I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  ‘It’s a hernia,’ Denis says. ‘It doesn’t cause him any pain, but it does stop him from mating.’

  Beside the bull is another cow, with a horse-like tail and a flap of skin that looks like a deflated balloon laying slack over one side of its hump. Denis says the horse-cow is just that, a ‘horse-cow’.

  I grew up on a farm. As far as I know, horse–cow crossbreeds are not a real thing. ‘Really?’ I ask, doubtful.

  ‘Yes. It’s a half-horse, half-cow. From an interspecies mating. And the piece of skin on its back is a semi-formed male sex organ.’

  I start to doubt Denis’s expertise.

  There’s a calf with the bovine version of Down syndrome and inverted knees, a hermaphrodite sheep with a thick, matted tail that looks like a beaver hanging off its back, and a cow and a donkey with no tails at all. There are all kinds of creatures with only three legs and a goat with five, the spare hanging limp from the side of its chest. And stomping, snorting, mounting everything in sight is a cow with what I recognise as freemartinism – a condition where the female twin of a male calf is born sterile, hormonally affected by her brother’s development in the womb. So Denis isn’t far off when he tells us ‘this cow is crazy – she thinks she’s a bull’.

  He shows us down to a small lake we can go rowing in, if we like? It’s more of a pond, really. Still, we climb into the little blue dinghy pulled up on the bank and paddle happy figure-eights in the sun. We pull up in the reeds at the bank, just as a black cow has come down for a drink.

  Oh god, oh Jesus on a mountain, the horror.

  Here it is. But the cow doesn’t have two heads. It’s worse than that. It has one head with two distorted faces. Three eyes and three horns on one side of its skull, one of each on the other. Twisted nostrils and an upturned mouth that opens sideways and looks like a shucked abalone with teeth. The oral disfigurement is so severe the poor thing can’t graze – can’t grip the grass tight enough with its jaw. The park staff have to feed it by hand. Five times a day, someone comes and sits on a small stool beside that beastly head with a bucket of hay and grains, patiently guiding handfuls of food into its mangled mouth and speaking softly to the hole where one of its ears should be, those three black eyes blinking back with gratitude. The kindness overwhelms me. I choke up. I weep.

  I ask Denis if I can meet Mr Ndura, the owner. He’s out of town at the moment, but Denis gives me his phone number.

  When I follow up with Mr Ndura a few days later, he tells me: ‘These are God’s creatures. We have a duty to look after them. If some scientists wish to come and study them here I welcome them, but that is not the purpose of the conservancy.’ The park is funded mostly from the money he’s made in business. I ask whether he thinks there is something causing these deformities? Contamination of some kind? He can’t be sure, but doesn’t think so. The animals are from all over the region. Their defects are seemingly random occurrences in otherwise healthy herds, or sometimes the result of inbreeding. Word of his sanctuary has spread through the towns and the villages. He has convinced people to send defective animals his way to be cared for, instead of slaughtering them out of a fear of evil spirits. ‘I am an educator,’ he tells me. ‘That is my passion.’

  Mr Ndura’s passion for education is clear in the final section of his park: the Climate Change and Environmental Education Centre.

  A twelve-foot-high cement installation, bright with fresh poster paint, shows men working a patch of green grass with machetes and hoes and cutting down trees, while sorrowful animals watch on. Lettering along the base of the scene reads ‘UNITED IN GRIEF MOURNING THE LOSS OF THEIR HABITAT’, and then a sign on a giraffe-patterned rock ‘DESTRUCTION OF WETLANDS LEADS TO LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY’. A huge concrete half-dome representing Earth is hollowed out, the opening covered with chicken wire. Across the span of the mantle reads ‘The 11TH COMMANDMENT: Thou Shall not destroy PLANET EARTH – IT IS OUR ONLY HOME’. Inside the globe, a three-dimensional model of the apocalypse has been constructed out of junkyard knick-knacks. Among the toy cars carrying coffins and beaches flooded with blue paint is an armless lady mannequin, blood dripping from one eye, a gluggy explosion of yellow-brown goop smothering her left breast – the result of ‘SKIN CANCER’, according to the laminated label stuck to her chest.

  All over the place are signs listing the consequences of global warming. ‘A rise in sea levels, upsurge of diseases and the collapse of economies and ecosystem’ warns one. Another shows a woman and child walking across the bare earth carrying bundles of firewood on their heads, the sun shining pointedly from above them and a caption reading ‘USE ALTERNATIVE SOURCE OF FUEL’.

  Then the pièce de résistance – a statue of Wangari Maathai, the renowned Kenyan environmentalist and first female African Nobel Peace Prize winner, standing in a bright orange dress and matching headscarf, her hands clasped above another entreaty: ‘STOP BLAME GAME ON GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE: WE EITHER ACT TOGETHER OR PERISH TOGETHER’.

  At a time when climate change scepticism is taking hold in the Western world, the enthusiasm seems futile. The average Kenyan is lucky to have electric light at night, let alone an SUV to drive around town, or ducted air conditioning. Kenyans – like all people in the developing world – are the least responsible for what’s happening to the planet, and the most vulnerable to its consequences. But here they are, campaigning for action, pleading for cooperation to avert a global catastrophe.

  Marcus and I thank Denis for his tour and leave him with a good tip before hitting the road. It’s another hour and a half to his friend’s farm, right on the Ugandan border at the foot of Mount Elgon, and we’re keen to get there before dark.

  We drive in the dying light past people walking away from the road, towards huts in the dry middle distance. Their homes are silhouetted against the sunset, as are the acacia trees and flocks of roosting birds, shadows before a blood red glow diffused through orange dust.

  We arrive at Pat Reynolds’ property just as the sun dips behind the mountain. He and his Norwegian wife, Siri, a doctor, welcome us into their home – their verandah looks over a valley and across to Uganda’s hills on the other side.

  Pat grew up here. Over dinner, he tells us how he remembers being a kid in 1976 and waking up in the night to a roar that rattled the windows. Palestinian and German terrorists had hijacked an Air France plane and Ugandan President Idi Amin had allowed them to land at Entebbe Airport, where they’d taken over a hundred Jewish hostages. The noise that woke Pat was Israeli commandos flying in to rescue the passengers after a two-week standoff – ‘Operation Thunderbolt’ would go down as one of the most audacious raids in history, and would not have been possible had Kenya not allowed the Israelis to refuel their Hercules planes in Nairobi first.

  On this side of the border, the history is a little more placid. The property is one of the oldest in Kenya. Since 1920 it’s grown all manner of horticultural products – coffee, peaches, avocados – but for the last twenty years Pat has focused on roses. He sells them to the European market by the millions. (He’s not alone – Kenya is one of the world’s biggest exporters of flowers.)

  In the morning he takes us through the greenhouse where in the cool crisp air, rows upon rows of roses – in all colours and varieties – are suspended in hydroponic troughs and lovingly tended to by a busy team of Kenyans in red sweaters. (The farm isn’t simply a commercial endeavour – it funds a number of community projects, including a medical centre, an HIV clinic, a home for AIDS orphans and schools.) In the sorting room, the cut roses are separated according to quality, type and stage of bloom: a worker explains that the English prefer their petals opened wide; continental Europeans tend to want them tucked up tight. Every day, a plane lands on the property’s dirt airstrip to be filled to the brim with blooms which, mere hours later, are for sale on the streets of Amsterdam.

  Yet again, I’m struck by how much of Africa’s role on the world stage is hidden from the West, drowned out by the spectacle of trage
dy.

  A couple of days after I get back from my road trip, Marguerite is off to the coast again. This time to a beach resort in Diani, just south of Mombasa, with ‘Cousin Frances’ and her teenage daughter. ‘A girls’ weekend,’ she says. ‘Perhaps we’ll find the young one a suitor.’

  ‘Watch out for the beach boys,’ I say, as I help load her bags into the back of a taxi.

  ‘Why’s that?’ she asks.

  ‘Well, they’re gigolos!’

  ‘Are they!?’ She seems shocked. Then mischievous. ‘Well! Perhaps they ought to watch out for us! Ha!’

  Jade’s on duty with Walt, walking him around the house as he inspects the pavers for any unvanquished weeds. I’m on my laptop in the living room, emailing Alex about the logistics for a visit to the FilmAid project in Dadaab. It’s been hard to find a time that works. I want to go for at least two weeks, so I’ll have to either find a replacement while I’m gone or try to time it for when Fiona’s here so that she can take on the third-carer shifts.

  I see Walt tear past the window, Jade following closely behind. The man’s on a mission; he can move quickly when he wants to. I hear car doors slam shut. Oh, of course. A car. It’s just Ruby and her friend Sean from dance class, getting dropped off in a cab at the gate. They’ve been for a drink and are here now … why?

  Ruby and Sean run across the driveway and come in giggling through the sunroom entrance on the side of the house, leaving Jade and Patrick to try to explain to Walt who was in the cab that’s now driving away and why he’s not allowed to follow it through the gates.

  I go out to help calm him down, and between us, we manage to redirect Walt’s attention to the burning trash pit behind the staff quarters. He busies himself poking stray bits of paper back into the heart of the flames, and telling David and James not to get too close when they start to add more.

  By the time I’m back in the house, Ruby and Sean are in Walt and Marguerite’s bedroom. In their wardrobe. In their clothes.

  ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’ I say.

  Ruby spins to face me. She’s wearing Marguerite’s pink golf visor, lemon polo shirt and white capri pants. Sean is still in his own jeans but wearing Walt’s old pair of slippers and with one of his silk robes thrown on over the top.

  Ruby rushes into the ensuite and comes back with pink lipstick daubed across her mouth, then grabs a tweed paddy cap from the top of the wardrobe and places it on Sean’s head. ‘There.’

  The pair of them admire themselves in the mirror on the back of the door.

  ‘We’re going to a fancy-dress party tonight,’ Ruby explains. ‘One of Sean’s friends from the UN.’

  ‘It was my idea,’ Sean confesses.

  My heart skips a beat as the door swings open – it’s Esther, carrying a pile of fresh sheets to change Walt’s bed over. She gasps at the sight of us, then starts to apologise and back out of the room.

  ‘No, no – it’s okay, it’s okay, Esther,’ says Ruby, pulling the maid back in and closing the door behind her. ‘We’re just – shhhhhh,’ she puts her fingers to her lips, bringing poor Esther into the conspiracy. ‘We’re borrowing some of their clothes for the night. You can’t tell anyone.’

  Esther relaxes enough to ask, ‘You are pretending to be the memsahib? And the bwana?’

  ‘Yeah, what do you think? Have we pulled it off?’ Ruby clears her throat, adopting a regal stance. ‘Yoo-hoo! Yoooo-hooooooo!’

  Esther hides her face behind her hands, then slaps her thigh with delight. ‘Yes!’ she says, almost crying with laughter. ‘Yes! That is very good!’

  ‘Okay, sweet,’ says Ruby, stripping their layers off and shoving them into her backpack. ‘Let’s go before Walt comes back inside.’

  I help them sneak around the far side of the house and run down to where their cab is waiting by the corner, and feel a pang of jealousy at the fun they’re having.

  Though I also feel pretty smug when, at about three in the morning, I wake up to hear Ruby retching in the bathroom. I go in to check on her, turn the light on, and see she’s doing it all wrong.

  She’s sitting on the toilet, and vomiting forward. A violent spray of red wine and mystery chunks, all over Marguerite’s shoes.

  Ruby manages to clean the spew off the shoes enough that you can only smell it when you lift them close to your face. They’re in the wardrobe again by the time Marguerite returns from her holiday, none the wiser. She’s come back with a new pair of shoes anyway: a pair of Bata ‘flip-flops’ with rainbow straps. There are Bata shoe shops all over Kenya – their thongs are as ubiquitous as Havaianas back home – though I’m not sure septuagenarian colonial women are the target market.

  ‘Aren’t they fun!’ she says, twirling around the living room and doing ballet poses as she models them for Walt.

  ‘Oh yes, yes, marvellous,’ he says, with faux sincerity, then pretends to try not to let her see him pulling a disgusted face behind her back. It’s playful moments like these that show how even through the murkiness of the disease, he’s still capable of wit and fun.

  As a treat, Marguerite grants Ruby and me a rare night off together. We reach a group decision – that Jade will be fine on her own, and that Fiona doesn’t need to know we left just one carer on with Walt.

  Ruby and I arrange to rent the Kirbys’ flat.

  We drive the Peugeot over and the Kirbys’ askari, Charles, lets us in. The Kirbys are out of town so it’s only us and their staff here tonight. He walks us through the lush gardens to the cottage at the back of the property. It’s a cosy little log cabin with a double bed, a bathroom, and a small landing overlooking a lily pond.

  As the sun goes down we sit on the deck watching the monkeys squabble, relishing the silence and the relief at not having to consider how our every move might disturb Walt. I close my eyes and listen to the night birds harmonise with the last call of prayer for the day. It’s the first time I’ve felt truly relaxed in weeks. When it gets dark we move inside, lock the doors, and settle into the pillows, watching a movie on Ruby’s laptop. Around eleven, we start to drift off.

  Around eleven-thirty, we shit our pants.

  Someone’s on the deck. We both feel the room shake with the weight of heavy footsteps and sit up in bed at the same time, hearts pumping, ears open, gone from near slumber to high alert in an instant.

  I turn the bedside lamp off. I don’t want them seeing in when we can’t see out.

  We sit dead still in the dark, straining to hear. There’s shuffling. There’s a man’s voice. There’s the door handle jiggling against the lock.

  ‘Fuck this,’ Ruby whispers. There’s a panic button on a key chain on the bedside table. She presses it. Nothing happens.

  ‘How do we know it’s worked?’ I say. ‘Shouldn’t it beep or flash?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe the battery’s flat?’

  ‘Fuck. This.’ I grab the switch knife I keep in my bag and flick the blade open, holding it the way I’ve been shown to stop it being pushed back into my own hand, my thumb behind the handle. I know how pathetic it is – that this won’t save me, that nothing will if whoever is outside wants to hurt us – but fuck it, I’ll at least try to do some damage on the way down.

  But nothing happens – there’s silence. We sit there for minutes, frozen still, starting to wonder whether we imagined the whole thing. Ruby gets up and looks through the window. She can’t see anything. ‘Maybe they’ve gone?’

  Nope, they’ve just moved around the cottage – we can hear low voices on the bathroom-window side.

  Ruby jumps back into bed and pulls out her phone. ‘Should I call Charles?’

  ‘Yep, and I’ll call G4S.’ I start googling the number.

  ‘Charles?’ Ruby whispers. ‘Can you come to the cottage, please? There’s someone outside. They’re trying to get in.’

  It feels like hours pass as we sit there waiting, holding hands tight, wondering if we’re going to die together tonight.

  The cottage shu
dders again with the weight of a man leaping up the stairs. ‘Hello! Hello? Miss Ruby – it’s Charles.’ He raps at the door. ‘Hello?’

  I feel my grip tighten around the knife. What if he’s in on it? What if it was him all along? An inside job like the hijackers that got Claire’s father-in-law?

  Ruby pulls the curtain across. We can see the long, curved glint of a panga in the moonlight. His knife is much bigger than mine.

  We stand there together, looking at each other, trying to work out if we can trust the guy.

  ‘Of course he has a panga,’ Ruby points out. ‘They all carry them around. And he’s come down here expecting intruders.’

  ‘True,’ I concede.

  We don’t have much choice, gotta go with our gut. We unlock the door, and Charles doesn’t kill us.

  ‘Hello, madams, are you okay?’ He looks through to the cottage, checking that nobody else is inside.

  ‘We’re okay, we’re okay – but there’s somebody out there. More than one.’

  ‘I couldn’t find anybody,’ Charles says. ‘I went all around the gardens – there’s no one here. But maybe you should come to the main house. I think you will feel safer in there.’

  ‘Yep, let’s go.’ We grab our things and follow him up the path.

  We lie awake with the lights on in the Kirbys’ guestroom for the rest of the night, my rage slowly morphing into a fatigue-dulled terror.

  By sunrise, the fear’s gone. It seems like an overreaction. The dew shimmers on the lawn; the ducks paddle across the pond. That said, I’m shaken and exhausted as we drive back to the house to clock on for the next session with Walt.

  And when we get inside, there’s more drama to deal with.

  The door to my room is closed, and we can hear the vacuum cleaner going. Ruby and I look at each other. It’s odd. Esther never closes the doors when she’s in the bedrooms. It’s an unspoken rule of the house – a demonstration or assurance of honesty, I guess.