TwoHelp Kenya

Finding Mombasa

January 30, 2006 on 6:28 am |

It is human nature to take time to adjust to new surroundings. For me, it took me nearly two weeks to adjust to the bustle of Kenyan cities. My disgust for the garbage and pollution and my reactions of horror to the congested mixture of pedestrians and vehicles were at their hight when I first arrived in Mombasa.

Guide books have a way of misrepresenting the locations they cover and painting them in a cheery light. I am unsure whether that is done on purpose, to convince potential travelers to purchase the guide or if the books are written by people who have an easier time overcoming the shock of new culture than I. Both the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet mention the charm of parts of Mombasa, the allure of the 400-year-old Fort Jesus, and the difference in culture brought about by the heavy influence of the Portuguese and Middle Easterners along the coastal areas of Kenya. These are reported to be most noticeable in Mombasa, an ‘exotic’ city that I had known previously only from a Warren Zevon song.

After 6 brief hours in Mombasa in the middle of the night, before departing for Malindi, I was overcome by the garbage in the streets and the wet heat that hovered around 85 degrees at night. I was glad to leave, disappointed with my initial impression.

Returning to Mombasa made me skeptical. The road from Malindi is a treacherous pitted stretch of disintegrating tarmac filled with speeding matatus (minibus taxis), exhaust-belching trucks, and giant busses of European tourists flying past the locals to reach the walled-compounds of the beach resorts. Three hours in the back of a Red Cross vehicle, facing sideways, sweating, getting covered in dust and exhaust ejected from the vehicles ahead only heightened my skepticism. Kirsten, Winnie, and I arrived in Mombasa sticky, tired, and ready to leave.

It was that evening, after we cleaned up, that we ate a superb meal at the Tamarind restaurant, overlooking the night lights of the city. Things were improving.

Our hotel, the Royal Court, was listed in the Rough Guide as one of the nicest in Mombasa. The seediness of the lobby initially startled me. It reeked of smoke and the sound of slot machines coming from the casino. A sign advertised large bingo prizes, given away several times each day. The air conditioning was off and by the time I made it to my room, I smelled like a smoker and was sweating profusely. The heavy heat was there to stay. It was then I found out that the air conditioner in my room did not work.

At midnight I went down to the front desk to ask for a room change. There was no way that I would be able to sleep with the damp heat. It was like having a large stranger breathing down the back of my neck. I thought that a cold shower would help, but the cold water was lukewarm and the shower head was helplessly encrusted with mineral deposits. The single stream of water that sprayed out went directly in my eye when I turned on the shower. It took 5 minutes to get my hair wet. I felt dirtier after drying off with the mildewed towel provided by the hotel than I had upon arrival.

The front desk refused to give me a new room. Instead, they sent me back up with a remote control and a maintenance man. The maintenance man used the remote control to turn on the AC unit. It was blowing air, but I didn’t hear the compressor. I asked the man to wait until the compressor turned on. We stood and looked at each other for about 7 minutes. The compressor never came on. Finally, he climbed out the window onto the tiny balcony, bent over the compressor, and hit a hidden reset switch. With an unhealthy mechanical groan, the compressor started. The AC began to cool the room. Telling me to not turn it off, the maintenance man returned to the lobby. I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed. As I pulled back the threadbare bed cover, the compressor made a terrible noise, the lights flickered, and the AC turned itself off. Dammit.

It was twenty minutes past midnight when I called the front desk to report the problem. This time, they agreed to let me switch rooms. When the maintenance man arrived with the bellboy, they were alarmed that I had used a towel and pulled back the bed cover. The bellboy took my dirty towel, gave me a dirty look, and escorted me and my half-packed suitcase to another room on a lower floor. Removing the clean towel from my new room and replacing it with the dirty towel, the bellboy departed and the maintenance man made sure that the AC turned on with the switch by the door before leaving. It was blowing hot air. The compressor did not turn on. I was too tired to complain.

Through the night, my growing frustration reinforced my initial impression of Mombasa. By the time that I awoke, severely dehydrated, at 3 in the morning, my bed and pillow were soaked with sweat. The travel alarm clock read the temperature in the room at 33 degrees Celsius. The humidity was through the roof. I took a cold shower (with a slightly improved showerhead) and then rolled around, thirsty, in the sweaty bed, in the dark, for about 20 minutes before calling Alexis. For a country where it is highly recommended to not drink the tap water, it’s disappointing to check into a hotel that fails to provide a bottle of drinking water in the room. I had only been in Kenya for two weeks, yet I was ready to take my suitcase full of dirty clothes and go home.

The next day the sun was a furnace that had glued my clothes to me by 9 o’clock in the morning. Winnie departed and Kirsten and I spent the day visiting the homes of PLWHAs (People Living With HIV/AIDS) in the city slums. All indications were that they had prepared their answers to our questions in advance. We found out that the KRCS Mombasa staff frequently takes visitors to see the same clients. Where we looked for genuine answers, we received rehearsed rhetoric. Everything was presented as perfect. Each meeting ended with a plea for money from the clients we visited.

Nothing is worse than being in a position that restricts you from assisting. For a mere $15, Kirsten and I could have turned around the lives of one family by restoring their soap-making business. They had been forced to spend their savings to put their children into secondary school and were now unable to continue their small business. However, a gift of cash would have created a bad precedent for the Kenya Red Cross, since they are unable to sustain such gifts and are unable to provide them to other clients. For the clients themselves, their neighbors would have accused them of excluding them from opportunities and may have turned to shunning them for having HIV. Many don’t understand why the KRCS helps people with HIV but doesn’t help others. In the worst case scenario, neighbors may have begun to view their HIV status as a way to make money and may have deliberately infected themselves with the disease in order to get handouts.

After an interminable day of sick people and focus group discussions, Kirsten and I asked to be dropped off at Fort Jesus, so that we could spend the last 90 minutes of sunlight doing something outside and winding down from the stress of the day. Fort Jesus is a Portuguese fort that was built in the 1590s. Through the years, it has been well-maintained and now stands as one of the most popular sights to see in Mombasa. From the intricately carved Lamu doors, reminiscent of Moorish architecture in Portugal and Spain, to the old Portuguese graffiti that has been restored, the history of Mombasa begins to spring forth.

Mombasa is an old city that has seen many owners. Some evidence places the age of the original Swahili Mombasa settlement at over 2000 years old. Compared to Nairobi, which is a mere 100 years old, there is a lot of history and culture in Mombasa. The Portuguese sacked the city during the 1500s and it proceeded to switch ownership many times. More recently, it was under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and the Sultan of Oman. The heavy Middle Eastern influence in the region has left Islam as the predominate religion, a reminder of which are the early-morning chants and prayers broadcast from the minarets on the local mosques.

In Mombasa, Kirsten and I met Sheik Idris, head of the Kenyan National Council of Imams and Preachers. A powerful presence in the local religious and political scenes, Sheik Idris works in conjunction with the Kenya Red Cross (the name of which is off-putting for some Muslims) to educate the Muslim populations of Mombasa about HIV. Through his guidance, imams throughout the region use the local network of mosques to help decrease stigma towards the disease, while encouraging constituents to go for voluntary counseling and testing. With a booming voice, speaking smooth Kiswahili (residents of the coast claim that their dialect is the only true Kiswahili), Sheik Idris patiently answered our questions about HIV in the Muslim community for over an hour, while several dozen people waited to meet with him. Our interesting discussion ended with several other imams popping open some coconuts for us, for a cool treat of coconut juice and meat.

Outside of Fort Jesus is a road that leads into the Mombasa Old Town. The first block of this stretch is infested with tourist shops and pushy purveyors eager to sell cheap wares for far too much money.

However, after a block or two, Old Town turns into the true cultural center of Mombasa and the most culturally genuine and rich area that I have seen in all of Kenya. Perhaps it was the low season or perhaps tourists fear to venture too far from the main roads, but the Old Town of Mombasa is truly charming. White mosques with stained glass windows guard narrow streets with little vehicular traffic, large numbers of children playing and people going about their everyday lives. Every house sports a carved wooden Lamu door and the people that duck in and out of them fit into the scene, men wearing flowing white robes and many women in full black Muslim dress, locally called ‘ninja’ garb.

The children played in the streets. For them, it was fantastic to have their picture taken so that they could see it on the camera screen. Others played tag and football. Almost all of them greeted us with their school-taught English phrases, “Hello! How are you?” and “What is your name?” They wanted to talk, to shake hands, to join us for a walk, and to know where we were from.

Their parents kept an eye on them from local restaurants, food stalls, shops, and porches. Many people waved, smiled, asked how we were, welcomed us to Mombasa, and wished us a nice stay in Kenya. During our hour-long wander through the Old Town, we only saw one other (obvious) tourist. This was the first place I had seen in Kenya where the cycle of mutual exploitation – the tourist vs. the native culture – was absolutely absent. Nobody tried to take advantage of us and we were not there to take advantage of them, only to enjoy a few moments of immersion into their everyday normal lives.

I was tired. I was hot and sweaty. I was filthy from the dust and exhaust. I was lost, wandering, sauntering. Yet, for the first time since my arrival in the city, I didn’t care. I would have thrown my guide book in the garbage right then and there. Finding the charm in Mombasa is not about walking down the correct street or seeing the most interesting museum. Finding the charm in Mombasa is about letting go, accepting the sultry heat, forgetting about being dirty, forgetting about being a different color, engaging the people, and forgetting that you are not from Mombasa. While the scores of European tourists sat confined in their walled compounds along the beach, I was happy to be immersed amongst the people their walls were meant to keep out.

It is an exotic and different place. For me, once I let go of the differences between my life and Mombasa, I found it to be wonderful.