7 weeks in East Africa: Trains in Zambia, luxury in Kenya, innovation in Malawi

In southern Kenya, two dirt roads meet in the small town of Imbirikani, a place more sky than town. My American mind saw the Wild West, encouraged by the word “Saloon” in hand-painted lettering above a door. But this town was built with sheets of corrugated steel and bricks the same color as the road. At the corner was the hotel/butchery combination so common in these parts. Next to it was a row of doors, each leading to a business and at the end a sign for Matthew Davy Auto, advertising “spare/puncture repairs.” We were there to learn about conservation efforts at the headquarters of Big Life Foundation on the outskirts of town. A plane buzzed overhead. It was Craig Millar. A name people know all over Kenya. A hotshot flying a yellow plane, making dramatic entrances on empty, dusty airstrips. He’s the kind of man other men want to be. Larger than life. Living in Kenya and overseeing security for the Big Life Foundation, an anti-poaching operation protecting elephants and lions by employing the warriors who would kill them to protect their cattle. By compensating Maasai cattlemen for cows that are killed. By building a lodge on the top of a hill, an exclusive place with exclusive prices, where you can eat dinner with conservationist Richard Bonham — who is the reason all of this is happening. Like so many, I am drawn to this part of the world and think about it when I am not there. Richard Leakey, whose team discovered a 1.6 million-year-old skeleton near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, said there’s a reason the Rift Valley feels so profound to so many. It’s where our story begins. This journey was seven uninterrupted weeks. I took a leave of absence from work and invited my now-veteran travel companion Earl Bridges to join me. The defining moment of my life happened at age 22 in the Nairobi airport as I tried to find my way in the world for the first time, traveling alone for three months with $700 and a backpack. At 49, standing in that same spot, everything was different: Kenya and me. I had a flash of the arc of my life in those intervening years. If at any point I had imagined that this trip was to relive something or reclaim something, I knew in that moment that it would be about something else. For those seven weeks, I let myself be quiet. Among large animals in wild landscapes. Among big personalities: fortune seekers, conservationists, innovators. Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania and back to Kenya. In the quiet, I felt what it was like to be myself with nothing else around — just the motion of an old train, just the smell of a rhino, just the pain and hopes of strangers who told me their stories as I passed through their lives on my own journey. As we finished our milky tea and our morning of conversation, Craig Millar asked what we were doing next. We had no real plans. Craig mentioned the Ol Donyo Lodge. We all laughed off the idea of going to a town built of corrugated steel and paying thousands of dollars for one night. But we were there to live each day as if it were our last. So when we got in the car, I said, “It sounds iconic, that lodge. It sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience. When will we be here again? Let’s go and see if they have a room.” We put Ol Donyo Lodge into Google Maps and headed down a dirt road toward the mountains. The backseat of our Toyota station wagon was empty, and I was aware of it every time we passed someone trying to flag down a ride. We hadn’t stopped for anyone yet in our trip, but I told Earl that we should start. We saw a Maasai girl on the side of the road with her arm out and he stopped. I didn’t see much of her before she got in, except the black backpack she carried. We asked her where she was going, and she said she was going to the lodge — 45 minutes away, according to Google Maps. I had a list of Maasai words on my phone and decided to test them out. She corrected me on some and added some words that weren’t on the list. I read the numbers and we recited them together: 1 through 10. Then 20. Then filling in with 13, 14, 15. It broke the ice. We asked her how old she was. 27. I looked at her closely now and saw that what had appeared to me out of the side of my eye to be a teenage girl was a woman. She looked older than 27. Her face was scarred, circles burned into each cheek when she was a child, just like so many others we met. She had five children, she said. Her husband had died, she said. Then she handed me a manila envelope. Inside was a resume and a cover letter. Her name was Abigail, and she was a mechanic. She was going to the lodge to ask for a job. I looked at her again and saw a different person still, a woman working in a man’s profession. I said so. She grabbed my forearm and took a beaded bracelet out of her pocket. It was too small to get over my hand but she forced it. It didn’t have a clasp, just an unbroken circle of beads, woven in triangles of green and purple, lines of orange and yellow. This is me, she said, pointing at the bracelet. The GPS said 30 minutes now, but the road was slow-going, especially in our rented car. The dust was thick enough to rob us of traction if we slowed down too much. The center of the road was high between wide ruts and scraped the bottom of the car if we took the way straight on. With each fork in the road, we turned to Abigail. She knew the way and pointed in the direction we should go. She more than pointed. She snapped and pointed, and Earl obeyed. We trusted her. I felt safe thinking about her in the backseat. If the car broke down or a tire went flat out here, she would know what to do. I put her resume in the manila envelope and handed it back to her. As I did, I noticed a dirty fingerprint on it and I wondered if it was already there or if I had added it. The dust was collecting on me and everything we carried with us. Dust splashed up against the windows as if we were driving through puddles, not dry empty savanna. We came to a fork in the road at a place where Google Maps only showed one road. A huge truck carrying tanks of water came toward us. Abigail said, “Ask him.” The driver gave us a worried look, but kept going. I looked at Abigail and saw that she was uncertain. For the first time since we started, I felt afraid. Earl took a left and we headed up a steep hill. The orange dust gave way to thick black sand, ground up from the lava all around. We were near our destination on the GPS. 1 km. 900 meters. 800 meters. But when we arrived, there was no lodge. We were far from anything. We were lost. Something happened to my body. I suddenly felt weak, as if I had not eaten in a long time. We got out of the car and I looked at Abigail and said, “I’m sorry.” She hugged me and told me to take a photo of us like that, her arms wrapped around me. She was back to being a little girl. I held up my phone and took a selfie. When I look at that photo, I can see the fear in my eyes, even though I am smiling. Earl flew his drone above us. On the screen, we could see the roof of the car and the road we were on. He flew higher and followed the road. And there it was, the lodge, not too far ahead. We celebrated and jumped back in the car. An elephant walked out of the brush and Earl saw it in the rearview mirror as we drove away. When we pulled into the portico of the lodge, I thought they would be as relieved as we were that we made it. I didn’t hesitate to bound out of our dirt-covered car, covered in dirt myself, excited to share the adventure we had just been on to get here. Three members of the staff stood there, smiling. I reached out to one woman who was obviously in charge and introduced the group: Earl, myself and then Abigail. I told her that Abigail was here looking for a job, that we picked her up in Imbirikani. I hoped for a moment that Abigail’s arrival with us would help her. “She’s been here before,” the woman said. Abigail looked at her in the face and shook her head “no.” I wondered what it meant. No, don’t tell us? No, I haven’t been here before? I saw her again, differently, through the eyes of the staff. I imagined this was a very difficult job to get. The job came with room and board, since it is so hard to get there. There was not a room open at the Ol Donyo Lodge. I asked if we could stay for lunch and then we would head back the way we came. There was no lunch. We could stay for a drink, but we would need to move the car. I walked with the woman to a stone building out of sight of the lodge where the employees lived and where we could park. Her name was Stella. When she told us, she said “Stella!” like Marlon Brando’s version of Stanley, begging his wife to come back to him. I imagined how many people had come to this lodge and done that, shouted “Stella!” when she told them her name. I wondered if she had ever seen the movie. We left Abigail with the other employees and her resume. A fleet of forest green branded Land Cruisers were parked inside carports. A sign above the lone gas pump read “Fueling on Fridays only.” It was Wednesday. This was her chance, I thought. She whispered something to Stella. “She asked me to not to let you leave without her,” Stella said. The dog-eared copy of “The Rough Guide to Kenya” we borrowed from friends in Nairobi describes this as the best lodge in the country. As soon as we entered, we understood why. It was designed to take advantage of the view of the Chyulu Hills, a view so expansive you see whole weather systems forming and moving. It was safe and quiet and breathtaking. Stella had two chairs brought out for us and put them on the edge of the deck to look out on the view. She brought us each a gin and tonic, served with ice. Below and centered in a perfect photograph were two elephants drinking from a watering hole obscured from us by a pile of branches. We looked at each other and laughed. “This is amazing.” We shared a second gin and tonic and I never wanted to leave. This was movie-set perfect. Also, I didn’t want to get back on that road. But our glasses were empty. I asked Stella if there was another way to get back to town. No, that’s the way. I asked how much we owed for the drinks. “You don’t owe us anything,” she said. “Tell Craig Millar it’s on his tab.” We walked back to the car, and Abigail noticed a plastic piece was hanging loose from behind the bumper. She got on the ground to get a closer look. “You are lucky. You have a mechanic with you,” Stella said. A Land Cruiser was leaving the lodge for a game drive. We followed. There were two tracks across a field of tall yellow grasses. It ran parallel to the road we came in on. I reached into a paper bag and pulled out three slender tubes of honey we bought the first day of our trip in Nairobi. I handed one to Abigail. We enjoyed the taste of honey as we drove. A lone Acacia tree stood on the horizon. Yellow foreground. A giraffe. I snapped a photo. Then a wildebeest. Another photo. I rolled up the window and asked Abigail how her interview went, excited to hear. But when I looked at her, I could tell it hadn’t gone well. She shook her head. She was wearing a white shirt with puffy sleeves, a panel of lace and pearl beads sewn across the chest. The lace was torn. I hadn’t noticed before. She asked for my phone. I opened the Google Translate app and handed it to her. She held it for a while before handing it back. The words were a clumsy translation, but the message was not. She needed money for her children. I held the phone for a long time. I told Earl she is asking for money. I know, he said. The money we would have spent on a night at the lodge would have supported her family for the entire year, but we hesitated to give her anything. Why? I wrote back that I could give her a tip for helping us on the road. I told her she was a good mother. She thanked me for the encouraging words because life is hard. “When we return, I will do what I can to clear the plate I have made,” she wrote. Two men walked on the side of the road with some cows. It was market day and late afternoon, so these were the cows that did not sell, returning to pasture for another week. We pulled into Imbirikani. Abigail snapped and pointed for us to drive farther through town. She showed us an easy way to get back to the highway. She didn’t want to get out of the car. We drove to the highway and I got out to signal it was time to part ways. I pressed 2400 Kenyan shillings into her hand. $16. I still wear that bracelet. It’s stuck on my wrist until I cut it off, which I can’t get myself to do. When I notice it, I think of Abigail. And all the things it means to be her. And to be me. ‘The boy who harnessed the wind’ We headed back to Nairobi and caught a flight to Malawi to meet someone who was expecting us. As soon as I heard we were going to meet William Kamkwamba, known to the world as “the boy who harnessed the wind,” I wondered about his wife, Olivia Scott Kamkwamba. I knew a few things. She’s from the United States, grew up in Charlotte but her family is from Florence and Sumter. They met at Dartmouth. She has a Ph.D. I wondered what she would be like and what her life would be like, living in Kasungu, Malawi. I couldn’t wait to talk to her. We pulled into town and waited at a gas station until someone on a motorcycle could find us and show us the way. There was no gas at the station. There had been no gas at any station we passed. At each place, we would pull up to the pump and the lone attendant would look at us in bewilderment. They would shrug or throw up their hands. “No petrol.” A lack of foreign currency in Malawi limited the amount of fuel they are able to buy. There is always a shortage, which means people help each other to save fuel. It also means a black market operates with high prices for those desperate enough to pay them. As we waited for the motorcycle escort, Earl walked to the attendant and asked when he thought gas might be delivered. Tomorrow. Maybe. He returned with an orange-labeled Tamarind soda, sweet and strange. I took a sip and pretended to like it, but didn’t take another one. The motorcycle arrived and we followed it to a house just around the corner. The gates opened. Inside was a busy gathering of young people, a new cohort of interns at Moving Windmills, the design-thinking nonprofit run by William and Olivia. We were introduced around and I scanned the room for Olivia. There she was, tall and confident. Dressed in boots left loose and untied for easy taking on and off, moving indoors and outdoors. William wore his the same. We were invited to follow along as they gave the interns a tour of the property where they would spend the next three months. We walked through the podcast studio, where they would learn to tell their stories. We visited the workshop, where tools would be available for check out and piles of scrap wood from past projects were available for trying new things. We looked at the books — 22,000 books sent over in containers from Books for Africa — to start and fill libraries in Kasungu and to line the walls of this creative place. And we saw the fleet of motorcycles, all converted to electric motors by William and the interns he is teaching. These interns were invited to follow in the footsteps of William, who at the age of 14 saw a need for electricity in his village and built a windmill from scrap metal and bicycle parts in his family’s backyard. It worked. And so he built another one. It worked. Ideas spread. Word spread. A movement was born. And ever since, William has been showing people in this part of the world and around the world how to see a problem and use the resources at hand to find a solution. “And ask for help,” Olivia said. These interns had been welcomed into this design center and given three important things: guidance when they needed it, freedom when they didn’t, and a space to create and experiment. Each would propose a project — something to make water pumping, power generation, planting and growing easier. They would build it and take it home to try it out. “If you create something to help plant a field and give it to the farmer, they will tell you right away if it doesn’t work and why,” Olivia said. Then bring it back to the design center to calibrate, reiterate and try again. But Moving Windmills isn’t just a workshop. It’s also a place to build confidence and perspective through storytelling, through reading and discussing, and seeing what each person brings to the table. A strong personal narrative is the difference between one windmill in a backyard and the ever-expanding concept that now encompasses seven sites in a 25 mile radius, with solar panels now on the roofs of remote schools and working water pumps in village centers. Knowing where you fit into the world and believing that you are empowered to help others solve their community’s problems is leading William and Olivia toward a dream of growing Moving Windmills into a campus where people from all over the world can come to work and teach, experiment and design solutions. Olivia and I sat for hours that afternoon and the next morning, talking about everything that came to mind, but mostly how to change the world by changing ourselves. We talked about Malawi, the country she’s now calling home with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. She started in the country working for USAID, looking for ways to improve education and build 20 new schools where they were needed. It’s an amazing thing to be able to draw schools on a map and see them happen thanks to the resources of a large aid organization. It’s another thing to sit in a room at the base of Kasungu Mountain and work with the community one idea at a time. I pulled some books off the shelf before heading to bed that night and read essays about the history of Malawi and the complicated interplay of help from the outside, like Madonna’s generosity in building a wing of a hospital in the capital city. I woke up curious about the large white house on the hill above Kasungu, owned by the first president of the country and now sitting empty. I asked if we could visit. Olivia said she had always wanted to see it. William said it was impossible, but we could try. He stayed behind. Olivia, Earl and I piled into her electric Leaf, giddy with the idea, and headed toward the house. It is well-guarded. There’s an electric fence and a tall gate, bookended on each side by a guard’s tower. A groundskeeper came to the gate, and I asked if we could go in. I know a handful of words in Chichewa, the local language. “Thank you.” “How are you?” “I’m fine.” Barely enough to start small talk, let alone explain why we were standing there. But I understood that we were being turned away. I tried one more thing. I pulled out my phone and waited for the cell network to connect. The man waited patiently, too. I opened Google Translate and typed: We are interested in history. We would like to visit the president’s house. He read the Chichewa translation and laughed, a real belly laugh. As he laughed, he softened. He pointed to the road and gave us directions with his hand and gave us the name of the person we would find at the end of those directions. That was the man who would decide. We drove and then we turned, but all we saw were fields and a clumping of small houses, made of unfired brick, the same rust color as the ground. Tobacco is the cash crop of this area, but it won’t be planted until December when the rains come. These fields were harvested in April and carved back into rows for the next season. We could not find a road for the next turn, but we could see a white house in the distance, surrounded by electric fence. “Let’s walk,” Olivia said. And so we navigated the foot paths through a grid of fallow land and the people standing outside the house, watched us slowly approaching. Clothes hung from a line. A small cooking fire was burning on the ground at the center of three bricks and a large pot rested on it. It was almost lunchtime. We made it to the fence and said the name aloud. One of the men stepped forward and pulled out his cellphone to call the person we were looking for. He explained, as we had, that we were hoping to see the president’s house. The conversation was long. We looked at each other. “It sounds like no.” “Wait. I think it sounds like yes.” We were giddy now that we had made it this far in our quest. “You’re my kind of person,” I said to Olivia. We both laughed and turned our attention back to the man on the phone. He hung up and pointed us back to our car and back in the direction we came. But then his hand made a left and he promised to meet us at the gate of the compound and introduce us to the man who had the final say. This time, we sent Earl to meet the men at the gate and when he returned to the car, he came with an escort who jumped in the backseat. We could go. We must promise not to post photos. It turned out, as we walked the grounds of the house, we learned the man walking with us had been a bodyguard for the president. He knew him well. I had so many questions and wished for a reprieve from the language barrier. The city spilled out below the house and, through the trees on the property, we could see an open-air stadium, stone seats surrounding an open field, once used for the president to land in his helicopter, women dancing in greeting. On our drive home, we described to each other what had just happened, each of us taking turns piling on new details and celebrating the little moments along the way when we could have given up but didn’t. We declared each other heroes of the journey and looked forward to telling William what he had missed. The best sleep of my life We said goodbye and continued our journey. We had a mountain to climb in southern Malawi and plans to canoe on the Zambezi River in Zambia. Seven weeks went by and when it was time to point toward home, we wanted to take it slow. So we boarded a train. Tickets for the Tazara Railway are sold on the second floor of a building in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. To get there, we walked from our hotel down Cairo Road. Overhead was a canyon of brown brutalist skyscrapers built in the ‘60s and ‘70s after Zambia’s independence. They line Cairo Road, its name a reminder that it is the way from South Africa to Egypt. The streets were full, busy and alive. A watch repairman sat on the sidewalk with contents of a timepiece spread out on a small table in front of him. Men sold socks, cellphone covers and jars of homemade peanut butter from blankets on the side of the road. Full-figured mannequins advertised women’s dresses. A man unloaded live guinea fowl from the open hatchback of a car and placed them in a wheelbarrow. The hotels on the road are full of people on mission trips, helping to plant churches — Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists — and businessmen casting their lots in farming, mining and tech. This stable country is the new frontier playground of fortune seekers as Kenya gets expensive and Malawi struggles to find its footing. The train tickets cost $30 a bed for first class, and most people just pay for all four beds to have a cabin to themselves. The Tazara train starts in the copper mining central region of Zambia and ends in Dar es Salaam, 1,115 miles later. We were warned not to expect anything to happen on time and that the train could take three days or four. (It took four.) I had the best sleep of my life on that train from Zambia to Tanzania. There’s something utero about the experience. The train rocked from side to side. It repeated itself with a sound like a three-legged horse: CLOP, clop, clop, CLOP, clop, clop. It was hot like a womb, the metal car with no insulation. We pulled down the window and left it open the entire journey. The glass was milky from decades of calcification, from sweaty condensation, from rain. To see out and to catch a little of the breeze through the window, we piled blankets and pillows and made perches for ourselves during the day. We looked out of the window and saw children running to wave at the weekly train, a game to see if anyone would wave back. We saw the round huts at the center of small clearings in the woods. Laundry hanging. Whole cleared mountainsides where trees were burned to make charcoal. Foot paths, crisscrossing up hills, between trees, wide enough for two people side-by-side. How long have those paths been there? How many generations have used them? The sun set and warm light spread across tea fields and banana trees and men riding their bicycles at the end of a long day. When darkness fell, I crawled to the top bunk and made sure my face was close to the window at the very edge of the bed to catch the cool night air. The train rocked me to sleep and the sound of it — the creaking and clopping — blocked out the world. The first night, a drunk man burst onto the train slurring obscenities in English and Chichewa. The alcohol stripped away all that held in his anger during the day, and he shouted down the hallway of the lit train car. The wooden doors to our cabins were closed and locked. The floor was still shining from a wet mop, the last chore of the train staff before sleep. Police pulled him off the train and sent him on his way. He pulled a red blanket over his head and disappeared into the darkness. I slept and didn’t hear the man until the next day in the dining car when everyone told and retold the story, adding to each other’s versions of it. I sipped my coffee and listened. Between sips, I put the cup on a saucer to catch what spilled as the train rocked and shook as the couplings caught, one car after another in a wave. The train was built in the 1970s with help from China and gave Zambia a much needed connection to the coast. It is a time capsule as much as a journey. Go when you don’t need anything from your days but passing scenery, sounds and smells. Go when you want to be no one and nowhere for a while, tracing your way on a paper map. We pulled up to the border of Tanzania. A man appeared in our car offering to change money. We knew and he knew that our Zambian money would be worthless in minutes. He knew but we did not know that there were so many changers on the platform, offering competing rates, paper money folded between their fingers. That’s why he made sure we saw him first, pushing his way onto the train. We didn’t have much Zambian money to change, but he made $1.75 from us in the deal — one cog in the worldwide economy of people skimming cents off every currency exchange. Children were standing next to the line of train passengers as we waited to get our passport stamps. They didn’t seem to want anything. I looked at what was left of the little boy’s plastic shoes. Earl took a piece of sugar cane and balanced it on his nose. The children laughed and pushed closer to him in hopes of laughing again. On the other side of the border, we were led into a large empty room — two stories of emptiness, painted yellow and blue. A few windows broken. It felt as if no one had been there since the last train. Someone brought in a wooden desk and left it in the middle of the room. And we waited. The sun set. A man brought in a box of yellow fever vaccinations and sat behind the desk. We got in line without being told. I got my yellow fever shot months before the pandemic, paying the hundreds of dollars it takes for that jab with plans to go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to climb a volcano there. A worldwide shutdown and dangerous local rebels took that trip off the table. But the vaccination lasts forever and earned my permission to enter Tanzania by flashlight. The next morning, the sun came up and we were in the mountains. Baobab trees stood, tall, thick trunks, among the scrub and wisps of smoke from breakfast fires. I walked through the car to a sink and brushed my teeth with bottled water. I washed my face with a wet wipe and brushed my hair back into a barrette. Out the window next to the track was a rusting axle and the remnants of train cars that derailed years ago, emptied of cargo and left there. We packed four days of food but on day three were getting tired of our sardines. The bread was dry, and we had used all the hot water in our thermoses. We looked up the words in Swahili for egg, so we could buy two boiled eggs from the girl on the platform at the next stop. We bought bananas and cobs of roasted corn. When it was an acceptable hour, we poured gin and tonics into blue enamel cups and toasted the day. We guessed that we would arrive in Dar es Salaam sometime in the morning. But before that, the train would snake through another night, carrying us across an entire country. We stopped at an empty platform. No passengers got on or off. The only light for miles was the sodium glow from the station. Men in uniforms walked along the outside of the train, looking underneath, preparing for something. An hour passed. And when we set out, the train sped through a wildfire on both sides of the tracks. Bushes and grasses burning. Smoke and heat and light from the flames filled the cabin. Ash blew in and landed on the little table below the window. I slept through the whole thing. I guessed the train would pull into Dar es Salaam at 5 a.m. and set an alarm for 4, so I wouldn’t be groggy or disoriented in a new city, stepping off the train for the first time in four days. We made it at 7 a.m., just as the sun was starting to warm the inside of the train. People were gathering at the platform, tickets in hand, packed for the long train journey back to Zambia.