Impossible Odds

could feel it at the time, but it was already pulling them onto the same ground.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Jessica:
    It was June 2006 when I first stepped off the plane in Nairobi, ready to experiment with living another life in Africa. After spending my late teens and early twenties abstractly concerned about the dreadful phenomenon of child combat soldiers, I’d become convinced much of the deprivation on that continent would be eliminated only through education. My field of study was in general education for children, but my concern was the neglected girls of Africa. I had already cut my teeth on teacher training in America and Guatemala, and at the age of twenty-seven I felt fully charged for the task, having finished clearing away the mistakes of my early life. My three-year marriage to my high school sweetheart had collapsed into an abusive slog that ended with him abandoning our relationship altogether. For me, getting married had felt like a natural and expected life step, something I was supposed to do. Once inside the marriage it quickly became apparent that in getting married both of us had done what we thought we were supposed to do, but neither one had thought through what our lives were supposed to actually be like together.
    I guess the trauma of the failed marriage left me numb tothoughts of spiritual life for some time afterward. In spite of my Christian upbringing, I wasn’t in Africa to do missionary work. I needed to make changes in the world that I could see and feel, among people I could deal with and come to know. Any thoughts I had at that time about my spiritual condition were pushed to the back of my mind. It all just felt like a realm I couldn’t understand.
    Of course the divorce felt something like death at the time, but it didn’t take long before I saw it as an emancipation. The goofy nickname “Africa Jess” had been bestowed on me by college acquaintances in their attempt to help explain my obsessions, but it also represented their unspoken recognition of a force that has driven me from an early age. By the time I was ready to actually make the trip, “Africa Jess” felt like a built-in part of me. Why I cared about children in Africa was an irritating question I could never answer well. So there I was, standing in a foreign airport, knowing my individual efforts would be a drop in the bucket but no less determined to get started.
    The air was pleasantly warm and made the transition to this new climate feel easy. It was neither the location nor season for any of Africa’s famed desert heat or jungle steam. The arrival was sweet.
    I was met by my friend Susan, who had originally hailed from Texas and was there to pick me up with a middle-aged expat named Larry. They were cheerful companions, and I was glad to have no romantic encumbrances to inhibit this journey. At this point in my life the only romance interesting to me was the one I planned to have with this new adventure.
    After my husband left I’d avoided the dating scene and taken a couple of years to finish classwork for my teaching degree. The phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” can sometimes have a positive meaning. When my ex threw away our marriage as if it was worthless, his betrayal freed me from the guilty shackles binding me to a conventional life that had come to feel no more authentic to me than it must have felt to him. The bathwater mayhave evaporated, but the baby had just stepped onto the tarmac in Nairobi, Kenya.
    Soon afterward the airport was behind me, and I found myself jolting along in Larry’s beat-up Land Rover while he cheerfully narrated our passing surroundings. “Yup,” he said, grinning, “nice to have new people arriving. After being here for the last twenty years, it helps me see this place with fresh eyes! Look out across there—termite stacks as tall as a man! Yucca plants as tall as a tree! Got anything like that at home? Ha!”
    In every direction were striking and strange reminders of how far I’d ventured. It was odd to still be under the same sky, in a place so alien. We plunged down the road passing those giant yucca plants and termite stacks, along with massive anthills the size of guard towers.
    Larry drove us past a particularly dilapidated neighborhood. I later learned it’s one of the poorest in Nairobi. Video journalists like to use it for backdrops to their stand-up pieces. It makes whatever they say sound important. It’s so bad, the sight of it glues