There was a lady at the reception desk. She was one of the Project Managers at the organization. She said, come tomorrow. Just like that, I had a job. The good lady pulled it out of her ear for a total stranger dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. And so the next day I started work at Sight Savers’ Resource Center where I helped organize their research material. To my delight and gratitude, it was temporary, and would allow me to make some good money to finance my hustle as a budding playwright and director. I took no joy in prolonged corporate servitude.
I chose to get to work by walking the two-mile distance every morning and back home. I did not want to have to push and shove with the masses that jammed up the busses and matatus. I thoroughly detested that part of public transportation where you became nothing but one of hundreds of potatoes in a sack, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. You boarded with clean shoes and alighted with mud all over your feet on a rainy day. No, thanks, I’d rather walk.
I was psychologically ill-prepared for my walking-to-work experience. I should have been warned, prayed for and counseled. Up until that first day of my walk from Golf Course Estate to Sight Savers, I had never really known what the word “masses” meant. I had written about it in my college papers with academic authority and educated ignorance. Now I came face-to-face with the masses. They started flowing out of the cracks and crannies of Kibera like an invasion of human cicadas.
They marched silently along Mbagathi Way, and I marched with them, shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath. With every step they increased in numbers - hundreds, nay thousands, until they felt like a swarm around me. Not a single good-morning was uttered, not a smile, not a grunt, not a nod; just a steady march of chiseled chins, battered boots and fractured spines tired of holding up the weight of shattered dignities and distended dreams. I was shaken to the core. I lived in Nairobi and never knew this side of life existed. I knew, but I didn't know.
As I was slowly engulfed by this sea of broken humanity heading towards their daily labors at Industrial area, jua kali sheds, road-side kiosks, hawkers’ alleys and hustlers’ dens, I started to suffocate. The air was dunk with unsurrendered sweats and decayed hopes. I was trapped, without any place to go except move with the masses, march with the mules; move with the masses, march with the mules; move with the masses, march with mules…
I found myself trying to catch the faces, perchance to see a wrinkle of hope, a resolve to survive, and when I did, my heart raced ahead of the march with shear excitement. I recall getting home in the evening and writing the poem, “Faces.” I so badly wanted to etch for eternity, somewhere in poetry, the humanity therein, the drop of dignity that still clung to a beaten brow, the snap of a defiant spine that would one day march to a beat all its own. I will tell their story; I will tell the world.
Now this old memory from a far-away land comes rushing at me like a river broken at its banks. I'm in another world, thousands of miles away from the sidewalks of Mbagathi Way. I'm a lot older. Today, a Mr. Jacobs who was laying cable in the heat of Washington, DC's summertime said to me, “I’m a mule. I work long hours, six days a week, sometimes seven, for minimum wage. On the day I get to rest, I feel lost, like a slave looking for his master. That is a sick mind.” Yet some call him lazy for seeking government help to supplement his family's nutrition, relief in rent, healthcare he cannot afford. I caught a stone in my throat. I said goodbye, but I have no problem finding this man. He streams out of American homes every morning in the thousands, nay, millions. A march of mules.
