Lake Neuron

Between my two speaking engagements last weekend, I got to thinking about stories from the trip which I’d been meaning to post here because they didn’t flow into the newspaper series.

I mentioned in one of the installments that our bottled water was like a security blanket. Being a writer, I was just as devoted to having a pen. I have a huge stockpile of blank journals, some of which were donated to me and some of which I bought myself for Summer Plus creative writing workshop. (Hopefully, I’ll get to use them for that purpose next summer.) I don’t use them for normal personal use, but I didn’t think it was inappropriate to take one on a mission trip, and I’ve done that for each of my foreign trips.

The journal serves as a reporter’s notebook, a personal diary and just as scratch paper during the trip. I refer back to it when writing my stories and even when speaking about the trip.

The journaling makes it extra important that I have something to write with. In the Developing World, you can’t take things like pens or pencils for granted the way we do here in the U.S. So I bought a big package of stick pens to take with me on the trip.

Unfortunately, during our in-country training in Kisii Town we had to do a team-building exercise in which we interviewed a teammate whom we didn’t know well and then introduced them to the group. Bob Willems asked me to facilitate, and since most of the group didn’t have pens or pencils with them at the time I ended up handing out most of my stash. I did manage to hang on to two of them, and I guarded them carefully the rest of the trip.

My other story also involves Bob. I mentioned in the series an incident in which our bus failed to pick us up from the church in Keumbu and we had to get alternate transportation back to Kisii Town. The “alternate transportation” meant matatus. A matatu is the type of public transit van seen all over Kenya and identified by a yellow stripe down the side. They are weatherbeaten and often filled far past what we in the safety-conscious U.S. would consider capacity.

Pastor Abel flagged down a couple of matatus and stuffed his mzungu guests into them, alongside their existing passengers. We drove the half hour or so back to Kisii Town.

I, being, er, portly, had been put in the front seat. As we arrived in Kisii Town and I got out of my matatu, Bob, who was in the other matatu, walked up to me. “Do you want to see what you were riding on?” he asked. He pointed to the front passenger-side tire of my matatu, which was as bald as Captain Picard and badly shredded to boot.

“God is my co-pilot,” I shrugged, and walked into the hotel.