I played chicken today on the walk home from the gym.
In Kenya, the car has the right-of-way.
In Kenya, the car has the right-of-way.
But I wanted to see if he would really just hit me. In broad daylight. A stranger. A visitor, in fact, in his country. So I played chicken. He was coming fast. Bryanne said that I should move but I said, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“No, I’m playing chicken.”
She kept walking. The car approached. A bit faster than recommended.
Eventually, he veered to his right just before he almost had a bad day. I veered a step to my right, too, at the same time. I’ll admit, it was a tie. I didn’t win at chicken.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
One of the ladies we passed on the way home knew Susan. They said hello and all of the other stuff in Kiswahili but then just as we were leaving they exchanged something in KiBakusu (which is a language I don’t know - by the way.)
Susan probably said something like, “Help! Save me from these crazy white people!”
When I asked her, she insisted that she was just telling her we were coming home from the gym. But why couldn’t she have said that in Kiswahili? Why indeed, I ask.
2Bhonest, I probably would have felt bad about not knowing what
they said to each other in KiBakusu when we first got here. But after 6years in this land - I’d bet my entire TOPPS baseball card collection from the 1980s that it was harmless. So instead of fussing&fretting I
started listening to this eerily-soothing sound in the air.
It was a mixture between what you might hear on a Friday morning coming from your local neighborhood Mosque combined with a taste of Indian and a splash of African Christian sounds. ‘Twas nice. Just one man’s solitary voice. Floating. Effortlessly. Carried only by the breath of wind that endeavored itself to accompany it. [Okay, so it was really carried with the help of a microphone and speaker system at the Showground.]
But we were nearly a kilometer away and we could still hear it. Not bad wind. I smiled. And listened. And then greeted two dude-guys riding past us on their bikes. One was carrying half of a kids’ bike on the back of his. It was red. And unusual. It’s not that the “bike” itself was unusual other than being, sure, half of one. But the fact that there was a “kids’ bike” at all was really the unusual part. Kids don’t normally have bikes here. And if they do . . . then they’re the grown-up kind. They ride standing on the peddles since their butt can’t reach the seat. It works - why not.
I probably looked at the half-of-a-red-bike too long, though, or at least longer than I should have because immediately I felt a little slipNslide underneath my left tennis shoe. Yep. Goat-du. Fresh. A bigger-than-normal helping and I landed right in the middle of it.
Pretty good aim for not looking.
When I took my ‘boys’ [Otieno & Onyongo] to town today to get them some jackets and shirts, I saw something as we went up the stairs in the Supermarket.
On some of the steps, a company who sells mosquito nets has put a sticker with words on it talking about stuff that would make you want to buy a mosquito net in order to protect your kids’ futures. Most of the time people look down when they go up the steps and so you read the words. It’s way-cool advertising and fun as well. I like to read them.
But this time I was with Otieno and when I read one --- I stopped straight-up-still in my tracks. It said,
“My son dreams of flying some day.”
“Look, Otieno,” I said. He read it,
