Saturday
My trip to the market is irritating as a) the old bloke who makes the shakers hasn’t turned up b) the lad who makes the beaded bracelets has forgotton to make my Palestine order and c) perople will not stop bothering me. However I do find some fab Nativities from Fatuma’s Ugandan disabled group, a boy selling beaded AIDS awareness badges for WAD and a random chap who has made some tiny calabash nativities. I also get imbroiled in a bit of a hooha with the lady from the soapstone opposite Mwangi. I bought a lovely red plate there last visit. And ordered four more in different colours from the bloke I thought was running the stall. Gave a deposit of £25 and got reciept etc. NOw turns out that the bloke was not in charge of the stall but was a friend of the lad who was SUPPOSED to be running the stall for the real owner, a fiery lady who has now returned. The other bloke – Dennis – is a broker and took the order for someone else but has now disapeared with the money. 900 bob of hers and 2100 of mine. Thefiery lady is incandescent. She makes me look calm and considered. “Now there will be a war!!” she bellows. I really would not like to be Dennis. Felix, the lad who was supposed to be in charge of the stall but who took a bung to let broker Dennis nick feisty lady’s customer, is fired before my eyes. I leave.
We are marvellously early in leaving and I have to go to Junction for wifi so I agree to meet Doris there at 2pm. For a proper discussion on time management. I go into Nakumatt and get a load of cardboard boxes in preparation for a mass packing up of soapstone things tomorrow. Doris texts to say she is running late. Make it two thirty. Then three. I go to Safaricom and put some money in Mpesa. There is a girl at Felista’s for whom MAma B paid college fees. NOw she is on the final stage and has had a very successful placement at one hospital and is supposed to move to another placement at another hospital. But the hospitals charge the students for the placements. Of course they do. This is Kenya. £50 tho’. SO I send the money off. Now Njoki will graduate and will be a lab technician. Not bad for an abandoned kid from the slums. I eventually text to find out exactly where Doris is. Bloody miles away on the other side of the worst jams in Nairobi. Get off, I say. Go to the pork place, I will get David and come to you. I call David. He has gone to Adams as yet another bit on the Davidmobile has gone dodgy. He is at The Mecanica. This almost never ends well. I call Doris back and explain. I ask if she wants to stay at the pork place and wait till the DAvidmobile is patched up and makes it to KAwangware, or come down to Junction. “Let me come” says her text. So I wait. Another hour. Meanwhile I am supposed to be going to Evan The Soapstone’s workshop to give my order the once over. And now it is raining. I call Doris. Turns out when she said “let me come” she meant “let me stay at the pork place and wait for you”. So she has been patiently waiting. I call DAvid, tell him to go to Uthiru to the workshop while I Get a matatu to KAwangware. But now it is raining. Big, massive, splooshes of Kenyan rain. ONe drop will soak the back of a coat. I get a matatu. It is mental. No one can see anything. All the windows are steamed up.
We are crammed in and my cardboard is wilting in the hot damp. But I get to the pork place eventually. Doris is knackered. Her father is ill and is now losing weight and there seems to be nothing she can do to persuade him to help himself. He refuses to go for the prostate cancer test. One of her sons (who are about six or seven) was caught telling a girl to remove her panties so he could lie on top of her and the entire neighbourhood has turned on Doris. She is still not that well. She is overwhelmed with people coming to Mama B needing help and she said that while she was really ill she just stopped taking business plans. Our great plan to do Medical Days has been a disaster as we have been stymied by petty politics at every turn. Doris is at the end of her tether. I buy coffee, we talk, I reassure, we agree to meet on Monday and make a Grand MAster Plan. I also make her promise that every single plan and request will just get passed on to me. Immediately. She no longer tries to keep the gate, she just opens it. Till she feels better. Because of MAma’s lack of funds she has to do a LOT of saying no and this is a hugely stressful thing to do. I know. I have to do it too. It is making life as MAma B difficult to say the least.
I go home and schlepp my bags and boxes into my increasingly crazy looking bedroom.
And then something hilarious happens.
I get a text from London asking for my help. The volunteers – AManda, Letitia and Souad are in a bit of a pickle. A small child (offspring of a regular customer) has handcuffed sister Amanda. With a pair of antique London Met handcuffs given to me by the Staines POlice as a thank you gift for chairing the final of their schools quiz. They are bombproof. And I lost the key about twenty years ago. I was not worried as they were in the bottom drawer of my desk and I never imagined that anyone would be so cretinously stupid as to use them. And lock them. They call the police. Who want to know how we got the police issue handcuffs … Then they call the fire brigade. Who have to cut Sister Amanda out of the cuffs. “Most people we have had in the shop all day” observes Letitia, in a text. I don’t think they bought anything…
