Bill Bryson's African Diary Read Online Free PDF Page A

medical attention.
They were just normal people like you and me who wanted to be somewhere where they could have a life.
    Nearly everyone I spoke to complained of shortages of one kind or another—of work, of food, of teachers, of things to do.
There are 28,000 pupils in the camp’s schools, but only 807 desks. There is only one textbook for every 20 students, one classroom for every 75. I talked to a bright young man named James Makuach, one of 357 students preparing to take the Kenyan Schools Certificate exam, a prerequisite for going on to higher education. He told me the school didn’t have the facilities, in particular the scientific equipment, that would allow them to pass the test.
    “You have no hope at all?” I said.
    “Not much,” he said and gave me a heartbreakingly shy smile.
    I couldn’t understand this at all. I asked Nick—demanded really—why conditions weren’t better than this. He looked at me with patient sympathy.
    “There are 20 million like this all over Africa, Bill,” he said. “Money only goes so far.” Besides, he went on, dispensing aid is much more complicated than most people realize. It is, for one thing, a fundamental part of aid protocol that you cannot make conditions notably better for refugees than they are for their hosts outside the camps. It wouldn’t be fair and it would breed resentment. “Everybody would want to be a refugee,” Nick said. “In practical terms, you can only do so much.”
    “But the kids,” I said. “They have no future.”
    “I know,” he said sadly. “I know.”
    Later, as we walked through the camp, Dan pointed out a nifty self-closing tap on a standpipe in the school grounds and told me that Nick had designed it, though he was too modest to say so. Nick, it turns out, is a water engineer by training and the tap was one of his first projects in Africa.
You can find them all over Africa now, Dan told me.
    Interestingly, nearly all the field workers for CARE were trained to do something else. David Sanderson was an architect before he became an aid worker. Adam Koons, whom we would meet in another day or so, was formerly a photographer on Madison Avenue in New York. A fellow working in Uganda for CARE in a previous life designed the round tea bag.
    “People who work in the field are different from most of the rest of us,” Dan said as we strolled along. “They live far away from their friends and families in places like this that are generally difficult and often dangerous, trying to help people they don’t know to have better lives. Pretty remarkable really. Could you do that?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Neither could I.” He was thoughtful for a minute. “But then I’d never have thought of the round teabag either.”
    Late in the afternoon we returned to the airstrip for the 90-minute flight to Nairobi. I asked Nino what the weather was like there.
    “I’ll let you know when we get closer,” he said vaguely, as if he weren’t sharing all he knew.
    Ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why he was being coy. Ahead of us was a storm. It looked big. The thing about sitting near the front in a small aircraft is that you can see everything—to left, to right and straight ahead. None of it looked good.
    We were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi and some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence—and it wasn’t too bad. It didn’t feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything. But then the rain came—suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion. It was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets. Maybe it’s always like that in cockpit and you just don’t know when you are in a separate compartment further back, but this was most assuredly unnerving. Worse, after a minute it became evident that Nino couldn’t see a thing. He began to move his head from spot to spot around the windscreen, putting his nose to the glass, looking for any tiny bit of visibility. I couldn’t understand why he