Kenya

I wasn’t sure why I was going. Even now I’m not sure why I went. It seemed to be the right choice. I just feel quite lucky sometimes. Luck seems to operate above the level of conscious comprehension as often as not.

I met Cate a few months ago in New York at an event between The Moth storytelling organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She told me how gorgeous it is in her home city, Nairobi, and how affordable the airfare was. As part of her boosterism for Kenyan tourism, she said she had a spare room in her apartment and would be happy to host an international visitor. I smiled and thanked her and said I should totally go and quietly decided that was mostly insane and that after my play ended a few short weeks later I would need to finally spend some time in LA, my new home city that I have yet to have a chance to live in.

When I did arrive back in LA, I kept thinking back to this sudden opportunity to see a part of the world I’d never been to and stay with a fabulous international activist. I messaged Cate to see if the spontaneous invitation to an otherwise total stranger was still good - and was ready to be totally understanding (maybe relieved?) if not. Still good she said! I booked my ticket and messaged Cate one more time to say it’s totally alright if this doesn’t work for her, but if she could just let me know within 24 hours - the window I had to get a full refund on my ticket - that would be great. I seemed to be tapping the breaks just to see if they work. Everyone else was buckled in for the ride.

Now that I had my ticket purchased and my lodging secured by a person I had met exactly once but she seemed nice enough, I just had to figure out why I was going and what I wanted to get out of the trip. It was an open question for the next two weeks until I departed LAX. I felt I had to find a big reason, something incredible or, failing that, at least practical. Could this be research for one of the projects I’m working on? It was as if “I’m going because traveling brings me joy” was not an acceptable receipt to my internal accounts department. Perhaps The Reason would emerge over the course of the trip if I was patient enough. Something would happen to alter the course of my life and I would sigh, my shoulders would relax though I hadn’t known they were tense, and I would put my palm on my temple and say with eyes wide open “Oh! This is why I’ve come! I knew there must have been a reason.”

When my plane touched down in Nairobi, I called an Uber to take me to Cate’s home. Addresses in Nairobi are often just the name of a building. No number, nothing like that. It requires a lot of local knowledge and/or a good GPS mapping system. The place I was going was complicated to find even by local standards, so Cate asked to speak with the Uber driver to help guide him in. Turns out I was in good hands.

I met some incredible people. Cate introduced me to a few of her favorite folks. I was invited to visit her friend, Rachael Mwikali, for dinner at her home in the Mathare area of Nairobi. Rachael, like Cate, is a human rights and gender justice activist at home in Kenya and around the world. Not long ago she had to live in exile because violent, regressive groups were upset with her and her advocacy. The threats are real and credible - only one week after that dinner a prominent Somali-Canadian activist, Almaas Elman, was shot and killed in Mogadishu, in neighboring Somalia. We ate home cooked Kenyan cuisine and drank Irish whiskey. Rachael told me a little of what it was like living in Mathare. She spoke about the strong sense of community. She’s lived there her whole life.

I traveled to the coast with one of my other temporary flatmates and two of her colleagues, three Canadians working for an education NGO. We spent a few days on Diani Beach, one of the most pristine, soft white sandy beaches I’ve ever seen. I got some sort of food poisoning on the trip out, making for a challenging plane ride, a feverish, sleepless first night, and a couple days’ worth of meals consisting of plain rice. I healed enough to enjoy the local foods and fresh mangoes (astoundingly good mangoes) before heading back to Nairobi. A day or two later I was told that one of our traveling companions had a nasty fever and symptoms similar to mine and I began hoping I hadn’t gotten someone else sick, although I was pretty sure that food poisoning isn’t contagious. Another day later and she got her diagnosis: dengue fever. Which presumably she picked up from mosquito bites as we walked home along the water’s edge and she complained about getting bitten a lot. I had not worn any mosquito repellant. Just lucky I guess.

I saw such splendor I could only curse my mediocre camera skills for capturing not but 1/10th of 1/100th of it. On the five hour train ride from the coastal city of Mombasa to Nairobi I witnessed perhaps a dozen or two elephants out my windows. No big deal, only the largest land mammals in the world gracing my train ride with their presence. I was fortunate enough to trek around in northwest Kenya, around Lake Nakuru and Lake Naivasha, and see animals that are so big and beautiful and graceful and intelligent that I suddenly understood the men and women who choose to live and work in these areas as armed rangers, surrounding themselves in the local fauna, protecting them from poachers and other forms of human danger.

Below are some favorite photos that I snapped during my brief trip. I still can’t say I know why I went. I am glad for it, though. The rest I’m sure I’ll figure out as I go.