My Life

A random walk through the first 17 years

At the tender age of 6 years and 8 months, I was plucked from beautiful Ethiopia by the forces of history, and ended up in equally beautiful Kenya. There, I went to the Ecole Francaise de Nairobi, which by that time had already achieved world class status, with it's vibrant student body of approximately 200 students total in 13 grades, it's potholed driveway, and a soccer team which distinguished itself by almost never wining. Later on, basketball become the #1 sport, and despite our boundless enthusiasm, our record was no less abysmal. Surprising, because our coaches were way ahead of their time ("let the girls play"). Maybe we should have practiced something other than "deux pas" (lay-ups). Anyway, the school grew, and so did I, and when I left after nine years, we had passed the 300 student mark, and I had passed at full speed the last mark (at 1m79) on the graded cardboard giraffe we used to measure our height at home.

During those years, my family lived at the Bishops Gardens Flats. So many things happened there that I cannot possibly do justice to the experience. Maybe someday I will make a WWW page for that wonderful zoo I grew up in. Until then, let me just list the highlights of what I learned there:

  • how to swim
  • how to make amazing airplanes out of cardboard, sticks and wire, which could fly for very long distances when launched from the roof
  • how to cut and strip thick wires with my bare hands from the garden walls (where they were supposed to support creeping plants) and cut rubber in order to make wire cars with rubber tires
  • pepeta, a game of our invention, which is like pingpong except that you use a soccer ball and your feet/head/shoulders, and instead of a table you're on two adjacent car parking spots.

    I have to pause here, to remember the inventor of many of these activites, my friend Gyvira Muliro, one of the most amazing people I have ever known, who died a few years later at the age of 18 or so. Jive, if you can surf the web from wherever you are, I hope you enjoy this page.

    Sacrificing chronological order, I jump now to the highlight of my experiences in East Africa (and probably of my life), which happened in 1987. I went over to Tanzania, and with 3 friends undertook to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. To make a long story short, I made it to the top! There, Uhuru Peak, I fell to my knees on the rough ice, partly from exhilaration but mostly from exhaustion. I was alone -- my friends had given up and stayed behind a few hours earlier, and my guide was sulking and had left me. And very, very high: both physically (5985m above sea level) and mentally, because the scarcity of oxygen puts you in a state of quasi-delirium. I felt so close to God... and yet so small, as I gazed down through the clouds, at the savannah way below.