The Flat

09/04/05

My dreams are increasingly complex and vivid and disturbing. I assume it's the Larium. Hopefully I don't go totally crazy like extended use supposedly cause. This morning Susan warned me that Moses was a 'bad kid', but was very vague about it. I pressed, and got drinking and fighting. "But he seems so nice." "All that glitters is not gold." How true.

Elizabeth was in the passenger seat with baby Daniel, Killiom at the wheel, so I jumped in the back of the pickup truck. Tom followed and told me I could squeeze up front, but I declined. We rolled out through the gate and Kaleb shut it behind us. We hit the open road. Up A1 to Rongo, and then a left at the market, down the road that leads to Homa Bay. We stopped for gas. A guy appeared behind me and tried to sell me socks (they had nice patterns but were very thin.) "Two for 100." "No thanks." "Okay, three for 100." "No, really." "Four for 100." "No." Each time he would add another pair to the pile he was pushing in front of me. He would try to drop them in my lap and I would have to push his arm away. "Five for 100." Not only did I not want the thin socks, I hadn't even brought any money. Just my phone and camera. "Six for 100. Come on. I can't eat socks." Tom and I laughed, and the Sock Man joined in. "Seven for 100." I felt vaguely bad for the fellow, and for a second had this clear image of him sitting at his table trying to eat a big plate of socks (salt?) There was a short pause. "One for fifty?" We laughed. The Sock Man turned to Killiom and said, "Two for 100."

We pushed on down the road, and turned off the tarmac onto dirt. We bumped along, passing men on bicycles, women carrying baskets on their heads, waving naked kids bathing in a dirty pond. Just as we were about to reach Elizabeth's shamba, BANG BANG HISSSSS. We stopped in the middle of the road. The rear passenger tire had a bad puncture and was losing air fast. Killiom found the jack and lug wrench, and I checked under the bed (yes there was a spare.) Killiom started taking off lug nuts, and then Tom noticed that the front tire was losing air too. Trouble. Then Killiom got to the safety lug, and didn't have the key for it, so started trying to get it off with the lug wrench, badly stripping it in the process. Double trouble. So the decision was made to try and 'limp' back to Rongo. The back tire was completely flat. We jumped in and turned around. The noise was sickening and I could smell burning rubber as we clunked down the rocky road. People kept pointing and yelling at us to stop. Killiom pressed on. Close to the tarmac the wheels locked up and we came skidding to a stop. We jumped out. The back tire was shreds and the front was flat. Killiom went to work on the front safety lug with the wrench and a rock, and miraculously, managed to get it off. We jacked the truck up and got the spare on the front. The plan was to put the flat on the back and ditch the shredded tire, and try to limp some more. Elizabeth and Tom got bodabodas to take them to find someone with better tools. That left Killiom and me and the baby and a growing field of onlookers. Guys kept trying to take their turn on the impossible safety lug, and I contented myself with taking pictures of the baby. An empty Matatu came by and we sent the flat tire with him to get repaired in Rongo. There was a lot of trust and goodwill and helping going on, and it was nice to see. 30 minutes or so later and Elizabeth came back with a fellow with tools. He went to town on the safety lug with a hammer and chisel and finally managed to get it off and get the axle moving again. We waited, Elizabeth and I chatted and played with the baby. Finally a bodaboda came down the road with the fixed tire, and we were quickly back on our way. I was in the back with a couple of guys who had helped out, the sun was setting, and there was a(nother) rainbow.

Elizabeth and I and then Robert and Edward as well talked well into the night about the project here. Elizabeth thinks that if the pilot is successful the group will be eligible for PEPFAR money, which is really exciting. I get discouraged sometimes when I think how many people in need there are here, and how the projects we are going to start is only a chip off the iceberg, but if it primes the group for a significant grant from the USG, then we've done something real. There is a catch-22, whereby to be eligible for PEPFAR funding, the group needs to show that they've managed similar amounts of monies. So where is a community like this supposed to get that money to begin with? And how are they even supposed to know about PEPFAR, let alone know where and how to get a grant application (let alone understand all the HIV/AIDS PLWHA OVC VCT CBO FBO WHO ART TOT ABC USG PEPFAR lingo…)? So, long story short, we may be doing something even bigger than I thought.

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