Jammin' with Flat Bill

My dream of jamming with Bill Clinton - me on piano, him on sax - lives on. One day it will happen....it just has to (especially now that the Clinton School has not one but two former music majors!). In preparation for that moment, I've been jamming with Flat Bill here in Kenya (see picture to left). It will suffice for now.

What's a musician to do when he's got a sweet melody in his head but no piano or keyboard readily available to pluck it out? The answer: search Google for "java piano".

At five weeks and counting, this is the longest I have gone without touching a piano/keyboard since I started playing piano in second grade at age seven (surpassing the previous high of four weeks). I try not to be as melodramatic about my need to play piano as some of the people I met at Berklee College of Music ("I can't live without music, bro!"), but I'm honestly beginning to hanker for the opportunity to lay my fingers on ivorite (fake ivory - the ethical way to go!) keys once again. Making music just makes life more fun.

Patrick and I have begun co-writing a song that I am going to finish when I get back to the States. I first had the idea when I was in Kenya in 2007, but I never followed up on it, but Patrick has helped breathe some new life into it. It's going to be called, "How Are You, Mzungu?" You may recall from a previous blog post that "mzungu" is the Swahili word for "white person," which I hear regularly around here being shouted by surprised children as they take notice of me. But I failed to mention in that previous post that the word is also inevitably accompanied by the greeting "How are you?", which seems to be the first bit of English that every Kenyan child learns (and I have reason to believe that most of them don't even know what the phrase means, based on my attempts at returning the question to them).

But what is most interesting about their greeting is the way they say it. The kids - all of them, meaning I literally haven't heard a kid here stray from this rule - put the three words to separate pitches, making a little melody out of it. They say it very quickly, putting a little dip in the "are," sandwiched in between two higher pitches for "how," and "you" (for my musician friends out there, the solfège is Mi-Do-Re for How-Are-You).

So seeing how they have naturally constructed a melody out of the line, I'm really just pilfering it to make a song out of the only two things they say to me as I pass by them: "How are you?" and "mzungu." And isn't it convenient that these two things rhyme?

Here's the vision for the song - a typical African pop sound with beautiful, clean electric guitar, simple harmony, and groove-inducing drums/percussion. Patrick helped round out the lyrics in the chorus, which will be sung by some kijanas (kids): "How are you, mzungu? / I hope you're having a very nice day / How are you, mzungu? / I know you came from so far away."

A future Kenyan pop hit? Bill on sax?

Word Gets Around

The other day Welliminah's son, Vincent, was driving Patrick and me in his car. As we were driving out of Es'saba village, we passed a group of little kids hanging out on the side of the path we were driving on. I heard them shout out something I have become used to: "Mzungu!", which means "white person" (some of my travel guides for Kenya try to be polite and translate it as "Westerner", which is not quite true). But I also heard them put another word on the end of it that I wasn't familiar with. "Wetu", as in "Mzungu wetu!" When Vincent heard this, he cracked up and said, "Do you know what they just said? They said, 'Our Mzungu'". Our white person.

Strangely, I have to admit that it feels good to be referred to as "our white person". I'm not just any white person - I belong to somebody. I'm Es'saba village's white person. I'll take it.

Patrick has a better shot of blending in here due to his skin color (he's been told that he looks like a Nairobian visiting the countryside to passing strangers here), but when he's with me, that shot goes out the window. We (mostly I) become a spectacle walking through the villages. Often we'll be walking around in an area where I don't see a single person around us in any direction, but suddenly we'll hear a kid shout at the top of his lungs, "Mzunguuuuuuu!!", as if it were an alarm or alert system for the entire neighborhood. Soon after hearing this 'alarm', streams of kids will run out of houses or shrubbery to simply stop and stare. I try to do my best to put a smile on my face and wave at them, because I know they are curious about what white people are like. So if they get any impression from me, I hope it's that I seem like a friendly guy, even if my mannerisms and Swahili accent come off a little odd to them.

And it's hard to hide in white skin even when I'm at Welliminah's house. Patrick and I have gotten into the habit of working during the day in her living room, typing at our computers, doing stuff for our projects. At some point in the afternoon, around 3 or 4, we'll often get a little stir crazy and decide to head out to the front yard and toss the frisbee around or even kick the soccer ball. Every time, without fail, the kids start trickling in to Welliminah's front yard to play with us. They come out of the woodwork. I have no idea how they find out so quickly that we're outside playing. Yesterday was an all-time high for us. Check out the picture below - at one point there was a whopping fourteen kids hanging out, including little babies who had been brought along by their older brother or sister.

It's cool with me. It makes it more fun for us to hang out and show these kids how to play frisbee, and to learn how to play soccer from them (even if I sometimes may get a little too peacocky for my own good).

But word gets around to older kids and adults too. I guess the buzz around town is that two Americans from Kijana are staying at Welliminah's house, so we'll sometimes get people popping in to say hello. Yesterday, a teenager popped in. I initially just said hello to him and continued working on my laptop, since it appeared like he was just there to visit Welliminah, with whom he struck up a conversation in Swahili. But eventually, Welliminah told me that he had come seeking assistance from Kijana. His name was Franklin, and he had passed Form IV (12th grade, making him a high school graduate) back in November 2009. But he was also an orphan with very little money. His problem was that despite passing Form IV, his school wouldn't give him his certificate (or diploma), because he still had a balance of 600Ksh on his tuition. He was wondering if he could get a donation.

600Ksh is roughly $7. Considering that this was now June 2010, and he had graduated in November 2009, it means that for seven whole months he was unable to accumulate the 600Ksh necessary to settle his balance and gain something that I assume is important to anyone - a high school diploma acknowledging four years of  hard work. More importantly, if he wanted to take the next step in his education and head to college, he would have to display proof that he had graduated high school, further emphasizing the significance of that piece of paper. So I gave him the money and wished him good luck. Really, the money came from the stipend that the Clinton School gave me for the summer. While most of that money has been spent on plane tickets, vaccinations, travel insurance, and even three days in Egypt hanging out and visiting the pyramids, I decided $7 to pay for a young man's high school diploma was a reasonable expense as well. So Clinton School, you should know that some of your money is going to micro-philanthropy in a rural village in Kenya.

Although it's hard for me to imagine Franklin being able to afford college tuition without a significant scholarship or other aid, I asked him what his aspirations for college would be. He said he would like to go to an agricultural college located in Nakuru. In any case, I asked him to write down his name and contact information for Kijana. Maybe we can figure out a way to help. In the meantime, I think Franklin is happy enough to have his high school diploma.