Lucy

This morning I have tea with lucy. I pass her every day at least a few times and I miss her when for some reason she's not there. Every morning it's 'Jambo', a wave, some fruit for 5 bob and/or a chat about something inconsequential. I look forward to this exchange of friendly noises in a way I would never do at home. At home I rush around hoping against hope I don't bump into anyone I kinda know and am forced into inane chat about the weather. I like Kenya Anna much better.

Today though she asks me to stop. My tea cup gets filled from from her own cup and her daughters as there isn't actually any left. Her daughter gets up to offer me the only stool at Lucy's stall, and some fresh mdazi.

We talk of her morning and laugh over shared and unshared vocabulary. She is generous with my toying swahili and pretends to understand my often frustratingly skitty and mumbling english, which even my mum often has difficulty deciphering. Her morning involves going to the market and stocking up on produce, I see that she has bought much much more than usual, due to the mzungu presence down the road? She stays in a room in the house opposite us, our regular avocado and tomato based lunches must have meant a substantial boost in trade for her. I ask her about it, brashly inured to asking such indelicate business questions from my work so far on the program. She doesn't directly respond, I think due to embarrassment this time rather than my enunciation. I wish I hadn't asked, she is modest an shy with regards to our 'business' relationship. I am her friend and guest and take an mdazi and another cup of tea to make up for my insensitivity. The tea is typical Kenyan tea, thick like cream with at least 5 sugars, builders eat your heart out. Mdazi are kenyan donuts, their gilded caramel casing giving way to a sweetly disintegrating eiderdown interior, when done well. Usually they tend to be slightly yellowing and flabby with grease. Lucy's are the best I've had.

She talks to me about her brother's sons who want her to move out of the house she stays in but which is technically theirs. Patriarchal inheritance laws. She cooks and cleans and gives them her money, she cant save anything for herself. Where will she live with her daughters? As she confides her hardship her talk shrinks to a whisper, I have to strain with all my auricular and mental faculties to piece together what she's saying. It's a painful while before I perfect a method of responding in a way which prioritises expression of sympathy, whilst temporarily deferring full understanding, and thus prompts repetition. I begin to be able to replace the frequent 'loom's' I hear with 'room's', etc until the articulating bones of her story animate themselves in my imagination.

Why is shy confiding this to me? She is generous to me with her secrets and troubles as well as her hospitality. That disagreeable and decidedly western sensibility I felt stir its ugly head inside me from time to time in Lalwet, is suspicious that she wants something from me. Is that the only reason she is treating me like this? How selfish of me to think so. What do I want her to want from me? I want her to like me for 'myself'? What on earth does that mean?! Nothing but western egocentricity, mixed with equal parts of MEDCentricity (more economically developed country).

What is this ambivalence I sometimes felt in Lalwet, feeling pressure and sadness that I couldn't respond to their exorbitant hospitality with a guarantee of a scholarship to an english university that they so covet. The painfully uncomfortable awkwardness I felt in the market when the woman I bought my plimsoles from aggressively insisted I become her friend and take her back to england with me goes some way towards both understanding and excusing it, but you can't generalise like that.

What is it exactly that makes me uneasy and suspicious? Do I think I am being put under obligation by her kindness? Why should I think this? It is an unpleasant sensibility which does not exist in other societies, in ancient Greece and Rome such ties of 'obligation' underpinned interpersonal relationships, strengthened the fabric of society and did not necessarily diminish one iota the 'authentic' ties of love and affection between friends. It is different with Lucy. I find myself thinking of the bible just as she would, 'do unto others as...' I am very suggestible, not a great quality usually, but on this occasion at least I am am grateful for the empathy it affords me.

Perhaps she thinks I might be put here to help her, I know that it would be within my power to so. To do much more than she might even hope for, not that I should of course. I could help any number of individual Kenyans. I struggle to hold in my rational mind that this is an inherently flawed approach. This entrepreneurship course is specifically designed to help in a sustainable and still meaningful way. But what about Lucy? She 'only' needs the one off 5000 deposit on top of the first months rent for a new room, (she can keep up her rent easily after that if it weren’t for the advance).

I have to move the conversation into less fretfully treacherous waters. Shy, generous woman, I try to explain my new found taste for roasted maize, she misconstrues and thinks I mean gidethi which is a dish of maize and beans boiled to within an inch of their lives, and boiled again till they finally submit their bullet carapaces to being chewed. My heart sinks a little as she says that it's her speciality and she would like to make me some, I tell her that's a really nice offer, and think no more about it.

Lauren and I are working together on our first session with a Kenyan group. We spend the rest of the day drawing up a pretty comprehensive lesson plan. Josh comes through the door with ingredients for our dinner and informs me that Lucy has made a pot of what transpires to be more like a vat of beans and maize. I feel terrible. I decide that I'm going to bloody well eat them, and bloody well like it, but does she want me to pay? I wish I understood Kenyan etiquette better. It could either be terribly rude to offer, or terribly rude to not. Dougie and Lauren come with me for moral support which is lovely. Doug also shoulders responsibility for untangling the question of payment. I'm so, so grateful.

She wont let me pay, 'I am her friend'. She won't meet any of our eyes when she says this and I go a little bit crumbly. Caleb, our Kenyan in residence adds potato and tomato to the mix and it actually tastes fucking fantastic.

Lauren and I finish planning our sessions for tomorrow. Absolutely terrified. Two lessons of 2 hours with 2 groups, one at 10 and one at 2.

Go to bed.