Day 25

Saturday, June 14, 2008

The time gap between Nairobi and Athens is weird. When I am getting up on Saturday, Ya’’ll are going to bed. This morning I got a text from Cindy that they needed some info that they thought could help them to find. We tried by text for a while, but then I called. It was a difficult time and one of the first times it really felt like my being gone was a bad thing for my family. I carried a lot of guilt around all day, but couldn’t figure out how to help in the situation.

MOMA - Museum of Modern Art

My next field research was to go to an art exhibit about the post-election violence. Since my paper is on peacemaking in the light of the riots, I thought it might be helpful to try to crawl inside some of the thinking at the time. The art exhibit might give me a unique insight. I left late from Flora because of the phone call and really hurried to downtown. I got their 8 minutes early ( I hurried een faster than I thought possible). Maurice and I then went to meet a couple of other teams that were going to the same exhibit. We had to wait about 30 minutes, so all the hurry was unnecessary. I bought a coke because I was thirsty.

The exhibit was painful. It was graphic. There was lots of death. It was scary. The disparity between what was going on at the street level and what was going on at the political level was stark. In all of the time of the hanging chad, I never felt like our country was going to descend into madness. It happened here.

It is clear now that the president of Kenya stole the election. They continue to refuse to make a full accounting of the ballots. His party hired thugs to go into the towns and help create the violence and pit tribes against each other. They staged the crisis, knowing that it would give them power to negotiate. They should have lost all power but managed to keep 50% of the power. It was so terrible.

There were photographs from the towns I had visited in Western Kenya. It is hard to believe the cynicism required to use age old tribal injuries in this way. It makes me so proud of our system of government, and so glad for great leaders in our past who limited themselves.

Yaya and beyond

I made it back to Flora and at a quick lunch and then headed to the Internet Café to see if I could help the home information situation. I took a bus and got there in about 8 minutes. I ran up the stairs only to find the door closed. The lights were on, but they told me the Internet was down. I got on a computer and typed my Friday blog hoping the computers would start working, but to no avail.

I asked if there was another place near. They sent me across the street. The difference between the YaYa and the second floor of the opposite building was stark. One is a place the other a hovel. One is shiny the other smudged.

The Internet crawled, sputtered, stalled and then died. After 30 minutes I gave up and went back across the street to wait. Still it was on the fritz so I wandered the stores until finally the door was open.

After an hour I had not solved the problem back home, felt totally like a failure, and logged off and walked back to Flora. It started to rain. I didn’t have my jacket or an umbrella. I crossed the street to catch a bus and it didn’t stop when I tried to wave it down.

The rain drop on the end of my nose turned loose.

By then I decided there was no real reason to get in a small box with other wet sweaty people, so I just kept walking. By the time I got back, the rain had stopped and I was mostly dry. The cloths I had hung out in the morning were still damp.

Flora

I typed notes from the day. I added information to my paper that I got from Dickson, and made sure I had completed everything else I could. Then I started in on the Nouwen project for a couple of hours.

By the end I had a calendar produced with the four Gospels split into 365 different units and had assigned each unit to a day. I had also gotten the official holidays and put them into the calendar. At that I quit.

I then read another 100 pages in my book on South Africa, and drifted off the sleep.