scary ghetto-ville to my destination, so, having so recently made peace with my destiny, I stood around in the dark by the side of the road in some unknown slum where I could not have been more conspicuous had I been crouching down giving live birth to a dromedary, and I tried to relax and enjoy the night life, the man roasting maize over a fire in a barrel, the hip hop music blasting from some unseen speaker, the old man calmly grooving to it on the median, silhouetted by the headlights of vehicles tearing by. But by then I’d sort of worked myself into an I’m-Gonna-Die dramarama state and I didn’t relax till I was on a matatu at last, at which point I didn’t relax either because immediately all the passengers got off and two policemen got on and I thought, again, “oh my god it’s a setup.” But whereas confronted by thieving bus conductors I’d felt resigned to my fate, confronted with thieving policemen I was prepared to FIGHT. By the time I made it—quite safely and unmolested—to town, I was pooped. That’s the problem with having a hypercreative imagination in an area with a high level of violent crime. Where the hell else is my mind going to go with those sorts of situations? Sometimes it’s hard to be me.

Well anyhoo, in other news, I’m on msnbc—thanks, Yon! Check it out: http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/08/2092946.aspx . Good stuff.

And those are the haps.

what makes life great

This poster was on the marquee outside the grocery store today.

It made me so, so happy.



















Reflexology, anyone?

the slippery slide to social Sheol

Fortunate for me that I’m not interested in a new relationship, because I believe I’ve sabotaged all my chances: it appears that I’m becoming… a birder.

Or bird-geek, as our guests today declared, two Somali-Americans whose game drives I joined these last couple days. I didn’t see this coming; birds, I mean please, does it get less entertaining? Especially when you’re surrounded by elephant and giraffe! What sort of doofus would come to one of the greatest game parks on earth, where lions stare back at you with golden eyes and lumbering buffalo challenge each other with a smash of horns, and actually be interested in differentiating between the greater and lesser egret?

It grieves me to say this, but—apparently me.

It helps that the birds here are amazing creatures. The stubby, red-wattled ground-hornbill, the liquid-voiced Rufous-naped lark, the Bateleur eagle with its short red tail, the lilac-breasted roller which soars on brilliant turquoise wings. I fought it, though. Andy’s been predicting for months that I’ll get sucked in, and I’ve denied it could ever happen. But on yesterday’s drive, he pointed out a couple dozen species, and it made such a difference, seeing a bird and knowing what it was. I memorized them all, telling myself it was just to prove I could. Then this morning he brought the binoculars and bird book…and it all went to hell. I’m afraid I’m hooked.

It’s not such a bad thing, I guess—to add a new hobby to my already transformational life here. Last night after we got back to camp, in the pink-streaked stretch before dusk, I walked down our winding access road, reciting the birds’ names in my head, breathing in the clean Mara air, while glossy topi snorted their disapproval at my approach, and I was so happy I cried. Just this, this beauty, this freedom and satisfaction. It was air my mother would have loved, and later, under the half-moon, I lay in the crisp grass talking to her, wishing. Baboons screamed in the trees below camp, warning of a leopard on the prowl. This is the life I’ve wanted for my whole life, but I’d never have had it if she’d lived. This contradiction never stops chewing at me.

This morning I woke to a fuschia sky and the realization that one year ago today, I embarked on the backpacking trip from which I never really returned. In hindsight, the disconsolate weeping I couldn’t restrain as I was leaving makes sense: on some subconscious level, I must have known I wouldn’t be back. I wouldn’t live with my siblings again in our delightful discovery of the peer relationship we never had growing up as two different generations of Hansen kids. I wouldn’t make another home with my husband. I wouldn’t have a place for that beautiful glass-topped coffee table from the consignment store in Peterboro, I wouldn’t wear the adorable summer dresses I’d snatched from the Target fall clearance rack. A year ago today, without realizing it, I walked away from that life. Now I own four sets of bunk beds and I wear a lot of brown T-shirts that don’t show dirt. Now my life, which used to be charted out for the next 60-plus years, is unknown just a few months out from now.

Now I drive around the world-famous Masai Mara game reserve and exclaim over birds.

This morning we headed out after breakfast. We stopped to watch Ruppell’s vultures plunging their long necks through the skin of a dead wildebeest, most of them too busy fighting each other to actually eat anything—a uniformly revolting bird. We watched a martial eagle swooping above us, its speckled white chest bright in the early morning sun. I rolled their names around my mouth: gray kestrel, superb starling, swift. There’s a bird called the sooty chat, which is enough to ensnare me right there. Add hammerkops and the glorious red-and-purple Ross’s turaco, and it’s a done deal. By the time I’d zoomed the binoculars in on the iridescent wings of a Hadada Ibis, I was a convert.

“I can’t believe I’m becoming a birder,” I moaned. “Birders are suck dorks! They’re as dorky as online gamers…and I was one of those too!”

And I loved that as well, at the time. With surprising regularity I find myself recalling quests my husband and I undertook: the tedious underwater turtles we slew on repeated ventures with the Hunter’s League, that floating sky quest where we had to clear the entire zone and then the Named popped and kicked our asses anyway. The shaman character I named after a grandmotherly figure in my writer’s group, which, after level 15, could morph into a bear named after the teddy bear I had as a kid. Our final duo, Darmah and Grehg. I wish we’d ever embarked on that quest for a mount, I’d have loved my goblin riding around on a unicorn…

But my gaming days are over now. And it appears I’ve degenerated to bird-geek.

I’m never going to have sex again.

The life I expected

(written Fri 18 Sep)

8 pm on a Friday and I’m already in my jammies in bed, reading a book about AIDS in Africa. Not much of a night life for this 32-year-old single girl. But what can I say, I was out with a group of hookers till 5.30 this morning—I think I need an evening off.

I’m up from camp for three days, carefully scheduling my list of tasks around the availability of electricity: errands and appointments on days the apartment has no power, a blissful work-in-bed pajama day yesterday when it did. The brown LandCruiser and I have been taking Kenya by storm, six lovely hours driving from camp on Tuesday and errands all over town on Wednesday, me shrieking with exultation after each chaotic roundabout successfully navigated, each traffic snarl elbowed through on the force of the truck’s size and my audacity alone. (And gasping in mute shock when a trucker sideswiped me on the drive from the Mara, shattering my rearview mirror in a spray of glass across my face and throat.) My first night back in town, after the unparalleled bliss of arriving coated in dust and having a hot shower to climb into on demand, I went out for dinner with my new housemates and listened to tales of all the carjackings that have been happening around Nairobi, and decided this driving business will be a daytime pleasure only. But my, it is a pleasure, indeed.

This is so not the life I expected when I dreamed of Africa. Power-sharing, and traffic jams, and violent crime. Not the beer and goat Tuesday night for Jamie’s birthday dinner, a cluster of Americans and Africans talking AIDS and foreign policy. Not the most vibrant social life I’ve ever had, daily discovering new people I connect with on a deep, meaningful level. Rebecca handed Jamie her birthday gift, a book on aid in Africa; Jamie was delighted. I looked at my two new housemates and thought, I so picked the right apartment.

But I have, too, the Africa I did expect. I have the Mara, the landscape and the wildness, lizards dropping on me from the wall, mama baboons forcing me to slam on my brakes as they sashay across the road with their babies on their backs. And I have the people. The Masai, one of the most culturally intact tribes of Africa, still living in cow-dung huts, still bending to drink from the fountain of blood spurting from the throat of a slaughtered goat. Tuesday morning the doctor and I drove out into the bush down a faint track that led us, almost miraculously, to a large manyatta, low houses built adjoining one another to form a large ring, cattle protected in its center overnight. The chief had invited us to give a talk on HIV. I had expected to let the doctor officiate, but instead we were segregated, Kisiara to the men, myself to the women, and suddenly I was in front of a crowd of 40-plus Masai mamas waiting expectantly, and I had to wing it.

The women had questions. If one of us has the sickness, is there a way to protect our baby? Can you give us drugs at the clinic to keep us healthy?

It was the most helpless I’ve felt in Africa. “I’m working on that,” I said lamely. I presented it as a story: me, I travel very far, all the way to Nairobi; I talk to the big doctors, I say, “give me drugs for the women in Engos.” “Not today,” the doctors say, “come back tomorrow.” So I keep going back…and one day they will give me the drugs, and I will bring them to you. And you will live to see your sons grow to be tall, strong men.

They smiled.

In reality, I’m writing grants, I’m talking to different offices and NGOs: we’ve got to get HIV response into this part of the Mara! But the process is slow, and really, what the hell do I know? I have to remind myself that my efforts are better than no efforts at all; it doesn’t matter if I’m new to this, I can still make it happen. And I must. Now my mind is branded with the names and faces of the Trans Mara women who are slowly dying, unheralded, many unaware. “Not today, come back tomorrow,” I declared, while the chief translated beside me, and inside I thought, that isn’t good enough.

Afterward the doctor and I crawled into a boma to check on a woman who’d given birth in the night. In the outer room several old women crouched on the floor, taking tea; in the dark room at the back, by the dim light of a fire, we found the mother. Her baby was healthy, but there was a hard lump in her abdomen which Kisiara said was clotted blood she hadn’t shed. He began to massage it. After a moment I laid my hand on her belly too. Digging my fingers in, I could feel the lump loosening; a peek under the blankets by flashlight revealed the bright splash of blood between her thighs. I looked around me, eyes streaming from the smoke, at inner walls made of carefully woven sticks, outer walls plastered with cow dung. Outside, the livestock were just being herded out for the day, all bony hips and ribs, children scampering behind, scooping up the night’s cow pies with their bare hands, slapping them into large piles.

This is the Africa I expected. Ancient culture. Big-eyed children. Wild animals. Huts.

And then there are the hookers. Last night I had dinner with a Somali journalist, a buddy of my housemates; he lost friends in yesterday’s suicide bombing in Mogadishu, and it fell to me to help him party the bad feelings away. We went to a club downtown, me the only mzungu in the place, and there I met an amazing woman named Flava. She makes her living selling condoms to prostitutes. She’s tough, savvy, warm, and intelligent, one of those no-nonsense types, one of those mother hens. We talked for hours, and as the bar emptied, the hookers who hadn’t scored a client gathered around Flava to drink and gripe and laugh, and I, by my association with “Mama Condom,” was allowed in the circle. God, those women. Brash, bawdy, ballsy as hell, picking fights with each other, shaking their asses to their own loud renditions of “all the single ladies, all the single ladies,” which slurred into “all the shingle ladiesh” as the hours passed. They told me stories and I tried not to listen too wide-eyed, to play it cool, while inside I was thinking, oh my god, it’s finally happening, the hookers have let me in. I knew it was conspicuous, but I had to do it—I pulled out my notebook and scrawled their conversations down.

I stayed till 5.30, when the girls were slumping with drunkenness. At that point they had to stay till dawn or they were likely to be arrested by opportunistic policemen, willing to release them, of course, in return for sexual favors. They hugged me goodbye, took my phone number, wanted to know when I’ll be back. It was a triumph for me, after all my brainstorming about the women’s center in Mlolongo: first, that my ideas were completely validated by Flava, who’s worked with hookers for years and thinks the center is the perfect way to support these women; second, that I can in fact move in that world. I mean, I’ve never hung out all night with hookers on the job before! I didn’t know whether they’d really accept me, the goody-goody mzungu who’s sure as hell never had to spread her legs for money. I didn't know if I’d really be able to sit with them without pity or judgment. But it was perfect. I felt a powerful resonance: we’re all just women, we can appreciate each other and work together. I didn't feel like a development worker, I felt like one of the girls. Bizarrely—and I don’t want to hear any obnoxious jokes about this—it turns out I’m just really comfortable with prostitutes.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine such a vibrant and fulfilling life. An open door to the Masai community and hookers giggling with me over beer and cigarettes at 4 a.m. Last night I let myself be bullied onto the dance floor, awkward, self-conscious of my American dancing among the incomparably fluid Kenyans. It was past midnight, three and a half years since the day my mother died. I found myself sliding my finger in the ring I wear on a cord around my neck, the pseudo-wedding-ring my husband wore on his pinkie for the two and a half years of our marriage. Looking over my shoulder, I saw downtown Nairobi in the middle of the night, and for a moment it was so incongruous, so impossibly different from what I used to have. I felt every loss and sadness of the road that’s led to the unexpected soul-deep fulfillment of my days here. And I knew one more time, not exultantly, but achingly, that I’m right where I belong.

No, it’s not the African life I expected. It’s a thousand times better.

math and other lessons

(written 11 September)

“Right over left, left over right.” That’s what she taught me—my mother, repository of an endless store of useful miscellany. How to tie a square knot. How to poach an egg. How to multiply. “Eight times eight is 64, ask me again and I’ll tell you some more.” Still my easiest times table, ever since I was nine.

Twice today her absence has brought tears to my eyes, the kind I can only prevent spilling over by digging my fingernail into the tender flesh at the base of my thumbnail—a trick I learned when she was dying, one I figured out myself. Today, the tears threatened in a restaurant, as I knotted my silk scarf around my throat and suddenly, clearly, heard her voice in my head. Right over left, left over right. Three and a half years now she’s been gone. These days I know statistics on the prevalence of HIV in Africa, I can signal a matatu that I want a ride and follow the flow of Swahili conversation—things she could not have taught me. Life goes on even when the one your life revolved around leaves you. U tafanya nini—what are you going to do?

I was in a restaurant in Thika, north of Nairobi. Sitting with a beer and my laptop, on the final stretch of writing a big grant proposal, and a kick-ass proposal it is (how could I have failed to predict the perfect marriage my writing and my work with NGOs would produce?). Not far away, a trickle of water spilled over a formerly impressive waterfall; the jacaranda trees, so comfortingly purple when I first arrived last November, are coming back into bloom. And there I was, savoring a cold Pilsner, working to the earphone accompaniment of Ethiopian jazz, resplendent in a skirt and heels with my beautiful elephant tattoo revealed. She would not know what to do with me now, perhaps. Just as I often do not know what to do with this, loud Swahili gospel songs blaring from storefront speakers, bent men approaching me to peddle belts, newspapers, cheap Biro pens. Kenya, land of my nativity, land of my choice. Land where a grizzle-haired businessman gifts me with papayas and his nephew leans in to kiss me gently by the waterfall. Sometimes it all seems so apropos of nothing. Sometimes like the most vital life I could ever live. She didn’t prepare me for any of this—right over left, left over right, but what about when a child pleads with you at a red light, and you hand over your half-empty soda and he runs elated to his mother, slumped at the base of a streetlight? What about the shocking moral debate of how to follow up the theft of a great deal of money from your hotel room, knowing the staff are likely to be rounded up and beaten en masse until one confesses? What about the soft flesh of a mango, sliced yieldingly across your palm in a criss-cross pattern so you can effortlessly scoop out each succulent bite.

The old knowledge doesn’t always apply in this new life.

Eight times eight is 64, but what is the sum total of 25 years of Christianity, three and a half years since the earth fell in, and 10 months of drinking in the wild wonder of life like a wasted woman stumbling at last to the dusty river of hope? There was so much more I could have learned from her. Just one heartbeat that had never stopped and I’d still be there, and it would be some other woman sitting here, writing a proposal for a maternity clinic in the Masai community, tears in her eyes under jacaranda trees, a perfectly-knotted scarf around her throat.

my latest mantra

“Life.” This is Andy’s catch-all phrase.

“It is what it is.” This is mine.

I never noticed before how often I turn to this phrase, but it has become one of my mantras: an expression of acceptance, resignation, surrendering to the flow. Acknowledging that everything doesn’t have to go according to my plan to still be good. And that sometimes things suck, and they’re hard, and sad—and what are you going to do? It is what it is. It’s all okay in the long run—this, I feel sure, is true.

Today was an is-what-it-is kind of day. The morning: tromping endlessly around Kitengela with Salome and Beautiful, looking at new school possibilities, undertaking the heinous task of clearing Salome from her old one. The afternoon: taking to bed with my laptop to catch up on work, ending up weeping anguished tears for Joshua instead, continuing to cycle through another stage of despondence over the loss of the man I love. Yes. Love, present tense. Not that I would ever, at any point in the past six months, have said I didn’t love him. But it still comes as a bit of a shock to realize how very much I still do.

Life.

It is what it is.

“Clearing” school in Kenya is a process. I talked to the principal and the administrator, serious middle-aged women who were quite distressed I’d chosen to pull Salome. I explained the behaviors of “Nacho,” the vile Dean, and why I could not consider subjecting Salome to another term under his abusive authority (grabbing my kid by the collar and throwing her bodily out of the classroom? Hapana!). Then my goal-oriented American self ran head-on into Africa as Salome sauntered around the school much more focused on greeting her friends—and enjoying the celebrity of showing up in her civvies beside her mzungu mama—than attending to the business of cleaning out her belongings. Already jumpy with impatience, I then had to fight the vile matron for access to the dorm. Then wait while Salome’s vile schoolmate (who stole from me, and was thence barred from my home) took all her stuff out of Salome’s box. (Why was her stuff IN Salome’s box?) Then argue with the secretary over her pronouncement that we could not take the box till Salome had returned all her books. A long discussion ensued wherein the heretofore agreeable secretary displayed her shadow bitch side, and I barely refrained from displaying mine. Finally the administrator arrived to insist: we cannot clear Salome’s box until we are sure she has not lost any books.

“Salome,” I asked, “have you lost any books?”

“Noo,” she said, turning the single-syllable word into about three, as is her way.

“She hasn’t lost any books,” I said.

“It’s the policy,” the administrator said.

“Okay,” I shrugged. “It’s the policy. That’s fair. But I’m an impatient American, so I’m leaving. Salome, turn in your books, get your box, and call a taxi. I’ll see you at home.”

I came home, sat down to work, and ended up crying over Joshua instead.

Salome called. She had lost two books.

I’m not sure what a mom is supposed to do in that situation. Your teenager has been irresponsible. It’s going to cost money. Do you bail her out? Do you help her brainstorm a solution? Do you throw her under the bus? Danged if I know; I’m not a real mom! Left to my own devices, it’s likely Uber Friendly Hero Mom would have shown up as usual and smoothed the whole situation out. But I’ve been sleeping badly, I’m PMSing out of my brain, and it’s my third consecutive day of bawling my eyes out with missing my husband. Somehow Uber Hero failed to materialize. In her stead, we were introduced to Snarky Ma. “Well, you lost the books,” I said. “It’s your responsibility. Figure it out.” And I hung up.

I spent the next three hours feeling deeply guilty. But I didn’t bail her out, dangit. And eventually she appeared, with a plan outlined for how she would pay off the books. So! My firmness appears to have encouraged responsibility in the end. Huh. Wonder if I should try that again sometime.

Honestly, I just have to laugh. How has this become my life? I’m Stay-at-Home Housewife Girl, I’m Navy Wife, I’m “what shall I do today until it’s time to cook supper for my husband, shall I go to the library or take my dog to the park?”…and then suddenly I’m Snarky Ma, parenting two teenagers, inflicting my uptight Americanness on the laidback African continent, standing in the grocery store with a loaf of lemon bread and some yogurt in my basket, neither of which I need, realizing I am soothing my upset feelings by buying food, which is an addictive response, which is ANOTHER whole topic I’m working on lately (not at all unrelated to yearning for Josh, who I’d also have stuffed in my basket and paid quite a high price for had I been given the option at the moment, and damn the reasons I left in the first place), and then I go home and make coffee (comfort drink) even though it’s afternoon, and eat lemon bread (comfort food) even though it’s a totally inadequate lunch, and cry a lot.

Life.

But life is GOOD. And this scary, unknown path is a good one. My Kenyan road to healing—so thick with dust the car sinks up to the rims, so bumpy I bonk my head into the ceiling, so corrugated I have to cling constantly to the little hand grip mounted over the door, which I don’t think I ever clung to for one minute back in the U.S., why do they even include them in U.S. cars?—a road that I travel, consciously, every day, happy times and bawling times, working so hard to be present with my feelings, to work through my baggage, to love even the ugly sides of me, to trust the journey. This road, despite the cost, is one I am proud to be on. Good job, Anena—good job.

So I’m taking an hour off working through my baggage to nurture my brave, determined little self. Eschewing my laptop-full of tasks to read The White Masai (she’s so much more of a whinger than I am; quite reassuring really), drink water instead of coffee (because I have worked through my there’s-not-enough panic and am ready to rehydrate instead of inviting caffeine jitters), and sit compassionately with my feelings of loss and sadness: come on in, guys, hang out as long as you need to. We spend enough time together, we may as well be friends.

My life here, for all that I adore it, hurts a lot. But I’m here. I’m living it. And I’m proud of that. Proud that I have stuck it out even when it was awful and scary and I wanted to be the old Anna and run bawling to Josh for him to fix it. Proud to have demanded the most of my life and gone after it with open hands. Proud of my core of steel, my courage.

At peace, most of the time, with what it has cost me.

It is what it is.

some thoughts on poverty and plenty

Thoughts on Money

Another beautiful work day in bed. This morning, after being up till 4 a.m. skyping with a work associate in Canada, I am taking it easy; I slept till 10, then woke to the heavenly music of water filling the tank. Did I ever complain about water shortages before? They were nothing compared to this. My house has been out of water for weeks. The old days when we rationed showers and reused our wash water to flush the toilet seem luxurious; showers are a thing of the past now, and clothes rarely get washed in the first place. The newspaper last week pronounced Kenya now one of the most water-poor countries on earth. It’s one of the frontline issues in the news, that the Mau forest, our primary water catchment, has been laid bare by illegal treecutters harvesting wood for charcoal, and years of politicians looking the other way has finally resulted in the inevitable: prolonged drought that will take as long to rectify as it took to create. Crops are withering, cattle are starving, and white women are griping about not being able to flush their toilets. Even in the unspoiled depths of the Mara its effect is felt, as wildebeest gambol safely across dry river crossings and the crocodiles which depend on this feast before breeding leave rangers scratching their heads, wondering what will become of the croc population. The ramifications are endless, the politicians’ hot air is extensive, and the people shout: you can make all the show you want of kicking illegal settlers out of the Mau, but the farms are dust and the livestock are dying and how are we going to feed our children today, let alone tomorrow, let alone next year, let alone the year after? There is no quick fix. But the politicians, you can be sure, will continue taking showers and washing their clothes. It is always the poor (and no, I am not in that category!) who suffer. There. End of Anena’s political commentary.

In the past few weeks, power-sharing has been implemented—the country is hydroelectricity-based, and with lakes and rivers shrunk to a fraction of their former size, they can no longer produce the power we need. Three days a week, electricity is turned off from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Small businesses are folding everywhere: welders, hairdressers, thousands of people who cannot ply their trade without electricity. It’s stunning to see a poverty-stricken populace struck even harder. Like, it can GET worse? Yet here I am, blithely allotting my pennies: this much to go get a massage, this much to rent the apartment in town plus keep the house in Mlolongo, this much to put aside toward flying home to visit. I’ve lived on the cheap before; in my single days I was a proudly starving artist, for art and independence enduring skanky apartments with heinous roommates, multiple periods of sleeping in my car, and that stage where I dug through my glovebox each day for enough change to go to Taco Bell for one item off the dollar menu. Back here in Kenya this winter, newly severed from my source of sustenance—my husband—and with no idea yet how I’d support myself, I lived pretty damn cheaply too; I moved into this (palatial) house with two mattresses, two spoons, one pot, and the jiko, and we cooked over charcoal for the first month and didn’t have a fridge for the first three. Oh boo hoo. I’ve never for a day in my life worried that I’d starve. I’ve never not known that, if things got really bad, I could just call home to Daddy for a bailout. My pride, not my lack of options, have kept me living lean. That’s the big difference between me and everyone else in the developing world.

My father actually bailed me out this spring. I was down to my last $25. I’d stayed the weekend with friends in town, and hadn’t been able to contribute to any of our expenses, the dinners out, the beer brought home; one had even bought me two books about Africa he insisted I had to read, because I couldn’t afford them myself. It was the least powerful I’d felt as an adult in a long, long time. Still I was determined to stay and build a life here, so I stretched every penny as far as I could—and then one morning when I called home to say hi to my dad, he told me he’d put $100 in my US bank account. It was a gift. It was a lifesaver. I made it last a very long time. I also made myself a promise: my father will never give me money again. From now on I will be the one giving money to others.

And I am. Not yet to the scale I will; but I have multiple dependents now, and a full-time employee with multiple dependents, and I support them all, as well as myself. It’s the hardest-working, and most empowered, I’ve ever been, by far. It feels so GOOD. This is why I’m so driven. This is why, even when my girls complain about me being gone again, I head out to camp, I leave the house at 5.45 a.m. to work in town, I come home from a week away and barely say hello before I plug in my laptop and start making business calls. This is also why I marvel when I look over the Mara and think, I live here—why I am speechless with gratitude at the luxuries that have come into my life in the last few months, why I am so deeply proud of each accomplishment. Apart from my development-work efforts for people facing struggles considerably greater than mine, nothing matters more to me right now than establishing myself as the successful adult I’ve never been. Nothing.

So this is the personal perspective I bring to the widespread devastation of Kenya. It’s bizarre, the way we carry our ingrained perceptions with us—how a grown woman can leave her whole life behind to be a development worker in a third-world country, can look in the face of abject poverty and suffering every day and pour herself into efforts to mitigate them, and still maintain first-world expectations of personal prosperity. Last week, Andy and I dined at Artcaffe, one of my favorites and arguably the most popular go-to restaurant among expats, and I caught myself again—I was sitting on the low balcony, surrounded by wealthy westerners, drinking a glass of wine, and along the sidewalk came a woman bent under the weight of a tremendous bag of charcoal. I watched her shuffle by and I squirmed. I tell myself there’s a balance to be maintained; that I’m responsible with my use of resources and conscious in my gratitude for my blessings; that I work hard for the charcoal-carrying poor and I’m entitled to relax with a glass of wine without feeling guilty. Still I’m embarrassed at times like that, caught on the cushy side of the income divide, aggrieved that there’s such a stark divide at all and that I’m sitting there wishing I’d ordered red wine rather than white instead of jumping the rail to take that woman’s hand and ask, how can I help. So many expats move through Africa without ever seeing the Africans, and I’m damned if I’ll be one of them. Yet there are times I feel as western as anyone else: it’s all about proving myself, it’s all about making more money, it’s great to be able to afford this but tomorrow I want to afford that too, and fuck the bleeding-heart idealism that makes such a big deal of the suffering Africans anyway. Then there are times when the glass of wine in my hand seems an indictment of my criminal selfishness as I watch a woman struggle past under her bag of charcoal and I wonder how I could ever, for one second, think that getting ahead financially by my western standards really matters.

As always, there’s a balance to be had here, too. A couple months ago, when I defended my shlumpy volunteer lifestyle to Andy, he replied, “Africa doesn’t need more poor people, Anena.” I was stunned. That, too, was a turning point. Christian-raised New Englander that I am, I’ve always considered my willingness to live cheaply a virtue. Now I’m realizing being able to live cheaply and appreciate everything you have while eschewing the frills you don’t need is NOT being righteously poor. When you have money, you can give money. When you have more money, you can give more money. So I am consciously, determinedly, making money now—for my own dignity, for others’ survival. Does this make the world better? I think so. When a sick woman can feed her children, when a disadvantaged child can get an education and break the cycle of poverty, doesn’t that matter? God, I hope it does. Otherwise everything I’m doing here is pointless.

And what about when a middle-class woman from New Hampshire can rent a house and buy a plane ticket home and take her girls to the coast for a couple days and never ask for money from anyone again—does THAT matter?

I don’t know.

But it matters to me.

living the good life

Another day, another delight. I can’t stop adoring the simplest moments: glancing out my window to see sleek topi and shy orrabi grazing by; pausing in my work for a midmorning snack of fresh mango and papaya; strolling to the escarpment to sit a little while, serenaded by cowbells from the Masai cattle on the slope below, the Mara spread out before me like a visual feast. Two nights ago I watched Out of Africa, and the first time the cameras pulled back for a sweeping panoramic shot of the Mara, I exclaimed out loud, “I love my life!”—the view moviegoers have thrilled to for decades is the same I see every morning from this camp (literally). As I write I am seated on the escarpment’s edge, feet tossed up on the deck railing, the plain below dotted with thousands of tiny black specks: wildebeest, grazing their way across the lush late-winter plain. When I drive by, zebra trot away, impala and gazelle leap gracefully through the tall grass, but the wildebeest never fail to scatter in a disorganized panic. They are unrivalled in their ability to look frantic. I love them for this.

Yesterday I went to the clinic to shake a few babies and kiss a few hands, all part of making myself a familiar face in the community. The language barrier becomes irrelevant when you coo at a baby, even the strange little one with cross-eyes and a bizarrely elongated head that I can only assume is the result of too much inbreeding. As I held one wobble-kneed infant endearingly chomping his sharp new teeth into my knuckle, I thought, shouldn’t I be feeling baby lust right now? Hakuna baby lust—only gratitude that I could chuck the slobbery little fellow back to his mother and go my merry way. I did, however, experience puppy lust—I followed a mother dog to the nearby boma where her pups, about four weeks old, were tumbling around the grass. I sat down, gathering puppies into my lap, and practiced my Swahili with the goggling children in the yard. The oldest girl invited me inside the low-roofed boma, where I managed to bash my head multiple times (thankfully my internal censor prevented my teaching the children any shocking English words in return). The girl offered me a puppy. With great reluctance, I refused.

It’s good to be back at camp. I love how life slows down when I’m here, how I slow down: I’m still productive, but I’m a little more graceful impala about it, a little less frantic wildebeest. I go to bed early, persistent in sleeping with my huge tent window rolled up, despite how spooky and vulnerable it can feel—I love the cold breeze in the night, bundling myself under three or four wool blankets so I can leave the window open to the air and wake in the morning to the sunrise through the trees. Lately, with no moon at night, I’ve had a few shocking animal run-ins in the dark, including spotting two charging lions a couple nights ago as I approached my tent, and finding myself shaking head to toe even after realizing only two seconds later that they were in fact zebra. I’m so not as African yet as I want to believe! Later that night I woke suddenly to a huge black shape outside my screen window, not even a foot away. A fat zebra, grazing his way along the edge of my tent. I lay still as he passed, hugging myself with happiness inside my blankets: oh my gosh, zebra pass my bed at night, close enough to touch—I love my life.

Now it’s Sunday and I’m back in Mlolongo. I need to learn to write shorter blog posts; I get bogged down and next thing I know my unfinished posts are old news! It’s nice to be home, such as it is for a little while longer: yesterday I found a room in an apartment in town, which my friend Steph and I are going to co-rent as she and I are both gone more often than we’re home (she works with Kiva and travels east Africa extensively). The location, the facilities, the price, the roommates—all are ideal, and I’m so excited. It’s going to be a huge relief to be based in town instead of this wearying commute all the way out to Mlolongo. But I’ll still have the house to stay at when I’m working out here on the women’s center. Plerfect.

Thursday morning before driving back to town I zipped over to the clinic, successfully navigating the Cruiser through the mud bog that was the road after two straight days of badly-needed rain (not without a few panicky moments of my muddy tires failing to find their grip and sending me sliding helplessly, during which my first thought was always dismay that I’d have to call Andy to pull me from a ditch—I have such massive performance issues!), and paid a visit to the mother who had delivered triplets the night before. Three babies! Three and a half pounds apiece, two girls and a boy. Hakuna baby lust, for sure. Then Andy and I drove the bumpy six hours back to town, after which I indulged in… a social life. Our other New Hampshire friend Ian met us for dinner and we all geeked out a bit on our laptops and mobiles; then my friend Nico, who trained me for the job selling ad space in the Economist and who has come back to Kenya for a week of meetings, joined us for an evening of consuming Kenyan beer. So weird to go from the restful silence of camp to a crowded Nairobi club. I was glad to head home to Mlolongo. After a day at home with my brother and my girls, I went back into town yesterday to hang out with Steph (and get in a bus accident…another day, another bus accident, TIK; I cut my hand and was forced to figure out when I’d last had a tetanus shot—something I really ought to have thought through long ago), and we went to Mathare, another of Nairobi’s worst but unglamorized slums (unlike Kibera, which receives all the attention for its size but is far from the slummiest), where we dined with friends, played endlessly with their adorable two-year-old daughter (and I had a bit of toddler lust! I think I was missing Paige), and then went for beers with her fabulous friend Austin, the most un-Kenyan Kenyan man I’ve ever met. He coaches girls’ football. He devotes his efforts to keeping secondary girls in school. So cool. FINALLY, after months of searching and waiting, I’ve found the place to give out the reusable menstrual pads I brought with me in the fall—his girls, utterly disadvantaged slum kids, often resort to putting mattress padding up inside themselves as tampons, or simply stand on the street in a skirt and drip. !!! I KNEW I’d find girls that really resonated as the perfect group. I can’t wait to meet them and give them their Lunapads. He has far more girls in his program than I have Lunapads, though; I’ll have to get more.

So, all is well. Every time I go back to camp I think: ahhh, I’m back at camp. Every time I go back to Nairobi I think: ahhh, I’m back in town. And every time I come back to Mlolongo, to my thin blue stars-and-moon mattress and my cuddly down comforter, my lamp and my photo wall and my secret stash of peanut M&Ms, I think: ahhh, I’m back in my own cozy bed. It can be hectic to transition so often from one space to another, but it’s good for my short attention span, and once I’m in each place, I’m so content. Despite the rushing I try to practice awareness, to focus only on wherever I am, staying in the present. Which I suppose is why tiny present-tense moments are so delightful to me. Heading home from Steph’s this morning, I stopped at Yaya for a heavenly Java House breakfast (Java is the Mecca of Western breakfasts for all expats. I just discovered they have breakfast sandwiches: egg and cheese on a bagel, my ultimate Dunkin Donuts favorite for years. I almost wept). As I sat alone with my delicious Malindi chai latte, reading my Economist and nibbling my almond croissant before heading home to Mlolongo, I suddenly loved my life so much, I could hardly bear it. The richness! All these little moments continue to blow my mind. Zebra in the bush or croissants in town, there’s no other way to put it: I love my life.

overdrive

(written Sat 15 Aug)

Oh, the busyness, the busyness! I love it. So much has happened in the last couple weeks! For one: my CBO has been born at last to life. Last Saturday, nine months after I first began bandying about the idea of starting My Little NGO, more than a dozen people gathered in my living room to sign their names as founding members of the Women’s Empowerment Development Agency (kudos to Davey for coming up with the name). Two Americans, one Australian, and the rest Kenyans, we spent the afternoon working out the nitpicky details of a legal association (a great trial to my far-from-stellar attention span, but I survived without getting too crabby or sarcastic), and by the end we’d elected officials and agreed on by-laws and I looked around and thought: all these people have come together to support MY vision! It’s astonishing and marvelous. Together we’ll start a women’s center, implement support programs for the Mlolongo prostitutes, and, eventually, incorporate all sorts of other services: vocational training, peer mentoring, income generation, education, support groups of all kinds, oh the list is endless. I’m so excited to see where this will go. I’m so proud that it’s finally gotten this far.

It was a beautiful afternoon, all of us gathered in my sunny living room, drinking tea and chatting and making plans to help our community. I was amused that in the end, more men than women were in attendance, though it’s actually kind of lovely—all these men motivated to support vulnerable women. The group includes successful businesswomen and HIV-positive jobless men, full-time volunteers and illiterate mothers, yet the cohesion was flawless, everyone wholeheartedly united toward a positive goal. I loved it. It’s incredibly affirming for so many people from such diverse backgrounds to want to be part of this project.

So, we are WEDA, and we are going to make a difference for the hookers of Kenya. And I have years to continue dropping my favorite conversation-stopper, “I work in the commercial sex industry.” Sooo worth it!

Also this week, Andy, Dr. Kisiara from our clinic, and I met with World Vision to make plans for implementing an HIV prevention and treatment program in our community in the Mara, which is dismally lacking in services at present. World Vision is excited to support us and we expect a similarly positive response from Amref, whom we’re meeting this coming week, and, hopefully, the CDC. We’re gonna tackle HIV in the Trans Mara! I’m deeply proud of WEDA and I love being part of a grassroots project at its opening stage, but I’m also thrilled by the opportunities presented through affiliation with an established NGO like AMS. Each benefits the other; as Adam and I discussed, there really is tremendous advantage in an alliance of complementary NGOs. I love being part of this. I love that my field of expertise is expanding to include HIV care—never an arena I foresaw, but it’s turned out to be a fascinating and deeply satisfying field to work in. I’m starting to feel like I have a finger on what’s involved in combating HIV—on a technical level, as far as the specific programs (testing and counseling, ARV distribution, mother-to-child-transmission prevention, etc etc) are concerned, as well as the cognitive level, as I continue to grapple with the drawbacks of Western aid inside developing countries and strive to find a balance that works: effective, accountable distribution of assistance in a sustainable, beneficial way. What a privilege to be part of this.

This past week contained one other significant event: um, that would be the NBC correspondent who filmed a story on my work. He was in Kenya from his usual post in Moscow to cover the AGOA conference (and yes, he met Hillary…and yes, he’s met Obama…I so chose the wrong field) and he came to our WEDA founding meeting Saturday, then stayed a couple days to accompany me on home visits to my HIV ladies and to the orphanage. It was a fascinating experience seeing how a TV news story comes together, no saying featuring in it. My favorite was Sunday afternoon, when we went to visit Violet with Beautiful and a boy from the orphanage named David. Violet had made chapatti for us and put on her best clothes, and we crowded into her little room and, oddly, watched African soap operas with the sound off, while Elizabeth sat in my lap singing songs and David skillfully took over the chapatti-making and Violet sat there and glowed. Yon miked her for an interview and she did an amazing job, talking candidly about her experience of living positive in Kenya, and then we all ate delicious chapatti, and it was a beautiful afternoon. Yon got it, too—no callous journalist he; he saw the people here for who they really are and appreciated the privilege of being able to walk into a tiny African slum house and be accepted as one of the family, eating and interacting with a group of instant friends, something few Western visitors experience (and, perhaps, few would want). I can’t wait to see the story he puts together.

So I continue to rush about, each day too short for everything I want to do. Tomorrow I head out to Kericho for the Amref meeting, then to camp for a couple days, then hopefully back here for a couple weeks so I can spend more time with Davey while he’s still here and my girls while they’re on term break. The other night I was feeling pressured: wanting to spend time with my loved ones, but needing to prep for an upcoming Economist deal and the World Vision meeting, and really craving some down time for myself—and I thought, how do working moms DO it? It must be a tremendous strain to be married, and have children, and be pursuing a full-time career—you’d never have enough energy or time for everything. My hat’s off to those women, but I’m grateful to be able to focus on my work.

what you see at a Masai community meeting

Chiefs.

Mamas.

Andy pontificating.

Fabulous old people.

I couldn't get enough of the the elders...

...or the fabulous Sho Sho. She was loony.

The beautiful mamas laughing.

Goats don't just herd themselves. Cows either!

Me n my homeboyz.

back in the mara

Home, home, home. Friday I drove out alone, six hours across Kenya’s bone-jarringly bad roads, through its jaw-droppingly lovely landscapes, to the Mara. Already it feels like where I belong, country girl that I am at heart—tilting my head back in the evening and seeing nothing above me but sky, the moon hanging nearly full, tall trees silhouetted around me, unknown animals making spooky noises in the bush. That night I meditated out in the grass under the moon, talking to my mother till the tears suddenly burst from nowhere: god, I miss you in my life. I wish you could see me now.

Saturday was a business meeting with a booking agency, at which my job was to be intelligent and cute, followed by a community meeting with the local Masai, at which my job was to sit with the elders under the tree nodding with feigned profundity at the long, Masai-language speeches while filling my memory card with photos. Normally I’m reluctant to photograph people in Kenya, it feels so discourteous and zoo-ish, but that evening, after Andy introduced me as a “writer of stories,” they gave me carte blanche and I ran with it. Andy chaired the meeting and afterward, because I chose to move to Africa and because I respect local customs, I joined him in consuming the goat roasted in our honor. “You don’t have to eat it,” he said. “Of course I do,” I replied. They brought over a large limb, impaled it on a stake in the ground, and sawed off hunks with a machete, tossing them into a pile of leaves. Goat was never my favorite meat to begin with, and I’m virtually a vegetarian now…but I’m a development worker first (and, as Andy frequently says, a bush girl, to boot), so if courtesy requires it, I’ll hack meat off the bone with my jackknife till the bloody juice drips down my fingers and choff it all down with a smile. I didn’t move to Africa to eat Hot Pockets. (Mm… Hot Pockets…sigh.) And I’m not going to risk cultural insults when I’m trying to earn a place for myself in this community. Now drinking cow’s blood, that is another issue, one that I sincerely hope to avoid.

Sunday at the clinic I held a meeting with the mamas. They sat soberly around me in the grass, colorfully wrapped in lesos that made me kick myself for showing up in pants, and I spoke in short, self-standing phrases (try this sometime! it’s harder than you think!) for translation into both Swahili and Maa. Geez, as if my Swahili wasn’t inadequate already, now I’m back to zero with Maa, as many of the Masai know only their tribal dialect. I guess I’ll have to get tutored. I talked to the mamas about the clinic, not that I really had anything important to say, I just want them to be getting to know me, I wanted the face time. Because when it comes time to set up HIV testing and treatment, or to talk about mother-to-child-transmission prevention, I want them to have a context for me as their ally and their friend.

And I’ve been driving and driving, thundering down the rutted roads in the big Landcruiser, developing my feel for which pits and gullies will jounce the truck versus which I can actually coast right over, and how to ease my way through a massive herd of languorous cows without brushing a single one, and how far to the side of the road I can safely ease when passing someone without getting my tires caught in the soft sandy ditch that pulls you right down in (I figured this one out the hard way). I love driving again! I leap behind the wheel every chance I get. I’ve gone to pick up a couple fly-in groups down in the valley, parking with all the other safari-camp Landcruisers at the end of the dirt airstrip, all of us awaiting clients arriving on the 45-minute flight from Nairobi. The rule is, the first truck to arrive drives down the airstrip just before the plane is due to make sure there are no wildlife in the way. What a great rule! I love living here! I can’t wait to show up first.

And my work here is moving forward. Last week I was home brainstorming a program to integrate HIV prevention and treatment in the community when Andy called to say World Vision wants to fund us to implement theirs. I jumped around my living room screaming. This is how I get my kicks these days! Yay! HIV prevention funding! What more could a girl desire! Sunday I talked at length with the doctor at the clinic about condom usage among Masai (shall we say, not stellar), and it was the most fascinating conversation I’ve had in ages. What can I say, I’m freaking excited about HIV prevention. This is who I’ve become. I have a great deal of questions, even reservations, about the efficacy and morality of Western aid work in the developing world, but at the same time, as I puzzle those issues through, I remain convinced of the value of investing myself in educating people and increasing their health and wellness. I asked Andy, before he even offered me this job, if he feels sure his work these 20 years in Africa has made a lasting difference. “Positive,” he said. Education, he believes, is priceless, and health care is a basic human right. I’m on board with that. As I work with bigger NGOs and prepare to get my own small one off the ground, I’m experiencing a lot of internal debate, but in the long run I think he’s right: some things only help and never hurt. And preventing the spread of a deadly disease, through practical, culturally respectful, culturally relevant methods, fits that bill, right?

More on that topic some other time.

For now, I am beginning to make a place for myself here in the Mara, the first pieces laid in what I foresee being a long-term, in-depth commitment to this place. This rural element has been missing from my Kenyan experience, and I’m thrilled to incorporate it—I love Nairobi and I wouldn't trade my lattes and business clothes and friends, but I have wanted this, too, to sit in the shade with a group of African mamas, holding a newborn and transcending the language barrier by simply, obviously adoring the baby. To pass elephants when I’m running errands. To relax on the escarpment’s edge looking down over the Mara, the most beautiful vista I’ve ever seen, while stunning red-and-purple birds squawk in the fig trees and a condor rides the thermals above the cliff. To clasp hands with a wizened Masai elder and understand enough Swahili—barely—to respond appropriately to his somber welcome. I have wanted this. I’m so grateful.

git 'er done (I hate that phrase actually)

I don’t seem to know what to do with myself anymore when I’m not working. I never thought aimless, vague me would write these words, but…I believe I have become a workaholic.

This is so unprecedented. Two years ago I was a disconsolate housewife, sitting on the couch all day, waiting for my husband to come home—tired, sad, unmotivated. I looked at productive, energetic people and knew they must think I was lazy. I apologized to Josh; I said, I’m sorry I didn’t cook dinner today, I feel too lousy; I said, you should tell me to go get a job and contribute something. Josh, of course, being Josh, would just hold me and say, you don’t have to do anything, baby, just be good to yourself. He was much better at being compassionate with my crushed state than I was.

Now here I am, on a Saturday morning, consciously disciplining myself: you will NOT work today! You WILL take a day off instead! So I got up and made coffee, brought it back to bed…and now I’m danged if I know what to do with myself. How do I normally relax? I can’t even remember. Relaxing feels like work, when what I want to do is update the NGO website, answer emails, make phone calls about the upcoming CBO board meeting, draft by-laws and read my new book about AIDS education and figure out long-term volunteer placements in the Mara. I want to check my online banking and pay bills. I want to plan meetings. I feel energetic. I want to WORK.

Yesterday in town, as I sat with my laptop in a coffee shop, a man stopped beside my table, exclaiming—it was one of my friends from the fall, the restaurant owner who gave me a lot of tips on NGO startup before I went home for Christmas and subsequently lost track of him. “Some things never change!” he smiled, and I said, “no, Paul, lots of things change,” waving my new internet-capable phone for emphasis. “Right now I’m chatting online with my colleague in Spain about an ad deal for the Economist, and I work with an NGO out in the Mara, and I’m getting shit done with my women’s center in Mlolongo.” Then I stopped, as amazed as he at how far I’ve come in eight months. I’m doing so many things I adore! No wonder I don’t want to take time off; my work is the most fascinating, delightful entertainment I could want.

Perhaps it’s because I was raised by powerhouse parents. My father, out in the barn morning and evening milking the cows, always fixing vehicles (I still love the smell of engine oil on skin), repairing houses, treating people, a man who could wire a building, replace a roof, skin a deer, build a boat, stitch a wound, deliver a baby, crochet. And my mother, a gifted writer and artist, utterly invested in the lives of everyone around her, cooking and cleaning for a household of elderly saints and small children, ceaselessly creative—teaching herself to sew clothes, make quilts, refinish furniture, weave baskets, decorate homes, grow and can vegetables, and upholster, and still finding time to read to her kids. These go-getters were the parents of my impressionable little-girl-hood. Years later, inherently un-driven, I drifted through my 20s with increasing self-judgment for my failure to produce—unwilling to work a 9-to-5, unready to publish, unable to hit on the work that would hold my attention and provide me an adult lifestyle. Then came the spaghetti stage after my mother’s death, when I was enervated by grief, sitting on the couch all day with my laptop, trying so hard to be as kind to myself in my mourning as my husband was to me. I was finally married, a.k.a. grown up, but I still didn’t know what to do—always carrying the memory of my parents’ dawn-to-dusk activity, enthusiasm, and goal-orientation, a self-imposed ideal I’d never lived up to for a day in my life.

And now I’m here. 32. Starting over alone in a developing nation with nothing but a vague notion of empowering disadvantaged women and the desperate knowing that I had to do this or drown. Gradually feeling my way forward into a path that is finally becoming clear. For the first time in my life, I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and am passionate about doing it. I don’t sew quilts, but I do let down sleeves on my new business jackets. I don’t fix vehicles, but I do drive a massive Landcruiser through Nairobi traffic. I can’t stitch a wound, but I can cuddle HIV kids and dispel rumors of how the virus spreads (two weeks ago I had to earnestly promise three disbelieving men that no, they will NEVER get AIDS from condoms). I don’t cook and clean for a demanding household—at least, not anymore; now I pay someone else to do it for me, because I can. I have an endless to-do list and I work all day, every day. I wake up knowing exactly what I want to do. I’m energetic and goal-oriented. I’m a powerhouse.

Who knew.

Interestingly, it’s not my parents I wish could see me now—it’s Josh. He only ever knew me as grieving, listless, and needy as hell. Till the day I die I’ll appreciate the fact that he loved me at my worst and never uttered a word of criticism; he was unconditional love to me. I just wish he could see me at my best, too. A couple days ago Andy and I had a discussion about some work issues on which we had very different opinions, and it got quite heated, and I expressed some thoughts I knew he didn’t want to hear, and we were both stubborn and a bit obnoxious—and then we dropped it and strolled into a restaurant to grab some lunch. Later I said, why couldn’t I have been this way with my husband? Why couldn’t I have expressed my needs authoritatively, without getting in a panic that he’d stop loving me? Why couldn’t I have let him be pissed at me and trusted that he’d work through that space and come back to me on his own? Why couldn’t I have been—gasp—emotionally independent? Why am I finally strong and centered and capable of giving, and my husband’s not even around to reap the benefits—or to see that I can be this girl?

What a different sort of marriage we could have now.

But that’s rather like an alcoholic who’s been sober for a month deciding to go back to work at a bar. It’s been over a year now since I lived married life—early last July Josh deployed to the middle east, and, though we didn’t know it then, our marriage was effectively over. Living in my NH apartment with my siblings, I was much happier than I’d been with Josh; I loved them and lived closely with them but I didn’t NEED them. In the same way, the men here with whom I assert my needs, refusing to shoulder their emotional crap, are not my romantic partners, so I don’t need them, either. With all people on the planet I can carry myself with confidence and authority and calm, except that one man to whom I make myself emotionally vulnerable, and oh geez, with him I’m a mess. I don’t begin to understand this yet. I can only hope I’ll figure it out with time.

Obviously this means I have a lot of healing and growing to do. Maybe it means I’m meant to stay single for good. This is the beauty of my life, that right now the answer doesn't MATTER. That I don’t wake up on a Saturday wondering if Josh will want to do anything with me today, or what it will take to lure him away from his computer to be with me for a couple hours. I wake up wondering how I’m going to go all day without tackling a single task on my list. I wake up relaxed. I wake up in my own space, responsible for my own feelings, not looking to anyone to provide me with anything—it’s all about what I can give to others, not what I need from them. Sometimes I actually feel like I’m hiding by staying single—that this emotionally independent life is an avoidance of my issues, taking the easy way out. But I just can’t stop loving being alone. Earlier this week I ran into an acquaintance on whom I’ve had a vague crush for awhile; we talked some, and I watched him interacting with other girls, and could see very clearly that his interest in me was nonexistent, and I was so RELIEVED. Oh, thank god. If he’d liked me back, who knows, I might have caved, might have gotten involved, might have had those snuggly feelings and sweet interactions and sex and companionship and belonging—and I’d have given up all this, the peacefulness, the ease, the emotional independence, the autonomy. No relationship can give me what solitude does.

Yesterday Andy mentioned another thing he’d like me to get involved in at work. I said sure. “I don’t have a partner, Andy,” I said. “My kids don’t need a great deal from me. I have all the time in the world to put into my work.” And I ADORE this! Both the singlehood that allows me to direct my energy wherever I want, and the newfound sense of purpose that gives me so much energy to direct. Much has happened already, for better and for worse, that I can’t change now; much will happen later that will be the right thing when it comes along. Today, my life is as right and rich as it’s ever been. Today I’m a Jan Hansen in my own right, well-equipped with some handy Lewis Hansen skills, finding my niche in the world as Anena Hansen, writer and development worker and businesswoman, mother and daughter and ex-wife.

Today, I’m a workaholic but I’m not working. I’m NOT. I’m in bed with my laptop but I’m only going to relax…writing a blog doesn’t count as working…well…maybe I can just take a peek at my list…it’s not really work if it’s what you love…right?

happy busy days

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.” Christopher Morley

Have I mentioned that I love my life? Sometimes it’s hard to think what could possibly make it better. The end of last week was my Sabbath of Womankind, so I put off all my outside-the-home tasks till Monday; then when Monday rolled around, I was exhausted from a busy weekend, so I put them off again and worked in bed all day. How luxurious is that? I adore being mistress of my own schedule. This is my idea of spending my life in my own way: being deeply invested in challenging, fascinating, fulfilling pursuits, and being autonomous while I do it.

I am living my definition of success.

Yesterday I prettied up in Real Person Clothes, complete with heels and eye makeup—geez Louise, I’m hot when I try—and into town I went to a) interview a potential new waitress for the camp (she’s a yes), b) visit a couple big companies that recently ran big international ads to pitch them ad space in the Economist (promising), and c) do coffee with Deb and outline my role with the safari camp (extensive. fun. I can’t wait). Then I spun over to Westlands and had dinner with my Australian friend Adam, learning that he’s moving to Kenya as well and has started an amazing NGO, and we drank delicious wine and talked with much waving of our hands about the ways our respective projects can complement and assist each other (making good use of Dwight’s “Do you want to form an alliance with me?” line), and I got even more excited for where my work with prostitutes can go; his vision is big and our interests perfectly aligned and I think working with him is going to be a tremendous boon to my women’s center. Finally I joined some other friends at a sushi bar where Fitsum’s roommate Zelalem was dj-ing (what is the verb for that?!), and had a fabulous time chatting and drinking amazing chili-mint cocktails and having a SOCIAL LIFE, until nearly two in the morning…good heavens, it’s almost too much for a converted workaholic like me. Zelalem gaped at me: “are you wearing MAKEUP? You look…beautiful!” He was the last that day in a long line of friends who gaped at my ta-ta appearance (including Deb, who literally didn’t recognize me); apparently I’m normally even shlumpier than I realized. Fortunately I have no pride and I just said, “dude, I KNOW!”

This morning, after crashing with some of my very tolerant friends, I experienced the miracle I’ve been praying for since returning to Kenya: I found chips and salsa. At the final grocery store in all of Nairobi that I had yet to check. I jumped up and down. It was early, I was a bit hungover, and nothing but espresso had crossed my lips yet, but I breakfasted on chips and salsa with all the relish of the flavor-deprived…oh, heaven, HEAVEN. The chips had some horrible nacho-cheese-flavored powder on them and the salsa was decidedly gel-like, but I nearly wept with pleasure. My favorite snack ever, a staple of my diet, lost to me for half a year…the reunion was sweet.

Then I took myself, in my still hot (if somewhat slept in) business outfit, out to Kitengela to do home visits, which was decidedly bizarre—as if I don’t stand out enough when I’m in my ergo flops and Lolline’s stained hand-me-down capris, now I’m stepping over standing sewage in my heels? no wonder everyone stares at the crazy mzungu!—and I had a lovely time reconnecting with the ladies. Shy Grace was downright effusive, which was delightful; normally I have to toil to string any sort of conversation along between us but this time she barely let me put a word in edgewise! I love seeing her opening. And I love being able to help support her family, and others, now that I’m finally getting ahead financially. I’ve committed to contributing a certain amount to each family every month, and I’m so GLAD—this is the difference between them going hungry or not, and they’re so grateful, and it feels so right. It doesn’t improve their situations in the long run. But there’s something to say, also, for improving their situations today…just because I can. I also told Grace and her sister Hellen that from now on I’ll pay their childrens’ school fees, and they were ECSTATIC. They and I all know education is the only chance kids here have.

We chatted together at Hellen’s, little Indago cuddled adoringly on my lap, the normally shy adult sisters laughing, wide-eyed Arfa practicing her letters after being told she’d finally be going back to school. “Brenda loves school,” Grace reported of her 11-year-old. “She says she’s going to study hard and become a pirate.”

“A pirate?” I exclaimed, wondering whether the influence of our Somali neighbors has pervaded the dreams of prepubescent girls in tiny Kenyan towns.

“A pirate,” Hellen confirmed. “And then she can fly you over to America!”

“Ah,” I said. “Gotcha. An excellent career choice.” This makes me suspicious that Arfa might actually be named Alfa, which would also make more sense.

I carried Indago home, smiling benevolently at the children screaming “mzungu!” (on crabby days, I call them fuckers under my breath…so this was good). “Do you know her status?” Grace asked me, nodding toward her daughter, seeming a little nervous. “I know she’s positive,” I said. I wonder why that worried her—did she really think Indago’s HIV status would impact my willingness to be close with her? I wanted to ask if she’s on ARVs, but I didn’t; I know she’s not. Children rarely receive them here. She will probably die long before her parents, who are both on treatment. It’s just how it is.

Then when I was finished my visits, I did an amazing thing. I was walking to the matatu stage…and, quite spontaneously, I turned into Africana, the bar where I consumed many a beer with Hank and Emily and Jo and Lolline and other friends gone by. I sat at a table by the pool and ordered a Smirnoff Black, a disgusting drink which, inexplicably, I always order there. And I simply RELAXED. I didn’t look at my list; I didn’t rush home to continue crossing items off. I pulled out my Economist but I kept getting distracted from reading it by my own happiness: thank you, thank you, I’d find myself saying out loud. The afternoon call to prayer droned from a nearby mosque, such a nostalgic sound, and I was in Kenya, doing work that makes a difference, dressed in Successful Businesswoman clothes, relaxing with a beer and a cigarette, all by myself—a busy day behind me, a busy evening ahead, but just then, a hiatus, a pause in the crowded schedule I’ve constructed for myself and can freely alter at any time. I looked at myself, and I loved what I saw.

Living my life my own way. That may or may not be the only form of success…but it is certainly one, and it is sweet indeed.

imagine infinite possibilities!

There are butterflies here, dazzling aqua-blue butterflies. And plain gray lizards that transform themselves to brilliant shades of pink and purple. Across the ravine, the tinkle of cowbells and bleating of sheep rises in a soothing background track, punctuated by the calls of birds I can’t begin to identify yet, and sometimes, the barking bray of a zebra. Below me stretches the Masai Mara in the splendor that earned its designation as one of the seven wonders of the world. And here I sit on my little patio outside my cozy tent, working on my laptop, watching green and scarlet birds flit between the bushes—well aware that I am one of the wealthiest women on earth.

Last Wednesday Davey and I made the bumpy six-hour drive from Nairobi with Andy, my New Hampshire friend, to the safari camp Andy and his wife Deb started six years ago. Their location on the escarpment above the west edge of the Mara, in the heart of the Great Rift Valley, gives new meaning to the word breathtaking: I’ve never seen a panorama like this, the vast grassy plain dotted with acacia trees, stretching to hazy lavender hills far away. I rise before dawn to sit on the rim, wrapped in a wool blanket, and meditate as the sun rises pink and gold across the plain. As the afternoon sun sinks behind me, I lie in the stiff grass watching eagles soar on the updrafts along the escarpment edge. The view silences me every time. Without question this is one of the most exquisite places I have ever seen.

Thursday Andy showed me the projects his NGO has implemented over the years: the schools, the clinic, the churches, all built by volunteer crews from the U.S. and maintained with donor funding. The impact they’ve had in this rural, disadvantaged Masai community is massive. Girls who used to be married off at 12 or 14 now have a secondary boarding school where they can see their education through. Women who used to die in childbirth now go to a clinic with a maternity ward. Andy and Deb have made the Masai the foundation of the work here: what do YOU want?, they ask, and then, from the platform of the safari camp, they send international volunteer crews out to fulfill those requests. Schools. Clean water. Traveling medical teams. It’s a community-development project after my own heart, grassroots, personal, volunteer-driven. It’s amazing.

Thursday we talked for hours. All that has been done. All that could be. The potential for wellness and empowerment work with the girls and women here made me salivate. I was yearning to stick my fingers in the pie—all these teen girls! and a Kenyan community without any HIV support structure whatsoever!—but what good does it do me to get too involved? This is his baby, and if he wanted my help, he’d ask me.

And then, he asked me.

Finally the truth came out. He did not invite me up here just to give me ideas for my work; he invited me to bring me into his. He’s busy running the camp; he needs someone to go ahead with the community development, coordinating and directing the volunteer efforts, expanding the programs, and being the before-and-after liaison as well as the hostess/PR manager when they’re here. He needs someone to maintain the website and write reports. He needs someone gregarious, independent, visionary, with a passion for this work and the freedom to pour their time into it as required.

He offered me the position of Assistant Director. “So? Are you in?”

Hell YES I am!!

I am overwhelmed with gratitude. The entire shape of my Kenyan experience has just shifted, falling into the exact position I’d have wished for if I’d ever imagined anything so flawlessly tailored to my passions and skills existed. My schedule will still be my own to set, and since my writing travels with me (and always, out of deep personal necessity, maintains priority in my life no matter what else I’m engaged in), it’s really just my work in Mlolongo that’s impacted, and the slow pace of laying that foundation leaves me plenty of flexibility to spend one or two weeks a month in the Mara, as client load dictates. Even when I’m away, my volunteers can continue working under the watchful (and so much more authentically Kenyan!) eye of the live-in housekeeper I’ll now be able to hire. As with my other projects, much of my time will be spent online and can be done anywhere, and when I’m here I’ll be networking in the Masai community to establish a grip on what they want, then planning and implementing projects to address those needs. The job is as big or as small as I make it. It offers the variety and autonomy I adore. It’s exactly what I came to Africa to do.

Yesterday we took a game drive through the Mara. We saw mama elephants with tiny babies only a few days old. We spooked a giant owl and watched hippos heaving themselves from the mud. We saw the vanguard of the world-famous wildlife migration: thousands upon thousands of zebra, crossing the plain in an endless line, leading the way for the wildebeest who will arrive in coming weeks. Parking by a low spot in the river, we climbed on the roof to watch zebra leap off the bank and wade across, splashing and braying, our location the perfect vantage point to monitor the submerged outlines of lurking crocodiles waiting for the feast. Over and over the zebra wandered within chomping range and my heart was pounding in terror and excitement each time, waiting for the inevitable clamor of splashing and galloping as a croc would suddenly lunge, huge jaws snapping, and the surrounding zebra would leap away in communal panic. Thwarted by the shallow water, the crocs failed every time, even on that vulnerable-looking baby who sprang straight in the air out of the massive jaws. As we drove home we stopped in the middle of a vast plain to watch male wildebeest fight for ownership of the females, who, to my amusement, tripped off on their merry way while the boys were busy grunting and locking horns. Male giraffe stood side by side, swinging their endless necks in huge parallel circles, another contest of dominance. A pack of female lions watched indulgently from a rock while their cubs stalked a family of mongoose who chattered in alarm and finally scuttled easily away. The entire day was the most riveting display of life and survival in the wild that I’ve ever witnessed.

And it’s all mine. Over and over I looked around me, at the animals, at the endless green splendor of the Mara itself, and thought: I live here now! Today after breakfast, before buckling down to the online tasks that Andy and I have been up late roughing in every night, I wandered over to the escarpment edge just to take it all in again, the steep grassy slope tapering away to the valley floor hundreds of yards below, dotted with herds of Masai sheep and cows, the tiny black shapes of tall giraffe barely visible beyond. I stroked the three red circles of the Masai burns on my arm, which felt impulsive yet deeply authentic when I submitted to them in April, and for the first time I understood what they really are: the mark of my commitment to Africa. “We belong to each other now,” I said out loud, looking down across the Mara. “You have given me so much already. I’m in it for the long haul.”

Ironically—just like a marriage. Africa has offered herself to me and I have accepted. The scope of my work has just deepened exponentially, and as I look at my life here, my writing, my work with women, my new opportunity with the rural Masai, I’m speechless: with every moment, I am ushered deeper into the life of my dreams. Tonight elephants may crash around outside my tent again; tomorrow, at the end of a six-hour drive, I’ll enjoy a latte in town before heading back to my dear little house in Mlolongo, the home I’ve created for my Kenyan girls and my volunteers and me. My life, my deeply fulfilling, utterly wonderful life, just got even better.

Does the universe reward those who step out in blind faith to follow their heart’s call? I’ve never believed it more.


















The life for me: getting some work done at camp.


















A few zebra making the crossing--usually the river is much higher and they have to swim, giving the crocs an easy time of it, but this time the shallows thwarted the predators' efforts.


















Always my favorite animal! Two mamas and their newborn babies, wandering away after we'd watched them feeding awhile.



















The local version of Pride Rock.


















Wildlife grazing against a horizon of smoke: the park service burns much of the park every year to encourage new grass growth and keep the wildlife coming back.


















Davey and me loving it.

peeling off another layer

You’d think I’d know by now. I’d recognize this pervasive sense of sadness, I’d sit with it in grace and compassion instead of anxiety and judgment. “What’s wrong with me?” I’ve been thinking, the last week and a half. “Why do I feel so miserable?” It was like a killer case of PMS—edgy, unhappy, uncomfortable in my own skin. But the moon has only now rounded to fullness, and I’m nowhere near being able to blame PMS for my miseries.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I blubbered into my Tusker the other night, on the balcony at Tacos, looking down on the late-afternoon Sunday pedestrians of Nairobi. My fabulous new friend Stephanie said nothing, and soon I was pouring it all out: divorce is so sad, and sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing in Kenya, and it’s so hard to be gracious with myself for not wanting to stay in a marriage that was starving me. Stephanie has lived and worked in some of the toughest slums of Nairobi and she wasn’t about to be daunted by sitting with a snotty-nosed mzungu weeping into her beer—though, fresh from Masai Market with a big hand drum in tow, more hideously foolish we could only have looked if we’d both been wearing a khaki, snap-up, multi-pocketed safari garment or two.

But being the snotty-nosed mzungu weeping into my beer bore rich fruit, because once I’d sniveled it all out, I sat back in surprise: “This is just the next layer,” I said. “I’m processing another big loss in my life, and this is what it feels like when I peel another layer off.” A couple years ago, I’d have recognized this for what it was at once. But the passage of time has made these stages fewer and further between, and I didn’t even recognize this one till I finally put my feelings into words to the longsuffering Stephanie.

God, am I grateful for a good girlfriend here.

I woke from a dream of him this morning, aGAIN. He’d pulled in for one evening on his submarine. We’d agreed, suddenly, joyfully, to reconcile. Where does my subconscious get these things? With my conscious mind I remind myself a dozen times a day that this is best, this is right, we were never going to make each other happy, we had a weak foundation, our marriage was never meant to be for life. Then my subconscious throws some happy reconciliation dream at me and I wake, half giddy, half distraught, knowing the journey isn’t over yet.

It’s hard to let go. It’s even harder to let go with grace. I loved my husband deeply, and was deeply loved by him. The undoing of our marriage was sudden, unforeseen, and vague. At Christmas we could have worked things out, no question; instead I sabotaged and sabotaged it, determinedly, even while weeping with longing to stay his wife. Once again my conscious and subconscious were at war. There’s a black dog and a white dog fighting, which one wins? The one that has lurked beneath the surface of your marriage for nearly three years, occasionally boiling over with passionate conviction, demanding at last to be heard.

So I have learned, these past six months, to sit with grief in a new way. After my mother died and Josh deployed to the middle east, I threw myself into grieving with the abandon of the brokenhearted, because there was no hiding from it anyway; at the least, I could hope that being truly present in anguish now would pave the way to being truly present in joy later on. Paige’s death was a massive setback, but even while I navigated the unexpected rage I felt over losing her, I knew this much, that I MUST feel it. I’ve learned to sit with the hard feelings, looking them in the eye, feeling them with every cell of my devastated soul—I don’t run away from sorrow anymore. But everything about losing Josh has been different. Because this was our CHOICE. Because he’s still alive out there somewhere; I’ll see him again. He’ll still be hilarious, he’ll still be handsome and kind. He’ll never be mine again. And herein lies the heart of the whole matter—because possessiveness, with me and perhaps with most of the world, was in many ways the root of my love. Marrying Josh meant I owned him, he always had to love me and be mine, he always had to get my back and be there to rely on. He was my artificial sense of security in a world that had become horrifyingly unsafe. Possessing him meant I could shift the burden of my doubts onto him: am I good enough? Of course I am, Josh loves me. Am I beautiful? Of course I am, Josh is attracted to me. Am I always going to feel so sad? Of course not, Josh is here to cheer me up. Am I ever going to be normal again? Who gives a crap, I’ll cry and Josh will hold me and I’ll be able to ignore the bad feelings for awhile.

Josh was my ultimate painkiller. Owning him meant I could rely on the fix for the rest of my life. Leaving him meant I was back on my own in the cold scary world again, with nothing to numb the pain. This is a totally different sort of loss to sit with. This is part of why it’s been so difficult to let go with grace.

This is why, months into my new African life, I spent a week and a half in a gradually-building storm of anxiety and gloom till finally, blubbering into my beer, I recognized my edginess for what it really was: just fear, Anna. Just the ongoing process of adapting to change.

So Stephanie and I clinked our bottles, and when I got home I sat awhile in the dark, hands over my heart: I forgive myself for how hard this is. I love myself even though I’ve made mistakes. I accept myself and how much it hurts to lose this man, and I embrace the pain. I know, better than many women my age, that the only way past loss is through; four years after the cancer diagnosis heard round the world, I know how to hurt! And I know that only by making friends with the sadness do I stand a chance of ever feeling it melt away. So I let myself love Joshua even while inhabiting the relief and terror of being on my own again. I pray for his safety and well-being with the same earnestness sometimes bordering on desperation as when he was still my partner. I will sit with the pain of releasing him for as long as it takes. Knowing that, in the end, I’m finally loving him honestly in a way I never did while we were married.

Someday I hope to crawl from the trench of these losses and finally be a renewed being. I’d like to be gracious and centered at all times, guided by wisdom and love. I’d like to look change in the eye unafraid: come on in, change! Step right up, loss and sadness and pain! You don’t scare me anymore, I am enlightened!

Until that day rolls around…I sit with the peeling off of one more layer. Hmm, wonder if this one will hurt too? Yes, yes it does. I’m gracious with that much at least. I don’t care if I’m messy as long as I’m honest and I don’t hide. I loved my mother, I loved Paige, and I love Josh. Love hurts. Healing does too. Growth is the reward… and that’s what I cling to.