'Safari has died'

Today I called my carpenter to check on the shelves he told me would be ready last month. An unfamiliar voice answered the phone. "Is Safari there?" I asked. The reply was muffled. It sounded like he said, "Safari has lied."

Then he said, more clearly: "This is his brother. Safari has passed away."

I'd spoken to Safari on Monday. This had become a weekly or biweekly ritual since I met him in October and contracted him to build me a coffee table. I'd call and he'd answer, "Yes, boss!" I'd say how are you and he'd say, "Fine, boss!" I'd ask how the work was coming and he'd say, "Very well, very well." It would take a few more moments to establish that while the work might indeed have been going very well, it was also going very, very slowly.

In January, after about 10 weeks, Safari finished the table he'd said would be done in two. It was gorgeous - a rich, dark-stained mvule wood, elegantly carved in the Swahili style and inlaid with bone. It was just the sort of coastal Kenyan look I'd had in mind in October when I happened to see his little tin-roofed kiosk at the roadside, with the name "Malindi Furnitures" carefully stenciled at the top, and pulled my car over to wander inside.

I liked the table so much that I sent a picture of it to my parents:



















Similar wood and workmanship would cost two or three times more in the U.S. My mom asked if she could have one shipped to her. I immediately asked Safari to make a set of matching shelves to fill out the room. The last time I saw him, last week, the shelves were about halfway done, with the sanding, staining, carving and bonework left to be done. "You don't work quickly, but I guess it's worth the wait," I said. He beamed. "It will last your lifetime," he said.

Bhargavi was visiting over the weekend and we drove past his shop on Sunday, but it was closed. That was strange, I thought. Sundays are usually busy for him, with lots of foot traffic from the nearby shopping complex. On Monday it took me several tries to reach him by phone, and when he finally picked up he didn't sound the same. "I'm sick, boss," he said. I asked if he was seriously ill, but he said he would be OK after a few days.

Safari's brother said it was chicken pox that killed him. Put aside for a moment the insanity that something like that can kill a strong, middle-aged guy, because as I've come to realize, people in Kenya die every day from afflictions we think of as routine. His brother said the family was preparing to take his body to be buried in Malindi with his ancestors, and asked if I could help with the arrangements. I'm traveling out of the country this weekend, I said, but I could help out when I returned.

"And don't worry," he said. "I know you have paid some money. We will organize to have all your work completed in the next few weeks." I started to offer some platitudes about the work not being important, but I stopped. I want those shelves even more now, and I know this sounds maudlin, but I think Safari would have wanted that too.

Dangerous workout

Power cuts are something you live with in Nairobi, as in much of the developing world. People in Uganda and even South Africa deal with it just as often as we do, and in Liberia they don't even have electricity. So I try not to complain too much when the power goes out. I don't have a generator, but in most cuts usually it takes less than 10 minutes for electricity to be restored (although I can remember one case last year when it went out at 6 p.m. and by 9 p.m. was still out, so a bunch of people in my neighborhood went out drinking because, hey, bars have generators).

Naturally, however, there are less opportune times than others for the power to go out. It's bad when you're in the shower and suddenly you find the water heater's stopped heating. It's annoying when you've got Sunday morning eggs on the stove, and suddenly they stop scrambling. Then there are all those times when I've been pumping away at work, and then the Internet is gone.

But today was nearly the worst. I was running on the treadmill at the gym when the entire shopping complex lost power. Rather than merely slowing down as a treadmill does when you hit the "Stop" button, the belt went from a good 11 km/hr pace to zero in a split-second. Porsches don't brake this well. I ran right into the console and was stabbed in the gut. And these were brand-new machines.

Don't they have a mechanism to keep them from stopping on a dime like that? I figure even when you yank that red emergency cord, it just takes you down to a trot. It's probably not something that the manufacturer - whose address was listed as Orlando, Fla. - normally has to think about. But it'll be a few days before I'm able to get back on one of those things.

The prodigal son

The Kenyan media are covering Barack Obama's run for the presidency as if it was the presidency of Kenya. Hardly a day goes by without a wire story about Obama in the Nairobi papers, or a blurb on the evening news about his latest campaign speech. When he was here last summer, and visited the village where his father was raised and his grandmother still lives, it was the prodigal son returned.

Sure, Obama is in favor of abortion rights and gay rights, and most Kenyans are against abortion and view homosexuality as a sin. But some Kenyans want to do more to help him. Yesterday the Standard newspaper published a letter by one Kevin Kadipo of Mombasa, calling on Kenyans to contribute to Obama's run for the White House.

"I call upon willing Kenyans to donate money for our son's campaign so that he can clinch the party ticket and finally the presidency," Kadipo wrote. "When Obama becomes president, it will be easy for Kenyans to go visit, do business and study in America. It is thus in our interest to support Obama and wish him well."

I love the pride in "our son" and the hope that an African-American in the White House would ease the restrictions on Kenyans seeking visas to enter the United States. So I'll be curious to see whether Kadipo's movement gathers any steam or shillings. They've got a way to go; yesterday, on a brief campaign swing through L.A., Obama collected $1 million in one night from the glitterati of Beverly Hills.

The Africa reality tour

I'll admit that I've done this: needing an anecdote to illustrate a story about poverty or deprivation in Africa, I've driven to a slum neighborhood in Nairobi to interview "real people." The stories are often really compelling (one of my favorite places is the Ayani primary school, where the kids sing a hilarious song called "These are my private parts...and nobody should be seeing them"). And some people become friends who still send me texts months afterward.

But when you drop in and drop out like that, sometimes it can feel a bit like disaster tourism. A few visitors have asked me to take them to visit Kibera, the biggest slum in East Africa, with probably 1 million people. (If you saw "The Constant Gardener," that was Kibera at its most hectic/beautiful.) Recently the new U.N. Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, toured the place before issuing some pronouncements on the need to promote African development. Chris Rock was also there some weeks back. Kibera is quickly becoming an obligatory stop on the Kenya tour, right after the safari parks and the house where they filmed "Out of Africa."

Now comes a nice story from Reuters bureau chief Andy Cawthorne about Kibera's growing cachet. I couldn't have said it better:

Any journalist wanting a quick Africa poverty story can find it there in half an hour. And now at least one travel agency offers tours round Kenya's Kibera slum, one of Africa's largest.

"People are getting tired of the Maasai Mara and wildlife. No one is enlightening us about other issues. So I've come up with a new thing -- slum tours," enthused James Asudi, general manager of Kenyan-based Victoria Safaris.

James sounds like a particularly enterprising guy. But the Nairobi intelligentsia is up in arms. The entire story is here.

Don't be alarmed

Some of you are likely to pick up Saturday's New York Times, where you'll see an article by my friend Jeffrey Gettleman about the recent spate of murders in Nairobi. Last weekend two women -- a missionary and her daughter -- riding in a U.S. Embassy car were killed in a carjacking in broad daylight. The same weekend, the top regional official for the charity group CARE USA was murdered in a nighttime carjacking.

The shrugs and gallows humor about "Nai-robbery" aside, the news from last weekend shook the hardened community of Nairobi expats. As Gettleman points out, "something seems to be in the air. Either there is more crime or more publicity about it, perhaps because many of the recent victims have been diplomats." He mentions the best known case, of the American defense attache who was shot by carjackers last fall outside his home not far from the U.S. embassy.

Something is in the air, indeed. Today's Washington Post carries a story by Craig Timberg about the recent crime wave in South Africa, which counts some leading entertainers and other well known figures among its victims. South Africa might be the most crime-ridden country in Africa - certainly the most violently so - Bhargavi and I agree that we both feel safer in Nairobi at night than we do in Johannesburg at dusk. Increasingly, Timberg reports, the the feeling of being at risk of violent crime in SA straddles color lines - both blacks and whites feel like they could be next.

My gut reaction to all this (after the feeling of relief that my parents live in L.A. and don't read either the Times or the Post, or this blog) is that it's worth noting that both these stories were written from the two biggest media, business and humanitarian-aid hubs in Africa. There are other dangerous cities in Africa, to be sure - I've heard you walk alone at night in Dar es Salaam at your peril - but Nairobi, Johannesburg and Cape Town are famously so.

There is tremendous inequality in these cities between the elite/expat community and the 90-plus percent who we as journalists, aid workers, advocates and others are there ostensibly to help. And so we should be saddened, and chastened in our own actions - but we should not be surprised. The elites probably aren't targeted for their skin color or their countries of origin; the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, as well as Kenyan police, were quick to point out that they didn't consider the attack on the women an act of terrorism. But they - or should I say we - are targets because of what we are not, which is part of the vast suffering majority.

The Embassy put out a "warden message" to all Americans in Kenya that urged us to be vigilant and, in the case of a carjacking, to comply with our attackers. It also said that the four people who attacked the missionary and her daughter were riding in an SUV that had been stolen in an earlier carjacking. Driving to a carjacking in your carjacked car - that's either the height of brazenness, or stupidity, or desperation, or maybe all of the above.