January 2007, Esabalu, Kenya

By Terry Farish

In the kitchen, Helen wore a kanga tied around her waist and red flip flops. She worked efficiently, squatting, sometimes holding out a hand behind her, and a child – Rita or Harrison – supplied the spoon, the plastic tub of fat, the egg. They knew.

We could barely see one another in the small, mud-walled kitchen. In the daytime, streaks of light shot through holes of the metal roof so that the room was cut with magical ribbons of dust light. At night it was black except for the cook fire, and a tiny flame Helen held at an angle to find a missing paring knife or cup of water.

She selected items from the wood pile made up of branches, sticks, pages from an old New Yorker I had given her, cardboard, anything that could burn. The fire became hotter and hotter as she added larger sticks.

I lived with Helen for 10 days when I came to Kenya to begin a literacy project. Every day I worried they would kill the cow staked out on the front lawn by the tall cypress trees or the blue gum trees that are her husband Peter’s pride. I knew an animal was often slaughtered for visitors. The cow was brown with white marks like the continents.

The first day, when my friend Li and I entered the house, Helen emerged from behind an embroidered cloth nailed at the passage to the bedrooms and kitchen. She wore a sheath-like dress and a bit of cloth tied around her head. She was thin like the cow.

“Karibu,” she exclaimed in a soft, modulated voice. The exclamation was in her eyes and the way she held her hands wide, then brought them together. “You are most welcome.” She laughed softly. Her cheeks bunched up with her smile. “Welcome to my house.”

I learned that not only was English not her language but Swahili was not either, both of which are Kenya’s national languages. Helen speaks them both, but the language she calls “my language,” the language she speaks to her children and the language in which she sings, is her dialect, Luhya.

Here I was, an American visiting Esabalu, Kenya, bearing my flashcards of Swahili I created in my sleeplessness. “Habari?” How are you? “Mzuri.” Fine. “Wimbo.” Song. “Ni me potea.” I am lost.

We relied on Helen’s breathless English.

We ate dinner at a table lit by a lantern. There had been no dusk. At 7:00 p.m. the sun suddenly descended, and it was dark. At the table, Helen lifted the lids of each of the serving bowls to show us what we were having for dinner. There was no beef, so the cow had survived our first day. However, there was chicken. One less chicken would roost under the table that night.

I said I did not eat meat or chicken. Helen and Peter looked at me. Chicken was a delicacy.

“Americans are so strange,” Martin said. Martin was Peter’s brother. His lips opened in a teasing smile, and the timbre of his slow voice filled the room. “We follow very closely what the Americans do today, because we know it will affect us tomorrow.”

It was some nights later that we gathered in the dark around the low fire, cutting up potatoes and onion for Helen to cook. I heard a noise from behind us. The cow was here.

“Why is the cow in the kitchen,” Li asked.

“He lives here,” Harrison said simply.

I was relieved the cow was here, happily chewing her cud in the dark.

We had eaten ugali, the sticky bread made from maize, every meal. Sukuma wiki. Helen showed us how to make it: sauté the onion, the tomato, the kale. Add fat if you have some to make it taste good. We had eaten bananas that tasted like potatoes. For breakfast, we followed Helen’s lead and ate a sweet potato like a banana, carefully pealing back the skin. We ate chunks of sweetly sour pineapple and handfuls of ground nuts.

“Like that,” Helen said.

I had not caused an animal to die.

In the kitchen, I told Helen, her daughter Rita, and Li about a meeting I’d had with teachers where we talked about books and reading. The teachers had said, “In the village, we don’t have a reading culture. Here, the children are labor. If they are reading, they are idle and this is not good. They must go and cut the napier grass for the cow. They must fetch the water. And who has money for paraffin? One cannot read in the dark.”

Helen nodded. Yes, this was true.

Helen has been working since before the sun was up. She had worn a long kanga to her ankles and a shawl over her head to protect from the cool morning. I walked with her down a muddy path and over a field to fetch the milk from an elderly woman whose large milk cow lounged by her front door.

Helen carried the milk home in a dented, metal tea kettle. She swept and cleaned and scrubbed clothes by hand in a basin in the sun. She cooked ugali and sukuma wiki for mid day. She walked an hour to the market in Luanda, where she sold her giant, magenta sweet potatoes, and with the money for the potatoes she bought sugar and tea. Her work is physical and continues all day.

Now in the kitchen cooking again, she was tired, though after she drank tea, which was mostly hot, very sweet milk, she was revived.

The pot of water for the ugali came to a boil, and Li poured it in and stirred the pot with the long wood spoon.

Then Helen and Rita began singing. They sang songs in English, then Swahili, but when they began to sing in Luhya, the singing was light and high and spirited. The ugali was perfect. They sang through the stirring and the music stayed in my head long after the meal.

By the last days, Helen was a mirror to me. Li said we were alike in temperament and that’s why we were drawn to each other. We are soft spoken. We are deceptive in our power. In her, I could see myself from a different angle.

I saw my waste of paper as she burned every scrap of the New Yorker to boil water for the ugali. She wastes nothing.

I saw my dearth of language. I could have raised my daughter multilingual so she would be prepared for the global life that is our future.

I saw my muscles used every day and my exhaustion and my need for energy. I saw the preparing of beef or chicken to sustain myself and my family. It will be right when Helen prepares the cow, and she will waste nothing.

On my last day in the village, I met a teacher and we talked about reading and books. She said: “If we are informed, we can assist. The women’s groups are strong. They can do that work.” I saw that the women are strong. They want to push their children forward, like the sukuma wiki, which Helen explained means to push a person through the week, a cheap food to sustain the poor.

If a book will help, they will see that it fits in the day of tasks somewhere before the sun drops behind the treetops.

Terry Farish is a fiction writer whose last book is a picture book, The Cat Who Liked Potato Soup. She is currently at work on a novel about children from Sudan called Songs to Juba. To learn more visit www.terryfarish.com, where you can also listen to Helen and her daughter singing in their kitchen.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 | Email This Post

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 12:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.