— Hey, Madame Zero, will you be shopping for new dresses in Nairobi? he asked.
Everyone laughed, and Anthony smiled a barely tolerant smile.
It is hard to communicate how momentous it was, after seven years in that camp, to be on the way to Nairobi. It is impossible to explain. And most of those in the group were worse off than me. I lived with Gop Chol, and had a paying job with an NGO, but most of the other members of the drama group-twenty-one of us, all Sudanese and Somalis, all between twelve and eighteen-had nothing. Besides Tabitha, there were eight girls, most of them Sudanese, and this made the trip particularly enjoyable, and not at all punishing, for the rest of the Dominics. We rode on a standard blue UN staff bus, the windows open, the two days of driving buoyed by cool wind and constant songs.
The scenery was astonishing, the peaks and valleys, the mist and the sun. We passed through the Kapenguria area of Kenya, much of it mountainous and cool with rain. We saw birds with bright plumage, we saw hyenas and gazelles, elephants and zebras. And corn! So many crops, everything growing. Seeing this part of Kenya made it all the more depressing and inconceivable that our refugee camp had been placed where it had. We pressed our faces to the glass and wondered, Why couldn't they put Kakuma there? Or there, or there? Do not think it was lost on us that the Kenyans, and every international body that monitors or provides for the displaced, customarily places its refugees in the least desirable regions on earth. There we become utterly dependent-unable to grow our own food, to tend our own livestock, to live in any sustainable way. I do not judge the UNHCR or any nation that takes in the nationless, but I do pose the question.
As the land passed by, I saw my parents, my approximated visions of them, on every hill and around each bend. It seemed as logical as anything else that they would be there, on the road ahead of us. Why couldn't they be here, why couldn't we will ourselves together again? Surely my father could find a way to live and thrive in Kenya. Just the thought of my mother here, walking with me along these green paths, along that river, near those giraffes-it felt so very possible for a few hours of that drive.
We stayed in Ketale, in a hotel with beds and sheets and electricity and running water. Though this town was not the size of Nairobi, still it left us astounded. We were unaccustomed to the sky's black being punctured by lights. Some of the Somalis had experienced these things before, but those of us from southern Sudan had seen none of this; even in our homes, in our villages before the war, there was no plumbing, and any of these amenities, bedsheets and towels, were rare and coveted. At that hotel in Ketale, we ate at their restaurant, drank cold drinks from an icebox, swishing the ice cubes-which at least a portion of the group had never touched-around in our mouths. If we had turned around the next day, just that one night in Ketale would have made for the most spectacular of journeys. In all of the time at Ketale, Tabitha and I barely spoke, saving any interaction for a later time. The opportunity would arise, we knew, and we needed only to wait and watch.
We drove on in the morning, through the afternoon and through the night, and by the morning after, were in Nairobi. I have to attempt to communicate the awe that comes over a group of young people like us, after spending many years in a camp at the edge of the world, upon seeing something like Nairobi, one of the largest cities in Africa. We had nothing with which to compare it. On the bus there was a hush. You might imagine a bus full of teenagers loudly pointing at buildings, at cars and bridges and parks. But this bus was utterly silent. Our faces were pressed against the windows but no one said a word. Some of what we saw was impossible to understand. Houses upon houses, windows upon windows. The tallest building I had seen before that day was precisely two stories tall. And knowing that these buildings faced no threat, that they would stand untouched-the sense of permanence was something I had not known for many years.
When we arrived at Nairobi that morning, we were dropped off at a church and there we met our sponsors. Each of us was assigned a host family, most of whom were in some way affiliated with the national theater. I was assigned to a man named Mike Mwaniki, an extraordinarily handsome and sophisticated man, I thought. He was perhaps thirty years old, and was one of the founders of the Mavuno Drama Group, based in the city; they performed original plays by young Kenyan playwrights.
— This is the man, eh? he said to me.-You're our guy!
He shook my hand heartily and slapped me on the back and gave me a slice of cake. I had never had cake, and in retrospect it doesn't make much sense that he would greet me at nine-thirty in the morning with cake, but he did, and it was delicious. A white cream cake with stripes of sunflower orange.
The other members of the group went with their sponsors, and Tabitha went off with hers, an older couple dressed extravagantly and driving a Land Rover. Miss Gladys quickly disappeared with a very handsome and wealthy-looking Kenyan man-we did not see her again until the performance two days later-and I went with Mike. He shared an apartment with his girlfriend, a diminutive and luminous woman named Grace, and together they lived in a part of the city called BuruBuru Phase 3. It was a mad neighborhood, busier than any place I had ever known. Kakuma held eighty thousand people, but there was very little traffic, few cars, no horns, scant electricity, very little bustle. But in Nairobi, in BuruBuru Phase 3, the hum of the streets was inescapable. The motorcycles, the cars and buses run at all hours, and the sweet toxic smell of diesel is everywhere. Even in their apartment, where the floors and glass were so clean, the street was there, the smell of the roads and sounds of people passing under their windows. The cars were so many colors, an array I didn't know existed. In Kakuma all the vehicles were white, identical, all bearing the UN symbol.
I was given the bedroom Mike and Grace shared; the mattress was enormous and firm, and in that first moment in that room the sheets were so white that I had to turn away. I put my bag down and sat on a small wicker chair in the corner. I had a crippling headache. I thought I was alone in the room so I dropped my head to my hands and tried to massage my skull into some kind of agreement that all this was good. But my head frequently was overwhelmed, and the best times of my life were often accompanied by migraines of inexplicable origin.
— Are you set? Mike asked.
I looked up. He was standing in the doorway.
— I'm fine, I said.-I am very good. I am very happy. I forced a smile that would convince him.
— We're seeing a movie tonight, he said.-You'll come?
I said I would. He and Grace had to go to work. They worked at an automobile dealership down the road, but they would be back at six to pick me up. Mike showed me the TV and the bathroom and gave me a key to his front door and to the apartment building, and he and Grace jogged down the steps and were gone.
To be alone in that place! They had given me the key and I sat for some time, watching the people move below the window. This was the first time I had been on the second story of a building. It was quite disorienting, though not so much unlike sitting in a tree over Amath's house with Moses and William K, trying to listen in to the conversations she would have with her sisters.
After an hour of watching the street, the path below the window, I tried the television. I had seen only scattered bits of TV by that point, and so, left to my own devices, alone with twelve channels, this was a problem. I did not move for three hours, I am ashamed to admit. But the things I saw! I watched movies, the news, soccer, cooking shows, nature documentaries, a movie where the sky held two suns, and an examination of the last days of Adolf Hitler. I found a learning channel, directed to students my age, where the hosts were teaching the same book I was studying at Kakuma. This filled me with a certain pride, knowing that what was good enough for refugees was good enough for the Kenyans of Nairobi.