Mama Salome and the poorest of the poor

That morning, Mama Salome Rading had gone to the clinic near Holo to get the injection that would quell the pain in her right hip and left arm. Well, at least for the next two weeks. The 75-year-old lady had walked 45 minutes down the dirt track up to the main C27 highway, and taken a matatu to the clinic at Holo, only to find that the doctor was absent. Disappointed but not vanquished, she had brought her old bones back home. Her son was due for lunch bringing a visitor with him.

I was that visitor, completing my long journey from another continent and culture in an old taxi from Kisumu, the last lap down a dirt tack off the C27 highway. There was a right turn at the fork, another right onto a smaller track, and then we passed several ancestral houses, rooftops visible over hedges of lantana, before reaching Oby’s compound, easily among the largest  so far.

Mama Salome was waiting for us, an indomitable soul in a body that gives her nothing but trouble. A few teeth remain in her mouth;  she is in a dress, with headgear as befits the mikai, the matriarch, of the Obyerodhyambo family. Her late husband Bernard, deceased early last year, rests in peace in a humble white grave adjoining the corn and spinach patch, a few feet from the grave of his second wife Judith. Marigolds sprout along the graves.

If Mama Salome is in any pain from her arthritis, she hides it well as she bows her head and recites a long prayer welcoming me into their abode.

My first Luo meal at the house of my friend Oby, Mama Salome’s son — steamed millet flour bread called ugali, boiled greens, and fish from Lake Victoria in a thin gravy

At the lunch table, I tasted my first Luo meal — whole mackerel cooked in a thin tomato-based gravy with hardly any spices, boiled greens, and a large brown cake of boiled millet called ugali. Bland would describe it well; so would nutritious.

Following Oby’s lead, I cut off a block of ugali, and rolled a portion of it into a ball to mop up the gravy and fish with. I am not good with peeling fish off the bone, and the plain fare was a challenge to a tongue weaned on the heavy spices of Thailand and India. I watched Oby tucking in with relish, and entertained philosophical thoughts of the fickleness of the human palate.

After lunch, Mama Salome hobbled off down the dirt track on the tedious trek back to the clinic for her injection. Oby and I decided to take advantage of the remaining daylight hours and summoned up motorcycle riders to take us to St Peter’s Kajulu School, aware that Form 4 exams were in progress and that my chances of engaging students in anything extra-curricular were slim. Across the hill from the school, separated by a wire fence, is the local Catholic church, small yet but well on its way to becoming a parish. Here I was awaited the following day by the local youth group, who too would be in the thick of their exams but were eager to meet the stranger from the east.

St Peter’s is a mixed school of some 180 heads and perhaps a dozen teachers. More than a 100 of the students are orphans, supported by local charities and non-governmental organizations. What an astonishing number of orphans, I remarked to Charles Ochieng Odindo, the deputy headmaster, a benign man with a dazzling smile in mahogany skin. “AIDS has done this to many families here,” he said simply.

We set up an appointment for Monday afternoon and left. This time we walked, an unhurried amble of one and a half hours past everyday life of Kajulu.

Several things strike me about Kajulu. It is not a village as one imagines a village — a cluster of huts and houses with a market and a church. Its houses are strung over the countryside, tin roofed or mud huts surrounded by fields where corn and greens grow. Everything is at least a 30-minute walk away, and the only place where you might see a crowd is the place mysteriously called The Hall. There once stood a hall, goes the legend, but over years of disuse, it disintegrated and now there’s no trace left. The Hall is now the marketplace, with a motley string of provision stalls, barber shops, a bar booming reggae, and a new building called the East Seme Digital Resource Centre, where something unheard of called computers are waiting to be plugged in. This is also the one place in Kajulu that receives its own electricity so it is popular at all times of day with Luos who have cellphones to charge. Okeyo Steven, the 23-year-old youth leader who dreamed up the centre, hopes to offer Kajulu another first — photocopy services and computer classes.

Vendors at Kajulu’s market sell the green spinach called sukuma wiki, and yellow roundels of cooking fat wrapped in waxy paper.

In the open centre of The Hall, women had set up stalls selling dried fish, tomatoes, kale (sukuma wiki in Kenya), and yellow rounds of cooking fat wrapped in wax paper. 1,500 people and each one related to the other. Was everyone in this market related to everyone else? I looked around at the spectrum of social classes — the visibly poor vendors; the natty young men hanging out at the saloon and the bar; the gentry in the upscale compounds we had passed. Were they all uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces of each other?

I asked Oby. “Certainly,” he replied. “I could sit down with anyone in this market and in a few minutes we’d have figured out our common ancestry.”

I believe him. On the walk back, he was accosted by an elderly woman who, after a few frowns and calculations, figured out that her husband was Mama Salome’s nephew. A shy young man, asked if he recognized Oby, said, “My grandfather is your mother’s brother.” Back at Oby’s house, we walked up to a fundi, a mason, who was helping get a new hut together for Oby’s brother, quickly figured out that his ancestors and Oby’s were linked by Midodho, son of Were.

And so darkness fell upon Kajulu. Sunlight disappeared and was replaced by nothing  else. A complete darkness, unbroken by the reassuring glow of electricity. We ate by the light of kerosene lamps, and Oby showed me to my bed in his hut, guiding me by the light of a torch.

The day was November 5, the day known to Indians as the Festival of Lights, Divali. Mine, it seemed, would be lit by starlight and fireflies.