Assorted Stories

The Arabuko Sokoke Forest

On the way to Vitengeni we passed through the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, a strip of land five to ten miles wide and thirty or forty miles long. The area, protected by the Kenyan Forest Service, appears to be the one place in the coast region that has not been denuded of trees. It is also home to elephants.

I had not expected to find any of the more exciting wildlife species so close to my place of work. Since my arrival in Kenya I have seen monkeys, large insects, bats, chameleons, several other types of lizards, and one octopus. They were all very nice to see, but they are not big wildlife. With the exception of the octopus, which was entirely out of place according to my preconceived notions of African wildlife, the animals I have seen here are all expected to be around populated areas in tropical countries. But I never expected to be near the sorts of animals that spring to mind when one thinks of an African Safari. Just the possibility of seeing an elephant was fresh and exciting, and for the ten minutes we cut through the forest, I was not thinking at all about the ten candidates for Field Officer that we were to interview that day.

The vegetation in the forest stands in a stark contrast to the surrounding areas. Passing under the electric fence designed to keep the elephants in, it is like entering a different country altogether. The road is a tunnel carved through the dense undergrowth and the large canopy overhead. The air is cooler and moister. The green is darker. We did not see any elephants on the way to or from Vitengeni, but a pile of dung that appeared to weigh around twenty-five pounds testified to their presence, and to their ability to produce deliverables similar in quality and quantity to those of many bureaucracies.


Witchcraft

Witchcraft is real. Even in Kenya, arguably one of the most developed nations in Africa, witchcraft and superstition have a strong presence. I do not believe in hexes or curses, or the power of incantation, but witchcraft is real. It is not always visible, but it is there, lingering in the doubts and fears of a large and poorly educated segment of the populace.

On my first Saturday in Kenya three of my new acquaintances and I went to a local restaurant for lunch. Two others and I sat in a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw, and one on his motorcycle. Rounding a bend in the road and looking toward the intersection ahead I saw the street crowded with people, all running in the same direction, yelling. Not knowing if it was a riot, a terrorist attack, or a parade, we slowed and asked the driver what was happening. He was quiet for a moment before hearing from someone in the crowd that there was a witch. The crowd passed in front of us quickly, and I saw some boys running to catch up, looking almost euphoric at the excitement of the witch-hunt. We turned in the other direction and stopped in front of the restaurant, not understanding what had just passed before us.

Our friend on the motorcycle went to investigate, and returned a few minutes later somewhat dazed by what he had seen. A woman, her clothes just shreds barely clinging to her body, had been chased into a field by the mob. She was raving as hands and stones hit her. Two men in regular clothes got through the crowd to her and held her down, then dragged her to the police station away from the mob.

I imagine that some of the people in the crowd were frightened, and I imagine that some were angry. I hear that the woman was unbalanced or insane. But what I remember seeing with my own eyes were the boys, laughing at the game, as they chased after the witch to kill her.


The Paraguay Roll- Not on the Sushi Menu

When my bus rolled over in Paraguay it was probably going around twenty-five miles per hour. It was large and rickety, and probably could do no more than fifty miles per hour even had it been on pavement. The man who was supposed to be driving was passed out in the front row, and the guardia, the man who usually collects the fare, sat behind the wheel, trying to figure out how to switch gears without grinding the transmission into dust. He also was trying to reach his máte drinking equipment, which was stashed in a glove box four feet to his right.

It was around four in the morning. Apart from myself, the passed out driver, and the guardia acting as substitute driver, the only other person onboard was a kid of about ten on his way to Pilar to go to school for the week. The bus came through my community on Mondays and Fridays, at any hour between three and four thirty in the morning, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that ride you would wait a few days for the next bus or take a long walk through the sand or mud or both to Humaitá, about ten kilometers away, where at least one bus passed a day, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that bus you either made the walk back, or spent the night in a hammock on the courtyard of the home of one of the ex-dictator’s ex-lieutenants, but that is another story. This is the bus story, or one of them.

I glanced from one window to another, trying to catch a glimpse of something in the darkness, remembering the ride to Pilar not long before when the sky over the Argentine Chaco was illuminated by bolts of lightning and the clouds appeared out of the blackness, backlit and ominous and beautiful. Now there was nothing out the side windows, and the dim yellow headlights only illuminated twenty feet of dirt in front of us. The guardia, sitting behind the wheel, motioned to the kid to help him reach his máte equipment, and then he himself leaned across to the glove box. I glanced again out the side window. There was still nothing.

Then the headlights shown on the small tree as we were about to run it over and I shouted a warning, I’m not sure in what language. The guardia looked up but we were already over the tree and heading into the ditch. He tried to swerve us back onto the road and I thought it would be the wrong way to turn the wheels given the ditch, and an image of the wheels turning against the slope and losing their hold appeared in my head and I grabbed the handle bar above the seat in front of me as we began to roll. We rolled slowly, and I turned into it, and the seat across the aisle and one row in front of me came crashing down. The kid held on to the pole by the door. The man in the driver’s seat held on to the wheel. The passed out driver fell across the aisle, and we stopped.

We were silent for a moment. The bus was on its side, and its side was on a slope, leaving the wheels pointing up at close to a forty-five degree angle. We rocked a little, as the top of the bus, now sharing the lowest point with my side, rested on a brambly collection of woody shrubs. One of them, not the kid, thought about trying to climb out the bottom and work his way out under the shrubs, but I advised against it. The kid said he was scared, but the real driver, who had sobered up quickly, reassured him. There was nothing to be afraid of. We climbed out a window and jumped off the side of the bus to the side of the road. The wheels were still turning and the guardia climbed back in to turn off the engine. When he came back out it began to set in that they would lose their jobs, and he swore and punched the tire in frustration. The real driver, older, wiser, perhaps still a little drunk, took it more in stride. It was one of those things that happens. He grinned a resigned grin. There was nothing to do about it now. Ten minutes later the bus that passed through Humaitá every day came by and picked the kid and I up. The driver and the guardia stayed with their fallen comrade. The kid sat at the front of the new bus, and I toward the back, and I never saw any of them again.