Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 13: Ted & Rebecca

I am at the market in Karen, buying tomatoes with a volunteer nurse, John, when someone forcefully shoves me aside. As I bend down to retrieve the tomatoes I dropped, I see a street boy running away. He is dressed in ragged clothes and carrying a bunch of bananas in the crook of his arm. Immediately voices are raised all around me.

"Mwizi! Mwizi!"

Thief.

Two security guards quickly follow, knocking me and John out of the way. Once he is clear of the market stalls, one guard stops, raises his rifle, and fires two shots.

I watch as the street boy collapses in the middle of the road. People stop on the roadside, startled. John and I are of the first to reach him. He is face down, his eyes wide open. He is panting hard. There is a scattering of pink brain matter on the road before him. The bullet struck him high on his head. His brain stem is still intact, so his body is still struggling to survive even while bright red arterial blood is spreading out all around him—already it has reached the bananas that have fallen alongside.

John moves to take his backpack off and administer first aid, but the officers have come up now. They motion with their rifles for us to clear away. I don't understand. I try to explain that we are trying to help him, that he is not dead.

The officers say nothing. Their eyes are invisible to me behind their sunglasses. If they were not armed I would rip the glasses from their faces. Finally, probably sensing that I am endangering myself, a soft-spoken Kenyan man wearing a Roman collar pulls me aside. He speaks in measured, almost apologetic tones. "They are waiting for him to die," he says to me. "If he lives they must take him to the hospital and that will require them to do a great deal a paperwork. If he dies it will be less work for them."

I take another look at the boy. The "who" of him is already gone, spread out in the brain matter at my feet. The "what" of him is all that remains, and not even that for much longer, I realize, as the people that have gathered take steps back to avoid the growing puddle of red, broken only by the island of yellow that is the bunch of bananas.

☼

After I see the street boy shot to death in Karen, I go through bouts of irritability and frustration. What good is anything we do, when people can turn on one another so easily? When the answer, to those with so little, to those suffering from injustice, deprivation, oppression, is not to help one another but to hurt?

Then again, was I so naïve as to think otherwise? To think of the world in such simple binaries of good-bad, victim-victimizer, oppressed-oppressor? Had I not already learned that nothing was as simple as I wanted? And if the problems were complex, so too would be the answers.

It was just that I didn't want them to be.

Angry and cross, I take a bus into town to run a few errands. While walking down Aga Khan Way a street girl, no more than seven years old, with a toddler on her back, comes up beside me begging for bread. Usually I ignore street children, while keeping a wary eye on them as well as a hand on my wallet. I think of it as benign neglect. I also feel justified since I am in Kenya to help children. I can ignore these children with a clean conscience.

"Tafadali. Please bread," the girl says. Then she touches my hand.

Begging I can tolerate, but not touching. I yank my hand away and tell her in Kiswahili to get away or I will beat her. For just a moment, I'm completely convicted in my righteousness. This was how you dealt with street children who invaded your space. They should know better.

The look of fear on her face as she looks up at me in horror brings me out of myself and I wonder what I have done. But she is already running away, casting scared looks over her shoulder as I try to follow.

I try not to run too quickly as to scare her or make her drop the boy off her back, who is now crying. I call after her in broken Kiswahili and tell her I am very sorry. Nothing stops her. She is a child that thinks only of survival. Realizing this, I say to her I will give her bread.

Now she stops. She is breathing hard. She is still scared but I can sense that she is weighing the risks of trusting me. Food is a powerful temptation for a starving child.

I sit down on the sidewalk as to seem less threatening. I am oblivious to the Kenyans walking by me, surely thinking that I am just another insane foreign do-gooder. I reach out my hand. I say I am sorry again. The girl comes up. I tell her my name is Teddy. She says she is Rebecca. She is fascinated now, to the point that she is ignoring the boy on her back. I ask her what his name is, bringing her attention back to him. His name is Paul. He is her brother. She pulls him off her back and makes him shake hands with me as well. He looks uncomfortable touching a mzungu. His hands are gray with dirt and grime.

I ask Rebecca where her father is. Kufa, she says, dead. Mother? Kufa. Grandmother? Kufa. Grandfather? Kufa. I asked her who took care of her. She did not seem to understand the question. I know that means no one. She is the provider for her brother and herself.

I tell Rebecca to come with me. We go to the nearest supermarket, which on the inside does not look too terribly different than a supermarket back in the States. With the equivalent of five dollars I buy her enough food to last her a week. I constantly watch tourists give money to street children with scorn, writing them off as suckers for sentiment. If they really wanted to do good they would give the money to an institution or a charity, I think.

But I am not so sure anymore. Rebecca and her brother need food now. Of course they will need it tomorrow and the next day and the next week and my handing over food and money now is not "sustainable" as we like to say in aid circles.

But that does not change the need she is experiencing at this moment.

While she follows me in bare feet through the store, a clerk tries to throw her out. I explain to him she is with me. He hesitates at first then leaves us alone. We exit the store and now I follow her to the Kenya Bus stage where there are two other girls her age with younger children on their backs begging. Rebecca calls them over to her to share her bounty.

Realizing I was buying for six and not two, I return to the supermarket, buy the same things, bananas, bread, nuts, milk, and orange juice, then return. Rebecca and the others are still there in the middle of the sidewalk. If one ignored the passing legs of commuters on their way home and the gray sidewalk beneath them, one would think these children were in a field or at a playground having a picnic.

In a way they are. The world does not make room for these children, so their playground, their picnic site must overlap with our sidewalks and our bus stages.

I tell them to be careful and save some food for later, then leave. I don't know what else to do.