I was lounging in the red, earthy dirt of Ewuaso at the base of a tree alongside Jeremiah when a drop of sticky white substance oozed out of the rough bark and fell onto my forearm.
“We call this oloilei. It’s like glue,” Jeremiah said in his smooth, deep voice, securing a stray leaf to my notebook with Kenya’s natural glue. “Can I show you something else?” he asked.
We ambled through the main town of Ewuaso, past the large main building housing a bar and poolroom, a health clinic and a butcher’s shop. Pungent smells wafted out of the meat market as we passed, stinging my nose with their curt and sour scent. Depending on where the sun hung in the vast blue sky blanketing the Great Rift Valley, the main area of town was a mixture of bustle and abandonment. At mid-day, the market was often overrun with feet—big feet, little feet, bare feet, shoed feet. Vendors set up their booths with colorful tarps and shaky wooden benches to display vegetables, jewelry, kangas (colorful wraps often worn by women), shoes made of tires, portable radios, carved wood figurines.
Once a week, people would flock to the central market area like the sheep they herded, bodies weaving in and out of the crowd like an intricate tapestry amid the angrily rumbling supplies truck from the city. Now, however, late in the afternoon, it was as quiet and empty as a ghost town.
Jeremiah was taking me to his apartment in a square mud building right at the edge of town to show me a book we had been discussing. When we reached his apartment, I took in the scene slowly. He had, in my first startled glance, no home.
His entire life was confined to a square area no bigger than sixteen square feet. Tucked in one far corner was a wobbly wooden bench with a bright red spotted kanga loosely hanging off one edge and trailing along the packed clay floor. In the adjacent corner was a tiny wooden dresser adorned with a sunny yellow plastic mixing bowl and a dented metal pitcher for washing. A dirty chunk of soap lay in the bowl, waiting. Three tin coffee mugs splashed in a dark blue robin’s egg print sat beyond the pitcher, two at attention, one sleeping soundly on its side. There was a small lamp on the ground near the entryway with a stubby white candle and box of matches to accompany it. A clothesline was strung across an open span from one wall to the other about four feet into the room. It sagged tiredly under the weight of a tattered floral bed sheet. I asked Jeremiah if his bedroom was beyond the curtain. He said it was not—that was his neighbor Rose’s apartment.
I looked more closely at his home. Everything he owned was here? A low pile of earth-stained books lounged against the wall behind the lamp. A bible sat open to the book of Jeremiah on the ground in front of the stool, the pages scrawled with neat notes in Kiswahili. A scrawny gray kitten was perched lazily on the edge of the stool, hopelessly trying to lick his matted fur into perfection with his pink tongue, which, in fact, was the only thing in the entire apartment that was not dusted with at least one layer of thick Kenyan soil. Above the stool, a Precious Moments porcelain ornament hung precariously from the rope dividing Jeremiah and Rose’s living spaces. The egg-headed child stared at me with teardrop eyes and butter-blonde curls, clutching a golden cross in her small hands.
“My sister in Nairobi gave me that for Christmas a few years back,” Jeremiah said.
There was not a bed, not a plate, not a utensil in sight. There was no bathroom, no food. A slight glint caught my eye, and I turned to find myself looking into a gritty and fractured mirror clinging to the wall above the dresser. I tried to find myself in the murky sky, but could only see one startled eye staring back at me from a clear silver patch.
“Here it is,” Jeremiah said, fishing out a book from a corner piled with objects I had not even noticed.
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