Thursday
Quite a road trip planned. I need to get my ticket for Western first. Then to Ruai, to meet the amazing Dinah, at whose wonderful school Joseph, Jane, Miriam, Moses and Michael, whom I met in 2010, have been given opportunities they never imagined. Precis : Mum died. Dad abandoned. Kids lived feral. Felista rescued. Kids very ill. I lived in hospital with the girls, sleeping under their bed. Lived at DECIP. Miriam raped (aged 8). Left DECIP. Lived with uncle who suddenly appeared. I started helping. Went to Ruai and started at Dinah’s school, MAma Biashara paying fees. Uncles wife has new baby, doesn’t want these kids around. They start boarding. MAma Biashara pays but Dinah gives MASSIVELY discounted rates. Joseph has left to go to secondary, did one year but is now out of school because of costs Jayne is now in secondary but on a term by term basis as there is no money and the other three are still with Dinah, who looks after them like a loving Auntie. It is she who has squeezed money from the money for Miriam, Moses and Michael to pay for Jayne to attend a local day school and stay with her at night.
We go, deliver some bits and bobs and hear Dinah’s plan that if Joseph and Jayne can get through secondary and a year or so of teacher training then she will give them both jobs at her school. Which is really rather incredible. Then they can look after the others.
Thence to Ruiru. To Spinners and Spinners mills where I am hoping to bag a bag of cotton off-cuts to continue The Great Sanitary Pad Experiment. Cotton/lycra legging failed miserably but, by all accounts, cotton alone will work. Luckily there is some sort of management bloke outside having a smoke and a chat on the phone, so when the smirking askaris treat us like dirt he intervenes. With the bad news that Spinners and Spinners is a 100% acrylic enterprise. Hmmm.
But he suggests a couple of places we can try. Which is good.
Now back to Nairobi and our afternoon medical. Or not. Doris calls to say that the whole area we were visiting has been called to attend a meeting with Kabogo (local governor heading towards re-election. For which read that everyone has been given 300 bob to attend the meeting and make it look like Kabogo has a huge amount of support. They will get another 300 for their actual vote come election day. As all we have are dewormers and scab cream, we are gazumped. So David and I pass by Garden City Shopping Mall. One of the biggest in East Africa. High end shops, huge restaurants, leisure facilities, you name it, it has it. And the high end shoppers of Nairobi would like to thank you, the British People, because the mall was built with about 12 million quid’s worth (might be more, I shall check) of the UK’s Aid money. I take a couple of photos inside but then am followed by security guards, so I split.
We meet with Doris who has a load of our Education Project posters and flyers in Luhya for me to take to Western.
We also make a list of other information leaflet type things that are needed. When we go places, I always give information on any problems … like the fact that cooking over charcoal inside the house is going to cause respiratory problems for your children and yourself. And especially your tiny, snotty baby. And our How Not To Get Cholera leaflets stopped the spread of the disease in its tracks in both Nakuru and Mombasa area. People frequently ask what they could do here to help if scabs are not eir thing. The answer is simple (as long as you are not a moron), tell people stuff. Information. Knowledge. Knowledge you didn’t realise not everyone has : like smokey stove cooking inside a one room house with five kids in it will create problems and a massive amount of snot.
We have requests for more cholera leaflets, plus our Why Lightening Your Skin With Household Bleach Is A Bad Thing info, my special What Is This Pus ? A Commercial Sex Worker’s Guide To STDs and, sadly, for the Mijikenda (indigenous peeps along the coast) an explanation (with helpful suggestions) of rickets, scurvy and the sickness they call ‘kwashiokor’, which is malnutrition and the whole big belly horror. The drought is hitting them very hard and they are a poor people anyway. Info will go, in their languages, plus HTC’s marvellous calcium gummies for kids and anything else we can think of but the problem is massive and we (as the striking doctors point out) are very small. Still no reason not to try.
Good news for Exure Condoms (thank you Poundland and Poundworld), although I am unsure as to how they might spin this into an ad campaign) is that the sex workers of the coast (both male and female, but especially men) think your condoms are absolutely the greatest. They need more. More. MORE. They feel good (apparently), they do not perish in the heat (you can even carry them on the beach when looking for business) and they can survive the most strenuous anal action without breaking. No one EVER said that about Durex now, did they ? Dear Exure Manufacturers, for the cost of a lorryload of your wares, I can get all of that for you on camera … it is deffo a USP …
More good news from the coast is that the original group of ladies I helped with their devastated skin problems (20 years of scrubbing with household bleach twice a day … light skin is what the customer wants and the customer is always right) are doing great business with henna decorations and other stuff. The group now numbers 60 and growing. And it seems that with love, shade and a LOT of cream (Johnson and Johnson’s baby cream, Nivea and Ingram’s have all played their part), the skin can recover. At least enough for normal life. It will never regain its youthful bloom …
And so off to pack for an early rise
Friday
David is at the gate on the dot of seven. Marvellous.
We take several ‘panya routes’ and are well on time. We are held up in one queue at the roundabout into Haile Selassie Ave. As we eventually clear it we see a small, doughnut shaped police lady is the one directing the non flow of traffic. David eyes her balefully. “That is why I hate all fat ladies” he says “I HATE them. They think very slowly.” I let it pass.
I sleep almost all the way to Cheptulu. Where it is raining.
Julius is there and we load a pikipiki up with my boxes and send it off while we have tea (fabulous, worth an eight hour trip for, boiled up syrupy lemon tea with chapati and kunde (yet another type of delicious greens)) and discuss the weekend. Rain has stopped the massage workshop this evening. It will now be done tomorrow afternoon after a medical day. Starting with deworming and, where necessary, dejiggering. We pikipiki back to my sleeping place with Ernest. It starts to rain. The brilliant Stephen Sondheim has obviously never been to Cheptulu. The Rain on the Roof most certainly does not go Pit Pitty Pat. It goes boom crash boom until you cannot hear yourself think. Julius seems less than impressed with out Education Campaign posters and flyers. Even in Luhya. But he goes home with a bunch. And I sleep
Saturday
My pikipiki boy is called Elvis. We load up the boxes and bags and me and start off. Two stops for re-positioning the tower of boxes later, we are at Julius shamba.I almost miss it because he has cut down most of his eucalyptus trees to make a shelter. Apparently that is OK because they grow very fast. We deworm with a will. A large drunk man has come to get help with his feet. His toes look like black cauliflower. I see it very well because he refuses to sit with them in the basin of disinfectant and keeps waving them in my face. Some of the shoshos take him to task and he leaves. Everyone seems to be covered with some sort of pustule or vesicle. One young boy has whole areas of his body crusted with clusters of tiny plooky nastiness. The place is a dermatologist’s playground. Some things are much less frightening than they look – the old scabby leg here can look quite monstrous. There is a fair old amount of malaria, a lot of vomiting, a large knot of constipation and the usual heartburn, headaches and generally sore bodies. The sore bodies are instructed to come back tomorrow when there will be a team of highly trained massage people to ease their bits. I lose count of the times I miraculously heal a headache and dizziness with a big mug of water. There are a few REALLY sick kids who are being very brave. It starts to rain again and we scurry to Julius’ new shelter. Unfortunately the roof is not finished and there are no walls. But it is better than the alternative.
We continue the medical with many coughs and much congestion. And then a mildly manic bloke appears, smelling pungently of home brew, but happily so. He grabs me and shouts “you healed me !! You healed me”. He raised a raggedy trouser leg to reveal a skinny calf with a tiny scar on it. “You healed me!” He repeats. Pointing at the scar. And I remember. He was drunk then too. In November. He had a fairly ghastly wound on his leg he said was caused by a njembe. I cleaned it up and made my own larger sized steristrips and closed it as far as I could then lathered it with antiseptic and antibiotic powder and cream, bandaged it and gave him cod liver oil. The scar is TINY. I am a bloody genius !! He shows everyone the scar. He is extremely happy. Mildly annoying, but happy. We gather an audience of kids and continue till everyone is seen too. Then I go inside Julius’ house, where it is pitch dark – it is a traditional mud house so no leccy and he doesn’t seem to have a lamp. We get the new foam mattress on the floor and, starting with my four students in chairs, I teach the very basics of neck and shoulder massage, loosening arms, hand massage and then we get down on the bed and work from neck to foot. Very general stuff. But I demonstrate with some force, how so much of the problem experienced by all the women comes from the same place. And when I hit their gluteus maximus … well … The entire thing is watched over by an amused hen who is sitting in a basin in the corner hatching chicks. There are bloody loads of them. At least a dozen. It makes a nice soundtrack to the massaging.
It is getting dark and everyone needs to go home. More rain will come and you really want to be inside when that happens
I have the weirdest dream involving the lovely Mummy Bridewell – the epitome of gentle kindness and expert cake-baking – running amok with a shotgun. It must have been the kunde.
