Jun 20 2008
On This City Heat And Kenyan Memories
It is really freaking hot right now.
Aren’t warm showers and chai tea supposed to make you cooler?
Only in Africa. Apparently. Or maybe it’s just in LA that you can sweat all your insides out and never find relief. You never feel clean despite the many confessions and showers and facial scrubs. There’s always something else to tweak, something else to inject, something else to perfect.
Lotion doesn’t do it. I’m still dry, and I’m still parched.
I brought my boxes too; but I didn’t force them into this place. They’re all still in my car, waiting for the turn. I’m just biding my time, learning as much as I can before I move on out.
I wish I played something portable, like a guitar or something. I got used to James’s nylon strings, though, and anything else just eats my fingers away.
Don’t shut that door without saying good night.
I want to be in Africa. I want to be in Kenya, where the air is sticky but REAL. Africa is reality. It is life, magnified: unashamedly broken, unashamedly joyful, unashamed of life and death.
We’ll find some excuse to fall like dominoes into the lukewarm bed; we’ll find some excuse for the attraction of magnets.
Ten minutes and I will be twenty. What is the ratio for that?
Ration is ratio plus a letter.
Well, then, does that mean that to have your ration is to have more than the ratio? That you have MORE than your fill if you have a rationed part?
I suppose this is true in the United States. Focusing on this city, there are 80,000 homeless. And yet there are facilities- as underfunded and shorthanded and unreliable and insufficient as they may be- that can feed them, clothe them, if they are in the right place at the right time.
There are water fountains here. The water magically comes from the ground without constant work by the individual; it’s already been taken care of. The water isn’t diseased, isn’t tomato-soup colored, isn’t the same that is used for bathing, isn’t unsanitary in the least.
Kenya was different.
We went to an orphanage. Before funded by an American church, the orphanage’s soul water source was a well- dug deep into the red-orange earth by honest and loving hands. I prayed for rain, for clean water to fill the open jugs lining the roof. Open mouths to open mouths, sweet and pure.
The water from the well left streaks of bright proof. It left traces instead of clean faces. So I prayed for rain.
I read somewhere that it costs somewhere around $1000 USD to build a well in Africa. A well of stone. A well of concrete. Not a well of mud and brick.
And I bought my car for $1500.
“You must be rich,” she said to me. She stroked my long brown hair. “So soft,” she exclaimed. She put her arm up next to mine: ebony and honey. Pointed to my honey: “I wish I had skin this color.”
It broke my heart into a million pieces, and I said with tears in my eyes, “I like yours better.” And I really did.
We laughed a little at the obsurdity of our observations.
She was about fourteen, with wild hopes and dreams of becoming a lawyer, a doctor. I was eighteen at the time, with wild hopes and dreams of being a missionary and light. God showed me I already was.
I miss Kenya more than words can express, and the snap-shot memories that haunt me leave me thirsty for more.
The heat of this city makes me miss Kenya more.
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