My Africa Trip - 7

Chronicle of 6/3/11

I awoke at around 4am(why is it always 4am? That's 2pm PST time.) to the feeling of bugs crawling all over me; dozens of them. They looked vaguely like wasps, but if the butt end was shaped like a maggot. The horrifying, hateful things were everywhere. Luckily they didn't seem to fly well, but their slow determined writhing and crawling was revolting. I stomped them dead for maybe 30 minutes. They were everywhere. In the beds, on the floors, in the bathroom, on and inside the mosquito nets. The way they'd find cracks in the netting and crawl up the inside of the netting makes me want to throw up.

After killing maybe 50-100 of them, I finally found where they were getting in. The crack under the door. I stuffed a towel under the door and killed probably 10 more as they found ways past the towel defense.

I was only able to sleep after another quick cold shower rinse, hopping into Katie's single bed, and stuffing the netting bottoms under the mattress as deep as it would go. Later there were only a few that got through the towel, but the slaughter of dead bugs covered every single square inch of the small room and bathroom we were staying in. When we asked others, no one else had experienced this strange attack.

REM went on as usual and staying my usual positive, optimistic self was becoming harder all the time. My table guys' perpetual friendliness certainly helped a lot.

Up to this point I had been relying on Sarah's limited information as well as control of our bus to tell me when I could go to town to search for food. She had said lunch time. This did not happen. I finally decided to be more proactive as Sarah was obviously spread too thin with REM and everything else she was doing.

The whole reason we picked Kenya, Sarah, and this trip to Turkana was because we were coming to a far off alien land and wanted to make sure we had a guide that was doing the same things we wanted to do. This was not happening as we had been told. REM was taking up way more of our time than I could have possibly imagined.

I talked to a couple people and found out the school connected to the church was taught by a wonderfully kind woman named Naomi. I spoke with her about getting the local Lordwar kids a bit more than one meal a day, and hopefully getting it to last. She suggested sweet biscuits. You could purchase one box of 300 servings for 240/= (about $2). "Wonderful", I thought.

As Sarah was too busy to go during lunch, she said "plenty of time later." I knew this was ridiculous when I heard it. I saw the REM schedule. I knew how late it went. Hope overcame logic and I told Naomi I'd go get the biscuits during the dinner break.

Sure enough, it was dark by dinner time, and going outside the compound at night equals guaranteed murder/rape for anyone not brown enough. I apologized to Naomi and promised the next day for sure. Come hell or high water or murder/rape, tomorrow for sure as it was the last day we were to stay in Turkana.

One part of REM that was different that day was something they called "hugging instructions", or something like that. They asked I work the music during this time as it was kind of like a show with models demonstrating different kinds of hugging and how to do them appropriately for humorous effect. It was a welcome break.

The big guy from our missionary group, Isaac, mustache and all, dressed as a woman w/ make up. It was interesting not just because a man in drag is consistently entertaining, but because they were concerned about men and women hugging too closely. So essentially their answer for the sexual perversion of a man and woman hugging too closely, was to employ a drag queen. Ridiculous, but funny none the less; especially so, with the Beegees Music and dancing.

Anyways, according to the REM guidelines, appropriate hugging during the meeting, between a man and a woman is to hold both each others hands, look into each other's eyes and say "I love you in Jesus." While the man on man hug is a big bear hug and the "I love you in Jesus" tag line.

The guys are always super friendly so the big hugs on the way back to my table from working the music weren't anything new. The awkwardness was with the women. As a representative of REM, I actually had to stop two women from coming in for a real hug. Naturally, this was awkward for everyone involved. One of the women I'm pretty sure simply didn't understand the hugging announcer's broken English while the other woman, was of course, Rael. I had already passed around the far side of her table on the way to the back of the room where my table was, and she called me back for a hug. Substantiation!

Little did I now just how right I was. More on that later.

That evening I spent time with an 18 year old Turkana local boy. I tried to explain what snow is as he tried to teach me some local dialect words. He spoke maybe 100 English words and with a heavy accent and I'm apparently linguistically retarded because he probably repeated "Yohtu"(hot in English) a 100 times and I still am not sure I ever got it right. I am sure he never understood what snow was though. It was like trying to describe color to a blind man. Apparently most all of the 20+ tribes in Kenya have different local dialects. They all supposedly speak Swahili and the closer to major cities they are the more British English they speak. I later read that while Africa is only about 12% of the world's population it has 30% of all the world's languages.

I gave the boy my dinner and tried to get more information about what life in Turkana was like. Very poor, very few jobs, rather dangerous, nothing too new. He did point out a rather sophisticated power station that was there and mentioned that mostly foreigners were brought in to run it. Apparently education is also extremely lacking. Later I did a simple math test on a couple boys in the sand. Their method for calculating a single digit multiplication like 6x8 was to make 8 rows of 6 slashes each and count them one by one.

This wasn't an indication of lack of intelligence. Them both jumping to the same poor method was indicative of poor teaching. Apparently they don't have their own books either. Something I vow to remedy.