Medley of Emotions

Calls for the next entry are slowly coming in, largely from family members who are beginning to feel estranged after months and months of no face-to-face contact. Excuses could abound – an attempt to justify the silence of April. Instead I choose to face the truth. During this month there have been three main influences on my life: singing, War and Peace and rain.

The 'Nyali Singers' concert

When I tell people I have joined a choir my mind generally jumps back to my father’s words to a little, eager girl: “you can’t sing to save your life. It’s your mother’s fault. She sang too much when you were a baby!” So I hope that my sterling contribution to the ‘Nyali Singers’ over the last two years is a testament to that fact that you can occasionally prove your parents wrong! Weekly rehearsals have finally culminated in a performance this week and it has been impossible to prevent the catchy tunes repeating through my head. So…. in memory of the concert I challenge my readers to spot the song lyrics on these very pages – interspersed throughout the paragraphs are words from three tunes that we sang in the choir. Can you find them and the guess the songs?

Throughout this month, one thing has been constant - Mombasa is grey. ‘April showers’ does not convey the persistent flood of water descending from the sky. It’s as if the heavens have been storing up a violent, pent-up aggression against the citizens of the coast and now we are sheltering from the tirade. Everything appears to stop. I rejoice in remembering the roast dinners, snuggly duvets and cosy sofas of old. Instead, what I seek for comfort now is Tolstoy.

War and Peace is an undertaking like no other. A tome which weaves you across a Russian world of love, loyalty and loss. You become intertwined in the pages, desperate to shake the characters and tell them to “Wake up and realise who you love” or “Man up and take responsibility”. Their reply is dissatisfying – the kindle informs you that you’re only 43% through and you begin a monotonous mantra to yourself while reading, saying keep going, you can do it.

Leo Tolstoy says within the book’s pages “Each Man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history”. This truth seems powerful – each of us makes choices which become the narrative to our life. They determine the direction and force of future events. Unlike a book, where we can turn back the pages and relive moments, we are stuck with our decisions, riding the consequences like a tidal wave towards an undetermined land.

So here, as time goes by, I’m beginning to realise the strain of these decisions. Life is no longer easy come, easy go but rather a chain of events so reliant on each other that you’re unable to extricate the causes and effects. Again, quoting the Russian Great “All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” I therefore have to embrace the unknown and appreciate the madness of my life that seems to be spiraling in an unforeseen direction.

I appear to be living on the never never – making the choice to stay in Kenya, remaining separated from my friends and family, building a new life in a different part of the country. Yet, the fundamental things still apply to this new future existence. I will be learning. I will be sharing moments. I will be with someone I love. And I know one thing: this is where I belong.

For now then, I have to embrace my remaining two months in Mombasa and enjoy the diverse society and Western-like luxuries that the Coast can offer because by August I will have replaced my cinema and coffee shop with a boarding school projector and canteen in a remote part of the Rift Valley. My “irrevocable” decision to move up-country is consistently quivering in the background, waiting to be released. Yet, any way the wind blows it will certainly be an adventure.

My new Rift Valley home of 2013-2015