Chamwino Running Club and Bad Cats

As I have mentioned before, house visits make up most of my days of late, and there are two customs relating to the house visit that I find particularly charming: pokea and sindikiza.  To pokea is to receive someone, and in this context, it means relieving someone of whatever they are carrying.  They will receive a sack of groceries if you happened to have hit the veggie stand before visiting a friend, or just your notebook if it’s all you’re carrying.  Most helpfully, often if I’m walking to my house carrying a lot of stuff, someone will pokea me and help me all the way home.  To sindikiza is to accompany a visitor part of the way.  At the end of a visit, a host will gather whatever they pokea’ed you and escort you on your way home.  When they have decided they have sindikiza’ed you enough, they will hand off your things—groceries, notebook, what-have-you, and wish you well on your way.  Some people will just walk some 20 feet, and some people will send a child to do the sindikiza’ing for them.  Some people have sindikiza’d me almost all the way home, as a very kind gesture of friendship. Then I feel the need to sindikiza them since they’ve gone so far from their home, and I can imagine this going on and on and neither of us ever gets home.

Most mornings I have taken to jogging into the fields along a dirt path.  Not too many people live out that way, but I often pass a few people going to their fields or to a neighboring village.  The other day I passed a Gogo man of about 40 years who was walking, dressed in the typical Gogo fashion: red plaid cloak draped about him, wooden staff in hand, sandals made out of repurposed old car tires.  After a morning greeting, he asked me where I was going, and I breathlessly replied, “Not too far!”  He said, “You’re doing exercise?”  I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I see.”  And without any other words, car tire sandals and all, he ran to catch up with me and he sindikiza’ed me on my jog.  He sindikiza’ed me for more than 15 minutes until I had to turn around to go home.  A few days later on another jog, I was on my way home when I passed a few schoolgirls carrying buckets and school things.  One of them also wordlessly decided to run with me, and the others joined.  Along the way, each schoolgirl that we passed joined us as if there was some tacit obligation, and by the time we got to the school, I had a pack of 15 girls sindikiza’ing me.

Finally I got another cat! It is a nice kitten that sits on my lap and purrs and it hasn’t run away yet.  I am very grateful for these things, but I am sort of disappointed that it hasn’t really been doing its job.  I’m still finding mice droppings in the corners, and in an even graver lapse in felinity, the cat failed to alert me to the 3-foot snake in my kitchen last week.  The cat was sleeping in the other room when I came across the black snake slithering amongst my coffee mugs and cans of oatmeal (still no furniture).  I ran, terrified, out my front door to get a neighbor, but when the neighbor came with his wooden staff to kill it, it was nowhere to be found.  After an extensive search, I left my house still terrified, and not long after, students said they saw the snake leave my courtyard, and at which point they ID’d it as the spitting cobra.  I kept on thinking of the turn of phrase people use when you’re looking and looking for something and it’s right in front of you—“If it was a snake you’d be dead by now.” 

That night and every night since, I slept with my wooden staff, and now I enter every room with my head first to survey before stepping.  Even so, I am often tricked by things like backpack straps, shoelaces.  Just this morning, my heart did a cartwheel when I walked into the kitchen to find a serpentine white line curving across the floor like a sine wave, like a perfect negative of that haunting black cobra.  Upon investigation, at the end of the twisting trail I found a half-empty bag of salt with little rodent teeth marks.  I don’t know what a mouse would want with a bag of salt, but it’s just more proof that that cat is not doing its job.