Muzungu
A-Frican Lost Soul's Reality Check
by
Pamela Sisman Bitterman
Copyright 2011 Pamela Sisman Bitterman,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0090-7
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
MUZUNGU
A-FRICAN LOST SOUL’S REALITY CHECK
Muzungu: The Swahili word for white folks.
Translation: Confused person wandering about.
By
Pamela Sisman Bitterman
Faith moves mountains, but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.
This book is dedicated to Doctors Nancy and Gerry Hardison, and to the children of Kenya.
It is in memory of David.
Chapter One - Arrested:
Hakuna Matata my Muzungu butt.
Joe Bitterman
“Pami, they’re arresting me,” my husband Joe cautions as I skip over to the security baggage check at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. He looks so dapper in his new safari outfit. Except for that twitchy smile hanging off his perplexed face. His head is raked in its customary tilt of contrition. He’s trying not to frighten me.
“Ooh Joey, let me get a picture!” I squeal.
It is eight a.m. on the morning that he and I are to finally fly out of Africa. I have been in Kenya for nearly two months. Joe came over only for the last week to take me on safari. Our daughter is waiting for us in London. Our bags are checked and I am flailing our boarding passes. But we will not be leaving as planned. Instead, we will be placed under armed arrest. Well, Joe will be under arrest, muscled around at gunpoint from airport to jail to courthouse to prison, while I paddle after him. The grinning officers who prohibit me from taking a photo try to cajole me into catching our flight and going on ahead.
“He’ll be all right, mama. He didn’t kill anyone. No worries. Hakuna Matata!”
“Yeah, right!” I blurt out with that twitchy smile now hung on my anxious face.
The following is Joe’s lyrical travelogue of our middle-drawer, six-day wildlife safari, his description of the bizarre scene at the airport, and its ludicrous unraveling: a blow-by-blow, often grisly, sometimes comical, ceaselessly tense horror show of the struggle of my husband and me to keep him from vanishing into an African slammer. It is touch and go. Every scene of the ongoing drama plays like pure fiction too preposterous to be taken seriously. Except it is all too true.
Here is the revealing reenactment of what should have been our sayonara to the Dark Continent, but instead emerges as a decisive sucker punch delivered by my Kenya in all of its confounding, pathetic glory. The events that make up the substance of my story will naturally precede the arrest, but they will set the stage for this final scene piece by piece, like a house of cards.
Joe’s narrative dictated, cleaned up and recorded:
* * *
I call Pami to wish her a happy birthday, her fifty-sixth. Here in San Diego it is actually the day before, but in Mombasa it is already October 7. After listening to her entertaining account of the events of the rainy stint spent in the saturated Tree House the previous night with Ian, our son’s friend and Pami’s traveling buddy, I dive back into packing for my rendezvous with her.
Dressy and casual clothes suited for both summer and winter weather are strewn all over the bedroom. I am not only packing for myself, but I’m also bringing non-missionary type outfits for Pami. She tells me that she is eager to shed the “schoolmarmish” skirts and blouses decreed for wear by women who travel to Kenya to live and work as she has done for the past several weeks. Pam fully intended to follow her orientation pamphlet’s recommendation to the letter: “Pack as though you will be leaving everything behind as a donation.” This will have reduced her to a state of unholy undress, so I’m bringing safari clothes for her as well. Then I need to throw together another bag for both of us for the second half of our trip, visiting our daughter in London and traveling with her on to Ireland.
The entire time I’m struggling to coordinate seasonal separates, our dog Mabel is whining, nose-butting my ankle, and beseeching me with her cloudy old hound-dog eyes. Her nervous drool flies with each violent shake of her shaggy head, sending globs of slobber to cling indiscriminately on African and European ensembles alike. I’m afraid that because the suitcases are out, our savvy pooch knows that I am deserting her. Nonetheless, my anticipation at the prospect of a reunion with my wife after nearly two months apart wins flat out. So in order to complete my allocated task, I turn two deaf ears and one soggy pant leg in Mabel’s direction and carry on.
The following morning I dress in my Safari clothes—a brand new pair of khaki pants and sport coat expressly designed to look worn and ruddy. Little do I know that it will also be my outfit throughout a fateful incarceration. I catch a lift to the airport from Ian’s father in exchange for the favor of delivering more malarial medicine to Ian, who is planning to continue traveling around Africa for several months. My flight schedule is from San Diego to Houston to London to Amsterdam to Nairobi, over a thirty-hour period during which I have a four-hour layover in London where I meet our daughter and leave her the duffel full of Europe clothes. So eager am I to be on an adventure again, and so looking forward to seeing my love and soul mate of twenty-five years, that I do not sleep one wink during the entire trip.
My plane arrives in Nairobi at six a.m. I indulge a momentary stab of concern when I don’t see Pami, but after I pass through the almost-negligible security, there she is. Although she still has the familiar gleam in her eye of the confident and enlightened woman I know, and the swagger of that seasoned traveler whom I married, she is wearing these hideous missionary clothes that make her look like a bag lady and I almost don’t recognize her. We embrace like a couple of newlyweds while we exchange our latest travel stories.
Pami tells me that she spent the night in the airport curled up with her backpack, on a luggage conveyor belt. She and a young fellow from New Zealand who was en route to Lamu, an island off Kenya’s southern coast in the Indian Ocean, shared the thin strip of lumpy rubber. I’m informed that this was likely the safest place for her to have waited for me. Then together we begin scanning the rows of men holding posters advertising various safari groups. Ours isn’t among them.
It is eight a.m. before our appointed safari guide casually shows up flailing a piece of torn cardboard box. Our last name is scrawled across it with childlike determination in bright purple crayon. Smiling pleasantly, our escort, an attractive, stocky, thirty-something Kenyan man, introduces himself as Harrison. He appears to have limited English-language skills. I soon realize, however, that he doesn’t understand our requests for tasks that he wishes not to perform but has excellent comprehension of anything to which he is agreeable.
Within moments of our departure from the Nairobi airport, on the road that will carry us into the poetic Masai Mara, an