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The Facebook, A murder and Prison: A fictional story of true events

Pious Onyango Ombede awoke with facebook on his mind. Most mornings he woke up with chai on his mind, or school fees, or occasionally, in the life he left behind, it was the headache in his mind from the drinks the night before.  But unlike most mornings, the somewhat mysterious and coveted something, “the facebook” seemed to lure him out of bed with such curious intensity that he arose, dressed and left his house immediately. Although he claimed to know nothing of computers, he also knew that if he wanted the facebook, a computer would not help. The closest internet café was all the way in town, which is an unreasonable distance for a reasonable man. But phones on the other hand, were a common commodity. Everybody had some kind of Mobile. How else would someone “MPESA” money to their family? How else would someone “Flash” their friend to say hi? Having a mobile was a must. It made up for all sorts of woes in the world.

Alice, his wife, stood bent over the fire blowing at the milk to avoid a spillover. She glanced upside down at his blue sandals shuffling his feet along the freshly swept dirt. He was shuffling right past his breakfast and she wondered what he was up to.

Although he felt a quickening in the usual pace of his heart, there was no change in his perpetually relaxed way of getting from one place to another. At 5 feet 8 inches he looked precisely his age, and his face possessed that rare quality of precisely portraying his life. This morning he looked decidedly well rested with a hint of apprehensive curiosity. “Will I really find a mobile with the facebook for 2,000 bob?” he wondered as he pressed on.

As he reached the roadside he wove purposely through the regulars who were setting up their wares for the day. Godfrida with her pastel wash basins, Mama Martin with mounds of clothes spread in disarray over old feedbags, Boaz straddling a stool selling nothing but trouble and a radio. As Onyango thoughtlessly avoided a chicken and her entourage, he came to the conclusion that yes, the facebook would be a bigger investment than just the cost of the phone. Connections, a whole other world, a better life awaited him.

Ah! At last. “Eh! Oyoure?” he called a good morning over at Isaac, the fat phone dealer straining his old eyes over the padlock. Owning a shop next to the mandazi dognut maker is too much a temptation for anyone to bear and he had given up the resistance long ago. “Oyowre a enya…..Sema?” he asked, finally standing up with difficulty and a deep grunt from the arduous opening of the lock.

As Onyango explained his pressing desire for the facebook, Isaac shook his head in dismay…”Ah, bro…you  don’t need one of those! Look here, what I have, if you need a new phone I’ll give you the best price. You and I have been friends a long time, don’t worry, I’ve got something for you.” “No Isaac, I have a phone. I just want to see this here, the facebook. You don’t have? Kweli?” A sudden stab of disappointment hit him in his chest and his face reflectively cringed. “tss tsss…Aye buana, sure?”

The fat man nestled his body comfortably in his shaded stall and pointed his lips and his eyes in the direction of Boaz, still slouching on the stool. “You know, I saw Boaz trying to buy a mobile with the facebook from a guy just the other day. Couldn’t pay you know? 2,000 bob for that thing. But kweli, that is cheap. It must have been broken.”

Now that sounded promising. And after further inquiry, the man in possession of the facebook mobile was still willing to sell for 2,000 shillings! Boaz gave the directions somewhat jealously and followed him with a mouth chattering away on Onyango’s shoulder until at last he was distracted by a woman garbed entirely in purple heading to town with a suitcase on her head, a purse in her hand and a high heal stuck in tangled barbed wire.

Onyango sidled slowly into the compound and looked around to detect any signs of life. All was still and even after he wrapped on the wooden door, it took several minutes for anyone to answer. Just as he began to walk back, the door opened and a man with glossy eyes looking far away stood there expectantly. Onyango tirelessly explained for the third time that morning his desire to have a mobile with the facebook and this time, there was an affirming smile spread over the blind man’s face. “Ah!” he said. “ Come in. I have just what you are looking for. Will you take tea?  Yes, of course you will, and bread? I have bread.”

The mobile immerged from the back room, sleek and dark as a black mamba, and just as poisonous too. Onyango unknowingly held and carelessly caressed the venomous thing, easily imagining how casually he could whip it out of his pocket and possess all the good things that could come of it. His motives were honest, pure, innocent and harmless, yet he knew not its sly power, nor where it had come from.

The deal was made and the phone was monetarily half his and wholly in his hands. He thanked the man, taking his phone number to MPESA him the other half of the bill when his own pocket would allow.

Two weeks passed with no detection of the evils awaiting him. The phone sat in a drawer, waiting for the last payment to be made. “I better not use it until it is completely mine, then I will feel right to use it” he thought. On the very day he made his last payment he came home from work early. He had been welding at Nehemiah, feeling that the day was normal. His face was bland, a bit sweaty from the bicycle ride home, and his lips stuck to his teeth with dry, viscous saliva. He called for Diana, his daughter, to fetch some drinking water. He sat down with his head lowered to his chest, resting outside of his house and waited.

He awoke from a doze by the sound of footsteps, and thinking they were his daughter’s, he cheerfully looked up at her. But it was not Diana he saw, nor Alice, nor anyone familiar. A policeman armed with an AK-47 and duplicated 7 times behind approached with hand cuffs and a frown. Onyango’s eyebrows pulled together in puzzlement and his bewildered cheeks rose in honest protest. “Are you Pious Onyango Ombedde? You are under arrest.”

“Why did you arrest me?” Onyango retorted fiercely.

“Where’s the phone?” the policeman stabbed back.

“The phone? The one with the facebook? Inside.”

All 8 of them marched inside tearing the house apart and taking anything of consequence. His tape measure which Boyce gave him, his leatherman knife, his new grinder, all supposedly stolen, as was the receiptless phone they found in the drawer. Onyango, the thief, no, the murderer they said as they filed him passed his wife, passed the overthrown table and into the car.

The black mamba bore his teeth, and pierced him. “What is my crime? “ he wondered. “How did they know I had the phone?”

The police customarily took him to the elder counsel for a background check.

“No,” the elder said firmly. “Onyango is not the sort to do such things. I have known him many years.”

His crime was described to the elder as follows: The man who stole this phone killed the original owner.  Because of the high technology of this phone, we were able to track him to Mamboleo.  We will take him to the prison in Siyaya to be tried for the theft of this mobile and the murder of so and so, that one politician’s son.

The murder of a politician’s son? Mobs, political violence, theft and murder….Onyango never dreamed that this would be the new world of connections his new mobile with the facebook would bring. But there he was, handcuffed in the dark of night, travelling to his needless imprisonment. “I have made a mistake, I admit I made a mistake, the worst mistake….I didn’t even have a receipt.” He moaned hopelessly to himself, half confessing to Jesus, half pounding himself for not being smarter.

Eighteen of the longest days he ever spent went by, his face sagged along with his foggy mood and the horrors of life inside with the inmates were too unspeakably burdensome to the mind as to cause him never to tell of them again and therefore will remain unknown to us.

However one of those 18 days held an unexpected surprise which saved him. One of the Kenyan Nehemiah board members made a phone call.

-Put him on the phone, I want to speak with Onyango.

-Unheard of. You can’t speak to him.

-I’ll speak to him

The details of the bail are uncertain. But one thing is true: Kenyans know how to take care of each other in a pinch. The anti-venom for the black mamba facebook phone took Pious Onyango Ombede by surprise, shook him up and put him flat on his face in awe of life, and of God (“I would never have made it out of there without God.”)

Pious Onyango awoke with the facebook on his mind. Still curious. Humbled, doubtful, and more than ever aware of the fragility of a day. He shuffled again across the freshly swept dirt in his blue sandals and sat with Alice, sipping chai.

Proverbs 31 and your average Kenyan woman

Many Kenyan women I know are very much like the Proverbs 31 Woman. They consider fields, they rise before dawn to care and prepare for their families, they save for the servant girls, give to the poor, they’re good money managers, business women…Their children call them blessed and so do their husbands. Their arms are strong for their task and so is their neck.

Life in Bible times is much more accessible to my mind and more palatable to my understanding since tasting Kenya. In Kenya, you don’t need to weasel your way into this passage and spend time thinking about how it translates into your life. A Kenyan woman often considers fields, and when it belongs to her family, she digs and digs. She prepares the shamba with rhythmic, forceful swings of the jembe. She raises it above her head and releases it down with a noise that resonates out of the ground and changes depending upon the last rain. Black cotton soil cracks in the sun and makes short, struggling chlink chlink sounds as the metal edge picks its way through. The sound of wet soil is more of a shlink, shlurp, suctioning sound. The wet soil is like a hostess who quickly and warmly welcomes you in, but then clings to you, hanging as you make your way to the door, not wanting you to leave.

Many families have house girls who are usually a younger relative like a niece or a cousin or a sister who want a change of pace from their home or need a sure meal and a place to sleep. They take girls, and often treat them like daughters in a way.

“Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value. She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life.” This makes me think of David and Meshack, the two fathers on the farm, and how they love and trust their wives, Anne and Susan. They adore them and respect them and are always being thoughtful towards them. The word “confidence” is the perfect word to describe their stance toward their wives. They make decisions together a lot more than other couples that I see in the area and they also like doing things together. I am delighted when I hear things like this: David says, “ Oh, let me just pull over here and buy some tomatoes for Anne, she will be so happy.” Meshack says, “You won’t mind, what I am gonna do, is to stop and pick up some bananas because my wife loves to eat bananas.”

“She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night.”
I think of Anne Isuvi measuring their milk out to people who come to her kitchen to buy. I think of Rosalyn and Juliet who have little shops in their homes where they sell the essentials: soap, Roico seasoning, little yellow balls of cooking fat wrapped in plastic, sugar, salt and matchboxes and kerosene. I see Rosalyn’s head balancing a load of firewood, which she traded by giving an old Mama some beans to plant. Her trading is profitable; she knows what her family needs and what she has to give. They trade buckets of maize for a day’s labor of weeding in the field and trade vegetables for vegetables.

“She opens her hands to the poor and extends her hands to the needy.” I see Rosalyn wrap up a hot chapatti in a torn corner of the flour sack and send it home with the lady whose house burned down last year. I see her piling mounds of popped corn, hot off the fire, into the cupped hands of the little raggedy boys sent to her to fetch their family’s milk for chai. They sit on stools and stuff the popped corn into their mouths with both hands held close to their face for easy access. Their teeth and the whites of their eyes match the popped corn and they all work in unison to fully satisfy Rosalyn’s generosity.

Sizco sits shredding greens for Anne and the next minute is helping Kimae prepare chapattis for the apprentices to bring for the potluck. Nancy is bending thoughtfully over Lucas’ math problem, explaining his confusion away. Anyone who comes to chat while you’re in the middle of something, will automatically take up the task with you and talk for a bit. Kenyan women actually do get up while it is still dark and rarely eat the bread of idleness. Susan does make garments and sell them, and the women I know watch over the affairs of their household with a care and dedication that leaves little time for the distractions of luxury.

Nehemiah families begin to have a higher propensity to honor instead of blindly expect the dedicated labor and noble character of the woman of the house. “Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”

Saturday Celebration

Saturday October 23, 2010

(A graduation party for Josphat, our children’s department head)

David, in his playfully formal manner, stands up to welcome us and give a sort of agenda for our gathering. He says something to the effect of, “I think we all know why we are here; because Josphat has invited us to celebrate with him. He has done a noble thing in graduating with high honors and we are all very proud of him. First I’ll ask for a prayer, then we will sing a song, and eat…we have plenty of food. After that we will have some speeches from various guests, and from the man of the hour. Then we shall sing again and close our evening with another matter that concerns us.”

The afternoon leading up to the gathering in the church was spent busily preparing at the Isuvi house.  I sat on the cement patio peeling potatoes for two hours while all around me the boys swirled in and out with pots and firewood, cabbages, chicken feathers and armfuls of tomatoes. David pops in and offers me cooked bananas and strong tea for lunch and then darts away again, gathering helpers to slaughter Josphat’s lamb. After seeing signs of the slaughter carried past, (knives, buckets of water, buckets of blood, a skinned sheep’s tail…) I finally see Ken (our lab technician) walking over with a huge grin and a bucket with protruding hooves and carved delicacies. “I am a slaughterer!” He tells me jokingly and swirls the bucket around as I peer inside. The joyous bustle culminates as all the other woman come to the kitchen to help make chapattis. I am in awe of Josphat’s generosity and ask if we should have just done it like a potluck where everyone contributes a dish. But he says no, he wanted to bless us and have a way to thank us all. And besides we were helping in the preparation anyway. I can’t but think how much this meal will set him back, but in true Josphat fashion, he thinks more of others than he does of himself.

We are all satisfied and full of rice and meat and cabbage, licking the grease off our fingers and finishing the last of our bottled sodas. The florescent light of the church is only available because of the generator, noisily groaning with the tractor outside. The power is out but our milk needs chilling and our party needs light. Voices slide away silently and our faithful M.C. rouses our attention for the speeches. “ I am just going to call upon a few people to say something about Josphat. Fidelis, you’ve been with Josphat, what can you say to him?” Fidelis stands, smiling as always, pauses with decorum and proceeds: “Good evening, we want to thank Josphat for being with us and caring for us. We love him and we need him.” The speeches went on and on, as David randomly and surprisingly gave each person present the opportunity to affirm Josphat. Anne made jokes about him as her “first born son” in a manner worthy of a mother, Jeanie encouraged him to start looking for a wife, friends told how much Joshphat had encouraged them. The boys all thanked him, and there was not one person with any thought but joy and gladness that we know and have Josphat among us.

I can’t  stop smiling and even crying for how beautiful and life giving those words are to Josphat. The openness of the Kenyan heart shines like I’ve never seen this night and we aren’t waiting for a funeral to praise a person. He also stands and gives each one of us a word of gratitude and friendship. Josphat has no supportive family apart from Nehemiah, but he fears the Lord, takes advantage of opportunity in humility, and loves people, which gives him great success. He was honored with the highest position in his psychology and social work program and received many offers from organizations, but he knows he is called here for now. This family celebration is truly the first of its kind here at Nehemiah as we have never honored and appreciated one person in this formal and intimately united of a way. The overarching sentiment is that Josphat is bearing fruit. Fruit that he has shared and blessed us with.

Songs are sung and prayers are said and one last item remains. David hands the floor over to Meshack who stands and begins with reminding us of the purpose of families. He says something like this in his melodically loud and eloquent way: “ We come to share together our joys because it concerns us, and we are happy together when one of us is rejoicing but when something bad comes, we also want to share in it because it concerns us. Tonight we want to bring to the community’s attention, something disappointing. But when one of us is gone astray, we want to bring him back because we care about him. Solomon would like to give a confession.” Solomon stands in front of us, solemn and pressed. He strains to confess over the noise of the generator, but his volume is not satisfactory. Meshack translates his volume and forms such an interrogating voice that he would be more appropriate in a court room. Solomon confesses publicly, although some of us are aware, that he snuck out of the fence and slept with a girl in another house. By doing this he has broken most of our rules, namely, sneaking out, having a relationship, and dishonoring and lying to his parents.  He asks for our forgiveness. The floor is opened to various people for responses. He is forgiven but not trusted, for regaining trust takes time and is up to him. Please pray for him as he is so well loved, yet rarely repentant to the point of changing his behavior or heart in other similar cases.

The mood with which we leave the church is an entirely opposite atmosphere than the way we entered. In some ways it seems odd and inappropriate to me to have both agendas smudged into one evening for the sake of convenience and timing. Yet in another light, I see the goodness and grace of being able to hold two things in our hands at once; to pair our joys and sorrows together as any family would. The foundation of love in the first half epitomized and peaked the beauty of our community which set the tone for loving discipline, although it was not facilitated perfectly, it seems right to be capable of handling opposites in such a way that reminds us who we are as a community and how in all ways, we want to help each other grow.

Last Week in Kolanya

Those Good ‘Ole Luo Days

I am involved in a widows and orphans group in Ohero, off the Nairobi—Kisumu rd. One day the group got together to bead bracelets and while we beaded we storied.  “Tell Anna about the olden days around here,” says my friend to Alonso, the Mzee (old man). Mzee leaned forward and stared into his bowl of beads for concentration, for composure and after a pause to rewind the years he slowly began to speak.

“Oh yes, I’ll tell her. I was born in 1939. I remember how the community members used to be together. They could sit and discuss in a forum, they talked about their welfare, or plowing; they discussed everything so at the time of harvest, no one would have to beg and everyone would have harvested. Those who had animals could herd, others would go for wrestling as recreation—the best wrestler would be chosen—then they would invite another clan to compete.

I was ten, and I saw how everyone was together. I saw how they armed themselves in defense of other clans like the kipsigis. Those clans were coming to raid. In meetings they planned how to defend from external attacks and cattle raids. They were using arrows and spears. But we Luos were not planning attacks, just defending. … It prompted the Luos to remove the lower six teeth—for identification—in a war we’ll see if you are one of us, or one of them. Also it was nice for passing medicine to someone whose mouth refused to open. The space was helpful, but now we don’t do that anymore.” I told him to open up and let me see. He smiled to reveal his toothless lower gums.

“I’m seeing differences in how we were together then, and how we are together in present. A long time ago they were loyal and faithful to each other—they were serious—the difference between the older generation and now, they’re just not serious. Now people back on their agreements and want to do things on their own.  But you see here this group of ours, it isn’t so new in theory of course. Our purpose is just a little bit different from those days. Now we believe that the Government is defending everyone, so now our group has a different role. We come to share new ideas and to agree. Being in a group makes people know each other. I went to such and such a place and saw that, can we try it? Will this work? You share a lot, you find out if people are sick. When I heard he was sick, they called me, we collected money and sent him to the hospital and now look at him, he’s recovered! We see that this friend of ours is needing new thatching on her roof, you see how it leaks when the rain gets in? We arrange and build her a new roof. That’s why we have groups now. “

Now we turn to Mary, his wife, her hands deftly stringing beads as she muses over the past like sucking on a cherry pit---The tart and sour taste of those memories are gone, but something solid is left.  She begins mildly, her age roughly 14 years less than her husband’s, but still a grandmotherly type—a “Danni”.  “There was a method of marriage back then—eloping. When I was 13, I came to visit one of my relatives here. We went to the market to buy some vegetables. The men were sitting, and then all of a sudden they forced me to go home with them. If you refused, they cane you or carry you there. Those men were friends of my husband’s. They were sent to bring me home to Alonso because he had seen me in the market. Then they guarded the door so I wouldn’t run away. They were ready to fight my brothers who would come. Once you go into that house and become a woman, a wife, you can’t go home, so I stayed. Then the dowry was all arranged—that’s how we did it back then.” The happy old couple look at each other and that is that.