Kenya Part 2 – Mama Lucy & Mohammad's Birthday

We flew from Nairobi to Malindi, a mid-sized coastal town renowned as an Italian resort destination, and apparently providing a vacation spot for money-laundering Italian expats with mafia connections.








It is also home to “Mama Lucy” and her 30 charges – orphaned children ranging in age from one to seventeen, living together in the simple but wonderful Heart Children's Home.
Mama Lucy (aka Nuru Said Mohammad) met us at the airport with the orphanage's “public relations” volunteer, who with her four year old daughter spends every weekday afternoon at the orphanage, but was on her way to Nairobi the next day to check in on her business and her clients – she is one of Nairobi's (Kenya's?) only two sex therapists, and a hoot to talk to. Her daughter would stay behind in the care of Mama Lucy for the five days she'd be gone, and unfortunately we'd be leaving just hours before her return. The following morning we were scheduled to meet Cocky, the director of the small volunteer placement organization that matched us with Heart Children's Home. Until then, we settled into our small apartment off the back courtyard of the orphanage and began to get to know the kids.
Within minutes, Colin was deep into the game of soccer raging in the dustbowl that is the side yard – Moses, age 13, was the best soccer player of the bunch and quickly became Colin's new best friend.
He was an amazingly talented athlete, a caring big brother to the younger kids, and a warm and friendly boy who seemed mature beyond his years. All of the kids, in fact, displayed the most incredible caring for each other, helpfulness in all domestic chores, and responsibility for themselves and their (very) few belongings. I couldn't help but compare them to the kids we know and have at home – how much easier parenting would be if all kids behaved this way! Considering the difficulties these kids had been through in their lives – the types of stories that are behind so much of the delinquent and criminal behavior among young people in the U.S. - it struck me as even more amazing.

Many of the children had lost their parents to HIV/AIDs; some had been abused or neglected by their relatives before arriving at Heart; and none of them had anything more than a notebook, some shared clothes, and their bedsheets to count as their personal belongings. The home had one soccer ball, on its last legs, a few additional balls made of bound-together plastic bags, and a few puzzles as their entire “toy” stock for the 24 resident children (the remaining six were at various boarding schools, coming home only on holidays). They shared five bedrooms in the common house, which also housed the office, the preschool, and the kitchen. Mama Lucy slept in a back room in the adjacent landlord's house, and the small apartment off the back was reserved for visiting donors, volunteers and other guests, as well as serving as a reception room and an overflow kitchen area. Ugali, cabbage and beans serve as the home's staple fare, and the kids walk 12 km on their two roundtrips to school and back each day.

When we first arrived, trying to help “around the house” was a loosing battle, so we laid low and assessed the situation, trying to figure out where we could fit in and be of some help. While meeting the kids and wandering around, we sussed out what needed doing, and where we could provide some value. When Cocky arrived the next morning, we asked if we could make dinner for the kids and crew one night, and suggested taking the whole group for a field trip to a place of their choosing over the weekend. Both suggestions were enthusiastically received, so we headed out for the local markets and left Mama Lucy to find out where the kids wanted to go and to set up transportation. Colin also discovered that they had been trying to create an online presence, and hadn't yet figured out how to create a “group” page for the orphanage on Facebook, so he had his work cut out for him. Over the next few days he created a Heart Children's Home group page on Facebook and trained Mama Lucy and Steve, the oldest boy, on how to use it, upload photos and develop their network of “friends.”
It was a huge success, and Steve became an instant Facebook addict. ;-)


Over the next few days, I developed blisters hand washing laundry, we cooked up spaghetti bolongese to feed 30, and generally pitched in here and there washing dishes and looking after the younger children while the older ones were off at school.
Noone could resist taking turns entertaining Lydia, the youngest (age 1), who compelled me to sing “Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you seen Lydia; Lydia the tattooed lady!?” (sung a la Michael Jeter, the homeless cabaret singer in “The Fisher King”) over and over again. We capped off our visit with the promised field trip - the kids hadn't been anywhere except home, school and church since last summer, so were beside themselves with excitement.
Filling two matatus with children and chaperones we headed off to Gede – the ruins of an ancient Swahili village –



and then to the beach, where we picnicked and played in the surf till the late afternoon.
The next morning, Mercy – a brilliant 13 year old Masai girl who had lived at the home for just over a year – asked to speak privately with us. We had decided to sponsor one of the children, and asked Mama Lucy to decide how best to use the contribution. She had decided that we should send Mercy to a private school – she had tested at the top of her class at the local government school since arriving at the home and needed a more challenging education that would open up more opportunities for her. Mercy hoped that we could increase our contribution so that she could attend as a boarding school student, allowing her to escape the distractions of so many children in so small a space at the orphanage in order to focus more on her studies. We sympathized with her request, but explained that we were contributing the most that we could and that if we were able to raise more funds at home we would once again leave it to Mama Lucy to decide how it should best be spent. We hope to be able to continue to cover her tuition for the five or so years until she completes high school, so if anyone is interested in contributing or sponsoring another of the home's children, be sure to let us know!
We'll also be sending periodic care packages of soccer balls and children's clothing, so feel free to drop your seconds off at our place. :-)
Our five days at Heart Children's Home sped past, and it was suddenly time to head back to the small airport a few minutes down the road and catch our flight to Lamu, a small island off the coast, in time for the annual celebration of Mohammad's birthday – a weeklong festival marked by donkey and dhow (sailboat) races, bao game tournaments (a complex variation on mancala), and music and arts exhibitions.

Arriving by prop plane across the channel from the island of Lamu, Colin and I walked our bags along a short path through the trees and then out a long dock to the waiting boats serving as informal ferries to Lamu town, the hub of the island. Lamu boasts all of two cars – one for the “chief” and one serving as the donkey ambulance. The rest of the island's transportation is by donkey (thus the need for the ambulance), bicycle, boat and foot.
The town's winding lanes are too narrow for anything wider than a donkey cart, restricting the two existing vehicles to the seafront road, which also served as the donkey race track for the Maulindi (aka Mohammad's Birthday) Festival. We arrived the day before the official start of the festival, without a reservation for a room, but since that was 24 hours earlier than most Kenyans' make plans, we had no problem taking our pick. By the next night, the town was full and rooms were getting scarce, and by the day of the donkey and dhow races, the squeeze was on. We picked a room in a private home owned by a Lamu native, now living in Amsterdam, who was visiting home for the holiday. He was one of Lamu's many easygoing rasta men, who incongruously live side-by-side with the island's strict Muslim majority without any obvious rancor.
Colin demonstrated a knack for making friends with most of the rastas in town, learning to play several variations of the bao game from them, and exploring their art galleries and other local haunts. He also picked a silversmith in town to set a stone (containing raw ruby and zoozite) that he had found in India into a ring for him, which he says I can wear until he grows into it. ;-)
Dana – the Czech we had met in the Mara (see Kenya Part 1) arrived on Lamu the same day we did, and joined us for a visit to Shella Beach the next day. We hired a skiff to ferry us to the beach and walked far enough to leave most of the other sun worshippers behind us.

We plopped down in view of a pair of camels lounging by the sea and splashed into the bathtub temperature water. After Colin had had his fill of surf and sand, we wandered down to the camels and found their owners – Colin negotiated a price for a ride and enjoyed a leisurely saunter down the beach on the back one of the quirky creatures.

Most of the rest of our visit to Lamu involved watching donkeys and dhows race (respectively) along or offshore of the seafront, and wandering the charming narrow lanes while marveling at the juxtaposition of a woman in a full black burka passing a Masai man in a short red toga while sauntering past talking with one of Colin's newfound rasta buddies.










Lamu is interesting.

We had one last weekend to enjoy in Nairobi after leaving Lamu, but only had one night with Candace and Bob before they left for the weekend to pick up two more Methow neighbors from their Mt. Kenya climb, so we headed for the home of a “friend” we'd never met: Flora Okuku was an old graduate school buddy of my mother's neighbor Scott. He had connected us through Facebook months earlier, and we'd written back-and-forth/off-and-on during our travels. She had invited us to come spend the weekend with her and her family – husband, son and daughter (her kids were a little younger than Colin, but still in peer-to-peer playing range). What a great connection! Flora is funny, irreverent, and completely comfortable to be around. She was born in Kenya, went to graduate school (graphic design) in New Orleans, moved to Zimbabwe when she was first married, and had been back in Kenya for a year when we arrived.
She had a beautiful old colonial home along a green belt, with plenty of space and a lovely lawn for picnicking and sunning ourselves while the kids all played outside.
They let us cook for them (not one of our most stellar efforts at pasta with unfamiliar ingredients, but the kids seemed to love it), were hugely enthusiastic about the bottle of red wine I shyly brought out (the majority of people in the last three countries Id been in had been fairly judgmental about alcohol of any kind), and made us a couple of lovely meals of Kenyan traditional dishes that we ate on the floor of their living room – including a meal featuring fried ants (Colin was thrilled!).
It was just like being at home, but not! Perfect. We adored their company, their hospitality, and the comfort of being at someone's home, if not our own, though they made it feel as though it was (thanks Flora!). On our last day, they dropped us at the local mall to see the morning screening of The Lightning Thief at the cinema before heading off to the airport – our next stop was Cairo, to begin a two-week tour of Egypt (my first organized tour – ever!). But that's the next installment.....

Up Next: Of Pharoahs and Pyramids