On the Road to Kinale

An RPCV might stumble, but never falls

To get to the town of Kinale — a small settlement of mud huts and brick-and-mortar blocks situated in the high country along the Western edge of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, East Africa — one must negotiate four miles of evergreen-forested terrain, the distance between the Nairobi Highway and the village itself. This negotiation is abetted by an unnamed road connecting the two points, a dirt track that can, at least in the brief dry season, accommodate, along with the plentiful bicycles and ubiquitous humans on foot, actual cars, a rare mode of travel in this poor, rural area. The meager infrastructural resources available to the Kenyan government, however, render this road a mess, as road and highway maintenance is virtually nonexistent, a condition that worsens in direct correlation to the distance one finds oneself away from Nairobi, the nation’s capital. Add to this the fact that Kinale is one of Kenya’s wettest communities with an average annual rainfall of over sixty inches, and the four-mile stretch of the Kinale road can only be described as an actual road during dry periods. And on the Western slopes of the Great Rift Valley, dry periods are wanting. 

Influenced for untold eons by the predominant topographical character of the region, great moisture-laden air masses grow and congregate as wind and air pressure meet drastic altitude alterations. Dampness pervades all, from a foggy drizzle to a steady rainfall. For a full ten months out of the year, the temperatures hold steady between 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun shines only intermittently.  Such weather conditions combine to make the dirt road impassable, a useless smear of red, clay-like soil turned to muck and mud. Though this grim parody of a road could be a depressing exercise in irony for the area’s residents, it’s actually regarded as just the way things are. Those residents of Kinale who actually own and drive a car can be counted on one’s fingers; bicycles are the main mode of non-foot travel, but even bikes are a luxury for the vast majority of denizens. These souls get around by riding the shank’s mare.

That is to say: they walk. I picked up the “shank’s mare” expression back when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya in the late 1980s from the Peace Corps nurse who gave me my in-country physical.  I did a lot of walking in the Kinale region myself. My then-girlfriend (and now-wife, as things turned out) lived and taught school in Kinale, and in order to spend time together — my own Peace Corps Kenya site was on the Indian Ocean coast, three hundred-plus miles away — we alternated visiting each other on weekends. Actually, being the chivalrous and head-over-heels-in-love young man that I was, I did the lion’s share of the visiting, sparing my girlfriend the hellish rigors and trials of the night bus from Mombasa to Nairobi — eight hours of bouncing and jouncing over the pothole-strewn Nairobi Highway, trying to sleep crammed among the various plant, animal, and human life also trying to sleep. 

The author at his site in Kenya

Peace Corps Volunteers are allotted a monthly stipend on which to live, an amount of money commensurate with the monthly salary of the Kenyans among whom they live and work. Kenya is a poor country, and Peace Corps teachers work in the poorest (i.e.: neediest) communities, so needless to say, I found myself being dropped off at the side of the Nairobi Highway where the road to Kinale terminates — nothing so grand as a bus stop there, but the Kenyan bus drivers all seem to know where to drop passengers destined for even the most obscure and insubstantial communities.

During one of my visits to Kinale, my girlfriend and I decided to head into Nairobi to sample its cosmopolitan attractions. After all, the Peace Corps life with all its attendant solitude and remoteness can drag. It was wet and rainy as usual, and we were moving down the Kinale road, catching up on our latest experiences. I’ve taken pains here to make it clear that the road is virtually impassable during the wet months. But Kenyans are an industrious lot, and through the years and decades and centuries, an alternate path has been formed: a narrow track of dirt running along the north side of the road, set about four feet above its surface. This ground was heavily traversed, for it could accommodate bikes as well as folks on foot, as long as the cyclists used caution. Whenever a bicycle came along, pedestrians had to shift up to the grassy verge bordering the road on both sides. No one bothered with the actual road when things were wet, which, as I have said, was pretty much always. Even the rare car owners would leave their vehicles parked and idle rather than get them stuck in the muck. The road went unused, caught in an endless cycle of underfunding. The road would be built but lack continuous funds for maintenance, and so go into disrepair. 

So we weren’t precisely walking on the Kinale road. The upper foot path was somewhat precarious, situated as it was. Its width was just about ten inches (single-file progress only), and it undulated according to the vagaries of the terrain and the feet (often bare) that had molded it through time.  The drop down to the road was nothing dramatic, but with all the mire down there, one definitely did not wish to muddy one’s feet by losing one’s balance and going over the edge. On the other side, to our right, ran an elevated tuft of subsoil and grass, about six inches in height — the path having sunk due to all the foot and bike traffic through the years. To the right of this verge was an open meadow, shiny green and verdant with native grasses and weeds, that stretched a few dozen feet to the edge of the pine forest.

Along the narrow pathway, then, we trucked, walking briskly, backpacks bouncing, excited to be together again and off on a weekend out on the town. The surface of the path was hard-packed, smooth dirt that was mostly impervious to the effects of the constant precipitation — mostly, but not completely.  It could be slippery if one wasn’t careful. We’d both walked this route many times, however, and were absorbed in our conversation. I was ahead, intermittently turning back to make eye contact, in which case I would walk backwards for a few paces, gesticulate to make a point, then turn back ahead for balance. On one of these turns, I slipped, nearly losing my footing. “Careful there, twinkle-toes,” my girlfriend said from behind me, to which I turned and, still moving, replied with a big smile, “I may slip, but I never go down.” She smiled back and kept walking. A couple of minutes later, really picking up the pace now, happily enjoying our freedom, I slipped again and stumbled a bit. Again I righted myself. “See?” I paused. “What did I tell you? I may slip, but I never fall.” My companion just rolled her eyes and smiled some more, and kept on walking, even faster now, passing me with a smirk.

We were approaching the end of the road now, the sound of desultory traffic on the Nairobi Highway up ahead coming to us through the misty, wind-blown pine-tree air. Just then I slipped again, and this time, unable to maintain my footing on the path, stumbled down the slope toward the sorry excuse for a road below. Pinwheeling my arms like a cartoon character, still proudly maintaining my mantra, “I may slip, but I never—“, I fell splat onto my back into the mud of the Kinale road.  

Instantly I was sodden. Embarrassed, I popped up as quickly as I’d fallen in an attempt at minimizing the damage. I stood in the mire of the road and assessed myself. Mud and muck caked all that one side of my body, from crown to toe. Mud dropped from my backside in graceless clots. Mud was in my hair and oozing between the fingers of my right hand. I flicked my arm and hand and fingers up and down on that side, trying to flay away some of the damage. Mud seeped into my pants and wetted my legs. It inundated my feet, spoiling the Vasque hiking boots I had bought special for my Peace Corps adventures only four months before. I stepped to move out of the mud hole and my right side listed, weighted down as it was with its extra red-brown, clingy cargo. Shucking off my soaked backpack and tossing it onto the grass, I lurched up to the path and met eyes with my girlfriend.  

We burst out laughing. “Look at you!” she said between guffaws, passing behind me in inspection. “Don’t go down, huh?  Never fall, right?” She was beaming as I moved past my backpack a few feet out onto the verge of the path, and, with no consideration, fell onto my back and right side and began pushing and squirming on the cool, slick green of the wild grass, trying to wipe the mud off of my clothing and regain a modicum of respectability.  

It was working pretty well, I thought, when I felt a stinging sensation on my muddied arm. Lifting it took all of a second, and in that time the stinging intensified threefold and had moved to three times as many spots on my body. I sat up in the now-mud-streaked grass, inspecting the back of my arm when I saw what was causing that stinging: ants. Safari ants. “Siafu,” as they are known in Swahili. I glanced at the ground and found that I was sitting in the middle of a vast, broiling ant nest. My frantic movements had agitated them.  

“Holy shit, get up!” my girlfriend cried. “You’re covered in ants!” And sure enough, I was. The stinging, which had been intensifying but intermittent, now became one solid scald of sting. Ants were everywhere. And they were big, too, with shiny black hindquarters, those beady alien heads, and startling spiked pincers. They bit and scurried, scurried and stung. My left boot must have been at the epicenter of the nest, because it was a fizzing mass of bright black. Uttering a weird, startled cry of mingled surprise, outrage, and fear, I leaped up, gathered my feet, and began slapping and kicking and swinging and flicking all possible jointed body parts, and even some unjointed ones. My head flailed back and forth and up and down on my neck as I slapped at my ears and hair; my legs did the boogie-woogie one by one, a manic shake and shimmy; my arms jerked and whirled, all in an attempt at ridding myself of this scourge I’d brought upon myself. Ants flew; ants also dug in. I felt fresh bites in my ears, on my arms, at my ankles; ants were using my forehead as a playing field. 

After a few seconds of this mad stationary dance, I realized the essential futility of it and commenced the only viable next step in this ant-ridding ritual: strip. Rain jacket and undershirt came off in a flash of red and white; frenzied ants zig-zagged across them as they dropped discarded onto the grass.  I lifted one foot, yanked off the boot, and tossed it aside; I did the same with the other. They teemed with ants. I ripped off my exposed gym socks — ants were on them, too, moving black freckles on a clean white backdrop.   grasped my belt buckle and undid it in record time, dropping my blue jeans and stepping out of them and away from the pile of my clothing, hot-footing up and down in just my skivvies. Then my girlfriend was at my side, laughing even harder as she helped me slap and whap the remaining intruders from my skin.  

During our Peace Corps Kenya training, we were instructed about the wide variety of wildlife in abundance in Kenya, a characteristic for which the country is renowned throughout the world. Mostly this instruction had to do with the all-important tourism industry, which in turn is centered around the large-animal population — lions, elephants, giraffes, cheetahs, rhinos, etc. — but the dreaded “siafu” made an appearance in our lessons, too. The advice to this effect was simple and direct: don’t mess around with them. They are the world’s largest ant, and most nests are fifty million ants strong. They have been known to decimate any area they overrun, reducing any and all inert organisms to the barest bone, humans included. An estimated thirty to fifty humans die each year from safari ant attacks. The siafu pinch with those medieval-looking pincers more often than they sting — but sting they do, as well.  The pinching is a reflexive action, producing a sharp “bite” on humans — that’s what I had initially felt.  The stinging doesn’t come until the group mind communes and decides upon it. That whole-body zap I’d felt was the result of a single multi-bodied life form focusing its attention and not inconsiderable powers on its enemy — me. Just as with bee stings, a human can have an allergic reaction to ant bites and stings, but the effects of such are quick, if not immediate. Though I was bitten and stung pretty much body-wide, I fortunately didn’t have an allergic reaction, and my speedy disrobing prevented a lot more potential pain.

A lot of the ants were hard to dislodge, but eventually we got them all off. During all this commotion, not a single Kinale local passed by and saw the “Mzungu” couple dancing their strange dance, the male one naked but for his underdrawers, the female fully clothed, a scene that would have compromised the universal Peace Corps Volunteer edict of humbly going about your business as an ambassador of goodwill from the United States, always respecting the local customs and culture. The bites and stings hurt, but as embarrassed and humiliated as I was, I played it off as much as I could, convincing my companion that we should continue on into Nairobi rather than walk all the way back to her site and tend to my multiple, tiny wounds. I had an extra set of clothes in my backpack, and got them on without further incident. The ants, having gotten rid of their surprise intruder with their customary efficiency, had withdrawn back to their nest, from which we had by then moved well away. I stuffed my soiled clothes into my bag, but not before using the shirt to wipe the mud off those nice Vasque boots. I would continue wearing them throughout the rest of my two-year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer and far beyond.

Once we got to Nairobi, I was able to see that aforementioned Peace Corps nurse, an elderly British expatriate with a salty disposition, whom every volunteer feared and who was reputed to have experienced the infamously wild days of colonial White Mischief. “You’ll be fine,” she said in her Welsh accent after examining me, adding with a leer, “Just be glad they didn’t get you on the wee-John!” She nodded in the direction of my belt, bellowed a smoky laugh, winked at my girlfriend, and dismissed us.

It would be ten years before I’d read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and be riveted by its detailed description of driver ants, another term for “siafu,” destroying an entire Congolese village, and twenty until seeing the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise, the centerpiece for me of which is when the ravenous killer ants, erroneously attributed to existing in South America as they are solely African ants, the “siafu,” devour a Nazi in three seconds. But both scenes would bring me back to that damp afternoon beside the Kinale road with my wife-to-be, and my encounter with those wicked ants there.