Uganda – Bundibugyo: Part One

Four brothers ascend into the Rwenzori Mountains, crossing orchards of cocoa trees, coffee and kasava to reach the untouched woodlands approaching national park land. The sky is most likely clouded over from their perspective, but through the cold mist, not much ahead is seen other than the dense forest at arm’s reach. Perhaps the monkey was already dead when they found it, or maybe out of hunger or pleasured desire they killed and then consumed the mammal together.
Each brother would tend to his lively duties as normal over the coming days visiting the local markets, socializing with neighbors, seeing to their crops, but after the second or third day, one of the brothers falls mildly ill with a headache and fever. Malaria, he may have thought. Maybe he had a blood smear done at Kikyo Health Unit and found evidence of the parasite, or maybe they simply prescribed the necessary drugs on a clinical diagnosis, but regardless of the treatment his symptoms progress with vomiting and diarrhea. His body is weakening, and by the disease’s fifth or sixth day, the brother’s eyes are turning red, his neck and body is stiff, and his kidneys, liver and respiratory functions are failing. A week has now passed and the one brother falls into sudden shock, maybe bleeds out then dies. The three other brothers follow.
The passing of a community member is followed-up by a series of funeral rites to bring closure to a person’s life. The body is washed and embraced by loved ones before carried then lowered into a grave outside the home. Here the virus is spread and over the next couple months a mystery illness rattles the local countryside.

ONE YEAR LATER…

The Kenya documentary brought me good reason to visit Uganda and South Africa. Proximity is one factor. A round-trip airline ticket is another; and serendipitously timed near perfect. Until a little more than a week before arriving in Kampala, I really had no solid plan for Uganda except I wanted to visit a cave and talk to people. For that reason, I allocated one week’s time in the country before hoping on a one-way flight to Johannesburg before returning to the States. In retrospect, I should have blindly planned for two weeks as I initially felt before the perceived absence anxiety set in.
Through my contact at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, I was initially provided with three leads to follow and a link to Scott and Jennifer Myhre’s blog, a pair of doctors living with their family in western Uganda. Through a snail’s paced Internet connection in Kericho, I downloaded and printed 67 pages of entries dating from the end of November last year to early this year chronicling a local’s perspective to the most recent Ebola outbreak in the remote town of Bundibugyo. Admittedly, I had difficulty sleeping one night in Transmara after reading up to the passage, “Grief and Fear”.
With only a couple days of preparation, I met Bob Chedester and family from the World Harvest organization in the city of Fort Portal. I was creating space in the aisle for departing passengers, when a mzungu got the attention of the driver who then directed me to get off the bus. By coincidence, Bob and family were planning to visit the Myhre family in Bundibugyo and offered a seat in their already packed Land Cruiser saving me the adventure of hitchhiking with my equipment and bags over a 100 kilometer stretch of narrow, non-maintained dirt road around and through the Rwenzori Mountains.
“Bundibugyo is about forty kilometers straight that way,” Bob pointed, “but there’s no way to go through the mountains so we have to go around. You could hike it though; it’ll take about six hours—at a good pace.”
Instead, I’ll settle for a three-hour rocking fest squeezed between my luggage in the SUV’s boot seated across three year-old Samuel. I said this before we started and I seriously meant it after, “This will make up for the four and half hour bus ride, and three and a half hours of waiting for the bus to depart, because I let myself be directed to the wrong departing bus.”
Almost immediately I picked up air off my seat and smashed my head on the ceiling.
“Watch your head,” Bob smiled through the rearview mirror.
“I’m used to it, that was number twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five?” Someone asked like I had already hit the ceiling that many times.
“Twenty-five times since arriving in Africa I’ve hit my head on low door frames, beams, rocks, whatever. I’m keeping track.”
“You’ll hit it a bunch more times on this road,” Bob assured me.

“I can’t wait.” The road snaked over what seemed like dozens of ridges in replace of switchbacks as we climbed to probably 8,000 feet.
“We have to stop at the lookout. It’s my favorite spot,” young Elizabeth claimed, one of nine passengers in the vehicle including Samuel and myself. The vehicle bounced.
“Twenty-six.” And bounced again. “Twenty-seven.” Everyone laughed. Glad I could provide comic relief. 

From the lookout, a vast gully between mountains receded into the flat plains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Outside the Rwenzori National Park, the mountains resemble a quilt, as Elizabeth observed, of various crop plantations patching the landscape. It is believed by one tribe the land is more fertile on the mountain slopes. Either that, or people don’t want to admit location, location, location is everything and worth the insane effort it must require to haul material and food through the forest and up onto those slopes.

By thirty and thirty-one, we arrived at what must have been the most anticipated destination on the 

entire drive, second only to our destination: the bridge. But not just any bridge, at maybe three cars’ length it is the flattest surface anywhere in the region.
The Land Cruiser shutters with bated anticipation then … silence. Everyone sighs a happy relief enjoying the moment of tranquility. Then, back to shuttering. This brought on a series of songs from “B-I-N-G-O” to “Ol’ McDonald”. In between travel ballads, my dialogue exchange didn’t quite go this way, but I’d like to remember it did:
“Can’t you sing some

thing with a little more pep to it?” I asked to no one in particular.
A pause. “It’s a small world after all…”
“No. No. Anything but that!” I cried. But in actuality, I prompted the song just so I could shoot it down quoting that last line.
Thirty-two.

OCTOBER 2007

Unlike traditional Ebola, this new unofficially titled Bundibugyo strain is weaker and partially asymptomatic killing roughly 30% of patients against a typical 70-90% mortality rate without the sensationalized “bleeding” from every orifice. These factors contributed to a prolonged identification and the much needed guidance of outside experienced organizations.

By late October, the mystery illness inspired the attention of Dr. Jonah Kule from nearby Bundibugyo hospital. The following is excerpted from Scott and Jennifer Myhre’s blog titled, “Grief and Fear” with an excerpt from “Bundibugyo, Where the Tears Never Run Dry”. The entry summarizes the events transpired at that time, text and pictures courtesy of the Myhres:

Jonah was a man of integrity. He refused to charge patients extra fees for his services, even though that is widely practiced in government hospitals. He was completely trustworthy with his responsibilities and resources. He was a leader who knew how to motivate, listen, draw consensus. He was not afraid.
Jonah first went to investigate this epidemic weeks ago; it was probably still October then. Rumors had reached him of a mystery illness. I remember well the day he came into the Pediatric Ward and told us about it. I gave him gloves and my bottle of alcohol hand gel, pitifully inadequate measures now. We had not heard of any bleeding, just vomiting and diarrhea and unusual deaths. We wondered if it was a cholera outbreak. I remember him slinging his backpack on, and getting on his motorcycle saying, “If I die, I die.”
When he came back he guessed typhoid fever, due to the prominent abdominal pain and even what seemed to be two cases with intestinal perforation. He noted the family grouping of the cases and held some community meetings to sensitize on hygiene, the basics of hand washing and latrines. He dispelled rumors of witchcraft and poisons. He wrote up a report. Then over the next week or two there was a task force set up, some Ministry of Health epidemiologists came and took blood samples.
We got the good news that it was not Marburg or any Viral Hemorrhagic Fever based on samples sent . . . Not sure where. Then there was the message that more samples had been sent to South Africa. Days went on. Uganda’s attention was on CHOGM. Jonah continued to attend to patients as they came into Bundibugyo Hospital, as did Scott. Jonah was the primary doctor for Muhindo, Jeremiah, an older gentleman who had been active in visiting the sick in Kikyo then fell ill in Bundibugyo. [Friday November 23 is the day Jonah believed himself to have been infected. That was the day he and Scott examined Jeremiah Muhindo. In between two of the times they saw the patient together, Jonah went in alone and arranged a facemask of oxygen onto the dying man, hoping to provide some relief or comfort. He was not wearing gloves because he could not find any at the hospital at that moment, and he felt that his friend needed the oxygen. That was his greatest exposure.] A week and a half ago Muhindo died.
A few days later Jonah went to Kampala on personal business; he has a house there still from medical school days with rooms he rents out, and three of his daughters are in school in Kampala, and his mother and brother stay with them there. We went to Kikyo the day Jonah went to Kampala, all of us still wondering what this disease could be, still being told the samples had been sent from South Africa now on to the CDC in Atlanta. Then last Thursday the bombshell announcement came, that it was Ebola, a new strain. That day we talked to Jonah on the phone, he had a headache he said, maybe early malaria, he’d watch. By Friday morning he found it prudent to admit himself to Mulago hospital. That was his last act of bravery and wisdom. We talked on the phone that day, he sounded so normal, so himself. I went to find his wife Melen who was still here. We prayed and wept and embraced and called him again.
Saturday morning I drove her early to town to get on transport to go to Kampala, even though she knew she would not be allowed to see him. She’s six months pregnant with their sixth child. From Friday until 4 pm yesterday every report we got from the doctors was hopeful. He was walking and talking, drinking. His doctor even said he was wanting to call and talk to us but they were looking for a way to charge his phone which he had with him in the isolation. He did have a couple of days of reduced urine output indicating an effect on his kidneys, and he did continue to have fever. With each new symptom and passing day the hope that it was all just malaria became less and less. Still Jonah is a strong man, healthy, smart. He was in the country’s main hospital, not out here in Bundibugyo. He was getting lab tests. He had a team of doctors, including MSF Spain. We had hope. Then suddenly last night they called back. He had died. Maybe there was bleeding, involving his kidneys and lungs, I don’t have the real story yet.

You can read the Myhre's complete blogs entries at: http://paradoxuganda.blogspot.com

Kenya/Uganda – Conclusions and Beginnings

For the consistent reader, I only posted a summary—at best—of my one month through southwestern Kenya. Many worthy stories remain scribbled in one of two notebooks or are vividly retained by memory. Stories of generosity and salvation at a government hidden IDP camp. The love and insecurity of a mute outcast mother and her leashed preteen son (one of many touching and complicated stories at Sister Freda’s Clinic). Meeting an American missionary family living in north Kenya and learning of their life with the Trukana tribe deep in the north deserts (and their unexpected ties in the film business), are only to highlight a few as I reflect on the past four weeks walking down a foot-worn trail over green pastures.

A Maasai herds-boy bowed his head in passing. I laid my hand atop of his head and continued forward. I had made the mistake of shaking a child’s hand in greeting early in the visit. Shaking one’s hand is a ritual reserved for adults in the Maasai tribe— those having passed the rite of manhood (or womanhood) through an annual community public circumcision ceremony for adolescents aged 14-17 followed by a month of isolation together into the bush. Wearing nothing but animal skins, the boys are mentored by the generation previous to become fearless adults under the influence of intense “medicine”. The details are kept secret, and for this herds-boy, he must continue to bow his head in respect aspiring to prove he is ready to be a man.
“It’s a form a brainwashing,” Emmanuel Tasur explained the following day with utmost respect for the tradition similarly shared by many tribes in Kenya, as well as eastern Africa. His son will go through the rite next year at age 13.An eastern breeze cooled the beads of perspiration formed on my brow. I easily weaved between the cypress and eucalyptus trees crowning Pirrar Hill. The steep hike reminded me of climbing SP Crater, an extinct cinder cone volcano in northern Arizona, but without the cinders sinking me down. Along the tree line, I sat on an exposed rock overlooking one side of Transmara.The name Transmara is indicative to its meaning. The area is a transition zone between the mountainous Rift Valley and the low-lying savannahs. “Mara”, a Maasai word for “spotted”, refers to the sporadic grouping of trees dotting the land similar to the spots on a leopard or cheetah. From above, a word for “checkered” would be more appropriate, as farming has quartered the grassy hills like a relief chess board. I spotted the school Emmanuel is building on the slope of another hill and where I played football with the primary-grade students at break.
Last year, Emmanuel campaigned for a Minister of Parliament position, but backed out of the race for one of many reasons, including the construction of a primary and secondary school system in Transmara.“I would like to bring hockey into our sports program,” he expressed, but not referring to the common field hockey version. “Something no one here I Kenya could offer. We would be the first.”
Ice would be a logistical and expensive impossibility, but roller or plain street hockey is certainly doable. Emmanuel walked me down the hill from the four classrooms, over the rocky slope soon to be developed into a soccer field and to the future secondary school site.
“Right here is where we could place the rink.”
“Problem is there wouldn’t be much competition,” I noted.
“At first, but I plan to have five schools throughout Transmara, which they can play against each other.”
I pondered the idea. A hawk glided overhead and dipped down the hill blending into the background as a distant dark speck. A small pack of goats grazed just below my position, and I could hear the steady ringing of cowbells further down. As the day approached noon, I watched the evening clouds develop on the horizon and eventually engulf the sun.

Heavy rain fell long into the night. Victor’s bus had broken down followed by his matatu while en route to meet me in Kericho, a small city two hours north of Transmara. Fifteen past midnight, I bid farewell to Tyler before squeezing into the taxi to take Victor and I maybe two kilometers at most to the Akamba bus station.
After haggling down the cab-fare, I tried to sleep through the rough eight hour highway bus ride, stopping several times at towns along the way discharging and accepting passengers until the border. The predawn hours dragged me down as I brushed off money-exchange hawkers at the visa office to the sound of Islamic chants broadcast over loud speakers from a nearby Mosque.
Looking out the bus window at passing southeast Uganda and its shallow contrasting hills of banana palms and eucalyptus against rusted earth trails and corrugated metal roofed homes this is what I pictured Uganda and east sub-tropical Africa to look like, but seeing it in person sends a slightly apprehensive chill down my spine. The cold humidity bites hard and for the first time in weeks, I’m wearing pants on purpose. But as morning turns to afternoon in Kampala, a near equinox sun cooks the air and I wish I were wearing shorts.

"Can you take us to a hotel near a bus station that'll take me to Fort Portal?" I asked a taxi driver gathering my bags from the bus's boot.
Moses, the taxi driver, delivered us to the Amber Hotel in the local commercial district--not the best part of town--just outside city-center Kampala.  Even though the traffic is just as congested as in Nairobi with matatus inches from each other and motor-bodas skillfully weaving in between, the air is cleaner, and thus the city is brighter.
“Uganda is a very friendly and safer than Kenya,” Victor restated what so many others have said before.
“Is that because of Museveni?” President Museveni over threw the Amin regime around the turn of the century starting with a guerrilla army of 26 men and since has turned the face and future of Uganda one-eighty.
“It’s time for change. He is on his third term and needs to step down. A man he fought with is now fighting against him,” Moses laughed. Afraid of handing over the country to another corrupt regime, one could say Museveni is forming a dictatorship while also preventing the creation of additional political parties to serve a Western democratic system. But, why break something that’s making positive steps?
My first positive step that afternoon was taking a warm continuous shower. Although one can turn hand-baths into an efficient cleaning process, streaming water does the job faster and is a relaxing pleasure I take too much for granted. Four minutes later, I am dressed, shaving and fifteen minutes from my first meeting.

A thirty-minute ten-kilometer taxi ride brought us to the front entrance of the Ugandan Ministry of Health. Taped to a window is a yellow poster titled from small print to bold:

FACTS ABOUT EBOLA

Over ten years of interest and study have finally paid off, and even after months of legitimate preparation, I have to pinch myself to its reality. And as I sit across the Assistant Commissioner of Health Education for the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the feeling dawns on me that this is really happening.
“Tell me about your assignment,” Paul Kagwa directed handing Victor and I a cold bottle of Coca-Cola.
“In the mid-nineties there was a documentary called, ‘Ebola: The Plaque Fighters’…”
“Yes, I know of it,” Mr. Kagwa pushed forward.
“This is its sequel, picking up where their story left off. It’s been over ten years and we now know where Marburg hides and Ebola hopefully soon to come. This is a historical time forty years in the making. But beyond that, this documentary is not necessarily about the virus itself, but the human story behind dealing with it,” I explained and continued with the current plan. “Right now, I’m establishing the contacts and gathering the necessary knowledge so when I get the phone call that something is happening in … the Congo, I’m prepared to move forward immediately and mobilize my crew to best achieve our purpose.”
“You know, we shot a one-hour documentary to show the community. The footage from that would be very useful to you. Let me make some phone calls and get this to you. Also, you need to speak with our director general, Dr. Okware. He is in charge of all outbreaks and has been around them since the beginning. There is no better person to talk to.”
And so the week in Uganda begins.

Kenya (Mount Elgon) – Kenya Side

The tiny stream cascaded over the eroded pyroclastic rock wall and splashed onto rounded solid black basalt boulders and vibrant green shrubbery. I shielded the camera and tripod from the tiny waterfall’s spray behind a large volcanic block and hopped from stone to stone over a heavily cratered pond of mud and shallow still water into the wide mouth of Kitum Cave. The rocks disappeared beneath a porch of fine dry dust that exploded into ankle-high plumes of soft mist with every footstep—one of many different animal prints pitting the floor. With the entrance now a broad sliver of iridescent green vegetation, I switched on the headlamp before handing my spare flashlight to the guide. Dressed in military green camouflage with an AK-101 gripped tightly by his right hand, he kindly led me up a series of large blocks. His narrow face and wide smile reminded me of the rapper Tupac.
Echoing around me, the cries and whooping of short screeches and dull fluttering quickly escalated in volume. I turned my light to the vaulted ceiling and caught the glitter of hundreds paired rusty-gold blinking beads.
The screeching stopped to give way to waves of rubbery flapping. Dozens upon dozens of agitated Rousettus fruit bats fled from of an unseen cavity in the dome roof and surrounded us with movement. I turned the light away and almost as immediately as the storm began it subsided with the bats returning to their roost. We pressed forward, I every now and then glimpsing clusters of citrine eyes nestled overhead in shallow indentations. The unsettling chatter and movement continued.
“You can see here,” the guide said tracing his finger inside one of many pickaxe scrapings in the wall, “these are ‘tuskings’, where the elephants carve at the rock to get to the salt.” Elephants, as well as many other animals like buffalo and bushbuck, will eat the porous soft agglomerate for the salt embedded within. “Some predators will take advantage of those animals and eat them for food,” Tupac noted over piled hyena bones beside an enclosed underground pool.
“When do the elephants come around?” I asked.
“At night, but you cannot see them now because they are on the other side of the mountain.” The “other side” meaning the elephants are on Ugandan portion of Elgon Mountain, which both Kenya and Uganda share including the national park. “Kitum cave goes into Uganda.”
“Really? That’s like forty kilometers from here.”
“Yes, but you cannot get there because a few years ago there was a cave in. You see, the elephants scrape at the rocks and can sometimes cause large boulders to fall.”
“Can you access the Ugandan Kitum entrance?”
“Ah, I don’t know. I think it’s spelled, Kip-tum. Kitum means sacred, I do not know what Kiptum means.”
Could a “border” be all that separates the transmission of a virus? I absurdly mused. What would make the bats on the Ugandan side harbor the Marburg virus, and not those from the Kenyan side? …A number of factors drew in my head, assuming the virus does in fact exist in Kitum cave as spotlighted in Richard Preston’s book, The Hot Zone. The truth is, two victims of Marburg during the early 1980s had visited the cave prior to dying from the disease, but it is not known if the virus was contracted there. Field studies of Kitum cave and its occupants (bats, rodents, insects, etc) revealed no evidence linking Marburg or sister virus Ebola to Kitum cave. As a result of the book, Kenya’s Kitum cave has received a bad stigma, and when asked about the virus in association with Kitum cave, park rangers will quickly laugh and assure you there is no association. Unrelated though, a few scientists studying the bat flu disappeared in the cave and never returned, Barasa, the grounds keeper informed us over a campfire.
From the top of Endebess bluff we watched the late afternoon bring its routine seasonal downpour to Elgon’s east facing forested slopes and the endless crop fields dipping below the horizon. In timelapse, the clouds develop and expand over the world’s broadest mountain slope returning to the valley with brief but sometimes drenching rain. Upon clearing, the mass movement of bushbucks, dik-diks and baboons roll past our banda’s doorstep near the park’s entrance below. Dusk passes and the clouds part revealing a moon-washed southern Milky Way overhead. Like last summer, Jupiter graced its yellow brilliance at zenith now positioned on the handle side of the teapot shaped constellation, Sagittarius. Although being just north of the equator, I noted the north and south poles at the horizon and from my seat beside the fire and watched the sky rotate directly toward the west. I discussed elementary (college) astronomy to a skeptical Carolyn and quiet Michelle. Both girls were volunteering at Sister Freda’s for the month, and knew Tyler from last summer’s volunteer work in Transmara; our next and last destination.

Kenya (Mount Elgon) – SLDF

Reverend Steven Mairori leaned his head through the open window over a vacant driver’s seat and said, “Wait here and I will let you know when you can come out.”
Following Mairori into the Mount Elgon District Commissioner’s Office was Africa Inland Church’s (AIC) bishop leading 4000 homes of God and Kenya’s retired military general under former President Moi. Just an hour earlier, we prayed over glasses of water and Sprite while munching on butter cookies together at the AIC’s Mt. Elgon home office. Neither Tyler nor I expected such a meeting, let alone an opportunity to film in the village of Kapsocony that suffered tremendously two years ago when the Sabaot Land Defense Force (SLDF) attacked and chased off people from their land. With the exception of a French medical team, we were the first film crew invited to visit this area of Mt. Elgon and report on the events that transpired over the last two years.
“The French medical team filmed activities in Kopsiro shortly after the elimination of the SLDF, but were given 24 hours to evacuate the area. One doctor was arrested.”
“Why was he arrested?” I asked the retired general.
He chuckled, “For practicing medicine.”
“For practicing medicine?”
“For practicing medicine,” he finished the conversation.
The question I wanted to ask was, “Why was the French team instructed to leave,” but I surmised an answer.
The French medical team, there to lend assistance to the violence affected Sabaot members delved too deeply into the torture inflicted by military forces ordered to hunt down and exterminate members of the SLDF and were evicted from the area. The creation of the SLDF followed former President Moi’s directive opening land t all Kenyan’s with a price tag. Land bought by those financially able left those struggling to make ends meet homeless, thus forcing the need for Internally Displaced Person camps (IDPs). Those buying the land include politicians, as well as rich tribal members. In the case of the Sabaot and Mt. Elgon, rich Sabaot bought out the land of their brother tribesmen forcing many to seek refuge. Some though took action and created a guerilla militia force out to punish the new landowners and reclaim the land. Punishment included humiliation, mutilation and death. In response, the Kenyan government deployed its national military force to combat the situation. The military went door to door and without due process executed the right of extrajudicial enforcement, which included similar tactics employed by members of the SLDF. The Mt. Elgon Sabaot population now had two forces to fear, their brothers and the government. Some sided with the SLDF in order to place food on their family’s plates, while others ratted out members to the military, sometimes erroneously with sad outcomes.
“I was hearing some youths that were saying that after their parents running away, that they have no food to eat, so they thought that it was good to join the militia so that they can steal the cattle and eat in the bush. Others were forced to join the militia because if you are a youth and you do not join the SLDF, it is better that you go outside Mount Elgon,” Crispin, a Pasteur in Mt. Elgon church community explained to us.
“My nephew was killed and damned into a pit latrine,” a man told us outside a primary school converted into an IDP home. “We only found him after twenty-one days in the pit latrine, removed him and buried him. Those people [SLDF] called me and used a private number and they told me the direction where they damned my nephew.”
Fast-forward two years to present day and peace—for now—is on Mount Elgon.
“I’ve never felt more insecure being a mzungu in Kenya than now,” Tyler expressed emphatically.
“Here at Mount Elgon?” Michelle asked.
“Yeah.”
I rested my head on the rear passenger window and in bold letters on the District Commissioner’s office wall read:

WE AS SERVANTS OF THE KENYA PEOPLE PLEDGE OUR COMMITMENT TO THE PUBLIC THORUGH OUR MOTTO: INTEGRITY AND JUSTICE.

The reverend, bishop and retired general exited the building with an entourage of district officials and church members. Mairori opened the driver-side door and sat behind the wheel, “Okay, we’re going.”
“To the rally?”
“Yes.”
A couple hundred or so locals attended the government/church/military presentation encouraging the public to accept the military’s presence and the construction of a permanent base. Although the leaders assured justice would come to those who committed the horrendous atrocities, all parties urged the community to forgive their neighbor as Jesus would.
Crispin a couple days later elaborated, “So people joined for different reasons and as the church, that is what we are telling people about who joined the militia group unwilling, forced, others were desperate, they had no where to go so they saw the option that they must join those people so they can continue surviving.”
Even though the military deniably condemned innocent lives, the public did express support for a military presence to protect the population.

Two days after the rally, we received word the military had left Mt. Elgon.

Kenya (Kitale) – Sister Freda

“Come inside, Franck,” Sister Freda offered under the doorframe of a mud-brick house the size of a middle-class apartment bedroom. “It is okay. The mother just gave birth ten minutes ago.”
Mother lay on her side with her back to the door. I stepped quietly on the dirt floor, tiptoeing over scraps of firewood and the checkered blanket she nursed the newborn above from.
Sister Freda caressed the top of mother’s head with her thumb speaking to her softly in Swahili. The girl, late in her teens, removed the suckling infant from her breast and allowed Sister Freda to pick up the child wrapped in a sparing bundle of cloth, the umbilical still attached and disappearing under the sheets.
The infant cried. “This little boy was born just ten minutes before we arrived. It was a quick birth. Very easy for the mother,” Sister Freda quietly repeated and expanded upon, cooing the child with her delicate and calming demeanor. Her heavy white fabric dress and overcoat against the dark walls holding the baby made me think of Mother Theresa.
An old woman arrived at the doorstep with a small blue and white striped T-shirt. Sister Freda set down the baby beside his mother, opened the sheets and carefully with assistance pulled the shirt over his pudgy head and thin arms. Mother then drew him onto her chest and the newborn quieted.
“You can see the conditions she lives in. Thirteen people sleep in this tiny space and this is all the food she has.” Sister Freda pointed to a small pot of unpeeled maize, sighed and folded her hands across the waist. “I do not have my delivery package with me, so she will have to wait. Either I or I will send someone to take her to the hospital.” She made an accepting murmur and stepped outside after speaking with the old woman.
I remained standing at a corner in the hut and watched the mother and her infant together.

I followed Sister Freda’s white Land Rover through the camera’s viewfinder as it turned the corner and disappeared behind a wood fence. Further down the two-wheel track dirt road fenced by a crop of maize was 31-year old Catherine, stabilizing with her right hand a yellow container of water balanced on her head. A cattle-herding boy snapped his switch ushering the group of animals up a shallow embankment out from her path. The woman turned the same corner as Sister Freda and disappeared.
Appearing no older than a girl in her mid-twenties, Sister Freda took Catherine’s free hand into both of hers and graciously bowed her head, gently closing her eyes with a kind and humble smile. The girl shyly smiled.
“This is Catherine,” Sister Freda introduced, “She is HIV positive, but her son Issac is not. We did all we could during the pregnancy with anti-viral drugs and instructed the mother not to breastfeed after birth.”
Issac, just under the age of two, ran to Catherine for a brief hello before bouncing around the front porch and my camera. “Issac’s father left Catherine after finding out she was pregnant. We have been helping in whatever way we can. Providing food. Providing medical care. It is a miracle he is negative,” Sister Freda continued slowly.
Catherine directed us to the far corner of her yard where two shallow mounds lifted the dark green lawn. She spoke in broken English and Swahili, and Sister Freda translated, “Her first husband and daughter are buried here. They died of HIV.”
We paused for a moment. “What do you do to comfort yourself, Catherine?” Tyler asked.
The same shy smile, but no answer.
“Come on. You can tell us,” Sister Freda encouraged.
“Sing,” Catherine whispered.
“Sing? Can you sing for us?” asked again Tyler.
And as soon as he completed the request, Catherine and the surrounding family neighbor children clapped and sang in unison about the love of God. Catherine embarrassingly laughed finishing the verse. Sister Freda hugged her.
“You’re very close to your patients.” Tyler stated later, his eyes watering after listening to the story of Catherine’s life.
“Yes. They are my children.”

I could write a book about Sister Freda, and in fact one has just recently been published. The lady works non-stop from dawn until dusk, caring for her patients and staff, overseeing the construction of nursing classrooms, organizing and treating community clinics, and guiding volunteers and guests around the hospital and Kitale. Everyday hovering around fourteen and fifteen hundred hours (2 and 3PM), the volunteers, guests and Sister Freda with her husband Richard, a retired Bishop, assemble for dinner at ground’s cottage and eat lunch together after sharing a prayer together. On our last day in Kitale with Sister Freda, she gave thanks to our visit and prayed for each one of us individually and together as a group.
Sister Freda is fond of saying, and said this while fastening a bead necklace around my neck made by a displaced Kenyan refugee as an opening gift, “A neighbor is not someone who just lives next door. Whether it is the Congo or Uganda or the United States, everyone is a neighbor and this is your second home. The doors are always open.” And they are.

Kenya (Kitale) – Polythene

“You must be strong,” Pasteur John encouraged me. With his nice dress shoes, he casually treaded sewage soaked mud from a topped-off set of latrines past an adjoining shamba (vegetable garden). The fecal mix caked to my hiking boots like wet clay. I dragged my feet on the dry earth, but a sliver of plastic wrapping had wedged itself between my right boot’s indents, carrying with it a thick mass of sludge. I sighed and followed the only suit in the village Kipsongo to a woman washing rotted tomatoes and potatoes in a metal bowl of intense brown water.
“See here. This is from town. They went to town to collect this from garbages,” Pasteur John explained picking up a perished head of cabbage from an assortment of low-grade produce. The holy momma continued with her task uninterrupted by our presence. “They use as a food. They wash with this dirty water. But because of poverty, there is no other way to get food.” He held up a tomato and with gentle pressure flattened it. “You use this as a food to kill hungry for a day.”
Kipsongo is a small slum of roughly 300 families not far from Kitale, but hidden from the roads by a wall of flowered trees and shrubs. During the early 1960s, members of the Picot tribe pillaged the Trukana people forcing their relocation. Forty years later, tribal segregation has kept these people from creating income, and the same government land policy that affected the Sabot and the resulting SLDF has isolated these people into a compact area of polythene huts—plastic wrappings over a wooden dome frame.
“Come, let’s move on.” With a brisk stride Pasteur John weaved his way between corridors of tarnished plastic and few mud-brick homes. “See the girls sleeping—no job. Hungry,” he elaborated like a real-estate agent showing off the corners of a mansion. One girl flapped her arm in the air shooing us off.
Born in 1967 Kipsongo, Pasteur John, through the Christian church and the goodwill of westerners, has brought meager portions of food, housing, education and money to the community, but many in that same community accuse him of abusing his position for self-gratification. This is a common criticism shared by all those providing good to a community, even by those of a similar mission.
“Okay, you can see this house,” he pointed to a polythene hut standing beside the narrow curtained entrance. “The owner has died and he is sleeping inside. You canna go inside.”
“Inside?”
Pasteur John was already halfway through the tight arch signaling for me to follow. I squatted down and waddled up a slick slope leading to the entrance. My right foot gave way and I fell to my knee. I quickly picked myself up and crawled inside.
The translucent plastic coverings lit the space with a deep orange hue. A myriad of shirts and trousers hung from a curved branch-frame wallpapering the enclosure like a closet wardrobe gallery. At the hut’s center, resting over rain soaked cardboard tile, a red and green-checkered wool blanket and a pair of chigger gnawed feet exposed from underneath the cover.
Pasteur John bent over the opposite end and unfurled the blanket’s end. I sidestepped to my left.
The man’s right fingers pressed ever so softly to his forehead as if in despaired thought. A fly scurried across his sunken cheek and into the hollow of his shriveled and bluing left eye before dropping through the stubble of his graying beard and parted frown. Through his frozen expression and empty stare, I could feel his sorrow and pain. He was like a statue chiseled from marble into a symbol of Kipsongo.
“We have been giving him a treatment, but now he’s lost his life. He’s dead. Do you see this house? His polythene house?” Gaps in the plastic allow for rain to drip through and soak the floor. “This is hard for me as a Pasteur here.”
I better get used to this, I thought.
Pasteur John continued, “Now I have to look for money for a coffin, and for a cemetery.”
I zoned out of what he was saying and interrupted, “Can we say a prayer for him?”
“A prayer?” He seemed surprised. “Yeah, but I can say it Swahili.”
The man’s son joined us following Pasteur John’s plea. The twenty-something year-old sat across from his father, his eyes wide and tearing. He wiped the dry and bloody mucous from his nose with the palm of his hand and spoke helplessly with his arms, barely forming words.
“He says he has no money to bury his father. He has beaten his knees because he has lost his father. So he needs only help.”
The man’s son turned to his father then to the Pasteur and then to me. I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes so wide and vulnerable.
Pasteur John stood. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I dreamt of our visit to Kipsongo that night, but through a skewed reality. I imagined what Havasuapi Falls must have looked following this summer’s scenery altering floods. Instead of the clear blue-green water, mud now spilled over Havasu Falls into a chocolate river also rich in sewage. At the waterfall’s base, the same polythene huts and Trukana people of Kipsongo.
An old woman plainly washed her clothes in the torrent stream, while soiled children picnicked at its shore, tinged avocado creaming their fingers. The sky began to rain and I ducked for cover under a polythene hut, slipping again on the same slick slope. Rainwater poured through seems in the plastic and pooled at my boots; the hut’s owner resting as he did when I saw him that day. I hugged my knees and leaned against the thin wood frame. Several other children and adults sat as I did, or slept cuddled beside the old man*. We waited for the storm to end.

*The week before our visit to Kipsongo, we were told, a mother had passed away in her plastic tent and left there for five days. Her children slept beside their mother until the necessary funds were gathered for a proper burial.

Kenya (Kitale) - Easy Coach

We negotiate between police blockades of spiked hurdles and ascend through the Rift Valley, a segment of a continental fault spanning from Jordon to Mozambique. Low-lying clouds bathe a mesa of agriculture in mist, and my lungs inhale relief abandoning the dark haze that is Nairobi now a memory. Below the hills of golden savannah and spire trees is Lake Naivasha. On the horizon, the Mau Escarpment lifts the prevailing winds and gives birth to cotton candy clouds checkerboarding the mountains with light and shadow.
The driver slows the Easy Coach bus to a crawl and slips through the narrow arch of an abandoned toll stop. A baboon crosses the 100 highway ahead and shoulder checks us as we accelerate past him and several others loitering on the shoulder. Herds of Zebra graze the shrubbery plains peppered by sharp contrasting farmhouses and shanty hawkers. Steep green cliffs feed into Lake Elmenteita and blankets of cornfields around weathered sheds. The bus stops, and picks up an Easy Coach employee. He gnaws on a toothpick checking tickets before dropped off again on the side of the road beside sporadic bouquets of red daisy-like flowers and thickening flattop acacia trees.
Passing the flamingos in Lake Nakuru and its respectively named city, we cross the equator and continue along the geographical divide into the north Rift Valley. The road tightens and rides like washboard over pits and seals of dirt. Outside the window, three smoke billows blend and disappear into a milky-blue broken sky. An old man follows a dirt trail weighing heavily on his walking stick towards the village stop at Muserechi. On my right, a boy leans on his staff under the shadow of a tree watching cattle pick off the pasture, and not long after, a late middle-aged woman dressed in a long purple and white floral dress sees to the needs of her goatherd.
The driver shifts into 2nd and then 1st gears powering his was up flowing verdant hills of deep green short and tall pines rooted from the red earth and cut by an asphalt highway rivaling a forest service road. Locals say the red earth is stained from the blood spilled in Africa. A sad allegory for a beautiful land.
Rising ahead and peaking behind poached thunderheads is the broad slope of Mount Elgon and the Ugandan border. The terrain is a fertile sub-tropical paradise of vivid flowers and acres of plantation land. We have arrived in Kitale, a small quiet town where boda bodas (bicycle taxis) grossly outnumber gas-guzzling four-wheelers and the air has a sharp humid chill that is thick with the sweet scent of a botanical garden.
The low-hanging sun shines around frayed cumulus and glistens through beaded raindrops atop petal ferns. First on the agenda: one-on-one soccer barefoot on the soft earth against the guest home caretaker’s nephew. Final score: Amos-6, Mzungu-4.

Kenya (Nairobi) - Matatu

In Swahili, Matatu translated means “of three”, but its east African connotation is a fourteen-person occupancy van privately owned and operated as Nairobi’s most common means of public transportation. The “three” represents the van’s driver, conductor and its passengers. Although built from the same mold, a matatu’s identity is unique and special onto itself—a representation of the owner’s sight and sound tastes.
Over a minimal but slick paint job, a matatu is customized through a combination of social icon photographs from American pop-culture performers to Osama Bin Laden, decaled catch phrases, character names or religious messages, and on a select few, fixed ornaments like a basketball hoop.
The interior is—if not more so—as ghetto as the exterior. Pastel ceiling cushions, soul-print seat covers, red and yellow tinted windows, as well as flashing neon and track lighting that culminate around a flat LCD television screen screaming hip-hop and afro-fusion (traditional instrumentation fused with rap or reggae) music videos through a theater-style speaker setup.

“Fifteen hundred?” Tyler scowled at the nearest driver. “The most I ever paid was seven hundred.” He turned to me. “We’ll just take a matatu.”
An earshot taxi driver cut us off. “Where do you want to go?”
“How much is it to Doonholm?” Tyler asked, exhausted and frustrated.
“Eight hundred—because of the time.” Traffic is bumper to bumper; a fifteen minute ride can take upwards an hour depending on the driver.
“Fine,” Tyler yielded and set the tripod and boom pole in the trunk. The driver pointed to my camera backpack.
“No, this stays with me.”
With Tyler at shogun, I slouched on the backseat beside the camera and unwrapped the last of three chocolate bars, revisiting a scene from Kibera earlier in the week.

“How are you?” A young boy asked leaning against the concrete barricade of an overpass. He toyed with rubrics cube and spoke with a high-pitched voice. Children everywhere throughout the Kibera greet and repeat, “How are you?” as if pre-recorded and automated, sometimes screaming from great distances.
“Fine. How are you?” I answered nicely walking past him and only glimpsing him from the corner of my eye.
The child dropped the toy box to his waist and quizzically peeked at me. “Una kula waru?” He asked himself.
Victor chuckled beside me, carrying the camera tripod. “Do you know what he thought you said?”
“No. What?” I swapped hands with the camera.
“He thought you said, ‘Fine. I eat potatoes.’”
“What?”
“'Una kula waru’ sounds like ‘How are you?’ in Swahili and means, ‘I eat potatos.’”
I laughed and the taxi abruptly slammed the brakes, but not before bumping the bus ahead of us. With traffic literally bumper to bumper and side mirror to side mirror, the damage would be minimal.
Our first accident, I thought. It was bound to happen. SLAM.
Our heads whipped forward then back. The camera pack bounced and wedged itself between the driver seat’s back and the rear cushion.
“Are you alright?” Tyler asked immediately.
Surprisingly, the impact didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, I was grinning. “I’m good—great actually. How are you?”
“My neck is a little sore, but I’m fine.”
A matatu crushed the passenger-side taillight and collapsed the trunk. I joined the driver outside and forcibly retrieved the stowed gear from the now sunken metal frame. No damage fortunately.
The traffic policeman rushed over, assessed the damage and passed judgment on the matatu driver.

The matatu conductor serves many roles besides retrieving less than 1USD worth of fare from each passenger. He frequently hangs to the roof leaning out from the side sliding door whistling at bystanders and hollering route and destination, banging the van with a fist alerting the driver to stops or danger. During heavy traffic, he spots the driver skimming centimeters from adjacent vehicles forcing his way across imaginary lanes, where one lane can become three.
The driver is a breed of adrenaline junky and arguably an artist helmsman. He makes driving a van cool despite its ghetto appearance, cutting into oncoming traffic, riding over cratered shoulders or pedestrian packed sidewalks while honking a warning to all for the sake of position. The matatu universe is one where any negotiable space is traversable; and where space seemingly does not exist, it is created. There is no regard for traffic law, if there is such a thing.
Like in the wrecked taxi we ditched, I found myself settled on a backseat, this time hugging the camera pack to my chest squeezed between two other passengers inside an over-capacity matatu. The rear tunnel perspective provided an accentuated sensation of movement no different than one experienced from the trailing car on a rollercoaster. An alternating red and blue neon light in conjunction with a deafening beat of 50 Cent further heightened my sense of absurdity over the driver’s power weaving and the van’s rebounding in and out of pot-holes.
Una kula waru?
I smiled and enjoyed the ride. Damn, I’m having fun.

Kenya (Nairobi) – Kibera: Part Two

The thickening clouds gave way to early morning rains and overcast skies. Cindy, a Kenyan resident student at the Village Volunteers home bundled herself with warm clothing. I walked into the kitchen wearing my usual gym shorts and a button-down blue shirt as she prepared breakfast, an assortment of avocados, bananas, chopped vegetables mixed with scrambled eggs and warm indescribable chai tea.
“Aren’t you cold?” The temperature felt like low 70s.
“No, this is great. The temperature back at home is hovering mid-30s C, so I’m liking this a lot.”
“You are crazy.” She annunciated with a grin. “This is cold for us, and this rain is not normal. Climate change.” Unseasonable rain and droughts, receding glaciers on nearby Kilmanjaro, Mt. Kenya and the Rwenzoris, are significant markers to a changing climate on equatorial east Africa. I expressed how cool it would be to hike the Rwenzoris, also known as the Mountains of the Moon, on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) then ski down only for the novelty of skiing at the Earth’s equator.
“Better hurry.”
I picked up a Matatu and met Victor for lunch in downtown Nairobi. A plate each was placed in front of us of tilapia fish caught at Lake Victoria and served fried and complete with slits carved vertically across the body. On the seat between us rested an Orutu, a traditional Luo single string violin-like instrument made for his half-brother.
“I’m surprised your brother sold it to me.” His brother is local Kenyan traditional/hip-hop fusion artist. I would have liked to meet him at his studio, but our time was limited.
“Actually, he didn’t want to,” Victor laughed. “The goat skin on its drum was slaughtered on his tenth birthday.”
“You’re kidding me? I can’t take this.”
“It’s okay. He has two, and he figures it’ll have special meaning to have one here and in the U.S.”
Victor, a university student and unofficial guide to Tyler and myself throughout Nairobi, finished his tilapia meal long before I finger tore through one side of mine. He picked at his plate of ugali (a loaf of maize) and talked of our similar and contrasting cultures.
“In this Nigerian film, a Nigeran man visits the United States and goes into a bakery. He receives a loaf of bread, but when he goes to pay for the bread, he realizes he left his wallet and money at his hotel. He offers to take the bread, but return with the money later that day. The cashier says, ‘No,’ and threatens to call the police ater he insists to take the bread, but return later. The Nigerian man is dumbfounded,” Victor described then added, “We find that really funny why the cashier would act in such a way. Here, it would be okay to take some food from a vendor with the intent of returning with money.”
“Meanwhile, people in the U.S. would side with the cashier and distrust the man, finding his actions humorous,” I generalized, picking up the check before meeting with Solo7 in Kibera.
“I finished it very nice for you,” Solo said handing me a wood canvas painting of Jesus Christ carrying his cross, mounted on an 8x10 hardwood slab.
“Thank you, Solo. This is great. I would have bought this piece off of you if I could ship it home,” I admitted pointing to his “fire” painting.
“You could take it off the frame and roll it.”
“That’s a good idea, but I don’t have enough money on me to give you and we leave Nairobi the day after tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
A pause then I had an idea. “You said art supplies are hard to come by, right? Would you want to work out a barter deal where I mail you paints and brushes in exchange for the painting? You could ship it to me after receiving the supplies.”
“That would be great,” Solo responded beaming with a smile. “You can take the painting now.”
“You trust me?”
“Yes. Sure.”

Margaret, Alan’s mother, dressed under a long thin purple dress with an off-white zipper-down sweatshirt rose from a stool at the foot of her kiosk and hugged Tyler and I. Hugs and other public displays of affection are taboo in east African culture. “Frank, I saw a picture in Tyler’s journal of his mother and father kissing,” Alan laughed with the same innocence of a kindergartner confronted against coodies.
“Don’t people kiss here?”
“Yes, but only in private. It is not acceptable in public.” Later I would learn dates are comprised of talking before going straight to business. There appears to be no middle ground. I don’t know how much of a generalization that is, however.
Toi Market, as it always appears, bustled with foot traffic through the narrow corridors between shops. An elderly woman lay on the dirt beside Margaret; her cheekbones prominent beneath crumpled paper skin. The woman pulled a brown blanket over her face, muttering something in Swahili to no one in particular and hid from us. Only pruned fingers tips gave hint someone huddled underneath the fabric heap. Not once did I see her peek from under the shroud.
Seven days since arriving in Nairobi and all but one day we visited Kibera, alternating visits with Solo7 and Alan’s family.
“You are free here, Frank. Do whatever you need,” Alan’s father John explained to me walking to Toi Market the first time. “People know me, they know Alan, and if they see you with us, you are accepted. Be free. Film what you want.”
That was a relief. Many either hid from the camera or shouted at me not to film in their direction. Many reasons can be cited for people’s negative reactions to any camera, video or still, professional or consumer. Exploitation ranks at the top.
Following the post-election violence, and to a lesser extent before, shantytowns like Kibera were under the spotlights of sensationalizing media attention. Although definitely a stark contrast to western standards, many residents of Kibera feel their lives are being pitifully portrayed as a means for profit. One cannot argue on either of those accounts, although on the other hand the truth is what it is and in rebuttal all media—journalistic and art—is exploitative under either negative or positive connotations. This is both an ethical and sometimes moral dilemma documentary filmmakers face, and it is not an easy path to follow. Fortunately, everyone who understands our purpose and project has not only been accepting of the camera, but also very forthright with insight through a candor that is shocking.
Serendipitously meeting Alan presented an amazing inside look into not just his family’s life, but also the inner workings of Kibera, specifically the surrounding villages of Mashimoni and Lainisaba, both areas of Kibera hit by the post-election violence.
“It was dangerous,” John explained to the camera. We sat at the center of a blackened tin siding enclosure, the remains of one’s home and now a site for trash dumping. “People were running everywhere. Some were running to the churches. The tear gas was all over Kibera. Houses were being burned. So many people were circumcised. Women were being raped. So many people were killed. You could not see Kibera. All you could see was smoke.”
Margaret added, “You see Toi Market. During the violence at Kibera, all of he shops were looted and everything was burned.” Months after, an NGO rebuilt the market place; the new shiny new siding stands in sharp brilliance against all of Kibera.
“Now we are staying very peaceful in Kibera,” John noted. He presented the view behind him. “You can see now we are restructuring ourself. We are coming together and I hope another election in 2012 such a thing will not happen.”
Following church a couple days earlier, we met with a self-initiated youth group of twenty-some children and teenagers brought together not only through faith, but a common interest in self-educating each other and those younger about everything from peace to AIDS through rap, poetry and plays. No adult guidance or direction; the assembly designs and creates everything privately and attendance is voluntary. Groups like this one, as well as other larger organizations covering poverty to women’s rights sprouted as a result of the post-election violence.

The shadows disappeared with the crowds and sun. Toi Market reflected all too well with its shiny metal roofing and dark wood foundations the cold blueness of nautical twilight. Tyler itched to get a move on.
We shook John’s hand and thanked him and his family for their support and cooperation with us. Together we bowed our heads and he led us in a short prayer.
“God, I ask you watch over and guide Tyler and Frank through Kenya that they may help bring peace to our country. I ask this of you Lord. Follow them. Protect them. Amen.”
“When are you coming back to Nairobi?” Margaret asked.
“I will be back in three weeks, but Frank will be traveling to Uganda and South Africa,” Tyler answered.
“Oh, you must visit us when you are in town. I am making a bracelet for both of your mothers. You tell her, ‘hello,’ for me from your mother in Kenya.”

Kenya (Nairobi) – Kibera: Part One

Alan squatted down on a bare spot of ashen rubble and shattered office ware he had kicked clear. His slightly torn red shirt contrasted him apart from the charred blue concrete walls, balanced by a shallow glow of daylight from an empty window behind him.
The 12-year old flipped scraps of burnt cardboard with a plastic shard as he explained, “I was just at home giving stones to my father and one of my friends was shot here,” he pointed to his thigh. “There was a fight in which enemies were fighting, and people were fighting each other.”
“Who exactly was fighting? What happened?”
“Police and also people. They go to house by house, house by house. They open the door, they beat you, they beat you, they rape you.” Alan clapped his hands together. He sat quiet for a moment. “You know most of them were my friends. One of them is in Kenyatta hospital.”
Alan continued, “In Kenya, tribalism is the thing which is going on and it is not finished. Because there are a lot of tribes and every tribe wants a land. You know there are forty-two tribes in Kenya.
“There was a tribe called Kikuyus—you know there is a place, Lainisaba, if they find you there, they take you and they circumcise you,” Alan waved his hands over the rubble. “Just like that, because they are their enemy.”
Public circumcision is a means humiliation and dominance, especially for tribes opposed to the traditional ritual as in the case between the Kikuyu and Luo. The Luo tribe set off the violence in December of 2007 after the Kenyan incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, apparently stole the election from Raila Odinga, a Luo. The police, mostly of Kikuyu origin, joined the violence. Their orders and execution are subject to debate.
“Do you think peace is possible?” Tyler Batson, the director of our documentary, A Chance for Peace, asked.
“No. I do not think so.” A pause. “But now there is grand coalition government of Kibaki and Raila. They are the ones who are in power now. Raila is prime minister. Kibaki is president.” In Kibera, Prime Minister Odinga is refereed to by his first name. “Raila” is painted on the walls of homes and businesses always in reference to “peace”, especially in Kibera.
A melting pot of over 600,000 residents—and on some estimates, one million—Kibera is the largest slum in Kenya, a scant fifteen-minute matatu (bus/van) ride from downtown capital Nairobi. Along the main one-lane highway, hundreds of private vendors hawk goods and services to town residents and adjacent Nairobi. Although bustling with heavy foot-traffic and mass transport, commerce appears scare from competition and poverty.
Tens of thousands of shanty shacks, few of concrete construction, many of corrugated tin siding wired to blue gum branches, blanket gentle rolling hills as one seamless rusting contoured floor. Home to many Kikuyus, as well as Luos, a dozen occupants may sleep in a space the size of a small studio apartment. Water is provided through a well system, but still boiled before drinking. Before the wells though, streams running between villages was potable, but a careless regard for rubbish and unsanitary latrine use has made the watercourse a reeking exposed sewer system.
Post-election, Kibera epitomized the example of violence from tribalism and political outrage. We met Alan while filming the ruins of a government building mobbed by protestors and torched by petrol bombs. I was told three people were killed just a few feet from where I set the camera. Alan, curious about the camera approached us.
Over the concrete fence, a choir’s praises resonated through cracked and scorched walls of a church still in use after fire bombed. A felt a drop of water splash on my neck, and although the sky looked as if it wanted to rain, nothing more fell.
“Can I ask you a question?” Alan asked me studying the camera as I reviewed footage from his interview.
“Sure.” No question followed. He slid two fingers over the camera’s focus ring. “You said you want to be a journalist?” I offered in exchange.
“Yes, but it is not going to happen.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not have money to go to college,” he stated quickly. (Refer to a previous post titled, “Namibia – Sundowner”)
“Do you need to go to college to have a job?”
“Yes.”
After a pause second-guessing my response, I explained to Alan how through persistence and unpaid labor for a local television station, he—in a sense—would get a “free” education, as well as establish connections that could lead to a paying job. In the States, internships especially in the film business are common practice, but here in Kenya?
He looked at me as if his heart, in all seriousness, skipped a beat. “I want your e-mail.”

Dressed in a flannel overcoat, forest-green beanie and enamel-splattered jeans, Solo7 carried a bucket of white paint to a wood fence and brushed the words, “Keep Peace by Solo7”. Local bystanders call out his name with affection as he crossed the Ngong Road to an advertisement wall. Smoke burning from heaps of trash blacken and peal the already muted colors of Melvin’s Chai Tea. “No Dumping” a sign reads. Solo writes, “Keep Kibera Clean by Solo7”. The bold white letters join the hundreds more political statements on every other surface in and outside Kibera’s main throughway. The vandalism is accepted and appreciated, and as a result, Solo7 is a hometown celebrity artist.
A tight dirt corridor between dividers of brown corduroy and pasty mud opens to a four-man Kenyan board game situated across from Solo7’s communal art studio, M2. A heavy metal door pushes into the enclosed cramped patio of a two-story shed. At the edge of the door’s swing is Gambo, another artist dabbing yellow acrylic onto a near-finished art canvas, his studio dubbed, “China”.
I walk up the bottle-cap coated staircase into “Amrika”, Solo7’s stage. Paintings, collages and sculptures shield the rusting tin wall. A window peers over the patio and surrounding Kibera framed over a bench littered with Giger-esque wire-frame figurines and woodcarvings.
Solo7 clears a space, sets a legal-letter sized composition against a propped-up translucent Coca-Cola banner, and outlines an ominous depicted figure with a soft lime-white glow. He dabs the acrylic paint heavily against the canvas; his brush blunt and hardened.
“After people heard that President Kibaki had won election, people grew mad ‘cause they expected Raila to be president. People say that they rigged election results. After that people had grown mad and they started torching people’s properties, setting them a blaze, and they were hunting Kikuyus from this place claiming Kikuyus are responsible for election rigging. So I saw in such a fashion, people cannot live that way forever since we are all suffering. All tribes of Kenya, because it was not business as usual.” He dipped his brush into a cap of green paint and touched the canvas. “Children were dying of hunger, and old men and women too. I decided to come up with this peace initiative writing on the walls at least to educate my fellow youths. ‘Cause they are the youth causing all this chaos. So I wanted them to understand and retreat back.”
Solo7’s penname originates from a series of coincidences: his proper first name, Solomon, being the seventh child in his family, and a series of life incidences that relate or reference the number “7”; in a much more significant way the number “17” has impacted my life.
“How has the post-election violence influenced your creativity?” I asked.
“It only affected the sense of my artwork, but not the creativity. I paint these pictures I normally see a kind of fire feeling. Like this piece that you see here,” Solo turned his body and pointed a large fabric canvas of human shapes worked into a flare of red brilliance. “Its got a lot of warm colors that depict fire.”
Solo continued to describe his depiction of the violence he experienced. I admired it for its composition, but above all the meaning from an artist of resistance.

Kenya (Nairobi) - Pieces

On the cover of Lonely Planet’s Guide on Kenya are the confident and anxious gazes of a cheetah family. Flip a couple pages past the front cover to the introduction page and you immediately get the sense Kenya is the premier tourist destination of eastern Africa. When taking into account the extensive wildlife, vistas and culture, nowhere in Africa is arguably so diverse and so accessible.
Outside the terminal gate at Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, forty or more drivers crowd a painted line on the floor holding paper name signs. Four middle-aged women decked out with outdoors safari attire, apparently a tour group, rant about the lack of pages provided in their passports. No free page, no visa, no entrance. They find their driver and laugh out the sliding door.
At the end of the line, a short, bald-headed Kenyan holds a sign with the title, “Village” for Village Volunteers, an NGO (Non-Government Organization) who’s purpose is to create sustainable development projects with other NGOs. This is achieved through grants, fundraising and importantly, to send volunteers where the help is needed.
Not far from the airport is Embakasi and the Doonholm district, a middle-class suburb of gated—and guarded—communities. (The term “suburb” is used to reference the upper-class locations of Nairobi.) Homes in Doonholm are like townhouses in the States; a two-minute walk from the Village Volunteers transition home however, will take you to the outer fringes of the Pipeline slums, a shantytown of makeshift huts and development housing. Interspersed between the shanty shacks and cement-framed apartments is a communal market of produce, services and apparel, in particular a wide assortment of shoes.
Vendors hawk their goods from a blanket or branch constructed shed. Higher end services, including salons and computer repair to government offices are walk-in closet-sized alcoves found along tarred roads leading into city center. The term “hole-in-the-wall” must have originated from the slums.
I stepped away for the rail track and let the six-car train chug over puddles of murky rancid water. The uneven chatter frightened a nearby chicken to flutter its wing fruitlessly. Scrupulous hawkers followed Winnie, a 26-year old Kenyan girl, and myself from behind their disheveled kiosks.
“Mzungu,” a group of guys ID-ed me smirking. We kept walking.
Two girls whispered.
“Go find your own mzungu man!” A man passing by witnessing the exchange yelled in Swahili at the girls. Winnie laughed.
“I’m going to open my own kiosk and call it the ‘Happy Mzungu’,” I joked. Happy white man.
“You should. You would have everyone’s business,” I was told. “You could listen to people’s problems and give them money,” Winnie suggested.
Maybe not. White is the color of Kenyan Schillings, in fact, and wearing an Arsenal jersey and speaking through an acceptable South African accent doesn’t change the fact I am a mzungu out of his element. Time is key.
An hour through standstill traffic brings me to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. A dense commercial market centered by the Hilton hotel—a landmark reference surrounded by rail, bus and matatu services, as well as a cluster-fuck of vehicle and pedestrian madness. And madness is an understatement, as a thick skin and ample patience is required to deal with the daily commutes and transfers of the mass population, where everyday is an endeavoring experience. Government willing, a civil engineer would generate serious bank to organize the civil chaos that is Nairobi.
Eight nights will be spent here, an excessive amount for anyone visiting without necessary purpose. But our purpose is necessary. And as the country regains credibility, we will examine the pieces that led to its fallout, and what picture it will construct as a result.
I’m sure somewhere in Kenya, Simba is presiding high on Pride Rock and those same middle-aged women from the airport are locked comfortably in their Land Rover jovially snapping pictures from a safe distance. As much as I’d like to join them (privately and unguided where one can break park rules and throw a rock at Simba for the sake of an exciting shot), that is not my purpose here in Kenya. Behind the tourist veil is a forgotten and misconceived reality, raunchy and impoverished, rife with corruption and hope of peace through a morbid recent history and uncertain future.
“This is Africa,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character states in the movie, Blood Diamond. Although used expressively before the movie’s release, the phrase—and its variation—is spoken with heightened popularity; at least it is here in Nairobi. “T.I.A.”
And as the electricity randomly switches off and on, herding pedestrians narrowly dodge reckless traffic, taxis and buses alike regularly fail or demonstrate the effectiveness of driving on empty, and political passions run rampant from city center to the bush, I am in Africa. No singing lions or wisecracking meerkats. This is Kenya.