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Health & Fitness

"Who's Observing Who?"

While I was observing little things about Kenyans, they were sizing me - the unmarried lady "mazunga" - up big time! Their impressions would make me laugh...and cry.

My Mama unlocked the gate to our compound and paused after stepping into the yard. She looked around anxiously. “What is it?” I asked.

“I’m smelling something,” she said.

I’d hoped it wasn’t me; it had been a long, hot day and I’d walked almost five miles going to classes that day. Maybe the one-bucket bathes might not have been cutting it. But I have a pretty good sniffer, and detecting nothing unusual I continued inside the house to prepare to bathe.  A few minutes later I heard Mama yelling to her house-girl, Domitila, from the chicken coup at the far end of the yard: a baby chick had fallen into a tin of water earlier, and drowned.

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Had Mama smelled that tiny chick, I wondered, dead only a few hours? But how could she? She must have been at least 50 feet away. No wonder she seemed to know whenever I’d had a single beer or pombe with the other Trainees down at Makutis! That night I jotted a notation in my journal: “Kenyans have a remarkable sense of smell.”

I made other such observations as well, like that Kenyans had a great sense of humor and a ready smile, but rarely showed other emotion. They never seemed to cry, for example, even under trying circumstances and tended to cling to the familiar, avoiding change, such in their cooking style (boiling, boiling, boiling). They seemed very supportive of one another. And, as one of my trainers told me, they tended to hold grudges. (This I discovered myself).

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I reminded myself that these were just first impressions; that there was probably more to them than met the eye. I felt obliged to delve deeper. But then, what of them?  Kenyans themselves, I would later learn, were huge on first impressions. What they didn’t know they just filled in themselves. In fact, it was better to lie – the bigger and fatter, the better – than to leave any blanks to fill in. Especially concerning outsiders like me. Especially a woman, and an unmarried one at that.

“Don’t just lie and say you are married,” one of my Kiswahili teachers instructed. “Tell him – your boss, your supervisor, the village chief...whoever - that you also have a boyfriend in Kenya. Not only that, but that you have one right here, in the community. That way maybe you won’t be harassed.” She smiled, “Of course, they’ll still talk.”

So while I was making little notes in my journal about Kenyans, they were writing a whole book, so to speak, about me. And some of it I wasn’t going to like.

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