A few weeks ago Sharon and I were in Kenya with some friends for an animal-viewing
safari. We were in Africa to help conduct vision clinics, and a Kenyan safari
was to be the fun part of the trip after the work part was over.
Before we went to Kenya, it had occurred to us that, since Barack Obama’s father was from Kenya, it might be helpful to have a few campaign buttons and
T-shirts to give to people.
So at the end of our stay in Kenya, we gave our safari driver, Paul, an Obama
T-shirt. He had spoken with pride of this descendent of his country who was
doing pretty well in America, and Paul seemed to appreciate the shirt.
But there were two other incidents that showed…well, I’m not sure what they showed.
Incident number one:
When the phone rang in our room at the guest house in Nairobi, I looked at
Sharon.
“Do you know anybody in Nairobi?” I asked, pretty sure that the answer was no.
When I picked up the receiver, it was a woman’s voice: “Is Sharon there, please?”
“It’s for you,” I said, handing her the phone. This was getting weird.
Sharon listened for a minute, laughed a little, and said, “Yes, we do.” A pause. “Sure. We’ll bring it right down.”
“That was the woman at the front desk who checked us in.”she said. “She wants an Obama button, too.”
A few minutes earlier, in the course of bustling around in our room we had
managed to knock a water glass off the bedside table and it had shattered on
the tile floor.
When I went to tip the man who came to the room to sweep up the glass, he
spotted one of our strategic Obama buttons as I was turning my pocket inside
out fishing for his money. “I like that badge,” he said, breaking into a smile.
“Here, it’s yours,” I said, handing him the “badge” along with his tip.
He broke into an even broader smile and quickly attached the badge to the front
of his uniform shirt. And apparently had gone directly downstairs and showed
off the button to his co-worker at the desk, which led to her phone call to our
room.
I walked down to the desk and gave the woman the button.
The next morning when we were checking out, our two new Best Kenyan Friends were
there, with Obama buttons prominently displayed.
Don’t bother to thank me—just doing my part for international
relations.
(Since this is not a political column, let me hasten to add that if I had been
somewhere in Arizona and had given a hotel employee a John McCain button, I’m sure it would have been received with the same thanks and gratitude).
Incident number two:
It would have helped a lot if the happy people from the guest house had called
over to police headquarters to fill them in on us, because it turned out that
the Kenya police did not project what I would call a friendly vibe.
Our group was in a safari vehicle on our way out of the city when we came to a
police checkpoint, in which bored young men with automatic weapons languidly
check vehicles as they pass through.
The officer in our lane, one of several stopping traffic at that checkpoint,
strode over to the driver’s window and unsmilingly ordered Paul out of the vehicle. He had a mean-looking
baton, and the tenseness of the situation wasn’t helped when Paul and the cop proceeded to have a heated discussion in Swahili
by the roadside.
This went on for a while and involved our driver paying a bribe and our giving
the cop a ride to another checkpoint down the road, but here’s the part of the incident I want to tell you about: At some point in all this,
the cop walked away from Paul and tapped on our van window. He leaned in and
questioned each of us about why we were in Kenya and where we were from. When
he had apparently satisfied himself that we were really American tourists and
not some sinister element come to cause a crime wave in his country, he
motioned that we could close the van door.
And then, in an apparent effort to bond with the people he had just detained and
questioned for no reason, he flashed what he probably used for a smile, and
said one word: “Obama.”
From these incidents, I conclude that the upstanding people at the guest house
and the no-good cop shaking down travelers by the side of the road both take
pride that a man with roots in their country is running for president in the
U.S.
There is, of course, one critical difference: we didn’t give the cop a button.
