AFRICAN DIARY

By Fr David McLaurin
Here I sit in an internet café in Mombasa, the sweat pouring off my brow, the fans running above my head to no noticeable effect. I suppose this is the sort of Africa that most people imagine: hot, very hot, and sticky, with palm trees and white sand. Readers of this diary with good memories may remember that I have been to Mombasa before this: the last time it was to the coast south of Mombasa Island; this time I am on the north coast, which is more lively: in other words, this is African tourist land, a strip of hotels along the beach, and all that comes with it: souvenir shops and beach boys and beach girls.
The beach boys are the ones who try to sell you something as soon as you step on to the sand. It may be a key ring. I told my first beach boy that I had a key ring, and did not want another. An, but did I have a hardwood key ring, he wanted to know. I told him I still did not want a key ring.
"You do not wish to promote the people of Mombasa," he told me sternly, appealing to my sense of post-colonial guilt. The girls are somewhat more direct in approach. They step forward and offer you a massage. Of course, the massage in question is not really a massage. My friend James has flown in from Uganda to join me and on his way to the bank to change cash he was offered three massages in about five minutes, and it was only 10 in the morning.
Because these sorts of importunate salespersons are such a nuisance, the hotels have roped off parts of the beach, and past these ropes the beach boys may not pass.
But still, one feels sorry for them, and even sorrier for the rather unhappy European ladies who stroll the beach hand in hand with Maasai boys. The age difference is usually remarkable.
Every year the papers carry features about the women who come here; find true love and marriage and then bitter disappointment, all in a short space of time.
T14 beach, someone once said, is a microcosm of life. Perhaps to understand Kenya you simply need to ' adopt a shady spot from which to observe what passes on the sand.
On the way down here one noticed one thing that had imprOved markedly. There is now a good road, well surfaced, for about 80 per cent of the 300 miles between Nairobi and Mombasa. Only right at the end does one have the terrible experience of driving over what seems like the surface of the moon.
And here, the people are at work rebuilding, their trucks driving up and down. The company in charge is called the China Road and Bridge Construction or something like that. And the people doing the building are, I have been told, Chinese criminals, doing their penal servitude abroad. One assumes they are white-collar criminals.
Along the road we had several pleasant experiences. For a start, some 30 miles out of Nairobi we saw some giraffes, about a dozen, including two young ones, all browsing from the trees.
Giraffes, I discovered, do not walk, but sway gracefully like the trees of the savannah they inhabit.
The savannah itself was all green, not dusty brown as it was two years ago, the last time I passed, thanks to a year of plentiful rain.
Further along, a herd of placid zebra browsed, oblivious of the passing vehicles. These were touches of true African beauty.
Fr David McLaurin is a missionary priest in Kenya d40mclauringhotmail.com