Long Way Down - Kenya I

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Recipe:  Chicken wrap

Ingredients
1/8 tsp Chili Powder 
 2 tbsp yogurt cheese (press all the liquid out of yogurt by wrapping it in cheesecloth, putting it in a sieve, and placing a bag of beans on top.  Let drain for a few hours).
Bunch of cilantro
Salt to taste
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 cloves garlic
1/2 small onion
1 chicken breast
1/4 tsp cumin
Handful lettuce
1 small tomato, chopped

Directions
Sauté onions in oil until translucent.  Add garlic, chicken and spices and sauté until chicken is done. Meanwhile, spread tortilla with yogurt cheese, add cilantro, lettuce and tomato, and then add fry-up and wrap it.
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 It is, I will admit, a little bit strange to receive a call from your parents asking how you would feel if they moved to Kenya.  Even if you are at the time living in Africa, and even if you feel great about it, there’s still something displacing about seeing the home you lived in your entire life get sold, and your parents move one whole ocean and a good part of a continent away.  On the other hand, since I happened to move across the same ocean, at least it wouldn’t take me an entire day to fly to them.  At least, that was the theory.
    I left Edinburgh for Kenya at seven in the morning.  This particular day it was very windy in London and due to the wind delays, both my plane out of Edinburgh, and my plane out of Heathrow taxied to a remote part of the runway, and shut off for an hour or two (okay, not to be critical of Heathrow airport, I know it’s really big and everything, but it’s located in London the place is windy the place is foggy you think they would have figured a system out by now).
    By the time I reached Cairo I had missed my direct flight to Kenya (four hours) and instead got routed through Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (six hours) where I had a four hour layover, and then flew back up to Kenya (two hours).  By the time the plane landed in Tanzania whenever I stood up I felt as though I was on the prow of a boat that was making its way through very stormy waters.
    Landing in Tanzania was a lot like landing in Malawi.  Tanzania is, granted much more humid than Malawi - it’s the type of air that when you walk through it, it actually feels wet.  But as we unloaded onto the tarmac and walked into the rather small airport it was the similarities that hit me.  The trees, bits of the language, even the dress styles of the tourists.  I spent a while in the waiting room watching a bird fly around.  It had its nest in a light, and was able to fly in and out so easily because the Tanzanian airport, like the Malawi airport, is fairly open - the walls don’t quite connect to the ceiling, and here and there, doors to the outside are just left ajar. 
    I thought about all the airports I’d been through in the past few months.  About the closed in tunnels of Dulles, about the crowded waiting rooms of Heathrow, and the soldier with the semi-automatic machine gun who was in my tram at Charles Du Gaul, to the palm trees lining the shiny new corridors in Cairo, and even about Edinburgh, where a jolly customs official welcomed me in and said he hoped I had a lovely year.  I thought about all of this as I sat there looking out at this bird I recognized, against a backdrop I recognized, in an airport style I remember quite well, and I don’t think it was up until that moment that I truly realized how much I had missed it all.
    We were escorted to the flamingo café for breakfast, although I wasn’t hungry, since I had already eaten a dinner on both my flights (side note, has anyone even had lunch on a flight?  I was thinking back, and I couldn’t remember a single time).  I sat down with three people who work in Uganda, which was nice.  It’s always a relief to meet people who work in Africa, because no matter where they work of what they do, there is a common affinity of understanding there. 
    It’s actually very difficult for me to talk about what Malawi was like to people who have never spent an extended amount of time in Africa.  This is because while I can describe in perfect detail my village, or day to day life, I don’t really think I will ever be able to even come close to conveying what living in a village was actually like.  In some ways, the experience is like a word unique to a language, untranslatable.  It’s fortunate for me that a lot of people in my graduate school either A) are from Africa or B) have worked and lived in Africa.
    After spending a nice four hours checking “Dar es Salaam airport” off my list of places to go in life I loaded onto an airplane and finally took off for Kenya.  By the time I landed in Kenya I had been in transit for 28 hours.  Imagine my relief then, when there were only three people in front of me in the visa line.  I went up and handed over my thirty pounds for a visa, the immigration official took them, looked at them, then looked at me.

Scottish pounds. Note the Bank of Scotland on lefthand edge, and Sir Walter Scott.

    “I can’t accept these,” he said.  “They’re Scottish pounds.”
    I replied that I knew that, but that Scottish and British pounds were the same.
    “No,” he pointed out.  “These say ‘Royal Bank of Scotland’ on them, and they have different people.”
    “Right,” I replied. “Because these are issued in Scotland. But Scotland and Britain are part of the same country.  It’s just the same.”

British Pounds. Note the "Bank of England" above and Queen.

    To which he stated that while he was fully aware that Scotland and Britain were part of the same country the Kenyan government had stated that they were not accepting pounds from the Royal Bank of Scotland (which actually might be smart, there’s a lot of counterfit Scottish currency running around right now.  We got an e-mail from the school telling us exactly what to check - watermarks and so forth - and it was just like, that’s all well and good guys, but honestly I don’t even know who’s face is supposed to be on there). 
    “Well the Kenyan government is wrong.”  I said firmly, and as an excuse for saying that, I can only cite the previous 28+ hours of transit.

     Fortunately, the border official I was dealing with was quite affable and replied that be that as it may, since I was in fact standing at the Kenyan border if I wanted to get in I was probably going to have to hand over a currency the Kenyan government accepted.  Luckily I had been to London recently, and happened to actually have some British pounds on me, which I promptly handed over.
    Giving me change, the border official apologized for having to give me British pounds.  I let it go.  At the time, the incident was frustrating, but thinking about it, the situation is a bit odd.  I really like Scotland having it’s own currency.  This is because I really like a lot of the cultural symbols Scotland uses to declare its uniqueness (if not its independence) from Britain.  That said, to someone not living in the UK, I can see where the concept of two currencies for one country would  be a bit strange.
    Two currencies aside I managed to pass through the border (thank you again patient border official) get my visa, and meet Dad in the lobby to head back to the new home in Kenya... (TBC next week)

Backyard in Virginia

Backyard in Kenya