Getting ready for the road

A quieter day. Up early enough to walk about the area a little with Heather - many surprised stares and smiles - a little like in China. Today we ran out of water - this is apparently going to be the norm in the area in January, but our big tank should be full by then. The mains pipe broke recently, however, so we have nothing in the tank and no mains supply - this scares me a little! There's water from somewhere which gets boiled and cooled for drinking, and is clean enough for washing, but there's no water in the taps, or filling the loos up. This should be an education.

We saw more of Kisumu today, driving in and walking around with Anne and Rebecca. While buying fruit, we bought off a group of persistent street boys with a bunch of bananas which the stallholder distributed: while she organised the street boys into an orderly queue (!), we made good our escape from requests for 10 shillings. A short drive towards Lake Victoria and we were passing the security guarded mansions of the rich - we stood and contemplated the contrast staring over the wide brown waters. A hippo-boat captain explained how ornamentally-introduced water hyacinth had nearly choked the lake, and stopped all shipping, until a Kenyan researcher found a weevil that ate it - the few sorry specimens at the waters edge didn't look like a threat to shipping anymore. We'll be back earlier another day to the Impala Sanctuary, and to see hippos from a boat.

There are unsaid things here (as everywhere, I suppose!). A Kenyan newspaper report the other day told of the death from "pneumonia" of Mandela's son-in-law, following his wife, who died a year ago. That's not necessarily an unspoken AIDS story, but I haven't seen or heard any spoken ones yet, in this country with a huge rate of infection and many, many deaths. Where are all the HIV-positive people? There's lots of HIV test adverts, seems like there's lots of education and public information of the "Take Great Care" variety, but I've not heard named anyone with HIV antibodies, or anyone who died of AIDS (I checked through the death notices in the papers a couple of times ...), and I haven't seen any signs or articles or organisations of or for people with a positive antibody status.

Gay people are even more invisible: this months "Parents" magazine has a moving story of a man struggling to understand his brother's out-of-the-blue suicide. In the note he left, he talks about a "problem he identified in the 1980s" which he'd tried everything to fix, which was why he was killing himself, and which he was not going to reveal even then. The surviving brother noted he never had girlfriends and wondered about impotence, but neither him nor the magazine mentioned the "g" word as a possibility ...

Of course, this is all seen through my white western eyes. More listening and learning to be done!

- Mark