We continued on to Boniface’s family compound, a short walk away. The village was virtually identical to Hamisi’s. We sat in the centre of a tidy collection of red mud huts, surrounded by young children in torn clothing, talking to Boniface’s brothers. Boniface’s family seemed to be better educated than Hamisi’s, although their standard of living was the same. And in Boniface’s family, too, three employed men were financially supporting all the rest. As in all of Africa, the women were working hardest of all, providing the food and the necessities of life.
I was making my usual effort to keep my English simple. Suddenly, Boniface’s oldest brother, Andrew, leaned forward and said something like this: “I think it’s time we stakeholders understood clearly that further education is anathema to the continuation of poverty in Africa.”
Stakeholders? Anathema? I couldn’t believe my ears! Most of the people I know don’t even know what anathema means, much less being able to toss it casually into conversation. The contrast – between the blood-sprinkling medicine man and the confident young man saying anathema – left our heads spinning.
Herbert and I leaned forward and began to study this man more carefully. Soon, we became engaged with him in a long and vigorous discussion about the Kenyan political system, corruption, tribalism, and the importance of education. “Ensuring transparency in our public institutions is paramount,” he was saying. “Also the eradication of tribalism and the establishment of the merit principle.”
Here we were, confronted with a man who was at least our intellectual equal, but who, like millions of other Africans no matter how gifted or capable, was still bringing up his children in a mud hut with no running water or electricity. Suddenly, we realized that if we had been born in an African village, it would have been us sitting in Andrew’s place. We would have been just as helpless to do anything about it.
The oldest son of a polygamous, illiterate father, Andrew Thuva had begun school under a baobab tree, without even a roof over his head or textbooks. But from the start, he had been determined to succeed. He had heard that the best student in his school would qualify for a YMCA scholarship to continue into high school. Secondary school was an ambitious dream that could only be achieved with hard work and outside help. His father earned almost nothing and could never have hoped to send him. Andrew’s ultimate ambition, to work in an office and one day drive back to his village in a car, seemed as far away as the moon.
Andrew not only won that scholarship, but went on to become the best student in his high school as well. He won another scholarship, which enabled him to attend college. He told us the story of how he had gone to Nairobi, with his school fees paid for but nothing more, with only ten dollars to his name and the clothes on his back. He had literally starved, sleeping on the dangerous streets while attending classes and earning good marks. The only thing he could think of was to write a European couple he had once met on vacation. They sent him enough money to pay for food and shelter during his three years in college.
Now, thanks to his education and ambition, thirty-two-year-old Andrew was earning two hundred dollars per month at a hotel. But instead of using the money to increase his own standard of living, he was doing his best to put his younger siblings through secondary school. He understood that nothing was as important to their future as education. He had already succeeded with two of them, Ngumbao and Mark, who used the word “hero” when he described the sacrifices his older brother had made for him. The next oldest, Katana, was also in high school. But the next in line, our friend Boniface, was out of luck. Andrew’s resources had run out. This is why we had found Boniface hawking shark teeth on the beach.
Once again, Africa had clobbered us and shaken us up. Every night our dinner table conversation was dominated by the problem of African poverty. Meeting Andrew was another turning point in our trip, and in our lives. He helped us understand that a ragged young man living in a poor mud hut was just like us.
Gradually, painfully, we came to one unavoidable realization. If we turned our backs on these people – whose needs were both so modest and so great – if we left without making some kind of significant contribution, we would fail our test as human beings.
20
Plinking Stones Down a Mountain
We knew we couldn’t solve all of Africa’s problems, but we realized that we did have the power to help Boniface. We decided that the minimum our family could do would be to support Boniface through the rest of his schooling. It was no longer possible to watch Africa as spectators; decency required that we do something. If we provided an education for Boniface, one that would enable him to get a decent job and pull his future children out of poverty, we would, in fact, have changed the world: Boniface’s world, and the world of those who would follow him. It was only a small act of kindness, one small pebble being tossed down a mountainside, but at least it was something.
We went away for two weeks on a safari to inland Kenya. During that time, we couldn’t help but reflect that the money we spent on the safari could have fed Boniface’s entire family for years. A few days after we returned, before we had a chance to tell Boniface about our intentions, he mentioned that his father, who had been ill, had taken a turn for the worse. Although he didn’t ask directly, implicit in Boniface’s statement seemed to be a request for help. Uncertain what was the right thing to do, a little nervous that we might be getting taken advantage of, we asked Boniface to take us to see his father.
We walked to Boniface’s village. Boniface’s father, Kitsao, was lying on his side on a woven mat on the swept dirt of the family compound, a shrivelled-up shell of a man wrapped in a piece of cloth. His eyes were closed, his head cradled on bony arms. He was only fifty-five, but looked seventy. His emaciated body was shaking violently, even though it was a warm day and he was lying in the sun. There was no question he was very sick.
We helped take Kitsao to a doctor, who informed us that the immediate threat was a severe case of malaria. Kitsao’s underlying problem, however, was even more serious: a large and growing tumour in his prostate gland was blocking his urinary duct. The doctor put a temporary catheter in place to drain the urine, but this was only a stopgap measure. Kitsao was in urgent need of surgery, which would cost at least 50,000 Kenya shillings.
My mind was reeling as I tried to translate Kenya shillings into dollars without misplacing any zeros. I double-checked my arithmetic with Herbert. He confirmed my fear: the cost was a thousand dollars. This family could never come up with that kind of outlay. They didn’t even have the ten dollars required to see the doctor that day. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach, and lay there, heavy as a rock.
While Kitsao was having his malaria injections, I whispered to Herbert what the doctor had told me. For a moment, Herbert and I debated in whispers whether we would be willing to assume the cost of the operation. It was our first instinct; how could we deny this man his life? But then we realized that we could not take on all of this family’s burden. Kitsao was already an old man by Kenyan standards. We had to establish priorities. That same money would go much further if invested in Boniface.
As we stood there, we realized we had just come to a decision not to help the sick man who sat slumped in a chair before us. Both Herbert and I had to struggle hard to control tears so Mark and Boniface wouldn’t see our anguish. For a moment, we wished we hadn’t got involved, hadn’t brought Kitsao to the doctor at all. It was like biting into an apple from the Tree of Knowledge – now there was no escaping the terrible knowledge, or its consequences.
“This is the price we have to pay for bringing these people into our lives,” Herbert said sadly. It was a heavy price indeed.
That night we lost sleep again – our Africa sleep, we were beginning to call it. We decided it was crucial that we talk to Andrew to make sure he understood the severity of the situation and began tapping into all available resources as soon as possible. We suspected no one in this family really understood what their father was facing. Mark h
ad listened to the doctor along with me, but I wasn’t sure he had clearly understood the message, buried under medical terminology, that without surgery his father was going to die. Andrew worked at a hotel near Mombasa, and only came back to his wife and children on Sundays. The following Sunday, Boniface brought Andrew to the beach where we were anchored.
We had guessed correctly; Andrew had no idea. When we told him how badly his father needed the operation, and the cost of it, his face receded deeper into the shadows of the mangrove tree under which we were standing, and he was quiet for a long moment. We could see that he was crying.
In a minute, Andrew regained his composure, and thanked us for letting him know. He began making plans to see whether his father qualified for some kind of medical fund that would at least pay part of the cost. But we had delivered a difficult blow.
It was hard to be the bearers of bad news, but we had good news for Andrew as well. We explained that we had come to a decision to sponsor Boniface to complete secondary school, provided he agreed to do everything possible to ensure that his own children would have the same advantage – and this meant not having more children than he could afford. Herbert also explained that one of the conditions was that in future, if Boniface was able, he also sponsor another child to go to school, and place upon that child the same conditions we were outlining today.
Boniface stood gravely as we spoke, looking very shy, almost as if afraid to speak. Andrew’s eyes were glistening again as he listened; then he turned to his brother.
“Do you understand the obligations you would be assuming?” he said to his younger brother in a severe tone. “This is a tremendous opportunity they are offering you. But if you accept, you will have to abide by these conditions. And you are going to have to work very hard. They are not going to invest this money in you unless you get very good marks. This is a lot of money. This is not the kind of money people throw away for nothing.”
Boniface nodded mutely. His eyes were huge.
“You don’t need to answer today,” said Herbert. “You take some time to think this over, and decide whether you are prepared to meet these conditions.”
Andrew shook our hands with an extra squeeze and we promised to meet again in a week.
As the brothers walked away down the beach, we could hear Andrew continuing his fatherly tirade. Andrew was a small man, but so very large inside. Our admiration for him went up another notch. Herbert and I climbed in our dinghy and returned to Northern Magic, carrying our own curiously heavy mixture of grief and hope.
It was time to get Northern Magic ready for her long slog up the Red Sea. We asked Boniface, Hamisi, and Mark to help us with painting her bottom. On the appointed day, another of Boniface’s many brothers, Katana, appeared as well. Katana was an extremely dark and handsome young man of nineteen, quiet, polite, intelligent, and unusually mature like the rest. Since we didn’t have the heart to send him away, he joined the paid work crew as well.
At high tide, we drove Northern Magic alongside some old cement pilings from a long-since-disappeared dock, tying up securely so that we wouldn’t tip over. As the tide fell, Herbert and the African boys scraped and painted her hull. Mark and Katana offered to stay awake in our cockpit overnight to guard against thieves. They appeared after dinner armed with crossbows and fishing line, and we slept securely knowing they were on watch.
In the morning I was faced with the question of what to feed them for breakfast. Being fresh out of maize meal, the African staple, I decided to make oatmeal porridge instead.
Porridge sweetened with milk and sugar was a luxury our friends had never experienced. But what was most interesting was Katana’s reaction to raisins. He just couldn’t get enough – so much so that after finishing his second huge bowl of porridge he began spooning raisins directly into his mouth. I finally gave him the whole pack, and he gobbled them all down. He’d never seen nor even heard of such a food before. I had, in fact, bought the raisins in Mombasa, but of course our friends did not shop at supermarkets.
The four of them worked hard and got Northern Magic scraped and sanded at low tide on the first day, and totally repainted on the second. I cooked a giant batch of chili, which, at the end of the day, we all wolfed down together in the cockpit. The meat as well as the bread with butter were more rare treats for our team of hungry, paint-splattered young men. A whole loaf disappeared in a flash.
As we sat there together, chatting, satisfied, and tired, Mark turned to me and said with a very big and grateful smile, “It’s amazing that people like us can sit here and just be friends with people like you.”
“What do you mean?” said Herbert.
“You are different from us,” Mark replied, “and we’re not used to people like you treating us as friends.”
“And what is the difference between us?” asked Herbert, although he knew full well what Mark meant.
There was a pause and it was Katana who answered, saying softly, “Our skin is black.”
“Well that’s the only difference,” replied Herbert, “and it’s no difference at all.”
All four of our guests nodded, but not with much assurance. There was something in this exchange that made my heart crumble. Why should these four intelligent, capable, and nice young men feel so grateful for the ordinary friendship we had offered them? It was because, for them, receiving hospitality from a white person, a mzungu, was unheard of.
The community of Kilifi consisted of a few relatively wealthy retired whites, mostly of British background, living in palatial homes, and a large number of extremely poor black people living hand-to-mouth. There is no fault in being rich, but it’s quite another thing to treat the rest as if they are just a little less than human. Yet this is what we saw, over and over again.
It would not be fair to suggest that the examples we saw are representative of all white people in Kilifi. There were people who treated everyone with consideration, and these were the same ones who were making other substantial contributions to the community. But Mark had been raised to feel that there was something insufficient and offensive about him, some mysterious rule of the universe that dictated that if you had white skin, you were automatically rich, and if you had black skin, you were poor and liable to be yelled at, kicked, or chased away.
I can’t forget how Mark looked after he saw the cramped interior of Northern Magic for the first time. After the painting was done, our boys had taught Mark, Boniface, Katana, and Hamisi how to play computer games, the first time the Africans had ever used a computer. Mark looked around in wonder at everything we had inside the boat – books, running water, toilet, stove, TV, VCR, stereo CD player, two computers, and so much more. Mark himself owned very little more than the clothes on his back.
“I can’t believe you ever leave this boat,” he said. “You have everything you need right here. Why would you ever want to come ashore?”
Boniface and Hamisi had treated us to a cashew nut roast, so we decided to hold a marshmallow roast on the beach. None of them had ever seen marshmallows before. We used up five whole bags that day – the marshmallows being grabbed, roasted, and gobbled as fast as I could liberate them from the bag.
But we had something even better in store. A few days earlier we had made our weekly visit to Mombasa, one and a half lurching hours away by bus, to send our e-mails and buy groceries. And there we had discovered the most wonderful news: three other Ottawa Citizen readers, moved by my earlier dispatch about the struggles of Boniface and Hamisi and their families, were offering to send money to help them. We were blown away. The amount that had been pledged totalled nine hundred dollars.
One donor wrote, “I realize that this donation may seem like little more than a token gesture of kindness, particularly since poverty affects many families in Africa, but I feel inwardly compelled to do something. I have many things to be thankful for in my life – a healthy family and the privilege of a higher education. Please offer my best wishes to these two families. Tell them that t
here is someone on the other side of the world that is thinking about them.”
We showed that message to Mark and Andrew, and each of them got tears in their eyes when they read it.
Over the course of the next week, we met with Andrew and other family members several times to listen to their proposals of how best to use the money. Education was a high priority, and there were many more ideas than could be accommodated in the funds available. It was our job now to sift through all the possibilities and find the best plan to make a permanent change in these people’s lives.
Our job was time consuming, yet very satisfying. How lucky we were, to have been given an opportunity to make a difference, however small. How much easier it was to sleep at night, knowing that at last we were doing something! How wonderful that our own small pebble had caused a few more to roll down that mountainside with it!
Herbert and I neglected our own children over the next few weeks, while we traipsed all over the countryside checking out prospects, visiting high schools, cow farms, training schools, and colleges. Usually, these trips involved long rides in a matatu, a hugely overloaded minivan. We’d generally try to bring along one of our three boys, although they weren’t too keen about making that long walk into Kilifi and then spending an hour or more on some bumping, grinding matatu with someone’s bare armpit pressed into their face. “You ride in a matatu?” several different white Kenyans said to us in tones of disgust and incredulity when they found out this was our regular mode of travel. But this, too, was part of the Kenya experience.
We were on our way to another distant country school: Herbert and I, Christopher, Boniface, and Mark. The matatu, as always, was hopelessly overcrowded, filled with about twenty people, the ladies wrapped in colourful skirts with babies slung on their backs, some with an intricate pattern of raised ornamental scars on their faces. One or two men hung out the door.
The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey Page 29
