Walazo: The Wazee

Possibly the best Kiswahili-immersion experience ever is hanging out with interesting, storied octogenarians who don’t know any English. Moving to Walazo was not very considered – it was more an act of “following my heart,” or my gut, which has always been (for me) the best decision-making matrix.

At Walazo, there are 40 boarders – ten women, thirty men.  Most of them are Muslim, most are well into their eighties, most have no family to speak of.  Many have lost their fingers to leprosy, or their mobility to arthritis, or their minds to time.  Some of them are grumpy, some of them are stoic, some of them are amazingly happy, some of them lie still and unspeaking for days and days like the already-dead.

While I mostly worked in the kitchen during my time there, I was assigned random tasks with the wazee every afternoon, like clipping their fingernails, or handing out Vitamin-C tablets, or embroidering their names in the collars of their shirts.  This gave me a premise for visiting and chatting and piga-ing stori, which, as the Sisters kept repeating, “is the best medicine.”  I can’t write about every mzee here, but I'll mention some of the ones that are sticking with me.

There is Mzee Haji, who has three teeth and sings this song to everyone who visits him, in the most winsome and haunting of voices: “Hurry, hurry, bring no blessing.  If you do hurry, you will stumble.  And if you do stumble, you will fall down." 

There is ex-nurse Mzee Adam who wants to control his own medication regimen.  He was never without a horrible scowl on his face, because he hates having the Walazo-nurses determine which pills he gets.  He was usually sitting outside the Sisters' house by seven in the morning to protest his medication.  He was kicked out of his last nursing home.

There is Mzee Abu Bakari who looks fresh and young, with a trimmed salt-n-pepper beard and cleanly-pressed shirts.  When I first met him, he shook my hand -- gracious and straight-backed -- and I couldn't understand why he was even in Walazo.  I found out later that his mind is almost blank.  Once, I was trailing Sister Calista as she handed out bread for an afternoon snack.  She went to Mzee Abu Bakari's room ahead of me and then headed down the hall.  Mzee wasn't expecting me to follow behind her, and when I poked my head in the door, he had most of the loaf of bread shoved in his mouth, and the rest of it bunched in his fists, torn and messy.  I felt somehow guilty for seeing him that way, undignified.    

There is Mzee Abdul, the sharpest mzee of all.  He sits in a wheelchair on his porch and surveys the campus with his hawk eyes.  He knows everything that happens, everywhere.  

There is one Mzee in an end room that overlooks the sea; everyone knows he just wants to die.

There is Bibi Teresa who never had her shirt on when I visited, but her radio was always on.  That's how I knew we were going to be friends.  Bibi T always played dansi tunes. She had lived through Ujamaa, and it was so weird to hear her describe the history I'd read about so many times.  At one point she asked me, "What tribe are you from?"  I told her I don't have a tribe, and she was like, "Ahhh, now you're just being coy."  

One day I was visiting the ladies' dorm, and I heard amazing taarab music coming from the room next door to Bibi T's.  It was Bibi Sofia; she had radio on and was so happy to have a fellow-listener.  After we'd hung out for a few minutes, Bibi T suddenly turned up her volume really loud in the room next door.  "Shani!" she called, "I'm playing dansi in here!"  I went over to say hi to Bibi T, and Bibi Sofia turned up her music a few notches.  It devolved into a radio-duel, each Bibi trying to drown out the other one's tunes.  Chaos in the ladiez dorm!

There is Mzee Hatibu -- small, spry, bright-eyed -- who is super inappropriate and raunchy, and always called me his "girlfriend" and hugged me for as long as I would let him.

The main thing that struck me, over and over again and with increasing sorrow was how dull and repetitive and generally life-less their lives were.  Before I say anything else, a disclaimer: I believe in the conquering, creative power of the spirit, in its ability to transcend the grimmest and smallest of situations.  I remember the specific moment I internalized this truth -- I was pretty young, seven or eight, and reading Anne Frank’s Diary.  Afterwards, my head was spinning at the richness and complexity of Anne's life and thoughts, despite her external confines; she and her family lived in a hidden concave behind a bookshelf for years.  Anyway, the old people at Walazo have similar lives: monotonous, restricted.  I read an article last week about an old people’s home in LA called EngAGE, “senior housing where the old go to flourish, not wither.”  EngAGE provides lots of engaging art programs, social events and creative outlets for the elderly, and it’s an admirable thing – but the contrast to Walazo is so terribly stark that it breaks my heart.   Those two worlds (the tango-ing grandparents in LA, and the sleepy silent wazee of Walazo) are infinitely distant from each other.