CALIFORNIA LOVE
Nairobi City Yangu.
When I was fifteen, I came home from boarding school. Our front door was open, so I entered the house and headed to my bedroom. As I pushed open my bedroom door, I was shocked to find an Ethiopian family having dinner exactly where my bed had been. Taken aback, I quickly darted out of the house, hoping I would find a metal number five looking at me from the front door. Of course it was there, just as it always had been. I walked back in, this time decidin to head for the living room. Our former neat and comfortable living room had become a crumpled, cluttered jungle gym. In one corner, we had the television set (it had been upraded from the Daewoo to a twenty-one inch color Sony TV) surrounded with mounds of clothes wrapped in leso. In another corner I recognized parts of my bed, now dismounted, standing gallantly like wooden soldiers - over which hung a pair of my boxer shorts. I didn’t ask what happened while I was at school - I knew. We had fallen on hard times; my mother’s business was on the decline - well quite clearly a decline was an understatement. We were, to put it bluntly, quite poor. The only way out of this financial hole had been to sub-let both of the bedrooms; we had the Ethiopians in one room and a young Kenyan couple in the other. Despite the financial struggle, being poor was actually quite interesting. The young Kenyan couple were loud - spending their nights either arguing intensely, or audibly engaging in adult activi