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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."