“Do not lose this!” Nan orders as she presents me with my itty-bitty lock. Then, encircling my neck with a lanyard dangling an even tinier key, like the one I had for my Annie Oakley diary when I was seven, she whispers, “Lock your room every time you leave it!”
“Oh, you bet! So no one can steal all this groovy stuff,” I chuckle to myself, still so naïve. We proceed, actually just pirouette around, with the rest of the tour. At the end of the hallway are, surprise! two toilets that flush most of the time, although I have no idea where anything that goes down goes. There is a short, blue-lidded pail beside each commode, “for toilet paper and any other non-organic matter,” a cold-water tap with a semi-affixed, precariously listing wall sink, and two open, cement shower stalls. In truth, everything in the dormitory is far more in the way of amenities than I had expected. I’d actually rather hoped we’d be camping out, like in the safari movies. Instead, it’s like we’re squatting in the projects.
As the day progresses, I meet the other volunteers and realize that almost all are representatives of some larger group, family, church, or school which sends its members or constituents on similar missions. My first night on the compound, I’m asked if I am awaiting the arrival of friends from home. I imagine I appear singularly misplaced.
“Oh, god no!” I answer with a vigorous shake of my head. “No one I know would come here.”
“Really?! Why ever not?” Stephanie, my new twin, asks with genuine astonishment.
“Well, because they’d probably die.” I answer as though it’s a silly question, but I elaborate anyway. “First off, most of the folks I’m acquainted with wouldn’t eat a single thing here. And besides,” I add with a shrug as though overstating the obvious, “they would never be able to poop.”
Toilets are a bizarre symbol of the civilized niceties that many of us citizens of today’s first world take for granted. Consider for a moment our nation’s escalating dependency upon and consequent on-the-spot access to paper toilet-seat covers. But, as Nan promises, there are virtually no toilets in all of rural Kenya. St. Philips has them, though, and other delights, like showers. I never imagined that while in Africa I’d be able to just step into a stone closet, flick a disembodied switch lying in a pool of slime, turn a corroded crank handle to open a rusty spigot, and have water channeled from raised tanks on the property, providing a steady stream of water, warmed by heating elements in a system similar to those in electric European teapots. I can bask in the drizzle for as long as my conscience will allow.
The Hardisons ask that we take minimalist showers and be conservative with both water and electricity. This would present no problem for me, as conventional showers are modern comforts that I was prepared to do without. I’d cruised for many years on a ship where cold, saltwater, deck-bucket rinses were the norm. And prior to going to sea, I had affixed a circa-1970s, northern-California cabin roof with black plastic pipe that solar-heated the water I pumped up from my well and gravity-fed to a hose I had strung in a nearby acacia grove. And I am in Africa. Consequently, under the circumstances, the Maseno dorm shower feels positively decadent. That is, when it works. But it isn’t the shower’s unreliability that concerns me. We are simply lucky to have either water or power on the compound since both are practically nonexistent in much of the rest of the country. Yet, either due to drought which makes the stream a mere dribble or to storms which blow through and knock down the town’s jerry-rigged electrical wires, both are, at best, inconsistent at St. Philips. All of this is unavoidable and all of it is fine with me. Nevertheless, I do have moments of pause while using these facilities, once I get wind of a disquieting rumor that is being bandied about among the volunteers.
Seems our brand of heating apparatuses has already been credited with cooking a fair number of do-gooders in the country. The obvious flaws in electrical mechanisms of this type combined with the inevitable standing water, bare wires, and faulty switches of our dorms’ setups create a shockingly conducive environment for a mass electrocution. I never know for certain if the urban legend is true but I get a stunning visual in spite of myself every time I stand in my soupy puddle and hit the switch. My clothes remain on until the last possible second to avoid my being found poached naked. Then, balancing precariously on one rubber flip-flop, I hike the other leg up in midair so as not to be the conduit for the electrical arc or some such scientific nonsense. Truthfully, I have no idea what I’m doing but the pose does make me feel better. Any locals witnessing my display probably write it off as a crazy muzungu cleansing ritual but I don’t care and I don’t miss a single daily dousing while in Kenya. In fact I have difficulty imagining a situation where it might be more imperative to get a good disinfecting scrub-down.
While on the continent, I feel like I am perpetually coated in sewerage. Maseno isn’t dirty, per se. It’s just that Kenya is so much more germ-infested, trash strewn, and unhygienic than I imagined it would be. The steamy heat, putrid stink, variety and virility of communicable diseases, constant mandatory physical contact, and the custom of cooking and eating with one’s bare hands make not having access to soap or water a running concern. Simply being able to slip under a lukewarm spritz at the conclusion of each contaminated workday alleviates my phobia of swarming, deadly contagion and in general wards off the queasy heebie-geebies. Any fear of being struck down in the process by a lethal jolt takes a sizable backseat. And those toilets! My first conversation with Stephanie’s brother Derrick, another volunteer, is all about the toilets.
“Nice, huh?” he says as he catches me examining one. “I’ve even considered dropping a couple bottles of Tuskers in the tank to chill!” Tuskers is the local beer named for and labeled with a picture of a full-tusked elephant. The idea of cooling a pint or two in the toilet tank seems brilliant until I am cautioned that because it is against the rules for St. Philips seminary students to have alcohol, we aren’t supposed to keep any on the compound either. But as the days wear on, it becomes apparent that that is not going to be an option for me. My subsequent quest to acquire, conceal, and consume my stash of liquid contraband serves as a valuable distraction from the day-to-day monotony, disillusionment, and despair of Kenya while, in no way that I can see, hindering my ethical or moral commitment to the mission. After finding out that alcohol can be purchased locally, my resolve is resolute, further fortified by my first dinner with the Hardisons where I discover that the good doctors nip regularly.
During that initial conversation with Derrick, I also learn that Nan and Gerry have their visitors over to dinner three nights a week. Besides these festive evenings, all our meals are prepared by the hired Kenyan cooks in an open fire pit in a grimy back shed, and taken in the dining hall with the seminary students and compound laborers. Along with this is a tacit acceptance that any attention to even the most basic sanitation standards concerning food handling is not being nearly paid.
“Oh, boy!” I say upon hearing that we’ll be having dinner parties. “So, how come we get to eat at the Hardisons’ house?”
“Well, they say it’s because there’s no meat served in the dining hall on these nights but I don’t think that’s their real reason,” Derrick confides. “I think they like the company and it’s their way of sort of keeping tabs on the volunteers.