Possession

There's German phrase which needs to be introduced into Kenyan society forthwith - 'mit sich gehen lassen', 'to let something come home with you'. The possibilities in English - 'pilferage', 'taking without consent', 'theft' all have a strong whiff of moral outrage, not really encountered in my day to day dealings with infractions here. 

Of course in many ways its not really surprising. On any main road out of Nairobi you see huddles of police pulling vehicles off the road for chance 'inspections', to be overcome by payment of a bribe.  What's thine is mine if I have power. endorsed from the top.  It's acknowledged. In the two-day national matatu strike last year, one respected economic institution conducted a study on the loss to the economy of the bribes to police which weren't paid by matatus on strike. Millions of shillings.  (So different professions become desirable in different countries. In a surprise discussion with a relief guard a few months ago he said wistfully, 'What I'd really like to be is a traffic policeman.'  'Mobile ATMs' they're called.)

'Where did you last have it?' isn't such a relevant question in Kenya.  It assumes that inanimate objects stay, immobile, where they were placed. Twice now at BigCorporate I have turned up, bushytailed, ready for work, to discover my computer, ethernet cable, power lead and all has disappeared. Walked off with a colleague for their use or been dumped into a mass dumping ground by IT Services. No shared networks in BigCorporate, so loss of hard drive means loss of all documents.  I've taken to using a flashdrive.

But its worst of all at school. No one expects children to be paragons of virtue in the keeping track of things stakes. But First and SecondBorn were the children of two working parents in UK, veterans of complicated liftshare rotas where Family One picks up to accompany to school, via walking bus, via school cloakroom, via after school club, via Family Two taking to Brownies and Family Three delivering home.  There were occasional disasters, where FirstBorn's school uniform got whisked off to far-flung work in FamilyFriend's car, and she had to slouch round school in non-uniform standout jeans all day.  But even in the worst case scenario, coats which had got left at gymnastics were still waiting meekly on the hooks in the council public changing room one week later.

Now in Kenya we (and others) source Clarks school shoes annually, one size large to grow into, transported if you (or a friend) travel to UK.  So the exasperation when they disappear on day one of wearing cannot be expressed.  It's not just happened to us. New children (and their brand new uniform) seem targeted. Four different cases that I can cite of distraught children and mothers on day one at a new school (and new country).  'But they CAN'T have disappeared.' 'But they have.'  And of course, relatively, we are so wealthy here. And of course it could be the far more impoverished cleaning staff.  But it isn't.  Rulers, rubbers, shoes, trainers, tennis rackets, gone, never to return. We've got through five compulsory sunhats in four terms.  I started out naming in UK style, nametapes sewn inside. But as my frustration has grown, so has my lettering. First and SecondBorn now have their names in ten cm high letters in indelible marker on the front of their caps. Hopefully if another child is wearing it, a child or teacher will bring the name change to their attention.

I'm not saying we're blameless, but the cultural expectations of swapsies too are different here. In term one, when SecondBorn came home in another child's nametaped shirt or socks we would wash them, and return them via the nanny or driver or whoever did the pickup. By the end of the term we were three shirts and four pairs of socks down. Reciprocity - or the authority to act independently to return an additional shirt to a mother without fear for ones job for stealing - in short supply here. So now I treat it as one out one in too. Become part of the problem.

Different too, the expectations of how much it is acceptable to swipe. I've 'tidied up' my children's Easter eggs after bedtime, even having sworn fervently that I wouldn't.  But I've been artistic. I've evened it up maybe, but I've known moderation.  I've realised there would be a small list of suspects with one name heading the list, and shyed away from the consequences of being disrobed.  SecondBorn came home in redfaced outrage from Saturday Cricket Camp last term. 'They ate ALL my biscuits while I was batting.'  His 'friends' and teammates sat and demolished all of his halftime snack, opening his tupperware, eating four biscuits, shutting it again, and then denying it barefaced when confronted with the evidence. 

Or the sad tale of our avocado tree. We didn't have a avocado tree in our garden in Hertfordshire. At our first harvest we were more than a little excited about its progress. No nonchalence here. Drooling salivation, and great jubilation that our first crop coincided with the family visit for Christmas.  'Would you like an avocado from our tree...?'  Smug smug smug.  This year we monitored the progress with interest. Stood under it and counted. Watched the ripening load with glee. Went away for one night. And returned to find the tree shorn of everything. Bare.  As with the Easter eggs there wasn't a long list of suspects.  We have an electric fence round the house, a guard perpetually stationned at the gate, and only one person, the handyman, with access to the ladder.  Miss Marple-like, I also recalled that our handyman's wife has set up a duka market kiosk (manufactured with over 50 cardboard boxes from our move.)  I don't mind sharing, having been asked, but really.  Had one of those firm, frank, forthright discussions I truly never used to have, which are becoming a regular part of life in Nairobi.

I suppose some might see these as victimless crimes, akin to shoplifting from a large and wealthy UK corporate.  For me it's even worse to steal from friends. Another Mum, embedded in society here, talks of her experience with one on one playdates. Toys disappear. You'll be getting the children into the car to return them home, and a child will say she needs the toilet and get out and go upstairs alone. And when she returns I'll think, 'That's another toy gone.'  Sometimes she has caught individuals red-handed, but the trend persists.  This isn't a case of three year olds, these are prosperous children into double figures, who should know better.  'But Catrin, haven't you understood yet, if you aren't caught here it hasn't happened.'

And that's true too. In our area brand new luxury houses are being knocked down, seemingly at random, to make way for a new road-building programme. Half million pound houses on quiet suburban streets, gone, from one day to the next. As I stood, mouth slack, outside the latest one, not two blocks down from us, someone explained these aren't just chance wilful choices. 'The road has been planned for years. The ones they've knocked down weren't legal you know. They didn't own the land, they did a landgrab.' And then built a half million pound house on the stolen land.  Nothing diffident or provisional there.

And now I'm trickling to an end without a conclusion, because these are tricky issues. But I think they matter.  The school says that things go missing because so many children haven't learnt to pick up after themselves, because their nannies pick up for them. I understand that's partly true. I think its also so, that children who are looked after by staff who are too scared to tell them off if they see them doing something inappropriate, may not learn wider senses of right and wrong on some things.  And there's the other part, my part in the saga, that it's embarrassing to put your head above the parapet and call people to account, try to coach to different action, try to model how things could be. One friend last week was called by the PE teacher. She rushed to school to discover her child hysterical, not, as she'd been told 'because he'd forgotten his trainers' but rather because another child was wearing them and refusing to give them back.  These trainers too were new, just bought in South Africa, and distinctive. They'd been put on a bench in the changing rooms while her son put his shorts on. They'd disappeared in three minutes. The other child said he had ones like this too.  But on investigation, his school shoes were two sizes smaller. After an hour's parental detective work in the changing rooms, restitution was made.  But most of us, I'd say, wouldn't push it that far. Would get embarrassed first. Would leave it to the school, who would brush it under the carpet as a Difficult Issue.  And that, I think, is how children who are tempted, become adults who act with impunity.

Fire!

Fire for me, in UK, has been something safe, contained, warm and fluffy in nature.  Some of my happiest memories of childhood are of building bonfires with friends on winter beaches, of toasting sausages and waiting till the tide came in and put out the dying embers.  Reading Firefighter Sam in authentic Welsh accent to toddler age children. Followed by years of bedtime stories spent devising our own setpiece Firefighter Firstborn and Firefigher Secondborn tales, in which today's choice of villain was vanquished by the junior firefighter and their crew, and left languishing up a tree or stuck up a pipe, while the victors relished a fictional party with cakes donated by the grateful crowds.

Yes, I've known that isn't the sole reality. 9/11. Money for Madagascar, the charity started by Mum and Allan, which sent, alongside cash for smallscale development projects, two decommissioned Swansea fire engines to serve as the sole engines in Madagascar's second town and major oil refinery.  Imagining the horror of a fire in an oil refinery without even one fire-engine to lend support. A German boyfriend who served as volunteer firefighter in his rural village, but who spoke bleakly of the reality of the motorway pileups to which he was also drafted.  But my experience, till now, had been of fires at arms-length and containable.

Yesterday, B, our part-time cook, phoned to say he needed to go home urgently. His house in Kangemi, one of our nearby slums, was on fire.  He'd been told it had burned down with everything he owned in it. 

Today he was back at work, though I'd said he should take as much time as he needed. His house, and those of eight neighbours, had been burnt to the ground. Someone had left a kerosene stove lit while they'd gone to the communal standpipe to get some water. A curtain had blown on to it, and by the time they returned the whole house was on fire.  Twenty houses to a plot in Kangemi, cheek by jowl. 

This isn't a rare occurrence. Another guard looked bleary eyed a few weeks ago, after a night spent passing buckets to try to save a neighbour's house, also in Kangemi. There two toddlers had been left unsupervised while their parents sought work. They'd played with the stove, which exploded. The children were both killed.

I've only seen two fire engines in 18 months in Nairobi. One seems permanently stationed in the United Nations carpark, some 30 minutes drive from Kangemi; the other spotted once in Karen, again at least 45 minutes away. And they don't just mobilise for any old fire I guess.  Here, as B explained, to put out your fire, you and your neighbours fill your buckets, pour your own water, save your own roof. And B had been at our house, making pasta and meatballs.

'There was nothing at all left,' B said sadly. 'Nothing at all.'
'You'd think there should had been melted appliances, bits of things in there, but there weren't.'
'Sometimes,' he said with pain, 'neighbours come and pretend to help, but they actually steal things from the burning house if no one is there.  I stopped them from telling me who did that. I don't want to know. It makes me too angry. I know that God sees everything, I have to place my trust there.'

'Nothing at all left' means something different here in Kenya. B has no bank account. No insurance. No facebook account with copies of photos. Thankfully his family are all safe in Western Kenya, but all his possessions were in Nairobi, where he spent the vast majority of his time.  He has only the clothes he wore to work yesterday.

'The worst bit was telling our 14 year old daughter on the phone. She so howled when she heard,' he said wearily. Two days before, he'd been telling me with pride how well she had done in her primary school leaving exam. Well enough to qualify for (feepaying, boarding) high school. I understand that her distress is not just fellow-feeling with her Dad. It's also realistic fear that with such a loss to the family, there is no money left to pay a major cost - already a stretch - for now three children at high school.

We'll do what we can. We've found a duvet, saucepan, crockery and cutlery, towel and t-shirts. Friends have promised trousers and shoes. We'll do our sums and have a whipround and see.  'Resilience' is the development speak word for it, - the amount of give in the system, savings and ability to bounce back from major tragedy.  And in financial terms everything is cut so close to the bone for so many here.

But I'm thinking of B's wisdom. Of his sorrow that others, friends, stole from him in distress. And of his choice not to seek to know who did this, not to give that precise bitterness room in his heart. Gerard Manley Hopkin puts it so well:

'call off thoughts awhile

Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room'

That to me, is such grace in dire adversity. That is wise courage and steadfastness. That is true resilience in the things which matter.  In this land where fortunes change in hours, in this land without safety nets, Leave comfort root-room. And those of us who can, let us see what more we can do.