Kibundo is a little town on the far, far edge of Tanzania. It is a humble town, with a market selling red plastic basins, and a bar with a porch wrapped in chicken wire. The children are cruel and taunting on the road into town alone---and their mothers do nothing to stop it-----but the colonists once planted jacaranda trees along the main road and they bloom in vast arches of violet, infusing their own shade with purple. There is also small chapel with services that commence with unsmiling adolescent girls doing a sweepy, spinning dance down the aisle in lieu of the usual choir in robes. There is a boarding school on the road out of town, and in the afternoons the children, dressed in English blue uniforms, play soccer on the damp green lawn and, when I was in Kibundo some years ago, I stopped to watch them. White fluffy seeds-------floated, caught in a beam of 4pm light, the children playing in the distance.
There is an aid agency compound of cabins at the edge of the small town. (Refugees had come to the area----hundreds of thousands poured over the borders from Congo, Rwanda and Burundi----and aid agencies followed to manage them.) The compound was at the top of a sloping embarkment that overlooked miles and miles of unfettered savannah. In the mornings, a dewy mist hovered until the sun burned the savannah a shimmering gold of afternoon. And every night, fires dotted the dark expanse---mysterious to me----until it seemed the sky had flipped and we looked down at big messy stars.
Every Sunday I walked into the savannah with a Kenyan doctor who was old and used a cane. When we came upon a hut, the family would come out to see all the excitement and the doctor would ask in Swahili How much for the hut? pointing with his cane. This created hope and possibility in the villagers' hearts, until the Kenyan doctor laughed at them and walked on.
The director of the compound was Englishman ravaged by too many years under the unforgiving African sun. He was mad---harmless, but annoying---a dusty, pessimistic, chain-smoking paranoid with uncertain wives flung here and there. He spent the days frothing about the influx that was certain to come any day, and the nights doing the same at the bar in town. The files I was to edit could not be located for a week, and in general I was very bored. I walked a lot, until one day I was threatened by some drunk men far from the compound and so I stopped walking.
It was a beautiful and cruel place.
One day two men pulled up in a Land Rover, and a few days later I pulled out with them. We crossed the Serengeti over four burnt-sienna days----the herds were migrating; at night the frogs croaked as loud as a rock band; and in the mornings we drank coffee by the crocodiles basking on the rocky river bank. All day I sat in the back of the Land Rover with the old army canvas bags and the packing trunks William's father had used when he used to take Hemingway on safari. William's father had died in airplane crash, and his mother had died in a suspicious car accident, and he was still young enough to be clenched, and restless. Out the door flap the aching and parched expanse of generous beauty passed. Fireflies hovered by the door sometimes, and in the distance formidable purple mountains rose.
Several years later, I returned to Kenya to live. I wrote to William and received a unusual reply from his girlfriend: We returned from the hospital yesterday, I have had a miscarriage. This is not a good time for us. The honesty was strange, I had never met her. I wrote back to her, and told her of a friend of mine who had recently lost a baby too---it had died in her womb and she had to wait two days before the surgery. I remember when my had friend called me---she calling from a phone booth on the street. Her husband was in Bhutan and wouldn't be home for days. She was very upset, and when I arrived at her apartment later she said these simple, wise words: Now is a time for crying.
I received a kind reply back from William's girlfriend and we planned to meet, but we never did. I left for Uganda and when I returned to Kenya three years later, by coincidence we bought a car from William's neighbor. I said, How is William? He said, "I'm not sure, I think he's in England." And that is all I've heard.
