First Day

I had people from Children’s Garden waiting for me at the airport in Nairobi. It was completely dark, of course, when we set out for Kawangware.
Before going to Muhoroni for a half year I decided to visit friends in a children´ s home in a slum close to the capital city. The arrival to the children’s home was intense. Already at the gate some children were glued to the car and followed us up the hill to the house. They were shouting something and pressing their faces to the windows. Shock therapy. I simply leapt in. After the first day my basic feeling was that I had never left Kenya. While here we live and travel fast, and our relationships change, it seemed to me that here I resumed the discussions where they stopped after I left two years ago. In the same way as people play chess throughout longer periods of time.
Suddenly names were coming to my mind, Swahili jumping out of me as if I studied it at home. I managed to tell the children an upgraded version of the fairy-tale about Little Red Riding Hood (Kofia Nyekundu) and a bad hyena, and 7 little goats and bad hyena. That inspired their desire for telling stories and so we spent some time telling stories to each other. I didn’t understand their fairy-tales as much but I was happy they were having fun listening to each other, and I tried to catch at least some of the Swahili.
The 8th graders had important final exams so there were plainclothes policemen on the school grounds and it was forbidden to enter it. The children told me that the policemen would shoot me.
I can feel the dirt getting under my nails. A hundred children are shaking my hand, my hair is greasy from different types of „massages“.
Slovak version of Three Little Piggies, Varila myšička kašičku (Panya alipika ugali in Swahili) survived the 2-year break and the little children immediately asked me to play it. So I was cooking ugali (squash) in their hands – not only little children but also teenagers – till my throat went sore.
The music teacher came to me and told me that he had taught the children a Slovak song. It turned out it was a Hebrew song but on a Slovak CD (Kvapôčky). The children ask me to sing it anyway. Little children led by Diana made a little house under the stairs and they were cooking African food in different covers and kept cradling a rolled-up jumper instead of a doll in their arms. So I was cooking and cradling and feeding the jumper with them.
The weather was bearable. In the evening it was quite cool, but I couldn’t keep my window open because of the mosquitoes so it was hot inside.