lately

(written Thurs 17 Dec)

Homeward bound, after nearly a year. I’m in the air above the Atlantic now, still a few hours out of New York, and the dull anxiety that kicked in a few hours before my departure last night has not developed into full-fledged panic as I’d feared—what’s to be anxious about, after all? I’m going home. And then coming home, in three and a half weeks. “No tears?” my girls asked me last night, a little disbelieving, embracing me on the sidewalk outside the airport—they’ve witnessed my fountains of tears at departures before. “It’s three weeks,” I shrugged. “What’s to cry about?” What a difference when the departure is my own, and my return is imminent. I’m so grateful for this—grateful for this trip, for a long-overdue reunion with my family, for reconnections with my friends, for soy lattes and Keene and a white Christmas; grateful too for my life in Kenya, my home and my family, my work, my routines—the life I have worked so hard to build, the place that has become my home. It’s good to travel when you know you have your safe haven to come back to. Last night I walked over to Number 12 to buy a couple beers for my sister—what can I say, a last-minute Economist ad took up my entire final-preparations day, and I didn’t get my Christmas shopping done, so Laurie gets Kenyan beer, why, is that lame?—and as I strolled home, I tipped back my head so the warm night breeze could lift my hair, and saw the constellations of the southern hemisphere (okay, most of them are from the northern hemisphere), and I said, “this is my home.” I feel grateful that this is true.

I’ve had a week of extremes. A week ago I attended James’ memorial service, which gave me chest pains when I walked in and heard “It Is Well with My Soul,” a funeral sentiment I find particularly insincere, but maybe that’s just because it took me so long to give myself permission to be angry when God took my loved ones away, and I’m projecting a similar muzzled pseudo-acceptance onto others—but overall the service was lovely. I deported myself as much like a Kenyan as I could, but I lost it toward the end, when they played a recording of James singing a gospel song: “It is good to be loved by Jesus,” he suddenly chorused from the speakers, and hearing his voice I burst into tears. Grace, his wife, sat weeping in the front row and did not lift her head once the entire service. Not an easy funeral by any means, but a good one, and I was glad to be there.

Afterward, and in stark contrast, I spent the afternoon drinking wine with Fitsum and talking about creativity and our respective projects just now—I swear that man is my muse; time with him never fails to intensely inspire me. And then, to the coast to join Austin and his True Colors team and my girls. Mombasa was wretchedly hot, but it was a great vacation-before-my-vacation. On the plus side, it’s a more intriguing city than I’d given it credit for, and I enjoyed exploring with a couple locals. On the minus, it’s a damn hard place to be white. Not just because I managed to sunburn; not just because small African children are fascinated by that bright pink skin and persist in pinching it to see if it hurts. (Yes! It HURTS!) No, most of all because the grotesquely offensive and inappropriate advances that I receive wherever I go are multiplied exponentially when I’m suddenly the only white girl on the beach. This, I discovered, is when it pays to be with a black guy. After biting my tongue and ignoring the rude remarks, then after getting fed up and yelling back, I finally found the solution—in the form of a stocky Kenyan with dreads halfway down his back, a guy who you look at and don’t really care to mess with, especially if you’re a seedy predator trolling the shallows for women to harass. Whenever someone paddled up to dispense a lame pickup line, I’d just yell, “AUSTIN!” and wherever he was, Austin would turn and give the guy in question the LOOK—and said guy would simply melt away. Only if you have spent the past year being harassed and pursued in constant and intrusive ways by strangers on the street, seatmates on the bus, your taxi drivers, your neighbors, your bag boy at the grocery store, your clerk at the bank, and a painfully high majority of the other men who’ve crossed your path—only then can you truly appreciate the wonder of a remedy that dispenses with unwelcome suitors in a moment. It’s MAGICAL.

The ocean was beautiful, and being there with the kids was a blast. There are times when this unexpected mother role grates me like sandpaper, and others that I wear it like a favorite, perfectly broken-in pair of jeans; this weekend was the latter. I had a ball with my girls, teasing and bossing them around, taking them to the beach, sending them to the market with spending money (they bought coconuts for our housekeeper Salima, which I loved). We played and played at the beach, Salome and Beautiful dunking each other with dedication, ganging up to dunk me, all four of the kids trying to dunk Austin without success: “I’m the strongest man in the universe!” Austin shrugged as the kids clambered and tugged at him, and I smiled with well-being—I’m just so glad my girls have a dad figure in their lives. I’m just so glad I have my girls. I had to laugh at myself, being so mommish at the beach, making rules about throwing sand, chasing away the teen boys lurking too near my girls, then relenting and pulling back a little way to bob in the surf with Austin and let a couple opportunistic lads “teach the girls to swim.” Sigh. Gotta let teenagers be teenagers. I found myself automatically doing the Mom Scan—one, two, three, four fuzzy black heads among a hundred, and I confess I could only keep track sometimes by looking for the color of the bathing suit. Wambui and Kamau had never been to the ocean, and a tromp through the shallows led us suddenly to a weedy patch which propelled them both into my arms—so I, who will go to virtually any length to avoid weeds, walked straight through, bearing the children, and I thought in that moment that I am beginning to understand what being a mom means.

Well, a couple days ago I was sweating and complaining in the brutal heat of Mombasa, and today I’ll be shivering in sub-zero temperatures. Guess we’ll see how that little swing from one extreme to another treats me. All I know is, it’s good to be going home.




















My beautiful living room.



















My beautiful living room full of people. This was the huge house party!



















I love this one: Grace was so playful and energetic.
















I let the kids take turns with my camera. This is what happens.

















Day at the beach.



















Playing with my girls the night before leaving.

another lesson on death and love

Saturday, full six weeks since originally becoming ill, I woke with yet another recurrence of fever and diarrhea. Fortunately, I had a massage scheduled that morning; unfortunately, I had a house party with 40 guests scheduled that afternoon.

Feeling as energetic as a toad, I wrapped a kanga around my waist and headed for my neighbor’s house. “Carry your phone,” Salome urged.

“I don’t want to carry my phone,” I explained. “I’m getting a massage and I don’t want to be interrupted.”

“But someone important might call.”

“All right,” I sighed, “I’ll carry my phone. Because AUSTIN might call.” This made her smile, as I had intended. My girls adore Austin.

I was less than a minute down the street toward Mary Rainwater’s house when my phone rang. Not Austin. Hank. A crackly transatlantic call: “I heard a rumor.” I struggled to make sense of what he’d said. He’s been back in Winnipeg now for six months. How could HE have heard this most unbelievable of news? How could word have traveled across the ocean to Canada, in the middle of the night, when I had heard nothing here in Kenya all morning? How could it possibly be true that James, who runs the volunteer organization, had been killed?

Rainwater found me bawling in her yard. She thought it was the diarrhea. “Sorry, sorry,” she soothed. It’s what Kenyans say when something bad happens to you—even if you stub your toe, a total stranger beside you on the sidewalk will cluck an earnest, “sorry!” In a land of so much suffering, sympathy is abundant.

“It’s not because I’m sick,” I sobbed. “My friend died. He was shot.”

Probably I could even call him my first friend in Kenya. The day I arrived, when he was shuttling us to our homestay placements, James singled me out and had me drive the van, knowing it was the wrong side of the road for me. He made me laugh with a joke about a TV show called “Pimp My Matatu”—his sense of humor included an appreciation of irony, rare among Kenyans. Since then we’ve built a real friendship. His warmth extended to everyone. He was fun, easygoing, and kind, the heart and soul of the volunteer organization. His is one of those “why him?” deaths. Why did that crabby witch survive cancer, and my beautiful mother not? Why do so many useless drunks stumble around Kenya beating their wives and raping little girls, and no one shoots them? Why James? There is no why, of course, it just IS, but it’s impossible not to go there anyway. Judgment of who deserves to live and who to die is made by all of us, inside, whether or not we’re the ones to wield a gun. This one shouldn’t have died, because their death hurts ME. Grief is such a selfish emotion, in the end.


So there I stood, still 24 hours shy of my subsequent diagnosis of giardia, so easy to treat that I kick myself for taking six damn weeks to get myself to the hospital to find out and stop undermining myself and start getting better—there I stood, sobbing over my first taste of sudden loss after these years of the drawn-out kind, feeling how raw and shocking this hurt is, how similarly horrible in such a different way. “Was it the one with the dreadlocks?” Rainwater asked, and I shook my head, ashamed to feel relief.

“No. If it was Austin, I’d be hysterical.” Later, I called him—shades of the old days, when my first instinct was to run to Josh for comfort, for a fix to ward off the sadness and the pain. Nowadays I’m religious in eschewing behaviors that smack of the old, needy me; I didn’t call Austin because he’s the boy in my life who fills the empty places now—he’s not. I fill those places myself or die trying. But I called him because he’s from one of Nairobi’s worst slums, because he has lost both of his parents and three of his four siblings, because he’s invested himself for years in the lives of high-risk kids who grow up and get shot by police, or are executed by the Mungiki, or drink changa’a and set themselves on fire. Because he knows what sudden, senseless loss is like, and I don’t.

“How are you?” he asked me.

“Not so good,” I blubbered, my determination not to cry immediately thwarted. “My friend, the one who runs the volunteer organization—the one you met this week, James—he was shot last night. He died.”

“Ah,” he sighed. “Sorry, sorry.”

It feels like the first bruise of a beating that will cripple me if I stay. If I truly commit myself to this place, to Kenya, to the developing world. This is a different angle to life here, one I didn’t see when I cast myself on the thrilling waters of Starting Over in Africa, one not even the knowledge that I’ll inevitably watch my HIV friends die had made me consider. Kenyans are accustomed to disaster; they can’t afford, or won’t permit, the luxury of acting tragic over something so common as a young father shot dead at the gate of his own home. But I’m not a Kenyan. I hurry places. I get right to the point of my conversations. I find pointing at someone and calling them a name based on the color of their skin shockingly rude. And I’ve never taken it for granted that sooner or later someone I care about was bound to be the victim of violent crime.

Even James’ coworker Cleo sympathized with me, when I called for him to explain the misunderstanding away only to hear him confirm it instead—“sorry, Anena, sorry,” he said as I burst helplessly into tears again, and I wept, “no, Cleo, I’M sorry.” James was my friend, a funny and kind and clever man, but to Cleo and the others at Fadhili he was a brother. To his baby daughter and his wife, he was everything. I ache for Grace, who is experiencing what I always dreaded, what I used to work myself into fits imagining—the sudden death of her husband. How many times did I weep in terror at the possibility. But then I left my husband, I divorced myself from the right to be devastated if anything happens to him—and she who stayed and kept and needed hers has lost him.


Even with a fever and diarrhea and my maudlin American tears, I didn’t have the heart to cancel the party. Over 20 grownups and 20 children came, most of them my low-income HIV friends, and I, who obsess over my finances with a truly American anxiety, found myself face to face again with the realization of my own wealth, seeing in my guests’ excitement what my simple-by-western-standards home is to them: a veritable mansion of treasures. Ecstatic kids ran from the Jenga blocks to the soccer ball to the skip-rope, adults focusing with comparable delight on the darts tournament and an hours-long game of Monopoly. Salima held down the fort in the kitchen, cooking up chapatti by the armful, and I circulated and circulated, seeing that my guests were all happy, making conversation, cuddling the kids, and every so often realizing with a sick shock that James was still dead. I was so glad to see all my friends glad; to provide them with the treat I knew this was for them. They played and laughed and talked all afternoon, then feasted on lentils and rice and chapatti and went home as darkness fell. I was relieved to see them all go.

Then, exhausted, I curled on the couch and we relaxed together, my family: Beautiful and Salome laughing into their cell phones, Salima clattering in the kitchen (that’s her idea of relaxation), Morris stretched on the loveseat, Austin’s quiet presence a bulwark beside me. His kids played on the floor, Wambui painting her toenails my brilliant purple, Kamau building the Jenga blocks into carefully symmetrical structures—girls are girls and boys are boys, the whole world round. Austin took in the two of them and their elder sister more than six years ago. He has sent them all to school. I marvel at him, at his love and generosity, this man who has survived the searing of Kenya’s worst fires and retained his extraordinary gentleness.

I’ve never been able to resist gentleness.

I continued to pray for my mother’s healing, reflexively, months after she’d died. The heart’s yearning creeping into my mouth before I remembered it would always be too late. In the days since James’ death, I’ve done the same, catching myself midway through prayers for his survival: please let James be okay—oh, shit. Will Grace do the same? I thought of her later Saturday night, as I lay studying Austin’s face by lamplight, the long scar above his eyebrow, the full lips, the silky skin across his cheeks where I often stroke my thumb. He’s frighteningly dear to me. But I don’t NEED him, am terrified lest I might, and remaining fundamentally single feels as necessary to me as ever. Yet there we lay, cuddled in a posture only love takes, and I couldn't resolve this contradiction of my being the woman not sleeping alone. I loved a man once, and married him, and left him two and a half years later, choosing life on my own instead. Grace loved her man and stayed. Yet for her Saturday was the first of a lifetime of nights without her husband, while for me it was another night in Austin’s arms, his skin warm beneath my fingers, the only man with whom I’ve ever slept all night, every night, entwined around each other. Grief is selfish, and so is love—that I, who had love once and walked away, am still taking more.

James always gave me a hard time for the guys I liked. Once he even called me when he knew I was on a first date, pressing me, “so where are you, Anena? who are you with?” just to make me squirm. It was one of the ways we clicked, something that always made us laugh uproariously. I was ridiculously open with him. “Anena, you need Jesus,” he told me once as I recounted a drunken encounter with a man the night before, and I’ve used that line back at him—a devout Christian—ever since. He always wanted updates on my romantic life. I always gave them. I introduced him to Austin last Monday when the three of us met to brainstorm about making the girls’ football program a Fadhili placement, and almost told him then—it would have been so fun to wow him with the casual announcement that the guy he was talking with was his update. But it seemed a little unprofessional in light of the new business arrangement, and I decided to wait. Now I wish I hadn’t. I’ll never know what he’d have said, never see the look on his face. I would have enjoyed that. One final laugh together.

Grief can be self-serving, too. When you are close enough to a loss to bleed but not to be eviscerated. “You always hear the stories,” I sighed the other night to Austin, tears trickling once again down my face. “But this is the first time it’s been MY story.” I finger the bruise again, the knowledge that if I stay, if I marry this place, it will not be the last time it’s my story, either.

“Don’t worry,” Austin tells me. It’s what he always says.

There’s a reason I hold men at arm’s length now. A reason that Austin is the first to peel back so much as a corner of my self-protective skin. Not just because I genuinely prefer my independence, have never been so happy in any relationship as I am on my own; also because my beliefs about love have been so wrong. Only now am I learning the concept of loving with open hands, spreading my fingers to allow our respective selves, our needs and longings, to sift freely through. It’s a new and challenging perspective. Love as possession was the hallmark of the first 31 years of my life—something I could clutch around me to keep me safe, to make me whole, to knit my shortcomings to another person’s plenty and thereby make me, somehow, good enough—and that would destroy me were it ever to be taken away.

It doesn’t destroy you, I know this now. After all, everything is lost in the end. Love is no guarantee, not for the man to whom I whisper ni yangu, ‘mine,’ not for the two delightful and trying teenagers who call me Mummy, not for the dying children skipping rope in my front yard with deceptive vigor while their weakening mothers watch and smile. You can love someone and lose them in an instant, or across the path of years. But you will lose them in the end.

This, I suppose, is why love is the only thing that’s worth it.

I wonder if Grace would agree?

I think James would. We were at the office a few weeks ago, and he swore. I shook my head: “James, you need Jesus.” We were planning to do coffee and get caught up, one of those “ah, I can’t do it today after all, let’s try for next Tuesday instead” meetings that we postponed again and again. You always think you’ll have more time. There is a balance, I suppose, between loving with open hands and still making the most of every opportunity to share your life with the ones who make it rich.

So I’m sharing it, a little more consciously than before. With my family in NH, who I’ll be seeing in just over a week when I fly home for Christmas, hooRAH! And with my family in Kenya, who surround me, from Rainwater to Violet to Salima and Austin and Salome and Beautiful. Weeks have passed since the evening my girls called Austin and asked him, “are you planning to take our mother away?”

“Is that bad?” he asked them.

They told him no, but if he was going to be with their mother, they wanted him to be their father.

“Then I am your dad,” he said. And they have called him that ever since. And now we are a family. What a gift.

They’re at the coast now, my kids, his kids, my gentle man. I saw them off on the train Monday night, loading them with bags of snacks and toilet paper, Wambui and Kamau scrambling on without a backward glance, Beautiful and Salome clinging to me for long hugs, Austin leaping back off the train to embrace me goodbye. I’ll ride the bus down after the funeral tomorrow to join them. My family. What James and Grace and Kelly were. What my siblings and my dad and my nephew are. What Austin and these children and I are becoming.

Nothing is certain. You just love, and love, and love while you can, and it doesn't matter what the outcome is. Love is the journey. Love is the reward.

what is

Yesterday afternoon I was in Mlolongo, delivering the opening speech for the football program to a classroom of eager teenage girls, when my phone rang: a new deal for the Economist which needed to go through five minutes ago. Result-driven American that I am, I abandoned the girls to their fate (which was Austin taking over and doing so much better than me that I wondered why I’d been leading the group at all), and after a few uptight hours of calls and emails between Kenya, Dubai, and Spain, the ad was set to go. Which found me this morning flouncing my high-heeled way into an office building, contract in hand, to close the deal—while inside my head all I could think about was the email I’d just discovered when I made my final inbox check before leaving my apartment: divorce papers, scanned by my husband, ready for me to sign at last.

I was wearing an aqua-blue blouse, a skirt, heels; several weeks of the diarrhea diet have rendered me downright willowy, and I knew even without the turned heads caught in my peripheral vision that I looked stunning. I looked like a professional. I looked like a grownup. Like all the things I never felt like during my two and a half years as Anna Hawfield, and as I climbed the stairs I wondered, what is it with untapped potential? Josh adored me in outfits with a professional cut, he was delighted when I engaged in pursuits I adored. Yet while I was his wife I spent the bulk of my time in pajamas, on the couch, crying. Good man that he was, he loved me unconditionally even then, when I was useless—but wouldn’t he have loved me even more now that I’m driven, accomplishing things I care about, coming home excited at night in hot business outfits? It almost seems a waste. What prevented my accessing this inner Amazon when I was his wife?

Last week, returning from the Mara, I drove the worst roads I’ve encountered yet, rain-slickened mudbogs through which I could not edge nearly as cautiously as I’d have liked because the truck had no headlights and I was on a tight deadline to complete the six-hour trek before dark. Twice the road was washed out, once sending me splashing barefoot into the mud and rain to detach the trailer, maneuver the truck from the slippery black-cotton soil, and find an alternate path across the river before it rose too high to cross; the other time, on the highway, prompting me to tap my burgeoning Aggressive Driver skills to force my way past other vehicles across the half-flooded, one-way-only passage remaining, even compelling me to rebuke a lethargic policeman and surrounding crowd into pushing aside a vehicle that was blocking said one-way-only passage. I was one of the last vehicles on the road without headlights on by the time I turned into my apartment complex. What a satisfying day. I loved the challenge of the slippery roads, the mandatory off-roading, the race against daylight, the mental contingency planning. I loved finding my own solutions. I’ve never been more in touch with my inner male problem-solving energy, and this I marvel at too—why couldn’t I have thrived on my independence and capabilities when I was with Josh instead of constantly sniveling for him to fix everything for me? He never asked that I be pathetic and dependent; I just was.

Stephanie is back in town. This weekend we dined out with her colleague Ben, and I delighted in boggling him with stories of my sheltered upbringing and subsequent clumsiness in navigating the post-Christian culture clash. He wanted to know how I first felt led away from the church; I told him about backpacking in Europe at the age of 23, about wearing pants and drinking my first alcohol and being stunned to realize they were just things, they even made sense (the wearing pants part anyway), and could it be God didn’t really hate them after all? I looked across the table at Steph laughing uproariously with Morris—astonishingly, for all her maturity and foreign professional experience, she is only 23 now. She’s lived and worked in Africa for years. She has a grownup job created just for her by Kiva, a globally renowned company. And me at her age, I was tiptoeing briefly around Paris and Frankfurt in my one shocking pair of trousers, emailing home to confess to my parents that I’d tasted alcohol, returning to the States to agonize over the fact that I no longer felt convicted for wearing sleeveless shirts.

Would I really wish for my life to have gone any differently? Of course not. Each experience has combined to create who I am today. “It’s a miracle you’re as normal as you are,” Josh used to laugh. Josh, the man who just sent me papers legally decreeing that our marriage has “broken down irretrievably and there is no possibility of getting back together.” It’s been nearly a year and a half since we lived together as man and wife; all I need to do is sign and scan and email and I’ll be single again on paper as well as in practice. I’ll be un-married. I’ll be like I was before except that I’m completely different, I’m a woman who can be both strong male and nurturing female, I’m the total-package go-getter individual I’ve always wanted to be—and I’m a divorcee, the one thing I didn’t want to be, ever.

Recently I chose a new middle name for myself. Not that the whole Anna-to-Anena name change wasn’t drastic enough. Just that dropping Hawfield rendered me two-named again, Anena Hansen, and I’m used to three; plus I’ve always loved my AHH initials, but Hilary has lost its relevance. Then a few weeks ago I hit upon it. Hastings. Name not of my father, or my husband, but of my mothers: Grammie Hastings, and her daughter Fern Hastings Brown, and her daughter Janice Brown Hansen, who never carried the name Hastings but whose it seems nonetheless due to her close and adoring relationship with both the women who bore it before. Screw societal conventions, I’m through with those; I can pick whatever name I want, and I’ve decided to call myself Anena Hastings Hansen. That’s who I’ve become at last, at 32, after years of wondering who I was going to be when I grew up, after a marriage and an un-marriage, after discovering that I kick ass in soaked muddy jeans as well as sexy business clothes, after watching some loved ones die and releasing others of my own anguished volition, after a move across the ocean and the establishment by sheer determination of the life of my dreams—this is me, far from perfect, but utterly content and genuine at last. In the bliss of my fulfillment I cannot forget the despair of my nonfulfillment before.

The only thing that prevented my becoming this woman, daughter of my mothers, defender of my potential, hero of my own possibility—the only thing that stood in the way was me. For better or for worse (yes, I note the irony), I could not become this woman except by being on my own. I hope my husband forgives me for this. Some people find themselves by the time they’re 23. Others of us take longer—but god, when the chrysalis finally cracks, we soar.

So I have signed the papers. I wrote my old name one final time: Anna. Hansen. Hawfield. I put down the pen and said out loud: “I’m divorced.” Words I tried on for size over a year ago, in a hotel in Syria, when the fabric of my marriage suddenly frayed too thin and I finally glimpsed the void beneath it—words I spoke solemnly to my mirror, shocked, trying to imagine if they could ever be real. Now they are. Sitting in bed in my pajamas (oh, the aptness!), I just got divorced. Unthinkably, Josh is not my husband anymore. I put my hands over my heart and promised to love him the best I can in this new shape of love—one that honors what we shared, that releases him, that promises to learn from each mistake. A final vow to him that I will not break.

And now I go on.

too much talk about dead cows

Back in the Mara, for the first time in nearly a month. I felt a lovely sensation of homecoming as we drove over the rutted dirt road, up the escarpment’s edge, and at last down the long driveway into camp. I said, “I don’t ever want to be gone this long again.” The short rains have finally come to the parched Mara, too late for the horrifying quantity of dead cows whose corpses, in various states of bloating and dismemberment, line the roadsides in a most unpicturesque fashion, but the plains are shockingly green and one hopes the bovine mortality rate will summarily drop. Certainly one hopes this when one passes a cluster of swollen carcasses downwind. Wow. It just about knocks you out.

Every day it rains—a downpour the first night, outdone by an absolute hurricane yesterday. Lying in my tent last evening, enjoying that old New Englandy feeling of being sheltered safe in my cozy home while the storm rages outside, I pondered for a moment the possibility that my tent (semi-permanently rooted to the earth via sturdy fiberglass poles) might actually blow away—it was that powerful. The storm had cleared by nighttime and a pack of hyenas skulked near camp, sounding their startlingly mellifluous coo; I could hear the anxiety among the usual herbivores grazing among the tents in the dark, snorting and stomping with discomfort at the hyenas’ proximity, but I never heard a kill. There’s also been a cacophony of piggish oinking which I rather logically assumed was warthogs, but Andy insists it’s male impalas, which seems completely ludicrous and it’s driving me nuts now wanting to figure it out. I know the huff of a male lion calling his lionesses on the hunt, the phlegmy rumble of a bull elephant helping himself to our fig tree, the squeak of a startled orribi, the wail of a bush baby. But for every noise I’ve learned to identify in the dark there are a dozen others that leave me mystified.

Since arriving two days ago I’ve accomplished virtually zero, being laid low once again with whatever’s been kicking my heinie for the better part of two weeks now. I’m trying to pay attention to my body, which is clearly disgruntled about SOMEthing. I so rarely have any sort of malaise these days, I know it’s a message when I do, but I’m danged if I know what this time. I keep on coming back to a need to rest and renew, and each time I say, but I CAN’T! But who knows, maybe I can. Maybe I must. After nearly two weeks of diarrhea, I’ve broken down at last and started on Cipro—I don’t know why I held out so long, but I think partly it’s because I have horribly negative associations of Cipro, which my mother was on for weeks after her surgery in a vain effort to slow her body’s quest to void every life-giving nutrient crossing her lips. So fine, I’m taking Cipro, which has plugged me as effectively as a cork on a wine bottle and about as comfortably too (still not graphic enough of a visual? oh, I can do better), and I’m working in my tent today, staying comfy and relaxed while I putter at my tasks. I of all people, after watching my mother work herself to death, believe in the necessity of nurturing myself first so I’ll have excess to give to others. Funny how hard that can still be to practice. Particularly as I adore my work here—surely you don’t burn out when you’re doing work you love? Turns out you do. Two weeks of diarrhea and overactive nostrils says so. Sigh.

So last night I made a list of What I Need to Thrive, and typed it up and read it out to the universe, so we can work in partnership from now on to make sure my needs are being met. Hoorah! I expect great things. Weekly massages and tri-monthly visits to the coast among them. Take THAT, snotty nostrils.

This morning I woke—from a startlingly sweet dream of Josh—and reached for the blanket I’d kicked onto the floor in the night, pulling it back onto the bed. Then I glanced at the floor and spied a couple of the largest, most violent-looking beetles I’ve ever seen, which had been lurking beneath the blanket, and found I was suddenly motivated to toss it back off my bed lest perhaps their friends had clung on for the ride. And thus I learn another African lesson. Beware the blanket that’s been lying on the floor in the dark. I guess that one shouldn’t have been so hard to figure out—but come on, I’ve never seen giant evil beetles in my tent before. Perhaps they’ve hatched in the rain. Perhaps they’re the spawn of the cow carcasses, which do teem with frighteningly efficient carpets of bugs; daily passage by the same body reveals shocking progress from bloat to shrivel. All right. I’m just going to stop talking about dead cows now.

Yesterday I talked to my amazing friend Steph back in Seattle—I have two amazing Stephs now, which can get a little confusing, but hey, what a great thing to have plenty of—and she was the one who told me to tell God what I need in order to thrive. As I made my list, I realized it culminated in time: I need the freedom to invest the bulk of my time in the work here that I’m passionate about, which means I need to get paid to do it. Because the women’s center is what I am meant to do. The other stuff is great—I love my work here, and I don’t want to give any of it up—but I need to be making a lot more money than I am, and I’m not willing to spread myself any thinner, so I need to make a lot more money for the work I’m already doing (a legit request, as most of it I do for free). I told God this too. Easy. Hurrah. Why the hell not?

Then I went to bed and lay awake awhile, excited, envisioning my future: the amazing work I’ll do with women, the impact it will have. I laid it all out in my head, inviting it to me. I’m so excited about the women’s center. I’m so grateful for meaningful work I adore. I guess I do need to give myself a little more down time, be a little more self-nurturing, but at the end of the day, I love my work so freaking much and I’m just so excited to see where it’s all going to go.

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.