Pami bounces over from where she’s been checking our luggage. “Joey, let’s go. They need your passport.”
“Pami, they’re arresting me.”
“Really? Let me take a picture!” she squeals excitedly.
“No, no mama, no pictures! He must come with us,” the supervising policeman warns with her hands in my wife’s face.
I’m sequestered off in a corner of the room to wait for the official vehicle that has been summoned to deliver me to the police station. Pami has been in this country long enough to know the drill. She squeezes her way into the tight circle of armed authorities surrounding me. “How much?” she asks my suddenly serious, threatening entourage. “We can just work this out here?”
“Too many people now,” the sterner policeman whispers, shaking his head. “I’m afraid we must go to the police station.” Then, and I think purely for effect in front of his cronies, as I have committed not one iota of arrest resistance, he grabs me really hard by the arm and commands with threatening authority, “Let’s go!”
“Wait! I’m coming too!” Pami asserts.
“No, no mama. You go on your plane,” the policewoman with the radio insists, adding merrily as if I were just being escorted to a pit stop at the loo. “He will come soon.”
“I am not leaving without my husband,” Pami declares with her hands on her hips.
“It’s okay, mama. He’ll be all right.” The policewoman laughs at her. “He didn’t kill anyone. Hakuna Matata. No worries!”
My wife adamantly refuses to leave my side and so off we all drive to jail in the paddy wagon, a military-issue type, road-weary jeep with a floppy, faded green tarp that cracks in the wind like a hard slap. I am sandwiched on a bench between the militia. The “warthog” tooth is jiggling on the corroded dashboard like some baby Jesus stick-on or quivering miniature hula dancer. Pami wriggles her way in to sit next to me. With all their bravado, the authorities don’t resist her much. It’s quickly apparent that as many locals as possible want to get in on this sting; four armed guards are obviously not enough to contain the likes of me. Pami has told me that she perceives the Kenyans to be gentle beggars at heart but are also well-schooled in the art of zeroing in on an easy mark. She says that they aren’t typically trying to provoke, just trying not to miss an opportunity to get a survival leg up. My souvenir and I might be the most excellent prospect this bunch has chanced upon all year. Still, I feel like they are being unreasonably nasty to me. Their bullying treatment and hostile attitude are unsettling to say the least. As I am being dragged off, the kind policeman that first called on his radio prior to all hell breaking loose senses my concern and tries to reassure me. “You will just go to the police station, pay a fine, and be back in time for your flight,” he sings out with a confident wave of his hand.
I really want to believe him.
Chapter Two - Getting There:
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For the record, here is where my journey begins. As an empty nester with an unquenched wanderlust, and at the tender age of fifty-something, I am raring to embark on my next great adventure. Although the world still beckons me as it had in my twenties, when I jumped aboard a circumnavigating tall ship, now it cries out with the voices of those less fortunate. This mother hears that call.
Convinced that I am still able to travel rough and do the difficult work, I conclude that all I need is a people, a place, . . . and devastation. Africa is one obvious answer. It has however, been over twenty-five years since I’ve been an independent world traveler and things have changed. For instance, doors are no longer opened to enthusiastic wayfarers. In fact, I find they aren’t even beat-downable. Helping out in the world——heck, just getting out there—has become an incorporated enterprise, sealed in bureaucracy and bound with endless red tape. I am soon buried in the facts and frustrations of beating my way in, in today’s do-gooder world marketplace. After two years of thrashing through maddening phone calls, frustrating meetings, and a mountain of form-letter-style rejections, what emerges is not encouraging. There is no end to the programs that are positively thrilled to take my money, but this I expected. It is what else I unearth which provokes in me a bone-weary apprehension.
During the last quarter century, a myriad of benevolent vacations have materialized throughout the world that poignantly advertise an outlet for the tourist-with-a-conscience. I am invited to pay a hefty fee for the privilege of participating. I will then be obliged to function under the auspices of—and abide by the rules, restrictions, and carefully protected liabilities that are strictly enforced by—some well-meaning charitable organization that typically has a religious agenda. This modern brand of program offends my independent spirit. Besides, I can’t afford most of them. Such groups try to accommodate me by offering the option of simply dashing off a check, but I have already determined that the guilt-salving spectator’s easy way out is not going to cut it for me. Nonetheless, I have held on to the knee-deep heap of brochures that are graciously sent to me by these groups, and each will receive their well-deserved due. Most also get my money. In the end, my search leads me to the good doctors—Nancy and Gerry Hardison of the Maseno Project in Kenya. We meet. They say, “Just get yourself here.” And I do. The rest is, as they say, history—albeit a rendition unlike any I have yet to run across. My journey should be revealed. It is as rife with portent as many a primrose path tends to be in retrospect.
I begin my search with organizations with which I am already familiar. I am still arrogant enough to assume that getting this munificent venture cranking will be a cakewalk for a candidate as capable and worldly as myself, to say nothing of the fact that I am so keen to sacrifice. The Peace Corps seems like the appropriate first contact. They are front and center in every hellhole on the planet, if I am to trust the news media and Hollywood. Besides, I nearly joined right out of high school. Why, they may still have my application! I suggest that perhaps the agent with whom I speak should have a look.
“Dear. That was like, what, a bazillion years ago? Are you sure the Peace Corps was even in existence back then?” she burbles.
“Yes, dear, it began as a call to action by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and I am a proud child of those sixties,” I enlighten her. “But okay,” I add diplomatically, careful not to alienate her but thinking this is a vital piece of information that was probably in paragraph one of the orientation packet for someone of her pay grade. “I guess the agency was pretty young back then.”
“Yep, pretty young back then all right,” she chirps, adding, “Like you!”
The Peace Corps has changed and apparently so have I, although I am not considered totally without merit. The helpful secretary sends me a pamphlet for the agency’s 50+ program and advises that if I am still interested it will take at least ten months to process my application. If I qualify for consideration, someone will be in touch. I don’t pursue it. I could have, but being so ancient and all, I am in too much of a hurry to wait months to be considered. Anyway, there has to be about a “bazillion” other agencies that are just chomping at the bit to get their hands on someone like me. Moreover, the Peace Corps requires a twenty-seven-month commitment from its volunteers and I am not prepared to leave my family for that long. I figure I’m good for six weeks, two months tops. I’ll keep looking.
Putting out feelers by the bulk-mail load, I realize with dismay that most connect me with fine organizations that contain sticky, non-secular subtexts. It isn’t on this basis alone that I object to them. I simply feel that it may not be in the best interest of these holy-endeavor enthusiasts to