Dancing in Summerland

I am leaving the tent camp at Maasai Mara with two men hitching a ride with us into Narok where we are again going to lunch at the Dreaming Garden Restaurant and where I will wait to switch to another van to go off with its passengers to Lake Nakuru, while Damian and Natalia (the Argentinians) will continue on to Nairobi.  Another two men will ride with us to the point in the road where their cattle transport truck got stuck in the mud and where they have contracted to meet a local tractor owner who will try to pull them out.  As we are waiting to leave camp I’m seated in the passenger seat of the van with the door still open.  Maasai men in traditional garb with thick bracelets around their wrists and ankles are milling about the van, chatting with the drivers, checking out the vehicle, passing time, saying goodbye.  I point to the watch on the wrist of one of the Maasai men shaking hands with me.  The watch has a very unusual and attractive face, and I say casually and totally unconsciously to the man pointing to his wrist, “Nice watch.”  I’ll learn not to do this one of these days, because in a flash he has his watch off and is attaching it to my wrist.  So I take my watch off, one of probably comparable value, a Casio, or Timex, and hand it to him.  He likes my watch.  It has a much nicer Velcro band than his watchband that is plastic.  Another Maasai man comes over to the van; he takes off his watch and places it on my other wrist.  He takes my watch from the first man.  He examines it.  I give his watch to the second man.  A third man comes over, not to be denied a part in the action of trade, and soon watches are being examined and moving from hand to hand.  I end up with all three watches while they admire mine.  I give back two of the watches and keep the one I first admired.  The owner of that watch takes my watch.  We each put our new watches on.  The van driver arrives, says “Twende,” (we go). All of the Maasai men and I shake hands.  I admire my new wristwatch – ascribe it with Maasai meanings, with the pleasures of time and travel, of possessions and value, of good faith and non-attachment.  It acquires significances not associated with my one time watch now adorning the wrist of a Maasai man hundreds of miles away.  I feel myself to be an inordinately happy trader. 
As opposed to my new driver, the loud and sometimes impatient and annoyed Titus, who is definitely not happy with his current six passengers, two of whom are a young Japanese couple, a single man, a single woman, and the two somewhat dour (shy?) young women from Norway who the driver tells me never say yes to anything he asks or suggests and will probably not tip him well, if at all.  I nickname them the “No Way” girls and commit myself to getting a yes out of them by offering cookies I’ve bought, or to buy them sodas.  I even ask if I can help them out of the van, or carry something for them.  By the end of the day I am batting zero in my effort to get them to yes.
Titus is just not my favorite guy.  He is opinionated and believes things I don’t … that Obama hates Kenya, that Tanzanians are lazy, that I should help support his kids.  He is critical and annoyed with other drivers on the road.  The father of three young children, two of whom are in private school, he is also very obviously trying to see what he can get out of me.  Nothing ventured nothing gained. 
When we get to our overnight guesthouse on the far side of Nakuru, a bustling town one hundred miles northwest of Nairobi on the main (only?) Mombasa/Nairobi road that goes to the Somali and Ugandan borders and is filled with big trucks making their runs, Titus takes me aside and asks if I trust him.
“Sure,” I say hesitantly.
“Would you like to stay at a better guesthouse, the one I stay at?” he asks.  “No extra cost.  Nicer rooms.  Better showers.  We’ll have a drink and dinner together.”
“Sure,” I say … hesitantly.
So we drive to a part of town that I would say is definitely seedy.  On the way we pass what I’m sure will forever be my favorite store name in all of Africa, the “Pentagon Butchery.” 
The gate to the guesthouse/motel-like structure we will arrive at is opened by one of the armed twenty-four hour security men on duty.  We are again the only guests I can see and we park inside a gravel courtyard, surrounded on all four sides by the motel, a barricade, a fort.  My room is meager but fine.  I do yoga, have a shower, play with the functions on my new watch, do not use the hair pick left so considerately hanging next to the room mirror.  Titus comes to call me for dinner around seven.  We pass through a small locked gate opened by another security guard on the other side of the courtyard, pass through an open air restaurant with a few customers, pass goat carcasses hanging in the open restaurant kitchen, pass some private dining rooms, and end up seated at a table with a pool hall on one side and a bar with a big dance floor on the other.  Some men are playing pool, but no one else is dining and no one is in the darkened dancehall.  Titus has preordered our dinner, a big single plate of stewed chicken in a light tomato sauce, steamed spinach, which I tell him is kale (which it is), and he insists is spinach, and roasted whole potatoes that are just fabulous dipped in the sauce.  There are no utensils on the table.  A waitress comes over with a plastic pitcher of quite hot water and a basin.  She pours hot water over our hands, which we “wash.”  The meal is shared and eaten with our fingers.  Titus tells me he always sits at this table so he can see people coming from all sides.
“If something is biting you it’s inside your clothing,” he says.

Titus calls his wife in Nairobi.  He puts me on the phone with her.  She is delightful.  He next puts me on the phone with his eleven year old daughter Elizabeth who wants to be a doctor and loves science and who I encourage with all my heart to live her dream.  Then I take my leave, and retire for the evening by eight, falling asleep quickly.
I am up again at midnight, awakened by fabulous throbbing music coming from the dance floor on the other side of the gate. I so want to go and see what is happening, but this exploration seems beyond even my comfort zone and sense of prudence; that I would walk into a bar somewhere in Kenya where I’ll be the only white person and watch people dancing.  I don’t think so.  But I so want to go.  I really do.  I want to see Africa.  Isn’t this what I came for?  So I get dressed.  Then I get undressed.  Then I dress, struggling gaily with myself about the potential risks and potential rewards.  I think I must have taken off and put on my pants three times.  I’m laughing at myself having such a good time not knowing what the hell I’m going to do and enjoying my struggle.  Of course in the end my pants are on and I cannot deny myself the experience of seeing what can be seen.
I leave almost all my money in the room, taking just a little cash, my passport, and one credit card, as I head out into the night, cross the courtyard, am admitted through the small locked gate that separates the motel from the rest of the complex by an armed guard, pass tables filled with people, and enter into a totally transformed environment, the music loud and pulsing, the dance floor, complete with strobe light, in what is a very well designed bar and tables surrounding the dance floor, a night club atmosphere, busy waitresses taking drink orders, and the dance floor filled with sixty or seventy people moving in delight.
I park myself in a corner of the room, but it is not long before a quite attractive woman in a lowcut blouse finds me and asks if I want to dance.  I decline.  She smiles.  She comes near enough to rub her leg against mine.  She has a genuinely lovely smile. 
“Buy me a drink?” she asks. 
“I left my money in my room,” I say. 
“Well let me go to your room and get it with you,” she says. I say no.

A man comes over to introduce himself.  I recognize him as a guide. He says he’s headed to Maasai Mara tomorrow.  We have a pleasant conversation about where I stayed in Mara, who my guide was, what animals I saw.  He tells me again that he is a guide, as if I didn’t get it. 
“You are about to have a real taste of Africa, my friend,” he says smiling and nodding toward the woman, “Just watch your passport and your money, I don’t want to find you crying in the morning.”

The dancers are absolutely wonderful.  Mostly men are dancing with men, or dancing by themselves, or dancing with whoever is next to them.  There are also women dancing, some with women, some with men, some alone.  The movements are subtle, feet often hardly leaving the floor, shoulders and hips so fabulously expressive in such a narrow range.   Some men dance with women whose backs are turned to them, the man’s hands on the woman’s thighs, pulling her into him as she dances and moves.  Some women caress their breasts as they dance.  Older men are dancing alone.  Big men are dancing lithely.  The strobe light magnifies the movements.  The dancers seem so happy, so lost in delight.

“Welcome to Summerland,” the same woman says to me, “I’m Kendin, would you like some company tonight?”
“Well yes and no,” I say.
“Tell me three reasons why no,” Kendin says smiling coyly.
“Well one is that I have a woman at home I really really love,” I say.  “Two is disease.  And three is that I’m just not the kind of guy who goes off with women he meets in bars, women who go off with strangers.”
“You not fear on me,” she says, and I cannot hear if she is saying fear or fair.  But it doesn’t really matter. 
“Come, dance,” I say, and walk onto the dance floor where the music literally doesn’t ever pause or stop, the sound and the Afro pop beat awesome, the dancers in some state of delight, and before long so am I, other women coming near as we dance together, no one paying the slightest attention to me as best as I can tell, except for one slightly drunk man who comes over to bumps fists with me and shake my hand as Kendin leaves the dance floor, and I am alone … with about sixty other people, in a bar, in Africa, dancing in delight.

Later Kendin asks again if we can go to my room.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she says, “Just be friends.  Have company.  Be fear on me.”
She is thirty three, and beautiful, a beautician with a three year old son.  And my answer is still no.  The fact is no.  Fear or fair is no.  And when I say goodnight to Kendin I almost feel badly for her. Later, when the first rooster calls at four in the morning and wakes me in my room, the music is still playing.