October 13, 2006 - Lamu: A man without a donkey is a donkey

The title is an old Arab proverb I heard someone use to describe Lamu. It is quite fitting as Lamu has only one “road” the rest of the town is all narrow paths that weave through the hilly coastal town. The paths are too narrow for a car, but just wide enough for a donkey to pass by pedestrians pressed against the walls. At times it seems as though the number of donkeys and the number of people are about even.
Lamu is a town on an island just off the mainland of Kenya. It was founded by Arab traders and has managed to retain its Arabic flavor through today. There are no bridges across to the island, as the residents prefer to keep vehicles off. The only vehicle that I’ve seen belongs to the District Commissioner. The remaining forms of transport are the donkeys and people. And so it goes - if you are not wealthy enough to afford a donkey to haul bricks or produce through town, you become the donkey and start hauling.
Lamu is a major tourist destination in the region due to the unique character, great beaches, and cheap sailboat rides out to mangroves or snorkeling spots. I however go for one reason: the Internet! Lamu has the nearest working Internet connection to Mpeketoni. Being that it is only about 60 km from Mpeketoni you’d think that it would be an easy trip. Not so!
The three buses a day to Lamu come one each hour starting at 11:30am. The trip to the boats that take you across to Lamu then takes about 2 - 2.5 hours due to the conditions of the roads and the frequent stops. Once you get to the boats it is another thirty-minute ride to get to Lamu town. The last bus from Lamu to Mpeketoni leaves at about 4pm. So it works out that if you catch the first bus from Mpeketoni to Lamu you can still get back to Mpeketoni on the same day if you only spend an hour in Lamu.
And who would spend five hours traveling over beat-up, bumpy roads just to spend an hour in Lamu? That’s right – a Mzungu in search of the Internet... But alas, I was not able to finish things in Lamu before the last boat left for the mainland. I tried to be quick (which explains the jumbled mess with the last post) but the Internet connection kept stalling on me. So my five hours of bus travel now included a night in Lamu.
Now with some time to spare, I decided to stop in and say a quick hello to some of Isaac’s family. His mom sells produce in an open-air market in Lamu and lives with Isaac’s cousin Mary. Mary is in Form III, which is equivalent to a Junior in high school in the States. Isaac’s wife also has a sister that lives in Lamu named Grace. Grace sells produce in the same market as Isaac’s mom (in Kenya you refer to a parent as the mother or father of the first born – in this case Isaac’s mom is Mama Jeff and Isaac is Baba Susan. Susan is named after Isaac’s mom whose name is Susan Wanjiku).
After wandering the narrow streets for a bit I found the market and Wanjiku. She recognized me but she doesn’t speak much if any English and my ability to speak Swahili doesn’t go much beyond greetings and things like Sitaki matumbo ya mbuzi! (“I don’t want goat intestines!” – more on that later). So we exchanged handshakes, smiles, and a few jumbled phrases: “Isaac good”… “home, welcome”. It was pleasant enough but also a bit silly. I’ll need to keep practicing.
I also said hello to Grace. She wanted me to pass along greetings to Isaac and Beth and to let them know that she was well and missing them. Even with the small distances, the difficult communication and travel make it so that visitors become the only sure way to pass along greetings between towns.
Grace let me know that Mary would be in classes until 5:30pm but that I should be sure to come back to say hello to her too. When I came back after booking a room for the night, the market was already closing. I continued up to Wanjiku’s house to see if I could find Mary at home. Their “house” is actually one of the more heartbreaking things about Kenya and poverty, but their hospitality and good nature in the face of poverty is moving. Mary and Wanjiku share a tenant apartment in a small block of five other apartments – three in a row facing two in a row. Mary and Mama Jeff’s entire apartment is about 9ft X 9ft and has enough room for a bench with all of the cooking items and two cots. Rent is 500 shillings per month (just over US$7). The room has one boarded up window and no lights - instead they use a kerosene lamp for lighting.
The apartments are laid out such that there is a 10ft X 20ft “courtyard” that all of the apartments face. The busted concrete courtyard is covered with a roof of woven palm leaves (makuti) that makes an excellent place to sit and enjoy the evening with the other tenants. Between the five apartments there are about three chairs and two stools that are brought out to the courtyard.
Being that I was stopping by unannounced, I planned to just stop in and say hello before heading back to finish up things with email and the Internet. Mary had not yet arrived, so I sat with a neighbor in one of the chairs until she came home. When she did get back from class I hardly had time to say two things before she told me that I would be staying for dinner. She immediately began preparing charcoal and the jiko stove to cook dinner. The jiko is a small (about 16 inches in diameter and 12 inches tall) cookstove that is a huge improvement over the old “three stone fires” that were much more common in Kenya in the past (and probably are still common in the very poor rural areas). The two main improvements are that it burns fuel much more efficiently and that it can be moved outside when it is first being heated up. Moving it outside when it is started cuts way down on the smoke that goes into the house.
Wanjiku came back from the market and joined us in the courtyard as Mary prepared dinner. Pretty soon I was found myself in a sea of lively chatter (in Swahili) as the other neighbors made their way home and also began preparing dinner out in the courtyard. Mary made a vegetable stew that was poured over a fried fish and served with a big bowl of rice. She served Wanjiku and me but said she would wait until much later in the evening to eat. Wanjiku and I managed to get a little bit further with a conversation, but it was mostly me shrugging my shoulders and her correcting my poor attempts at making sentences.
After dinner and some tea Mary offered to walk me around town. We walked past a few places where she was able to find her friends and show off her Mzungu friend. It was quite a kick. Later we ran into Grace again. The three of us went back to Grace’s place to watch TV and chat with her husband, Hussein. A pleasant night indeed. It made all the other hassles of traveling well worth it for the chance to just get to know these guys better.
By 6:30am the next morning I was on the boat back to the mainland. It had rained quite a bit the previous two nights so the roads were sloppy with mud and the potholes were filed to the top with water. It wasn’t a problem for the bus, but I couldn’t count the number of times we sent a burst of mud hurtling toward people walking on the side of the road. Many of them even tried to avoid the inevitable by moving a good six feet back into the bush for cover. Just after 9:00am we pulled into Mpeketoni - right in time to see Isaac and another technician, James, climbing a utility pole for the morning power rationing. It was good to be back.