Stories

It’s crazy, sometimes, the stories that people have.

On Thursday, my team got to go and meet with a man who was, for many years, the head elder of the Munyaya tribe (one of the unreached people groups in this area).

He was in an accident early on in our internship, and we were able to help pay for some of his medical bills, but we still had not actually ever met him.

In the common style, three of the walls in his front room were taken up by upholstered, FIRMLY stuffed couches – enough seating for the eleven us of us, plus himself – and the fourth was covered by a large, cabineted (Is that even a word?) entertainment center with a small television and a drape blocking the view into the back bedroom.

We sat and drank chai (tea) and watched a video of a ceremony where he was granted a religious honor. (I think. I was sitting near the end of the entertainment center, so my view of the screen was…not.) And then, he told us stories.

We learned that, if you are ever going to shoot an elephant, you have to hit it right between the eyes, any higher than that is, “just like hitting the radiator.”

And, he told us how he remembered the hills near one of the local schools being formed by bomb blasts as the Italians and the British fought during World War II, with the smaller planes coming down “like rabbits” to drop their bombs and then jump back up to safer altitudes, long before there were any local schools.

After the war, he joined the army as a sharp shooter, back in the days before Kenya had earned her independence and, even though he was not educated and did not speak English, was repeatedly promoted.

Eventually, after a stint of leading hunting parties for foreigners, he ended up back here and, basically, took it upon himself to bring his people up to the same standards that he had seen in other parts of Kenya.

He built schools, brought in teachers from other tribes (the British, as well as the early Kenyan government, had intentionally neglected the development of this area as a way to prevent uprisings by the majority Somali populations), and started an irrigated farm; and one of his thirty children was the first of any of the Tana River peoples to earn an university education.

How's that for an impressive life story?