Dancan Chege is a polite, God-fearing young man, but he can no longer call her anything but "this fucking agent" – the woman, this Virginia, who, as he says, lured him to Russia. He is unable to call her and demand answers, he says, because she has blocked his number. Nor can he go to her office in Nairobi, he says, because he is afraid he might end up killing her. That's how angry he is.
It’s a weekend in late February and the sky is overcast in Kiambu County, in the highlands of Kenya, an hour and a half by car from the capital. Red earth, black-and-white monkeys in the trees, lots of small churches. Dancan Chege welcomes his visitors into his house of blue corrugated iron between tea plantations and banana plants.
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Here in his village, he is more than 5,000 kilometers as the crow flies from the front in Ukraine, separated from it by several climate zones and seas. And yet, to him, it all feels so close: the drones, the dead. They are constantly before his eyes, he says. Bodies lying in the houses. The sounds of gunfire and explosions. "Bam! Bam!" he says. He says he thinks constantly about the drones: "The drones are the biggest enemy."
Chege is 30 years old, the father of a one-and-a-half-year-old son named Fredrik, who toddles through the yard with a smile on his face while his dad sits inside and talks about the war. Next door in the open kitchen, his wife Margarite – who for weeks didn’t know whether her husband would survive – is cooking a traditional Kikuyu dish of beans, potatoes and pumpkin leaves, served with chapati. The aroma drifts into the house. At the front, Chege says, there were only dry rations, biscuits.
