TAKING TO STRANGERS - EXPERIENCE AS A BLIND MAN
Sharing experiences in the last 6 weeks or so up here in Wanderlust has been interesting. Not least because of the hundreds of people who keep asking me questions, especially those who don’t believe that I’m blind. It’s like there’s this perceived low standard that blind people are not allowed to cross when it comes to achievement and anything beyond that cannot be the truth. Perhaps the question those people should be asking is whether their own world view is limiting their imagination and understanding of what human beings are capable of doing. Just because you don’t believe, doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Perhaps it’s as simple as you never having known or experienced that possibility before. Granted, there’s a lot of fake things in Kenya — cosmetics, booze, snake oil merchants, friends, people who make you believe they always have a deal — but I’m baffled as to why anyone would pretend that they were blind.
Thing is, this issue also confuses a lot of people in the Diaspora and not just Kenyans. You’ll be surprised about how much ignorance exists around the world when it comes to disability. You know when growing up how you used to be told not to talk to strangers? Well, sometimes I have to talk to strangers because it’s the only way I’ll get to do what I need to do. Strangers can be the most amazing people, yet the danger of meeting dodgy ones who will exploit and take advantage of you is an ever present danger.
One of my support networks in the Diaspora as a blind person is the local pub. It’s not just about the drinking, far from that. Wherever I’ve lived, it’s the people who work at the local pub who get to introduce me to interesting people, they get to help me out with local things — where I can find the best shopping area, where I can buy food cheap, where I can get a plumber or electrician, where I can get a cleaner, etc. More often than not, I get to be very good friends with the landlord and the staff. If I don’t feel like cooking or it’s not an option, my local pub is the place I can guarantee to get a decent meal once in a while.
But the strangers who are as baffled about my blindness as some of the Wanderlust members are plenty. Take the guy who I found in the gents at the local pub just finishing his business. I swiftly moved past him by the sink where he was washing his hands to take a leak at the urinals. The guy was confused, feeling that it was his humanly duty to support this poor blind fella who Lord knows, has no idea what he’s doing.
“Are you OK?”, he asks wondering what he can do to make my life easier. “Do you want me to help?”.
I’m thinking, “Are you mad?”. The only definition of help in this situation is for you to hold my dick for me to pee. What the hell did he expect me to tell him. “Sure, hold my dick as I pee, the doctor said I shouldn’t lift anything heavy”.
Then you get to meet the really cool strangers. Sometimes I want to just sit and drink my pint in peace, listening to Natalie Imbruglia on my music app and soaking in the madness of the day. Some strangers insist on talking to you but you’re not interested. But sometimes you can’t resist joining a conversation with the people next to you because it’s just a fascinating conversation.
Once, I actually laughed with a couple of strangers next to me about how crazy it was that we just started talking and we found out we had interests that we enjoyed talking about. I tell them the value of getting to know strangers by asking them “do you know who sang that song playing in the background”.
One of them says, “Of course, that’s UB 40”.
I ask them, “Do you know how the group met and how the band started?”. UB 40 is arguably the most successful Reggae band of all time after Bob Marley and the Wailers. They say they don’t.
I tell them that the members of UB 40 met in a queue in a government office in Birmingham in the UK when they were all waiting to apply for unemployment benefit as they were jobless. They just started talking because it was a long wait and they found out they had interests in music. The rest is history. I tell them that the name UB 40 is the actual name of the official application form you have to fill to apply for unemployment benefit in the UK.
But one of the most fascinating nights for me was in late January this year. I was thinking I should go to my local pub more often on a Monday night. It’s quiet, it’s serene and you can just disappear into your thoughts. Only that night, I met two very interesting and amazing people. Jaffah from Kuwait and Valentine, who is half Hungarian, half Russian. When Jaffah joined us, Valentine and Claire the owner of the pub who was behind the bar laughed when we asked where he was from and he said Kuwait. We were only minutes ago talking about how Valentine and I were the only ones in the pub and we were international citizens.
As it turned out, all three of us were sons of fathers who had worked in foreign service around the world for most of their careers. The conversation and camaraderie was fascinating. We talked about everything from European history, the 2nd World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the culture of Hungary, the current events in the middle east, our experiences as kids living in different countries where our fathers worked, the politics of oppressive governments run by bandits and predators around the world, the current conflicts pitting The Donald vs Iran, the proxy wars in the middle east and the Sunni Shiite dynamics of the region.
We talked about the influence of George Soros — who I learned is pronounced Shorosh because in Hungarian “s” is pronounced “sh” hence the pronunciation of Budapest as Budapesh, the history of Budapest from when Buda across the River Danube was combined with Pest (Pesh) in 1873, the issues of migration by Africans to Europe and the madness of the European Union, the centuries of exploitation by the Europeans of Africa and the long term effects, the nuances of cultures and languages in the collective capitals and countries that we’d lived in and our parents worked from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan, from Russia to Khartoum, from Dubai to Washington DC, from Kuwait to Moscow.
Both Jaffah and Valentine had been to Nairobi and either visited or worked and had many friends from the expatriate community. We talked about Kenya, about Africa and the exploitation of the continent for centuries. We spoke about the fallacy of religion and the subjective nature of history — which all of us were students of and understood the history of civilizations around the world as we compared them to our current situations in our home countries and the countries we had lived in. We spoke about the bandits and predators running our states with them reminding me that the bandits in Kenya don’t hold the monopoly. Many countries around the world including their own are victims of state capture.
We all agreed to keep in touch and exchanged numbers, followed each other on Facebook and marvelled about how a nondescript night on Oxford Street in London could turn out to be such a wonderful night of conversation. We also agreed at some point, that we will link up in Kenya again and that I’ll take them to my shags in Kendu bay to stop them from thinking only Nairobi and Mombasa exist in Kenya.
