How the ball bounces.

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I’ve left Nairobi for a few days in Nakuru, where I’m meeting up with my footballer friend, Peter. When I last saw him in November, Peter was upbeat: he’d spent the months since leaving Naivasha in talks with Mathare FC - a team that, at the time, was in a heated race for the Kenyan Premier League crown. (They would eventually finish second to champions Tusker.) Peter had been invited to try out for the squad in January, but he was at home in Kitale when violence broke out following the disputed presidential election. For Peter, the timing couldn’t have been worse: Mathare was a chance to get back into the Premier League, to play for one of the country’s top clubs. Stranded in Kitale, hundreds of miles from the capital, Peter had no way of getting to the try-outs. Gas prices were soaring; roadblocks crippled the major highways. When I spoke to him from Uganda, he was scrambling for other options. Things looked bleak, but he tried to keep a brave face. Throughout the violence we managed to stay in touch; his messages were always tinged with grief, anxiety, frustration, hope.

In Tulu - a small, scruffy town an hour’s drive from Nakuru - Peter greets me at the matatu stage with some of his teammates. He’s playing football for St. Andrew’s - an elite private school which fields a team for Kenya’s First Division - and I’ve come to watch them play a league match later in the day. We have a brief, warm reunion. It’s hard to say if the past few months have taken a physical toll; even last year, Peter was a lean kid - all bones and sharp angles. He wears a Kenyan warm-up jacket given to him by a friend on the national team. He smiles brightly. After all these months, it is very good to see him.

On our way to the school there’s a commotion up the road. Dozens of villagers have lined the shoulder, clapping, singing, wagging their hands, as a convoy of SUV’s barrels past. Peter explains that President Kibaki and the newly appointed Prime Minister, opposition leader Raila Odinga, have arrived as part of the grand coalition government’s goodwill tour of the country. They’ve flown into Tulu by helicopter - St. Andrew’s boasts its own air strip and landing pads - and now their convoy is hurtling toward Molo, where the two men will address a crowd of thousands in the stadium. For a few giddy seconds we watch the villagers stomp and cheer; Raila’s hand - a big, fleshy paw poking from a well-tailored cuff - waves from the back of a Range Rover. There are ecstatic howls from the crowd. Then the SUV’s disappear around a bend in the road, leaving behind a cloud of dust.

We walk along a gravel path toward the entrance to the school. St. Andrew’s is one of Kenya’s top private academies; Peter has heard that the tuition fees run upwards of Ksh600,000 - $10,000 - a year. The grounds are immaculate, suggestive of a well-kept English manor: short, clipped grass, bursts of flowers, ivy crawling up the walls. A long, high chainlink fence surrounds the campus, topped by angry snarls of barbed wire; a few feet beyond it is another fence, strung from high-voltage electric wire. We do not cross to the other side. Peter’s team and the St. Andrew’s staff share living quarters in a separate compound, just outside the school grounds. Jerking a thumb over his shoulder, where flaxen kids shoot across a playing field like bolts of gold, Peter says,

“We are not allowed to go across to their side.”

The askaris and cleaning ladies, the cooks and grounds keepers, live with their families in concrete barracks squatting on the hillside. Laundry flaps from clotheslines; cows low; goats chew. There are kids everywhere. We sit in the cramped bedroom Peter shares with a teammate, catching up on the past few months. When we spoke in January, I sent him some money through Western Union to help him reach Nairobi. But it would be weeks before he finally reached the capital.

“I was very unfortunate, because of this business in Nakuru,” he says.

In Nakuru his bus was stopped at a roadblock. Just minutes before, angry youths had set fire to an Akamba bus. Peter and the others onboard fled, only to be stopped by the police. They were wrongfully accused and taken to the local jail. It was where Peter would spend the next two weeks. By the time he was released Mathare had filled its squad, and Peter - jobless, faced with an uncertain future - returned to his family in Kitale. But the news in western Kenya was especially grim. Peter’s family, like other ethnic Kikuyus in the west, had been chased from their homes. They were staying in a local church; then in a police station. Only months later could Peter appreciate their narrow escape.

“ they were chasing people, but they were not burning houses,” he explains. Kikuyus living in Eldoret, or Kisumu - strongholds of the opposition - were not always so fortunate. Hundreds were killed; thousands of others returned to the Rift Valley, where Kikuyus remained the dominant ethnic group. But in Kitale, after the violence died down, the Munenes returned to their homes. A wary peace set in. Peter again turned his thoughts to football, even when his prospects looked slim. A cousin suggested Peter join him driving delivery trucks; he was making good money hauling cigarettes, produce, brandy.

“I thought maybe it will not work for me as a footballer,” Peter says, “maybe I will be a driver with Kings.”

In March he was invited to try out with St. Andrew’s. When he made the team, it gave him some hope for his football career. The team offered work and housing for its permanent team members; Peter, newly arrived, would have to share a room and pick up odd jobs until his future with the team was certain. Still, he had a roof over his head, and the school paid out small bonuses for the team’s performance - Ksh200 for a win, Ksh100 for a loss or draw. Last week, one of his teammates was hired to help the school install its electric fences. He put together a small crew, which included Peter. They split the day’s Ksh2,000 haul between the five of them. Slowly, things were looking up. Kings would have to wait.

We join the rest of the team at the coach’s house, just inside the main gate to the school. A few clouds have blown in, and the guys form a circle in the patchy sunlight, kicking and heading the ball around and around. The coach arrives in a beat-up station wagon that stalls on the lawn. His two young boys get out, jumping and squealing and high-fiving the players, before disappearing up the limbs of a tree. The air feels heavy, moist; it smells sweet and earthy, promising rain before the day is through. After their warm-ups the players recline on the grass, and Coach Nandabi goes over the game plan. He is tall, full-faced, wry, commanding. The players give him their full attention, and he sketches out formations and attack plans in the dirt beneath his feet. Then we leave the coach’s house and walk through the workers’ village toward the field, winding past banana plants and bungalows, children and livestock chasing at our heels.

The team plays on a scruffy pitch just a few minutes down the hill. The grass is overgrown, the ground is uneven; a dirt bluff rises beside one of the touchlines, framed by eucalyptus trees. The crowd numbers around a hundred - mostly young boys chasing after errant kicks, and older, jobless guys in their teens and twenties, with no better options on a Saturday afternoon. Much of the crowd, as I’ll soon learn, is seriously intoxicated. The first drops of rain begin to fall, and a few umbrellas - bright, multi-colored - pop open on the far side of the field.

If the old saying about the Brazilian football team is true - that the pressure they face is especially high, since they have 60 million coaches to impress - then the task of your average Kenyan footballer is no better. The crowd is merciless, shouting insults at the defense, howling at each strike that sails high over the crossbar. Still, there’s no question where its allegiance lies, and when some sloppy defending in the first half yields a goal for St. Andrew’s, there’s a raucous celebration. Dozens of boys storm the pitch, leaping and cartwheeling and chasing the goal-scorer into the far corner, where some impromptu dancing commences. When the rain begins to fall more heavily, just a few spectators jog into the woods for cover. The rest huddle under their coats, leaning together in the grass, closely following the action on the field.

Earlier, when we were chatting in his room, Peter talked about his plans for the future. Already he was looking ahead, hoping that his fortunes will improve this season. With Mathare FC at the top of the Premier table, he suspected his chances of joining them during the June transfer window were slim. But both Agro Chemicals and Sher Karuturi - mid-table clubs in the Premier League - have expressed their interest; one has hired a former coach, who still keeps close ties with Peter. He shrugged and leaned back on the bed, uncertain what the future might bring. If all else failed, he still had a place with St. Andrew’s, who are jockeying with three other teams at the top of the First Division. Promotion to the Premiership would mean better living quarters, a better playing field - the school has promised the use of its own manicured grounds should the team get promoted - as well as better money. A Premier League team pays Ksh8,000 a month - about $130 - to each of its players, with a Ksh1,000 bonus for each win. In the world of Kenyan football, where most players are forced to maintain jobs on the side, this would be a very big deal. Peter tugged on his socks and laced up his cleats and stretched his calves in the cramped quarters. There was no telling what lay ahead, but he was sure that whatever the challenges, he would be brave enough to face them.

The game is rough, sloppy; at close range, with just a few catcalls coming from the crowd, you appreciate what a physical sport this is. Players grunt and curse; legs tangle; shoulders barrel into chests. The sounds are what you’d expect from a couple of prizefighters going the distance. Midway through the second half, conditioning becomes a factor: passes lack pace, challenges lack conviction. Spirits are flagging on both sides of the field. When Strathmore puts home an equalizer in the 70th minute, the St. Andrew’s squad looks ready to pack it in. The crowd is growing restless. Though it’s early in the season, dropping points at home could be disastrous in a heated title race, with four teams jockeying for position. A loss would drop St. Andrew’s into fourth place, three points off the pace. There is little consolation in a hard-fought finish that doesn’t end in promotion. Another year in the First Division is another year of sharing bedrooms, scrambling for work, battling on a pitch that’s a long way from the immaculate lawns of the Premiership.

Over the course of a long season, though, there’s no telling how the ball will bounce. Late in the half Peter has a golden chance to score. The keeper follows the play outside the box - a grave tactical blunder - chasing a St. Andrew’s midfielder toward the far touch line. With a few deft side-steps he dribbles around the keeper and sends a sharp cross into the box. Peter slips in between two defenders and finds himself all alone, twelve feet from goal with no one guarding the line. It is an improbable stroke of luck - as close as you can get to a sure thing in this game. But when the cross reaches Peter he rises and sends the ball awkwardly off the side of his head. It sails high and wide, drawing some heckles from the crowd. Peter spends a few anguished seconds lying on his stomach, his face buried in the grass. Chances in football don’t come often, and each missed opportunity is a missed chance to change the course of a game, even a life. On the sideline we’re all grimaces, shaking our heads. Only in the waning minutes is Peter let off the hook, when a teammate sends a beautifully struck shot soaring past the outstretched arms of the keeper, setting off a delirious celebration as the referee blows the final whistle.

It’s the sort of finish that Peter must have pictured for himself, vaulting into the wet April air, only to send the ball glancing off the side of his head. But while the glory went to someone else, it was still a good result for St. Andrew’s, and for Peter. And after his header soared wide, Peter didn’t lie on his stomach for long. He got up, brushed the dirt off his jersey, and jogged up the pitch, waiting for his next chance to score

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