Kenya: Prologue to the Prologue
When I moved to Pinehurst, Georgia, I began to recover parts of myself I had set aside—grief shelved, stories downplayed, truths edited to sound more palatable. But truth doesn’t stay quiet forever.
In a prior life, I spent 2005 living in Kisumu, Kenya, as a volunteer at the Tropical Institute of Community Health & Development (TICH). I went to help, to experience another culture, maybe learn a new language. I also went to understand what happens when you open your heart in a place that holds so much beauty and pain and promise. This journal entry is the first re-issue from my Kenya archives and was the prologue for what became my book Poverty & Promise. As I revisit it now, I see it was a turning point, a moment when I stopped pretending things were easy. The truth will set you free.
After being in Kenya for two months, I realize the love sent by family and friends is my secret weapon against the hardships of living in Africa. Their love for me is the sap in my spine, straightening me, keeping my head level, keeping my mind perpendicular to the floor. No tilting.
My family and friends give me strength. I must be strong because there is so much need here. So much need.
I sent my friend, Jennifer Miller, a note last week saying I maintain a balance of being open while protecting my personal boundaries with Kenyans who constantly approach and ask for things; a job, money, food, shoes or to be taken to America.
Who am I bullshitting about balancing openness and personal space?
Me, mainly.
Then a creak, a pop, like tons of ice shifting down a mountain.
Tilting.
Living in Kisumu, seeing poverty, walking around with an open heart yet having little to give but myself is heartbreaking. Each day in Africa brings a thousand heartbreaks. But I ignore the heartache and go to a funeral. And then I have a break down.
I'm not sure exactly what happened. Maybe it was spending the day at Eric's funeral where dogs are kicked and drunks are hit (“it is the African way,” they tell me) and young men drink while burying their friend and women wail. While walking home that evening, two brothers, Churchill and Andrew, run down the darkening Kisumu street to catch up with me, claiming to be taking a pleasant stroll, but I know they ran just to talk to me, to be my friend, to go to the US with me. They run in the dark pretending to be causal, they're very polite, but I cannot be every Kenyan's friend! And don't they consider I might be frightened when people run on darkened streets to catch me?
Flashback to journal entry, Sunday, April 10, 2005:
“Sometimes I grow tired of being in Kenya. Like today. I get tired of smelling hot smoke from yard fires and from wringing heavy clothes by hand. Sometimes when I hear a rooster crow I want to scream. There is constant noise; people shouting, dogs barking, gates banging open and closed, cars crunching down dirt roads, people worshipping through loud song and clapping (for hours and hours), hammering everywhere and bizarre, terrifying calls from huge birds. I get tired of not being able to walk down the street without someone (typically a man) introducing themselves and wanting to be my friend, or wanting to tell me their dreams. I long for my own space, my own home, to decorate and run naked in if I please. I resent rocks in the road making it impossible to walk without looking down, rocks that tear up a pair of good shoes in one trip. I want a refrigerator so I can drink a cold beer at home instead of going to a bar. And I want a refrigerator so I can have cold milk instead of room-temperature milk on cereal and mayonnaise for sandwiches. And so bread will keep for more than two days and I can live like a human being again. But mostly I grow tired of Kenya because it causes me to feel too much and think too much, with orphans in our yard and funerals every day. I want to stop feeling and stop thinking for just a little while, for just a few hours.”
And then I break down.
It begins Sunday afternoon, once I've washed two tubs of clothes and hung them on the line outside our kitchen window. After I read Faulkner's “As I Lay Dying.” I suddenly feel tired and sit on my bed, under the mosquito net, and ache to hold my daughter, Jaime. I cry for Jaime, silently, so no one will hear because all the windows are open and all the household children -- Paul and Mercy and Joyce and Modis -- run hither and thither and mostly past my bedroom window. I rock on the bed, aching to hold Jaime, and lift my arms, imagining her in them, crying silently.
Could this be hormone-induced? There's certainly a strange, hollow feeling in my gut, near my ovaries. So I cry and rock and wonder at the source of the pain until I sleep. Monday morning, I awake and find I don't want to get out of bed. Don't want to lift my head from the pillow. Tired. Immense headache. I text the Reverend and say I won't be into work and I curl up and cry and sleep. Chris from VSO calls and I say I'm home with a headache and he says it could be Malaria, go to Dr. Sokwala for a test. I go back to bed and read and cry and feel disoriented, thinking 'maybe it is Malaria.'
I grab my pack with the emergency medical card and flag down a boda boda, pointing to Dr. Sokwala's address on the card: Ogada Street. He doesn't know it, but I climb on the back of his bicycle anyway and we head to town. I stare at the ground, sort of despondent, though I don't really know the definition of despondent. But suddenly I don't care... about a lot of things. I don't care that I'm not looking and smiling at others. I don't care that I'm not at work. I don't care that I've put the burden of finding Dr. Sokwala on this nice man. I don't care that I don't care. Very peaceful in my not caring.
I'm wearing my glasses but cannot focus my eyes. From nowhere I hear the words, “the truth will set you free” and scenes flash through the sunny haze. My father, drunk, in the middle of the night, taking every bottle out of the cabinet and smashing them with curse words onto the formica kitchen table. Ketchup and mustard, mayonnaise and broken glass commingling in front of my sleepy 4-year-old eyes... Waking one morning with a breast infection, the sickest I've ever been. Jaime is two weeks old and I'm 19 and I can't lift my arm to hold Jaime, to nurse her. Overnight, my left breast becomes hard and red and hot to the touch. I call Daddy in the next town over, crying, please take us to the doctor because Jaime is so tiny and hungry and I can't lift my arm to lift my baby to nurse her. Daddy comes for us... Granny banging the piano with her fat fingers, me sitting next to her on the stool, my feet just touching the floor, Uncle Bill standing over us as we all sing, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me, all the days, all the days of my life.” Uncle Bill, my father's brother, Billy Joe Brown, puts his hand on my shoulder as we sing and when we're through, he says, “Cindi, Honey, you have a very nice voice.” I smile down at my feet just touching the floor. I remember his hand on my shoulder when reading Mama's email three weeks ago saying Uncle Bill passed away. Uncle Bill passed away… Uncle Bill passed away and I’m half a world away. I swallow the news, swallow the grief, swallow hard, sending it down down down to the hollow in my gut near my ovaries. I can't lift my arms to lift her. It's the African way. The truth will set you free.
What is my truth? I feel unloved, uncared for. Not my truth with a capital “T,” just my unfocused truth on the back of a boda boda headed some place we don't know how to find. What's my other truth? I CANNOT CARE ABOUT EVERYONE IN KENYA AND REMAIN WHOLE.
We see Daktari's office. I enter and sit on the right, facing other patients. The room is 12 feet deep from front to back door and about 8 feet wide. Five people are ahead of me. I stare at the floor and seep weep. I avoid looking at the others because I cannot stop seeping weeping. The tears roll until I pull the travel pack of Charmin toilet paper from my bag. Jaime and James gave the Charmin as a gift. A very wise gift for Africa. I miss them and look at the floor, seeping.
The receptionist says, “Madam, you can go in now.” So I rise and walk through the door with a wet face and Dr. Sokwala is surprised by my tears and almost hides it.
“I'm sorry” I say sitting across from her. “But I can't stop crying.” She offers a box of tissues.
“What's wrong?” she asks.
‘I have a headache since yesterday and am disoriented and tired.”
“What anti-malarial do you take?”
“Lariam.”
“What day of the week do you take it?”
“Tuesday.”
“Do you feel this way every Tuesday?”
“No.”
Never...
“Lariam's most common side effect is depression. We may want to switch your medication. But I'm going to send you for a malarial test, okay?”
“Okay.”
She asks me to rest on the examination table while she checks my liver, kidneys and glands for swelling. Nothing noticeable. She avoids the hollow space near my ovaries.
“How old are you?” she asks.
“41.”
“Oh, you can say only 41 because you're young. I'm 56.” She works to level my brain, un-tilt my mind, with her soft laugh.
“You'll get the test results and bring them back to my office this afternoon. I think they'll come back showing nothing, and then we can talk about changing your Malaria medicine.”
They take my blood at the lab at the Nakumatt plaza. An hour later, I pick up the test results and return to Dr. Sokwala. She reads the test results and says, “Are you happy?”
“Yes, it's not malaria.”
“I think,” she begins, “that you're not sick, you're adjusting. Everything here is new; new food, new climate, new friends, new language. Your friends are far away. It's very hard and if you don't admit it's very hard, then the stress will manifest itself physically. Some people get sick, some people cry.”
Admit it's hard? That's the cure?
Ahhhhhh.
This shit is hard.
I tell her everyone approaches me, asking for things – money, jobs, food -- and she says, “Give it back to them. Tell them you're not a tourist, you live here. You're a volunteer and you don't make any money and you're helping through your work and then, you'll see, they'll turn around and will begin to sympathize with you! Stop being a victim.”
There it is. My Truth.
My Truth with a capital T.
I created this victimhood. Now I must un-create.
The tears stop. The tilting slows, then reverses, and once again my mind is perpendicular to the floor.
But despondency scares me – whatever its definition – and in the very early morning hours with crickets popping and in the late night hours with thunder popping, I think 'This shit is hard, this shit is hard.' Admit it and despondency will leave my hollow gut.
No more bullshitting.
No more victomhood.
This shit is hard.
2025 Reflection:
Looking back now, I don’t flinch at my tears or apologize for the anger or ache or exhaustion. I honor that understanding doctor, and that woman—forty-one, barefoot in a foreign land, seeping and weeping and still showing up. In this world, where we’re told to toughen up, move on, and smile for the camera, I’m learning to return to what’s real. To what’s tender. To what tilts us—and what sets us free.
That shit was hard. And I’m proud I wrote it down.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with the creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. She’s working on a book called Blood on a Southern Road about the ghosts we carry and the songs they leave behind. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, and the wild gospel that lives in red clay soil, you can find her listening for the next thing worth saying.
