It's a Small World After All

I am a bit late in writing this.  After a fun-filled weekend, I came down hard with a sinus infection that left me partially bed-ridden with fever and chills for the past few days.  I am beginning to kick it and can finally sit upright long enough to type a bit.

This past Saturday, I visited my friend and colleague Munsi and his family along with my friend Thomas.  I met his son Nashon, his daughter Floise and even got to name their cat, who is now called Tatu (or ‘three’ in Swahili.  She is a calico, so she has three colors of fur.).  They gave us a fantastic meal with great company and before we knew it, our other friend Sabora had come with his family from church to collect us to go to another home to share another lovely meal.

Sabora’s wife is my good friend Rebecca and they have an 8 month old daughter named Grace.  Grace just got her first two teeth and is on the verge of walking on her own!  I met her on the day she turned 3 months old and it has been so amazing to watch her grow. We had gotten Grace some dresses that fit her perfectly, and we brought Nashon (Munsi’s son) over so that he could play with Grace.  We are pretty set on them getting married in 20 or so years, so we thought it’s best to get started early.

On Sunday, my friends Rebecca and Charles took me over the border to Tarime, Tanzania, where we perused the local market and enjoyed a beautiful lunch together.  On the trip home, my throat began feeling a bit raw, but I thought it was nothing.  As the day went on, I got progressively weaker, dizzier, and feverish.  Since then I have been in an epic battle with the germs that have tried to overtake my sinuses.

Enough about germs....I also wanted to share two other fun stories from the week.  The first is about a conversation I had with my friend Alex, a boda driver.  He and I have been discussing movies a lot lately, and he’s particularly fond of documentaries.  He just watched one about Thailand and was asking me a number of questions about the Chakri dynasty (our current ruling family), the animals, and the food.  Then he said, ‘Ah, and I saw another movie about a big city. I think it is New York City.’ Of course, my ears perked up at the mention of one of my favorite former hometowns.  ‘Ah, but it was about an animal that got loose in the city.’ Anything can happen in NYC, as we all know, but I couldn’t recall a specific incident related to a rampant animal in Manhattan.  I asked him for some more detail.  ‘There is a monkey and he climbed a very tall building…’ I began to wonder if this documentary was in fact not a documentary at all.  ‘…because he was in love with a lady.’

‘Was this lady blonde and wearing a white dress?’ I asked.

‘Ah, you have seen it! It is a true story, yes?’

I felt a little like I was telling a kid there is no Santa Claus, and now I sort of wish I could go back and undo it, but before I thought better of it and with an irrepressible smile on my face, I told him that King Kong never did really terrorize the residents of New York, and then to his follow up question of how a monkey (ape, I noted) would love a lady, I replied that my best guess was that it was akin to us having a very fine pet that we adore because it is so lovely to be around and that I hoped, unlike Alex suggested, that Kong did not want to make half-monkey babies with the pretty blonde lady.

The second is just a reminder of how small the world is.  Twelve years ago I lived in Long Beach, California, as I tried to pursue my dream of being the next great female skateboarder.  Needless to say, there were far more guys in the world of skateboarding, so I ended up hanging out with dudes all the time.  Fortunately, every once in a while one of these guys managed to get a sane and pretty awesome girlfriend I could hang out with. One of those girls was Natalie.  She was gorgeous, blonde and blue-eyes, reminiscent of the cliché Barbie doll.  Her parents were neurosurgeons, she was rich beyond reason, and she took a shine to me from the start, she said mainly because I seemed more ‘real’ than any of the SoCal ‘bimbos’.  I liked her too, even though I was still trying to understand her world, where it was normal to spend $1,000 on a pair of shoes and get so wasted that you ruin or lose them within 24 hours.  I was working full time, skating a little but not well on the side, and trying to scrape by out there. In any case, after she realized how lame the guy was and dumped him, we stayed friends.

Anyway, Natalie’s parents wanted her to learn some responsibility, so they made her get a job.  She got one at her favorite brunch spot since she had no qualifications, but had made friends with the staff for her big tips.  This brunch spot was just down the street from my apartment, so I would go visit her from time to time.  On one of these occasions, I was sitting at the bar and she ran up and said a guy in the booth in the corner had asked for her number.  He was the singer of a band and before he left, gave her a copy of their CD.  I had noticed this particular guy, thinking he was really cute in that nerdy-artsy- kind of way and wow, did he look like someone who should be the singer of a band.  I also appreciated all the buttons on his bag with political and ecologically loaded statements I agreed with wholeheartedly.  A band guy with a brain.  Those don’t come along too often.

She asked me to be her ‘wing-girl’ to go to their next show.  She wasn’t sure if she liked him.  He talked about things she wasn’t interested in and didn’t feel like she understood enough to say anything about…literature, politics, travel, etc.  Their band was called the John Wilkes Kissing Booth.  And I loved them.  One of my favorite parts of the shows was when Derrick (that’s his name) would be singing and dancing around the stage with sparklers singing one of my favorite songs about firecrackers.  He was smart, charismatic, so talented, his voice was beautiful, and he was totally into Natalie.  And who could blame him.  Sweet, beautiful Natalie.  Another fun fact about Derrick: he was a gondolier as his daytime job, with striped shirt and straw hat, boating people around the canals of Long Beach, Belmont, and Marina Pacifica.

In any case, they didn’t last too long, but I had still found a band that I really liked and some guys I thought were pretty interesting.  Derrick and I stayed in touch.  Over the years, the band dissolved, but he kept writing songs and mostly poetry.  He gave me two signed books once that I still read through from time to time.  And once, when I was living in NYC and he came through on tour, he gave me and the organization I was working for (Women’s Refugee Commission) a shout out at one of his shows and tons of people came to ask me how to get involved.

I haven’t thought about Derrick in a little while, being so far away in a remote, rural village on the Kenyan/Tanzanian border.  That is, until the other day when I got an email from my friend Jana, who I met at Heathrow airport in London 10 years ago.  She is living in DC now and met up with a guy for their first date.  They met in a city a few hours from either of their homes, more of a middle meeting ground to see how the first date would go.  The guy had planned out a lovely date with nice restaurants, pretty walks, and a short film festival.  As I read the email about her date, I came across a sentence that said her favorite short film was a poem by a guy named Derrick Brown and didn’t I know him.  She had sent me the link to the short film (WATCH IT!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwQJHx615eE&feature=youtu.be.  I watched that face and heard that voice that brought back such precious memories of my time in the LBC, and was filled with such a fantastic feeling of 1) reuniting with an old friend and 2) seeing someone of so much talent receive the recognition they deserve (it’s won a number of short film awards at countless festivals).  I wrote to Derrick to tell him the story and how happy it made me, and he wrote back within moments to tell me how happy the story made him, and we were happily reconnected again.  It is a beautiful piece and I hope you will watch it and go see Derrick Brown when he comes to a town near you. 

I just love that a friend I met in London 10 years ago reunited me with another friend she’d never met who I had a crush on 12 years ago in Long Beach, by attending a film festival on a first date with a guy she’d never met before in a town she’d never been to.  And that here, way out in the middle of nowhere, when the planets aligned and I had internet and electricity going long enough to check through all my emails, I was reminded of how small this world is and how interconnected we all are.

‘The design in the stars is the same in our hearts. In the rebuilt machineries of our hearts.’ 

Love from Kenya, j