A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [46]
I hustled down there by effectively hitching a midnight ride on a British Airways flight out of Khartoum. Luckily, my friend Kamal, with whom I had worked those many months out in Darfur, had a friend who worked for the airline. The friend sold me a deeply discounted ticket and got me on the already full flight when it stopped in Khartoum at midnight en route to Addis Ababa and Nairobi. I’m not sure how he did it. All I know is that a groggy and bewildered European businessman was escorted off the plane onto the empty tarmac just before I was told to grab my big backpack and hustle aboard to a seat in the back. The ways of Africa are sometimes mysterious!
I landed in Nairobi amid uncertainty and confusion. The city is on the equator and is warm and tropical even in December. The airport terminal itself was a big open shed with no walls and a tile floor, with colorful birds gliding in and out, taxis milling along the curb on one side and an opaque glass barrier on the other, with sliding doors to admit arriving passengers. I found airline personnel and explained my dilemma. They were incredulous. There were no direct flights from Chicago, and I had no idea how she was connecting to Nairobi. The airlines, meanwhile, refused to give out any information about their flight manifests. So I simply met every international arrival—for a day and a half. Each time the door of the arrival lounge opened to disgorge passengers and closed again, I rode a cycle of anticipation and disappointment. I kept watching other people’s reunions, a great cross section of the continent—white, black, Asian, businesspeople, farmers, families, and friends. But not my mother. It was warm during the day and cool at night, and I slept fitfully between flight arrivals on an uncomfortable plastic bench.
Then, improbably, there she was. She looked tired but cheerful, smaller than I remembered, wearing a flowery shirt and floppy white canvas hat. “I wasn’t sure I would even see you here,” she said, laughing. My exhaustion and frustration gave way to tears of relief. She wept as well.
I asked what she would have done had I not been there. She said she had met a lovely Kenyan family on the plane, and they would have given her a place to stay. I had to admire her moxie—picking up from a tenement on the South Side of Chicago, flying to Nairobi, and thinking, I’ll figure it out along the way.
We stayed for a few days in a small colonial guesthouse set in a garden, which served cold toast and tea for breakfast. The Kenyan staff would greet my mother warmly each morning with “Jambo, Mamma,” which means “Hello, madam” in Swahili. But my mom would reply with “Jumbo,” which usually elicited peals of laughter. She couldn’t quite get the hang of it. However, we were always treated well. Respect for elders is very important in Africa, and my traveling with my mother was quite endearing to the Kenyans. We organized a couple of safaris, though she could have lived without the lizards that invariably scuttled across the ceilings at night wherever we stayed, and when some critter came too close to our van in the game parks, she shrieked. We stayed in tented camps, dined on multicourse feasts of fresh soups and roast lamb or stewed Kudu at night, slept under the brightest stars, and listened to the sounds of elephants crashing through the bush or hyenas yelping just beyond the camp. We walked up Mount Kenya, not quite to the summit but to about 14,000 feet; my mother was a longtime smoker, so it was a struggle for her, but she persevered. We took an elegant overnight train to Mombasa, down by the sea, where the blend of African and Arabic influences made a spicy mix.
It was a wonderful visit. After many months on my own in Egypt and Sudan, I was accustomed by then to the rhythms of Africa and was at ease making my way, bargaining in the markets, eating the local foods,