One 24-hour period in Nairobi (Friday evening to Saturday evening):
I met a man the other day whose mother is Kenyan and father is Indian. His name is Salim. He manages an electronics store in downtown Nairobi. Friday evening I met him in his brother’s electronics shop (yes, they both manage SONY shops), and ducked under a hole in the back wall where the office is. I interrupted some Mira chewing and general Friday evening hoopla. As it was Sept. 7, the conversation soon turned to 9/11 and a host of conspiracy theories and what did I think really happened. Was the whole thing really planned by George Bush? Seriously!
Later Salim and I we went out to Art Café. Which could be confused with a NYC-sheek eatery in Westlands. We had cappuccinos and people watched, surrounded by well-to-do Kenyans and tourists or all stripes. The women sitting next to me, most likely a mother and daughter, ordered a burger and fries and some kind of pasta that smelled heavenly. I leaned over as we left and said to her, “Enjoy your dinner it smells divine.” She might have been Middle Eastern, I’m not sure, but she spoke English because she smiled and thanked me.
We strolled around the Dubai style mall called Westgate where Art Café is located and found a Safaricom Customer Service Center and were able to get internet put on my Blackberry. I’d been trying to get it unlocked to work in Kenya and get internet on it for three weeks. Salim had been part of the original adventure in the back alleys off on Accra Street in downtown Nairobi getting it unlocked! Finally – success! Thank you Miranda, whom I hope becomes the Safaricom employee of the month! Customer service is not held in particularly high esteem in Kenya. So when I am served well – I shower praise on the unsuspecting and very deserving giver of service.
Salim wanted to take me to an Indian restaurant in the Nakumatt Ukay Plaza next door to West Gate. We walked across the parking lot and entered another world. Populated almost exclusively by Indians and Middle Eastern Muslims. The restaurant is run by a band of brothers, can’t remember where Salim said they were from. There are mostly long tables and mostly Muslim clientele. My head felt very bare in comparison to the majority of the women in the room. Most of the men had beards, some had on the long shirt that men usually wear to go to the mosque on Fridays in St. Cloud. The food was a mix of Indian and Middle Eastern. We are sitting on one side of a glass barrier. A man and his wife and their infant daughter sat at a table on the other side of the glass. The stroller faced the window. I’m soon busy chatting with the baby. At one point I go around the glass barrier and ask to hold the baby, who immediately begins to cry. I hope I haven’t lost my touch with babies! As we’re leaving I stop and tell the couple I hope they enjoy their dinner. The man stops me and asks me where I’m from, England…Canada. “No, actually I’m from the US.” Oh, the man says, “We’re Iraqi.” And looks at me very closely expecting it seems a frigid reaction, I smile a reassuring smile and say, “I have nothing against Iraqis.” We exchange a few more pleasantries and say goodbye. It doesn’t strike me until later, how interesting the exchange was… how important. Did they not expect to see an American in a restaurant surrounded by Muslims, dining with one? What did they think? I hope they thought, “Well, she seemed nice,” because that’s what I thought of them. Really nice actually, I wish I could see them again and hear their story.
Salim had called his taxi driver friend Solomon, who is a Rastafarian. (Yeah, it gets better!) Salim talked on and on about Solomon once we got in the car. How Rastafarians didn’t eat meat, etc. etc. I asked Soloman how he liked being talked about in the third person when he was sitting right there. Solomon said as long as he was speaking the truth it was okay with him. Then he countered saying some Rastafarians ate meat and that he ate chicken on occasion. Good to know! I actually couldn’t hear much of the conversation because we were on a bad road and Solomon’s taxi had a hatch back with a bad latch that made a deafening racket. I would love to do a photo essay on Kenyan taxi drivers. There are even a handful of women taxi drivers in Nairobi. (That’s a story for another day).
I spent the next day with Salim’s sister Nisha. She is 35 and a hoot. She has three children of her own and cares for two more. The youngest is in 9th grade, so she has a lot of free time on her hands. She sells second-hand clothes sometimes, but she doesn’t have a 9-5 job. Salim got her an apartment in his building and pays her rent and she cooks and cleans for him. She and Salim both have a gold eyetooth on upper right side of their mouth. I finally got the nerve up to ask Salim why they both had gold teeth. “I had a tooth knocked out in a fight in form 1 (9th grade), Nisha just did it for beauty,” he said. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course. And gold tooth or not Nisha is SO BEAUTIFUL! But she is divorced and wants to get married to a foreigner. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that gold teeth aren’t in the top ten of the western beauty scale. Besides if the right man is out there waiting for her…the gold tooth won’t matter one way or another!
I mentioned the first time I met Nisha that I liked the henna designs on her hands. That supposedly sealed the deal, because Saturday morning we were off to downtown East Leigh (Somali enclave of Nairobi) to be inked! And boy was I! See evidence below!
Even getting there was an adventure! The streets of East Leigh have been completely destroyed… so that with the rains the streets become more like a river, which means constant traffic jams. The matatu we are riding in decided to drop off all its passengers 10 blocks short of its intended destination to avoid the jam. We therefore have to walk to through the muddy crowded bustling sidewalks to get where we’re going. I see no other white people in the 15-minute walk. It’s hard to see anything really. The sidewalk, when there is one, is so uneven and muddy that you have to look down continuously to not stumble and fall. Which is a pity because East Leigh is a people-watching extravaganza! There are anthills that are less busy than East Leigh.
We duck down an alley and climb a rickety metal staircase to the first floor, where there is a small beauty salon. Inside are two very large Somali women getting their hair done. One is already under a dryer so they are talking very loudly in rapid fire Somali….ah, I think to myself, sounds like home!
The hairdresser is a Kenyan woman with short dyed orange hair. Her expression is blank with concentration or maybe boredom most of the time I’m there. A Somali woman on the small bench by the door motions me to sit down when Nisha tells her I want henna put on my hands and feet. She asks if I have lotion on, I say yes. So she motion me to sit in another chair and the hairdresser begins to wash my hands and feet with warm water. Everything at that moment becomes kind of surreal. I don’t spend a lot of time in beauty salons so I didn’t have a good notion of the bonding or care that is doled out to relative strangers. But it is an oddly intimate act. And as the first hour rolled into the second hour, and having nothing else to do, I observed the women interacting and caring for one another – ritual behavior really. One of the Somali women got out a prayer rug and said her prayers in the middle (there was no where else) of the shop. A woman came by selling second-hand clothes. Items were tried on but she left without making a sale.
The application of the henna is amazing to watch, the woman putting it on is so adept, it looks completely effortless. Henna is a plant based semi-permanent dye. She rolled a piece of plastic bag that once contained food of some sort. The writing on the bag was in Arabic, so I couldn’t say for sure what kind of food. The plastic is flattened and then rolled into a cone shape – as if you were going to write in icing on a cake. The henna is put into the cone and then the end is tied with another piece of plastic bag. A wonderful example of recycling!
When the henna is dry the excess is brushed off the skin with a dull knife blade or a fingernail. It was a big knife too, maybe five inches long…I wish I had brought my camera!
While they were working on removing the henna, the hairdresser, who by now is smiling and engaging me a bit, came over with a comb and started working it through my hair. As we were leaving Nisha said, “the hairdresser said she couldn’t resist touching your hair.” We laughed. Almost everyone I meet, if I get to know him or her, at some point or another is touching my hair.
We head back to the Park Road neighborhood where Salim and Nisha live. Nisha says we will eat lunch (it’s nearly 2:30) at the Ethiopian restaurant. I love Ethiopian food. We walk into a very hip place that is crowded even at this odd time of day. We order what looks like an incredible amount of food and eat it all! Again I am the only white person in the room…although now they are staring at my hands and not just my whiteness.
We return to Nisha’s apartment where her daughters carefully examine my inked hands and feet. A while later Nisha’s cousin shows up and doesn’t stop talking from the moment she walks in the door. She plops down on the sofa next too me. She is so animated; you can almost feel her energy. She pulls from her purse two black plastic bags of Mira (also called Kat), it’s not exactly illegal in Kenya but it’s a plant with the opposite effect of marijuana. It’s illegal in other countries, so selling Mira across the border would get you thrown in jail. I had never seen women chewing Mira before. It was quite the education. You basically just chew on the plant until it becomes like the cud of a cow. They also take little bites of Juicy Fruit gum – which I’m a guessing mask the taste of the Mira.
I didn’t ask too many questions…will save those for another day. I think I had pretty much used up my quota of cultural experiences for a 24-hour period.
