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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.