Two Weeks

A lot can happen in half a month.
Last month, I travelled to the alternate universe that is Nairobi. There, I spent two weeks training with the other volunteers who came to Kenya at the same time as me.
When I say “alternate universe,” I mean that Nairobi is more like America than my site in rural Western Kenya. Instead of the usual ugali twice-a-day routine, I had options for my dinner. True, we could choose to save money and eat Kenyan food at Afralti (which I did many nights to save money… especially after my sushi splurge) but, for me, that was hard considering I’d been so deprived of American staples like pizza and cheeseburgers for so long. The truth is, I didn’t really eat much of those foods in America. But I crave them here. I can’t explain it. Okay, enough about food.  

The buzz of electric lights, the hot shower, the flushing toilet. I can’t believe I almost forgot those things existed. What a transition to go from my quiet life at site to the cosmopolitan Nairobi! With all those amenities, plus friends I hadn’t seen in months, the two weeks flew by so quickly.

And in a flash, I boarded a bus, and took the eight-hour trip back to reality. The actual universe where I reside, not the alternate universe that contains many a stimulus overload.

I was glad to be back.

“We have some news, good and bad,” Stellah said as she greeted me at the gate.

My mind raced. What had I missed?

Stellah told me Emmah had given birth to a baby girl, called Viona.

I knew that would happen. Emmah was about to pop when I got to site in July. And in that way she remained for two months. But still, how exciting! I couldn’t wait to see baby Viona.

And the bad news? The puppy on the compound had been killed. It was attacked in the night by a neighbor’s dog. The other two dogs on the compound were strong enough to fight it off, but not our little puppy.

Now it’s just Doggie and Max. And even Max, the dog adopted by the previous volunteer, hasn’t been around lately. I can only assume it’s because she hasn’t been spayed.

“Max, she wants to get pregnant,” Florence told me once.

Yeah, she’s always wandering off.

Anyway, the puppy’s gone, but a new baby’s here. I’d only been gone two weeks. For me, it was two weeks in Nairobi time. For Joshua and company, those two weeks passed in village time. And village time is a lot slower.

Wednesday morning, before a meeting with the community health workers, I decided to tackle that mountain of laundry that had accumulated in Nairobi and beyond. Emmah had come by and said she was going to wash clothes, so I took my massive pile of clothes and trekked to Emmah’s. I knew it would be an opportunity to see little Viona as well.

Viona was napping when I arrived, but Emmah and I got busy scrubbing our respective collections of dirty clothes. She went fast:

A) Because she’s a Kenyan woman

and

B) Because she said Viona could wake up at any moment.

She had less clothes to wash than I did, and because my hands were starting to bleed, she helped me. When Viona awoke, I offered to hold her so she wouldn’t cry. Wow. I hadn’t seen a new baby in a while. She was not yet three weeks old, and tiny. Some older babies I’d seen in the village had cried at the sight of me. They had never seen a white person before, so what could I expect? Of course, Viona had never seen a white person before, but she is too young to realize that I was different. And this thought fascinated me.

I will be here, in this village, until Viona is nearly two. I wonder how much her perspective of the world will develop up to that point. I also wonder how the village itself will develop in that time. And how will it change me?

If the two weeks is indicative of the rest of my two years, I’m going to see many things change. At the same time, many things will be changing back  in America. Those changes, I won’t be there to see. But I know the alternate universe will still be there when I return, no matter different it and I have become.