Planes, Trains, and Piki-Piki-mobiles

Firstly, I’d like to apologize that there are no pictures in this post or the last. I’ve had a bit of trouble getting good photo opportunities so far, but I shall endeavor to illustrate my journey as soon as possible. Now, on to the main event.

I like to feel like I’ve had to work to get somewhere when I travel. This is why I prefer state highways to interstates: despite the enormous excess of time and space necessary to travel these more convoluted routes, one gets the sensation of traversing and surmounting the geography, rather than blazing headlong through it. In coming to Eldoret, however, I have sated my rigorous travel need for some time to come. It would be romantic to call it an odyssey; an ordeal might get nearer to the truth, although certainly one that I asked for.

The whole of it began as a pleasant ride with my parents. I hadn’t known until the day before that they were actually going to be able to take me to the airport, because there were a few potential conflicts in their schedule. I was quite pleased, then, when they told me that they would in fact take me to Atlanta, and feed me on the way to boot. Happy, comforted, and well-fed, I headed into the Atlanta airport for the next leg. Enter obstacle number one. The lady behind the counter first terrified me by telling me that her system only showed my initial flight to Amsterdam, and not my connection to Nairobi. After digging through the system for a bit, she changed her mind and assured me that everything was in order for my flight. Then, almost immediately, she undid the goodwill she had just built by telling me that I couldn’t leave the country without a visa for Kenya. When I found my voice again, I told her that the Kenyan government’s website seemed to indicate that I could purchase the visa upon arrival. “Oh, that’s fine,” she lightly said. “I just had to make sure that I had told you that you needed one.” Really? Madam, I believe you need an immediate course in tact, because there have to be better ways to say, “You need to get a visa somehow,” than “Sorry, you can’t go.”

I scurried hastily away from the counter with my boarding pass in hand before the carelessly unruly woman could find another reason to peremptorily cancel my trip. After making it through Atlanta security with far less trouble than usual, I waited at the gate before boarding my flight to Amsterdam. Now, the Amsterdam story has already been told, so you are welcome to gather the details of it in my previous post. However, if you have not, nor do not plan to, read that post, I will say that the fury of winter saw fit to complicate things near the end of my first flight, undoing my plans for Amsterdam and trapping me on the Royal Dutch Airlines a couple hours longer than necessary.

I waited through the Amsterdam airport, boarded Kenya Airlines to Nairobi, and settled in to wait for Africa to arrive. At this point, I had slept less than three hours in the last twenty-four, and was beginning to lose steam. Sadly, despite a quiet flight and a comfortable seat, I couldn’t seem to manage a decent nap on my way to Nairobi. So it was that I arrived in Kenya’s capital an hour late, and severely sleep-deprived. “Keep going,” I told my body, “we’re not far off now.” I was quite wrong.

I wondered the Nairobi airport for some time after clearing immigration and baggage claim. It was then that I found that Kenyans are extraordinarily helpful people. No less than half a dozen individuals, not all of whom were affiliated with the airport, came to see if they could help me find my contact. I must have looked pathetically lost, because two of the women who set out to help me called several assorted members of airport security and the director of the college here in Eldoret within a few minutes in their ruthless effort to track down my ride. However, Denis Pamba, a most excellent pastor here in Kenya, found me himself while I waited for the calls of the Kenyan hospitality fairies to bear fruit. Denis gave me a crash-course in African street smarts as we found a cab, all the while apologizing to me that he had not found me immediately, despite his having waited two hours for me at the airport. Upon arriving at the shuttle that was to take me to Eldoret, Denis secured my ticket and then informed me that we would be waiting for a couple of hours for the shuttle to arrive. Now, this will not seem all that remarkable until you realize that I am holding eighty pounds of luggage, am now dying to have a good nap, and am pressed into a busy side street with what I believe was the entire population of Nairobi. The scene looked rather like one of the bustling market scapes where people like Indiana Jones and James Bond go to chase suspicious figures through sprawling Middle Eastern or North African cities. Denis, again saving me from disappearing forever into the bowels of Nairobi, pulled me into a tiny alley with one bench, where we settled down to make small talk and daydream about sleeping. Well, one of us was so dreaming, anyway. Two hours later, the shuttle arrives. Denis, in less time than it takes to tell it, stops the driver, sees my luggage securely into the back, plops me into the front seat, and has me on my way to Eldoret.

The shuttle ride was a trip in itself, full of bouncing roads and people speaking rapidly in Swahili while seeming to perform any and every activity that came to their minds, so long as that activity did not involve using deodorant. If you’ve never ridden with a veteran driver of a developing country in his native land, you cannot quite conceive of the experience. The best description I can give is to tell you to imagine those reckless motorcyclists you occasionally see in the States weaving in and out of traffic. You know the type: you see them, and immediately think, “It’s only a matter of time before that guy is spread across the pavement.” Now, imagine a world where everyone drives like that constantly, and most are driving oversized old trucks or vans, and you come pretty close to the proper image. In Nairobi, this recklessness reaches the level of studied science, complete with its own set of languages. I watched in horrified awe as my driver used not only turn signals and hand signs to communicate his intention to other drivers, but also underwent serious verbal negotiations with other drivers through his open window regarding who was going to get which lane when, and whether he would be allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road if he gave up his place. It would have been terrifying except that it was so fascinating that it was difficult to accept as immediate, dangerous reality. Thirty minutes into this harrowing ride, the woman beside me opens a bottle of some juice drink so cloyingly sweet-smelling that I thought I would faint. Instead, the exhaustion mercifully claimed me first, and I spent the next two hours being jostled in and out of consciousness. I awoke occasionally to beautiful overlooks of the Great Rift Valley and a short glimpse of a herd of zebra. Finally, I came fully awake at the halfway point from Nairobi to Eldoret, about two-and-a-half hours along, nauseated and with pounding head. I fought through the illness and tried to enjoy the scenery, and finally fell asleep again to awaken fifteen minutes later with all affliction gone.

We pulled into Eldoret, and I was quite surprised by my new temporary home. The city is very large, larger by far than Chattanooga, but to drive down the main road is to pass through what simply seems like a very long village of low mud houses and pole fences, until you reach the center of the city. Even there, almost no building surpasses two stories, and it seems impossible that there could be so many people living in such buildings, until you realize that there are people everywhere, including right in the center of lanes of traffic. The population density here is unreal. I’ve only seen anything like it in National Geographic shots of Hong Kong bazaars and New Year’s Eve footage of Times Square.

Upon arriving in the city, the shuttle pulled into an old gas station, and I thought, “Finally, I can get to a bed and sleep for several days.” That is, I thought this until I realized that my host was nowhere to be found. Kenyan taxi drivers followed me around the lot, offering to tote my bags and give me a ride, but I stalwartly fought them all off until one asked me if I was Kent Dickson. Which, of course, I was. This latest comer introduced himself to me as Protus, and told me that Gene Mills, the director of the college here, had sent him to pick me up. Gene had been caught up with something unavoidable, and sent his profuse apologies. “No problem,” I thought. “One car is as good as another, and Protus can’t be a worse driver than my most recent chauffeur.” Then Protus took me to his piki-piki. Now, for those of you not conversant in Swahili, piki-piki is the word—onomatopoeia, I think—for motorcycle. I balked for a moment, and wondered if I shouldn’t just start running in a particular direction until someone with a proper vehicle took mercy on me. But, I decided, if I wanted secure certainty, I should have stayed in America. So, myself, Protus, and my eighty pounds of luggage climbed aboard his 250cc motorcycle, and peeled off with me clinging madly to my luggage and my hat, staying aboard the motorcycle by sheer fortune of past practice, amid the laughs of numerous Kenyans, who were probably as amused by my ridiculously flopping cowboy hat as anything else. Yet, despite my misgivings, it took me all of five seconds to decide that this was the most enjoyable method of transportation I had enjoyed so far. Protus, who turned out to be Gene’s gardener, cut skillfully through traffic, and I hung on expertly to the back of his thoroughly-overburdened piki-piki with just my legs and positive thoughts. And to think my mother worried when I bought my motorcycle that I would do something dangerous.

Protus and I rapidly left paved roads and began to buzz along extensively pockmarked dirt tracks through the city-village, before arriving at the gate of the compound of one of the Discipleship College faculty. Protus got off to open the gate, and I decided that it was high time I gave Kenya a surprise of my own. As the gardener turned around, I slid forward on the seat, dropped the bike into gear, and tore over the driveway and into the parking bay. “You can ride piki-piki?!” my new friend shouted after me. Yeah, Protus, the muzungu isn’t so dumb after all. From then on, my trip began to wind down nicely. Kathy, my temporary hostess, welcomed me in, and fed me Belgian waffles with Nutella and maple syrup (not terribly African, but I didn’t object). I sat on one of her living room chairs for a couple of hours, too tired to sleep, while she introduced me to Africa. Then Gene showed up, with a story perhaps worse than mine that totally excused his absence, and mercifully brought me back to a place where I could sleep.

I’d like to conclude this saga with a bit of philosophy learned from my trip. There is a phrase with which travelers to Africa, especially missionaries, like to console themselves. They say, “This is Africa,” with a shrug and a rueful grin. What they mean is, “This is the world we live in, take it or leave it, and all will be well, I guess.” I had several such moments in the trip, but the full weight of the principle most strongly dawned on me while standing in the lot of a burned-out gas station, holding all my gear for the month in my hand, choking on the dust of the largest village imaginable, and staring at the back of a piki-piki that looked for all the world like a death sentence. In that moment, I learned that I am decidedly not in Kansas anymore. Africa is a different world, and it plays exclusively by its own rules. Everything here moves a little slower, is a little simpler, and has a decided rhythm as old as the hills. So, here I am, wide-eyed, a bit uncomfortable, but faced with the certainty that, if nothing else, I will learn to live a different kind of life here. This is Africa.