It’s not there! My head is buried in the bottom of the worn
chest with the map of Africa burned into its battered lid. Sweat drips from my nose splotching on the
cedar. I replace the heavy tray filled
with slides, black and white photos and super eight movies grown brittle over
time. The lid thuds into place, and I
pull metals hooks over the latches. Dust
swirls as I rummage through boxes not yet unpacked from our move, run my
fingers along high shelves, sweep under beds.
I cannot find the blood-red fez.
I manage to lose it after it survives for 60 years. Why does it matter? Husband Jim read that a
fez represents the blood of martyred Christians. He doesn’t understand what this particular
one means to me.
Kenya, East Africa 1956
Dark and silent as a
shadow, a thin figure moves out of the fog which envelopes him. The morning is still. The smell of wood fires hangs heavy in the
air. The red brick house with its
high-peaked corrugated metal roof looms over him like an apparition. The shadow of a young girl disappears from
the attic window just below the rain gutters.
He steps onto the concrete porch as a sliver of light falls through the
blanket of clouds. His stomach is a bag
of nails. He takes a breath and knocks.
He smells of sweat and
soot, standing in his ragged shorts cinched tight over the knobs of his bony
hips. Bloodshot eyes gaze through yellow
sclera, swallowed by dark sockets. He
lives like most Africans; in a smoke filled hut with goats, chickens and
cattle.
A young missionary, green
as grass, draws open the door expectantly.
A vivid widow’s peak introduces that striking coal black hair which
frames a small delicate face. Her eyes
penetrate like needles but compassion bathes her diminutive features. Daniel Chege, hardly more than a boy is not
tall, but fine boned and austere. He
scrubs his shirt each evening on a rock until it is white as an elephant’s
tusk. Flashing a wide smile he blurts, “I
cookie roastie.” He has practiced this phrase repeatedly as he walks
barefoot along the dirt path towards the mission compound. Memsahib Eby suppresses a grin and invites
him in.
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Chege's Grandmother |
There is an uneasy silence
as they regard each other. ‘Kuja hapa
rafiki kidogo, come small friend,” Memsahib Eby says to put him at ease. She leads him over the red-waxed concrete
floor to a rough counter beside a wood stove that is radiating heat. The warmth is welcome in the cool morning air
at 5000 ft in the Kenyan highlands.
Washing her hands carefully, she instructs Chege to watch as she sifts
ingredients, mixing, then kneading the dough with a fury. She has barely
learned to make bread herself. Isolated
with her family far from Lake Victoria and any type of grocery store, she knows
that if she wants bread she will have to make it. Chege follows her tutorial, committing it to
memory in the quick way that he had. He absorbs everything like a clay pot soaking
up water. No further instructions are
needed. Mom throws in another log and
places the bread into the wood stove.
Chege makes bread two
days later and it is every bit as perfect as the Memsahib’s. She never has to show Chege anything twice.
Chege’s grandmother brings milk each day in a dirty bottle with leaves stuck in
the top. Mom notices dirt in it so she
shows Chege how to strain it through cloth and boil it until the foam subsides,
hoping it doesn’t scorch, It almost
always does and is a far cry from American pasteurized milk. I never grow accustomed to the taste.
My sister Lydia and I hang
around Chege like shadows coaxing him not to roll his Rs and he teaches us to
roll ours amid roars of laughter.
Preceding his serving debut, Daniel Chege lifts the long white Kanzu
over his bony shoulders, which rise like spikes against the rough
material. He carefully ties the red silk
sash around his waist. Gingerly, he
places the red fez onto his shaved head and adjusts the tassel at a jaunty
angle to the right of his round Kikuyu face just as Memsahib Eby shows him
earlier that day. His small chest swells inside the flowing white. His smile is blinding like sunlight on a tin
roof.
He pours the oxtail soup
into Mom’s best china bowl, which survived the voyage in the hold of a
freighter from Rotterdam called the Kenya Castle. White robe swishing around his ankles, heart
pounding, conscious of all eyes on him Chege stiffly carries the soup through
the swinging door. Bwana Eby, the
memsahib with our baby brother on her lap, my sister and I watch as Chege sucks
in his breath and ladles it into each bowl.
The bowl rattles against the saucer from his shaking hands. A little slops out when he serves me leaving
a dark stain on the tablecloth.
“Zuri sana,” I enthuse to encourage him rolling my
r perfectly. He manages a weak
smile. His breath comes in little
whistles through his lips, a nervous habit that never changes in the many years
he works for our family. He loves us and
we love him back unconditionally. He
whistles through every meal, that’s our Chege.
Mom is a nurse so with
Chege to help in the kitchen she can dress wounds from panga cuts, bandage the
heads of babies who have rolled into the cooking fire during the night, and
treat snake bite wounds. She does this
on the front lawn until Daddy builds her a small brick dispensary.
Each day she puts on a white nursing uniform
and her stiffly starched nursing cap as if headed to the Mayo Clinic and swings
her way purposefully to the dispensary to care for the sick. Years later Chege will be the one to
administer penicillin shots, malaria meds to the ill, many who have walked
trails for over a day to reach the mission.
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Cleaning before suturing. |
Mom has a snakeskin
belt, which she often cinches around her 22-inch waist. I find it in her attic
years later. Tall at 5’9” she has a way
of walking that captures attention as she sweeps into a room. Part of the reason for her thinness is the
financial sacrifice that she and Dad make to pay for our tuition at Rift Valley
Academy, a boarding school 200 miles away over grassy plains in a sleeper car
on the East African Railway. This leaves
little money for food. She raises
chickens and learns to chop off a head with amazing determination and
precision. She dips the hen in hot water, plucks the feathers, passes it
through a flame to singe and chops it into pieces.
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Tomboi, the gardener and his two little boys. |
She has a garden in the
back tended by Tomboi and his two little boys.
It once produced a tomato six inches across. The soil is dark and rich in the Kenya
highlands. The entry to the mission
station cuts through a large British Tea Estate that thrives in the fertile
soil and moderate temperatures.
In the evenings, we crane
our heads towards the small black radio listening to the crackling news from
BBC if it comes in. A British newscaster
reports news including that of Kenya, a British protectorate at that time. Numerous stories end with a favorite phrase
in crisp English, “No foul play suspected.”
Foul play is the norm after the MauMau rebellion. Many in Chege’s village were strung up by
their thumbs when refusing to take the bloody MauMau oath. This is mild
compared to the 100s who were savagely murdered by crazed Kikuyu MauMaus.
Mom becomes concerned, as
Chege seems pale, difficult for a coal-black African and thinner than
ever. She checks his blood and finds
that he has extreme anemia and TB. It
becomes her furious campaign to restore him to good health.
My father built a
U-shaped Bible School, which Chege attended.
Chege later becomes a pastor and marries a young Kikuyu girl named
Kedsia. They will have 10 children. He
eventually directs the mission work in Kenya for the entire mission
organization… “our cook!” He was as fervent a pastor and administrator as he
had been a cook. He is now with the Lord
who I can imagine saying, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” as Chege
flashes that wide smile.
March 2014
