Destroyers
Dave Mckay
Destroyers
by David Mckay
P.O. Box A678, Sydney South 1235,
Australia.
email: [email protected]
Copyright 2008 David Mckay.
Thank you for your support.
ISBN: 9781301093069
Table Of Contents
Introduction--Shinyalu
Chapter 1 Trouble
Chapter 2 Assistance
Chapter 3 A Loan
Chapter 4 A Tight Budget
Chapter 5 Josephat
Chapter 6 An Exciting Offer
Chapter 7 Culture Shock
Chapter 8 A Scanner Phone
Chapter 9 Relations with Amy
Chapter 10 Australia
Chapter 11 Quaker Service
Chapter 12 Back Home
Chapter 13 Josephat Returns
Chapter 14 Rosy Decides
Chapter 15 Destruction
Chapter 16 God's Good Earth
Chapter 17 Implanted
Chapter 18 Missing!
Chapter 19 Unity
Chapter 20 Becoming a Man
Chapter 21 Josephat Spotted
Chapter 22 Amy and the Kids
Chapter 23 Abundance
Chapter 24 Going Too Far
Chapter 25 Another Disaster
Chapter 26 Survival
Chapter 27 Despair
Chapter 28 An Invitation
Chapter 29 The End of Josephat
Chapter 30 Life in the Palace
Chapter 31 The Entertainment Hall
Chapter 32 The Alien
Chapter 33 Another One
Chapter 34 The Press Conference
Chapter 35 Kakamega Forest
Swahili Glossary
Back to top
Introduction. Shinyalu
Shinyalu was not so different from any one of a thousand other villages in Western Kenya. It was a collection of small shops (mostly butchers with chopping blocks for counters and fly-covered meat hanging beside the blocks) and open-air stalls selling produce, used clothing, pots, tools, and hand-made goods out of handcarts or just from tarps spread on the ground. The village had a post office, general store, hardware shop, kinyosi*, and numerous cafes which served up generous portions of ugali*,beans, and sukuma wiki*. On market days Shinyalu would attract a thousand or more shoppers, coming to sell their livestock and/or to stock up on essentials.
Shinyalu was situated at the T-junction of two dirt roads, one going south to the Kakamega Forest (and north to the paved road that leads west to Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria); and the other going northeast to Kaka-mega, where locals could get most of their "luxury" items: furniture, windows, anything electrical, and exotic foods like pineapples, potatoes, or chocolate.
Smack in the middle of theT-junction there were always matatus* and at least half a dozen boda-boda* drivers parked, waiting for business. Vehicles actually negotiating the road would simply drive around them, being careful not to move too close to the edges, where the camber was so steep that they were constantly in danger of slipping into deep rainwater drains that extended down both sides of the road.
(*Swahili definitions appear in a list on here.)
Roads like these linked villages throughout the interior. In the dry season they were a series of rock-hard ruts and pot holes, that threatened the suspensions of anything that dared to travel on them. In the wet, they turned into slippery ooze that regularly sucked vehicles into the drains, where driver and passengers would be forced to wait for sufficient volunteers to drag them out, using strong ropes wrapped around the nearest tree.
A hundred metres east of the markets, on the road to Kakamega, lived Amy Walker. Amy was a thin, softly spoken, unmarried Australian Aborigine, in her late fifties. Amy had a twitch in her left eye, which had led to her being called Winky by those who knew her well. She had been raised by a European family in North Queensland, but fifteen years earlier she had become convinced that she should go and live with her "people". Amy believed that the Australian Aborigines had, centuries ago, migrated there from Kenya, and that the way to find her spiritual roots would be to return to Africa. Here in this remote corner of Kenya, she had learned to speak fluent Swahili, as well as Luhya, the more popular local dialect. Over the years, people in the village had ceased to think of her as an Australian, and had come to accept her as one of their own. One by one, she took in selected orphans, until she had nine additions to her household.
An independent Pentecostal church in Queensland had sponsored Amy at the start, but two years after she left Australia, she had a falling out with them over religious differences. Amy had been forced to find support from other sources ever since. Although she had been granted Kenyan citizenship, the local government offered her no help with finances. Nevertheless, circumstances and her own doggedness had led Amy to enough individual supporters over the years to provide her with a dilapidated van and a four-room brick building to house her and the children who lived with her.
The house had no running water or electricity, but it and the van were considered luxuries by her less fortunate neighbours. Locals often used those luxuries to argue that Amy owed it to them to take on more of the workload in caring for hundreds of orphans in the area.
"You can only scratch as far as your arm can reach," she would reply, quoting a local proverb. "If I try to do too much, we all lose."
Nevertheless, she was often pressed into assisting in other ways, as readers will soon see.
The most notable thing about Shinyalu, about Amy, and about all of the people living in Shinyalu, was just how typically unnotable they were. There are thousands of similar villages throughout the world, all populated by the poorer half of the planet's citizens. People in them live and die without anyone from the major metropolises ever knowing a thing about them. Entire villages could be wiped out, through disease, famine, civil war, natural disasters, or political genocide, and the rest of the globethose who think they know what is really happening in the world today might never even hear of it.
But this is the story of one singularly unnotable bodaboda driver, from that one unnotable village, who came to be part of events that shaped the world.
Table of contents
Chapter 1. Trouble
"Please, Madam, I have a trouble... please."
It was very late on a Friday night in January. An unseasonal light rain was falling. Amy Walker had sent Benjamin to the door in response to a weak knock.
"Open it, Benjie," she said when Benjamin hesitated at opening to a stranger so late at night. Amy was fully occupied holding Karla, the youngest of nine orphans who lived with her. Benjie, at 18, was the oldest, and he had awakened her when the baby started vomitting.
Light from the lantern on the floor was visible from the road. It was the only light still showing on that side of the village.
"Wah! What happened?" Benjie exclaimed in shock as he opened the door.
The young boy slumped into Benjie's arms before he could answer.
"Winky, it's Moses Chikati! He's bleeding! Real bad!" Benjie struggled to hold the boy up and deal with the blood at the same time. Moses Chikati, the 14-year-old son of a local butcher, had been tightly holding his right bicep prior to the collapse, but when he let go, blood poured from below the elbow of his badly cut forearm.
Amy laid Karla on the floor and rushed to Benjie's aid. What she saw would have been too much for most people, but not her. The lad's forearm had been badly broken, just below the elbow. It had been sliced halfway through, causing it to dangle as though separated. Fortunately the main arteries did not appear to have been severed.
"Lay him here, and wake Anna, ay," Amy told Benjie. At 16, Anna was the second oldest of the orphans.
; Amy elevated the injured arm, to minimise blood flow, and squeezed hard just above his elbow. It took both her hands to do it, one encircling the skinny bicep, and the other struggling to keep the half-severed piece in line with the rest of the arm.
When Benjie returned with Anna, they used an old rag to make a tourniquet, which Amy applied, before resting the entire arm on the boy's stomach and carrying him to Amy's old Hi-Ace. Benjie climbed in first and then helped pull Moses in after him. He had to kneel over the lanky body that lay in the aisle between the seats.
Anna stayed to clean up the blood and care for the children, while Amy and Benjie headed for the hospital. Amy had thought of taking Karla too, but knew it was just a matter of time before the baby's fever would break, and this was far more urgent.
In the wet, slippery conditions, she had to struggle to keep the vehicle from sliding off either side of the road on the ten kilometre trip to Kakamega. They reached the hospital in half an hour, a good time in the wet, especially at night.
Moses was still breathing, but his heartbeat was weak as they carried him into the hospital. The night nurse called for the doctor, and Amy, who was type O, donated blood, which was given to him while they waited. When the medico arrived, he assured her that Moses would be fine. Amy and Benjie then left for the journey home.
Table of contents
Chapter 2. Assistance
The next morning the village of Shinyalu was abuzz with what had happened overnight. Fred Chikati, a local butcher, had attacked his wife with a meat cleaver in a drunken rage, and brutally killed her. Moses had been injured while trying to protect his mother, and had fled in the direction of Winky Walker's house, probably because it was the only one with a light on at that hour. His younger sister, Rosy, though uninjured, had been found cowering in a corner in shock, when neighbours went to investigate the screams.
The police had come to Amy's door shortly after she and Benjie returned from the hospital. They were, of course, looking for information, but Amy was little help, apart from telling them where she had taken Moses, and what his condition was. The sun was just coming up when the police left.
Later that morning, Fred was found sleeping in a nearby maize field and the police dragged him off to the local lock-up, where a stiff beating gave them all the information they would need to lock him away for the rest of his life.
That same afternoon, Fred Chikati's brother, George, came by with young Rosy. He wanted Amy to take the two youngsters in as orphans.
"They ain't orphans," Amy whispered angrily, hoping that Rosy would not understand if she used English. "They're your family; you take them." All of the kids staying with her had lost both parents to AIDS, and none of them had any other living relatives. She had refused to help literally hundreds of other orphans in the area because they did not match those criteria. Locals knew her rules, and most respected it; but George did not let that deter him.
"We'll not take them," he said. "They're cursed, Madam. A bad spirit will come on us if we help them."
"Don't be stupid," said Amy. "A bad spirit will come on you if you don't help them. They're your kin."
Her words had little effect. When George returned to the markets he left Rosy on the road in front of Amy's house, with a strong warning for her not to follow him.
"C'mon in, girl," Amy said to Rosy when George was gone. Rosy was 11, two and a half years younger than Moses, who had turned fourteen just before Christmas. Both children were big for their age.
Rosy was not talking. But she laughed.. a strangely happy laugh. She used it (and a word or two here and there) to respond to Amy's questions. For all Amy knew, this was how she always communicated.
Amy was able to get information out of Rosy just by asking the right questions and by watching how she laughed in response. Through this, she learned that Rosy was afraid to return to the butcher shop; and through her own children she learned that the family had a small shamba nearby, with a mud hut on it. Their father had only been renting the butcher shop, and so it would no longer be available to the children now that he was in jail.
Rosy stayed at Amy's overnight, and the next day, Sunday, Amy took her out to the shamba, along with Lucy and the twins. Lucy was seven, and Jane and Gene were nine. The land was in the process of being prepared for planting, and the hut looked like it had been used from time to time.
"Do you sleep here?" Amy asked.
Rosy laughed in a way that expressed embarrassment, and she shook her head vigorously.
"Did Moses stay here?"
Same reaction.
"So who stayed here?"
She raised her eyebrows, laughed again, then screwed her face up in disgust. "Bad lady," was all she said.
Whoever it was, Rosy obviously did not approve.
From the hut Rosy picked up a jembe, a short handled heavy hoe, and she proceeded to drop it forcefully into thick grass that had grown around the edges of the tiny block, and then to lever the grass out before turning each piece of sod upside-down to die. Soon she had enticed Gene into using the hoe, while she checked on a few other things. As Amy looked on, he got the feeling that it had been Rosy's job to farm the tiny plot.
Amy also worked out from a few gestures and words thata larger,neighbouring block belonged to the children's uncharitable uncle, George Chikati.
Kenyan parents divide their land up between their sons. With each new generation, the plots become smaller. Some sons sell out to their brothers, then move to cities like Nairobi and Mombasa; but for those who stay, just surviving on what they can grow on an acre, then half an acre, and then a quarter of an acre becomes more and more impossible with each new generation. No doubt the uncle wanted to see the children disposed of, so that he could claim back his brother's share of the family plot.
On Monday, when most of the children were off at school, Amy decided to leave Benjie in charge and take another trip to the hospital in Kakamega to check on Moses. Rosy came with her.
When they were in the hallway, before entering Moses' ward, Amy detected a hurried movement in the boy's bed about the same time that the nurse cleared them to enter the room.
Moses had a big grin on his face. Rosy ran over to him and leaned her head on his left shoulder, both to comfort him and to comfort herself at the same time.
"Me, I got a surprise, Madam," Moses said, looking over Rosy's head at Amy. "Watch this, Rosy," he added, and then, with a flourish, he pulled his right arm out from under the sheet.
Amy was shocked to see that the boy's arm had been cut off, below the elbow. Moses was displaying a heavily bandaged stump. And he was treating it like a joke! His resilience was amazing; but Amy was furious.
"Wait here," was all she could say as she turned to race back out of the room.
"What have they done to him? What have they done?" she whispered to the duty nurse in something close to a shout. "They didn't need to do that."
"Madam, you need to talk to the doctor about that. We don't have specialists here for putting pins and wires in; so he just took. That was better for him."
"Easier maybe, but not better," Amy said in disgust, as she turned to walk back into the room. The boy's life could be ruined just because of their indifference!
Moses was busy talking to Rosy, who was still only responding with laughs and giggles. It was hard to believe they had just lost both of their parents and one arm.
"You must not go with her. We will lose the land," Moses was explaining in Luhya.
"Sawa," Rosy managed to say in response, before adding her signature giggle, to show support for her brother's logic.
"Thank you, Madam, for helping me," Moses said to Amy in English, when he saw her approaching the bed. "Me, I think I woulda been gone they said that if you did not assist, I would be over the mountain and gone."
Amy was witnessing what she would come to see as trademarks of the young boy. One was his command of language. He could have easily spoken to her in Luhya
, but he enjoyed using English, and he would often use it in the strangest ways.. not because he lacked vocabulary, but rather because he had more vocabulary than he knew what to do with.
The other trademark was his spontaneous good nature... an ability to stay positive in the face of any adversity. These were qualities that were destined to take him to the top of the world.
Table of contents
Chapter 3. A Loan
"Madam, we got a trouble again. Please, can you give some help?" It was early Friday morning and Moses was back at Amy's door with Rosy at his side. He had been out of hospital two days, and, with his sister, had moved into the mud hut on their land, 400 metres down the road from where Amy lived. Their mother's body had been buried on her family's property the day before, because Fred had never paid a dowry. It made matters worse for the children, who were now more or less illegitmate.
"Show her, Rosy," he said, and Rosy turned to the side while lifting her blouse to show two round burn marks on her lower back. Amy bent down to get a closer look, and reached out to gingerly touch one of the burns. Rosy drew back in pain, but still managed a laugh.
"How did this happen?" Amy asked, although she knew without asking.
"He wants the land, madam, pure and easy. He put cigarettes on her back. Even he will do it again if we sleep there. Last night we laid in a shamba down the road. But we need the land, Madam!"
Rosy lowered her blouse and looked up at Amy with eyes that spoke sadness, but a mouth that still smiled.
"One second and I'll come with you," Amy said. Her children had just sat down to breakfast in the crowded living room, and so Benjie was put in charge.
On the walk out to the property, Amy asked Moses how his arm was.
"It hurts where it isn't," he said in English. "Me, I can't comfort it now... because it's not there."
Rosy skipped ahead and turned to take a swing at Moses' phantom right hand. He instinctively pulled back and she laughed.
"You know English too!" Amy remarked. She had assumed that Rosy's shyness meant she was not as smart as Moses.
To reach Moses' land, the trio needed to walk down a narrowpaththatpassedthroughhisuncle'sland. George saw them coming and was waiting.
