Don't Shoot! I Come Bearing Photos: A Play in Five Acts

By Andrew Hoekzema

(Mostly. If you want to get technical, photographic credits also go to Thomas Ginn, Carson Christiano, Silantoi Kisoso, and whatever random Kenyan I happened to hand the camera to when visiting a village.)

Act I: Journeys

(Setting: A little St. Louis, not enough Amsterdam, and too much Atlanta. Other locations not disclosed for security reasons.)

These are not the first African natives to greet me when I arrived in Kenya. I almost made the same mistake when I uploaded the picture on my computer before I remembered that these two people are in fact my dad and little brother Matthew, sitting around in St. Louis waiting for me to leave already. I believe this was the “let’s make sure the new camera works before we get halfway around the world” shot.

There are no pictures of Mom. Sorry Mom. But you got the most hugs at the airport, and I am pretty sure there are rules about this sort of thing.

The trip started out promising all the way through airport security, and then things went downhill as thunderstorms delayed my initial flight by several hours and cut my layover in Atlanta from three hours to approximately negative five minutes. Stewardess Cynthia, who so heroically commandeered a bulkhead seat for me so that I could sprint out the gate as soon as we landed, there is a special place in airline heaven reserved for you (Captain Miller, on the other hand, you of the circuitous routes and eternal holding patterns, you are in a far more precarious state of grace.) End result:

This is me. I am supposed to be in Amsterdam at this point, watching the Dutch national team beat up on Slovenia in the World Cup. Instead, having missed my trans-Atlantic flight, I am in Atlanta, at a hotel with no functional phone lines or ice machine. That is my "philosophical about being stranded in Georgia" face…would I ever reach Africa and fulfill a grand destiny as an international camel racer??

Ok, I can’t take the suspense anymore: yes! I made it to Kenya! My first night in Nairobi, I stayed in a tent!

The next morning, a short flight from Nairobi to Kisumu left me at the smallest "international" airport I've ever had the privilege of traveling through. I asked to take pictures but was denied for "security reasons." But because I am the rebellious type, I took this shot of the main terminal waiting area as we drove away as a show of defiance:

Impenetrable defenses. I hope this causes all of you who would attempt to use this top-secret material to threaten the security of Kisumu International Airport or its collection of plastic lawn furniture to think twice about what you are getting yourself into.

Act II: Where Journeys End

(Setting: Busia! Also known as B-Town--not to be confused with B-Money, which is what we call my roommate Bastien when we get sick of pronouncing his name the French way.)

The path to MSF house (so named because it actually used to be the local office for Medicins Sans Frontieres), which belongs to the roof in the background behind the rusty gates...and guard house...and concrete walls adorned with barbed wire...oh wow, I basically live in a prison.

It just happens to be a prison with a spacious yard, a garden with copious amounts of veggies and fresh herbs (seriously, that parsley is like a weed), and one very friendly dog (who must have been completing the rear part of his constant circuit around the house when this was taken). Hot water and western toilets are, however, in much shorter supply.

The sitting room, where we entertain our auspicious international guests (i.e. poor grad students crash on our furniture a lot). Our housekeeper, Millicent, a generally saintly woman, has apparently developed a deep conviction that the wicker furniture should never take the same arrangement two days in a row, because every day I come home from work to find it in some exotic new configuration. (As a brief aside: yes, we have a housekeeper. I know that seems like a conspicuous display of affluence in a very poor society, and perhaps appears inconsistent with living missionally alongside the people we are here to serve, but it is in fact a very culturally appropriate arrangement. If you have money--and the little that I get paid is still several times more than the average Kenyan income--it's part of your social obligation to use it to employ others, and it's not seen as flaunting your wealth if you do so. It's an arrangement I wasn't entirely comfortable with at first, but having Millicent around actually helps us give back more than we otherwise would be able to: she and her children have deep relationships with the local community, and as we get to know them better and invest more in helping them out, we find new ways to invest in the community as well. Also, she makes great homemade tortilla chips.)

Here we see one of the central fixtures of any self-respecting Kenyan household, a larger-than-life poster of Barack Obama. When certain European house members suggested substituting a printout of Nicolas Sarkozy for Bastille Day, the proposal was unanimously voted down, not out of sheer patriotism or disdain for France, but because covering Obama somehow seems like a criminally un-Kenyan gesture ("pin the nose on Carla Bruni", on the other hand, received serious consideration).

Where the magic happens. There will be a good deal more writing to come about food, both on what a typical Kenyan diet looks like and on the stunningly creative ways we find to avoid eating a typical Kenyan diet. Also, by "magic," I of course mean "trying not to burn my hand off every time I light the gas oven."

My room. Nothing special. The white thing hanging above the bed is my mosquito net, which Millicent likes to tie into an intricate knot every now and then when she changes the sheets. It's like one of those puzzle games where each level gets progressively harder as you go along…I imagine Millicent must sit around thinking up new knots every week: “Oho, solved that one, did he? Well let’s see him deal with THIS!”

I actually do not have pictures yet of "downtown Busia", as we like to call it, in all its one-intersection glory. So for now you will have to live with these two shots which I took as I walked home from work one day, which are on the blurry side because I thought it was cool to have a thunderstorm in front of me and a gorgeous sunset behind...but not cool enough to actually stop walking while I took the pictures.

Act III: Just kidding, more journeys!

(Setting: who knows? I kind of just jump in vehicles and let them take me places. These seem like they were probably taken in some village in rural Siaya, and then Kisumu, and possibly Nairobi.)

One of my favorite parts of going to the field is the kids, especially the young ones. We were lucky enough to catch this pre-primary school just as they were going for morning recess. One of their favorite games appeared to be a sort of rope-less tug-of-war, which starts like this...

...and, in a "who could have seen THAT coming?" twist, somehow ends up like this every time:

And hey! As long as we're all on the ground already...

(In case you can't figure out what they are all doing, they helpfully give you verbal hints as well; the hint for this activity was everybody shouting "I am jumping like a frog!" at the top of their lungs, in unison, over and over and over.)

But enough of this small-town scene! Let's hit the big city! First up, Kisumu, the third largest city in Kenya and the closest major city to Busia:
The view from a rooftop restaurant called the Duke of Breeze, where you are sure to find every ex-pat within 20 miles of Kisumu at least once a weekend. I suspect this has less to do with the food and more to do with the fact that they have the best wireless internet in the entire province.

The view of Lake Victoria is not so bad either.

And now off to Nairobi, land of the sketchy safari salesman on every street corner. Nairobi is a great place. It meets pretty much every criterion on my “is this a real city or not” checklist:

Malls: check!

Museums: check!

Weird creepy dinosaur statues: double check!

Buildings with more than two stories: check!

But most importantly, really greasy pizza made with fake tomato sauce: checkaroni!

Of course, the area just outside Nairobi is not so bad either, particularly the Great Rift Valley, which is easy to identify: it's where the bottom all of a sudden inexplicably falls out from the otherwise perfectly normal African plain you've been driving through.

Act IV: In which we finally meet some of the actual characters, but not all of them, because the author is really bad at taking pictures with other people

(Setting: None. Africa. Outer space. Whatever. Make up your own.)

The WASH Benefits Team! Clockwise from top left: Clair Null, a professor at Emory, one of my PIs, and a never-ending source of stories about latrines; Ben Arnold, an epidemiologist at UC-Berkeley, and a very nice person; Jack Colford, an infectious disease specialist at UC-Berkeley, and there is probably something else interesting about him too; Moses Wakhulunya, Assistant Project Coordinator for WASH, IPA veteran, and silver-tongued government liaison; Emmanuel Mwangaza, Senior Field Officer for WASH, scientifically proven to be the world’s greatest hand-washer; Carson Christiano, my fellow Evaluation Coordinator on WASH, alumna of Northwestern and UC-Berkeley, and sadly misguided Chicago Cubs fan; Duncan Otieno, field officer for WASH, my personal tutor in the dholuo language, and all-around snappy dresser and ladies’ man; Silantoi Kisoso, logistics coordinator for WASH and hip-hop aficionado; Scott Lee, MD/PhD student at Harvard, architect of the WASH community promoter program, and confidante of international health demi-gods Paul Farmer and Jim Kim; and some other guy from WASH Benefits, too many of them running around these days.

One of my field teams, ready to go deliver a batch of our sanitation improvement hardware to a small village in Siaya. They are all stellar. Except for that pickup. That pickup is a goner, having left the better part of its rear axle somewhere between Bumala and Ugunja. Resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful.

Here on your left we have Asavo the Fundi. "Fundi" is Swahili for "guy who knows how to do basically any handyman job you can think of", so Asavo is kind of our version of Ty Pennington except that he does not have a soul patch or his own TV show. On the right, we see a rare smile from Moses.

Sila and I celebrating after a successful day of installing improved latrines in a community. Her heritage is Masai, the legendary warriors of Kenya, which is why she looks tough and I just look constipated.

Carson’s goal in life is to carry water on her head like Kenyan women do. Two seconds after this was taken, that goal was not achieved.

Conducting a focus group in Siaya. Apparently we weren’t quite interesting enough for the dog.

Every focus group or community meeting we do starts and ends with a prayer by the village elder or another prominent community member. Of all the idiosyncrasies that go along with working in the field in Kenya, I think this one is pretty cool.

This is a picture of a very famous economist. His name is Michael Kremer, he teaches at Harvard and serves as a consultant for USAID, and he is the big shot behind my project. Here we see him in his natural habitat, sitting in the middle of an abandoned church in a tiny Kenyan village, checking his e-mail. It's been rumored that he can only survive for three hours without his laptop.

This is not a famous economist. It is a gecko. I have a lot of gecko friends here—on any given night, there are probably two or three running circuits around the ceilings of our house.

Speaking of things running around my house at night…

B-Money the crepemaster at work. What follows is Bastien’s key to delicious crepes: “the batter should taste like something you would eat.” Apparently adding liberal amounts of beer to the batter also helps.

Maryam (Texas native, Harvard alum, Disney lover) is supposed to be Bastien’s crepe apprentice (crepe-rentice!), but she is clearly doing a terrible job.

…and Eric (New York native, aspiring turkey farmer) ended up in a bit of a sudden-onset crepe coma.

Completely unauthorized biographies and embarrassing stories about each of these people will no doubt be coming shortly.

Pop quiz! Can you name all the people in this picture? (Answer: no. There is one new person in it. But bonus points for naming everyone else and figuring out who is missing from the first photo without looking.)

Act V: Safari! (subtitle: "Beware of making animals movie stars, it will only go to their heads")

(Setting: Lake Naivasha, where Robert Redford and Meryl Streep frolicked about, filming the Academy darling "Out of Africa." The animals shown here are all descendants of the zoological stars of that movie, meaning they are spoiled children of celebrities whose names, if we could translate them, are probably something ridiculous.)

“All right monkey, I like the shot, but let’s try it again and this time, I want passion! I want attitude! I want you to make me laugh! Cry! Love it! Hate it! Can you do that for me?”

“Uncalled for.”

Let's try again: “Mr. Waterbuck! Mr. Waterbuck, over here! Oh wow, I’m a huge fan. I know you probably get this all the time, but…could you maybe…you know…do that one pose? You know, that one for all those Hartford Financial (^TM? ©? ®?) commercials, where you, like, stare down the camera and look all proud and regal and sexy?”

“O. M. G. Perfect. I’ve got goosebumps. Does anyone else have goosebumps? I’ve got goosebumps.”

Some herds and plains and trees and lakes and extinct volcanoes and such…


The above photo is not, in fact, simply meant to illustrate my stunning lack of photography skills. The interesting part is not the four tiny antelopes in the background, but that very thin, kind-of-shiny-if-you-really-squint line right in the middle. See it? Keep your eye right there...

...as it turns...

...INTO A GINORMOUS PYTHON! ZOHMYGOODNESS! JACKPOT! LET'S GET THAT ON VIDEO!

Confronting a twelve-foot adolescent python while on foot is actually not a very frightening experience, but kudos to this one for trying its best to act intimidating while having its post-meal sunbath so rudely interrupted.

I call this next series "Giraffes are easy to sneak up on":

"Ok Geoffrey, we're almost there. I'm just looking for one more shot, and it's a big one. It has to be dramatic. It has to be iconic. It has to scream 'Africa!'. And try to keep it tasteful, yeah?"

"Eh, close enough."

Curtain.