Nan chats merrily and a little manically, as we drive the thirty kilometers from Kisumu to Maseno. I have been awake and hoofing it around the planet for three days, so I’m only able to slur dopey, semi-coherent responses, as I grapple to make sense of the distressing scenery. Kisumu is an actual city. It is not lovely, not Blixen’s picturesque village but rather a dirty, garbage-strewn, scummy, steamy skid row crawling with raggedy locals who look either sick or stoned and seem to reek of misery. This is not what I’d envisioned as the African misery that I had come to alleviate. There are no little, naked babies with swollen bellies and mouths swarming with flies, like on TV in the infomercials. It is more like Tijuana in my worst nightmare. I hold on, white-knuckled, to the bare metal frame of the bench seat in front of me, as we carom through slums on roads so marginal that James keeps veering down onto the steep gravel periphery to avoid cavernous potholes. A toxic cloud of grime streams in the windows, coagulating my sour sweat into a gritty paste.
We drive straight up, climbing out of the urban swill and away from the filthy shores of polluted Lake Victoria—no, not Livingston’s scenic mere—but where malaria, bilharzia, the hideously monstrous Nile perch, and suffocating, exotic, water hyacinths dwell. We reach an elevation of over four thousand feet, where the cool pastoral township of Maseno lies. Just as we pass an intersection, lined with trees shading decrepit lean-tos and milling Kenyans who, like James, all seem absurdly overdressed, we spin off the paved highway, such as it is, and onto a deep, red, mud-rutted road that shakes apart whatever hasn’t already been rattled loose in the vehicle or in me. A quarter mile later our van lurches through a rough, open gate cut into a droopy chicken-wire fence and enters the grounds of St. Philips Theological College. After spinning out in the wet grass, James shudders to a stop in front of a lumpy cement wall. A woman who looks startlingly like me pounces from a wooden slab bench that is wedged into the trunk of a massive sheltering tree.
“Welcome!” she gushes as she grabs both of my hands. It immediately occurs to me that she is too animated for the heat and too desperate for my rapidly dissipating peace of mind. “I’m Stephanie!” She appears to be about my age, wears a long skirt and a dashiki-type tunic and also sports a short gray haircut. She is clearly overjoyed to see me and this is alarming.
“Hi . . . Pam. Stephanie?” I mumble through a goofy smile.
“Come into the house for something to eat. You’ve missed breakfast and lunch won’t be served for hours.” Nan politely invites only me while locking my clammy arm in hers. She chatters away as she uses her free hand to wrestle with a giant, padlocked, metal barrier that leads to an open-air alcove. We are met by a bounding Simba (Swahili for “lion”), the Hardisons’ massive, shaggy yellow dog, and an exuberant Chui (Swahili for “cheetah”), their stouter, rounder hound. They attack me as soon as the door swings ajar. Nan orders me to quickly shut the barrier behind me, cautioning me not to let the dogs squeeze past as they scare the children walking to and from the nursery school, and they chase the chickens. A sickish, surreal, dream-state fog - of the stale stench of sodden polyester, intense pollution and scorched-earth ghetto, intermingling with playful romping dogs, happy sheltered children, healthy free-range chickens, and some ambushing, overly ecstatic lady who is my mirror image - swirls in my mushy head.
Nan gently deposits me in a sturdy wooden chair at a substantial oak table that takes up most of the space in the stark room. The floors are bare concrete. A few semi-stuffed worn chairs, a fully stuffed and lopsided bookshelf, and a single couch that is clearly the dogs’ domain, finish out the area. Random bits of local art are scattered unceremoniously about. An entire wall of the room is lined with windows that face out onto the dirt road we’ve just driven in on. A hard African sun jutting through fat, emerald leaves of wind-whipped trees spills into the room and creates a foreboding latticework of light, eerily shafted by the thick iron bars shielding the glass.
Nan putters away in the pantry. The kitchen itself, a room with a gas stove and oven, a sink with running water, and cooking paraphernalia scattered about, is across the alcove in an adjacent building that also houses the Hardisons’ facilities—a bona fide bathroom complete with toilet, shower, tub, and vanity. Back in the living quarters Nan serves me hard-boiled eggs, buttered toast, and cold lemonade. As I am reeling from travel and feeling dangerously nauseous, I politely decline most of it. Little do I know that it will be the most eggs, butter, toast, or cold anything that I will see for some time. But so far nothing has been anything I was expecting, so how am I to know? At the table I am joined by Nan, who is at once warm and friendly, happy and gracious, sweet and smiley. I will see this same Nan again during my stay but she won’t be a regular. Like the electricity, the rains, and the revolving cast of characters who come to volunteer, I will learn that Nan’s moods are also ephemeral and unpredictable—a dead-on, accurate barometer for life at St. Philips. Nancy Hardison will come to represent the living, breathing manifestation of the gentle or violent, organic or inorganic, human or inhuman forces of nature that shape her beloved Kenya.
Once the snack is cleared away, Nan, as animated as a little kid showing off a cherished toy, hauls me off to where I’ll be staying. “Can’t I live here with you guys?” I yearn to plead as she drags me away across the wavy green meadow around the aforementioned flighty chickens, a skinny cow, and a bunch of sheep so closely shorn that for weeks I’ll think they are goats. Up ahead in a small clutter of identical-looking structures looms the visitors’ quarters, a loafy, listing, whitewashed cement block with a small red plastic bucket on the stoop. I notice that a different-colored bucket is propped beside the entrance to each building and I silently command myself to remember Nan’s words, “Yours has the red one!”
A blockade of slab timber opens into a wedge of dark corridor that divides the seven bedrooms, four to one side and three to the other. Nan proudly shows me the room she has chosen for me. It is about eight by ten feet, has its own locking door—padlock on the outside, dead bolt from within—a window with bars and no glass but a creaky wooden shutter propped open with a branch, two single cots with saggy foam mattresses that look like slices of wet Wonder bread, two plastic mosquito nets suspended from nails and trussed up over each bed, one wobbly wooden table and chair, and a roughed-out set of shelves. A jaundiced, lonely, bare lightbulb hangs from the water-stained, peeling-painted, plasterboard ceiling, and one dodgy-looking electrical outlet, ostensibly for when there is power, dangles from an insipid concrete wall. The windowsill is adorned with a droopy candle, a box of matches, and a bottle of water. On the desk lies two limp, threadbare towels and two rolls of infirmary-blue toilet paper. Each bed has a blanket, pillow, and a set of sheets, all clean and looking as if they’ve been washed—more like pounded with a rock in a stream—about a million times. “And the other bed is for Joe when he comes!” Nan flings out her arm and announces with theatrical pomp.
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