Sick tena

Monday I was sick again, but this time with just a bad cold. So I hung out all day, laying low. I finished Barack Obama’s book, “Dreams from My Father,” which I think everyone should read. Some of the scenes he described of Kenya were so vivid and so similar to what I see every day. By the way, Obama is Luo (just like me) AND some of his family lives in Kariokor (like me). Here are some quotations I liked from it:

“Like how to deal with beggars. They seemed to be everywhere, a gallery of ills—men, women, children, in tattered clothing matted with dirt, some without arms, others without feet, victims of scurvy or polio or leprosy walking on their hands or rolling down the crowded sidewalks in jerry-built carts, their legs twisted behind them like contortionists’.” (38).

“The city center was smaller than I’d expected, with much of the colonial architecture still intact: row after row of worn, whitewashed stucco from the days when Nairobi was little more than an outpost to service British railway construction. Alongside these buildings, another city emerged, a city of high-rise offices and elegant shops, hotels with lobbies that seemed barely distinguishable from their counterparts in Singapore or Atlanta. It was an intoxicating, elusive mixture, a contrast that seemed to repeat itself wherever we went: in front of the Mercedes Benz dealership, where a train of Maasai women passed by on the way to market, their heads shaven clean, their slender bodies wrapped in red shukas, their earlobes elongated and ringed with bright beads; or at the entrance to an open-air mosque, where we watched a group of bank officers carefully remove their wing-tipped shoes and bathe their feet before joining farmers and ditch diggers in afternoon prayer. It was as if Nairobi’s history refused to settle in orderly layers, as if what was then and what was not fell in constant, noisy collision.” (309)

“It’s funny, you know. Once you’ve lived here [in Africa] for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.” –British guy he talked to in Kenya (355)