One day you’ll get to walk
through the paths, dusty and beaten, of this village in a remote part of Uasin
Gishu County. On that day, there’ll not be anything except orphaned children,
neglected mud-walled houses, lands that have been permanently left to fallow
and young men wallowing in the fate that has befallen them. They’ll be chewing miraa, while fondling
plastic Coca-Cola bottles with clear liquids inside if you peer closely. They (these
young men) will be fathers to their own siblings and would be mulling about the
day their parents went wrong. Today I’ll do you a favour. I’ll walk you through half the journey. I’ll
walk you well in advance before that day comes. Be warned though that this is
subject to exaggeration on my part and it would have been really great if you
walked it by yourself. Let’s begin the journey.
Here, you will catch a glimpse of
lands with cypress trees grown on the edges, pruned to the tip. You will wonder
how this is possible and give up when you realize that it is a vanity. ‘There have
pruning drones, ‘I‘ll lie to you. ‘Haven’t you seen them?’ I’ll ask to rouse
your amusement. Mud-walled houses with
rusty tin roofs and many of them grass thatched line haphazardly along the
dusty road. Maize plants on these lands speak of neglect. Weeds have choked
their growth and most are have very thin stalks with barely anything to
harvest. You’ll notice the road painted white from chewed maize stalks. It’s a delicacy
during this time of the year.
On the east of this village lies
a more affluent village. Large trucks of land where wheat and maize plantations
stop your eyes. If it’s your first time, you will find it delightful and you
will give in the temptation to take selfies to brag to so many people who don’t
know you on social media. Lonesome bricked houses stand solitarily either in
the middle or at the edge. There are those who let reason prevail and found it
worthwhile to construct their houses close together, but still on their farms.
It’s called Chebaon. It would qualify to be a leafy suburb. Let’s call it a
leafy village. Yes, Lavingtone.
To the west of Chebaon is Kaoni,
where my story is set. A river separates these two villages. Here you will
access Kaoni through a dilapidated bridge, constructed when there was still
very little difference between the two villages, when Chebaon had very few
residents and those who had settled found it worthwhile to have neighbours who
they would occasionally borrow each other salt when it became extremely
impossible to get to the nearest Kiosk. And they needed a proper bridge. Who
would walk through a wooden plank in the dark? The present doesn’t allow that. Chebaon is
almost not a village. A village is rather a backward word that denotes a people
who are clueless about civilization. People here upgraded their television sets
to pay TVs while the other village still is clueless about television. The
other village supplies labour to Chebaon. And that’s the biggest difference.
The kids of Chebaon parents
attend the best schools that could be found in the region. Kaoni kids attend
local primary schools and in Chebaon, the only school which hosts kids from
other villages but its own. Chebaon in very simple terms is a home of people
who don’t live there.
Across the river, you’ll find
grass thatched houses standing like they’ll collapse any minute. Some even have
poles placed to support the leaning houses. The mud-walled houses reveal a
sorry state. You’ll see kids dressed in rags, which mostly entail an adult’s
shirt or sweater, playing innocently outside these houses. They care less, just
relishing in their innocence. One will lend a wail to the rather quiet village,
having exhausted means of winning a contest against another who apparently is
stronger than him or her. An older kid
will prevail on the young ones and soon the games go on. They will be engrossed
till pangs of hunger cannot be contained anymore. Luckily you won’t be here to
see that. I’m just being too generous by telling you this.
One of those mud-walled houses belongs
to a village elder. He has many children some his own, some not. The
extraordinary thing is he doesn’t care about them. Everybody knows he flogs his
wife thoroughly yet they will rush to him with domestic cases. Everybody knows he doesn’t contribute a penny
to his children’s upkeep. Their mother can send them away for ages and he won’t
badge an eyelid. He could be tempted to ask where they are and the wife’s stern
reply would be, “is there anything you want to give them?” He spends all his
time away from his home except in the mornings when he milks his cows, (he
trusts no one when it comes to his cows.) and when he’s surveying his inherited
piece of land, scavenging for something to sell. He is a father, but this title
is largely ceremonial. Once he beat his wife senseless, leaving her unconscious
and went to tell his kids to go and pick their dead mother.
This elder runs the village. He solves
the issues that are way below the scope of the sub-chief. He solves small
squabbles that family heads find too tasking to tackle like when the wife wants
a more sober approach to their persistent squabbles, sometimes over the excess amount
of tea leaves in his tea.
As you walk through the dusty
paths, you won’t fail to feel something ominous in the air. People here seem lethargic.
They portray a picture of a people who’ve lost hope such that they view
strangers with contempt, like they’ve been sent to take away what’s left of
them and for them. They seem like orphans. They seem they are scared more by
what they know than what they don’t. Their greetings are hurried, like one is a
bearer of bad news, of death perhaps.
The animals too, tethered by the
road side, have that look of their owners. Cows are herded along the roads.
Trees sway sensually to the wind, almost often against its will. Young men will
be sitting aimlessly along the road, waiting vainly to ogle at a girl’s
posterior. Here girls are mothers, their innocence taken away at the earliest
opportunity. Their eyes stare at
something invisible, the hands clutching impalpable pain. You will be tempted
to look at what they are looking at, may be stretch your hand to feel what they
feel when their hands are tightly folded. Nothing will yield more disappointment
when all you feel is a rough hand born of many hours foraging for food, for
their kids.
The disease is in the air. No one
wants to talk about it. I feel it every time I inadvertently stroll through
this village. There are people am afraid for, the guys we played football
together before I left for where it would be easier to cross to greener
pastures. The journey is almost complete. A few days and I’ll be done. I’ll
show the homes of my childhood enemies. One time they beat me and ran away. I spent
almost all my lower primary break time trying to revenge. It’s been ages since I
last saw them. I want to meet them and ask them if they still remember the
source of our squabble.
That little squabble is among the
minor things I remember. Even the day I was flogged thoroughly for a mistake I’m
still trying to fathom to date doesn’t rank highly-part of the minor memories. There
was this day when the fight against AIDS was in full swing. It was in the
curriculum. It was around 2003 and 2003. The head teacher would gather us at
random times and tell us about this disease that doesn’t have cure. There was a
song she’d sing.
Tell them about AIDS slowly
So that they don’t say they didn’t understand.
And she did spoke of it at
lengths. And more importantly slowly. It got me scared, I don’t know how it
struck the rest. I stayed off girls as much as I could. One day the school organized
an HIV/AIDs awareness day. We all trooped to a neigbhours house to see for
ourselves what AIDS could do to a human body. We saw gory videos, of very thin
people whose bones were about to escape from their bodies. Effects of AIDS. We also
saw of other sexually transmitted diseases. They were equally gory. Unsightly. Nauseating.
All that and my friends didn’t take
it seriously. I wonder what happened to their brains. Now they are chewing
miraa, staring at their futures fade away. Like they want to salvage, they
clench their fists, gnaw their teeth. But it’s too late.
Tell them about AIDS slowly
So that they don’t say they didn’t understand.
I hope your regrets have this
sound track. Wait for your fate. Or guide it to a more favourable ending.
