Unconditional love!

Nairobi is a crazy city.... my last 24 hours in Africa made me pretty relieved to be getting a break for the next two weeks.

It started with confrontations with a big African at the matatu stage (minibus station). I arrived at the leaving point from Nanyuki to Nairobi at 12:30, my goal was to get there by 12 so for me that wasn't too bad, but I was rushing a bit because I wanted to get to the Masai Market for some Christmas presents to send back to the States. This was the whole reason for me to go to Nairobi on Tuesday when I wasn't meant to fly out until Wed late night. Anyway, as soon as I got out of my room-mates car I was completely swarmed by African men shouting city names to me, asking me where I was going, trying to "help" me with my backpack to get me on their matatu...this is completely normal for the matatu stages so its expected but it's never fun. I agree to go with the cheapest company which costs 270Ksh (a little less than 4 dollars). I buy my ticket and go to get into the matatu but there are no empty seats, I stand around while the conductor checks every ones ticket to confirm that the bus is full. I ask the conductor why he lied and told me that there was one empty seat left, he didn't like this but I didn't like that I was lied to. See the matatus only leave once they are full, there is no set schedule for the matatus going to Nairobi they are just constantly filling and leaving in a continuous cycle all day so the job of these conductors is to try to get as many heads as possible to their bus. So the full matatu leaves without me and I am directed to the empty one that takes its place, the conductor ensures me that he has a line full of people buying Nairobi tickets and the next bus will be leaving any minute.....right. I stand around waiting for like 5 minutes while random wandering vendors try to sell me everything from snacks to socks and just about everything in between. I get frustrated waiting and go to ask for my money back so I can find a new company heading south. While by this time these guys are pretty much sick of me and I of them and words where exchanged and I didn't understand the better half of what he said but as many people know cuss words are some of the first words you learn in a new language so I picked up an explicative here and there as he shouted in my face while I calmly held out my hand waiting for my money back.
I found a new company that for 350Ksh promised to be a better, smoother, faster ride....or at least that's what the conductor said for this matatu. I didn't care about the few extra shilling I just saw an almost full matatu and hoped that meant I could get the hell on the road. I gave the conductor 400 Ksh and he said he would be right back with my change, I took my seat and tried to get comfortable only to realize that the back row in which I was placed meant to seat 4 people now had 3 kids and 2 adults. Great. The conductor never came back with my 50 shilling change from the bus fare and a little girl sat on my lap for the 3 hour journey to Nairobi.......Whew and this was only the beginning!
After sitting in Nairobi traffic for an hour I finally made it to the big, hot, dirty, chaotic city. My great couch surfing buddy Sammy, who I have now stayed with many nights in Nairobi, was meant to meet me when I got off the matatu but was running on African time....which means I sat around waiting. I am normally an extremely patient person but I knew that the Masai Market was closing soon and if I did miss it, me coming down a day early was a complete waste of energy. Anyway, we made it to the market after a big of running around and Sammy and I played ninjas as he helped me purchase some awesome handcraft African goods at extremely low prices. I just went to a stand picked out what I liked, put it aside in one pile and walked away, he came up after me and did the negotiations and helped me get some amazing deals for some Christmas presents. I still spent more money than I intended (which is pretty on key for me) then I took Sammy out for pizza and beer for his help.
The night got better as we made it back to his house. It started out as a typical night heading to Sammy's shanty town of Kiole, wandering through Nairobi trying to find a matatu stand that wasn't completely full, shoving our way onto an over-crowded matatu bus (someone tried grabbing my phone out of my front pocket as I was getting on the bus) then riding an hour through Nairobi to the outskirts, getting off the Matatu somewhere I wouldn't be caught dead without my good friend, then making our way through the dark crowded streets into Sammy's neighborhood. All was going well and we where feeling good from the beers and talking and joking and singing when suddenly I stepped into a river in the middle of the path....well lets just say that this river was not made out of water and my flip flop came off and my foot was totally brown and covered in you know what.... At this point all I could do was laugh my face off as my good friend Sammy dug my flop out of the "river" and we continued through the dark neighborhood trying to find a duka (small store out of the back of someones house- like a bodega) where they would throw some water on my foot! Pretty much the most disgusting thing that has ever happened to me....no, not pretty much....most definitely the most disgusting thing that I have ever done....Bravo!
The next day we headed into Nairobi around lunch time and I went to a backpackers lodge that I know of that will store my pack safely for 24hours for about a dollar. Then we head to an Indian restaurant where I proceed to have the best meal of my life for under 3 dollars (3 course all vegan with 3 diff types of curry and endless chapati...wow). Sammy takes me to another good shopping spot and I get some great deals and finish off my shopping list with some funky carved statues, some painted tapestries, and some funny little bumper stickers for the cousins. We were in the process of walking to go check out a monkey refuge that Sammy knows of when all of a sudden we came up on a huge crowed of people in the city center. I didn't even think about it but this month is the 2 year anniversary of the post election violence that turned Kenya into a tribal clashing blood bath over some pretty crooked elections. If you don't know about this- read up and appreciate that most of us will never have to live in the middle of such gruesome and violent events. A long display of a photojournalist´s work during the violence froze us and everyone around us in our footsteps....tears streamed down my face as I gazed on the images of violence, destruction, devastation, and disaster. Houses burning, skulls crushing, woman crying....right in your face, a straight dose of the reality of the country I am living in. The realization that this can happen at the snap of the fingers of the right person, and it did as over 300,000 people where left homeless and over 1,000 killed at the hand of their fellow man during a blood bath lasting over 2 months of brutal killings in the street. Heart wrenching what can happen, how people can snap...the images of what a man can do to another man where burning in my heart as I watched the African people surrounding me, viewing these images. So many questions that may never be answered...
We didn't make it to the monkey house. We made our way through the craziness of an anti-corruption rally and found a quiet coffee shop where we spent the rest of the afternoon just talking and digesting what we had seen. For Sammy this was bringing up an experience he would rather not relive, his uncle was killed right by his side while he looked on...he was only 15.
That night we were supposed to meet up with a fellow couch-surfer who had just arrived in the country. Sammy is a very active couch surfer and is always taking me to meet the few surfers who are braving the city. We get on a matatu and spend about an hour making our way though traffic...I have no idea where we are going or what we are doing but this is normal when I hang out with Sammy so I enjoy the ride and sing along to biggie smalls and snoop dog videos that are playing on the big screen on the front of the matatu bus and look out onto the crazy scene of Nairobi traffic. We arrive and I am surrounded by like a ton of people....where the hell are we....this looks like Sammy's shanty town but with like ten times more people. We meet up with the CS from Austria and are suddenly being taken through the heart of Mathare, one of the most well known slums in Nairobi. The Austrian and his friends tell us they are members of a project called Slum TV which started off as a project which put cameras in the hands of kids in the slums and has developed into a larger project making documentaries of life for people in the slums. They told us that they do a screening of the movies once a month in the slums and this month was in commemoration of the anniversary of the post-elections violence. We passed hundreds of people on the streets, which where lit by the fires of people cooking and vending food on the sides of the road. The tiny tin constructed houses left nothing to the imagination of the peoples cramped conditions and few belongings. Children where running and playing in the dirty, people where sitting around and eating, talking, drinking, living... it was a lot to take in and I was pretty relieved when we made it to the screening just in time to miss the movie. It was all just a bit too much, but I made sure that I got a copy of the video so that I could view it once I was ready, which I still am not. I met the many members of Slum TV and they took us back to their studio and showed us around the small office space in which they work. It was a small space but they where so proud of it and it is always so heart warming to see people making something out of nothing and working their way up when they started so low in the scheme of things.
We made it back to the city center around 10 pm, my flight wasn't meant to leave until 3:30am so what left to do than hit up the Nairobi night life! Sammy and I drank and danced and ate greasy bar food until 2 when I said good bye and made my way to the airport. I was relieved for the 2nd time of the night as I arrived at the airport put some wu-tang on my mp3 and grabbed a beer while waiting for my flight to board. This feeling of relief didn't last long as Nairobi struck again one more time.... I wasn't done yet, I found out that the power on the landing strip had gone out and the plane which was supposed to take me to Istanbul had to land in Ethiopia as they couldn't see where to park the dam plane! ha! I passed out and didn't end up boarding the plane until almost 8 in the morning which caused me to miss my connection from Istanbul to Madrid.
One night in Turkey.
The hotel the airline put me up in was called the 3 seasons, haha.. it was in the middle of the huge crowded city of Istanbul. I have less than 24 hours in Turkey so I better do something and its night time so what left to do than party? I didn't really want to go out alone and luckily for me there was a girl on my Nairobi flight who missed her NYC connection. An American living in Tanzania, who turns out knows pretty much all the same people I know in Kenya....the ex-pat community in East Africa is very small. I posted a message on the Istanbul couch surfing message board saying 2 girls want to be taken out and showed a good time....so after going through the 50 or so responses I got back in about an hour during dinner, I found someone with some good references who looked like a fun and trust worthy candidate. His name was Murat and he told us to meet him in Taksim, which is the nightlife hot-spot in Istanbul. I had only the clothes on my back as my bag was still on a plane somewhere, so flip-flops and yoga pants was my attire for the evening as we headed out for the bars. The night consisted of good beer, live music, cold feet, and a taste of Turkey that left me hungry for more!!!
LONG story short I made it to Spain, safe and sound. I met up with my grandparents at the airport in Madrid, who got their laptop robbed before I got off the plane. But we all found each other and we are all alive and together and despite all the bull shit that's all that matters. We are staying in a super fancy time share condo in the south-east of Spain outside of a little coastal port town called Cartegena. We are spending a week here then a week on the west side of the Med outside of a little town called Estepona. We will be stopping off in Orgiva on the way through so I can see some friends and pick up some clothes I left and my LED hoop!
We haven't done too much other than eat, sleep, do some family yoga, and just recuperate from the journey here. I can't think of any better way to spend this time. I couldn't care less if we didn't leave the room for the whole time....and its not just because the place we are staying is so fancy and actually bigger than my house back in Kenya. I haven't gotten to spend time with family for a while and it feels so good, when I am giving treatments and working I put 100% love into the person I am working on. I give and I give and then I give more, its my work and I love it and it makes me so happy to be giving. But to receive love from your family is something that you can't replace. It's not the kind of love that you get from someone who wants something out of you. Its the kind of replenishing and extremely nourishing love that gives and gives no matter what you do. Unconditional love. The strongest and most powerful type of love. I feel like my love source is being refilled right now and I think it was due. I was feeling drained before I came and now I feel so much better and I have only been with the family for 6 days. I love what I am doing in Africa but I am doing a lot and I was beginning to ask myself if I could keep up and take care of myself. I think that as a healer and a human I give so much to others all the time and am sometimes neglectful of taking time for myself. I know that I need it and I need to keep myself charged and this is by far my biggest challenge in my life. I try to have my daily yoga practice and meditation and my healthy food....these things are so important to my existence and my body is quick to tell me when I am not getting it. The last 2 weeks I spent in Nanyuki with MORE stomach issues...as soon as I got to Spain they stopped. Its so amazing how the body is able to physically manifest when it is not being taken care of properly. Hopefully when I get back I will be recharged and ready to go. The yoga retreat that I am trying to set up will hopefully be starting the 3rd weekend in January and there is a lot of planning that needs to happen to make it happen. The hooping project with the kids has been drawing a lot of interest in the community and January will be when I put the project into full swing. I have also been asked to begin teaching and doing bodywork at some of the surrounding lodges and ranches in the area. AND I will begin training my 2nd and 3rd African mamas on some different massage theory and techniques.....2010 is the year of the Tiger....my time to shine. Now is my time for preparation!
Until next year! ONE LOVE