Having just survived the climb up and back down a termite-riddled, rickety lookout structure and having my breath taken clean away by the stunning view of Mt. Kenya’s silhouette in the misty dawn, I feel like it’s time for Chapter 4 – my last from Wajee. Today will be my last day here, and will be a busy one when it starts, trying to get as much done as possible.
I warn you all now, this one is a long one because I’ve had a jam-packed weekend and many stories to share!
Now where did I leave off? So on Friday last, Jagi arrived late at night. Everyone had been hustling all day to sparkle up the place for his arrival, but it was darkest night when he pulled up so we had to wait until the next day to see his reaction to all the improvements. (He was thrilled – by both the physical improvements and the infrastructure we’d put in place… this has to be the first time anyone has ever said the following sentence to me: “the auditors will just love what you’ve done here!” Wish I’d had a tape recorder for that one!)
The next morning Jagi took Flora and me on a day of touring the local sights and attractions that cemented forever my utter love of this part of the world, and he was the most passionate and knowledgeable guide you could hope for.
The routes to get to each of the local attractions are adventures in themselves and ideally would be done by mountain bike or on foot – but we had many places to see in one short day so took his Land Rover. Now, in paved and sterile little Vancouver, a Land Rover is no more than a big phallic symbol for a weak male ego – but in Africa, it just makes good sense. We passed a truck (a ‘lorry’, in the Kenyan terminology which takes its sensibilities from the UK, owing to its colonial past) coming down a steep hill and I feared it would lose its brakes and go hurtling into a stream never to be extracted! On either side as we barreled and bounced past were cows, goats, sheep, children, chickens, geese, and here and there women laying colourful laundry out to dry in a field. Then from the forest on one side emerged two traditional Kikuyu women, faces painted, walking with heavy burdens on their backs as women here often do. As they walked and talked, they were all the time busily weaving their colourful traditional baskets (I bought two such baskets at the Mihuti Market recently – they are gorgeous and are made from grass fibres on the vertical and re-used brightly coloured plastic bags on the horizontal weave).
First to Jajara Falls (meaning “rocky” falls in the local tribal language of Kikuyu). Hiking along a narrow trail, pushing through tall grasses with sharp edges, thorn bushes, fragrant herbs… crushed underfoot, they release a spicy green aroma with each step. Steep slopes, sometimes dry and crumbly and giving way, sometimes muddy and slippery. Rushing water louder as we approach, fresh cool moist air breaking the blasting heat of the midday sun, blessedly. Sweat trickles, tickly-prickly down the back! At last, a lovely cool perch on a rock by the falls, the soft mist soothing our burning skin.
Next, Igutha – which boasts both a waterfall and an organic coffee plantation/factory. Rows and rows of glossy dark green coffee plants with berries growing redder, soon to be picked and peeled and sorted. The water sorts the beans, how clever and simple! Low grade floats, higher grades sink – fascinating devices and special channels sift them into three distinct grades, and into chambers where they are washed and drained. Then to long, long drying racks in open fields, where they are sorted by hand and sun-dried. Off to market next go these happy beans, to be priced according to grade and shipped to roasters in North America and Europe who turn them into the shiny brown goodness that we grind up and make into our cappuccinos and espressos! Here, where the coffee grows and where people sweat and toil to sort and separate and husk the beans, they get only Nescafe instant packets… from the lowest of all the grades! Such a shame, that the growers never taste the highest quality product but instead export it all. Do we taste their sweat and labour when we sip our morning coffees, I wonder? Do we taste the red African earth and the rich rains, the yellow sun that dries this product and burns into the shoulders of those who pick through it for us, bean by bean? I think when I come home, I will taste all those things in my coffee forever. (And I’ll try to buy Organic, Fair Trade coffee as much as possible, too!)
Our next stop was fascinating. A local farmer blessed with particular ingenuity, Joseph Mwengi, has for many years now run his home on bio-gas. He has one cow, and its poop provides for all his family’s energy needs! Its stall is behind the house, on a ledge about 12 feet up from his garden/farm out the back. Its droppings are channeled into a deep cylindrical hole with a domed thingy on top that sort of floats on the manure sludge (yeah, ew, I know – but you know what? Not much of a smell!) – and by natural compression the methane is forced up a pipe that leads back into the house. They use the methane for lamps in each room and for the kitchen stove. He has created a variety of special portable clay ovens, which have small holes into which pipes send the methane. Voila! Perfect gas burners for each and every cooking task. And by the light of the lamps he has schooled all his very bright and ambitious children. His daughter, Purity, welcomed us and gave us a tour of their amazing home, and let us sign their guest book. It was filling up gradually with wonderful encouraging words left by tourists from all corners of the globe. The Mwengi farm is becoming rather an attraction in the area for visitors both Kenyan and international – it is a model of sustainable living, requiring no charcoal which is the standard energy source in Kenya, and it could be applied to many households. Apparently, last year, a German couple visited and were so amazed that they have been trying to get Jagi to find out the exact specs of how this bio-gas plant works, so that they can secure development funding to expand it. Potentially the farmer could sell the excess gas produced, and/or go into business setting up similar rigs at other homes. This same clever farmer has also solved his water problems by building the most extraordinary well/pump system that I can’t begin to describe… luckily I took pictures! It is made of an old tire, some tubes, some scrap wood, rope and some bicycle parts. He turns a handle and up comes water for his farm – or household – on demand.
Our last stop of the day was in Mukurwe-ini, the nearest town centre to Wajee (‘town’ meaning a few blocks of shops amid mostly fields and trees, of course). Along the way, we saw a lorry buying milk from farmers carrying big metal pails of the stuff. This milk lorry has a regular weekly route in the region, and dairy farmers – who have been given very high quality stainless steel sealed pails to put their milk in for sale – come and wait at the stops to have their product purchased by this collection service. It then takes the milk to Mukurwe-ini to a very modern processing station (which we visited), where it is tested, chilled and then put into tankers and sent on to larger towns and factories, where it is highly prized for cheese and yogurt making. The reason this milk supply is so safe and sought-after is that these farmers have been trained extensively by Canadians through an initiative called “Farmers Helping Farmers”. The Canadian farmers visit the Kenyan dairy farms and teach good animal care and hygienic practices, give free veterinary advice and care, and so on. They also co-funded the new high-quality lab/processing plant in Mukurwe-ini. Since the farmers profit so much from their milk sales, and know that the testing is very accurate, they are rewarded for following good practices as they would be ‘blacklisted’ if they sold watered down or contaminated milk. Thus a win-win situation that rewards honesty and good farming practices! There are apparently yogurt-making seminars at the plant regularly, too, for anyone wishing to expand from just selling milk to selling other products.
It was a long day… and then a long Saturday night! At first, it was quiet, and our happy little family of Wajee staff gathered at the campfire circle and watched the video “Beautiful People”, a humourous documentary about the Namib desert. As we watched, we sampled “amaroula”, a special cream liqueur made from the fruit of the maroula tree, which is native to Namibia, appropriately enough. It was particularly funny because part of this movie shows how the animals gorge on the fermenting maroula fruit, which have extremely high sugar and yeast content at the end of the growing season when they fall in masses to the ground. This gets the animals drunk as all hell, and they weave and wobble and roll around like clowns – elephants, gazelles, baboons, meerkats, wildebeests, all absolutely hammered, walking into trees and tripping on their own feet/hooves/paws/etc. … and then the next morning, ha! Animals with hangovers, if you can imagine that. It’s unreal to see these monkeys holding their poor aching heads, looking sad and sorry and wondering what happened last night. Amaroula, the human-made drink from this fruit, is actually a lot like Bailey’s, a bit more chocolatey. Very creamy. A nice sipping drink for movie-watching!
After the movie, quite a few local patrons descended on the bar so I went to bed and let them carouse on without me. They carried on all night! I hardly slept what with all their ruckus, and was horrified to find the next day that one of them – apparently the local ne’er-do-well, does this a lot – was STILL at the bar drinking beer, while poor Edna in her typical politeness had literally stayed up ALL night serving him drinks. Of course the watchmen were there to keep an eye out, but really. I told Flora to consider instituting this new crazy thing called “closing time” that we invented in Canada.
That same Sunday morning, Judy took me and Flora to her church (Catholic). The service was in Kikuyu so I didn’t understand the words, but the singing was beautiful. The offertory song was so lovely that it made me forget, briefly, the thought that the Vatican hardly needs more gold candlesticks off the backs of Africans earning less than $1000 per year…. Anyway, I don’t know who was more fascinated – me with the lively service, or the congregation with my glaringly white presence. Children popped in and out of pews to peek at me, then hid behind their parents’ knees and giggled. A gorgeous gurgling baby on the lap of the woman next to me was probably the only person small enough not to know that skin colour differences mean anything (or maybe I should say, ‘small enough to know that skin colour differences don’t mean anything’?), so he just smiled toothlessly at me and drooled. Scrumptious little round thing he was, with shiny chubby cheeks and a fetching knitted cap!
As I left, it was like a carnival was passing through. I kept wondering what was going on but apparently I was what was going on! At least 20 children followed me out and down the trails and roads towards Wajee camp. I wished I had some kind of a dance routine to entertain them or something; I felt like a pretty lame show for all that attention! But a handshake and a smile seemed to be enough to make them happy and I obliged. Later after I returned to the office, the two children who deliver milk to Judy every day worked up the courage to come and sit beside me at the computer and introduce themselves (Mary and Justice, 7 and 5 years respectively, sister and brother). Then they stroked my hair like I was some kind of big living doll they wanted to play with. So I gave them a sweet and chatted with them a while, and then they ran home to tell everyone the unbelievable story of this strange, pale, blond, blue-eyed creature they had spoken to!
The attentions I received in Nyeri on Monday were less enjoyable, I have to say. But I should back up. Starting out at 7:30AM on Monday morning, Flora and I journeyed to Mukurwe-ini (a very small town 5k from Wajee), and then on to Nyeri, for a variety of tasks, which took us to no less than the local office of the President (I got a picture with the D.O. and we exchanged business cards. Ooh la la, that’s networking for you!) and then the National Social Security Fund office to register Wajee’s employees (did you know they fingerprint everyone at every government office, every time you register for anything?? All 10 digits, no less!), and to various banks and offices. The experience at each and every office was… a lot of waiting around followed by more waiting around and then some waiting around. Bureaucracy is a bore anywhere in the world, but it’s at its peak here where just about everything is manual and done painstakingly slowly in pen and ink… aaack. Yes, I had a lot of spare time to practice my meditation techniques, that’s for sure!
Well when we were at last ready to go, burdened enormously with supplies we had bought for the camp, we had to make our way down a horrid busy street to the matatu station. Now, Nyeri is hardly Nairobi, but it is most definitely a city with all the attendant madness that can bring in this part of the world. And far from feeling like a vaguely amusing attraction as I did after church, I felt like a piece of meat in a cage being circled by sharks after being pawed, grabbed, and hooted at for three blocks. As we tried to get ourselves and our weighty packages into the right matatu, a man with devil-red eyes, intoxicated in the worst way, made himself obnoxious in his attempts to get me to follow him god-knows-where. So Flora, despite weighing no more than one of my legs I’m sure, went into protective mother bear mode, placed herself squarely in front of me, and drove him away, then took my hand and led me towards our matatu. The unpleasantness was momentarily broken when, as we marched off, I almost become a hackneyed punchline by actually slipping on a papaya peel – and very nearly taking a huge spill! Oh to have had a picture of that Stooge moment! It was really quite limerick-worthy, had I the brains to come up with one (“there was a young girl from BC, harassed by a man in Nyeri; she stepped on a fruit and went down with a hoot, and…” oh, whatever!). Suffice it to say that I have never been so glad to have a local ally with me, nor to finally get into a matatu however dusty and smelly, as I was then.
And the shower, once home again at Wajee, despite being freezing cold, was the best shower I’ve ever had, washing away the grime and ick of Nyeri and returning me to my state of peaceful appreciation that has been the more dominant theme of my trip so far.
The day after tomorrow, I go to Nguruman, for quite a different flavour – Maasai country. It’s a facility that is not even open yet, and has just one caretaker. So I’m having visions of me in the desert, surrounded by wild animals that want to eat or trample me, and one companion who speaks only Swahili whom I imagine to be saying “how are you, welcome to the lodge” when he is really saying “lady, move quickly, there is a wildebeest charging at you from behind”. Should be grand!
Until next time, I send you all big hugs from Africa!
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