-30-

When I was six, my sister and I shared two Barbie dolls, a blonde-haired Barbie with a button on her back that made a kissing noise when pressed and a dime store knock-off Barbie with brown hair and gargantuan proportions, especially when compared with Barbie. We had no Ken doll, my mom made most of the dolls clothes on her sewing machine and we learned early on how to cut windows that opened like shutters into shoeboxes that were reborn as the Dream House.

My friend Christa had all the accoutrements we lacked: the house, the car, the camper, the Ken. Whenever I went to her house to play, our Barbies invariably fought over Ken, changed in and out of dozens of outfits and fought over Ken some more. Even at six, we had an appreciation, even a flair, for soap opera drama but the plotlines of our Barbies lives had little variation. She went to university, then got a job as a nurse or a teacher, our imagination around career options being somewhat limited at six. By 22, she was considered successful in her chosen field, she’d successfully seduced Ken and was married by 24. (Bygones were always bygones with the Barbie who lost out; she was always the bridesmaid.) By 26 she had her first invisible baby – neither of us had a Barbie baby – and by 30 she had three little darlings, the husband and the career.

And then the story stopped. What more could be said? What more could happen? She had done it all and done it on schedule, before the age of 30. It was time to start all over again, change outfits, change careers and change the catfights that brought Ken to her clutches in the first place.

Why, at six, did we see 30 as the end?

We use 30 as a deadline all the time: company president by 30, millionaire by 30, bureau chief by 30, settle down by 30, sow the wild oats until 30, married by 30.

Think about all the movies or books where 30 plays a part in the plot, where ambition to “do” something by 30 drives the story. The pacts that friends make: If neither of us is married by the time we’re 30…

Thirty is the age at which we have it all figured out, that we stop playing around. It’s the age by which, if you haven’t done what you set out to do, you’re probably not going to do it.

(In the newspaper business, -30- is meant to represent the end. It’s a holdover from the time of telex machines, when editors would have no idea whether you’d finished your brilliant overseas dispatch or had simply run out of money or, in some cases, electrical current.)

On this continent, 30 is way past middle age. In Zimbabwe, life expectancy is estimated to be 34, meaning a midlife crisis comes at 17 and the average Zimbabwean doesn’t live to see 35.

For my 30th birthday, I got up and went to interview the electrical company spokesperson about their HIV program. I went to lunch and ate Indian food as the owner chewed out the guard for some real or imagine slight. I went to the Trade Fair and remembered why I don’t like crowds, especially crowds of children. The minibus mate tried to weasel an extra 10 kwacha out of me, and when I looked bored and unruffled, he told me he would forgive me this time. Thank you, I forgive you too, I said. For what, he asked. For trying to cheat me on my birthday, I said. I read a handful of birthday wishes sent via email. I went home, watched a movie, cursed my cell provider for cutting out. I went for dinner with two women I’ve known for two weeks, but who’ve become friends nonetheless. Then we went to a bar where the music was lame and the men were lecherous. I went to bed and woke up the next morning feeling no different: not older, not wiser, not any less depressed by the idea of 30.

In the past week, one man I interviewed asked if writing my story was part of a school project and someone else guessed I was turning 25 when I told him it was my birthday. Back in the day, when I had just turned legal and would seethe when anyone asked to see my ID, people – smug, vain, older people – would say: “One day you’ll appreciate that.” Sadly, that day has finally come.

I might say I was lucky, at 30, to be living a life that makes me content. There are very few people in their 20s who want something as intangible as satisfaction by 30, but I feel in lots of ways that I am living a life that satisfies me – something that is far more important to me now, at 30, than being famous or married or rich. I look at friends who have chosen the more conventional path – the kind I always scripted for Barbie – and are miserable with it.

Still, I am alone and as I turn 30, it weighs on me more and more. I guess you could say I’m growing up.

-30-

Life
Every experience under the sun
Karen Palmer
806 words
2 May 2006
The Toronto Star
ONT
D03
English
Copyright (c) 2006 The Toronto Star
KIGALI, Rwanda -- There is a certain exhilarating energy to an Africa bus stand.

It is manic, confusing, chaotic and overcrowded, the vans lined up nose-to-nose in a haphazard way while dozens of boys in plastic sandals and 50 Cent T-shirts bark out strange place names and try with feigned urgency and real competitiveness to steer you toward their minibus.

There is the inevitable give-and-take about the fare, accompanied by many exclamations of "In the name of Jesus, sister! Amen!" and a second round of negotiations about that hefty bag on your back.

There is the patient or not-so-patient wait while the bus fills, squeezing in 20 where 15 would sit comfortably.

Then a delay, another delay, a start of the engine, a blaring of the radio - brassy Congolese, American rap or hip hop in an unrecognizable language - a small shift forward, a sputtering of the engine.

Through the windows, boys and girls sell glucose biscuits, sugary Fanta soft drinks, bottles of cold water, boiled eggs with salt and piri piri sauce, tiny sweet bananas, oranges that are actually green, sticks of roasted goat meat, greasy samosas from a giant tub.

And once underway, there may be a sales pitch for aphrodisiacs or a sermon ("In the name of Jesus, my sister! Amen!") or a Nigerian film playing loud enough to be heard in Nigeria.

There is always a breathtaking landscape dotted with tiny homes and cheering, waving children.

Inside the bus there are curious questions: Where are you from? What are you doing here? Where is your husband? How do you find our food, our country, our people?

There is usually a test of your knowledge of the local dialect; a pass is rewarded with delighted giggles. There are the insightful conversations about politics and development, the back-and-forth about hopes for the country. Then the shy declarations of the secret wish for more education, to one day see Canada.

At your destination, there is the budget hotel, costing anywhere from a dollar to $15 a night and described variously as a brothel, only for the desperately downtrodden or, hopefully, friendly, well-kept and clean.

On good nights, there is the sound of chirruping crickets, the buzz of motorbikes, the soccer fans down at the drinking spot cheering Arsenal or Man U or Chelsea.

On bad mornings, there is no power and only a bucket and a plastic cup for a shower.

On the streets there are wide-eyed children, some tied to their mother's back, others peering out from behind her skirt with broad smiles or looks of astonishment or fear.

Some are even bold enough to try out their English, asking and answering their sole phrase: "How are you? I am fine! How are you? I am fine!"

The continent is too big, too varied to be summed up in words: there are camels and soldiers, deserts and jungles, gorillas and lions, mystics and juju masters, chapatis and cassava, Muslims and Christians, a jumble of vibrant colours and masses of people.

There is a constant sense of struggle, endless sources of frustration, frequent assaults on the senses, brilliant scenes of innovation and resilience, heartbreaking displays of humanity, enough injustices to challenge a traveller's principles, sensibilities and long-held beliefs.

Travelling in Africa is not for the timid: you have to put yourself out there to get the most out of it. It requires equal parts compassion, patience and humour and will often reveal more about you than it will itself.

As aviator Beryl Markham wrote in her 1942 autobiography West With The Night:

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries always intriguing, but never wholly solved.

It is the remembrance of sunlight and green hills, cool water and the yellow warmth of bright mornings.

It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts.

It is without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races.

It is what you will and it withstands all interpretation. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.'

It is all these things but one: it is never dull.

Karen Palmer is a former Star reporter who has moved to Africa.

The Nature of Things

Last week, the night guard at Doogles backpackers lodge (which is a dump and looks nothing like Mua Mission, which is pictured) came upon me crouched on the path to the chalets, one hand clutching my toothbrush, the other tossing stones further up the trail. Maybe he came because he heard me muttering, “Go on, get.” Or maybe he was just curious about why I was throwing stones. “There’s a toad,” I said, as he nearly stepped on it. A big, ugly, warty brown toad. He looked like a big, ugly stone. I felt silly, of course – a grown person paralyzed by a toad in the road – but I was hoping the guard would take up the cause and get the toad to move out of the way – not only out of the way, but away. Far enough away that it wouldn’t suddenly jump out again, or find its way into my room. I had already hit it with three fistfuls of stones, all very carefully aimed, none so violently thrown as to actually hurt him. Yet the stupid, ugly thing just sat there in its stupid toady way being all toad-like and stupid. Finally, with the guard’s boot nearly on top of him, he darted into the bushes.

This is brave little me in Africa.

Last night, there was a giant spider dangling from the ceiling and when I blew on it, he settled into the curtains, completely camouflaged. There was another hairy black one with stubby legs near the toilet and two Daddy Long Legs up near the showerhead. I slept under the mosquito net, confident they were catching bugs in their webs. Outside, there was a chorus of tiny tree frogs, their chirrups as rhythmic as breathing, their deceptive sound suggesting they were as big as hamburger patties.

This morning I went for a long walk up a hill that I will call a mountain near a mission called Mua on the road between Zomba and Lilongwe. The path leaves a small village, crosses through some maize and cotton and pea fields and continues through straw-like grasses taller than me and finally up into the rocky, tree-studded mountainside. It was loaded with grasshoppers, which make me flinch. One landed on my elbow and I shrieked. Even though it only landed on me for a nanosecond, it felt like it had suctioned onto my arm. I was already getting quite an arm workout trying to keep the buzzing flies away from me. Tse-tse or otherwise, I tend to swell up like a weirdo when flies bite and I wasn’t interested in giving them a free ride up the hill on my sweaty T-shirt.

At one point I decided to sit down on a rock and catch my breath. It was around 9 a.m. but already the sun was intense, just beaming down as though it was passing through a magnifying glass. After weeks of frosty temperatures – each morning wrapped in the shroud of a heavy, moving mist – the sun felt good but oppressive and I was coated in sweat by the time I sat down, a droplet falling from my ear onto my shoulder and my whole clavicle slick. It was the just the tiniest bit of a clearing, a widening in the otherwise narrow footpath. Across from my rock was a burned tree stump with three cobs of maize shoved into a hollow. This whole area is mystical and spiritual, with rapids curling around a hole in the rock that surrounds the river. The local people believe that this hole leads to the spirit world and that evil spirits can pull people down into it at their whim. The past two days there have been drums and singing and chanting coming from somewhere deep in the village as they install a new chief with masked dancers and spirit people known as gulies, who can spring up out of nowhere.

So I wondered whether this clearing had a particular spiritual meaning and whether the maize was meant to be an offering, or whether some bored kids just decided to shove some corncobs in a hole in a tree. As the sweat dried, I was surrounded by butterflies, literally hundreds and hundreds of little grey moths with white splotches. There were a few orange ones, a couple yellow ones and one or two brilliant blue butterflies who folded up their wings and looked like fallen leaves.

There is an “orphanage” nearby for lost and wayward animals and when I visited, there were a couple smelly ducks, a little antelope, an even smaller deer with wide Disney-esque eyes, a couple vervet monkeys pacing on the beams of their cages, another kind of monkey I’d never seen before, with light eyes and a bushy coat, and an old baboon who collects shiny coins from tourists, which she turns over to the night guard when he brings her food.

I saw a group of vervet monkeys down at the orphanage, swinging in the trees of the deer cage and generally reminding all the caged animals of the vague concept of freedom. When I passed today through the gates leading to the mission’s cabins, the branch of a bush swung with the lost weight of a retreating animal, too much bounce to be a bird, but probably a monkey. I waited and they slowly revealed themselves, stalking along the branches, wondering about me like I was wondering about them.

After I had returned to my room, rinsed out my socks and washed off the sweat, I sat outside with a book, listening to the water running in and around the giant hole in the river. Upstream, not far from my door, women pound clothing against the rocks, some with a rage that’s clear in each snap of the clothing, others with a rhythm that suggests they’re thinking about something else. Occasionally there is a big splash and some hearty laughs, a naked child landing in the water after dropping from the rock.

There is a buzzing, not from tse-tses, but from big, big bees and other insects that are as long and as fat as my thumbs. There was a rustling in the grass that sounded like a person walking gingerly toward me, but when I craned around to see who was coming, there was a massive, massive lizard – as long as my leg and as heavy as a toddler – walking slowly and diagonally toward my cabin. He had not seen me yet, sitting silently with a book in my lap. His tail swayed like a snake and his tongue darted in and out like a gecko. He was speckled, black and yellow. Ugly. As soon as I stood, he settled for one second, then took off, lickety-split, running flat out like a sprinter for the safety of the river.

At lunch, Marie – the lab tech turned lay missionary I caught a ride up with – told me she figured he was a gila monster, pronounced hela monster. His colouring was meant to show his bite is poisonous.

At least he didn’t jump.

Mzuzu

It was a hellishly long flight down to Lilongwe, capital city of Malawi, a splinter of a country wedged between Zambia and Mozambique. At Lilongwe, the sun was shining and it was a brilliant afternoon: after a month of dull, grey skies and daily thunderstorms, it was such a welcome change. It took virtually no time to go through customs, but then there was a wait for the baggage, then the search through the baggage. (I just finished reading “Swahili for the Broken Hearted” by Peter Moore, who writes about how Malawi’s crusade against the corruption of Christian values once had immigration officers shaving men’s heads if their hair fell below their ears and saw women having to roll a Coke bottle down the leg of their jeans to prove they were loose fitting and morally acceptable.)

I paid $20 to take a taxi into town and chatted with Charles, the driver, about potential story ideas. He told me that violence against women had been in the headlines – one woman had her eyes gouged out, the other lost her hands to a jealous ex – and suggested I go to the tobacco auction floors to see how the buyers were ripping off sellers. Turns out he was a great editor: the tobacco sellers are now on strike.

He also convinced me to check into a more expensive hotel, since the cheaper ones were all full of prostitutes and couldn’t be guaranteed to be safe or secure. That’s how I ended up at the Korea Gardens, paying $40 for a room with a television. The Kenya Airways food was the reason I spent most of the day in bed, getting up periodically to change the channel.

The next morning I took advantage of the beautiful weather to check out a bit of dusty Lilongwe, which feels like a large town. I managed to get myself totally turned around, but finally arrived at the centre of Old Town, where I hit the post office and the ATM (where the machines kept blinking in and out of service), bought a phone card and wandered into the Shoprite, a South African chain that always makes my jaw drop. It’s got such selection, so I stocked up on M&Ms and bags of chips and went home to watch “SuperSize Me.”

The next day I met up with Toni, who had very kindly agreed to house me at her place in the north. We went out for dinner with her boyfriend and a British mechanic, a CFAO salesman and a senior buyer with Limbe leaf tobacco, who asked if I was married 15 seconds after we met. (I learned later he was loaded, loaded, loaded, having been a confirmed bachelor for years. He spent his money on properties in Spain, Dubai and Scotland and spent the down season in India and Brazil. Sigh. Such regrets.)

The next morning we went to the airport to pick up some social work students from Ryerson who were doing a placement up in Mzuzu and would be staying with Toni as well. We packed the back of the truck full of luggage and took off, passing grassy fields and tiny villages and huge craggy rocks.

Toni accomplishes more before breakfast than most people do all day, so my week in her care was a busy one: she had me full of story ideas and lined up with interviews before I could blink. But it was good to get moving again. I’ve gotten so lazy it’s embarrassing.




I decided I wanted to write about education and the Millennium Development Goal of free primary education. Over three days I visited five different schools, including one government school, two private primary schools and two primary secondary schools. One was run by a British guy and seemed a happy, healthy place to have children learning their ABCs and how to multiply fractions. The rest seemed like a good place to keep children dry while it’s raining. The primary school had 95 children in each class and they were doing their sums with bottlecaps spilled out on the floor. The secondary school had 127 teenagers in one class and when we visited they were doing nothing: it was pouring rain and their teacher was curled up in the lounge with a charcoal stove at his feet.

We managed to take a ride up into the mountains, bouncing around in the back of a Land Rover as Eric, a Rhodesian tobacco farmer, kicked the carbon out of the engine by pushing it through virgin forests, small pockets of rainforest and further and further up the grassy hills.

Mzuzu has decidedly British weather – cold, rainy and grey – so I hit the used clothing market, replaced my wardrobe and added two fleece sweaters to the ensemble. Apparently the climate is great for tobacco, and good for paprika peppers, which Toni’s boyfriend farms. I visited and watched dozens of African employees grade the peppers, deseed them and lay them out for drying. Lloyd’s farm is massive and it’s difficult to imagine that the world could ever consume so much of the fiery red spice.




Toni’s friend Janet called to say she was coming up north to review a hotel north of Mzuzu and Toni signed me up for the trip, which gave me a bit of a break from the bleak weather. It was strange to go from shivering and wearing a fleece to dipping my toes in the surf while surrounded by women wearing bikinis. The place was called Sangilo Sanctuary and it lived up to its name. It was filled with gorgeous carvings and had been very cleverly designed to give lakeviews from virtually every vantage point, even from the toilet. The beach was a small cove, completely isolated and surrounded by equally empty little inlets that guests had claimed as their own. We had a delicious, simple meal and went to bed around 8.30 to the sound of waves hitting the shore.

The next day we tootled back to Mzuzu and were on the road again at 8 a.m. the next morning, stopping first at the Swahili market (so named for the vendors who go to Dar to buy up goods shipped in from the Philippines, Hong Kong and Paris). We had to stop at another lodge in one of the forest reserves to make arrangements for Janet’s editor to enter the annual bike race and we bumped and swerved down a sandy lane before abandoning the enterprise for fear the car would fall apart. We drove another 15 kilometres and realized we’d been driving on the wrong turnoff. It was a lovely little spot, nestled next to a man-made lake, where hiking trails crisscross through the bush and kayaks scuttle around the pond.

We set out for Lilongwe, trying to make it before the sun set and the driving became treacherous, only to hear a loud scraping sound at about the halfway point. The rear right wheel had split, the tread worn completely bald, and the spare turned out to be soft as well. We enlisted the help of some locals, who came with a bicycle pump and a desire to impress. Within 25 minutes we were off again, but we had to drive for about an hour in the dark, dodging cattle carts and roadside bicycles and the occasional lumbering semi-truck with weak headlights.

Travelling with Janet meant that our room at Sangilo was free and our lunch at the lodge was free and keeping with our skint tradition, we decided to crash on the couch of a couple Canadians Janet had met on her way through Lilongwe. They were quite accommodating and I slept like a stone, despite their insane dog barking madly through most of the night.

Janet had a to-do list as long as my arm, so she hit the ground running while I sat in the garden of a nearby hotel, sipping a tea and plowing through the stories I’d worked on while up north. I stopped in at the bookstore, debated taking some money out at the bank, wandered the grocery store and ended up at the “mall,” where I sat on a bench reading a book. By 3.30, we had collected another friend and were heading into the hills leading to Blantyre. It was a rather sedate drive, broken up by a short stop at a huge pottery factory, where we sampled some cheesecake as the sun set in a fiery red ball.

Now I’m in Blantyre, at a backpackers lodge not far from town, but close enough to the bus station that guests are forbidden to leave after dark. I expect to be here a few days – I’ve got lots of AIDS stories and a few tobacco stories and an assassination attempt to write about. My birthday is next Friday, so maybe I’ll sneak off to the lake for a while.

Corrupting the Whistleblower

More than a decade ago, David Munyakei was a young clerk processing slips at the Central Bank of Kenya when he noticed an unusual number of payments – for unusually high sums – going to a company called Goldenberg.

He dug around and discovered the company was being paid for exporting gold and diamonds – two things Kenya doesn’t have. The company turned out to be a shell, a pipeline to the pockets of politicians and well-placed businessmen. It became Kenya’s biggest corruption scandal, costing the public purse an astonishing $600 million (US).

For his role in it, Munyakei was fired, arrested and harassed. He received death threats, was forced to leave the capital and for a brief time even changed his identity. For more than 10 years he has lobbied to have his job reinstated, without success. Instead of a stable, well-paid government job, with benefits and pension, Munyakei has mostly pleaded poverty.

The Goldenberg scheme is a complicated one, but it essentially created an account for gold exporters to deposit U.S. dollars. In exchange, they would be paid out of the account in Kenyan shillings, plus 20 per cent. It was a way of both attracting foreign investment and reducing the country’s reliance on foreign aid.

The hitch was that the gold was likely smuggled from the Congo and the “exporters” were claiming 35 per cent above the export price from the government.

The investigations have so far revealed that the corruption involved dozens of judges and journalists, senior officials at several banks, handfuls of businessmen and scores of politicians – possibly even former president Daniel arap Moi.

Everyone, it seemed, but the young clerk who stayed late to work through the book of transfer orders.

I thought Munyakei would make a good hook for a story on the latest round of corruption scandals currently plaguing Kenya. I pictured him as clever, soft-spoken and patient. I figured he would have the confidence of someone who knows he has done exactly the right thing and the humility of a man who has been martyred for it.

I reached Munyakei through Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog agency, who awarded the whistleblower a medal in 2004.

When we met, Munyakei began by asking if Transparency International had told me about his “arrangement,” something about an allowance and money for accommodations. I was confused, but it soon became clear he wasn’t telling me about Transparency International’s generosity, he was saying he wanted compensation from me.

He told me he had come into the city from the famed Masai Mara game reserve and now had nowhere to stay and no means to get home. He looked like a young man, with springy black curls and the light skin and Arabic features of Kenyans born on the coast. The clerk position was his first job.

I asked him how much he needed.

Two hundred dollars, he answered, without hesitation.

That’s a lot of money, I said. Nairobi has a rough after-dark reputation, so I had less than $9 in my pocket, enough to pay for our drinks and a taxi ride back to the hotel the airline had put me in for the night.

Besides, it’s unethical, I told him. I don’t pay for interviews and most reputable news agencies have a strict policy against the practice.

Selling a story makes it vulnerable to manipulation since people are tempted to make the details juicier so there’s more of a payoff. It makes it difficult to trust the details.

It sounds cold-hearted, but I’ve interviewed street kids, orphans, women dying of AIDS, destitute farmers starving during the country’s drought and I haven’t given money to any of them.

I feel strongly that people should tell their stories because they want to, because they see the value in giving voice to an issue or cause, not because it’s something they can sell.

When I chafed at the idea of paying $200 to hear his story, Munyakei became wheedling and insistent, asking me how much I could give, saying it was negotiable. Like a carpet salesman or a tout trying to sell me a safari, he told me he had a family to feed. There was no protection for people like him, he said, and no one cared whether he was starving.

I said I had read that he was working in the city.

That’s a myth, he told me. Okay, he does have a job, but the salary is so small it can hardly be considered work, he said.

(I emailed Transparency International later and they confirmed Munyakei is indeed working in Nairobi – in the Office of the President. A spokesperson for the organization said they were “shocked and disappointed” by Munyakei’s request for money. She also said they sometimes pay his travel expenses if he attends TI functions.)

When I finally stood up to leave, Munyakei told me I’d misunderstood. I wouldn’t be “paying.” He was kidding when he said he wanted $200. “Forget I said that. I was joking,” he said. “Can’t you take a joke?”

Most Kenyans consider him a kind of public hero and many have sympathy for the turn his life has taken. An education fund for his three daughters was even established through a legal aid clinic.

I shut my notebook. Munyakei said he would settle simply for money to get home, telling me he lived in Narok, a dusty trading town about five hours from Nairobi.

Although the fare costs about $5, Munyakei told me he would need $25.

The more he talked, the faster I gulped down my soda. I was beginning to really dislike this man and just wanted to get away from him.

Finally Munyakei lowered his voice and repeated that he had nowhere to go and no way to get home. I could just pay for a hotel room now and submit it as part of my regular expenses later.

I paid for our drinks, told him it had been interesting to meet him, then walked out to a taxi.

I’m not sure I did the right thing. I felt guilty watching him walk into the shadows of the bus stand and wondered where he would spend the night, if he really had nowhere to go.

It made me angry that a man who was supposed to represent everything that is good and fair and decent about Kenyans had proven to be just the opposite.

I wasn’t sure which side of Munyakei’s life showed the greater need for whistleblower protection: the good deed that had reduced him to a pauper, or the fact that the lack of protection had turned him into the very thing he was fighting against in the first place.

Out of Rwanda

I managed to get out of Rwanda in one piece, having convinced the Star to pay for a one-way ticket to Lilongwe. I figured it would be far easier than trying to get through Western Tanzania, an area of the continent that my guidebook was rather silent about.

My last week in Rwanda without Tess, a British woman I’d met my first night in Kigali, with a decidedly boring one, saved at the last minute by the arrival of an American girl named Isabelle, who was sent to me from Kampala by Tess.

I was in Rwanda primarily to write about some American missionaries and felt completely frustrated after a month of getting the run around. At the last moment, I managed to get out to two of the churches the Purpose Driven missionaries had visited, one in Kibungo, where the pastors and a translator trotted out some little-seen Rwandan generosity. The town seemed to be carved out of banana groves and we took a drive up into the hills to visit some of the parishioners, including the little orphan whose picture I put up a while back.

A few days later I wrangled a ride with an Anglican official to Kindama, a two hour drive down a “road” that was the worst I had seen in Rwanda. It was a bit hard to believe that a country like Rwanda, with butter-smooth roads and winding, terraced hills, could have an area like this, which was mostly flat and marshy, with a road that seemed to get worse and worse as it stretched on toward Tanzania. The church service was long and hot and entirely in Kinyarwanda, but the singing was amazing. The interview afterward was not exactly forthcoming – we had a major language barrier as neither of us really spoke French – but the pastor and I could laugh about it. We had a pleasant lunch together and then I took some photos of him with his wife and their seven children.

The next day, I packed my bags and left the Kigali hotel for the seventh and final time, walked into town to check my email, bought some samosas to eat for lunch and basically whiled away the morning until it was a reasonable hour to turn up at the airport. I was incredibly glad to get out of Rwanda, a country that is beautiful to look at but is so scarred by its history, it’s a tough one to handle for an extended period of time. Isabelle was telling me about a Rwandan man she’d met, who took her to his mothers grave and told her all about his experience of the genocide. His mother was raped by four soldiers – including a friend of the family – and left for dead. His father had both hands cut off by rebels at a roadblock and they’d left him at a hospital. He was never seen again. This man, who was 12 at the time, had walked to a refugee camp in Uganda. At the end of the day, Isabelle thanked him and told him how much she enjoyed meeting him and making friends with a Rwandan. He responded by telling her he loved her and would always love her and that every breath he drew from that moment forward would be for her.

All of which is to say that Rwandans are a bit intense. This particular man told Isabelle he could never love a Rwandan woman, as they were all so deeply damaged by the genocide they were incapable of love. In the span of 45 minutes, he sent her four text messages, each more breathless and lovesick than the one before. Every young man I met seemed to be lovesick. Eric, a 23-year-old tennis player, actually asked me to clip off a lock of hair so he could carry it in his wallet. He was serious. It was the last time I saw him.

Kigali had just hosted a three-day worship-a-thon featuring American televangelist Joyce Meyer, so the entire crew was waiting in the airport lounge. I had done a little research on her, figuring I could attend one of the sessions at the stadium and file a freelance story on the influx of missionaries into Rwanda. The weather and my trip out to the church conspired against me, though. Still, I found out that Ms. Meyer is worth about $95 million. She has no congregation, but makes her money through personal appearances, taped services, syndicated radio shows and a book-writing career whose productivity rivals Barbara Taylor Bradford. A few years ago she was busted by the IRS for the dodgy set up of her ministry and for using tax rules for pastors to circumvent paying for her extravagant lifestyle, which features a private jet and three Mercedes Benzes.

Anyway, the entire Joyce Meyer crew was waiting in the lounge, looking at pictures of their trip. A woman with a huge head of curly hair wandered through the security scanners and wondered aloud: “Should I just go into the VIP lounge? I mean, am I VIP enough?” Turns out she was the singer at the event. (So the answer to her question was: No. No you are not.)

In typical Kenya Airways fashion, we were squished like sardines into chairs that could double as torture devises. A few hours later we touched down in Nairobi and since I was in the sixth row, I bolted out of the plane like a racehorse out of the blocks, made my way to the customs desk and managed to get my $20 transit visa before the rest of the passengers had even queued. I had a long to-do list now that I was back in a big city. I wormed my way downstairs and settled my night’s accommodation while waiting for my baggage to arrive. I had hoped for the Panari Hotel, where the owners spent $600,000 building a huge ice skating rink, but instead it was some place I’d never heard of and the airline woman told me it was “a little outside of town.” I even haggled trying to get the airline to pay for my visa, but to no avail. Then I went to the bathroom. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. And still no luggage. There was not even a sign flashing on any of the carousels suggesting that the baggage had arrived. I pestered a few of the guys in the lurid green vests and they told me to “wait, wait” as though I was some twitchy European that had just landed on African soil.

Finally, more than an hour after arriving, my red backpack came spinning out of a carousel marked “Johannesburg.” I hope it enjoyed the trip.

It was another hour’s wait for the Budget bus to leave for the hotel. There were two women and a couple French men and myself and we’d all been on the bus waiting for some mystery passengers who never arrived. We drove into the city – I feel like I know Nairobi so well now, even though I’ve never been beyond Westlands – and pulled up at the Boulevard Hotel. We stayed here with my parents when they were visiting, so I know it costs $90 a night, comes with hard, over-stuffed pillows, offers DSTv and a yummy buffet breakfast. The women started to get off the bus and the driver told them, no, no… you’re going to the Safari Club. My eyes popped. The Safari Club is even more exclusive than the Boulevard Hotel and the women were duly impressed when they got off the bus. Then we drove past the Serena, past the PanAfric and up into a hill where we stopped at my hotel, a down-at-the-heel hotel place where the walls were made of onion skins, the bathrooms had seen far, far better days and the television managed to pull in the local station, but with static interrupting the sound.

I tried the phone, since I had made plans to do an interview while I was in town. It was now approaching 9 p.m. I couldn’t get through, so I went for my complimentary dinner, then tried again. We made plans to meet at the Hilton.