From Silicon Valley to Swaziland by Rick & Wendy Walleigh (read aloud txt) 📖

A Quick Visit to the United States

And Going Home to Nairobi

In June, our daughter, Diana, graduated from Ross University Medical School, an event not to be missed. The ceremony was held in Lincoln Center in New York City. Wendy left Nairobi earlier than I because she wanted to visit friends in California and my mother in Washington DC. I flew straight to New York. Wendy had numerous travel problems with weather and mismanaged luggage by a now-merged airline (whose nickname was north-worst), but after a last-minute $100 round-trip taxi ride from Manhattan to Newark to pick up luggage, we were all safely in New York with our clothes.

The graduation ceremony was wonderful! Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center is an elegant and prestigious venue for a graduation, and the graduates looked so impressive in their caps and gowns. Following the ceremony, we took lots of pictures with Lincoln Center providing many great backgrounds. Then we headed for a late lunch with friends and family at a nearby restaurant, the first of a number of celebrations over the next two days. On Saturday, we had the main party. It was a late afternoon cocktail reception. We had commandeered the bar area of an uptown restaurant, which was packed with relatives and friends, some who had known Diana for twenty-five years and some who had known Wendy for nearly forty. It was wonderful to share the occasion, and everyone who came was greeted by Sallie Mae, Diana’s recently acquired and appropriately named five-foot-high stuffed animal giraffe.

For those who didn’t already know, we recounted the story behind Sallie Mae. It started during a family visit to New York when Diana was eight years old. One of the sights we saw was the famous FAO Schwartz toy store with its collection of unique and amazing toys. Among the especially attention-grabbing items was an eight-foot-high toy giraffe, priced at about $2,500. Diana had asked me to buy it for her. I told her that I would buy it for her when she graduated from medical school since Diana already knew she wanted to be a doctor. My answer got me off the hook at the time, but I really meant it. I never forgot my promise and neither did Diana.

Some months before graduation, Diana let me know that she remembered my commitment but that she was releasing me from it because she wouldn’t have enough room in an apartment, and it would be an excessive amount of money to spend. However, I still wanted to remember the commitment with a symbolic gesture. I searched online for various types of toy giraffes. I looked at many small toys at varying prices, and then I found the one I had to have. It was a five-foot-high stuffed animal with a cute face and a reasonable price, shipping included! Several days later, Diana got back to her apartment just as the UPS delivery man arrived with a large box. Diana was frequently accepting packages for her neighbor, so she assumed this was just another. She was very surprised when the UPS man said it was addressed to her. She muscled the box inside and opened it carefully. When she opened it up, she smiled widely and felt a lump grow in her throat. She immediately called me to say thank you because without reading the card, she knew where it had come from. Then she began to think of names. She finally settled on Sallie Mae to represent the government loans that had helped to pay for her medical school tuition.

After my very short trip to the United States, I arrived back in Nairobi. It was very strange to be on vacation in the United States and go back to Nairobi to live. The Nairobi weather was very different from what we had left just two weeks earlier. It had gotten overcast, gray and cool (less than 70 degrees F). The locals called this cold and had been warning us that it would come in July. Occasionally it got “really cold” (almost down to 60 degrees F). It was amusing to see the locals bundled up in their heavy parkas and wool hats.

As I jumped back into my daily routine starting with walking to work, some things were very familiar, such as inhaling the smoke of open trash fires and the sooty exhaust from diesel trucks, which probably combined to equal the harmful effects of smoking a pack a day. Other things seemed new as I saw them in more depth, such as the terrain over which I walked to work every day. In some places, I walked on real, raised, concrete sidewalks. In other areas, the sidewalks were at street level but protected with steel posts that prevented cars from running over pedestrians. Some places once had sidewalks but were now covered with intermittent concrete and broken rubble over bare dirt. Along some roads, broad dirt shoulders substituted for sidewalks, but matatus cruised onto these recklessly to disgorge their passengers and zip away. In some places, the dirt shoulders were below the road surface and only wide enough for a narrow footpath with a deep drainage ditch on the other side. Along other roads, the only choice was walking on the roadway, facing traffic as we were taught as children (except that in Kenya, it meant walking on the right instead of the left). Usually this was safe, except when drivers made extra lanes to pass cars they didn’t feel were going fast enough. Even this was usually safe because you could see the cars speeding toward you and squeeze to the edge of the road as they passed. Unfortunately, that didn’t cover every situation, as we learned one morning when we walked out our apartment gate, turned right to face the traffic, and were nearly hit from behind by a matatu speeding down the wrong side of the road. He didn’t want to wait in the line of