Sight Savers was about two miles from where we lived in
Nairobi. One could walk down hill for about an hour along the stretch of
Mbagathi Way, or walk to Kenyatta Market and take a matatu. When I sauntered
into this organization and asked for a job from out of the blues, I had zero
expectations because I was there on a totally different mission; to enquire on
what kind of services they offered to the blind.
There was a lady at the reception desk. She was not the
receptionist, but one of the Project Managers at the organization. She said,
come tomorrow. And so the next day I started work at Sight Savers’ Resource
Center where I helped organize their research material. That job never existed;
the lady pulled it out of her behind just like that. To my delight and
gratitude, it was temporary, only a month. I would make some good money and
move on to my hustle as a budding playwright and director.
I chose to get to work by walking the two-mile distance
every morning and back home. I did not want to have to push and shove with the
masses that jammed up the busses and matatus. I thoroughly detested that part
of public transportation where you became nothing but one of hundreds of
potatoes in a sack, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. You boarded with clean
shoes and alighted with mud all over your feet on a rainy day. No, thanks, I’d
rather walk.
I was psychologically ill-prepared for my walking-to-work
experience. I should have been warned, prayed for and counseled. Up until that first
day of my walk from Golf Course Estate to Sight Savers, I had never really
known what the work “masses” meant. They started flowing out of the cracks and
corners of Kibera like an invasion of human cicadas that carpeted the entire
ground.
They marched silently, with every step they increased in the
hundreds, nay thousands, not a good-morning, not a smile, not a grunt; just a steady
march of chiseled chins, battered boots and fractured spines tired of holding
up the weight of shattered dignities. I was shaken to the core. I lived in
Nairobi and never knew this side of life existed.
As I was slowly engulfed by this sea of broken humanity heading
towards their daily labors at Industrial area, jua kali sheds, road-side kiosks,
hawkers’ alleys and hustlers’ dens, I started to suffocate. The air was dunk
with unsurrendered sweats and decayed dreams. I was trapped, without any place
to go except move with the masses, march with the mules; move with masses,
march with the mules; move with the masses, march with mules…
I found myself trying to catch the faces, perchance to see a
wrinkle of hope, a resolve to survive, and when I did, my heart raced ahead of
the march with shear excitement. I recall getting home in the evening and
writing the poem, “Faces.” I so badly wanted to etch for eternity, somewhere in
poetry, the humanity therein, the drop of dignity that still clung to a beaten
brow, the snap of a defiant spine that would one day march to a beat all its
own. I will tell their story; I will tell the world.
Now this old memory from a far-away land comes rushing at me
like a river broken at its banks. Today, a man who was laying cable in
the heat of Washington, DC's summertime said to me, “I’m a mule. I work
long hours, six days a week, for
minimum wage. On the day I get to rest, I feel lost, like a slave
looking for
his master. That is a sick mind.” I caught a stone in my throat. I have
no problem finding him. He streams out of American homes every morning
in the thousands, nay, millions. A march of mules.
No comments:
Post a Comment