While in Kenya I was in was in quarantine, suffering from white guilt and a respiratory infection. For a time I thought I was going to have to fly home or go to a hospital. They were very dark days and I made dark drawings. But with the help of an Iranian acupuncturist and my friend Will I recovered. These are some of the drawings I made during that period.

Kenya watercolor #9

One of the girls in a wheelchair is wearing a blindfold. She’s laughing that open mouthed I-can’t-get-enough-air-because-this-is-so-hilarious kind of laugh and groping around the room for someone who breathes too loud or can’t stop giggling. Blindman’s bluff, that’s what Father Yacob, the 20 something sunburnt American tells me he did the last time he was at Cheshire.

Inside women and men are knitting melvins (toboggins for kids with chin straps and pointy tops), making purses, and aprons. This, Cheshire, is half catholic church, half farm, half dorms, half part boarding school for mentally and physically handicapped Kenyans (That’s too many halves, but you get the picture). And first thing first, I learned how to crochet a Kenyan doily. Then I awkwardly ran around trying to endear my rusted self to the ladies and gentlemen of Cheshire. Later there was a break and we played a rousing game of charades, followed by dancing. While learning some moves from Sara – effervescent curmudgeon-tamer with a club foot. I notice one quiet girl, eerily beautiful girl in a wheelchair and I painted this portrait of her.

Oh, let’s play it by ear.

My favorite word of the moment is phantasmagoric. Say it, I promise it’s fun to say out loud Phan-TAS-ma-goric. It has elements of fantastic, phantom, and orgy. It means a sequence of real or imaginary images like those in a dream. I would say that comics by nature are phantasmagoric.

On an unrelated note, it is remarkably difluffucult to type with dslu duct tape strapofoed to ones fan-gers. (dont’ ask)

This was one of my best days.
In the violence following the last election in Kenya hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. Some were never able to return home. Each family was given less than $200 by the government to resettle and build a new home. The sum is laughable, but this community came together, pooled their money and bought a small plot of land. With some help from my sister’s non-profit they built 75 mud houses with tin roofs and got a bore-hole drilled to an underground water source.

These mud houses were the cleanest and brightest homes I visited and the people really seemed to care for each other. This is a painting I did from memory of us Mzungus (white folk) and Kenyans taking tea and Kenyan doughnuts in one of the homes. We had spent the whole afternnoon chasing around children and we were grateful for the rest.