Safe Haven

In Kenya, running helps an American regain her balance.

January 9, 2008

It was already light outside when I noticed my running shoes were missing, too, just a few lonely clots of red mud to mark where they'd been. The policeman added them to a list of electronics the robbers had stolen. It was an empty gesture. Police recover nothing in Kenya. The police didn't ask about the welts on my body where the men hit me with the side of a machete. They didn't want to know where I was grabbed or how I was touched. This sort of thing happened all the time.

Depressed, I returned to the doorstep and thought about the irony of having my running shoes stolen. It was in them that I'd begun to feel safe in this city in the first place.

In the fall of 2006, my husband and I had moved from New York City to Nairobi to work as journalists. Upon our arrival, well-meaning expats regaled me with chilling accounts of carjackings, home invasions, troops of machete-wielding gangsters abetted by underpaid police. I became a pale, trembling shut-in.

In Nairobi, the economic gap between a freelance writer and most Kenyans is enormous. I'd worked out a simple calculus of guilt: The average income for a family of five in the slums, where 71 percent of Nairobi's population lives, is under $1.50 a day. That family could survive for three months on the price of my running shoes alone.

I resolved not to run. But after a few nights of insomnia, I found myself at the hotel desk before sunrise begging for directions to a park. I stepped into the road and a torrential downpour stopped, as if nature were on my side. Heaving as I made my way through that first dawn run at 5,000 feet, I came upon a gaggle of kids in royal blue sweaters and crisp gray shorts. There were shouts of "Mzungu!" (white person). A clattering of plastic loafers followed, and two boys pulled alongside me. "Hello. How are you? I am fine," one said, demonstrating his mastery of English conversation.

Up a steep hill we ran. Past a soccer field, two soccer fields. Along a tall fence outside of the presidential residence. A mile later, I slowed as we approached the park. Instantly, two heads swiveled toward me with–was it reproach? Trying not to groan, I sped back up. The boys ran beside me for another half mile, and then turned down the road to their school. "You will come again?" This, I thought, could be the beginning of something good. And it was. Moving through Nairobi on foot gave me an intimacy with the city, replacing dark abstractions with more human (if pint-size) truths.

But the robbery made running difficult. I replaced the running shoes easily enough, but I'd lost my faith. I tried once to run my old route. A little man stepped too briskly from behind a tree. "Hello!" he shouted. I leapt back in horror and ran away sobbing. I knew that kind of fear was a profound failure, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A month later, I went back to the park where I'd first run in Nairobi. It was evening and dark figures hurried through the thicket at the edge of the path. A woman waved at me to stop. I was sure she was going to tell me that it was too dangerous for me to run there.

"Would you mind if I take your picture with the girls?" she said, pointing to a dozen Girl Scouts along the side of the path. They liked running, too, she explained.

One girl grabbed my hand, and everyone else jostled around me. They laughed and stepped all over my new shoes, as if they knew I needed their help breaking them in.