Haunted Nairobi
We lived on Elgeyo Marakwet (pronounced "El-Gay-Oh Mah-Rah-Kwet") road on two different occasions, but in the same house. It didn't seem so strange at the time but looking back now it's a bit humorous that as a family of five we moved away for a few years and then decided to move back into the very same house we'd left.
During our first stay on Elgeyo, when I was perhaps 10 or 11, a friend of mine would take me to the cool-sounding but small and mundane Adam's Arcade, a shopping center south on our house, for chips1 and kabobs. It was a quaint road; so boring that I don't remember much about those walks except trying to be quiet and listen to Scott, who was A Teenager and knew much more than I did about life. On those walks he retold parts of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings to me, permanently turning my interests towards the fantastical.
At some point Elgeyo did become interesting - sadly interesting - when a house on the west side of the road burned down mysteriously one night. I was too young to pay attention to the news and we didn't own a television so it was fascinating in a "I should feel sympathy but why am I so interested?" sort of way. Along with friends I made up stories about the burned house and what lurked inside. Our stories stretched with time and as we tried to outdo each other the house grew more foreboding in its neglected state.
During those early years I became friends with a kid named Peter who attended the same British school. Peter, nicknamed PC for his initials, was a chubby American import and the only white kid in our class. One day, as we were walking nearby, he did the unthinkable: he dared me to go in.
In any haunted house story it seems like a forgone conclusion that someone will eventually be dared to venture in but the reason it was a surprise was the level of fear that the house evoked. The gate had been bashed in over time, the grass was waist high, and the roof had collapsed by this point. It was as much the house as it was the prospect of running into something really dangerous, like a black mamba2, on your way in that overwhelmed any of the pride it would take to satisfy the dare.
I told PC I'd check it out if he went with; I judged I could probably outrun him in case something out of a Stephen King novel decided to manifest itself in the burned ruins. PC, recognizing the stalemate, kept quiet and didn't try goading me any further.
It wasn't too long after PC's dare that we moved away and I forgot all about the haunted house. We lived in a new place and I'd switched from the British school, where PC was the only white kid, to an American school, where I was the only African in my class. I discovered basketball, the teenage crush, and new friends. New obsessions clouded my memories.
But we moved back to Elgeyo, and this time I walked south on the road to catch the bus, which was near Adam's Arcade, the shopping center where I'd eaten so many plates of chips and kabobs. In the few years since Adam's Arcade had become disheveled, being usurped by new commercial developments in the area. As such it became overrun by "parking boys" - our term for street children - who would go there to beg the patrons of the local shops as they made their way to and from their cars. In the upscale places the police and private security guards made sure parking boys stayed away by beating and harassing them. Younger parking boys were usually annoying but harmless, but in large groups they could mean trouble. Once they began entering their teens they'd transition from "parking boy" to "boho" - the sort of street kid that didn't bother with begging you for a few shillings, they'd pull a knife and jump you instead.
By luck or design the bus stop was not all the way to Adam's Arcade and Elgeyo was enough of a road that several schools put their bus stops on it. I would pass the haunted house, now years in disrepair, on my way to and from our house. In my mind my persona had changed: no longer the scrawny preteen, I was A Teenager, old enough to know everything I needed to know in life. Old enough to find myself questioning the fears I had about the haunted house.
Could it really be that spooky? At night, of course, but what about on a Saturday at 11am, with the sun so high in the air that any creature from the dark would be overwhelmed by its glare? One day, walking home, I crossed the street to walk right in front of the house, to scope it out in a sense.
Nothing happened.
Soon, it became this overwhelming curiosity for me to go inside and see for myself with PC's dare echoing in my mind. It was "real life" and nothing could happen if I wandered in and had a look at an old, burned house.
I remember the approach - although the grass was long there was a path that seemed to go towards the main entrance of the house. All the windows were broken but there were still the iron bars - what we would refer to as "burglar proof" - on them to obscure a really good picture at what lay beyond. I went inside and found myself thinking, as I walked into the entry way, that my curiosity had gotten the better of me and that I still had a chance to escape from the place unharmed.
Unharmed? My inner Teenager became annoyed at this childishness and I pressed on towards the living room which in fact wasn't empty. On the edges, by the wall, I could see cardboard arranged on the floor in large rectangles, the size of, well, a short, slim bed. On the walls I noticed a few pictures - frayed at the edges as though they'd been torn out of a magazine - haphazardly taped up. I remember other small personal possessions and seeing it so well in the daylight - there was no roof - and realizing that the haunted house, all these years, must have been a place for parking boys and vagrants3. A home to call their own. Each room was the same sort of arrangement and I remember thinking that there didn't seem to be so many of them living there - perhaps 15 or so.
It was at this point that I began to imagine how I would feel if I found some bourgeois kid going through my stuff in my burned down house, and how as tough as I thought I was I'd be outmatched if they decided to return to check out their place that day. I left in a hurry.
I left wondering how I couldn't see what was going on. After all those years, walking up and down Elgeyo, I'd never been able to construct that abandoned, burned out home for what it really was. Thinking about that did leave me haunted in a way I wouldn't have expected, and to this day I can still picture that cardboard on the floor, and the magazine pictures on the wall. For perhaps the only time in my life, I left my world and saw theirs.
1Don't think Ruffles, think massive french fries in shapeless cuts.
2The black mamba is Africa's most dangerous snake. They won't sway to music and often attack unprovoked. Their size is also fearsome - sometimes on the order of 14 feet; that's Shaquille O'Neal standing on Shaquille O'Neal's shoulders. It takes 10 - 15 mg of venom from a bite to be lethal to a human while it's usual delivery is 100 mg.
3The word vagrant is meant here in its literal sense. Here in the US we often overlap vagrant, transient, and mental case, but many people in Nairobi - perhaps even a majority - live without really having a "home." They simply cannot afford to live anywhere but in the cracks where they hope we won't notice them.
11:18:37 AM 
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