No Hurry in Africa (41 page)

The Centre’s principal aim is to return the street-children to mainstream society through care, compassion and education. I was very impressed by the good work going on at the Centre, and wished to lend what assistance I could. Fr. Paul arranged for me to talk with Sr. Florence, the formidable, but very caring, young Akamba nun who was in charge. She and I agreed a teaching role for me at the Centre until I would be returning to Ireland.

These children, most of them aged from seven to fourteen, had already lived more than I had in some ways. Most were the victims of indifferent, destitute, violent or exploitative adults. Sr. Florence introduced me to some of those who were hanging around the hallway after our meeting.

‘Brendan, this is Nduku.’

A shy girl politely shook my hand, then moved on.

‘She arrived here having fled her own Akamba circumcision ceremony,’ Sr. Florence explained. ‘That would have marked her initiation into womanhood in her community. We have to be very sensitive where tribal customs are concerned.’

I was told about other girls as young as eight years old who had been working as prostitutes, some employed for that purpose by local bus drivers. The Centre offered them the possibility of a better future.

I got a vibe from the nuns that they would rather not go into detail about the backgrounds of some of the children who ended up in their care. And indeed, I was happy just to get to know the children for the individuals they were at that very moment. Some were bursting with vitality, while others were timid and withdrawn. Whenever a row broke out amongst the children, which happened frequently enough, I would be given more background information to provide me with some understanding of where the children were coming from. Sr. Concepta, another young Akamba nun working there, was particularly helpful in this respect.

‘See these boys, Brendan, their parents died in an accident and they have been very slow to adapt to life without them. They can be difficult,’ she warned me.

On another occasion, she explained ‘These twins have been physically and sexually abused. Many street-children like them have been forced into sexual intercourse as young as nine or ten years old. Many take to drugs at an equally early age.’

Indeed, some children were nearly always as high as kites on glue that they bought off the shoemakers in the village. Glue sniffing was a very common problem with street-children in the bigger villages and towns throughout Kenya and, inevitably, in the Nairobi slums. They turned to glue in an attempt to escape briefly the harsher aspects of their lives.

The Centre was a modest building that accommodated over thirty resident children. They slept in bunks in two dormitories, one for boys and the other for girls. Each morning I was welcomed off my bicycle by a sprightly mob of youngsters who crowded around me and cheered. I was reminded a bit of the people at the orphanage in Lasse Hallstrom’s film
The Cider House Rules;
there was an almost tangible sense of impoverished togetherness among the children. Most of the time.

On one hot afternoon, they all went swimming in their pelts in a natural pool in the nearby river. This upset the Rodney and Del Boy of Kitui, who happened to be fishing from the rocks with bows and arrows, a makeshift net, and a crudely fashioned rod cut from a tree. The exuberant splashing and screaming of the children must have put to flight every fish within a wide area. Twenty minutes later, a huge rumpus erupted among the twenty-five or so children. They had taken sides over a piece of bread supposedly belonging to Fundi, a deaf mute boy who had only entered the Centre that very day. Sr. Florence, Sr. Concepta and I had to try frantically to separate the brawling children. Fundi could throw some punch. My glasses were broken in the commotion—again.

Most mornings found me sitting at my classroom table teaching a bit of English and basic mathematics. During my final year in DCU, I had conducted tutorials in a few subjects with some undergraduate classes. This was a different proposition altogether, and it was not just the age difference. Probably the biggest challenge was linguistic; most of the children only understood Kikamba, their tribal language. So, as I was teaching them English, they were teaching me Kikamba, and we had great fun. One young lad named Mutua had a natural flair for teaching. I could not help thinking that he had the makings of a great teacher one day, if only he gets the opportunity. The street-childrens’ English, when I arrived, consisted mainly of telling me, ‘I am not a glue,’ and, ‘Your name is a-British, you come from America.’ I decided I would add geography to the curriculum.

The Akamba tribal language, in my view, must be one of the hardest languages on earth to learn. For example, there seems to be about a dozen ways to say ‘hello’ depending on such variants as the time of day, the age of the person whom one is addressing, and the degree of respect he or she merits. Each greeting comes with a different reply. Every word seems to have four vowels for every one consonant. Despite these complexities, Fr. Frank is regarded by many as the foremost authority on Kikamba anywhere in the world—even more than any Akamba person. He has lived in Kitui since 1961.

I had picked up some Kikamba by listening to people in Nyumbani and Kitui over the months. I never saw it written down, even though there are books in the language. Perhaps because of the amount of vowels, it is a wonderfully musical language. ‘What is your name?’ for example, sounds something like ‘waazz-ee-attaa?’ Kitui people used to laugh whenever I used Kikamba. This was quite off-putting at first, until I was assured they were laughing, not at my clumsy attempts to communicate, but at the sheer novelty of hearing a
mzungu
speak their tribal tongue. They must think of Fr. Frank as a native speaker by now. Compared to Kikamba, I found that Swahili was fairly easy to speak.

One morning, about two weeks after I started in the Centre, I arrived full of enthusiasm for the day ahead, just as I did every morning. Immediately I sensed a rather tense atmosphere; everybody seemed unusually sombre. I could hear raised voices somewhere in the building. Eventually Sr. Concepta arrived and gave me the story in a hushed voice,

‘Four of our street-boys left the Centre last night and raped a grown woman in the village.’

She pointed three of them out to me. One still had not returned. The shock at hearing this was momentarily overwhelming. I was full of conflicting emotions, mainly sympathy with the victim, as well as disgust at the perpetrators. But this was tempered by an awareness of the abusive backgrounds of the boys in question. I could not help contrasting in my mind how different my own innocent childhood had been. The children who raped the lady were around eleven and twelve years old. Two of them I had been getting on especially well with, and another of them was the hotheaded deaf boy, Fundi. I had developed a good rapport with him too.

This incident happened a month before the end of my time with the street-children. When I moved on, the boys were still at the Centre, much subdued; I was told the situation was still being assessed. There was, apparently, confusion over the circumstances of the assault. There was reluctance on the part of the nuns to go into any detail. They did not reveal the extent of police involvement, if any. There was a sense that the community had their own ways of dealing with these situations. There was a sense, too, that the business of the Centre was rehabilitation, not punishment.

The rape incident did not detract from the huge enjoyment of working with street-children. I spent some afternoons learning to play traditional African rhythms on a goat-skin drum. The children used to spontaneously and joyously dance and sing to the drumbeat in the timeless Akamba ways. It was almost as if they were hypnotised and possessed by the rhythms; they were simply incapable of keeping still on hearing a beating drum—even when played by a beginner like me.

On other occasions, they loved to dance to a different, modern style of Akamba music that you could hear playing loudly from tapes in Kitui village every day. This music is known as
benga,
and is characterised by lively crisp high electric guitar chords and heavy bass rhythm interludes. Ordinary people never sing it or play it themselves, but they love to listen and dance to its infectious rhythms.

On some afternoons, I hoisted Mutua or Fundi or some of the other children onto the bar of my old bicycle and cycled down to the river to wash clothes. It was marvellous to see how these destitute children were all bonding together—though not always. One hot afternoon, they were all playing football with a ball made from plastic bags tied tightly with string. (The Dutch girls, Ilsa and Yvonne, had left them a proper leather football, but they often preferred the plastic bags because they were easier on their barefeet). Suddenly, World War III broke out among them. The usual suspects got stuck in, including the four who had raped the woman. Within seconds, though, Mutua and even the girls had joined in.

What had caused the free-for-all? I had no idea.

Eventually I got one word out of Mutua: ‘witchcraft.’

When I heard this, I let them at it; I was seriously outnumbered and had my glasses to protect!

‘It often happens here,’ Sr. Concepta explained afterwards. ‘One team is accused of placing a spell on one of the goalposts during the game. They take their witchcraft very seriously.’

‘Now that you mention it,’ I recalled, ‘the score was eight or nine to nil, and the ball did always seem to roll up short for the losing team, or hit the post.’

‘Maybe you have been here too long, Brendan,’ she smiled.

There was another occasion, shortly before I left Kitui, when the children were having a party and everyone was happily dancing and singing. Suddenly, Mutua accused a cheeky boy called Mumo of performing witchcraft on him. Mumo produced a sharp knife in the fight that inevitably ensued. It was only with difficulty that I managed to break it up and prise the knife from his grip. They were both sky-high on glue. With many of the street-children, it was often a matter of two steps forward, two steps back.

A couple of days later, Mumo and a small moody boy called Kilonzo came to my rescue when they stoned a light-green snake they spotted slithering towards me, as I stretched out in the shade of a tree. Kilonzo had been in a foul mood all morning up to then. To thank him for his alertness, I placed my khaki hat over his head and let him wear it. He was a sight. He could hardly see out from under it as it covered his eyes. It cheered him up no end, and he went round impersonating the
mzungu
for the rest of the day.

That week I heard Kilonzo and Mumo plotting to rob a lemon orchard. I just hoped they would not make a career out of thieving or banditry, as so many street-children do. In the English lesson that morning, I asked my pupils to finish the sentence ‘When I grow up, I want to be … ’ Nduku, the shy little girl who had escaped circumcision, replied,

‘A car.’

She had not understood. Some of the others laughed, and her big eyes grew tearful.

It was Kilonzo who asked the day after, ‘Is your hair real?’ while plucking at my arm.

On another occasion he enquired, ‘Is your father’s skin white?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but my mother’s skin is pink.’

He looked really perplexed until I told him I was just teasing. It was around this time that I picked up a cold. The nights are relatively chilly in Kitui during June and July. When I phoned home, my mother was very concerned—as usual.

‘It could be malaria you have, Brendan. You should get the plane home.’

My cold lingered for a few days, forcing me to stay at home in the evenings. I whiled away another sunset by reading Thomas Pakenham’s fascinating book on colonialism,
The Scramble for Africa.
From my perch on the verandah, I could hear nearby children singing as the light faded and the stealthy female mosquitoes moved in for a nightcap of blood. Driven indoors, I retired early to bed, but was soon awakened by the sound of gunshots not very far away.

Although used to such nocturnal gunfire in Africa during my year there, it always made me fearful; and it made sound sleep impossible. I just lay there, restless, in the menacing darkness. I was imagining the gunman and his violent mission. I dozed a little. In my semi-conscious state, the gunman got mixed up with the early rifle-toting colonists—images from Pakenham’s book. Then, in the stillness, another familiar sound: the high-pitched and highly irritating buzzing of a solitary mosquito. It was hovering inches from my ear, trying to infiltrate the mosquito net hanging over my bed. Big fears and small irritations meant I awoke next morning from a night without restful slumber.

After a couple of days, I felt perfectly well again and had very mixed feelings about returning home. I had really enjoyed my time volunteering with the street-children, trying to get the best out of each one of them. I had loved working with children the summer I spent at an activity camp in America, but working with Kitui’s abandoned, abused and orphaned children was so much more challenging, and more rewarding because of that. Some of them still had monstrous behavioural problems by the time I left, and other broken children were continuing to arrive on a regular basis. But I had become a father figure to many of them. I could see a difference in them myself. I had a feeling that many—I hope all of them—benefited at least a little from my time with them.

I also came away with the greatest admiration for the nuns who were dedicating their entire lives to giving these children a chance in the world. The sisters were doing truly trojan work in caring for and offering love to children who were not just unloved but, as often as not, abandoned and abused. In educating them, the nuns were also offering them that most precious of gifts: hope.

What was most encouraging was that the children were enthusiastic about education (as indeed they seemed to be everywhere I travelled in East Africa). They were also learning essential life skills beyond the limited curriculum. Despite the sudden, occasionally violent flare-ups, there was a spirit of camaraderie among them. Most were bonding with each other and learning to trust; to trust each other and to trust the sisters. Prior to their arrival at the Centre, their entire life experience had taught them not to trust adults. It took some of them several weeks to come round, but all of them learned to smile again. That, I thought, was the real measure of the nuns’ success.