Natasha From Kenya

Just met the most amazing and wonderful person.  Natasha is from Kenya, and she works as a traveling ER nurse.  She just arrived in North Platte, starts her new job tomorrow and is desperately trying to find housing.  She camped out last night and took a bath in the North Platte River this morning!

We had a great conversation, and she gave me a big hug when we said goodbye.  Longer post later.

Update:  I was at the Starbuck's working pretty hard on the blog, recharging the laptop and having my latte when Natasha came in.  I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but I overheard her talking to the two nice ladies I mentioned in my previous post.  Perhaps I only noticed because she got up from her table, walked over to them, and said, “I’m going to invite myself to sit down with you, so I can ask you for your advice.”  She is so graceful in the way she fearlessly approaches these two strangers, smiles at them and lets them know she already knows they can help her and that they will because they are good people.  I can’t help listening to her voice, she has the most wonderful, musical accent.  Before the two ladies leave she has gotten names and numbers of property owners in town, learned about their lives and exchanged emails and phone numbers.  She is a tiny dynamo who effortlessly creates community with total strangers in mere seconds.

Two people show up and greet her.  They must be some of the contacts she’s made.  She is hoping to find some kind of housing today, not in a week or two.  I was pretty busy blogging (you know I live for the blog now), but I hear her say that she has to go to work in the morning and needs a shower, that this morning she took a dip in the North Platte river.  Now, anybody who gets up in the morning needing a shower and is willing to dip into a river is a pretty awesome person in my book.  And I also think such toughness deserves the reward of being told about the hot showers at the Pilot truck stop.  So I looked over and mentioned it.  She didn't know about truck stop showers and was happy to hear about them.  We talked about it for a few minutes and then I went back to my thing and they continued their conversation.

Eventually some other people came and sat at the table between us.  When they got up to leave they asked me to please keep an eye on Natasha’s stuff because she had asked them to please watch it while she ran to the bathroom, but they had to leave.  So I did, and when she came back I let her know I'd kept an eye out for her.  We started talking.

We ended up having a fantastic conversation.  She tells me she was trying to simplify her life, that she liked the idea of making enough money to live reasonably but not having to worry about constantly striving for more and more.  I have already heard that she was a traveling ER nurse, and I tell her that I’ve heard that other traveling medical people (apparently there are quite a few of them), sometimes full-time in RV's.  We talked about that for a while, and I told her I'd put her in touch with my friend who fulltimes and is a wealth of information and resources on the topic.

She tells me about her two great Danes, how one is terribly destructive when she is away but is “God’s dog,” when he is by her side.  She has left the dogs with a friend while she travels to North Platte and looks for housing to go with her new job, hopefully a house with a fenced yard.

We talk about people, about how some of us are ready and willing to work to maintain ourselves, and some of us prefer to game the system and exist by taking from others and doing as little as possible for ourselves.  We talked about the tension we both felt within ourselves between our native desire to help and give and nurture others, and the resentment we feel when we encounter those who take everything we give and still want more and yet are unwilling to take a part in providing good lives for themselves.  I have seldom met another person who so struggles, as I do, with the opposing directives that have sometimes been labeled left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican.  It is the kind of thoughtful, considerate conversation that is universes away from the polarized ranting and finger pointing that so makes my toes curl when people engage in it and try to pull me in.

She tells me stories about people who come into the big city ER department complaining of chest pain during every spell of cold weather.  The hospital cannot turn them away until many thousands of dollars of tests and care have been given.  They cannot turn these people away even when they know very well what is going on because they see the same individuals regularly, and always when a warm bed, a hot meal, and a dose of morphine is preferable to a night sleeping on the freezing streets.  She tells me about one instance where a man who came in every week or couple of weeks with this scam showed up with the same old complaint, but this time it was for real.  If they had turned him away, he would have died.  And so it is the perfect example of how hospitals are over a barrel.  Resources, beds and time that are needed for people who are genuinely sick are given to those who don’t strictly need them.  They need something, but we have not figured out what it is and how to give it to them.

We talk about this, about ideas she has had and I have had to tackle these seemingly unsolvable problems, and then we laugh, because we are not likely to solve these old, old troubles of society.

I’ve told Natasha about the trip I’m on, the Goose’s recent troubles.  She tells me she hates the feeling of being stranded because in Africa she has been in places where you must be able to flee or you may be killed, so she equates being stranded with the threat of death.  And then, of course, I tell her about my blog. When I ask if I can take a picture of her and include her, she enthusiastically agrees and suggests I take her picture in front of the Kenya poster on the other side of the Starbuck’s, since she is from Kenya.  The poster is too high on the wall to include them both in the same shot because she is so little, so she jumps up on the table below the poster and poses for me.

We look at the picture together and she laughs and points out her sweatshirt.  Cool story, bro.  Tell it again.

I imagined I was in a place of ultraconservative all-white middle-America and that things are so different here from where I live.  But the joke is on me.  Everywhere you go, you find hip people decent people, kind people, and people who make things better and more interesting wherever they go with their musical voices and beautiful faces and their fearless ability to approach strangers, assuming the best about them and thus getting the best.

North Platte is lucky to be getting Natasha.

She gave me a wonderful hug when I left, and told me to “tell that Suburban to behave!”

I went out to Goose, and realized I’d left it unlocked and the Garmin in plain view.  But nothing was missing.