It Happened on the Way to War (2 page)

The gang burst out laughing.

“
Mzungu
knows Sheng,” someone chuckled.

A man with calloused hands stepped forward. The rest of the group fell silent. “
Wewe ni soldja wa mtaa. Karibu
,” he said: “You're a soldier of the streets. Welcome.”

I thanked him with a
gota
, a fist bump.
Soldja
was a term of high respect, a title that had to be earned.

“Nice job. You're an interesting one,” Tabitha said as we walked away. Her compliment was reassuring. Though I didn't know her well, I sensed that she was slow to praise.

It began to drizzle. The mud grew thick. We ducked down a narrow alley that twisted into a dizzying array of turns. By the time we reached Tabitha's house, I felt as if I were in the middle of a labyrinth. The thought reminded me of a Marine Corps recruiting advertisement in which a square-jawed warrior battles his way out of a medieval maze, slays an evil statue that magically comes to life, and transforms into a Marine in full dress blues with ribbons and a glimmering Mameluke sword. Silly as it was, I loved that ad. I first saw it when I was fifteen, and it had reinforced the calling I felt to be a Marine. “It is a test,” the ad's only words conclude in a baritone voice, “Not just of strength, but of the power of the mind. And if you complete the journey, you will be changed forever. The few, the proud, the Marines.”

Illuminated with a paraffin lamp, Tabitha's ten-by-ten was sparsely furnished and clean. I left my mud-caked boots on a step outside the front door. An outdated calendar hung on a wall with an advertisement for margarine; a small plastic cross hung on another wall. I sat down on her sofa while she disappeared behind the colorful
kanga
sheet that divided her shack into two parts: living room, and kitchen/bedroom. The sofa pillows were as hard as wood.

Tabitha emerged with two plastic cups, a thermos of chai, and a tin with brown sugar. She had no money and only a handful of earthly possessions, but she had enough to make chai for a visitor in her home.

“How many do you take?” She pointed to the sugar tin.

“One, please.”

Tabitha dropped a heaping spoonful of sugar into my cup, then dumped four spoonfuls into her own. She removed a note card from her purse and slid it across the table. It was one of the cards I had used in my life-history interviews with Kibera youth. The card had four questions:

•  What are your greatest problems?

•  Are there NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) doing anything about your problems?

•  What are your aspirations?

•  Were you in Kibera during the ethnic violence?

“You left this card behind when we first met. You always ask the youth about their problems. But you never asked me about my problems. You want problems?” Tabitha said softly but firmly, fingering her plastic cup of chai. “I'll tell you problems.”

Rarely had I been confronted in such a way. I asked Tabitha if I could turn on the tape recorder that I carried for my research.

“It's okay.”

I placed it on the table.

Tabitha took a deep breath and began, “Now you can imagine the problems I've been having. Okay, I'm jobless. Staying the way I'm staying. Initially I used to work, yes, to help my children little by little. But then, you know, I lost my job. Now we're just hanging. I'm almost at the street children level, the way you're seeing me. And I'm educated. I'm a registered nurse. Imagine. Now, there are too many unemployed nurses. Once, I dreamed of starting a clinic for my own, but I've no savings. Do you think it's easy to bring up children with no husband, no job, no business?”

“So how do you make your payments—your rent, food, and things?”

“My rent? For me to pay, even at the time I'm talking to you, I'm having an outstanding balance of four months. I usually rely on friends and relatives. If I go to somebody, maybe sympathizers, I say, ‘Give me something little,' I pay the rent.”

“Where are your children?”

“I've got the firstborn in the house. There used to be two others here. But when we can't manage, they just got out and went back to their grandmother's.” Tabitha referred to her “motherland,” her rural home in Nyanza Province near the shores of Lake Victoria. Every year thousands of people moved from the rural areas to the slums of Nairobi in search of greater opportunity.

“They're not in school?” I asked.

“They're not in school, even now.”

“So why do you stay in Kibera,
mama
? Why not return to your motherland?”

“I don't have any land. We're just pushing, you see. My husband was the firstborn in the family, but he died. I'm poor, but they [relatives in the rural areas] still think I'm the one to provide for them. Yet I've nothing to give.” She gestured to the mud wall with the old margarine calendar. Her sense of urgency was arresting. Tabitha's problems were so vastly different from my own. Yet I'd felt a strong connection to her ever since she had warned me of my first threat.

“Now I'm doing nothing,” she continued. “I tell you I'm doing nothing because I don't have money. If you want to sell
sukuma wiki
[collard greens], you have to have money.”

“You want to sell
sukuma
?” Collard greens, cabbage, and tomatoes were staple vegetables. They could be purchased for a pittance at nearly any turn in the slum.

“Yes, I can, if I can get money to start purchasing the
sukuma
.”

“What would your plan be?” It struck me as a bad idea to become another seller in such a crowded market.

“I can't compete in the slums. Here they won't pay. If you have the money, you go to different areas. You know, Kibera is a slum. Once you have a little money, there is Eastleigh, Huruma. You can choose such areas where residents, they have a little bit of income. Isn't it?” Eastleigh and Huruma were lower-income areas notorious for their high murder rates and levels of gun violence.

“What would you do?” I asked. “Purchase a place to sell it? That might cost as much as seven thousand shillings.” It was about $100 at the time.

“Even that's too much. You know me, the life I'm living, you can't talk of such money.”

“If you had fifteen hundred shillings, how would you do it?” In my time in Kibera I hadn't given out any money, but I wanted to do something for her and with her.

“Then I choose the place. Like now, a sack of
sukuma
is twelve hundred. Now if I go and purchase this one sack, I know I'd have a balance of three hundred. Now this three hundred, let me assume that fifty shillings is for the people who carry it from one place to where you sell it. And then I keep the rest for transport to Eastleigh.”

“You think it can work in Eastleigh?” I was impressed by her detailed understanding of costs.

“Yes, it can. Obviously I'll do it, because there are people who have money and there the police don't come down on you for not having the hawker's (vendor's) license. You know that thing, I can't afford. A hawker's license can cost you five thousand. So if I go to Eastleigh with my plans, obviously I'll succeed. I'll sell my
sukuma
.”

“Have you talked with anyone who's succeeded?”

“I've known many, very many,” her voice rose. “What we're crying out for is money.”

“So you could start off tomorrow if you had money?”

“If God gives me today, tomorrow, the twenty-ninth of June in the year of our Lord 2000, I'll be on the track.”

“The track to success.”

“Yes, I'm telling you the track to success.”

Spontaneously, I unzipped the secret holding area in my canvas belt and pulled out two folded-up thousand-shilling notes, $26. “Then the track begins today.”

Tabitha looked at me and took a deep breath. “God bless you. I know I'll work with it and it'll be something. I'll even mail you. I'll tell you how my business is going.”

“
Sukuma wiki!
” I pumped my fist in the air.

“I'll push the
wik
,” she responded, laughing for the first time that day.
Sukuma
means “to push,” and
wik
is an abbreviation of w
iki,
or week. Residents joked about “pushing the week” when they could only afford to eat collard greens.

I had purchased eleven
kangas
as gifts for friends in the United States. The brightly colored sheets with Swahili aphorisms were used as dresses, sachets, baby wraps, wall decorations, and room dividers. I reached into my bag and handed one to Tabitha. The
kanga
was deep purple with bright orange splashes and crisscrossing, black and white lines. Tabitha unfolded it and held it in front of her, inspecting its rich colors and crisp texture. She gasped as she read its aphorism, which was in a deep Swahili that I didn't understand until she translated it:

“Mawingu ya dunia ufanika wajane
.” The clouds of the earth cover the widows.

“It is a lesson,” Tabitha explained. “When you have a husband, people respect you. If your husband dies, you're looked down upon. People start hating you. And you know, you are not the one who killed him. If you're married, you have a cover; even if you have a husband who is abnormal, you have that cover. So now this
kanga,
it's telling me my cover is in fact the clouds of heaven. Oh, I think it is a good day for me!”

Tabitha refolded the
kanga
with great care, reminding me of my military color guard detail in college, when we slowly lowered our flag and folded it into a tight triangle for the night's watch. It was a good day, and I admired Tabitha. I doubted that I could live with such strength and dignity if I found myself in Kibera, alone, with no job and three children.

We shook hands. Tabitha didn't seem to be the hugging type. She walked me to a hill overlooking a portion of Kibera's sea of rusted tin roofs. We parted ways. When I looked back, she was standing on the hill with her hands folded behind her back like a sentinel. I didn't know if I would ever see Tabitha again, or what would become of the $26.

THAT FIRST FAREWELL with Tabitha was on my mind as I walked through the sultry air at Camp Lemonnier to the colonel's tent, his command post. I'd spoken to him only hours before. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible strain. I imagined my insides as a rubber band, bending and stretching, latched onto two fingers pulling apart.
How far could it stretch before it snapped?

It was rare to show up without an appointment, but the colonel could see from my face that we needed to talk. He was only vaguely aware of the work we were doing in Kibera. Although they were different worlds, I wanted to believe that my work in Kibera made me a better Marine.

I stood at attention in front of his desk, swallowed hard, and said, “Sir, I have an unusual request for you.”

“Stand easy, Lieutenant. Tell me about it.”

I explained Carolina for Kibera, our organization, the difference it was making in the community, and how personal it had become. I poured my soul into it. I told him about Tabitha. She was sick and I needed to see her. I laid it all out. When I stopped, there was a long silence. Marines usually shunned such emotional appeals. I could feel my neck pulsing. My palms were sweaty. The colonel pulled his dog tags out from under his fatigues. A small silver cross dangled between the two gray tags. We had never discussed our faiths. The colonel pinched the base of the cross with his thumb and his index finger. He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Well, what you are doing, Lieutenant, is God's work.” He took a deep breath, “I think there's something we can find for you in Nairobi for a few days.”

I almost lost my bearing and gave the old colonel a big bear hug. “Sir, thank you, sir.”

It was December 2004. I stepped out of the tent, packed my dad's olive-green duffel bag from Vietnam, and caught the next bird to Nairobi.

Part I

CHAPTER ONE

The Grenade

West Greenwich, Rhode Island

MY FATHER WAS THE MAIN REASON I WAS a Marine. He was a warrior, and the war that defined his generation lived on with a vividness and an immediacy that I neither realized nor had the capacity to comprehend as a child. He barely slept and would grunt when I tiptoed to the bathroom in the dead of night. After a neighbor's home was robbed, Dad added dead bolts to the doors and created barricades with two-by-fours and metal hooks. He positioned a baseball bat next to each door, formed a neighborhood watch, placed lights on automatic timers, and rotated our clunker cars through different locations in the garage and front yard. When we walked through the woods behind our house, he spotted details I rarely noticed: animal droppings, faint footprints, feathers, and hunting stands hidden in the evergreens. He taught me to shoot, to hunt, and to fight at a young age. He warned me to be careful and to anticipate danger when I least expected it, and he was the most defensive driver one could imagine. At least once every five minutes he laid on the horn, flashed the high beams, and shouted names at drivers that my friends found hilarious, such as “gumball,” “dipstick,” and “swineherd.”

My father made decisions and then charged into them until he finished the deed or became exasperated, in which case he quit as dramatically as he had started. As a sociology professor, he valued rigorous and rational thinking. Yet at times his mood changed so abruptly that he appeared impetuous and put everyone except his battle-hardened friends on guard. Dad, whose firm Prussian appearance was accentuated by a thick black mustache, often came across to others as confrontational when he didn't mean to be. Yet as intense as he was, and as outraged as he could feel at perceived injustices, I never saw him become violent. He always managed to contain his frustrations, often releasing them through competitive, injury-inducing sports. While my father may have had many of these characteristics before Vietnam, I believe the war cemented them and made them more salient.

Few military artifacts were in our home, but the ones I discovered captured my imagination at an early age. Dad's dress blue uniform hung with its Bronze Star and Purple Heart in a storage closet next to his Mameluke officer's sword. The faded olive-green duffel bag was tucked away in another closet. A plaque from the Third Reconnaissance Battalion hung near the entrance to his basement den with the inscription SWIFT–SILENT–DEADLY in Latin and the image of a skull punctured by a tight triangle of bullet holes.

And then there was the smoke grenade. Coated by a heavy wax preservative, the rusty, old grenade blended into a bookshelf behind the plywood desk where my father graded term papers and wrote research articles. Its cylindrical body had once held a fuse and a firing pin. A bullet hole through its core prevented it from ever detonating. When I first discovered it as a boy, I tried to visualize my father at twenty-four, leading a platoon through a Vietnamese jungle. When the ambush happened, the smoke grenade strapped to his flak jacket in front of his heart intercepted a Vietcong bullet. At the same moment, a bullet tore through his cheek, and another ripped into his leg.

That rusting grenade exerted a force over me. When I ran my finger over the shredded exterior, time seemed to stop. I closed my eyes and was transported to a still place of light without sound. The force had a dark quality that would take decades and a war for me to sort out. I never spoke with Dad about the grenade or the darkness behind the light. As much as I loved and admired my father, he was intimidating, and I could never figure out a way to talk about it. Though it was a filter for many of his judgments, Dad never said much about his war.

My father's response was subdued when in high school I accepted a full Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship to our nation's oldest public university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), in return for a four-year active-duty and four-year reserve service obligation in the Marines. His lukewarm reaction bothered me until I realized that it came back to the Vietnam War, a war that he believed was so misguided by generals and politicians that it was criminal. His combat experience made him eternally skeptical of any institution's ability to protect the best interests of individuals, and he was especially conflicted about the Marine Corps. My father was glad he had served our country, and he had formed his deepest friendships in the Marines. His best friend included me in his inheritance after he passed away. Lieutenant Colonel R. J. O'Leary, his former ROTC commander when Dad was a midshipman at Miami University in Ohio, landed me my first real summer job in high school as a hand on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. These relationships were things to live for, and they happened because of the Marines. Yet at the same time my father chided the hubris of the brotherhood, and he believed that many militaries throughout history too often destroyed more than they protected. He thought American foreign policy was excessively militarized, and he distrusted war-prone politicians who had never served a day in uniform. More personally, he knew the horrors of combat and dreaded the possibility of my death or severe injury pursuing a service he had encouraged, however subtly.

My mother was far less ambivalent in her views about the Marine Corps. She believed the military squelched the type of reflection and critical thinking that was so important in her own profession as an anthropologist and professor of nursing at the University of Rhode Island. She detested violence and the possibility of killing. Mom, whose easy smile and gentle appearance led some people to underestimate her, believed our military did more to incite violence than to deter it. Her entire body shook with anger when we listened to pundits on the evening news praising new weapons systems and military tactics in the Gulf War. And yet she never openly discouraged me from joining the Marines. That would have been against her deep-rooted values of freethinking and free choice. She was less judgmental than my father, and I knew that she would support any career decision I made so long as I was kind to people and did my best to help others.

Mom first encouraged me to study Swahili when I went off to college. She knew that before I graduated I wanted to return to the continent that had helped me get on the right track when I was floundering through adolescence. I didn't know where in Africa I might end up. I simply knew that I needed to go, and that I would probably conduct some type of research in order to “give back.” My mother, who rarely gave strong advice, told me that I should prioritize Swahili if I intended to return to Africa. She believed it was essential for anyone who wished to conduct research in a foreign country to know some of the local language. Research, she warned me, could be seen as being simply extractive, and it was essential that it be approached with humility. Learning a language was a sign of genuine commitment. It needed to start there.

THE FIRST AND only trip I had taken with my parents to Africa was far more transformative than we had anticipated. On graduation day from junior high school in 1993, as a fourteen-year-old, I had held a camping party in the woods behind my house. Unbeknownst to my parents, my buddies and I stashed bottles of hard liquor at the campsite. One of my friends drank so much gin that he went into seizures and had to be emergency evacuated in the middle of the night while I was lying in a pool of vomit. My parents had saved for many years so that the three of us could take a monthlong trip that summer that would culminate with two weeks on safari in Kenya. After the camping fiasco, they grounded me for the summer and contemplated canceling the trip.

“Maybe he'll realize how lucky he really is if he sees other parts of the world,” my father finally concluded.

When our airplane touched down at midnight in Nairobi, we were disheveled and sleep-deprived. If our body language didn't tell people that we were tourists, our outfits certainly did. Mom, who kept her wavy, dark hair back in a ponytail with an elastic band, carried a dog-eared copy of Isak Dinesen's
Out of Africa
. She wore scuffed-up hiking boots and a fanny pack stuffed with travel documents. My father carried a Swahili phrase book and a backpack. His gym shorts exposed his massive calves, calves so thick he had to cut the elastic band from his athletic socks to prevent loss of circulation. On his suggestion I brought a copy of Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a story of big-game hunts in the Masai Mara that instantly captured my imagination. We would soon be on safari in the same exotic lands Hemingway had written about. It didn't dawn on me then that I was not dressed for the bush. I wore Nike Air Jordan sneakers, a dirty white Boston Red Sox baseball hat, and a T-shirt that draped like a skirt over my baggy jeans.

After a short ride in a beat-up taxi, we arrived at the Norfolk Hotel and parked behind a Bentley. A dozen tourists sipped gin and tonics on the Lord Delamere Terrace, a perch at the entrance of the hotel named in honor of one of the most famous white settlers and land barons in Kenyan colonial history. Legend had it that the Norfolk was a favorite watering hole for Hemingway himself. Colonial times, however, had long passed, and Nairobi had developed a criminal reputation.
Nai-robbery
, some expatriates called it.

Had he been aware of its reputation, my father would not have suggested the following morning that Mom and I take a stroll to the Masai Market while he made the final plans for our safari. By the time we found our way on foot to the market, the place was bustling with hawkers peddling colorful beadwork, clothes, and ebony carvings from small open-air stands. Our attention turned to the spectacle at the bottom of the hill. There before us was a scene like no other.

Hundreds of cars clogged the arteries and battled each other to get ahead in one of Africa's largest roundabouts, a place called the Globe.
Matatu
minibuses flashed neon lights and thumped American hip-hop and African ghetto rap. Drivers laid on their horns; sirens sounded. A
matatu
jumped the sidewalk to get ahead, nearly sideswiping a pedestrian. The patch of dirt the size of a small park in the middle of the roundabout appeared to be a dump with fires smoldering on top of heaping mounds of refuse. Small creatures glided between the burning pits. We walked down the hill for a closer look.

The burning garbage released a sour odor that mingled with diesel fumes and the nauseating stink of sewage. Dozens of soot-coated children camped inside the roundabout's circle. They picked through the garbage with plastic bottles hanging from their mouths like pacifiers, feeding their lungs the fumes of toxic industrial glue. There were no adults. A small girl with an infant swaddled to her back in a colorful
kanga
wrap darted up to cars stuck in the roundabout's enormous jam. A glue bottle bobbed from her mouth. The infant on her back appeared to be crying. I had never witnessed such wretched squalor.

“Mom, I'd like to give this to that girl,” I removed my wallet and took out some cash that I had earned mowing lawns.

A group of teenage boys paced toward us with bottles in their mouths and yellow, frozen eyes.

“We better go now,” Mom said hastily.

She led me quickly back through the market. The teenagers trailed off. Afterward, Mom consoled me. “It's okay,” she said. “It's natural to feel bad. There's a lot of pain in the world, and it's good to help when you can.”

By the time we returned to the Norfolk, I was overcome by profound sadness. I thought that I might have felt better if I had been able to give some money to the girl with the infant on her back. At least I would have been able to help in a small way. Yet I wasn't able to do anything, and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of desperation was something that I didn't know how to process. That night, lying sleepless in the plush confines of the Norfolk, I thought about that girl and the infant, and for the first time in my life realized how fortunate I was to be an American.

THE FOLLOWING DAY we went on safari in the Masai Mara at a camp called Rekero, far from the diesel-choked streets of Nairobi. We delighted in seeing the wild animals of the Great Rift Valley, the tectonic fault line that reaches from Mozambique to Lebanon and hides many clues to evolution's puzzle. We watched lions stalking and dik-diks grazing with zebras and Cape buffalo. We drove alongside galloping giraffes and stampeding wildebeests, absorbing their thunderous energy and marveling at the beauty of the land. It was exhilarating. Somehow, though, I had anticipated these sensations. What I didn't foresee was my interest in the local people.

On our last day our Masai guide Jackson Ole Looseyia invited us to his village, where he welcomed us into his house, a smoky mud-and-wattle hut. I was amazed by his austere lifestyle. Looseyia told me about his culture and patiently answered my many questions. Afterward, while my parents took a nap, Looseyia led me with his long, rhythmic strides up a steep path to the escarpment behind the main camp. I was panting by the time we reached a slab of granite jutting into the air like a tilted tombstone. Looseyia stepped to its edge and surveyed the landscape below.