A Blog Post by Matthew Cole: Lemaiyan
While I will avoid the obvious Bon Jovi pun (sorry Christie), I should inform you all that I have officially passed my halfway point of being here in Kenya – a fact that I truly cannot believe. When I arrived in Kenya, I was alone in Nairobi for almost two full days before I went to Samburu to begin working. I remember distinctly that my first full day in Nairobi I spent mostly at my hotel, due to jet lag and the unfamiliar feeling I had of being alone in a new country and culture, with no one to guide me. Even the second time I went to Nairobi a month later, I spent a good deal of time in my hotel room. But, when I went again for the third time last month, it was completely different. At that point, I had been taking Swahili lessons for almost two months, and now knew people in the Nairobi area to grab a meal or a drink with. The night before I was to return to Wamba, I ate dinner at my hotel, since it was pouring out. I was looking out from the restaurant balcony over the Nairobi skyline and I had a sense of comfort, as I ordered my dinner in Swahili; something that I had never before experienced in Nairobi.
This sense of comfort was multiplied two weeks later when our choir went for our competition. I mentioned in one of my early blogs that I had joined the choir at the local Catholic church in Wamba, in no small part due to the feeling of familiarity that it would provide from having sung in my mother’s church choir for so many years. When I first joined the choir, I did not expect that I would be committing myself to something beyond singing in church on Sundays and attending practice once or twice a week. However, I quickly learned that the choir was preparing to go to a competition in November, which required learning The Heavens are Telling, a famous movement from the oratorio The Creation, composed by F. Joseph Haydn, who is more famously known as a mentor of Mozart. As most of the choir members had no formal education in music, and only 1-2 knew how to read music, they had never been exposed to this kind of worship music, instead of being more used to traditional Swahili music which is much more upbeat and encourages dancing. So, needless to say, this was quite the challenge for the group.
We met nearly every day with a “repeat after me” style of music teaching being used. The progress was slow, and sometimes I secretly wondered to myself if we were ever going to achieve the level of proficiency we wanted. However, after months of hard work, we polished off The Heavens and set off to our competition. The competition was in a place called Asumbi, in Homa Bay County which is in the southwest of Kenya near Lake Victoria, a journey of nearly 600 km. When looking it up on Google Maps, it estimated a journey of roughly 11 hours, that is of course if we were traveling by Land Cruiser and traveling nonstop. However, as there were close to 40 of us traveling from Wamba to Homa Bay, we took a school bus. I severely underestimated how slowly the bus would move uphill, and how long our breaks would be. Long story short, the journey took a little more than 24 hours door to door each way. As our school bus weaved through the mountain roads of the Rift Valley in Kenya, I was struck by another sense of comfort (although not in the literal sense as my body ACHED from the bus). I looked around the bus and saw my friends as we were on a journey together. We laughed, sang, and prayed our way through our trip.
The day of our competition, November 30th, was, in fact, the exact halfway day for me in Kenya. I relished this as it gave me a definitive marker on my journey here and helped to negate the feelings of missing home that came with missing Thanksgiving. When we arrived at the venue, I realized I was the ONLY mzungu there. I had expected to find one or two others as there were many choirs from the urban centers in Kenya and Kenya does have an estimated population of about 50,000 white people. Word quickly spread about the choir with the mzungu and when we finally shuffled on stage to sing The Heavens, I could tell that there was a distinct sense of curiosity at how we would perform. I should also mention that The Heavens has a Soprano-Tenor-Bass tercet in the middle that is not easy, and I was selected for the tenor part. While I have always been a decent singer, I have never had the most confidence as I don’t have the best control over my pitch. So when I was given the part, I accepted confidently and screamed inside. When we finally started singing, and the three soloists stepped out to sing, I could feel many eyes on me. I was so nervous in our rehearsal the morning before, that I had bungled my solo a few times. But, when I nailed the first three notes of the solo, I knew I was off on the right track. We finished the song to genuine applause and the comment, “We didn’t know Samburu could sing like that” from the announcers. We all shuffled outside and hugged.
When the results came, it turns out that we had received a 90% on The Heavens, our best score out of our three songs, and we finished 15th out of 57 choirs. We were ecstatic. We proved that our small rural choir could compete with the big urban choirs from Nairobi and could sing classical western music.
A good luck selfie before we went to sing
On the joyful bus ride home, there was a touching moment. I was given a Samburu name , Lemaiyan, meaning “blessed one” in Samburu. In that moment, I realized how far I had come in the 4.5 months I had been here. It seemed so long ago that I was too nervous to leave my hotel room in Nairobi, and now here I was, speaking Swahili with my friends and receiving a traditional name. This has been the most enriching and incredible 4.5 months of my life, and I cannot wait to see what the next 4.5 have in store.
A view of the Rift Valley of Kenya. My phone camera does not do it justice, but it is breathtaking to see the powerful evidence of geologic forces at work here as you wind through switchbacks up and down the sides.