Low Points, and Room 242

It's really the longing that hurts most after two weeks in the hospital.You see the bright sunlight out your window and the trees rustling in the breeze and you want to be there walking freely. You want a home cooked meal that doesn't taste like hospital sheets, and a few new episodes of a show you'd never watch, just because you cannot bear another rerun. You want to sleep in, and the beeping sound to go away, and to rip all your bandages off for a good hot shower. You want the aching in your veins to stop, and people to quit pricking you with needles of various shapes and sizes, and that drip drip drip, watching antibiotics enter your body, to never drip again. You just want to go back to how things always were during the normal times when you felt good, which of course weren't appreciated because normal never is. It is a sad truth of life we don't value things like good health until it is taken, the same way we tend to neglect good people until they die, leave us, or travel far away. Life in the hospital is wrapped up, suffocated, and constrained by IV chords, and you stay strapped down to a bed in ways beyond the physical.

Things can always be worse. The nurse told me one night I was easy and that patients are often admitted for three months and can't roll over or go to the bathroom by themselves. A few weeks earlier I was shown the general ward of Kenyatta National Hospital, where a number of victims of a recent Al-Shabaab bomb blast in Nairobi were being treated - in a room that resembled an airplane hanger. Illness comes in many forms, and I was lucky that a short series of invasive procedures and a steady flow of drugs, standard from today's perspective, ultimately saved my life. 150 years ago the case may very well have been different, and that is always a powerful thought to let settle. As life slowly and gradually gets normal again, it becomes very clear how unimportant some things are I made very important for far too long. We drive ourselves to the grave, I think, always chasing after something. It is such a trick in life to realize you are free and that you need nothing.

I felt sick the entire drive home on a cool Friday night, with seemingly more questions than answers. One of the worst feelings in the world is looking at your body, or life, and not knowing exactly what troubles it. Without that spout of knowledge, you don't know how to fix it, and we all just want to be fixed when we sit alone and ill, our minds left to run wild. There were a few scary nights in there, up late in the dark sweating and aching, wondering what would happen next. I have little doubt I will sit at a bar in a city where sickness is less extreme and treatment more organised, someday far off in the future, and talk about that time I got meningitis in Africa, realizing that probably made me better, my story more interesting, and my spirit more resilient in the end.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Four Masai children no more than ten years old carried small whips alone on the side of the road. I didn’t see them for long, as my car rushed by, but their job was presumably to care for what must have been a hundred goats, and at this instance usher them across the highway in unison. Knowing as little as I do about the pastoral Masai culture, I know that these animals are life as much as water, and you do not have to look far to  connect and compare white children of the West who cannot even pour cereal at that age without making a mess. It is a fact of life that children grow up quicker in the third world, as a matter of necessity as much as it is culture. The more these sort of images accumulate the more you redefine what it means when someone says someone else has grown up sheltered.

Up the road, past domesticated goats and wild baboons, sits the Serena Hotel at Lake Manyara – part of one of the most successful hotel groups in East Africa, having perfected the art of getaways in complete isolation. For days I stayed there around Easter, watching the rains come out of the nearby mountains and spread across the lake in varying waves and shades and layers. This is the green expanse of the Kilimanjaro Region, where rolling hills and flat grassland exist as one, and water is everywhere during the rainy season and carves its little niches in streams and puddles and misty downpours. It all created a delightful sort of stillness, one absent over the past few months of my life, where you sit and close your eyes and there is no urgency and you just listen to the birds and the bugs make their noises. I believe that in this space you find everything – the words that fit on a page and the rights and lefts your life requires next – and I do trust it’s there waiting even when it feels far away.

“…and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

Easter is always a peculiar time, whether in the solemn streets of Seville during Semana Santa, the old cobblestone pathways of colonial Guatemala, or an isolated lodge of a heavily Christianized African nation. I hold every age of human history to the same explicable standards. As I have trouble believing a man could rise from the dead in today's world of zombie pop culture, I do not find this plausible 2,000 years ago at a time the most respected cure for common ailments was bleeding a patient to balance their four humors. But people continue bellowing "He is risen," believing its importance, its tangible benefit, and how much private attention is given to our lives while billions continue to suffer based on chance and geography. I've always found organised religion to the most convenient thing in the world, because you don't have to do a damn thing, yet you believe you've done everything. 

Down the cliff, falling away from the Serena at the base of the Lake, sits a Masai Village. There the goats sleep alongside the people and the people live in grass huts you only find nowadays in museums that say “this is how they used to live.” Hippos live in the Lake and elephants in the surrounding plains and the herders have to think about protecting their livestock from lions, and this is one of their challenges. Thanks to Christian Colleges and missionary expeditions, these villages celebrate Easter too, and whether that makes their lives better or worse or the same, I'm not the one to say. In Africa, as is true anywhere in the world, the elegance and the harshness sit side by side, but perhaps Africa just can't mask its paradoxes as good as the others just yet.

I didn't see Kilimanjaro until the last day; the low lying clouds and the periodic rains kept the tallest mountain in Africa hidden from view. The snow-capped peak was only visible for a time out my right-side window, ascending and descending quickly back into Nairobi - back to suits and ties, impossible schedules and deadlines, phone calls and emails and meetings, and all the various tenets that make life so busy again. The paradoxes, for better or for worse, function in a way that sometimes make a small cabin with a wood stove in the middle of the Canadian Rockies with a pen and a beer alone the only thing in the world that makes sense. 

The Smoke That Thunders

The torrential downpour at Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, is not the average way to turn twenty five. 500 million cubic meters of water plummet 100 meters into the gorge each minute, and there just aren't many places - if any - like it in the world. From a helicopter you see the real prowess of it all, spreading out 2 kilometers, the mist shooting up into the air and visible from miles away. I stood at the adjacent island for quite some time, soaked from head to toe, water coming and going from every direction, entranced by the way nature does things, and how simple and complex that can be.

The Kololo Tribe, living around the Falls in the 1800s, called it "Mosi-oa-Tunya," or, "the smoke that thunders," and as I find true with many tribes and pre-colonial, pre-industrial nations around the world, living before the era of telescopes and microscopes and science, they have the simplest and sometimes best way of explaining things. We can know very clearly how something works - that a basalt plateau has many large cracks filled with weaker sandstone, and that over the course of 100,000 years the falls recede upstream, eroding the sandstone to form these very gorges - but no one really cares when they look out at it. We know we are seeing something miraculous, the culmination of a million tiny and improbable factors over a period of time much longer than we will ever witness first hand, and that is quite enough.

One of these very witnesses was David Livingstone, who explored the Zambezi River in 1855. He was the first European to see the Falls, and in the most British of ways wasted no time honoring his home country by naming the site after the Queen. "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It has never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight," he said shortly after discovery. People have come and gone and thought similar thoughts since the very beginning, no matter their level of intellect, and these are things I always find comforting. In today's world, we are hardly ever alone. Consider the best things and the worst things, and someone out there has no doubt been through it before, survived, and died an old man better for having done it. 

I'm well into my 25th year now, but I still think back on that weekend trip down south: the roaring sounds, the fresh smells, and the invisibility that turned to visibility as the spray of water came and went with the wind. 25 years is a drop in the ocean. There are some things - from a family to a river to the stars - far bigger than ourselves. Seeing it that way is both humbling and empowering. As we sit and tell ourselves our lives are volatile, hopeless, and out of anyone's control entirely, trying to keep our heads above water on a day-to-day basis, things just keep on moving, so we are best suited to find some level of peace in the short time we have - and guard that inner peace with everything, because without it there is nothing. 

In Kisii

A long drive in Kisii County at night reminds you things can always be worse. As the car rumbles along winding dirt roads ripped to shreds by the rain, up and down the hills and mountains, past coffee farms and villages made of dust, people walk who knows how many miles in the dark. They clutch kerosene lamps if anything at all, guided by the little path they have etched many times before. Like too many parts of Africa, people live not so differently than they did 500 or 1000 years ago, their houses thatched together with grass and the night real night without any electricity grid. You think everyone - the little Carnegies and the Rockefellers of each generation - can forge their own way in life, until you see those condemned to the bleakest of circumstances with no hope of going anywhere at all. They don't teach you that in American schools, because it's not the American way. 

I have sat a bit defeated on the floor of my shower, letting hot water rush over my head, too many times over the last few months trying to flush out noise and volatility. It's hard to write or talk or do much at all under such circumstances, the basic foundations of self whipped around and turned to mush. But the beauty and the tragedy of the third world is that you don't look far for perspective; human life is always harder and a bit more real around every corner and back alley, and in places you once thought safe. The paradoxes don't make things easier, but provide a framework to compare and assess and work through your personal trivialities. 

A volcano just went off in Guatemala - one I sat and looked up at on many peaceful nights alone - and seeing the photos for whatever reason took me back to many places and many times, and they felt very near to me. On the cusp of my quarter century, Picaya is a reminder that things just keep moving and evolving and time doesn't give a damn how slow or fast.

Back In Sync

I am in a relationship now, and that is something I either would not or could not have said out loud for many years under a wide variety of complicated criteria. It is a new concept, and a pleasant one, simplifying life through complete transparency. As I look back on a million people I have come to know, I'm not sure how the bad ones sleep at night disguising facts and figures as subtle half-truths. My head feels light and airy on the pillow, with nothing to hide from the world.

Likewise, it is both a powerful and a terrifying thing to look at someone and know they have all of you. It requires profound levels of unconditional trust, and that's how trust must work. It puts your fate in someone's hands, and hopes they are gentle with it. It makes you feel out of control, and you either decide to be okay with that or end things now, recognizing a loss of basic fundamentals. The reality is that no external forces can affect levels of trust between two people. Trust is something decision-based, solidified and broken by two people unto one another, and in the midst of this process - testing the waters and feeling and being - you certainly do not have to lose yourself along the way.

I'm not sure what all this means or where it goes. I couldn't tell you what the prospects are or how far I could potentially fall. These are the risks we take with relationships and it comes down to the simple question of what we are prepared not to do based on an array of factors and expiration dates and what ifs that may never happen. I live my life, and have for awhile, in spite of these factors or fears. You do what you do with the person who makes you feel no one else exists and you spend time with the person who keeps you up at night stranded in isolation amidst your thoughts. Whether I look back and curse myself or pat myself on the back, I would not do much differently starting the end of 2013.

I traveled with my girlfriend - another odd word for me - around East Africa for New Years, and thought back on the Hemingway quote that said something about the need to travel with a women to really know her. Not many people have traveled with their girlfriends in such places, and that is something worth remembering. It all wasn't simple, but it was good, and that is the range of life these days. Good things do not have to be simple, but in fact can rip us apart and put us back together. 

The New Year

I sat awhile with my feet in the sand on the first day of 2014. Funny little crabs dug holes and buried themselves alive while children danced and played games only they understood right into the Indian Ocean. White people and black people and everything in between walked up and down the beach, talking and holding hands and sometimes fighting as people seem to do too much on vacations and getaways. As the wind picked up and the sun went down, I walked back to my simple beachside guesthouse and poured a quiet glass of wine.

The first day of the year brings with it strange little thoughts and simmering hunches, and I always find it sad when people are unwilling to either look back or look forward because what’s done is done and what could happen is unpredictable. The man-made concoction of New Years Day is a delightful chance at evaluation and divination. You are where you are because of what you’ve done, and if you aren’t where you ought to be than you did something wrong or misguided and inadequate along the way. Likewise, if you want to end up anywhere in particular, you must have some foresight and direction and not show up to the theatre unprepared. This is the beauty of toasts: you clink glasses together and speak aloud about resolutions past and present and open yourself up to a little bit of truth and vulnerability. You sit and talk candidly to people about what can be changed and what could be better. I find myself loving this sort of transparency more and more as time goes by, and any chance we get to do so in a socially acceptable way does not deserve to be scoffed at by people who "hate new year's resolutions."

December flew right through elephant sanctuaries and giraffe centres and tortoise trusts, permeating out into the East Africa and melting right into the light blue sea around Zanzibar. I clinked my own glass of champagne there, and thought about the year that has come and the year that passed. 2013 is difficult to say goodbye to, futile a thing as that is to say. Years of such fullness, filled to the brim with different joys and sadness and delightful unknowns, do not come to everyone and are challenging to repeat. I reflected back on memories both simple and profound embedded deep within the cracks of New York City and Nairobi, Austin and Antigua, Doha and Seville, all coming together to form a overwhelming year in review. I thought about the thousands of miles covered by plane, train, boat, and car, and the thousands more that surely will. I wondered why some people exit our lives when we thought they would stay and others enter them unannounced. I wondered why we always drift back in our minds to the same places - far off lands with different smells and sounds and auras - when left alone to our own devices. Then a drank my glass and then another, and the newest section of life, the great unknowns and undecideds of 2014, were ushered in for better or for worse.


The faint-hearted merchant neither gains nor loses; nay he loses: one
   must take fire in order to get light.


There are a lot of things I’m not sure about these days - too many to make anyone feel particularly comfortable and enough to make one lay anxiously awake at night - but I do feel my future self from some ambiguous age saying with a little smile, “you won’t look back and wish you had settled with X, Y, or Z. You are doing just fine with everything you know. You will know a lot more soon, and I can assure you, there is just no need to worry. Now go enjoy the bright sparkling stars above Zanzibar.”

Into Kibera

The Kibera Slums are among the biggest in the world, sitting twenty minutes outside central Nairobi. They host their own informal economy, a myriad of well-intentioned NGOs, and as one pompous Brit told me, are almost "touristy."I had never been to a slum before, never witnessed the nauseating smells, the piles of trash, the battered children, and unstable shacks. When it comes to the third-world images on US television screens and the sponsor-a-child advertisements that show black children with flies on their face, all those images could be taken from any given corner or alleyway in Kibera and it is a powerful thing to have it there in front of you.

I went with 600 cookies because I wanted to, and because I believe if you wish to write about the world, you have to see it on its good days and its bad. A coworker and I walked down the main road and back up a hill to the abandoned railroad tracks. We were the only white people, apart from one man off playing soccer in a makeshift pitch. The kids clustered around, smiling and reaching out and only sometimes grabbing. There was an incredible amount of order, all things considered, and that is something you do not expect from slums.

On top of the hill I looked out and saw the aluminums roofs follow the base of the valley to another hill, and then continue on out of sight who knows how far. A stream of muddy water rushed through the central part lined by trash, and its hard to imagine an African rainy season down there. I have asked myself each day since how one fixes this, the absolute mess that happens when humanity at is primal center is left to its own chaotic devices. NGOs are good ideas, but are based on big important peoples' generosity, and are almost never sustainable. The corporate world supports itself, but is largely run by those interested in their shareholders bank accounts and buying fillers for their homes. It seems to me that to take impoverished children out of a slum, to find the money that will build pipes and toilets and electrical sockets, it requires a fundamental shift in how everyday human beings view success, and the ideal life. It requires everyone to reassess their priorities by seeing a big filthy picture. Frankly, I'm not sure that's possible with seven billion lives, and so the world will continue on for a long time, some of us profiting, some of us suffering, the icecaps still melting, all largely based off mere circumstance. This is sad to say, and pessimistic, but it is hard not to go to places like Kibera and start feeling painfully realistic. It is also hard to go to places like Kibera, and not want to hand each child a cookie and a few shillings, regardless of its sustainability, or far reaching impact.

The day before, I went to a work event: the launch of a new investment city 100km outside Nairobi. There the President of Kenya spoke, and said that God must indeed be on Kenya's side given that on this special day rain miraculously decided to fall for the first time in six months. He, and others, saw it as a blessing, and I wondered how any President of Kenya could think God is on anybody's side with places like Kibera sitting on the doorstep. I have said this before, and say it often, but any God that sits by apathetically as kids spoon dirty water into their mouths and wither away with hunger is not a God I ever want to believe in, much less fall to my knees and pray to.