LIFE BY LOUIS: Winter in my village

It is approaching winter in Kenya. If this weather had not grown horns and it behaved the way it was supposed to, June should be a cold season signified by cold cloudy days.

In the Kenyan highlands where I come from, the weather manifests in thick fog and consistent drizzles that force people to stick indoors until the next signs of the sunrays emerge through the clouds.

This weather is not aligned to the preferred dress code for the young Nairobi residents.

Men with young blood coursing through their veins prefer to wear tiny shirts that look like misguided vests.

They match the tiny shirts with tight trousers that go past the knees only under intense persuasion.

They complete the outfit with strapless shoes called loafers that I would classify as upgraded sandals which you wear together with a bathroom robe.

Younger ladies on the other prefer to wear their younger sisters’ clothes, and those who do not have younger sisters have clear instructions to their tailors to cut their cloth with a fifty percent reduction.

The wearers of these minimal outfits cannot survive a single day in my village without suffering frost bites and freezing of internal organs.

The standard outfit comprise of heavy cotton jackets, knee length wellington boots, thick socks, a scarf around the neck and a heavy woollen cap known in the local dialect as mbocori. You wear this outfit during the day and when you go to bed you only remove the wellington boots.

Apart from dressing up like someone going to the moon, you must eat a double portion and maintain a regular hourly snack from morning until you go to bed. 

Again these city-bred youngsters whose idea of a heavy meal is a croissant and a packet of juice would find the going very rough if they were relocated to my village. They would have to be weaned of that baby food and be introduced to adult meals that feature large servings of ugali and mukimo accompanied with a lot of watery stew.  

BODY HEAT

Our parents taught us that body heat comes from the stomach. Looking back, they must have been the original nutritionists and physiologists before these careers were commercialized.

Back in Karugo Group of Schools which is located in the Artics, you had to demolish a sizeable piece of ugali with tea in the morning before your parents could confidently release you into the cold morning.

As you left the house, you would stuff a few handfuls of githeri in the school uniform pocket to nibble at on the way to school.

There would be some fruits like guavas and avocado in your bag for the 10-oclock snacking, and these fruits were not necessarily carried from home.

They were sometimes acquired illegally from the neighbouring farms on the way to school.

Come lunchtime there would be your lunch in a plastic pan that we had nicknamed ‘pottie’, and although the food would be at sub-zero temperatures by lunch time, we ate and shared it with relish.

On the way home, you would chance on some sugarcane or carrots acquired clandestinely from some poor peasant’s farms.

When you arrived home there would be half ripened bananas from the granary to be eaten with the lunchtime leftover food, then drowned with tea from the black kettle that was permanently located by the fire place and containing dark superheated tea. If your parents were not around you would steal two eggs and quickly sort yourself out before they showed up and started a fight.

There was still supper to be had after all that. When you went to sleep, your stomach churned like a busy food manufacturing factory and when you woke up there would be steam and mist on the inside of the windows.

By the time we were clearing Class Eight, the boys had developed thick chests and wide shoulders. The girls had developed powerful backs and strong legs and some were already dating the bigger boys.

In my final year of primary school, I had this female deskmate with a mighty body frame, high cheekbones and sunken eyes. She looked so mature to me and I always stopped short of calling her Auntie. What always mesmerised me was her well pronounced belly. She loved her food and she was always nibbling at something even when the teachers were present in class and looking the other way.

Her belly was quite prominent and lightly caressed the front of the desk as she wrote notes.

When she rose up from her desk she would smother her blouse and touch her belly appreciatively.

I always wondered what was in her belly and why it was so pronounced while the rest of us had taut torsos like athletes.

One day after our KCPE examination rehearsals when I knew we only had one week of school remaining and there was nothing more for me to lose, I asked her if I could kindly touch her belly and kill my curiosity.

She agreed, in exchange for my exams clip board which she didn’t have and I happened to have two.

Upon being granted permission which was restricted to five seconds lest the class snitch saw us and announced to the whole world, I gently poked at her belly with my tiny fore finger.

It was firm and hard, and she told me that those are the kind of preferential benefits that awaited me when I grew up.

I swallowed hard, and I wanted to renegotiate the deal with my remaining clip board for ten more seconds.

Wisdom prevailed to save my remaining clip board, and I finished my examinations with a different kind of knowledge that you don’t read from the books.