The Turtle

So the other day Ben and I (Kurtis) were playing outside; I think Ben was climbing trees and I was
feeding ant-lions. (Look em up on wiki!) Ben suddenly called out, "Look daddy, turtle!" and sure
enough a very nice sized turtle was wandering past the climbing tree. So I picked it up and took it
to show Carla. Our neighbour was walking by and mentioned that she thought it belonged to some kids
so after we showed Mommy, I left Ben to "fyaka" (cut the grass) and I went to the closest house to
see if I could return the turtle.
I found a mama cooking supper and we went through the greetings and then in my very broken
Swahili I explained that I found this turtle and I thought it belonged to some children and I wanted
to return it. That took a couple of tries and then I figured out that this turtle probably didn't
belong to her kids. Then it took a couple of tries from her for me to realize that she was asking
me to pay her something. That just about did it for me as I had already received a much higher than
usual number of requests in town that day. So I got a bit terse and I'm sure everyone understood
that there was no way I was going to pay for the privilege of returning the turtle. In the end we
did the polite good-byes and I ended up leaving the turtle there.
Then when I got back to our yard Ben was completely gone and it took about a minute before we saw
our gardener (who just happened to be going by on the weekend) bringing him back from the road. He
had been running full tilt probably looking for me.
So in about 90 seconds I managed to wreck the day for a number of people. The kids no longer had
their turtle, I was mad about automatically being asked for something because of my skin tone and
that I had blown my first meeting with this neighbour, the neighbour was probably annoyed that she
didn't get anything (except maybe turtle soup) and that I had been so rude, Carla was not too
pleased that I had left Ben and the turtle was most likely disappointed at becoming dinner that night.
..
A couple of addendums...
- That week we had just come back from a trip and found a great deal of water had been removed from
one of our tanks with a path leading from the tank towards this neighbours house though of course we
will never know for sure who took it. So that might have been on the back of my mind and why I
didn't have much patience.
- A few weeks later Ben and I were playing with his tricycle and some kids couldn't resist coming by
to watch. So we played together a bit and somehow the turtle came up. I mentioned that I had
returned it to that house and they took off right away to go find it so hopefully they did get it back.