A few days later I get a call from a man I don't know who turns out to be the son of the previous tenant. He's heard my story from the housing association and has a suggestion to make to me. ‘I've heard you're about to move in to my late mother's apartment and they tell me you don't have much stuff because you've just returned from living abroad. What I'd like to propose is that you take a look at what there is in the flat and take whatever you like. I'll have the rest taken to the tip. All you have to do in return is take responsibility for cleaning the place out before you move in. How does that sound to you?’
I'm really touched and overcome by his gesture, thank him and arrange a date to come and take a look. I'm beginning to think my luck is supernatural. My mother comes along with me to give me some advice on what to keep. As soon as I walk into the flat I'm really taken with it and know we're going to be happy here. After living in huts in Kenya, the large, bright living room, open-plan kitchen and little bathroom feel like a palace. The furniture is a bit old-fashioned but I don't mind that; at least it all seems clean and well looked after, and a lick of paint here and there will work wonders. The kitchen is completely kitted out from gold-rimmed porcelain plates to frying pans and there are even sheets and towels in the cupboard in the hallway. I soon realise I could move in straight away without needing almost anything else at all. All we'd have to bring is our clothes. All this without spending a single franc. Once again I thank God for all the luck I've had in the last month.
As I'm wandering around the rooms admiring everything I can't help feeling it's as if I'm getting something back: I had a small flat just like this before I went off to Kenya. As I was totally convinced I would never be coming back I handed over the lease on the flat and all its contents to a student for just the price of my plane ticket. He could hardly believe his luck then either. I can still see the face on the young lad about to start at the technical college standing there with his mother asking me in astonishment if I really didn't want to take any of it. ‘Nope, where I'm headed I won't need any of this stuff,’ I said, with a laugh.
So in a way today this all feels like a ‘present in return’. I thank the nice chap very much and tell him how much easier his kind gesture will make my life. He seems almost embarrassed and says goodbye quickly. A doorway across the landing opens and I introduce myself to my new neighbor and tell her how pleased I am to be moving in. Two little girls stick their heads out from behind her and I realise that this is going to be just paradise for Napirai too.
The week at work flashes by and I chalk up my first small-scale and large-scale successes. The last night we spend in my mother's house I'm so excited I can hardly sleep. Grateful as I am to her for putting us up, I'm looking forward to my independence. At long last Napirai and I will have a flat of our own where I can arrange things my own way. As all this is going through my head late at night I realise I've been in this position before. When Lketinga and I spent our last night in his Mama's cramped little hut in Barsaloi, where we had lived for a year, I couldn't get to sleep either because I was so excited at moving out into a big new manyatta of our own. I remember how proud I was fitting out our new home with our few possessions.
I'm also reminded of a strange event that happened then. When I was putting my clothes away I found a little gray snake on the cow pat wall. In shock I instinctively grabbed a stone from the hearth and killed it. When my mother-in-law found out the next day she didn't seem very happy about it. Lketinga explained to me that if a young woman finds a baby snake on moving into her first manyatta it means she must be pregnant, so on no account should you kill the snake. I was really upset about having made such a mistake even though I was certain that there was no way it was an omen that I was pregnant. There's no way I wouldn't already have known. But as it turned out I found out a couple of weeks later that indeed I must already have been pregnant at the time. ‘At least there's no chance of finding a snake tomorrow,’ I tell myself as I finally drift off to sleep.
The next day we pack up our few possessions and move in. We're hardly carrying more than my nomadic mother-in-law. Except that we're using a car rather than the donkey she packs her few worldly goods on to: first the big, reusable branches from the manyatta are dismantled and strapped to the sides of the donkey so that the rolled-up cowhides and the homemade sisal mats for the ceiling can fit between them. Then she hangs her pots, pans, cups and gourds around them, and everything's ready for the long day's trek through the bush.
Our move in contrast only takes an hour. My mother's given me a big green pot plant to give the room a bit of life, and a big basket full of groceries. Napirai goes around looking at all these new things not sure whether she ought to be pleased or not. After we unpack I take her down to the playground where there's a slide next to the sand pit. There are children of all ages playing there and they watch us uncertainly whispering or giggling to one another. People here appear unused to people of a different color as they all stare at Napirai. Two children even run away and I spot them a little later standing with their mothers out on their balconies. I try to get at least a few names from the rest of this tribe of children but it's only when Madeleine turns up a little later and tells them who we are that things perk up a bit.
That evening I make a pasta dish in our new flat. Madeleine and her son are coming round for a bit of a house-warming. It's my first to chance to cook in a European kitchen again as my mother wouldn't let anyone else into hers. I get pleasure from simply turning the knob for the right hotplate and turning a tap to fill a pan of water. Everything works well and it's all really fast. Just doing these simple chores in our manyatta would take up to two hours. First I had to go down to the river and use a tin can to fill a canister with water and bring it home. Then I had to go and gather firewood and carefully build a fire which was not easy as we had no newspaper to burn and I had to hope I'd find a glowing ember in the hearth which I could blow on and bring back to life. By the time I'd finally got it lit the hut would be filled with smoke bringing tears to my eyes and making it hard to breathe.
And now here I am in my own Swiss apartment where I can just turn two knobs and there's the pot cooking on the hob. Time and time again I keep seeing even the tiniest things as miraculous and can only feel grateful that I've seen life from the other side. Madeleine brings round a bottle of red wine and now we can properly celebrate. We're both amazed that that first meeting of the single mothers’ group has changed our lives. Tomorrow is the next meeting of the group and I'm interested to see if any of the others have had such positive results.
The group's founders are delighted things have gone so well for us and say, ‘That's exactly the sort of thing we were hoping to achieve. All of us have our own contacts and can possibly help someone else. That's the way it's supposed to work.’
I get talking to a woman who's new to the group and I am amazed by her story. She lives on her own bringing up three children in an ancient house in a village of just fifty inhabitants, twelve hundred meters high up in the mountains. She has to do everything herself: chop wood, build a fire in an ancient wood-fired oven to heat the house and provide hot water, and even do her own repairs to the building. Going shopping means a two-hour trek on foot and she has to carry everything back up the mountain in a rucksack. Every winter she has to shovel colossal amounts of snow. Since she divorced a few years ago she's hardly been out to meet people. I'm really struck to find a young woman living such a cut-off, old-fashioned existence of her own free will. I want to see for myself how she manages and arrange to go and visit her the next weekend.