Umoja

It was a bit different this year. I’m not sure what the most unusual thing about this year’s festive break. It could have been the two hour service delivered in Dholuo at the Anglican Church, getting sunburnt, spending 48 hours without a beer, seeing a turkey running around and not having it for supper, being barred from cooking…As I hurriedly mentioned in a previous post, at the last minute, our landlord and landlady, Baba and Mama Omundi, invited Tommy, Hannah and me to join them with the rest of the household in their countryside homestead in Seme about 40Kms outside Kisumu to the north. This is the area in which Baba Omundi grew up, his father having lived in a neighbouring plot.

We were due to set off for the country first thing on Christmas Eve. Suffice it to say that we got going just after lunch, having had to rouse Tommy from his afternoon nap. Hannah went with Mama Omundi, Tommy, Paul and Mercy whilst I travelled separately with Baba Omundi. We travelled along 36Kms of good new tarmac roads, before taking a series of gradually more worn dirt roads, the last of which had much in common with a dried river bed.

As the sky blue compound gates swung open, we entered a large open space planted generously with various trees and liberally strewn with a selection of building materials. Upon swinging right and parking in the centre of the garden, the compound revealed itself more fully. It consisted of a main building, a block of bedrooms for guests, a toilet and washroom block and a boma for eating, taking tea and generally radgering around in (to use a phrase favoured, perhaps even invented, by my mate Mr Pill). In two corners of the plot, newly built toilet blocks looked to have sprung up fairly recently.

Hannah, Tommy and I were assigned a generously proportioned room in the guest block. It was about the size of a large double bedroom yet suffered a little from a surfeit of fixtures, being as it was furnished with a double bed, a set of bunk beds, a sofa, three armchairs, a coffee table and a set of four stools. It contained enough seating to comfortably entertain a small orchestra and their families, though there’d be no room for their instruments, so they couldn’t have entertained us. To be honest, it reminded me a little of how Mum’s house used to be, so I was pretty comfortable.

On arrival, it soon became apparent that I was a little bit out of my depth socially. Hannah had arrived a little earlier than myself and was to be found in the food preparation area picking stones out of the rice we were to eat with lunch. Tommy was running around the kitchen area, generally getting in the way of people, touching things and annoying the household animals. Also busy making lunch were Paul, Mercy and Carolyn, with Mama orchestrating things in the background and assuming control of the cooking pot at critical moments. I offered to help on more than one occasion, but it soon became clear that as far as the women present were concerned, the only useful thing a man could do in their kitchen was to get out of it. Quickly.

This left me a little at a loss as what to do, so Tommy and I just took a quick tour of the grounds before lunch was served. This turned out to be our second lunch of the day and as soon as it was finished, the household disappeared off in to the kitchen to prepare supper. By now I was starting to pick up disapproving looks from Mama as I broke seemingly broached yet another social convention I wasn’t aware of so I decided to retreat to the bedroom and sulk in bed for a few hours whilst Tommy bumbled around the room hurtling back and forth between extreme boredom and wild excitement.

Tommy soon pooped himself out and so we got him ready for bed. This included a bath in the kitchen area (I was given temporary respite to enter, on the unspoken understanding that I pretend that I was not really there) before retiring exhausted to bed. After our meal, Hannah and I quickly joined him and passed out almost immediately.

As I’ve noted before, sleep is proving fitful for me on this continent, for a variety of reasons. Mostly it’s down to dogs and mercifully, they didn’t accompany us out of town. Unfortunately, just behind our bedroom was the cattle shed. The cows themselves were pretty quiet, but from about 3am, one of the goats proceed to bleat in such a manner as to sound like someone groaning, crying and retching.

It kept me awake until daybreak at which time I noticed that I’d been eaten alive by mosquitoes. I received bites to my face, back, arms, hands and thumb and ankle. Tommy had a total of about 12 bites, 11 of which were on his legs. Added to the various scratches and cuts he has accrued over the last month, his legs looked like they’d been attacked by a Morse code obsessed tattooist. Hannah received precisely none.

Being the childish and material obsessed westerners we are, Hannah and I waited precisely 8.4 milliseconds upon Tommy’s waking to force his Christmas presents upon him. He’d been kicking at them for a good portion of the night as we’d left them at the end of his bed. After a bit of persuasion (As anyone who’s ever woken Tommy up will appreciate), he got the hang of opening and was thrilled to receive three packs of plasticine, a cutting set (for plasticine) and two toy cars. Tommy soon forgot about the plasticine.

Hannah and I exchanged gifts too and I received a book to help me distinguish between the 8 billion bird varieties there appear to be in this country. I knew I was getting a book as I’d been dropping hints about it for ages. I’d been wondering for a while what to get Hannah and had decided upon getting her a hair dryer. I’d been pretty surprised she’d not brought one with her, so I figured it was a good present. We held back giving Tommy his last present (a football) because we wanted to be sure we had a gift in case there was a gift exchange custom that the family practiced. It all went to pot because Tommy found it anyway and set off round the compound kicking the ball as he went.

Hannah and I had been working on the assumption that we would be spending a good portion of the day in church. We had been told that we’d be setting off for church at about 9am. Thankfully, things proceeded at a proper African pace and after breakfast, which was eventually ready by about 9.30am and finished by about 10.15am, we set off for the local church, myself, Tommy, Baba Omundi and his brother in one car, Hannah, Mama, Paul (Mzee) and Mercy (Nyangi) set off separately in the other car.

The church was only a short drive away in Ruwe. The congregation was segregated with women sitting to the left and men to the right. The children all sat together to the front left, at a 90 degree angle to the alter (and in plain site of any parents and guardians). As we arrived, a man was standing at the front at a lectern, reading through what seemed to be a list of the monies given and owed over the last year. The entire service was given in Dholuo, the local language, apart from a brief aside from Baba Omundi where he explained what he had just been talking about.

Tommy managed to sit still for all of about 3 minutes, after which he started to wriggle, writhe and then audibly complain. As he was starting to drown out the speaker, Tommy and I went for the first of many trips to investigate the local surroundings. Over the next two and a half hours, Hannah, Mzee and I alternated in giving Tommy a variety of walks, wildlife tours, chats, book readings, ant races and chicken chases until the service drew to a close. One point of interest (for anthropologists and those interested in religion) was that all the people on the alter were female. I’m sure Hannah can add some comments below here about this, I found it very interesting, especially since they appeared to lead all prayers and deliver all the readings, Psalms and the sermon(s).

After Church we returned to the house and retired to the boma for a Lunch of stew, a local green (which is just about the weirdest tasting thing I’ve eaten in a few years) and Ugali. Mama, Baba and Baba’s brother all ate matumbo, but we turned this down because, as we all know, matumbo is cow’s stomach.

Soon after lunch, Tommy went down for a rest and Hannah, Paul and Mercy got ready to go out. They were going to visit Mama Omundi’s family. I wasn’t invited. It started to dawn on me that the roles of men and women in Kenya can be quite different and that things that were expected of Hannah and I that were defined by our respective genders. As far as I could make out, there was very little for me to do. Hannah was allowed in the space reserved for cooking, was expected to comfort Tommy when needed (Tommy was expected to run around and “be free” in the compound most of the time), to wash and to clean. As Baba Omundi ws frequently out and about, I was getting a bit bored.

After about 30 minutes trying, Tommy gave up on a rest, just as everyone who’d left made a surprise return to the compound. It turned out they were going to borrow a large 4 wheel drive pick-up for the trip. On seeing this, Tommy decided he wanted to go too. This left me seemingly alone in the compound.

It turned out Baba Omundi was also about and was not due out for the rest of the day. I was called for 4 o’clock tea and Baba and I set about the start of a 2 hour chat about all kinds of things, ranging through business, religion, politics, tribalism, growing up, the role of being a man in Luo society, development, poverty and the local fauna and flora. I won’t go in to detail here, but it really helped me to understand a few things about what I’m supposed to be doing in certain social contexts (not much apparently!).

Not long after our chat drew to close, Hannah and Tommy returned and we were soon back in the boma for another meal (smoked fish stew this time, although I think Tommy had chicken stew instead as there was chilli with the fish). By now, Tommy was so tired that he actually asked to go to bed and then promptly fell asleep. I’d spent a little too long out in the sun and was very tired too, so we were all in bed, sober, by about 8.30pm.