nyahururu

The last day of the safari we got dropped off in Nyahururu, or Thompson falls. we went to the actual water falls first with the rest of the group before they left us to drive to nairobi. here's what happened:

i jump out of the last row of the range rover, my back killing me because of the previously mentioned height issue, and immediately 6 africa women swarm me, each one telling me to come to her shop. i tell them i will get to them, and then have to pretty much ignore their constant "you come to my shop now!" and just go into the first shop i see. i ask how much the kangas (which are the african wraps) are (knowing they should be between 150 and 300 kenya shillings), to be told that this one here is 2,500. it is this kind of price increase that i am talking about that happens every day, with every item, just to give you the right idea. i tell the woman that this is ridiculous and that i wont pay more than 300 and walk out. Every store (these stores are actually shacks) is filled with the same hand carved, really quite beautiful statues of animals, bone carved spoons, beaded necklaces, and colorful kangas. but every item is so over priced that i cannot even begin to bargain with them. if someone asks for 2,500 there is no way that i can ever get them to reduce the price down to 250 shillings. the lowest i got was 500. which i thought was pretty good considering i've only been bargaining for the last month. the problem is that T falls is a big tourist attraction and these women know that they can convince tourists that it make sense to spend $30 on a piece of cloth that they paid $1 for. but i know that i can find all this stuff for much cheaper when i go to Zanzibar and so i just keep on going. Regardless, i didn't end up purchasing anything. and i also never actually got to see the water fall.

i did walk away with a lot of anger and frustration. this place is just so full of people who see you more than ever as a source of infinite wealth. and like i have said, i am really rich compared to them, but these women just had no sense of what it means to run a business. well not in any sense that i had ever experienced before. they come out to the street and force you into their shop, and if you leave to quickly they get angry and say you didn't give them a fair look around. the most ridiculous part was that each time i wanted to buy something and i offered low, the woman would go and get her boss. and the boss just happened to be the same woman for each shop. this meant that the entire market is owned by one person which means there is no bargaining off other shopkeepers because each lady is only allowed to go so low, which is dictated by that one boss woman. she had a complete monopoly on the entire business. and she was a real bitch.

anyway we left there, feeling totally drained and frustrated and attacked. that's the best word for it.

we then got dropped off in town, said goodbye to bev and lee, caroline and dani, jeff and jim, helen, kamunge and boxson. the feeling of complete freedom that washed over me as the car drove away was amazing. the thing about the trip was that it was very much the planned trip for the adventurous tourist, but was just that: totally planned. we were there to see peoples and animals and culture and it was set in front of our faces and then we saw it. in spite of that, i don't regret doing it by any means because you simply cannot see the north of kenya unless you do it the way we did. you can't just take mutatus and hitch rides and buy your own food because there aren't any mutatus or buses and there aren't any places to buy food or get water.

but when we started walking away from the car it was like this thick haze fell away. what we had been seeing for the past 8 days had been real, very real, but we hadn't had to interact with it on a daily level. and then there we were. walking around this town that reminded me so much nanyuki, with cars driving by nearly running us over. and then people were calling out to us, mazunge which means white person. we went to the grocery store and bought some food and dealt with people who didn't speak any english. then we went and got some tea and somosas at this cafe (they call a cafe here a hotel). and we just sat and enjoyed being free in this very alive place that we didn't know at all.

we bought some mangos and ate them on the side of the road, which, since we were sitting down, was a clear invitation to every street seller in the area to come and try to sell us chocolates and crackers, water and watches. everything. others just wanted to talk with us. it was really interesting because at T falls all the store sellers had been women, but town was only full of men. most of which were in some stage of drunkenness. that is actually a really bad problem here. men are drunk at literally every hour of every day.

we ate our mangos and then walked over to the mutatu center. of course there was the usual bustle and argument over which mutatu we should take because everyone wants the white people to ride in their car...as we finally got into the mutatu these street sellers came up to the window and asked us to buy more stuff. at one point this guy asked lauren to buy some bananas. she told him cheekily that she already had 7 bananas in her bag, but thank you very much. his reply to that was, "well then give me some money anyways because im poor and you're rich."

finally we got going in our mutatu for the 3 hour ride to nanyuki. luckily the car wasn't as packed as other mutuatus we've been in, still white squashed tho. there was this young african guy sitting in front of us who immediately started talking to us. his name was john and he lived in nanyuki. we talked to him for most of the trip. suffice it to say he may have wanted to marry me. that was until he asked THE question: are you christian? to which i replied that i was not entirely sure what i was but that i certainly believed in a something. because of the language issue, this answer did not quite cut it and he began ranting on about how jesus is the savior and how god created the world. there was a lot of arguing and miscommunication back and forth until he asked if i thought that gay people were okay. i answered him honestly, knowing full well that he wasn't going to like my answer: yes i think gay people are perfectly alright. boy did this get him going on about, "do i see boy cows mating with other boy cows?" etc. but i've heard all that before. the hardest part about it was that he could not understand why i wasn't giving in to his point of view. he was explaining and explaining and i just wasn't budging. finally i told him that i understood where he was coming from, that i simply did not feel the same way, and that we should start talking about something else.

he got a little weird at that point, asking me why i was turning him down and would i come visit him at his house later. it was hard because i could tell that he was starting to think that i didn't want to get involved simply because he was black and i was white. but it wasn't that. it was that i just honestly wasn't interested in him. i think he'll survive tho. im sure in fact that he's already forgotten me entirely and moved on to the next mazunge girl he sees. usually guys like that see in white women a chance at either an easy lay or a ticket to the states and three year down the line citizenship as an american...

anyways he got really rude in the end and we ended up just ignoring him for the rest of the trip. it was weird how quickly it all changed. the second we werent good believing christians, the second i thought boy cows could be with other boy cows, i was no longer his bride-to-be.

we got out at the end of our road, which is still about an hours walk from the farm immediately again, people swarm us. it's just the way it is. but after all that we had been through it was too much. this one guy was trying to convince us that we wanted to ride the bicycle taxis, called bodabodas, which take almost longer than it takes to walk. its so weird because there are times when someone is trying to sell you something and you are kind of somewhat interested in buying it and then these people are reallllyyy good at convincing you that you do in fact want to get whatever it is they sell. but then there are these times when you just absolutely do not want whatever they are selling and it is in those moments when someone is trying to literally convince you of what you want, that it gets funny, and then irritating. i finally kind snapped and looked right at this one guy and told him straight that we didn't want to ride the bikes and please leave us alone. we ended up hitching a ride in the back of pickup back to the farm with this old black guy who wouldn't let us pay him.

in that moment both lauren and i were at our wits end, having felt completely attacked for the entire day. sadly we were also feeling totally abused by the men that had surrounded us the whole day. not in the physical sense obviously. but in the sense that every guy we had come across that day had either looked as us with sex or money in his eyes. and then here comes this nice old african who won't accept out money, when he so easily could have, and our faith in common human decency returned.

that was a really exhausting day.