Drama

I’ve always liked the month of October. In many parts of the world, and where I grew up, it’s the changing of the seasons. It’s the onset of winter which, unlike most people, for me was exciting. I’ve never disliked cold weather and I was always excited for the autumn colors and the first snow. It was always an active time of sports with (American) football, the baseball World Series, and the anticipation of basketball and ski season. There was of course the drudgery of the long school year ahead which never appealed to me (something I regret now), but overall it was an enjoyable time of year.

I was listening to a history podcast the other day (yes, I like cold weather and history podcasts) and historians were talking about the origin of some of these autumn holidays and festivities. In addition to the more obvious fusion of religious and/or harvest influences, apparently in some northern societies there were more somber connections to the often-tragic implications of the impending severe cold. Suffering, loss of livestock and, in many cases loss of human life, were inevitable each winter and some festivals and traditions were meant to appease the gods in hopes of allowing people to survive the upcoming harsh conditions. That would certainly put a damper on one’s view of the season.

I'm going to assume those bottles are empty...

As the earth heats up, we may need to reinstate some of these festivals, move them to spring, and seek the gods’ favor in helping us survive the often-tragic implications of extreme heat.

* * *

Here it is spring. As I have mentioned previously, I am one of the few people in the world who has the distinction of living in the southern hemisphere and working in the northern hemisphere – though both locations are admittedly not far from the equator. Technically I'm flipping back and forth from spring and fall during any given week. Somalia is hot and sort of just stays that way. Nairobi is getting warmer, with intermittent rains, but remains blissfully without extreme temperatures. I say blissful but I do miss the cold.

* * *

Nairobi may have blissful weather, but it’s not bliss. This past Sunday morning at about 1:30am we were awoken by the sound of loud gunfire. I’m used to gunfire in Mogadishu, and we hear it from time to time in Nairobi, but never this loud or close. This was directly outside our window on the street below.

Standard procedure is to stay away from the window in situations like this, but Priya and I allowed curiosity to get the best of us as we peered out trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually the gunfire ceased but you could still see silhouettes of people moving around on the street. Though there were some tree branches partially blocking the view, it appeared that there was at least one body on the ground. No one was attending to the person so my assumption was that he was dead. Eventually, as calm seemed to be restored, we returned to bed and decided that we would learn more the next morning.

Sometimes when things like this happen, you never learn anything. It’s as if nothing happened. Maybe it’s because things like this happen so frequently that it’s not noteworthy. In any case, we did find out, at least the official version of what happened.

Apparently, there were three men who were on an armed robbery spree. They had successfully robbed some people several blocks away and had moved towards our neighborhood. The police were allegedly tracking them and had followed them to our street. They were supposedly in the process of robbing some pedestrians near our compound when the police unloaded on them. Two were killed on the spot and the third, injured in the shooting, was able to flee on foot.

Most of this checks out with what we observed, as well as the observation of our neighbor a floor above us who saw someone running away from the scene on a side street. But I’m always a bit suspicious of police accounts that make them sound so effective, including the part where they were able to return stolen items to both sets of victims. It’s not necessarily a slam against the police, it’s just that Nairobi is a messy place, particularly at night, and I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to do that job. If the account is true, it’s pretty impressive.

The next morning, I was due to go for a run. It was a cool morning, about 6am. As I walked out of our compound, I couldn’t resist the temptation to head in the opposite direction that I normally would go to see if there was any evidence of the drama a few hours earlier. Just a few steps from our gate there was a standing pool of blood. There was another stain on the sidewalk a couple meters away. It’s a sobering sight, regardless of what happened. As I carried on with my run, I passed a homeless family with two small children huddled under blankets sleeping. Soon after than I passed the same paralyzed beggar that I see nearly every day with his head down and his cup extended.

I’ve never liked living in a city and yet it has been the reality of most of my adult life. Living somewhere else, I wouldn’t see these things, but it wouldn’t make them go away. But I admit that I have grown weary of being exposed to so much hardship, not only in Nairobi but even more so in Somalia. Nairobi used to be a place I would retreat to from some of the things that I’m exposed to doing humanitarian work. Our neighborhood has deteriorated so much in the past few years that it’s not much of a retreat anymore.

And then there’s the fact that I have two children who are being raised in this environment. I don’t mind them being exposed to poverty. It’s a reality and I want them to be aware of difficult things just as I want them to experience wonderful things like walking the streets of Paris and backpacking in Idaho. It’s just that we seem to be inching closer to erring on the side of too much exposure. One of the main reasons we left Bujumbura was due to the nightly gunfire, instability and the thought that it was no place for small children. They were oblivious but we weren’t. Now that they are older, they are more aware of their environment and it requires some intentional parenting to help them sort out all that they are seeing. I don’t anticipate radical changes on the near horizon but time will tell if/when we need to pull the plug on this life as we know it.