Slug in a Bun

We are at the tail end (very punny) of the short rains, and the ground is fairly covered with banana slugs - which are the cause of much mirth and excitement for some of us (ok, mainly just me!). In the rich tradition of gross-out, cross-over children's poetry, I present:

Slug in Bun

Yellow and black on forest floor,

like a New York City cab - off duty.

Banana slug smugly snores,

looking impossibly snooty.

Snoozing in dead center of the trail,

I stepped around his slimy highness.

‘Detritivore!’, daddo details,

without intentional wryness.

Well, said I, inside my head,

my hermaphodritic homey.

Time for me to break some bread

and for you to show me -

How you did get that tasty sobriquet.

Quick as a blink, I did slap sluggy

into a whole wheat hot dog bun.

No ketchup here, it’s far too muggy

the food chain, mon cher, can’t be outrun

by a mere gastropod!

I dabbed my mouth, feeling a little green

With my favourite red bandana.

I’ll say this though, for outdoor cuisine:

I much prefer a ripe banana,

to that slithery gelatine!

Of abstractions and expectation management

S. hugging a 300 year old tree in a 'kaya' or sacred forest on the South Coast. Note the black robes, designating us honorary members of the Mijikenda tribe for the duration of our walk

S. is entering an age where she is grasping at abstract concepts, usually catching us off-guard on the scope of the suitable response. For instance, and as mentioned before in this blog, we often go to the hindu temple across the street for walks, yoga and roller blading classes. In a typical outing to the temple, we may well exchange greetings with the priest, see people praying, or walk by a shrine. Sofia invariably asks, what the devil is going on here? Ok, not in so many words, but to that general effect are questions such as:

• What is a temple?
• Why is the priest dressed like that?
• What does ‘respectful’ mean (this when I ask her to stop singing at the top of her lungs as we walk by the prayer hall)?

Thusly have we broached the broad topic of ‘prayer’. So far as I’ve been able to explain it to her, prayer is our way of saying thank you for all that we have been given. For instance, I tell her, I am thankful for our family, our health, my blue sweater (it was chilly), and peanut butter. In lawyerly fashion, I had organized the list from greatest to least significance. She nodded sagely. But even as I impart these gems, I am acutely aware of the law of intended consequences with S.

For the adjective ‘poor’ (another philosophical topic which arose due to Jack – of Jack and ze Beanstalk fame – and his mother being very poor because of the giant), for example, I defined as someone who doesn’t have many material things. Again the sage nod. But on a recent forest walk, S. asked whether banana slugs (which litter the path between the trees) were poor – after all, they don’t have many things.

I don't want to give the impression that we only have lofty discussions. Scatalogical humour continues to enjoy great acclaim in our household! On which point, see below the best bathroom we've seen so far (at a recycled glass factory we visited last week):

Alarmingly and unrelatedly, S. has also begun to intonate in faintly British fashion – with the last syllable of every sentence rising sharply, thereby making every sentence vaguely inquisitive in nature. “This road is very bumpy” for instance, has no business being a question but I find myself reflexively scrambling for an explanation because of the way S. delivers the sentence.

For my part, my favourite Swahili adoption is ‘sawa sawa’ – which is roughly the equivalent of theek hai, or ‘ok ok’, except for being way less dismissive, and therefore way more versatile:

• Someone cuts in front of you in line – sawa sawa (meaning you register with disapproval their behaviour, but aren’t inclined to make a fuss)
• Ending a phone call – sawa sawa
• Politely but firmly telling the bootleg dvd vendor you don’t think ‘Johnny English’ is a film you’ll enjoy – sawa sawa (may need to be amplified with a wave of the hand)

On the topic of sawa sawa/expectation management, our move date (December 9) grows ever closer. We got rid of some furniture before moving here so we have hired a carpenter to build a dining table, chairs, guest bed and armoires for us. The carpenters here deal so much with expats that they have Western catalogues (and not just Ikea, but Room & Board, Restoration Hardware etc.) from which you can pick your design. Underemployed as I am, I have married mid-century Danish profiles with a more robust country kitchen effect. The carpenter has been impossibly patient and accommodating, to the point that I am beginning to suspect that saying ‘no’ is just not in his repertoire. I’m probably gunning my Hummer of expectation directly towards the bluffs of disappointment - but I’m having a lot of fun along the way. Below, some shots of work-in-progress in Willish (the carpenter)’s workshop.

Sawa sawa!

Mvule wood office desk - local hardwood not dissimliar to oak. Note the artisan's dog Snoopy in the background! Not a labour-saving device in sight (largely because labour costs are relatively low)
Dining chair (varnished) upon dining table (unvarnished) - also Mvule wood. Upholstery will be pale green cotton-canvas.

The Hills are alive (with the sound of my dry heaving)

Don Quixote's worst nightmare!

I do love a good hill walk.

Luckily, the south west end of Robi is studded with the Ngong Hills (say it two or three times, you know you want to), a series of peaks (approx. 2500 feet) along the edge of the Rift Valley. It is about a 45 minute drive from where we are resting our heads (pour ne pas dire 'house'), but we were in a landscape a million miles from the city. Ngong is the Masaai word for 'knuckle', and the range has four knuckles or hills (of which the third is the steepest). Walking beyond the first is considered a security risk, so rangy, bored looking men in various rent-a-cop outfits materialize from the mist at the top of the first peak - to escort you (for a modest fee). Ours had a lovely smile and an evil looking truncheon!

We reached at about 830am, having driven our loaner Corolla over a rutted road which was still slick and red from the morning rains. We were literally in the cloud cover, and the entire scene had a dream-like quality. At one point, I thought we were in a high-school production of the opening scene of Macbeth.

Except that there were giant wind-mills standing hundreds of meters above us, their 10 meter long blades cutting lazily through the clouds and the mist, and then, just as suddenly, vanishing altogether into the haze. It was difficult to judge distance, and we began to think it might be a short walk after all (no rain gear, one jogging stroller, and three kids under age 5). But as we disembarked from our cars into the thin air, the clouds has already begun to thin.

I haven't run much since the NY marathon a few years ago due to the existential angst I found long runs generated in the city - Manhattan Bridge, Chinatown, Financial District, Brooklyn Bridge, skipping the ipod, watching the late night partiers finishing breakfasts and saying boozy goodbyes, nodding to the hard core Wall Streeters on their way to the office on a Sunday morning - there was just too much to think about at any given moment. Running in the Ngong was instantly transcendent ( I use that term advisedly) - and I am really not given to lapsing too lyrical. On your right, the Rift Valley, up ahead the emerald hills and the battered red earth, and above and about you the wispy clouds. No need to play music you'd never admit to owning (although 50 cent is surprisingly fun to run to) - you are a mere piston, evolved over hundreds of thousands of generations to run these very hills.

At the top of Knuckle 3, I'm pretty sure an eagle was hitting on me. It was hanging as though pinned to the sky, absolutely motionless, surfing on a wind channel. Given that we were at the same height (he hundreds of meters of void about the valley floor, and I on the peak of the highest knuckle), our eye contact was inevitable and intense. Our moment could have led to something great (cue Lionel Ritchie's greatest hits) had I not then had to retch from the effort of making it up the hill. When I looked up to wipe my chin of vomitus, the eagle was gone...


Anno and E. atop knuckle 3.

The third knuckle beckons (blue speck is yours truly)
GC showing disregard for security advisements!
For a sense of scale, that is a LandCruiser (and a bit further to the right, some cattle) at the foot of the windmill!

On being 'hangry'

After-school/pre-nap snack - October 2011

One of the biggest adjustments to living in Robi is the nanny-state shaped hole in my life. For better or worse (and more than likely the latter) and much as I grumbled about some of the absurdities of NYC (pack of cigarettes $14.00!, MTA charging more for less, 40% tax rates), I am evidently accustomed to having an ostensibly benevolent set of authorities watching out for me - whether by means of laws, public safety interventions, or even institutions of which I was only notionally aware (like child protective services, or 9-1-1).

This is not the case here (although granted I've never lived through a Hurricane Katrina type of scenario). And perhaps because I am a parent, I feel a sense of vulnerability which is relatively new to me. Examples abound:

• A man in a clown suit at a party handing darts to a 2 year-old to throw at a dart board standing in front of an inflatable bouncy castle. (I took a deep breath but did not intervene because the mother seemed cool with it)
  
• A child of ten with vacant grey eyes desultorily asking me for change through the car window, with a sky blue pot of glue hanging from a thread around his neck (Totally not sure how to behave - just averted my eyes)
  
• A security guard's belly laugh while he absent-mindedly searched the trunk of a car at a security check point at a market popular with expats (I felt safe enough, maybe because I was alone in the car)
• Ridiculous decision-making exhibited by the 15-seater minivans (mutatus) which serve as municipal buses here (My sense of invulnerability was shaken by the sheer violence of some of the accident scenes I have witnessed).
  

On balance, perhaps a little self-reliance might be a good thing for me, but it is certainly proving more nerve racking than anticipated. Maybe it is also a sense of quasi-permanence of us being here which is contributing to this need for re-orientation.

We have signed a lease which is to begin on December 9, so I am spending a lot of time at or around the house trying to get it licked into shape by then. Some of the changes are critical (getting security sensors and fence re-done to UN spec), some structural (roofing), and some cosmetic (re-tiling of bathrooms). While the landlord pays for much of this, the onus falls squarely on the tenant (yours truly) to ensure that the work is progressing with December 9 in mind. Given that Anno will 8 months pregnant then, it is crucial that all sanding, painting and other noxious work be concluded before then.

As a result, I've had a lot of dealings with Kenyan tradespeople. First off, I have a whole new respect for the concept of punctuality. By and large, people are very respectful of appointments, and arrive on time if not early. This is especially impressive given that they travel almost exclusively by mutatu, that extremely coarse needle stitching together space and time in Robi.

Imagine - you have an appointment with your (economically significant) client, but you have no idea when the next bus will arrive, what condition it will be in, or what madman will be at the wheel. Now imagine arriving on time, smiling, and (by and large) work deliverables in-hand. Impressive!

Every now and then, however, the veil of formality will slip and you can taste the hardness of this sort of life. To enter the nabe in which our house is (Spring Valley), you have to pass a security guard manning a gate. Normally, you drive past in a car with a wave at the guard. Once this week, however, I was walking by to go to the petrol station (Oil Libya - you won't see that in the States, or maybe soon you might!) to buy a drink. I nodded to the guard as I walked by, asking 'how's things?' (or something to that effect). He looked me straight in the eye and said: "Very well, but I have much hanger."

This caused me to furrow the old brows. He didn't seem especially angry. I asked what he meant, so he pointed to his tummy and repeated: "Hangry" I nodded slowly, without any comprehension of what he was on about.

It was only under Oil Libya's humming tube-lights that I realised that he was very hungry. I bought some cashew nuts and handed them to him on the way back, hoping that my deduction wasn't wrong. His 1000 watt smile suggested it wasn't.

In any event, photos of the house after the jump:

Main entrance

Anno hamming it up as we check out the grounds!

View of garden

Drinking the laughter milkshake...

Last week, we moved from the old serviced apartments (Wasini) to new ones (Spring Valley Gardens - SVG), largely because the latter are much closer to our to-be-new house (lease starts December 9), the UN campus, and Sofia’s school. SVG flats are also much larger, allowing Sofia to sleep in her own room at a proper bedtime (745 to 8pm).

The UN campus is an emerald rhomboid of several square kilometers on the northern edge of Nairobi. Bordered by the Karura Forest (of. W. Mathaai fame), the UN campus is a universe unto itself, with a heated pool, a commissary (who knew duty-free champagne was still pretty expensive – although, on the plus side, I’m considering taking up a serious smoking habit and/or smuggling tobacco into NYC), restaurants, medical clinics, oh and a few offices.

The UN campus is also where I go, on a weekly basis, to wage bureaucratic trench warfare in order to get us in compliance with the rules applying to diplomatic families here. So as not to bore you, it will suffice for the present to simply say that there are some forms to be filled, some of which require passport photos and supporting documentation. The tricky bit is the Rumsfeldian nature of both the paperwork and those souls tasked with processing them – in that there are often things that an applicant (such as myself) will simply not know to ask. And no one in these offices will volunteer a shred of information beyond exactly what you’ve asked. This makes for a frustrating dialogue:

Me: So how can I arrange for duty free import of the car I have bought from Japan?

Officer: For which agency do you work?

Me: Actually, I am a mere spouse, but my wife …

Officer (interrupting): Hee-yah, hee-yah (stabbing at a printed sheet with finger), the staffa must sign forms X, Y, Z and then present themselves with Authorization Certificates A, B and C.

Me: Oh, so you need to have A, B, and C before you can get to X, Y, and Z?

Officer (barely keeping it civil now): Have you received Action Forms D, E, and F from your HR?

Me: Erm, well I do have our passports and a writing implement so perhaps…

Officer (calling over my shoulder at the line forming behind me): NEXT PLEASE!

By late morning, I had reached my personal limit for such administrative hand-to-hand combat. I hadn’t actually gotten anything filed or submitted, but the various decision trees were at least clearer in my mind.

So I decided to celebrate my limited success with a brand new experience: laughter yoga. While shopping at the greengrocer opposite SVG (another perk of the move, at the old apartments even buying a container of milk required a taxi ride), I saw a flyer announcing laughter yoga classes at the local mandir (also opposite SVG).

Now the closest I’ve come even to yoga so far are the internal breathing exercises which hung gar kung fu favours. In the spirit of saying yes to things (hence the name of this blog), and safe in the knowledge that I am totally anonymous in this town, I showed up in ‘comfortable clothes’ (I’d read that somewhere re: yoga). The grounds of the temple are leafy and several decibels more muted than the street onto which the entrance gives. People of all ages and colours were walking in ambling circles around the main temple structure, where the temple authorities have created a walking path (a rarity in Nairobi) for the general populace (no id checks or guard at the entry). It is so refreshing when religious organizations produce actual social value and relevance. I was impressed even before I got to the great hall where the class was being held.

In one carpeted corner of a football-field sized hall were a group of about 15 women, ranging in age from 7 to 75. The instructor was a kind-faced lady in her early 50s, with a mannish voice and the sort of relentless enthusiasm that had a cynic like myself rolling my eyes (privately, of course). Self-doubt began to leak into the vessel of my adventurism. But before I could engage my navel-gazing emotional sub-routines, the class began.

The instructor had us stand, and explained that eye contact was crucial to this class. We accordingly eye-balled each other creepily while she went on to explain the basic premises of laughing yoga: (i) the human body and mind are simply unable to discern spontaneous laughter from generated laughter, and the benefits (endorphins etc.) are released regardless of how laughter is triggered, and (ii) from a technical standpoint, laughter is merely a form of exhalation, and exhalation is the key to all mindful meditation. Although the wizened lady in a headscarf into whose eyes I was gazing at this point might not have been able to tell, I appreciated the common-sensical and Sanskrit-free nature of the instructor’s explanation.

And then we launched into our first exercise, which consisted of clapping our hands (with fingers spread out so as to engage the pressure points) twice at waist height while shouting “Ho Ho”, then three time at head height while shouting “Ha Ha Ha” – all the while shuffling around the carpet in no particular pattern and maintaining a dizzying degree of eye contact with our neighbours. All at once, the instructor called a halt to this, and started into an entirely unrelated scenario:

• You’re sick (she says), so you go to the doctor. He writes a prescription, which you get filled. It is a bottle of pills. You read the label, and they are laughter pills. Let us now take the pills.

To the great credit of the instructor, all 16 of us did exactly as she said – taking an imaginary pill from an imaginary bottle and placing it on our tongues, and then erupting into a self-summoned bellowing laughter. Incredibly, by my third pill, and locked in eye contact with a 7 year old Indian girl, my laughter began to feel true. Why not, said my heart and mind, why not?

Other such exercises followed:

• The Laughter milkshake: You have a cup of laughter yogurt in your left hand, and a cup of laughter berries in your right. Pour the berries into the yogurt, then drink it (and burst out laughing)
• The 'very good' - Bend at the waist, inhale and swing your arms, saying "Very Good Very Good". Then exhale, straighten your torso and extend your arms over your head, saying "yay!"
  
• The gibberish: With a partner, speak in an entirely made up tongue of weird sounds and gobble-de-gook (luckily, I get a lot of practice with S.). Your partner has to start their gibberish sentence with the last syllable in yours. Bonus – the instructor also said this was a great way to remove the tension from an argument with a loved one – cannot wait to try this!

I left feeling vaguely high, and will definitely be back next week. In fact, I will make a point to schedule some tedious but necessary task beforehand just so I can then drown my despair in a laughter milkshake!

It’s also such a good feeling to have the time and bandwidth to actually be mindful for an activity like this. In NY, I can remember showing up to kung fu class so frazzled that I would keep my watch on just so I always knew when I had to leave. I guess saying yes to things has its perks!

Very good, very good, YAY!