Travels in Africa

Some reflections of early fatherhood: There are times, it seems, for reading light fiction. And times for reading serious fiction. And times for reading no fiction at all. Donanne is having trouble just now getting through her third Helen MacInnes novel in as many weeks. The other two gripped her; she came upon them at […]

Donanne offers an account of our first months adapting to new life-roles: When Fred drove us home from the hospital in our Datsun (East African Safari Rally-tested) sedan, our dear “staff” was waiting to meet Pauly. Laban, who came with our coffee plantation house in 1969, had returned to us after our year of travel […]

TIA’s previous post mentioned my leaving my young family in Nairobi tp travel to the US for a weekend conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center relative to the staged reading there of my drama THE HEMINGWAY PLAY. An incident on that trip provoked an essay published on the Monitor’s Home Forum page. Called “Thinking […]

About the time I became a father on May 30, 1972, there also arrived the possibility of becoming a produced playwright. Arthur Ballet of the University of Minnesota’s Office of Advanced Drama Research, a dispenser of grants and a facilitator of production opportunities, had written that he’d be in Los Angeles. He set an appointment […]

My contacts with Joy Adamson, most of them involving Donanne and Pauly, spanned a year. It took that long to nurture our mutual projects. With her husband George, a Kenya game warden, Joy had taken care of the cubs of a lioness George shot when she attacked him. Their most noteworthy achievement was raising the […]

Having pestered Travels in Africa readers for eight weeks with accounts of our son’s birth in Kenya on May 30, 1972, I thought it might be interesting to see how his parents occupied themselves immediately after The Great Event. Fortunately, I kept a daily log, a crucial tool for a working newspaper correspondent. Donanne writes […]

Donanne concludes our eight part series, resuming the day of Pauly’s birth: Several hours later after we had napped – he in the nursery and I in my private room – a smiling nurse brought him to me and then graciously left us alone. I held this tiny bundle of dearest boy close to me […]

At the end of the corridor the white doors of the delivery room opened. A Kikuyu nurse hurried along the hall, grinning. I ran toward her. “You have a son,” she announced. Very soon the nurse I had succeeded in offending came along, walking efficiently from the delivery room. She was carrying a baby – […]

While waiting for her baby to arrive, Donanne thought of her mother. While I paced the dark halls of Nairobi Hospital, I thought of my Dad. It had rained off and on our entire day of waiting for the baby to arrive. I wondered if it had rained the day I was born. What kind […]

Having-a-baby stories are definitely for women. But frequently, though – alas! – not always a husband is involved. In the case of tiny Baby Pauly Hunter at Nairobi Hospital on the early morning of May 30, 1972, husband was present. And because he was a writer, he made a record of that momentous event’s effect […]