The Blue Hovel

It’s not a moment I am stuck in. Rather, it’s an experience. And since hundreds of moments comprise that experience, I have no definite starting point. No moment I can point to and say, “This is where my story begins.”

So, I shall begin with a photograph.

In August of 1996, I moved into this simple room in a rural village in the western highlands of Kenya. It was a move I had been anticipating for several months. When I took this photograph, I had been living in Kericho and teaching at Kenegut Secondary School for about a week, so the initial dread of moving to a developing country had worn off.

This moment I remember well. I was sitting in that chair, engrossed by Mikhail Sholokov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, and had read uninterrupted to the end of a long chapter. I looked up from the page and took in my now-familiar surroundings. Before me was the girl’s hoop-ball field. Beyond it was the boy’s soccer pitch, identifiable as such only because of the two netless goals crouched at either end. To the right of the pitch squatted the brick-and-mortar schoolrooms and the headmaster’s office. To the left stood sentinel the hedges that blocked my view of the dirt path that meandered six miles to the nearest paved road, the B-1, or the Kisumu-Busia Highway.

I stood, retrieved my cheap camera, and took the snapshot above.

As well as one of my bedroom.

Home. I was home.

Yes, this little nook, this crumbling hovel, was my home. And home had suddenly come to mean much more to me. Home was now a feeling that could not be put into words, but it was a feeling that all who have journeyed to Africa understand. And any words crafted to define that experience almost always fall flat and ring untrue to the ear, like trying to describe a soaring piece of classical music. No, you must hear the music yourself.

I won’t romanticize my feelings at the time, because they were conflicted. I had traveled to Kenya at a point in my life when I had decided to stop leading a vagabond existence. Up to this point, I could count more than ten places as home—among them Chicago, Carbondale, Las Cruces, Missoula, and Caracas, Venezuela. My parents had been divorced almost twenty years by then and had moved many miles away from one another, so I never had a definite sense anymore of what “coming home” meant.

But here I was. A roof, a bed, two chairs, a table, a wash basin, a box of candles, a stack of books, but no running water or electricity. Home.

Before I got the call to live and work in Kenya, I had been ricocheting across the country for five years. First to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I received an M.A. in creative writing. Then to Missoula, Montana, where I received an M.F.A. in creative writing. From there, I returned to Las Cruces in a desperate attempt to return to a scene of former glory.

There, I wrote fiction in the morning, worked afternoon and evening shifts designing ads for The Dandy Dime, and in between jogged and walked my Australian Shepherd, Beau. I could not, however, find work that would meaningfully sustain me. I lasted only five months before I tucked tail, packed my wheezing, rheumatic Subaru station wagon with my few belongings, including Beau, and returned to the suburbs of Chicago, where my sisters and childhood friends still lived.

Ten gloomy months I spent in Chicago, to which returning seemed like miserable regression, trying to decide on what trajectory my life would now take. Why go to the southern tip of Illinois for my Bachelor’s, then to southern New Mexico for my Master’s, and finally as far north as Missoula to receive another Master’s, only to return to my hometown? To me, the point of getting those college degrees was to abandon the nest and make my way in the wide world. I was bitterly disappointed in myself, a feeling that lingered over me like a black cloud.

I immediately found a job at Walden Books in the vacuous, soul-sucking Woodfield Mall, a job which I walked away from after only three months, without a word, in the middle of a shift. I then took a part-time job working three days a week, Tuesday through Thursday, at a behemoth insurance company drawing up contracts I literally did not understand. I awaited the axe almost every day, but after several months the company was willing to slide me into a full-time position at the end of the summer. I seriously considered the offer. As a part-timer, I was pulling in about $1,500 a month; as a full-timer, I would be making more than twice that, with benefits.

I was thirty-one years old. I should stop knocking about, I told myself. It was time to start making a living. Pull my own weight. Plant roots. Get married. Have a family. But as I ticked off those milestones, I had only a vague image of myself in those moments, and the image of myself was of someone I disliked.

Then, in late June, I got the telephone call. During the brief return to Las Cruces, I had submitted an application to a Phoenix-based organization called The International Foundation for Education and Self-Help (IFESH), an application which I had long ago forgotten about because I had missed the deadline by two weeks and was told I would be considered for placement the following year. So, when someone from IFESH telephoned me more than a year later to say that I had been accepted to teach in Kenya, I was completely blindsided.

Was I interested in the position? Yes, of course! Never mind my recent agonizing about my life. I would go to Kenya. Certainly.

At work, I was an empty suit, pretending to be busy but most of the time daydreaming about Kenya. And when I could no longer stand the confines of my cubicle, I would wander the hallways of the building, sometimes taking the elevator to the top floors and peering into the grandiose executive offices. Already, I felt like an intrepid explorer, for no one questioned my right to be there. The trick was to look as if I were on official business and, as camouflage, always be carrying a folder or a piece of paper.

During one of my expeditions to the top floor, I passed a conference room with executives sitting stiffly around a table, listening attentively, dutifully, to someone giving a presentation. Except for one gentleman in a charcoal-grey suit. He was leaning back comfortably in his seat, legs crossed, one arm dangling idly, twirling a pen in his fingers. He was an older gentleman with graying hair, but he was slim, fit, good looking. The epitome of a successful businessman. He looked at me as I walked by. I waved. He waved back, a whimsical smile on his face.

That brief moment stuck with me. His gesture seemed to me the permission I needed. Go, if you must. Leave me here with my daydreams.

During lunch breaks, I would often go outside and saunter along the walking path, gazing up at the Gallagher Centre where I worked, a veritable skyscraper at 26 floors and almost 400 feet, the second tallest building in the Chicago suburbs. There was the beehive to which I had almost become indentured.

And as I walked the path around the manmade Hamilton Lakes, co-workers, mostly women, would speed past dressed incongruously in their business clothes and their Nike, Adidas, or Reebok walking shoes. Hamsters on their wheels, I thought. But not me! I was escaping.

Once again.

Yes, I was doing it again. Despite my determination to be more responsible, here I was, uprooting myself once more to live and work halfway around the world. But the seed had been planted in my brain and had given flower to various imagined scenarios of life in Africa. This would be my last hurrah, I told myself.

Resolved, I was able to enjoy the dwindling time I had left in Chicago. Even trips to Woodfield Mall were magical, for it housed a travel shop at the time, and I would pore through the numerous travel guides about Kenya and East Africa. Eventually, I settled on The Rough Guide to Kenya, primarily for its sage advice for people traveling on a budget.

Bomen Hotel in Isiolo, for example, with its flowering jacaranda and hibiscus trees, was exactly as the travel guidebook described it, and a most welcome and inviting haven at 1,500 shillings, especially after several gut-churning hours sitting on a slab of wood on a rickety bus through the desert scrub of Northern Kenya. 

When I set The Rough Guide to Kenya on the counter, along with thirty individual travel packets of Woolite, a moneybelt, luggage locks, and a Leatherman Wingman multi-tool, the salesperson, a young man in his twenties, rotated the book, read the title, and then looked up at me.

“Kenya, huh?”

“Yep,” I nodded.

“How long you gonna be there?”

“At least a year.”

“Holy cow,” he said. “Peace Corps?”

I explained my situation to him, and he was genuinely impressed. As was the salesperson at the camera shop.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Africa,” the gentleman said. He was an older man, in his fifties, it seemed. He had graying hair at his temples and he peered at me over his reading glasses, which he had put on to explain to me the settings and options on my cheap camera.

“It’s never too late,” I said, optimistically.

“When you have two daughters in college, it’s too late,” he said.

The next few weeks went by in a blur, but everything I did was tinged with the imminence of departure and subsequent adventure. I bought a Walkman compact disc player with attachable speakers. A cheap pair of binoculars. Mosquito netting. Hiking shoes. I visited the post office to get a passport. A health clinic to get cholera and yellow fever shots. My childhood doctor, whom I had not seen in more than fifteen years (they no longer had my records) to get a prescription for Chloroquine, an anti-malarial.

The day before departure, my older sister had a pig roast at her home in Crystal Lake. I invited a few childhood friends. We reminisced, drank too much beer. They slapped me on the back, wished me luck. And then, amid all that good cheer and revelry, I suddenly became homesick. Already, I was homesick. Here were people who had planted roots, had wives, husbands, and children, had comfortable homes to return to at the end of a long work day. Pensions, savings accounts, 401(k)s. Security.

“What the hell am I doing?” I asked my friend Eric. 

He slapped me on the back and said, “You're going to Africa.”

“I'm having second thoughts.”

“Have a third thought,” he said. 

I woke the next morning, hungover, and inspected my luggage—a bulging five-foot duffle bag and a large backpack stuffed to the gills. Then I glanced at Beau, who was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, ready once again for the signal that it was time to load up and journey to another destination.

But this time Beau would not be going with me. The first time in five years. I was leaving behind my traveling companion. I gave him a hug and a tearful goodbye and left him standing at the front door of my sister's house.

I was off to the airport. My journey was about to begin. And it would be an experience that would define my life in many, many ways.

(To be continued)