There is a side of my experience that I rarely share with people outside of the Peace Corps sphere. All of you know that I stand out everywhere I go, and I have talked about some of the attention that I get, but the following is an example of some of the common, unflattering attention that I receive.
It starts pretty normal, I was running, with tons of people yelling at me and some people running along side me. Today I decided to run 10 miles, and I had completed about 8.5 of those miles when I child threw a small stone at me and hit me. This is about the 5th time that this has happened to me in the past month. My reaction was to show this child that this was bad behavior, so I started chasing after her. I caught her after about a 30m chase and grabbed hold of her arm. Then she started shouting something that I did not understand in kimeru. It must have been something pretty intense because she kept repeating it and within about 20 seconds the population on the street had gone from 10 to 50. They all saw that she was not in any danger, so they just stood by looking amused and waiting to see what was going on. The girl kept screaming, but I carried her to the nearest person that looked like a mom and explained that the girl had hit me with a rock. The mom replied by telling me that this girl did not do it, but she definitely did, which I tried to explain to her although it was difficult since I had just finished running 8.5 miles... I finished the rest of the 10 miles without much hassle.
At the end of the run I decided to do about 1.5 miles barefoot at the primary school attached to the secondary school. There were some local young men hanging around watching the Athiru Gaiti football club practice. One of them bystanders started running right in front of me, looking back at me with that look on his face that says "look at you, I am beating you" (I commonly have people start running in front of me yelling at the top of their lungs, "I am beating the white man"). Although this guy didn't make any sound, the words were still there, so I told him in kiswahili "continue for 16km and then you will have reached where I am." After I said this he sped up and flipped me off.
I just kept running and he stopped running and left me alone. I continued by myself for half a mile, then a couple of kids started running with me. They were really great. A couple of nights ago they laughed at me when I stepped on a big rock barefooted, but then I scolded them and they apologized. Today they ran with me, without saying anything. Then when it got so dark that I was afraid of really hurting my bare-footed self me and one of the kids said good night and I returned home to wolf down some calories.
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