I made guacamole for my host family. My host sister decided it would best serve as pasta sauce.
Kenyans are weird about feet. They have a pair of flip flops designated for use inside the house, to keep their feet warm and the floor clean (Does this make sense to you? Cause I’m lost). Mama Sylvia seems to be even more anal than most. Somehow I’ve managed to get out of this by wearing socks around the house, since apparently going barefoot is taboo. Mama Sylvia is also adamant that my feet be washed before entering the house, and then before going to bed… taking off my Chacos and leaving the dust on my toes after walking home from school is unacceptable. Which is funny, cause I’m pretty sure there’s just as much dirt on her feet as on mine; you just can’t see it. And I think maybe her flip flops broke or something, because in the last few days she’s taken it upon herself to adopt mine, full-time, without asking.
Monday after class we took a bus to the Giraffe Center, a place just outside of Nairobi that has a breeding center and sanctuary for Rothschild giraffes– smaller, endangered, and a little different-looking than the ones that prowl the savannahs. There’s a lookout tower where they have a giant bucket of pellets, and you take a handful and the giraffes come up and all the sudden your hand is all the way inside their mouth and you can’t feel any teeth, but there’s fuzzy lips and tongue wrapped around your palm and slobber everywhere, and half a second later you have an expectant giraffe head staring you down and trying to headbutt you into giving it more treats. In theory, they’re on a diet (“Two handfuls of food per person”), but the keeper kept telling us to go back for more. Oh yeah, and the food was free. Go Africa. Then we boarded the same number bus to return to town, figuring it would take the reverse route that we had come, only to discover (after dark) that it, in fact, trundled (sans suspension) among the cars of the nightly Traffic Jam into the opposite side of the city, through the industrial district, and into an unknown dimly lit bus station full of hundreds of matatus, lined with dozens of buses, and swarming with thouands of super-sketch people crowded everywhere. Oh, did I mention we were carrying two cameras, two phones, and a passport? This is why then invented brightly lit supermarkets and saintly cab drivers who come searching the city when we call: according to Joseph, “There is the good part of town, and there is the bad part of town. This is Moi Avenue. If you had crossed the street, you would have been in the bad part of town. Mzungus do not go there.”
Nairobi’s sole (orthodox) synagogue is located next to the university’s main campus, surrounded by 15’ walls topped by several strings of electrified wire and guarded 24/7 by a watchman. In order to gain access, you have to email in an visitor’s application and then show a copy of your passport when you get there. Across the street is a building in which the third and seventh floors are occupied by Saudi Arabian and Egyptian governmental personnel respectively, both of whom have the synagogue under surveillence. Anyway, I went to Kol Nidre services. It was a huge moshpot of people: a couple dozen Kenyan Jews, another couple dozen Indians and Latinos who may have been Kenyan, the Israeli ambassador, a Hasidic rabbi from the Chabad in New York, a ton of white people from all over, four ultra-orthodox Jews on vacation from Israel, and Amir: an orthodox Puerto Rican Jew who works for the US embassy doing maritime defense training and recon work in Manda (on the border with Somalia), who unearthed proof he was Jewish when he found his grandmother’s name in a list of members in a Siddur from an underground synagogue in Spain after his grandparents (who were Spanish nobility) fled the inquisition to Puerto Rico and died before they could tell his mother they were Jewish.
After services, I ditched the fast (Hey, I’m in Kenya.) to meet up with my classmates at a club in a place called Westland- Kenya’s version of the Strip, which consists of a couple blocks of higher end clubs. Except on the Strip, I doubt they pat all the guys down with metal detectors and waive the girls straight in without checking ID. And on the Strip, I doubt pickpockets are nearly as shameless (Yes, a chick leaned over me, shoved a cigarette in my face, asked for a light in French (???), then in English, then removed her left hand from my empty pocket and returned to her partner who promptly gave her a lighter). And on the Strip, I doubt close to a quarter of the people in the joint are hookers, blatantly flaunting their legs and doing business in plain sight. And on the Strip, I highly doubt that 50-year-old men in suits twist and shout on the balcony to music blaring from the dance floor, and you don’t have to shove your left hand with a ring on your fourth finger in a guy’s face to tell him that “No” means “No.” Yes, I bought a ring special for going out. Works like a charm.
In the morning I hit up the Maasai Market and managed to barter vendors down to the local price after convincing them with my minimal Kiswahili that I, in fact, was not a Mzungu and was not going to fall for their idiotic jacked up white-people rates. Funny thing, though– none of them are willing to negotiate prices out loud (“Hey, there are Kikuyus here!”), so out come pen and paper and pagefulls of scribbles ensue.
I went back to afternoon services to finish up Yom Kippur. And then the community broke the fast and almost everyone left and a few of us remained to break out the melon, pasta, chicken, challah, matzo, honey, really good Israeli wine and music and tell stories around the table into the night. Crazy that it took bringing myself all the way to Africa and being dropped into a crazy casi-bathe-in-the-blood-of-Christ-religious family to get me back into a Synagogue. And it felt wonderful. Crazy also that I always thought if I took up a third language it would be Hebrew, and here I am learning Kiswahili. But there you go.
Oh, also: “Hakuna matata” literally means “there are no problems.” Go figure.
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