MAJOR TSUNAMI DEVASTATES EAST COAST OF KENYA

Tsunami waves measuring nearly eighty feet high struck Kenya, on the east coast of Africa, causing massive damages. Seven people have already been reported dead, while many more have been reported missing. This is the latest of the aftermath following a moderate 6.5 magnitude earthquake in India on Saturday. The death toll in Kenya is expected to climb steadily over the next week as more information is collected and volunteers move in to assist with the clean-up of the small towns that sat directly in the path of the deadly waves. Although the South African Meteorological Agency’s sensors had detected the coming waves and sent warnings to the Kenyan President Kenyatta, the lack of technological advancement in the affected area limited the ability to get the people fully evacuated.

The waves struck around 4:00 A. M. local time, reaching nearly ten miles inland, and destroying several small towns along the coast.

Relief efforts are being planned by nonprofit organizations. Kat Bennett, the director of The Wild Heartland Organization (WHO), is calling for donations and volunteers to assist Kiwayuu, one of the small towns that was directly in the path of the tsunami’s reach. WHO has worked in a village outside of Kiwayuu for the past seven years, helping to build suitable housing, provide education solutions, and fund small business loans for the town’s citizens. “My worst fear is that all the work we’ve done in Kiwayuu will have been washed away,” Kat said. “Every dollar donated to WHO will go directly to relief efforts. These people deserve the help, they are such good and kind people. They do not deserve this devastation. We need to stand with Kiwayuu and all of Kenya in this time of suffering.”

To donate $10 to the Wild Heartland Organization, text #KenyaTsunami to “DONATE” (366283).

Karibu kwa familia yongu



Nick

I stepped off the plane in Lamu, Kenya and hoisted my bag over my shoulders. There were only three of us that had continued to Lamu from Nairobi, and the airport was nearly silent. It was eerie, walking past all the empty terminals and waiting areas. I had been in lot of airports, but never one as quiet as this. The tension of the recent devastation seemed to weigh the place down. All the employees that I saw seemed anxious and upset.

I stepped out of the terminal and into the main lobby of the airport and glanced around.

Kat Bennett was easy to spot. Even if she hadn’t been waving a Wild Heartland Organization sign, I would have known it was her. She had cornflower blue hair, gauges in her earlobes, and a lowbret on the right side of her chin. As I approached, her grin widened and I noticed one of her front teeth was chipped. She ran forward and quickly wrapped her arms around me, squeezing tight around my midsection. "Karibu kwa familia yongu!" She said as she pulled back. She spoke in a fast, excited tone.

"What?" I asked, confused. I could've sworn I had heard the word 'caribou' in there somewhere.

"It's Swahili," she said, "It means 'welcome to my family.'"

"Oh," I said, "Well, uh, thanks." I smiled and shifted my bag a bit.

"Asante.”

"Bless you?"

Kat laughed, “No, it means thank you.”

“Oh… then… asante,” I corrected myself.

We started walking through the small airport to a tiny loading bay where some guys had pushed a cart with three suitcases on it. Two of them were mine. Kat grabbed one of them and pulled it off the trolley. “You packed a lot,” she commented.

“I’m here for a week, aren’t I?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she replied. She didn’t say anything more, though I got the feeling she kind of wanted to. She dragged the suitcase behind her as she led me away from the luggage cart. “So how was your trip?” she asked.

“It was long,” I replied with a shrug.

“Just ‘long’?” she asked.

Again, I shrugged. I didn’t know what else she expected to know about the planes. They’d been a collective 20-something hours. I was tired. There really wasn’t much else to ‘em. "I'm just ready to take a nap, to be honest. I'm not so good at sleeping in a moving vehicle."

Kat's face did a funny twist and she looked at me with a slightly guilty expression.

"What?" I asked.

Kat cleared her throat, "Well," she said, "The village is a little ways north still."

We were approaching a large white van. Kat fished her keys out of her pocket and opened two wide back doors. The back of the van was full of big boxes so jammed in there was barely space for my suitcases.

"How far north?" I asked.

"A little past Kiwayuu," she replied hurriedly.

"How far is that?"

Kat answered, "About seven hours by dhaw."

"Seven hours?" I asked, visions of a nap fleeting away. "By what now?"

"Dhaw."

"What is that Swahili for?"

Kat laughed, "It isn't Swahili; it's a kind of boat. C'mon." She waved for me to get in the van. A little bit of me didn't want to. I thought about going home and finding some other way to show Lauren that I wasn't self-centered. I mean, what the hell kind of place was I going to if it took 20-plus hours of flying, and also a seven hour boat ride?

But I wanted Lauren back. I couldn't turn back now that I'd said I was doing this. She'd find out and it would all be over… I’d never get my life back.

I got in the van.

Kat drove out of the empty airport garage and through a winding street into a very small town that looked almost like those pictures you see of Greece. Squat, white-washed buildings with detailed stone work on the edges of the window frames and long laundry lines strung porch to porch in narrow alleys, where kids were playing on cobblestone streets. This was not the sights I'd expected to see when I thought of traveling to Kenya. Where were the giraffes and elephants and shit? I wondered. Where were the deserts with ladies carrying big jars on their heads and the starving kids holding empty bowls? I realized the stuff I was thinking was probably racist, but it was the only Africa that you ever see in pictures. It was what I was conditioned to expect, and I realized that maybe Africa wasn't going to be anything like I'd expected at all.

"You're awful quiet," Kat commented.

I looked over at her. "It's different than I thought is all."

Kat laughed and nodded, "The first time I came, I thought I got dumped off at the wrong airport."

"It's weird. Why don't people ever show these type pictures of Africa?" I asked.

Kat shrugged. "I've wondered that for years." She drove over the crest of a hill and before us was a breathtaking view of the rest of the little town below us, ending right up against a brilliant blue bay that came in off the Indian Ocean. "You'll see more of what you expect when we get out to Kiwayuu," she said. "This is sort of the touristy area, the last of the big cities."

"This is a city?"

Kat smiled, "Compared to our town, this is a metropolis."





Kat

Part of me didn’t believe he would come.

When the financial assistant back in the US told me that Nick Carter had offered to match the donations Wild Heartlands received to help Kenya, I’d laughed and thought he was playing a joke on me. But it turned out the kid was so young that he didn’t understand the full weight of the name “Backsteet Boys” and the impact it would have on a woman my age.
It turned out he wasn't joking.

Once upon a time, I had been certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would marry Nick Carter. I discovered Backstreet Boys before they were big in America, when my family lived in Germany for ten months. My father was an engineering specialist in the marines and we moved around a lot with him from base to base, where he repaired supercomputers for the government. I discovered BSB then, at a time when nothing else in my life was stable. My mother and I traveled for shows a couple times when my dad was busy and we had a good time at the concerts. I was a Brian girl. Then they went on hiatus and my dad retired and I finished school and joined the peace corp and hadn't really paid attention to pop culture since. Like I had their latest album, but I would never have known anything about their personal lives or anything like I once did. Last I knew, Nick Carter had been overweight and on a bad path to self destruction.

I never pegged him as the type that would give a rat's ass about Kenya, even when the hype was all over the news, thanks to the tsunami. It really surprised me, which was part of why I called him to thank him - I wanted to know it was really him. And also, I admit, I wanted to talk to Nick fucking Carter.

I'd blurted out my offer for him to come to Kiwayuu before I'd thought it out all the way. He said no and I was kinda relieved, disappointed, too, but glad I didn't have to try to explain to Nanny why it was a big deal that this strange man was coming.

But then he called back.

He said it had been bothering him, that he couldn't get Kenya out of his head, he was losing sleep and he wanted to help. He wanted to do more than just give us money. He wanted to fly to Kiwayuu and help build homes for the people in the village I was helping.

Long and short, here he was.

Nick fucking Carter less than a foot away from me in the passenger seat of a rented van, a tangible collision of my worlds. I swallowed back my shock for the hundredth time.

"So what all is in the back?" he asked.

"Tents," I said.

"Tents?"

I nodded, "There's so many people displaced right now, we're trying to build new homes but it's a lot of work, so it's slow. These tents will be temporary homes for the people so that they can have roofs over their heads and protection from the bugs and animals."

"Like rhinos and shit?" Nick asked.

I laughed, "Like snakes, more usually, but I guess a rhino could wander by, sure." Nick looked surprised, like he had expected me to shut down the rhino idea completely. "I mean we're close to the coast so there's not as many rhinos as you'd expect," I added quickly.

Nick laughed, "I'm not like scared or nothin'."

"I didn't say you were," I answered. But his eyes sure as hell had.

We drove down through Lamu to the port and I parked back-in a spot by the pier where our dhaw was anchored. I'd left Taji on the boat while I went to get Nick and he was laying in the V of the bow, legs up on the edge, arms propping his head, sunbathing joyfully. I got out of the van. "I'll be right back," I told Nick as he yanked his suitcases out of the back. He nodded.

I trotted down the pier until I was near to Taji and I called out his name. He woke and sat up. "Paka," he called, grinning. "You are back! So soon!" He shielded his eyes and saw Nick standing by the van kind of awkwardly. "Is this the man you've picked up? The Backstreet Boy?" The band name sounded funny in his thick accent.

"Yes," I said. "And we have the tents for the village, too. Could you help carry them aboard?"

"Right away, Paka."

He leaped from the boat onto the pier and pulled the boat's mooring rope taut until it was next to the pier and we could easily load the boxes in. Taji rushed down the length of the pier, grinning at Nick as he approached. Grabbing hold of Nick's wrist firmly, he started shaking it heartily. "Jambo? Hello. Backstreet Boy Nick." He ducked his head excitedly and let go of Nick's wrist. "I am Taji."

"Hey Taji," Nick looked a little unnerved by the ferocity of the handshake.

Taji laughed and grabbed the first several boxes and rushed back to the dhaw.

"Jambo means how are you," I said. I took the next box. "And the way he shook your hand indicated highest respect. That was an elder's handshake." I smiled, "C'mon, let's get you on the dhaw."

"It looks like a sailboat."

"Yeah," I said. "An Arabic sailboat."

“I saw some like this when we went to Israel awhile back,” Nick said. “They’re pretty cool. I have a speed boat back home.”

“There’s not many speed boats around here,” I answered. We hoisted the box I carried and Nick’s suitcases on board the dhaw. “You’re lucky you can get a motor on a boat at all,” I added with a frown. Taji ran by for his second load of tents. “We’d gotten one for the village but it stopped working awhile back.”

Nick rubbed his chin. “Maybe I could take a look at it. I fixed my boat back home once.”

We helped Taji get the tents onboard the boat. Once the dhaw was pretty full, we all climbed aboard and we watched the coast of Lamu fade off behind us as Taji raised the sails and we started on our journey north over the Indian Ocean.

I stared at Nick as the boat skimmed over choppy water.

Strange new tides were brewing in my life.

30 Days Earlier...



Nick

Lauren was brushing her hair. She was angry and pulling the brush through roughly, making this horrible sound that set my nerves on edge and made me grit my teeth in rage. AJ told me once I had mild misophonia when I’d complained about noises he was making chewing food like a savage. I thought of the resulting argument every time a noise made me feel like this - like my entire body was being raked over a cheese grater. Misophonia or not, I couldn’t help how pissed off the sound was making me. My muscles were tensing up.

Finally, she stopped brushing her hair, shoved the brush into a drawer and came out, her sleep pants loose at the ankles, and climbed into bed without undressing.

I frowned, staring at the Rolling Stone I was reading.

Usually we had sex after a fight.

“Turn off the fucking light,” she said, her back to me, curled in a loose fetal position.

“I’m reading,” I answered, voice matching her tone.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

We both fell into silence for a long moment.

The tension was so heavy in the room that not one of the many pets we shared were in there. Nacho had hovered by the door for a good ten minutes, but he’d hiked it when I’d slammed the dresser drawer a little harder than was necessary.

I turned a page in the magazine.

“I need a break,” she said. The words were so quiet, I almost didn’t hear them at all. I blinked at the magazine page, where Bruce Springsteen was grinning up at me, and tried to comprehend the words she was saying. Lauren rolled over and looked at me, and, as though saying it once hadn’t been enough, she said, “I need a break.”

“A break?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

“A break from what?” I asked.

“This,” she said. Her voice was thick. “You. Us.”

I lowered the magazine to my lap and turned to look at her, more annoyed than anything else. I didn’t believe her. I didn’t think she’d do it. “Why are you fuckin’ being like this? It’s ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous.”

“I am not being ridiculous,” Lauren snapped. “Sometimes living with you is like being around a misbehaving two year old.”

I rolled my eyes. “I make one little mess...”

“It wasn’t just one little mess,” she argued, “If it was just one little mess it would be totally different, but it’s not, Nick, it’s just not. You always do this to me. The messes are not one and they are not little and there’s no appreciation for it. When was the last time you did the laundry? Or cleaned the toilet or vacuumed the hall or started the fucking dishwasher? I’m not your mother.”

“I in no way think of you like my mother,” I said.

“You better not, I’ve met that woman,” Lauren shuddered. “But that doesn’t change the rest of it. Nick, I am always cleaning up after you - always - and you just take it for granted that I’m going to do it. You never think about me.”

“I think about you,” I replied.

Lauren shook her head, “You really don’t. You don’t think about anybody but yourself, Nick, you’re self-centered. And I get it, you’ve been on your own so long and in this insane bubble of a life that you’ve never had to think about anybody else. Nobody else has ever had the balls to tell the great Nick Carter off for being inconsiderate of others.”

“Jesus Lauren, you make me sound like an asshole.”

“Well sometimes you are,” she said simply, not really in a mean tone, just in a matter-of-fact sort of way that somehow stung worse than if she’d bellowed it at me.

I scowled.

“I just need a break from being your keeper,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. “You’re divorcing me?”

“No,” Lauren replied, “Just taking a couple steps back for a little bit.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” I asked.

Lauren laughed in that way that wasn’t really from amusement but more like a huff of derision or a silent ‘I told you so’. She shook her head, “I don’t know, Nick. Maybe figure it out yourself.” She rolled over again.

“Well where the fuck are you gonna go, huh?” I demanded.

“I’ll go to Alex’s. Or my father’s. Whatever.”

“I’ll hire a housekeeper,” I said as an alternative option.

“It’s not that,” Lauren answered, “It isn’t just the cleaning. That was just the current example. You’re just --” she sighed. “I knew you were like this, I don’t know why I didn’t --” she paused. “I just thought it would change once we were married, that you’d be more -- I don’t know. Nevermind.”

“More what?” I asked.

“Nevermind,” she said.





Kat

I was getting my hair re-dyed in a salon in Los Angeles. My head could’ve picked up radio signals with all the foils that was up in it and I glanced up from the Mental Floss magazine I was reading to see a breaking news story flash across the TV. There’d been a tsunami in Kenya. My heart accelerated, and I dropped the magazine onto the rack.

My mind whirred; that was my home, my family out there. I'd come home to do some promotional stuff for Wild Heartlands, otherwise I would have been there. Where was Nanny and Taji? Where were Azizi, Tia, Zahur? Fakira? Safu? I was worried for them all.

My phone vibed in my pocket and, with shaking hands, I pulled it out. It was Michael, the Wild Heartlands office design specialist. “Kat,” he said with a shaky voice, “Kat, there’s been a tsunami in Kenya. Seventy-to-eighty feet high waves.”

“Fuck,” I gasped, "I know... I'm staring at the news." My voice shook. People were looking at me. I realized I must’ve looked hysterical. I swiveled the chair away. “Have we heard from anyone?”

“No,” Michael answered, “No one in the field. It was projected right for the Lamu-Kiwayuu area, though."

I felt sick. So it really had hit them, then. I could feel the world starting to spin a little and I stood up. I needed to get there, to get to them.

"Are you okay?" My stylist had come over, a concerned look on her face.

I had another ten minutes under the foils, but I flailed, trying to yank them out as panic flooded me. "No," I choked, "No, I need to go home. My family needs me." The TV screen was showing the projection lines of the waves, according to the South African meteorological society. Michael was right. The waves had been projected directly into the Kiwayuu bay. I felt hot tears burning my eyelids from within. "Oh Jesus," I croaked.

The stylist looked up at the TV and saw the projection animation running over and over. She looked back at me, "Honey that's in Africa, that ain't here." She waved for me to sit back down, even as I continued to pluck foils from my hair and chuck them at her. "Your hair's going to be only half set!"

"So it’ll be a lighter shade than I planned. I can't stay," I replied. I realized I'd forgotten entirely about Michael on the line. "Get me whatever you can for travel arrangements," I barked into the phone. "I'm on my way."

I rushed out of the salon, only pausing long enough to pay.

When I got to the office, I ran inside from the lot. I couldn't remember the drive. It was a blind haze, a cloud of memories and fears running through my mind like an old fashioned movie. Michael was hunched over his computer, the TV in the corner blaring the news. A blonde newscaster was talking about the tsunami in an alarmed sort of tone that heightened my tension.

"Tell me you booked me something," I begged, chucking my bag onto my desk and rushing over to Michael's.

"Everything into Nairobi and Lamu is shut down," he said. "I'm trying to reroute you through Kampala -" he looked up and stopped midsentence. "What happened to your hair?"

"I was at the salon; I ran out mid foil," I relied. "Book whatever it takes. Just get me to Kiwayuu."

"I'm doing my best."

I wrung my hands and paced. "Nobody's called?"

Michael shook his head.

"They need to call."

Michael didn't reply.

"I'm so scared." My voice cracked.

"I have you booked to Kampala and a rental car will be waiting at the airport," Michael said. He swiveled in his desk chair and looked over at me with a nervous sort of expression, unsure how to comfort me.

My phone vibrated from my desk and I leaped at it like a puma. It was my father. "Daddy," I gasped into the phone.

"Thank God. You're stateside. I saw the news. Did you hear --"

"Yes," I gasped, "I'm so scared."

"You're okay baby girl," he said, his voice shaking with relieved nerves. "It's going to be okay, and I know you, you'll help the people who were affected when you can. It'll be okay."

I couldn’t answer. The comforting sound of my dad's voice allowed the tears to pour down my face.

The Arrival


Nick

The dhaw moved over the water with velocity as Taji expertly jumped from side to side, pulling the mainsail taught and guiding the ship along. We could see the shoreline and I watched as the hotels that line Lamu slowly got smaller and smaller, further apart, and finally became little grass huts set further back among trees, and finally disappeared, leaving nothing but long stretches of empty white sand.

“Tourism is the main source of income,” Kat said when the hotels started dying out. “The less hotels you see on the coast, the poorer the people are.” She shielded her eyes with her palm, staring out at the palm trees that leaned over the ocean’s edge on land.

“Is there a hotel in Kiwayuu?” I asked.

Kat smiled, “There’s one in Kiwayuu, yes, but we’re going to a village just north of it, and there’s no hotel there.” She paused. “Well. There was one in Kiwayuu. It’s not there anymore.”

“The tsunami?” I asked.

Kat nodded.

“So how bad’s the damages really? They usually look worse on TV, right?” I asked.

Kat looked down at me. I was straddling the bench, facing the land. She lowered so she was straddling the bench, facing me. She stared into my eyes for a long moment. “It’s really bad, Nick,” she said. She sighed deeply, “It hit Kiwayuu and the village dead-on, it swept away everything in it’s path. The only warning any of the people there got was from Taji… who was on the beach and saw the water receding as the wave came. He knew something was wrong and ran back to tell everyone. They couldn’t do much to prepare except pray.”

“Did anyone you know die?” I asked.

“One of the Wild Heartland volunteers, a really sweet guy named Clay… and Taji’s twin brother, Tamal.” Kat hung her head, then glanced over at Taji to make sure he couldn’t hear her, “He blames himself,” she whispered.

I looked at Taji. He seemed pretty happy-go-lucky, I didn’t see how it was possible that guy blamed himself for something so major. But then again, when my sister, Leslie, died, I went through a period of believing it was my fault, too - a feeling mainly fueled by my mother’s accusations, of course - I went on doing my tour. I carried on and pushed my way through the pain I felt. To every face in the world, I was okay. Lauren was the only one who really knew what I was feeling.

The thought of Lauren caused a pain in my chest and I turned away from Taji, suddenly flooded with the feeling of missing her. I gritted my teeth and winced away the ache. She’d been the only person that had stood by me through the worst times of my life - time and time again - and I couldn’t handle the idea that something else terrible might happen without her by my side. I had to push on, had to get this done, had to get back home, and get back my wife, my life.

“Nanny has been inconsolable since…” Kat was saying, still low, but she’d turned to look ahead over the bow. “She cries at night so deeply the entire village can feel it. It’s like her sobs are the village, are the land, crying out for the blood and the destruction.” Kat looked at me and the sun caught her hair, making it bright as the water we were sailing over. Her eyes, too.

“That sucks,” I said. It was probably the least poetic response I could have had, but the only one I could muster. I didn’t have a clue who the fuck Nanny was and honestly all that was going through my mind was that Kat kind of reminded me of a blue-haired Pocahontas and suddenly I had Colors of the Wind in my head.

Kat stood back up, our conversation over.

I looked back at Taji again and he smiled and waved enthusiastically as he steered the mainsail to the starboard side, running along the frame of the boat.

We’d been on the boat for nearly four hours when my back was starting to hurt from sitting on the bench, so I stood up and stretched my arms, leaning backwards to pop my spine. Kat had sat back down in the bow, her chin on the frame of the boat, one hand leaning over the edge as though in an attempt to reach the water that sped by.

At one point, I saw a dolphin further out, jumping along the surface, his dorsal fin cutting the water as he swam. Several others followed him. I had to admit that this place was beautiful and entirely unlike anything I’d ever expected to see when I had told Kat I’d come out to Africa to help. If Lauren had known this was what this place was like, she would have thought I wasn’t being very selfless at all. It was kind of a win-win for me. I was getting the woman and a nice vacation.

Despite what Kat had told me before, I was still pretty sure the destruction in the village wouldn’t be as bad as the TV had made it sound. I was still imagining walking into a clean hotel room with running water and a real mattress with a TV and a plug to charge my cell phone with...

Another hour later and that vision was starting to fade. The first effects of the tsunami were becoming apparent along the coastline as fallen trees came into view. There were torn leaves strewn across the beach and uprooted trunks laying half in the water. It got worse and worse and soon there were artefacts of buildings on the beach, too. Scraps of wood, torn blue tarps, a broken chair, a plastic bucket. The trees were levelled, laying flat on the ground in messy, soaking heaps. People stood among them, moving them using ropes. Pieces of the wreckage started appearing in the water and Taji slowed down our progression, trying to navigate among the drifting, broken bits.

“Jesus,” I whispered as a doll drifted by in the water, naked and missing one arm.

Kat’s face was somber.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My stomach turned. I gripped the edge of the boat and closed my eyes, trying to steady myself, afraid I’d end up throwing up. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?

Every time I didn’t think it could get any worse, it did. It got steadily worse until Taji finally navigated the boat toward the shore, making his way through lumps of grass and wood. There was a short pier that had obviously been built in haste with rope and some of the fallen trees. The leaves were still attached to the trees and everything as they bobbed on the surface of the water. Taji got the boat up to the trees and tied the dhaw up, carefully climbing out and tugging ropes to bring the boat parallel to the trees.

I took hold on my suitcase handle and stood up. Kat helped me get the suitcases out as Taji started unloading the tents, running back and forth from the beach to the ship with armfuls of them. “Paka, go and show your Backstreet Boy the village,” Taji said as she tried to help with the tents, “I will get these for you.” He smiled brightly, his broken and imperfect teeth showing. I couldn’t help but think that if he had veneers he’d have a great smile.

“Asante, Taji.” Kat turned to me, “C’mon.”

I followed her across the beach, dragging my two suitcases and finally understanding that I was most definitely overpacked.





Kat

Nick followed me as I picked my way along the path that we had cleared from the village to the beach. Taji and some of the other guys from the village had worked for days to clear the path. When I’d first arrived after the tsunami, I’d had to climb over fallen trees and remnants of homes, past drowned and rotting livestock and shattered furniture, all the way inland to the village. I’d spent the entire walk terrified of what I’d find on the other end, terrified all of my friends and family here in Kiwayuu would be dead. The memory of the fear choked me up, even now, as I moved through the thick, salty woods and I knew that the things that haunted me would haunt my people tenfold.

Nick’s footsteps were loud on the floor of the tropical forest that we were moving through. I glanced back at him. He was staring up into the trees at the broken and bent branches and the sun coming through torn and tattered leaves. The forest was so much thinner than it had been. Many of the villagers said that it was thanks to the denseness of the forest that they had not all been killed; the trees had slowed some of the wave and had given them a bit of protection, the only protection they got from the forces of nature.

“There’s usually monkeys in these trees,” I said.

“Monkeys?” Nick looked at me with raised eyebrows.

I nodded. “They run wild through these trees usually, the way squirrels do back home.” I smiled at the surprise I’d had the first time I’d traveled to Africa to learn that monkeys were so common. “They’re friendly. Or they were.”

“Where did they go?” Nick asked. He glanced over his shoulders, “They weren’t washed away, were they?” He snickered, “They’d be sea monkeys if they were.” Then, realizing his joke was in bad taste, he sobered and said, “Sorry.”

“The monkeys have heightened senses,” I replied, ignoring his sea monkeys comment. “They know when there is danger.”

“So where are they now?” he asked, “Shouldn’t they have come back?”

“Probably further inland,” I answered. “Nanny says the monkeys will return once they sense that the danger has passed, but we have not yet seen them.”

Nick stared thoughtfully into the trees again as he followed me.

It’s a long walk to the village. Nearly eight miles. I always forget how long a walk it is until I’m leading someone who isn’t used to it along the pathway. Nick was breathing heavily before we reached the sixth mile. “We can take a break,” I offered, but he shook his head.

We were almost to the village when there was a crack in the woods to our left and Nick jumped about a mile. “What the fuck was that?” he cried, looking around in a panic.

I looked through the trees and saw three boys crouching behind some fallen trees. “Azizi… Mosi… Nyo… I see you.”

The boys came out, dressed only in shorts. One of them was clutching a long stick and all three of them were covered with mud. They ran over and the younger two, who were both eight, wrapped their arms around my hips in greeting. “Paka! Paka!” they cried excitedly.

Azizi, the oldest at twelve, was the one holding the stick and clearly the leader of their motley little crew. He grinned, “You’re home, Paka,” he said.

“I’m home,” I said with a nod. “Azizi, Mosi, Nyo… this is Nick. He’s come to help us rebuild the village. This is the very nice man who is matching the donations that Wild Heartlands gets.” Mosi and Nyo seemed awestruck for a moment, then quickly rushed to hug Nick’s hips as they had mine. Azizi, though, looked at Nick warily.

“Kuwakaribisha!” Mosi and Nyo cried as they hugged Nick, welcoming him in Swahili.

“Ka-wacky-bisha,” Nick attempted to repeat and the boys laughed and started running ahead on the path. Azizi eyed him carefully, then joined them. Nick looked at me, “That kid doesn’t like me.”

“He’s wary,” I said. “He’s been through a lot. His father… was not a very good man. I’ll tell you more about it later,” I added, seeing that Azizi was not as far away as I would want him to be when I told Nick the story incase he overheard.

The boys ran ahead, singing an old folk song that Nanny had taught them as they crashed through the trees to the village. Azizi waiting every now and then for Nick and I to catch up to be sure we were following along okay. We finally crested a small hill and there before us lay the damp, sodden land that was once the thriving village… now essentially a muddy cess pool.

Nick came to a stop beside me. He stared around. The people were sitting around a fire in the center on logs, fallen trees they’d dragged from the woods. There were clothes flung over branches that had been stuck into the ground in poor attempts to create tents and one measly home that had been built over the past three weeks far off in the corner of the clearing, where Nanny, the eldest in the village, now lived.

Nanny herself was seated at the fire, handing a little girl, Siti, Mosi’s sister, a piece of a mango. Nanny spotted us and she stood up as Siti started to eat the mango. Mosi and Nyo had reached the circle, shouting that I was back with Nick and the people turned, their eyes taking in Nick and I at the edge of the forest and looking to one another with excitement and curiosity.

Nanny walked over, hobbled, really, her grey hair swept up into a long braid that hung over her shoulder, her long robes dirty with mud. She stepped past me to Nick and raised her old hands up and clasped the sides of his face, staring into his eyes for a long moment. I saw Nick blink nervously as she stared, a breathless sort of awe shivering it’s way through the other people around the fire. And then Nanny smiled up at him and leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Asante,” she said lowly, “Kuwakaribisha.”

The Most Heartbreaking Thing



Days Earlier…

Nick

A little better than 500 days.

That’s how long my marriage with Lauren had lasted before the day I woke up and found her side of the bed cold.

I told myself at first that she was testing me, that she was gonna be back by lunch… by bedtime… by the next day… by the end of the week… but when she didn’t show up, I started to feel afraid. I sat in the living room, staring at the clock, listening to it tick, my head organizing things and trying to come up with a solid plan of What the Fuck I Was Going to Do. The word pre-nup kept echoing in my head and I grabbed one of the sofa cushions and clutched it to my chest, rocking myself a little, thinking about how truly awfully she could potentially be about to fuck me over.

She left on a Tuesday and I didn’t have the balls to try calling her until Sunday, afraid she wouldn’t answer, or, worse, that she would answer and would tell me she was through with me. I wrote down a whole pros and cons list for reasons why she should stay with me and even in my own handwriting the list weighed against me. I rubbed my eyes and paced and finally sat on the deck with the cell phone and a beer and called her.

“Took you long enough,” she accused by way of answering the call.

I leaned down and stared at my bare feet on the weathered wood. “Sorry.”

She was quiet a moment. “Well?” she prompted.

“Come home,” I said flatly.

“Why?” she challenged.

“Because… I miss you.”

“And?”

“I love you.”

She sighed. “I love you, too, Nick.”

“So come home, then,” I replied.

Lauren was quiet. “What have you been doing?”

“Wandering around the house like a fucking zombie,” I replied. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I haven’t showered. I haven’t left the god damned house. I can’t focus on music or movies or TV. I ain’t even watched the Bucs, babe. I can’t see straight when you ain’t here.”

Again, complete silence rang through the phone.

“Lauren, please. I need you,” I begged.

“You need me,” she said. “You, you, you, you, you. And more you.”

“What?” I asked, confused by the tone and the repeating of the word.

“Everything you’ve said since getting on the phone has been you-centered, Nick. This is exactly what I’m talking about, exactly why I needed a break. It’s all about you. All the time. You haven’t even asked me where I am, if I’m okay --”

“Where are you?” I asked quickly.

“Nick.”

“I wanna know.”

Lauren’s voice wobbled, “If you did, you would have asked me.”

“I did ask you,” I said, “I just asked you.”

“Before I reminded you to ask me,” she added.

“Of course I wanna know where you are, though,” I questioned, “You know I do, why can’t you just tell me shit when you know I wanna know? Why do I gotta remember to ask?”

“Because you will remember to ask if you really want to know.”

“I won’t, I forget everything,” I said.

Lauren’s voice was breaking even more as she spoke. “Two weeks ago, we were in the car and you were driving and you wanted to know if cows could sit like dogs do. You remembered to ask Siri at the next stop light. Are you saying that finding out whether cows can sit like dogs do is more important to you than finding out where I am or how I am doing?”

“No,” I said.

“Nick,” Lauren said gently, “I just need you to think about other people sometimes.”

“I think about other people all the time,” I said. Nacho was sitting at my feet, staring up at me. He licked my hand. I closed my eyes again.

“It’s ten o’clock at night, Nick,” she said. “Did you think about whether I’d be asleep when you called? Or did you just pick up your phone and a beer and call?”

How did she know I had a beer? I wondered.

“That’s what I thought.” Her voice was heavy. “I gotta go, Nick.”

“Wait. When are you coming home?” I asked her before she could hang up, my voice panicked.

“When the world stops revolving around you, Nick,” she answered.

I put the phone down on the table I was sitting next to. I ran my hand through my hair and stared out at the water moving slowly, at the moon reflecting off the surface. I felt like shit. I drained the beer and put it on the table, too, then stood up and shooshed Nacho back into the house, locking the sliding door behind me. I dropped the bottle on the kitchen counter and went upstairs, stepping over the laundry that was collecting on the floor in front of the hamper and threw myself onto the bed, face-down, breathing in the fading scent of Lauren’s shampoo.

On the TV that hung over our dresser, I could hear a woman’s voice echoing from the speakers. “This is the most heartbreaking thing I’ve seen in my life,” she said.

I knew she was talking about the tsunami in Kenya, but it felt like she had a window into my room and was commentating on my life.





Kat

It took me 5,000 Shillings and two days, but I made it to Kiwayuu. The night I got there was the night that they were to bury Tamal. After my long walk through the broken path in the forest, I emerged in devastated square of the village to find Tamal laying on a bed of woven leaves, the women of the village crying over his body and Taji standing on the hill, his hands covering his face as Azizi stood beside him, stone faced and fire-eyed.

“Paka,” whispered Azizi when he saw me. He turned to Taji, “Paka is here, look.”

“Paka,” cried Taji, turning to me. Tears soaked his face and he clutched me, pressing his face into my shoulder. He shook as I pressed my palms to his back. “Paka, it is my brother. And Msaidizi Clay.”

The words stung like he’d thrown ice water into my face, or directly down my spine. Clay was a twenty-six year old boy from a small town in Oklahoma that had volunteered less than two years ago for Wild Heartland. Tamal was one of the strongest leaders of the village - had they a formal government, Tamal would have been the leader of the people.

I could see Nanny laying across the body as the villagers took turns approaching and laying aloe leaves around the bodies. Normally, they would be in the home of the deceased, laying on a mat, but there were no homes left. The village was flat and desolate.

“The livestock is gone as well,” Azizi told me, as though reading my mind about the houses. He stared up at me for a moment. “All of our sheep and goats, all of our oxen. We found only one goat in the woods and he’s to be sacrificed to help guide the souls of Clay and Tamal straight to Heaven.” He looked somber.

“Tamal needs no guide,” choked Taji. “He will lead Msaidizi Clay and the goat to Heaven himself.” He turned his head against my shoulder to stare down at the procession of villagers below.

“That’s true, Taji,” I whispered, and I patted his back softly.

Nanny was sobbing and she fell forward, her face pressing to her dead son’s chest. “I must go to her,” whispered Taji, and he broke away from me and started down the hill, leaving Azizi and I alone.

“We found him on the shore,” Azizi informed me. He looked up at me. “Me and Taji and Sefu. We went searching for the people we were missing. He tried to save the motor boat.”

My throat burned.

The people were laying on the ground now, in a wide circle around Tamal’s body, where Nanny and now Taji were gathered. I realized that as they laid down, the people were going to bed, the only roof they had was the stars. In the morning, they would bury Tamal, at an hour when the sorcerers of the night were back in their beds and Nanny had shared her last night with her son.

I walked down the hill with Azizi to the desolation. He left me at the edge of the circle the people were forming to go and join his mother. I gingerly stepped around them as a general whisper broke around the circle that Paka had come, and walked to where Clay laid on the ground. His biological family was half a globe away. I knelt beside him instead and ran my palm over his forehead, smoothing his hair back. Clay normally wore glasses, but they'd been lost in the wave.

Nanny looked up at me, the dead between us, and her glistening eyes were the saddest I had ever seen. The tears she cried were flooding the deep wrinkles on her face. I reached a hand out over the bodies and she reached out hers as well and we touched fingertips for a moment. Then she withdrew and returned her gaze to Tamal.

We spent the night there in the center of the village, under the stars, sitting beside Tamal and Clay. I struggled to stay awake. The symbolism of the act was that we were protecting their souls from the devil until morning, when the bodies would be buried. Taji sat holding his mother, whose eyes were glassy and far away, as though remembering Tamal's entire life.

I didn't know Clay as much as I should have. I knew only that he had grown up on a farm and had come to show the people how to farm and preserve the food they sowed. They had grown beans and corn and a funny kind of squash in the acres beyond the village. He laughed boldly and told great ghost stories with a flashlight beneath his chin. The children loved him, except for Azizi, who trusted no one. Clay had joined Wild Heartland as part of a student loan repayment program, fallen in love with Kiwayuu, and just never left.

I thought about those things and about how much the tsunami had taken away until the sun came up.

Food for Thought



Nick

Nanny studied me, her eyes squinted, fingers still pressed to my face. I felt like she was looking around inside of me with her eyes. It was unnerving. Finally she lowered her palms, nodding, and said something in Swahili. I didn't know the words, so I looked at Kat.

"She says you're a force of nature," Kat said.

"What's that mean?" I asked, glancing back at Nanny."Is that good?"

Kat shrugged.

Nanny was still staring at me, though with a twist of curiosity on her old face. Finally, she turned to Kat and I felt a rush of relief run through me, as though I'd been holding my breath without realizing it. She and Kat spoke quickly in Swahili for a couple minutes while I stood there and surveyed the land around us. It looked like one of the post apocalyptic video games I played, it was so desolated and torn asunder. You could tell there had been something there once and that what remained didn’t even slightly resemble it as it had once been.

Nanny grabbed hold of my hand and began leading us down the hill to the village. The people all greeted me with wide smiles and handshakes like Taji had given me back at the dock in Lamu. Kat spoke loudly and quickly in Swahili and the answers were a jumble of Swahili and English. It felt rather like being in a swarm of BSB fans, so I wasn’t too freaked out, though I did wish Mike were there some place in case things got out of hand.

“They’re all really excited to see you,” Kat said, as if I couldn’t tell that already.

At the bottom of the hill, Nanny pulled me down to sit next to her on one of the logs and motioned for Kat to sit next to her on the other side. The people all started settling back into their seats and Nanny reached into a basket at her feet and handed me a banana that was still hot from having been cooked in the fire. Who the hell cooks bananas? I wondered. She gave one to Kat, too. “Paka, eat,” she urged, then turned to me, “Eat.”

Kat smiled, “Asante, Nanny,” she said, and started pulling back the peel of her banana. I mimicked her, mumbling my thank you and opening the thick skin of the fruit. Everyone was watching me, I felt pretty self-conscious. I hate eating in front of people, it gives me the heebie jeebies. One of the worst thing about paparazzi is their obsession with taking photographs of me eating.

Once Kat and I were eating out bananas, Nanny put her arms around each of us and, in very weak English, asked, “Tell us of the travel, Nick.”

I wondered what everyoe’s obsession with me talking in detail about the damn trip was.

“It was good,” I replied. It was They were still hanging on my every movement. I cleared my throat, “I got on the plane in LA… that’s… that’s a big city in America,” I said, unsure what they knew for geography. Probably more than I did, I thought fleetingly as I looked around and many of them were nodding knowledgably. “It’s where I live. On an ocean, kinda like this, I guess, but different.”

“Nick has a boat back home,” Kit told Nanny and everyone, “He said he will look at the motor boat and see if he can fix it.”

Something like pain flashed in Nanny’s eyes, though she didn’t say a word, nor did she let Kat meet her eyes as she did.

“I can try,” I said, “I can’t promise anything.” But everyone was so excited and were all saying asante and thank you and talking over each other again excitedly about me. It felt really good. I mean, I’m an attention whore, we all know this, and these people were like the ultimate audience. They were just so damn excited about everything to do with me. It made me feel like a superhero.

In my high of adoration, I bit into the banana.

It was like biting into a potato. Like a raw, plain potato.

Without thinking, I spit the bite back into my palm. “Mother of God, there’s something fucky about this banana,” I said.

Everyone was staring at me again. But with a different kind of look this time.

Kat cleared her throat, “It’s a plantain,” she said, “They’re starchier.”

Instantly, an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond came to mind. In the episode, Ray’s twins are playing some sport and the coach is trying to get him and Debra to bring the snacks for the whole team. I don’t really remember how there ended up being plantains at the game, only that Ray went fucking apeshit and threw plantains at the coach guy before the end of the episode. It was really funny. However, that was my closest point of reference to a plantain. I’d never personally experienced one.

“Maybe yours wasn’t cooked all the way,” Kat said and she quickly took it and looked at it. “Yeah, see, it’s not.” She put it back into the fire. I got the distinct impression she was acting to alleviate the tension that had grown around us. I had a feeling there wasn’t anything wrong with the plantain, either, that it just tasted that way.

I also had a feeling I was gonna be screwed food wise for the week.

I was suddenly extremely thankful I’d packed a full box of protein bars in my carry on. I was about to be living off them.





Kat

It’s hard being presented with a different palate. I totally get it. The diet in Kiwayuu leaves much to be desired (like chocolate cake, for example, which I binge on every time I go back to the United States). I’d thought when Nanny handed Nick a plantain that would’ve been a nice, safe first step into the food culture. I mean, at least it wasn’t ungali or goat head or something. I wished I’d warned him not to spit out food. The excitement of having a stranger in our midst was now a bit more tense since he’d gone and spit out the bite of plantain at a time when food was pretty hard to come by in the first place around here. Most of what we did have at the village was from the two trips I’d taken to Lamu with Taji. We’d bought building supplies and food.

We got lucky and, before Nanny could give Nick anything else to eat, Taji appeared at the top of the hill with the lorrey we’d built, carrying all of the tents. We spent the next hour distributing tents to everyone - one per family - and made Nick help me show them how to put the tents together. It proved he was just as helpless as they were about it and he actually managed to hit himself in the face with one of the poles. This act of cluelessness made the people laugh and the tension from the fire lightened up a bit. While everyone was putting their tents together, I helped Nick put together one of his own.

As the sun set over the line of trees far off over the desolate cornfield, I watched as Taji carefully helped Nanny up from the logs and carried her to the one little hut that we had built so far.

Nick popped his head back out of the tent and watched Taji disappear into the hut with Nanny. “How old is she anyways?” he asked.

“I would guess in her sixties,” I replied. “That’s exceedingly old for this area. The average life expectancy is somewhere in the mid-thirties. So, I guess, to many of these people, we’re old, too.”

Nick looked surprised.

“Nobody really knows how old Nanny is, though. She has a bad heart, we know that. When I first came here she was really sick and the people had already started funeral rites. One of the other volunteers had gone through some med school training back home and he recognized signs of a heart murmur and we brought her to the hospital in Lamu and Wild Heartlands funded a surgery. She’s mostly better now. She should be on medication, but she won’t take it.”

“My friend Brian had a heart murmur,” Nick said, “Back in ‘98. He had to quit a tour and everything.” He was quiet a second, thinking. “He changed a lot after that.” He disappeared into the tent.

I remembered Brian Littrell’s heart murmur quite well. I was a huge fan at the time it happened and, like I said before, I was a Brian girl. It was terrifying hearing about it from my end of it and worrying about him. I remember the first time I saw the Backstreet Boys after it had happened and I was staring at him and kept waiting for him to collapse on the stage or something, terrified he wasn’t as healed as he kept saying God had made him. It was a strange moment, standing in a desolated village in Kenya hearing Nick Carter talk about Brian Littrell’s heart surgery in a way that suggested I didn’t know about it. It was strange that this person on the other side of this flimsy tent wall was one of my teenage heartthrobs. It was just all around really weird.

I squatted down to look at Nick again. He was laying across the bottom of the tent, a balled up sweatshirt for a pillow, his feet up on one of the suitcases, eating a granola bar. A whole box of them sat on the floor beside him, spilling out of the cardboard container. “You want one?” he asked, waving it at me.

I shook my head. “That reminds me, though… Try not to spit out food they give you. If you need to decline it, just do it politely, but anything you take make sure you eat.”

“I thought it was a banana,” he said. “That was no banana. That thing tasted like a raw potato. It was frackin’ nasty.”

“Plantains are starchier and less sweet,” I agreed, “But it’s a staple here. They don’t have a lot of extra food, so every bite is really precious and… I mean… you know?”

Nick nodded. “Okay.” He chewed thoughtfully. “What else do they eat?” He rolled over and sat up. “They don’t eat like rhinos and shit do they?”

He was really hooked on that whole rhino bit. I wondered how many times I’d have to tell him that rhinos don’t really frequent the area on account of us being too close to the coast? “No,” I said, “No rhinos.”

“Monkeys?” he guessed.

I didn’t want to freak him out, so I changed the subject.

"So what made you decide to do this anyway?" I asked.

Nick shrugged and laid back down on the floor of his tent. "Just, you know, wanting to be a good guy, to help other people or whatever."

"So you're just sitting around in your mansion eating twinkies or whatever, and you think to yourself, gee I'm gonna go to Kenya?" I asked. For some reason, I'd always pictured Nick sitting around tour buses eating gold-powdered twinkies when I was a big fan of BSB. His weight problems didn't exactly negate the idea, but I don't know where I got it in the first place.

Nick shrugged again. "My wife had something to do with it," he said.

I did a double take. "You got married?" I asked in shock.

Nick's face told me how rude I'd been. "Yeah, why's that so shocking?"

I backtracked, "Not because of you but because you're you - you're Nick Carter. Nobody ever thought you'd get married and - well you said - in interviews -"

He blinked. "You're a fan?"

I hadn't really planned on telling him that, but I didn't really have much of a choice now. I nodded, "Not a very good one, obviously I've missed some stuff. Like you getting married."

He nodded. "Yeah, there was a TV show and everything."

"About you getting married?" I raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah," he replied. He took another bite of energy bar and chewed it slowly, staring up at the roof of his tent.

I'd always hated those reality type shows. I'd been of mind that people willing to shove their lives all over the media had to be pretty vapid and one dimensional if they thought anyone gave that many shits about them. He didn’t seem vapid and one dimensional. I mean, here he was in Kenya of all places, volunteering to help out. How many vapid, one dimensional people did stuff like that? I stared at Nick and wondered where the disconnect was happening.

"When I get back to the States, I am gonna eat the crap out of a steak. Like one of those big motherfuckers with all the grease and the char..." Nick's eyes were closed as though he were picturing it. "Or a big ass bowl of Cheerios," he said, crumpling up the wrapper to his energy bar. "I love Cheerios. With real milk, not the soy shit I usually drink."

"Lactose intolerant?" I guessed.

"Yeah partly. Also partly I'm like 80% vegetarian."

This statement so closely following the other seemed disjointed. I stared at him.

"Do they got grocery stores around here?" he asked.

"Uh..." I tried to think where the nearest one was. "There's a market in Lamu every other week." I knew Nick was thinking more of one of the big box grocery stores, but I didn't know where the nearest one of those were. I'd never been to one in Kenya. Maybe there was one in Nairobi, which was more of a proper city.

Nick looked unnerved. "So where's the food come from?"

"The land," I answered. I pointed behind me, "That was a very plentiful cornfield a month ago. And there were other vegetables that grew in a garden behind Nanny's hut and there were cattle and goats for slaughtering and a well for clean water over there..." Nick looked and then leaned back onto his sweatshirt pillow. He was chewing his lower lip, thinking so hard you could almost see the wheels turning inside him. I decided to let him stew in his thought. "Anyway, get some rest. Long day tomorrow."

"Alright," he said. I stood up and he zippered the tent behind me. "Night," he called through the fabric.

"Night," I answered.

I started to walk away when I heard the zipper undo. “Kat?” Nick hissed into the dark.

“Yeah?” I called back.

“You’re sure there’s no rhinos around?” he asked, a slightly nervous edge to his voice.

I smirked and rolled my eyes in the dark. What was with his obsession with the rhinos? They weren’t even particularly violent animals. “Nick,” I said, “I’m positive.”

“Okay. Cool. Night then.” He rezippered his tent.

Shaking my head, I walked over to where my own tent was and took a deep breath. You could smell the salt of the ocean, more strongly than ever before because of the brine and bits of seaweed that still clung to broken trees all around the village. It was pitch dark. I could see the glow of Nick's cell phone through his tent walls. He was gonna run out of battery quick, I thought. I looked up at the sky, the stars overhead like tiny pinpricks in a dome of black.

I was about to get into my tent when Taji came up beside me, returning outside from Nanny's hut. He looked up, too. "The stars are very pretty," he said. I could only just see him by the glow of the moon.

"Very," I agreed.

"Paka… is Nick your msiri?" Taji asked.

In Swahili, one’s msiri is their lover. I shook my head. "He is married."

"Ahhh.” He looked at the glow of Nick’s tent. “Where is Mrs. Nick?" Taji asked with concern.

"America, I suppose," I replied.

Taji said, "He had traveled so far without her?"

I nodded. "He travels a lot for work, I guess they're used to it."

"I could not become used to being away from my msiri if it were me, Paka."

I looked at Taji and smiled. "You have a very deep heart, Taji, that is why." I pressed a palm to his chest. "There is a lot of love in there."

He nodded and smiled eagerly. "Yes. Very much."

Rhino Attack



Nick

I woke up with a ridiculous amount of pain in my back. I groaned and stretched and heard several of my vertebrates popping and cracking as I moved. I could see the sunlight coming through the flimsy side of the tent and I grabbed the zipper and yanked it down to open the tent and let some air in. It was humid already and even hotter in the tent with the sunlight on it. I kicked the sweatshirt I’d used as a pillow away and stuck my head out of the tent.

Outside, everyone was already up and moving around. There was a large fire already going, around which Nanny and Kat and a bunch of women sat. It looked like they were cooking. I saw Mosi and Nyo run by carrying twigs while Azizi and Taji were moving stacks of larger pieces of wood. Some men were moving building supplies into the space next to Nanny’s house and setting it all up.

I realized I had to pee like nobody’s business.

I climbed out of the tent, bent awkwardly because of the height of it and the height of me and I managed to catch my foot on the lip of the door and sent myself to the dusty reddish ground, knocking the wind out of myself. “Fuck,” I groaned. One of the guys passing by paused and offered me a hand up, which I took. “Asante,” I muttered, embarrassed he’d seen me fall down like that.

When I turned, the smirk on Kat’s face told me she’d seen it, too.

I flushed.

“Wewe ni sawa?” the guy asked me.

I had no idea what he said. “I’m a’ight,” I replied, assuming he wanted to know if I was okay.

That must’ve been it, because he turned and walked away.

“Habari za asubuhi,” Kat greeted me when I walked up to her by the fireside.

“Hi?” I said.

She smiled, “It means good morning.” Azizi was unloading his armful of wood into the fire and it cause the flames to flare up behind her, giving her an orange aura that contrasted her bright blue hair so nicely... She was actually a beautiful girl, I thought, caught off guard by how pretty that orange aura made her look. She had the kind of face that plastic surgeons try to create in LA, with a sweet little nose and bright eyes. The piercing on her chin gave her a classic Hollywood look.

“Well… Good morning,” I replied. I wasn’t even gonna try to repeat what she said. I’d hack it.

Nanny looked up and held up a bowl that contained what looked like a white brick. I looked at Kat. “It’s ungali,” she said. “It’s a corn rice. Sort of tastes like bland grits. Maybe a little thicker. If you like grits, you won’t mind it. It’s boring, but it’s definitely a staple.”

Bland grits sounded safe enough. But before I ate I had to pee.

“Asante,” I said, “But before I eat… is there a bathroom ‘round here?”

Kat looked at the woods.

“Oh. Right. I’ll be right back.”

As I dashed off, I heard Kat explaining to Nanny that I’d be right back. I jogged quickly up the hill and down the path that we’d taken from the shore the day before. I didn’t want anybody to see me taking a whiz. I mean I’ve peed outside before. Sometimes when the tour bus breaks down all five of us Backstreet Boys have had to go outside in the woods. I trudged a way in and paused, looking up at the trees. I thought I’d heard something. I didn’t see any monkeys anywhere. But I was on edge. These weren’t the woods on the edge of some highway just outside of Chicago or St. Louis or whatever. These were truly wild woods and there could be anything in here. There could be voodoo witches lurking in the trees or a lion or something. I shivered and it took all my strength to step off the path and start moving through the dense trees to find myself a pee spot.

I didn’t go far. I didn’t dare to. I was jumpy and looking around wildly, spooked by my own damn imagination. Finally, I came to a halt and opened my fly and set to my business.

That’s when I heard it.

A grunting in the woods to my left.

My stomach flipped. I was midstream, there wasn’t anything I could do but stand and stare in the direction I’d heard the noise, my heart thundering in my chest. I was sure I was about to pee through my own death.

I never pushed pee so hard in my life. I shook myself off and started running before I’d even got all tucked away. Heavy footfalls and the sound of crashing branches followed me.

“Motherfucker!” I cried, and I ran harder. Harder than I’ve ever run in my life. Branches were slapping me in the face, I could feel them scratching my skin and my shirt got caught on one especially nasty branch and, in a fluid motion I only knew from having to escape from four “older brothers” all my life on the tour bus, I wrangled out of it and left it for dead. There was a rhino behind me. I could almost feel his dirty nasty breath on my neck for crying out loud, who the fuck needed a shirt when they were about to be gored on the face of a prehistoric demon animal?

I ran all the way back to the village, so hard my shins ached as I moved and my heart thumped against my ribcage wildly as I choked for breath. People looked up as I pelted down the hill, hitting some loose rock part way down and skidding the rest of the way, like some kind of crazy ass surfer. I hit the bottom abruptly and stumbled, only now looking back over my shoulder.

The rhino must've gave up because nothing was following me now.

"What the hell happened?" Kat asked in a panic, having leaped up from the log she was sitting on with Nanny. The other women were all nervously staring at me and several of the men nearby were staring up at the tree line.

"There was -- it was chasing me -- I was pissing and --" I couldn't breathe. My chest seared with the pain of oxygen moving through my lungs.

"What was chasing you?" Kat questioned, her brows furrowing. She turned toward the hill and I caught her wrist, shaking my head violently, not wanting her to die the tragic death I'd envisioned for myself.

"Bloodthirsty rhino," I gasped.

Taji had bound past us and up the hill before I could get the air to yell for him to stop and he disappeared. I closed my eyes, not wanting to hear or somehow see the gore that was certain to follow. But nothing happened. I opened my eyes and we all waited with baited breath.

Several minutes passed and then Taji returned and in his fist was my abandoned shirt and in the other a handful of Azizi's hair as he pulled the boy along. "Here is your rhino," he called.





Kat


I wasn't sure whether to laugh or get angry. Azizi looked guilty as hell as Taji pulled him down the hill to the village, where his mother, Zuwena, was standing up with an angered expression on her face. It was rare that Zuwena paid much attention to Azizi, we all knew Nanny was the one who gave Azizi his talkings to when he was in trouble because of his mother's detachment. But Nanny sat still.

Nick's face was a mixture of shock and devastation. "But it was a HUGE sound," he argued. "A kid couldn't have made that much racket and it - it chased me -"

"Azizi was smashing the earth with a log," explained Taji, "Mosi and Nyo were helping him. I did not catch them, they've run into the forest. They were trying to scare you."

Their mothers exchanged looks.

"But - but - but I’m - it - I -" Nick looked helpless.

Nick's sputtering was silenced as Zuwena began shouting in Swahili in loud, sharp tones that echoed through the village. She spoke so quickly that even being fluent Swahili couldn't help me to keep up with her shouts. Azizi looked increasingly more guilty and his half laughing expression of amusement slowly faded into one of guarded anger. The words I did catch chilled me for Zuwena was screaming about Azizi's father..

Nanny stood abruptly. "KUACHA!”

The word rung through the air, silencing Zuwena and making Azizi's eyes shift from anger to nervousness. Nick stared around too and although I hadn't taught him that kuacha meant stop, I could tell by his eyes that he knew what Nanny had bellowed the same as all of the rest of us did.

Nanny walked slowly to Azizi. In Swahili, she asked him gently, "Why have you done this?"

Azizi swallowed. "I was just trying to make fun."

"Making fear is not making fun," Nanny scolded. "You do not like Nick."

Azizi's eyes narrowed.

"Why?" Nanny asked.

Azizi shook his head. "Leave me be." He turned and in the greatest act of insolence I'd seen from any of the children in Kiwayuu, he stormed away, leaving Nanny staring after him.

Jaws were dropped all around them, nobody could believe what they'd seen.

Nanny turned to Nick and put her palms on his face. "You are... Safe." Her English was awful, jagged and poorly timed, but Nick's eyes relaxed at her words. "Now eat," she added, and she pulled him to the log by the fire, grabbing the bowl of ungali and pushing it into his hands.

Slowly the people went back to what they were doing, except Zuwena, who looked tired and went to her tent and zipped it closed behind her. We could hear her crying from inside.

Nick sat down on the log beside Nanny and started eating the bowl of ungali she had given him.

“I’ll go for Azizi,” Taji said.

I shook my head, “I’ll go.”

“Are you sure?” Taji asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I replied. I glanced over at the work site. “If I’m not back by then, if you could help Nick out when it’s time to start building, that’d be great. I’ll be back before then hopefully, but you know Azizi.”

Taji nodded.

I jogged off onto the path to the ocean, leaving the village behind quickly. Azizi was known for running off like this when he was upset and he always went to the ocean to sulk when he did. I could only assume it was a habit that he had learned from years of his mother attempting to run away from his father before she finally succeeded. Back in Uganda, Zuwena and Azizi had lived a hard life. He trusted very few people when he ran off and I happened to be one of them.

I didn’t find him until I got all the way to the shore. Azizi was sitting on a rock by the water with his long stick, drawing on the sand and hugging his knees. He didn’t even look up as I walked across the beach and sat down next to him on the rock. We sat in silence for a long time.

“So how come you wanted to scare Nick?” I asked him.

Azizi shrugged. “I didn’t think everyone would get so angry,” he said. Azizi’s English was the best of all of the people in the village besides my own. He had gone to a Christian missionary’s school back in Uganda for the first several years of his life, where they taught him English as a standard. It was easy to forget sometimes that English was his second language.

“I think it’s just because he was really, really scared,” I said.

Azizi shrugged. “It was just a joke.”

I paused, trying to decide how to play my hand at this. Finally, I admitted, “It was pretty funny when he came running down the hill into the village like that.” Azizi smiled a tiny little smile that only just barely counted as one at all. “How did you know to play the rhino card? He’s been asking me about rhinos since he got off the plane,” I said, smirking at him.

“I heard him ask you a couple times,” Azizi replied.

“Good detective work, master Holmes,” I said. Azizi was a big fan of Sherlock Holmes. Well, not the real Sherlock Holmes, but these made up stories about him that I had made up over the years, telling the kids about him, making Holmes out to be more 007 than detective.

Azizi’s smile didn’t widen.

I nudged him, “Is something bothering you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Azizi nodded.

“Well,” I said, “If you decide there is something bothering you, then you know you can talk to me, right?”

Azizi nodded again.

I looked down at the pattern he was drawing and I got up and grabbed my own stick. “Do you know how to play tic-tac-toe?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“C’mon, come play me.” I drew out the cross hatch gameboard and Azizi followed me and we started to play.

Match Donation



Three weeks earlier…

Nick

My mopey sadness had morphed into resolved annoyance by the week after Lauren had left. AJ was over, he had Ava and they were watching TV on the couch, Ava clapping along with some crappy cartoon song, and I was pacing behind them. Rochelle had made a couple dinners she wrapped in tupperware and sent over for AJ to stick in my fridge. “How do I even prove to someone I’m not self-centered?” I demanded as I walked back and forth. AJ was bouncing Ava on his knee. “I mean, seriously.”

“It’s not that hard,” AJ said, “Just do some kind of charity stuff.” He’d started to say shit but caught himself just in time.

“I do charity all the daaa--darn time.” I hated when AJ brought Ava over because it made our conversation really punctuated with replaced cuss words.

“Obviously not impressively enough,” AJ said with a shrug.

“Besides,” I said, “Even if I did some kinda charity thing, she’s gonna just say I’m being self centered if I call her and tell her about it.”

Ava was laughing loudly. “Bragging about doing charity is a pretty scummy thing to do,” AJ agreed with a nod. He grinned at Ava and made a face that made her giggle even harder.

“So what the fudge am I supposed to do then, AJ?” I asked.

AJ shrugged.

I sighed and leaned my forehead against the wall.

I should’ve called Howie or Brian. They were better at this selfless shit. They were the most selfless people I knew. I groaned and rolled my forehead over the stucco texture of the wall, hating the situation and myself for being in it.

How could I be selfish if I hated myself? I wondered. Obviously Lauren was fucked up in thinking I was selfish. I just had to make her understand that she was wrong and I was perfectly alright.

The TV show Ava was watching went on commercial break and she slid off AJ’s lap and ran off to go to the bathroom, announcing she had to tinkle. I kept my forehead on the wall. AJ shifted his weight and changed the channel to check the score on the game that was supposedly the reason he was over my place for the day. They, too, were on commercial. It was a thirty second advert trying to get people to donate to the tsunami relief fund.

The TV spot was saturating cable. I’d seen it about a hundred thousand times. There was this girl with blue hair and she was showing the effects the tsunami had had on some village in Kenya somewhere. She kept going on about resources having been lost and whatever and she walked around in a field in a dirty pair of shorts and tank top with dirt smeared on her face and some little kid that looked at the camera with startled eyes, talking about how much texting the number on your screen would help in this incredible time of need.

“Maybe you gotta do something so big it’s talked about by other people,” AJ said.

“Like what?” I asked.

AJ’s voice was excited, “This man,” he said.

I looked up. AJ was gesturing at the TV. The blue haired girl was still talking on the TV set.

"Everyone's donating to them," I said, "Why the hell would Lauren hear about if I did?"

"Nobody is matching donations made," AJ said. "They'd talk that shit all up."

I made a face, “You’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“You can put a cap on how much you’ll match to,” AJ answered with a shrug. “But they’ll still talk about it trying to get the donations to match it.”

“A cap?”

“Yeah, like you’ll match donations up to - I dunno - five hundred-thousand dollars.”

“Then I’d donate… what… a million?”

AJ nodded eagerly.

I thought about it for a minute.

“Ain’t gettin’ your life back worth a million bucks?” AJ asked, raising his eyebrow.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well there ya go,” he said, “There’s how you do it for a million dollars.” He gestured at the TV again.

I stared at the TV, at the blue haired girl pleading with the camera to please think of the people of Kenya. It was true that everyone and their great aunt Sally was talking about this tsunami. Lauren herself had been moderately obsessed with the updates on TV. AJ was right. Match donations always got talked about. Lauren would hear about it on her own, I wouldn’t have to brag about donating to the tsunami relief fund. She’d think I was selfless and come back to me and my life would go back to normal.

I turned and quickly snatched my phone off the coffee table just as Ava was coming back and AJ went to change the channel. “Wait,” I said, stopping him. “Read me that number first.”

AJ’s voice carried a smirk. “1-800-....”





Kat


Once a week, Taji and I had to take the seven hour ride by dhaw to Lamu to get supplies for the village. There was no food growing in the ground, all we had was what Taji and I could buy and bring back. The organization’s funds were dwindling quick, even with donations coming in at a more steady pace than usual. The problem was that most of the donations we were receiving were small $10 here and there type things and it just wasn’t enough to feed an entire village for very long as well as build new houses. There was no hope of buying new animals at this point.

Taji and I were in Lamu a couple weeks after the tsunami to get food. I stopped at the one ATM in Lamu to pull out money from the organization bank account. Five hundred dollars, which exchanged to over 50,000 shillings, was the most I could afford to pull, though. It sounds like a lot, because of the exchange rate, but it didn’t stretch as much as you would think, even though things were considerably cheaper in Kenya. We would still be eating meager at the village. The receipt came out of the ATM and I stared at it for a second, blinking in disbelief.

The balance of the Wild Heartland Organization had more zeros than I had never seen on a bank balance in my life.

“What… the hell…” I muttered, staring at it.

“What is wrong, Paka?” Taji asked, looking at me and at the machine.

“I - I don’t know. I need a phone. I need to call the office,” I stammered.

We walked from the ATM to a hotel nearby that sold international calling cards for cell phones. Then we sat in their lobby with my phone plugged in until I could add the card minutes and make a call out without the battery dying instantly. I gave Taji the rest of our money and he went to barter for the cornmeal to make ungali with at the market while I waited for the phone to charge up. When it finally had, I called the office.

“Kat!” cried Wendy, one of the volunteers that worked at the office part time sounded ecstatic to hear me when I called her. “How is everything?” She’d been among the volunteers, along with Michael, who had come to Kiwayuu to help film some footage for news outlets and TV spots. They’d only stayed a couple days. The organization just couldn’t afford to support too many volunteers over here, food wise. I couldn’t ask the people who worked for me to go hungry, but I could ask myself to, so it was just me over here now until we could get things steadied.

“Still the same as ever… Listen, Wendy, is David there?” David was our financial assistant.

“Hold on.” I heard her pass off the phone.

“Hey Kat,” David’s voice was excited, “I had a feeling you’d be calling next time you were in Lamu.”

I pulled the balance sheet out of my pocket. “David… talk to me, that’s a lot of zeros on our balance.”

“It’s accurate, Kat,” he said. “We got a huge donation this week, a match donor… He donated a hundred thousand outright, then offered to match up to five hundred thousand more.”

I think I stopped breathing. “What? Who?” I choked the words out of my empty lungs.

“His name’s Nick Carter,” said David. “He’s apparently some kind of musician. I went on iTunes and found him.”

I was dizzy.

I was dreaming. I had to be.

“N - Nick Carter?” I stammered.

“Yeah, according to Wikipedia he was a Backstreet Boy or something… You know that song I Want It That Way? Apparently that’s him.” David’s voice sounded like he was shrugging.

Like a Backstreet Boy donating to Wild Heartlands wasn’t a big deal in and of itself, regardless of how much money he’d donated.

But $100,000?

And an up-to-500,000 match?

That was over a million dollars.

“Oh my God,” I felt like the whole world was spinning about seventy-five trillion times faster than it needed to.

With over a million dollars, we could afford the building supplies we needed to rebuild the houses. We could make them out of actual wood instead of grass huts so that they could withstand more before needing repairs.

With over a million dollars, we could buy livestock - cattle and goats and chickens.

With over a million dollars, we could get the motorboat repaired, we could make it to Lamu quicker in emergencies - only three hours instead of seven.

With over a million dollars, we could fix the village, make it more vibrantly alive than ever it had been, even before the tsunami.

“He left a phone number,” David said, “He said if you need to call him --”

I leaped up and ran to the front desk, “I need a pen,” I gasped. The clerk raised his eyebrow and gave me one. “Asante.” I ran back to my perch by the wall. “David, what’s the number? I, uh, I need to call him and thank him. Formally. You know. As the director and everything.” I bit my lip.

“Sure hang on, let me get that for you.”

My head was spinning.

Not only was Kiwayuu going to be saved… but they were being saved by Nick fucking Carter. I felt like a teenager. A very, very, very, ecstatically happy teenager whose fear of letting down a village had just been soothed by one of the most famous singers in the entire world.

“Ready for the number?” David asked.

“I am so ready,” I answered.

The Boy Who Turned into a Fish



Nick

Kat had disappeared to God knows where, which left me with Taji and the other guys, who were trying to show me how to build the house they were working on. I’ve never been much of a handy-man and it showed as they tried to get me to help but I was more of a problem than anything else. I could tell they were all thinking it, muttering to each other in Swahili.

“What are they saying about me?” I asked Taji under my breath.

“Nothing, friend,” he said. “We are all thankful for your help.” But he looked guilty and I had a feeling he was lying.

I couldn’t blame them. It must be annoying, having such shitty, inexperienced help as I was messing with the workflow and not even being able to cuss me out in a language I’d understand. I’d be frustrated and muttering, too.

I kept hoping Kat would come back from wherever she’d gone off to and overhear them talking down about my so-called assistance and get me out of the mess I was in, but she didn’t come back with Azizi until the sun was starting to set and the sky was tinged pink and orange overhead and the fire was blazing. Taji suddenly took the hammer from my hand, “We are done for today,” he said, “Come, let us go and eat.”

I was all too grateful to call it a day on the half-finished house. My back ached from sleeping on the ground the night before still and the long day of hard labor hadn’t exactly helped in making my back feel better by any means. I was starving, too. What I wouldn’t have given for some good stick-to-your-ribs food, like Lauren’s turkey burger chili. I could almost feel myself salivating just thinking of it. I’d give anything for that over the ungali which was about as delicious as stale oatmeal. I’d had some of the ungali that morning, once I’d calmed myself down from the fake rhino attack. It hadn’t been exactly great but it was better than nothing at all, so I settled myself onto the log between Taji and Kat and shovelled some of the bland stuff into my mouth.

“So where the hell were you all day?” I asked Kat, looking over at her as we ate.

“I went to talk to Azizi,” she replied. “He was pretty upset.”

“He was upset?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “He didn’t think he was about to be gored by a rhino.”

Kat shrugged.

I know it’s stupid, but some part of me felt kinda jealous that she’d felt the need to go comfort the lil shit instead of me. I gnashed my ungali in silence for a few moments, holding the bowl and glaring at the fire.

That’s when Nanny stood up and a general hush fell over everyone around the fire. I glanced up at her small, hunched figure above me. She took a deep breath, and started talking in low, rolling tones that seemed to wash over the people. I had no idea what she was saying, but I watched as her mouth moved, her eyes bright and damp as she spoke, moving her hands before her in various motions that I didn’t know how to interpret. Everyone was transfixed, though. Even me, even without understanding her.

When she’d finished talking, Nanny smiled around at us all. “Usiku mwema,” she said thickly.

“Usiku mwema,” chorused the people, and just like that, everyone started getting up. Even Kat.

“Is that like Swahili for bedtime or something?” I asked.

Two of the men were dousing the fire. “She said good night,” Kat explained.

“Got’cha. So… so now everyone just goes to bed?”

“Yeah, basically,” Kat answered. “We have a long day tomorrow, more building to do.” She led the way through the camp to the tents and I followed, reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire, not looking forward to another long night under the stars on the hard ground. “You okay?” Kat asked. I nodded. “You sure?” she asked.

“Never been better,” I said. We’d reached the tent, so I went for mine and pulled the door back. “Yo’ sookie me weema,” I told Kat.

She chuckled. “Usiku mwema, Nick.”

I zipped the tent door shut behind me.





Kat


I laid in my tent that night, staring up through the sheer ceiling at the stars and the silhouette of the tree tops. It was eerily silent in the village these days without the chirruping of the monkeys in the forest or the call of the birds that usually filled the night. The only sound was the distant thrum of the ocean waves, the wind rustling leaves, and somewhere, in one of the tents, one of the women was humming a lullaby to her children. I felt uneasy, listening to the gaping silence, as though waiting for something. It felt like an awkward pause in the middle of a sentence, as though not everything had been said that needed to be.

The zipper was loud compared to the night. It was Nick's. I listened as he got out of his tent and started to shuffle by. I sat up and unzipped my own tent and watched as he moved toward the forest quickly.

Not wanting to disturb anyone else, I didn’t call after him. Instead, I climbed out of my own tent and hurried after him. He disappeared into the trees. I hesitated, torn between letting the guy have some privacy and ensuring he didn't go getting lost. I decided that, in the dark, in the woods, it was best not to leave him alone, so I followed behind him down the path. I could only just see him ahead of me, a dark shape moving against the blue of the forest. When we’d walked far enough from the village, I called to him, “Nick.”

He turned around in surprise. “Kat?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Where are you headed?”

“I had to pee,” he explained.

“Got’cha.”

“Where are you headed?” he asked, trying to mimic my suspicious tone.

“I didn’t want you to get lost in the woods,” I said, smirking. “Now go pee.”

Nick looked at the woods, then up at the canopy of tree tops, the moonlight coming through them. He glanced at me, “I dunno if I can.”

“Why?” I asked.

“‘Cos… you’re here… and… I dunno… I can’t pee in front of an audience.”

I laughed, “Stage fright are you?”

Nick shrugged.

“Well, tell you what, we’ll walk until you can’t hold it anymore, then,” I said, and I started trodding off along the path again. Nick hesitated only a moment, then rushed to catch up with me.

“Where we goin’?” he asked, and I noticed that the further down the path we went - the darker it became - and the closer to me Nick hovered. He reminded me of the Cowardly Lion, afraid of his own tail.

I shrugged, “We’re just walking until you have to pee bad enough to ignore the audience,” I replied.

He looked around and continued to hover closer as we walked along. The silence only grew the deeper and deeper we got into the trees. I looked around, staring up at the low lying branches, wondering what had become of all those monkeys. There’d been so much life among these trees before… now, there was a lot of devastation and loss. A lot of grief was buried among their trunks. I felt a chill and rubbed my palms over my arms, trying to warm them up.

“So what was Nanny saying tonight?” Nick asked quietly, his voice low, “At the fire? Just before everyone went to bed?”

I’d forgotten to translate for him, I realized. “She told a bed time story,” I explained, “For the children.”

“A bed time story? What was it about?” he was cowering close to me, eyes darting about still. I had a feeling we were talking to keep him distracted from whatever he thought was lurking around in the trees. I wish I could’ve expressed to him strong enough to quell his fears that there was nothing alive in the trees. Everything was gone. So much so that it was more frightening than the prospect of anything that would’ve been out there, hidden by the leaves.

“A boy who could turn into a fish,” I told him.

“Like a dolphin or something?” Nick questioned.

I shook my head, “Nothing as impressive as that, just a regular fish. The boy had gotten this power from the mgnanga wa kienyeji - or a witch doctor, basically. It was a curse, placed on the boy when he refused to sit and listen to her monologues about channeling the spirit of a great fisherman of the past. So the boy and his family had to move from that village because they didn’t live near the water and because the boy was now a fish they needed to be near to the water so that he could swim when he changed over…” I looked at Nick and he was staring at me with intrigue, interested in the tale. So I continued, “They found a village close to the shore, like this one; actually, in Nanny’s tale, it is this village… It was much closer to the shore before, when this took place. The ocean has receded quite a bit since the old days, giving us back a lot of the land that we’re walking on now, you and I.”

“So all this used to not be here?” Nick asked.

“Many, many, many years ago when this story took place, supposedly, yes. Nanny has suggested that the tsunami might have been the sea’s way of attempting to reclaim the property that has been stolen from it by the earth.” I paused, hearing how crazy it sounded, as though I were talking about an ornery neighbor in an suburban neighborhood. I smiled. “The elements have quite distinct personalities in the belief systems here, you see.”

Nick laughed, “The sea sounds like a bitch.”

“It really is. Anyway… this boy… he found the village and they were very poor, nearly dying from their need. He and his family realized that this curse could be a gift and they tied the boat to him when he as in the form of a fish and he was large enough to pull the boats through the water to bring them to Lamu, where, even in those days, there was hope of food and supplies and medicines that the village couldn’t access on their own. The boy’s name was Kiwayuu and that is why the village is named Kiwayuu, because of his bravery in helping the village to survive. The purpose of this story is to know that a curse is not always a curse, but is also a blessing, which you will learn in time, when you think of others outside of yourself.” I’d recited the moral word-for-word to what Nanny had said.

Nick nodded slowly, “That’s a pretty cool origin story.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s nice. There are alternate versions - in one of them, the villagers eat the boy while he is in his fish form and the fish is large enough that it feeds them for an entire winter.” I laughed at the face Nick made in response. “Yeah, it’s not as pleasant as a giant fish helping the boats get to Lamu. It’s told further north mostly.”

“So more than one village thinks that’s how it started?” Nick questioned.

“It’s an old folktale, Nick, everyone takes it and make it their own. There’s little differences. In some of the villages and cultures that use the tale the boy becomes a lion and defends his village from an attack. In another, he’s a werewolf-type creature and only changes on the moon. Others, he can turn into the boat itself. It really varies, depending on the needs of that culture. Kind of like how different countries have different versions of Santa Claus or whatever.”

Nick said, “That makes sense.”

Somehow we’d walked all the way to the shoreline and I came to a stop at the edge of the trees, where the path we’d been following melted seamlessly into the sand that lined the edge of the ocean. The white-capped waves glowed in the moonlight on the dark black abyss that was the seemingly unending sea. Nick stopped behind me. We stood, watching the water roll.

“Okay, I really gotta pee, and that water is not helping...” he announced, and he dove into the trees to the left, crashing through the low branches until he was out of sight.

I smirked to myself and ran down the beach, leaving behind only footprints for Nick to follow to find me.

Starry Night



Nick

When I stepped out of the woods after doing my business, I could only just see Kat’s silhouette, way off across the sand, dancing in ankle-deep ocean water that gently licked the shore in the moonlight. Her cornflower hair was silver - like diamond silver - in the pale moonlight, seeming to shimmer as she twirled about, her cargo pants ankles rolled over her knees. I walked across the sand slowly, kicking off my shoes after a few feet and rolling up my own ankles. I found Kat’s shoes at the edge of the where the wet sand met the dry and I deposited my own shoes there before approaching her. She was humming a song, some tune I’d never heard before, her toes sending water up in little spark-like splashes.

“You look like you’re having a good time,” I said, smirking.

She turned to look at me and held out her hands, “C’mon. Dance with me.”

I didn’t really feel like dancing. I shook my head, “I’m okay. You have fun. I’m good here.” The water was just barely reaching my toes. She stared at me, one eyebrow raised, as though she didn’t believe me. “Really -” I said, “Go on. Have fun.”

Kat wrinkled her nose, then lunged forward and grabbed my hand, “I’ll only have fun if you dance, too,” she argued. She pulled me along behind her and I stumbled through the sand into the tidal pools she was dancing through, the water cool against the skin of my ankles. She laughed and said, “C’mon.” She swayed, swinging my hands with hers as she spun herself around until her back was pressed to my chest and then back out in a funny little pirouette.

Slowly, I started to let my guard down; after all, it’s not as though there was anyone around to see us. There was nobody to tell me how ridiculous I looked except Kat herself, who looked just as silly as I did as we started splashing about, dancing about, the water flying around us as we spun, Kat’s humming the only music besides the rolling of the tide. As we moved, laughing every now and then at the absurdity of what we were doing, Kat changed her tune to one I recognized - Sweetest Thing by U2.

With a smirk, I started to sing along quietly. “I wanted to run but she made me crawl… oh the sweetest thing… eternal fire, she turned me to straw… I know I have black eyes, but they burn so brightly for her… this is a blind kind of love…”

Kat laughed and started singing, too, and just like that, there we were in ankle deep ocean water, laughing and singing all crazy and purposely off-key to the imaginary tune in our minds. “Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl,” she sang loudly, spinning and spinning as she sang, “You can sew it up but you’ll still see the tear…”

She’d gotten quite a ways away, and I ran along after her. As we moved along, past the make-shift pier, my eyes roved over the fallen plants and the washed up remains of old homes and seaweed and I saw that broken down old motorboat for which Taji’s brother had died. I stopped running, even as Kat continued on, and I walked up to the boat, running my hand over the curve of the bow as I walked along, my palm pressed to the side of it, running along the smooth body.

Suddenly Kat was at my side. “They traded a lot of livestock to get the boat,” she explained, “Five good oxen and twenty goats. It was very expensive. Losing the boat would have been a very great tragedy… You can get to Lamu in half the time by motor boat. When someone is in critical condition, it’s very important. Tamal had been worried about Nanny. It was especially important to Tamal and Taji, in case something should happen to Nanny. That’s why Tamal had considered it worth risking his life.”

I stared at it. “Was it working okay before?”

“As far as I know,” Kat answered.

“Could be the engine flooded,” I suggested.

“I mean we looked at it as best we could, but there aren’t exactly any mechanics in the village,” she explained. “I haven’t been able to get someone from WHO over here yet to examine it.”

I pulled myself up into the boat. The floor inside had obviously been flooded in the tsunami, too. It was heavily tethered to a couple of trees. It was a miracle that the trees had stayed standing, given the state that some of their neighbors were in. But the Lord smiled on the fate of the boat, I guess; perhaps because it had been Tamal’s final act. I reached out my hand and pulled Kat up into the boat with me. She stood there, watching, as I walked to the nose and climbed up to have a look under the hood, sitting with my back to the windshield. She leaned against the body of the boat as I stared into the engine, which had indeed been flooded. There were bits of seaweed tangled up into some of the cogs and gears and there was a few parts damaged, but as far as I could see by the moonlight, there didn’t seem to be anything irreparable. My boat in Key West had been way worse off when I’d repaired that with the help of some of my buddies. But I’d had tools and access to parts and the internet to help out with the fixing.

“Think you can do anything?” Kat asked.

“Probably,” I answered. “I can try anyways.” I shrugged and poked about at the pieces I was looking at, making a mental checklist of what I’d need to do to get the boat running again. “It’s hard to see for sure without any light,” I added.

“It would be a blessing if you could,” Kat said.

“I’ll do my best,” I promised, and I realized that I really meant it. There was something about the idea that Tamal had stood and faced a tsunami in the name of rescuing the boat that had been the only hope of his family. I pictured him standing on the bow, staring up at the wall of water, knowing he’d done all he could… it stirred something inside me, something deep down in the very pits of me.

Kat smiled, “Thank you,” she said. She was looking at me funny.

“What?” I asked.

Kat shook her head, “Nothing.”





Kat

After Nick had finished his appraisal on the boat, we sat on the beach in the dark and listened to the waves moving and a gentle breeze moving the trees behind us. It was peaceful out there. I could hear nature existing and Nick’s soft breathing and I swear that I could feel the earth moving through space. It was one of the things I loved most about the quiet of a late Kenyan night; the stillness of the night was so consuming that you could really feel the smallness of the planet and the bigness of the universe. In the sky, the stars were bright and steadily growing brighter, too. Colors were popping all over the place, brilliant hues that seemed to snake and curl around the stars.

"Is that -- is it like the Northern Lights or something?" Nick asked.

I shook my head, not looking away from the colors. "No… it’s stardust, on fire."

"Stardust?" he repeated.

"Yeah, like what you see in NASA photos. It's just so dark and so unpolluted here that you can actually see it."

I could barely breathe for how beautiful it was.

“Rangi,” I said.

Nick looked over at me. “Rangi?”

“Color in Swahili,” I replied. I looked back at him. “So what made you wanna come to Kenya anyways?” I asked.

Nick was leaning back on his elbows and he turned back to look up at the sky again. “Dunno,” he replied.

“There’s gotta be a reason,” I said. “People don’t just come to Kiwayuu for the hell of it. Especially after the devastation that’s gone on here. Most people would never come here.”

Nick gnawed his lower lip for a moment, then, finally, he said, “I just wanted to see it. To know where my money was going. To help in more… more tangible ways…” he was squinting up at the rangi in the sky. “Just wanted to see it, really.” He looked back at me after a long pause. “What made you come to Kiwayuu?”

“I fell in love with the people here,” I explained. “I stumbled on them. I was in Lamu once a long time ago, when I was a kid. My dad was in the military and we were stationed in Durban for a couple years and we traveled north once and stayed in Lamu on a vacation. It was just so lovely there, and the vacation was really important to my mum…” I stopped speaking for a moment, my throat closing up, pausing, remembering. I could still see her in my mind. She’d danced in the surf the same way as I had just earlier that evening, spinning through the tide in a beautiful yellow sundress, a pink parasol clutched in her palms… We’d held hands, as I’d done to Nick, and danced through the wet sand. “The first chance I got, I came back.”

Nick was staring at me still, transfixed again by the story.

“I was a part of a clean water mission with the peace corp the first time we came to Kenya. I signed up for it because of that trip to Lamu; I learned of Kiwayuu then. I just… left my heart here, I suppose, when I was a kid. The moment I arrived, I knew it was home. It meant everything to me to bring hope to these people.”

“You do a good job of it,” he said.

I shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder who brings hope to who. Honestly, it’s not always me bringing it to them. It’s usually them bringing hope to me.” I smiled.

Nick looked back up at the stars again. “So why do they call you Paka?” he asked.

“It’s cat in their language,” I laughed, “Like the animal. Taji called me Paka first, translating the word cat, not realizing it was my name and… it just stuck.”

“That’s funny,” Nick laughed.

I nodded, “It’s a pretty catchy nickname, really. I could’ve done worse.”

“It’s cute,” he agreed. “It kinda fits you, too. It sounds happy and you seem happy, like you’re full of light… like the stars or something. You’re just so selfless and giving.”

“I wasn’t always,” I answered with a shrug.

Nick raised an eyebrow.

“I was a very selfish person once,” I explained, “Somewhere along the way I lost myself among the stories I heard and the love I saw and… I dunno. My selfish self wasn’t a happy person, I’d lost a lot of feeling inside, and when I opened up the fists I held so tight… I just… I was a lot happier.”

“I can’t imagine you selfish,” he whispered.

“I was,” I whispered back, “I am. We all are. Selfishness is human nature. We’re not all Ghandi. We’re everyday people, living everyday lives, on a piece of rock flying through the universe and all we can do is pray that we’ll learn how to just love with all our might and fight for the happiness that we’re all entitled to as human people.”

We were just staring at each other now, our eyes searching through each other’s faces. His stare was so deep, so full of emotions. My heart raced and I felt as though the largeness of the universe I’d just been marvelling at had been swallowed up by the butterflies in my stomach as I looked into Nick’s eyes… everything seemed to spin around me, like time was frozen and I was looking out of eyes that were stuck on some sort of long exposure camera setting.

The things I was feeling… I could see them stirring in his eyes, too, could see them flickering on his face. He was leaning closer… so close I could feel his aura nearly touching mine and his breath grazed my forehead.
He looked away suddenly, leaning back into his own space.

I was breathless.

“We probably should get back to the camp,” he said finally, and he stood up and dusted off the bottom of his pants, “Don’t you think?”

The sun was starting to come up over the horizon. “Yeah,” I replied. “You’re right, we should.”

He walked over and scooped up both our shoes and waited as I got up and dusted off my pants. I joined him and he handed me my shoes and at the edge of the path through the forest, I ran my feet over a stone to get the sand and water off and pulled on the shoes, Nick mimicking me. We set off into the dark of the empty trees once more, the sunlight following along behind us as the morning came.