Kenya and Tanganyika, East Africa, 1956
I never could eat that
first week at school. My parents had no choice. The mission board under which they went to
Kenya gave them no choice. They had to
send us to boarding school. I was nine,
and my sister Lydia was seven.
My sister, Lydia
My parents drove us in the old green pickup with the
canvas-covered back that first time. We
rode behind the cab leaning against our luggage, the red dust thickening our
hair as it seeped through the cracks. Two
others missionary kids rode with us. After
hours fighting rutted dirt roads, we were stymied by an impassable river
rushing toward eager banks. New to
Africa, my Mom had on high heels but gamely took them off, wading through mud
and streams those last few miles to Mara Hills.
My sister and I could hardly contain our admiration. Mom was seven months pregnant.
We walked five miles with our luggage watching the
sun burn itself out. The black
impenetrable night was punctured by a vast array of stars as we arrived. We sat
patiently waiting on a bench next to the flickering candlelight in the entrance
of the u-shaped building while our beds were hastily prepared. Lydia rested her weary head on my shoulder,
her silent tears burning into my neck. My
dad was feverish and shaking with chills from his first case of malaria, one of
many to come. He still managed to get up
at the first light of day and trudge back with two Masai men to push the truck
out of the rising river.
My Mother
How could I imagine what lay ahead? There were bars on the windows, beds from
twisted Zebra hides, flashlights boring a bouncy minuscule shaft in the night
on our way to the outhouse, an eye out for snakes. I routinely shone my flashlight down the hole
in the rough wooden seat, prompting nightmares of slipping into the maggots
swarming below. “I suspect a slight infraction,”
the housemother announced one morning, a smile playing around her thin lips. We were supposed to use the potty under our
bunks at night.
The hunt brought gazelle and impala for our meat,
salted down to preserve it. No fridge at
Mara Hills. We had little garden plots
where we all competed, urging on our corn and tomatoes. We fought to take out slop to the pigs, which
were also butchered for meat.
We went barefoot to class, a one-room schoolhouse,
grades 1-8. I saw my first dead body, a
man lying stiffly in the back of the school pickup right before class. We popped green coffee beans right off the
plant into our mouths, saving them in our cheeks, enjoying the sweet juice as
our heads bent innocently over our books.
The Mennonite house parents were stern but
kind. I missed the daily hugs and kisses
from Mama and Daddy that I had so taken for granted. I wrote letter after letter begging them to
come get us. The letters were not sent,
I learned later.
Meals were formal, our cloth napkins stuffed
carefully in rings made from sliced Impala horns. Dessert was often one cookie with a raisin in
the center, as lonely as I felt. A
freckled girl with long strawberry braids tried to dislodge a guava seed
caught in her teeth with her fork. She
got cleanup duty that meal. Manners were
important at Mara Hills. Her Dad owned a
diamond mine in South Africa. She did
not get one letter from home.
My sister and I clung to each other for
security. One day to my horror, she ran
towards me, dark braids flying, one eye pinched shut with a shiny eyeball
gracing her palm. Panic gripped me as I
realized I had failed to watch out for her and she had lost an eye
somehow. Convulsing with laughter, she
opened her eye shouting, “pig eye.” It
was slaughtering day.
Semesters lasted three long months and then home for
a month and so on. Headed for home at
last, Lydia and I leaned against the rail of the steamer as it inched from the
shore of Lake Victoria in Musoma, Tanganyika headed for Kisumu, Kenya. It was just too far and dangerous for Mom and
Dad to fetch us by truck each time. We
turned towards our stateroom where two small beds would see us through the
lonely night.
Noon the next day, the sun like a scream in the sky beat
down on the black skin of Africans swaying and humming softly to the throbbing
of the engine. Their night had been
spent on the deck under the stars.
At sundown, we nosed into the harbor. Two thin figures became clearer as we neared
the shore. Dad in khaki shorts and Mom, long
legged and slim, smiling, holding the baby brother we had not seen yet.
Three months’ emotion let go and I sobbed with total
relief at what seemed happiness beyond my wildest dreams. I would be home in Kaimosi in two hours.
Probably Mombasa in front of Ft. Jesus.
This picture got wet during the Hurricane Ivan in Pensacola.
