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Kenya Railways

Kenya, I remember the hospitality of the people, travel to rural areas, the legacy of colonialism, the dignified formality of handshaking and dress, the colors, the rhythm of Kenyan English, the rain, the wheat fields and forests and scrub and waves on the shore.

A country is as hard to catalog as a universe or as a family. But I would want to try to tell how the country is beautiful, and how people formed a happy life with less than a tenth of the possessions we think are necessary for basic life, and how life and death, laughter and heartache, wealth and poverty seemed so much closer together there.

And of course, a key point of real travel for an American is always to try to see the country on its own terms, but illuminated by your own perspective. To see it, in other words as capable of existing just fine without the United States, to see it in terms of its own definitions of self and not your own.

Despite the passage of 20 years, the time there, the friendships and events are still vivid.