The Kenyan Lunchparty

Host parents are encouraged to take their surrogate children to visit other parts of Kenya if the opportunity arises. My mama went to visit her cousins today. She didn’t think to invite me but as if to compensate for her disinterest, Jane and I went to visit her host mum’s parents in the ‘interior’. I do not know where the interior is and there certainly is no ‘exterior’. I think that interior is just a way of referring to rural areas or less wealthy parts – maybe both.

We travelled there in a landrover so old that it still had ash trays built into the doors. However, it did have a full set of working seat belts, which I was impressed by. Our 18km journey seemed to be going very slowly and extremely jerkily. I leant over to Jane in the back seat and pointed out that we were still in 2^nd gear, hence the terrible juddering of the car, it can’t be good for the engine to be driven like this. If only this simple explanation were correct. As we pulled over Jane's uncle explained that someone had been cleaning his engine recently and so the petrol tank was full of water in addition to petrol. The sensation was much the same as driving at 50mph in 2^nd gear but evidently more complicated. It being a Sunday my hopes weren’t high of help, but to my amazement we soon had a team of 5 mechanics gathered around the car. I’m so grateful to them for getting us started again (not that the quality of the drive seemed to have improved much but at least the car was running). We juddered along, right up until the first hill. At this point we established a habit of getting out and walking up every hill to take the weight out of it. This worked well for some time but then inevitably there was a hill that was too steep and we could go no further. So the women abandoned both the car and Jane's uncle to go on foot (we actually wanted to help give it a push, and did make as if to do so, but we forgot that we were women and therefore not allowed to do such things!) There’s an assumption here that white people can do no work and are generally incapable. Jane and I always enjoy surprising people by proving this to be wrong (we’re the only whites that do their own washing for example) and so we delighted in walking the remainder of the journey. Not least because both of us rather like walking and the scenery was amazing. To my amazement the scenery was lush and green, set on steep hillsides. It actually looked like another country, perhaps an Asian-pacific nation. If you saw a photo of it and had to guess where it was taken, you probably wouldn’t guess Africa.

When we arrived we were greeted by Jane's 'host grandparents'. They are 95. Grandmother has had a stroke and it affects her right side but she’s a very plump and smiley lady. Grandfather is slim, walks bent double due to a life of hard labour that has given him back pain (but he can stand straightened when he wants) despite his advanced age and physical state he still digs in the garden on a daily basis. The ‘Shamba’ (farm) on which they live is an acre and they haven’t let their old age stop them from working on it. I was shown a tall tree with no branches and a narrow trunk by his children and told that he’d recently had to be scolded for climbing and pruning it. I was amazed. Aged 24 I couldn’t consider climbing that tree! The children incidentally have told him they’d rather pay a tree surgeon than allow him to swarm up it again, but apparently he always just waits for them to go and then does the jobs he knows they’d disapprove of. Some people here really blow away your expectations away about the life expectancy of ‘poor’ Africans. I don’t think many of us in the UK imagine people living in such harsh circumstances living to be so old (other people have forgotten their birth date – I recently heard of someone claiming to be 203) certainly not in a more spritely state than our own pensioners.

We were joined by 2 of Jane's uncles and one of their wives. The 2 men looked very similar and both spoke good enough English to convey some wicked senses of humour (1 managed to convince me that he had 4 wives). They are actually a family of 10 but many of the siblings weren’t present. Jane and I were given a tour of the farm while lunch was cooked by some ladies (I’m not sure who they were, I’m sure at least one wife was there but there were 2 others I’m less confident of). As neighbours caught sight of ‘muzungus’ (white people) in the site they popped round to visit. One old lady (who didn’t speak a word of English and I would venture, not Swahili either, I think she was chatting away to us in Kikuyu, her tribal language). She had a big bag with her and I was given the chance to carry it Kenyan style. Jane had had a similar experience the weekend before. Jane had been lucky, the bag for her had been quite empty. Mine was full of potatoes! Without realising this she offered to escort the old lady all the way to the main road. Oh my gosh! Happily for me, Jane also offered to take turns with me as we trudged down the little dusty track and the old lady took over before we reached our final destination. The lady (who can’t have been younger than 75) was delighted by all this and found it very funny (probably because it was a white person doing physical labour, which would have been considered to be quite startling) she chatted to us most of the way in fluent Kikuyu and so neither I or Jane (who is better at speaking Swahili than me as she’s got a social host mum who likes to teach her) understood much at all. (I did get one word, ‘gosh’, but it wasn’t much help in putting a sentence together).

When we got back to the house, which I probably ought to describe to you a bit better, it was nearly lunch time. The home is a series of out houses. I understand that it wasn’t always this way but as the family ‘progressed’ (in their words) they learnt that having a firewood stove in the house wasn’t healthy so they moved the kitchen outside. Also the animals no longer sleep in the main house, they sleep in the detached kitchen where there is a wooden pen. There are also outhouses for a corn mill and a couple of bedrooms. The building in which we ate was the biggest, it had 3 rooms, the one I was invited into was large (about the size of our kitchen), had a concrete floor, corrugated iron walls, it was gloomy with windows only on one side of the room, it was lined with an amazing number of chairs and there were 2 tables in the middle (but too many chairs for the seats to correspond to a place at the table). Living room chairs in Kenya are always decorated with cloths that are about the size of napkins and they always have matching sets. Even though this family were less well-off they still adhered to this slightly bemusing tradition. My host mum will change her ‘napkins’ every few weeks. At the moment we have blue ones with white trim, before that we had ones that looked more like woolen doilies, before that it was very big white ones (actually the latter set were more like table cloths than napkins). For lunch we had chapattis, peas and chicken. I was quite pleased about this because it’s a well-balanced meal (something you should never take for granted!) and I haven’t eaten chicken in a very long time. I really shouldn’t have been so pleased. I had served myself 2 pieces of chicken in the gloom. The first turned out to be kidney, or at least that’s what it tasted like, but it was much bigger than a kidney should be (about the size of a 10 year old’s fist), maybe I shall claim it was a lung. The second was a leg or wing, but had no meat on it, just skin. Nevertheless, I’m glad that it wasn’t a head or foot, because both of them were in the cooking pot. Also, I do love chapattis.

When all the plates were cleared, we were encouraged to have seconds. Surprisingly Jane and I weren't very keen to get more 'chicken roulette'. I compromised with a little more chapatti and veg. Then when this still didn't seem to be enough I had thirds. Despite this grand gesture, Jane's mum told everyone we met that her two girls wouldn't eat ANYTHING. Frankly, she feared for us.

I like Jane's mum.

Little Drunk Chef

After the wedding I was exhausted, as was my Kenyan sister, Georgina, but our mum wasn’t in so we had to cook dinner. We could have bought it in town but knew that we’d be in trouble if there weren’t leftovers at home for mum. So I went home to cook. Importantly, I’d drank almost a quarter of a litre of brandy at this point, but I didn’t feel very drunk and so I’d forgotten that I wasn’t sober. I approached dinner by chopping up all the types of vegetable that I found in the fridge and making a stew. This was all going rather well but then I couldn’t find any carbohydrates to go with it. No pasta, rice or potatoes and so I decided to make dumplings. There was a hitch with this – no milk. Ever resourceful, I decided to use tea instead (because there was always a thermos of tea in the house, whatever time of day). I thought this might taste a bit odd and wanted to mask the taste of the tea with ground black pepper. Unfortunately, my hand slipped while pouring this in and rather a lot was added. This couldn't be helped though, the show must go on! Having come this far I didn’t let the next discovery that I didn’t have baking powder stop me either, so I used bicarbonate of soda instead (despite the fact that I didn't have an acidic ingredient to activate the rising agent in it). I then found that I had rather a lot of mixture. Not to worry, I poured it all into the pan to top the stew (what’s the point in leftovers right?) The problem then was that I had an enormous quantity of mixture, and it took forever to cook. The second problem was that it tasted disgusting (possibly because it wasn’t cooked). This was more of a problem. Especially when my quite nice stew was underneath. Georgina (my Kenyan counterpart) was very kind about it. She said that she liked it and then didn’t eat it. When I came home the next day from my day trip I found that it had all disappeared which was rather a relief. Jane says it makes her feel good to know that even I mess up in the kitchen sometimes and so I’m happy to think that this disgusting disaster has brought comfort to someone.

The Kenyan Wedding

Yesterday my good friend Jane got married to John (usually known by his surname, Miano). Both of them are Volunteers. Jane is from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and Miano is from Nairobi. This pairing caused much excitement locally and I don’t think Njoro has ever seen anything like it. I was even stopped beforehand by locals who intercepted me on my way to the dairy to ask me about it. In these rural parts, they couldn’t believe that a white woman would marry a Kenyan.

To be honest they were right to be skeptical (not that I told them so) as the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. The couple, while good friends, were not really getting married.

Jane didn’t fly to Kenya with a wedding dress but she’s been to Nakuru this week and amazingly managed to get one for 100/= (which is less than 1 pound)!!!

She was to have 3 bridesmaids: her Kenyan counterpart (Mercy), the other female in her working group (Georgina) and me. 

I went over to Jane's house on the morning, carrying 20 hot chapattis in a plastic bag as a contribution to the wedding feast. Jane was very nervous, ironing her dress, and wondering why on earth she’d agreed to the whole thing. One of her main worries was that her parents, (who are a bit cautious about  Jane's adventures, having never left the UK), weren’t convinced that the wedding wasn’t real – they seemed to think that Jane was being hoodwinked into a union that she didn’t intend to make. It’s not easy having such unhappy parents on your wedding day. Luckily they were very safely on the other side of the world and so not in a position to intervene and had to limit themselves to distressing their daughter over text.

Once we were all dressed up and ready to go the Kenyan girls arrived and started getting ready. I was quite surprised by this. It’s the bride that’s meant to be late to the wedding, not the guests. It turned out that they’d been readying the venue all morning, they just hadn’t told us (otherwise we’d probably have been there to help). The other surprising thing was that they proceeded to put on nice dresses in shades of black and white. This is so obviously inappropriate in the UK that it barely needs saying. Luckily the maid of honour had been tipped off in advance and so was wearing blue. It's the opportunity to learn about these cultural differences that makes the whole thing fun!

We had quite a bit of time while waiting for everyone to get ready and so I popped out to visit one of my entrepreneurs, bedecked in full finery and low heals (which is significant when you consider the uneven road terrain), to get a mandazi for the bride. Joshua had sent me a text message to say he’d done a batch of coffee flavoured ones that morning and Jane is particularly partial to his creations so it seemed like the right thing to do. She is probably the only bride ever to be sat on a sofa in a wedding dress munching on a mandazi while waiting for her girls to get dressed.

When everyone was ready we walked to the wedding venue, leaving just Jane and her maid of honour behind. Despite the fact that the venue was about 2 mins away on foot, they were waiting for the car to pick them up, in traditional fashion.

The trouble was that certain details of the wedding hadn’t been organised yet, particularly who would be where, when. The other problem was that half our wedding guests were volunteers in Nakuru town along with the wedding cake. Unfortunately the president was visiting Nakuru to celebrate the fact that the vice president had been acquitted of the charge of inciting the post election violence and all the roads had been shut as a safety precaution, preventing them from coming. By 12noon, the wedding was 2 hours late, the guests had arrived, I was quite bored and had been teaching ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue’ games to the children. At long last I set off on foot to collect the bride.

At the home I found Jane and Mercy (the maid of honour) rather restless, perhaps unsurprisingly. It was funny to see a woman in white wedding dress and veil stomping impatiently round a dusty Kenyan yard with washing flapping on a line overhead. We contacted our Program Coordinater to come in his car (he’s the most senior figure here) and I convinced Jane to wait 10 minutes for him before stomping her off to the wedding on foot. Luckily he did arrive in time.

John (our program coordinator) was absolutely delighted by the scene. He’d got balloons attached to the car and once we were inside he drove while beeping the horn continuously. To introduce John, he's best described like the character of God in ‘Bruce Almighty’ – to see him laughing and whooping was a very different experience. I wanted to ask if the volunteers had ever staged a wedding before, but seeing John’s reaction I no longer needed to – he’d definitely not ever had a team of volunteers do anything of the sort. I wasn’t sure whether he was s-bending in the road out of celebration or to avoid the potholes. From my seat in the back of the car it was hard to tell. When we got there they opened the field gates and all the guests crowded round singing. We hadn’t had a wedding rehearsal, choosing instead to have a hen night and so we didn’t actually know what to do. An Usher rushed over to the car when it stopped to tell us to get out when the music started playing, this was good, we at least had some sort of idea what to do. After what felt like a very long wait we heard ‘Isabella’ playing. It made me smile because it was inappropriately romantic for a fake wedding. The other thing that made me smile was the difficulty we had walking up the isle. We had to go very very slowly. Mercy and Jane had been practising this at home, but I hadn’t and rather struggled to go at the ridiculous pace. Worse still, it’s all caught on camera. The isle was flanked on each side by large white gazebo style tents full of wedding guests. They were decorated with tinsel, fake flowers and were populated by Kenyans and UK volunteers as well as a few locals. At the front of the isle was a Matt wearing a priest’s collar and his mama's sun glasses and ready to give a short sermon on the nature of love, Arman was summoned as best man to take a reading from the gospel of entrepreneurship. Matt had written some wedding vows which made everyone laugh and then announced that John may kiss the bride. To our absolute amazement the loving couple then proceeded to do just that.

Next the couple left the ‘church’ followed by best man, maid of honour and me to enjoy their first dance together which was very sweet and extremely well documented by the many cameras. The following step was the cake ceremony. This is very important in Kenyan ceremonies (because they don’t traditionally ‘kiss the bride’, they feed her cake instead. Our wedding was a hybrid so that's why we had both). So Jane fed Miano cake, Miano fed Jane cake. Then Jane fed the best man. Miano fed Mercy and me. Then the cake was cut up and all the guests were fed. Once everyone had eaten cake they went up to the buffet (which had tragically run out of plates when I got there, so I ended up eating off a second hand plate, using my hands instead of cutlery - classy). The entertainment of the afternoon was music and dancing as well as an enormous waterfight.

Kidney Bolognaise...mmm delicious?

I have accidentally invented a new classic dish: Kidney bolognaise.


This came about as a result of an error made by the muppet doing the grocery shopping (i.e. me) who was unable to ask for "mince" in Swahili. I therefore got what looked like diced steak, because as it transpired, the butchers didn't have a mincer. I stood there, the wally I am, watching them hack a lump off the dead cow strung up in the shop window and chop it up for me, wondering if it was going to turn into mince at any point. It was then wrapped in newspaper and handed to me; no such luck.


I resolved to cut all the meat up into small parts so as to look like mince and compensate for my mistake. This worked very well for all the parts that didn't have bones in.


While cooking it dawned on me that my 'diced steak' may have more than diced steak in it (ie kidney). It's the smell of it that gave them away. I don't actually like kidney (apparently this is typical white person behaviour, we're not keen on innards) and as a result I wasn't prepared to taste test my creation until I was jolly sure it would taste nice. Instead I gauged the taste of my dish by smell.


Unsurprisingly, the smell caused me to believe that it didn't taste like spag bol should and so I put a WHOLE BULB of garlic in to compensate. After that I felt brave enough to give it an actual taste and found that it tasted powerfully of garlic. Caw!! So I added some extra tomatoes to dilute the flavour and hoped for the best.


I presented this dish to my family as a cross between Kenyan and Italian cuisine. A "sort of spag bol". A nice compromise. I didn't enjoy it myself because of the kidneys but Georgina (my Kenyan sister) loved it and resolved to cook it at all sorts of future events such as birthdays. So in many ways my odd creation was a success.

Hot Cross Buns. How hard can it be?

I got the idea to make hot cross buns for my host family at Easter. Unfortunately, I was too busy at the time and so it’s taken me until today to make this happen.

My host family were initially very impressed at the idea. They particularly liked the fact that a ‘Muzungu’ (white person) would acknowledge the significance of Jesus on the cross.  I didn’t like to correct this view and say that I am a typical English atheist ready to embrace anything I can eat.

There were 3 of us who had taken on the challenge of baking today; 2 were suffering debilitating hangovers and 1 had an oven in her host home. Perfect.

The day started easily enough when I went round the supermarket to stock up on ingredients. It’s a bit hard to know how many grams of sugar ‘3/4 cup’ is, but I managed. Luckily for me none of the Kenyans have had hot cross buns before and so they won’t know if I mess up!

                                                                                                                                                                

The more I cook in Kenya the more I learn. The egg shells here are tough, for instance, and so in order to crack an egg, you should tap it against the wall rather than the plastic mixing bowl. It feels quite counter intuitive, and I’m sure my UK-mother would be alarmed, but it’s much more effective. The recipe also required a lot of kneading. It’s not something I’ve ever had to do much of before and I would have been very unconfident if it were not for the fact that two of my entrepreneurs have patiently taught me to knead dough within the past month (one was a baker and I was learning his trade, the other wanted to find an activity I could do with his mother), both believed themselves to be my first teacher (clearly I was a slow learner!). It was nice to be able to put these skills to good use and soon our dough was looking nice and smooth

After 2 rounds of kneading and leaving the current filled dough to prove while naps were taken, we were ready to put the 19 spiced balls of dough in the oven on gas mark 3 (although I can’t be 100% sure about this as I know very little about gas marks, it may be that 3 was a poor guess). Lighting the oven was a bit of a faff because it made us so nervous to put our hands inside a flammable gas chamber while holding a lit match. Worse still, the oven kept going out once we turned the gas all the way down to gas mark 3 and cockroaches continued running out which was quite off-putting. Presumably they weren’t enjoying the gas chamber either (although I’m glad they were running away from the baking tray – it seems like the most hygienic direction).

Very little cooking time had elapsed when the oven ran out of gas and everything came to an abrupt halt. My host by now was fast asleep on her sofa and we didn’t like to disturb her more than necessary so we decided to take a couple of still squishy buns to a nearby house with a microwave. We were welcomed there by the friendly resident volunteer-host-mother (Elizabeth) and given a cheerful lesson in how to operate the necessary appliance. She appeared to have a great deal of faith in our ability to bake bread in her microwave; which was good, at least someone did.

3 minutes later the microwave pinged and we took out a piping hot bun. I know that microwaves tend to cook from the inside out and so although the outside didn’t look cooked (the cross was barely visible – it was white against beige) we felt that it might taste good inside. We burnt our fingers investigating this and were surprised to find that the inside was actually like toast. (There’s a reason we don’t microwave sandwiches back home and this is it). We were just about to put a second one in for a shorter amount of time (alternative options were few!) when the power cut out. This is not uncommon in Kenyan households but it’s not unannoying either. Now we really were challenged.

The first thing to do was make a list of people we knew nearby with ovens. The list was quite long, but when we made a few enquiries we found that not a single one of these ovens were operative! There was one family we knew with a functioning oven that lived a good distance away and eventually we resorted to asking them if we could visit (it was that or try and cook the buns in a borrowed toaster and I wanted to keep that as a very last resort). However, when I got in touch I was dismayed to find that their oven was electric and, while this meant there would be no more trouble with gas marks, it was also the case that we still couldn’t be helped until the power came back. I decided to sit it out and waited for the power. It came on at my side of town at about 5pm, dusk was at 6:30pm and I didn’t get news that light was back at the oven side of town until 7pm. I was beginning to lose my sense of humor at this point. Hot cross buns were more trouble than they were worth. Walking around after dark here is not advisable, particularly if you are a lone female with pasty white arms glowing like a beacon advertising your presence. I stomped off to my various friend’s houses to find the trays of buns I had stranded in everyone’s kitchens. Firstly to my friend with the exhausted gas oven (no luck, her house was locked) and then to Elizabeth’s house with the tray of buns in her microwave…if only I could identify her gate. I did eventually find a house that looked like hers. I would have been more confident if it were not for the rawkus female voices I could hear inside as I knocked hesitantly on the door – I’m sure that the homeowner I’d come to meet was quite a quiet lady. I felt such relief as Elizabeth opened the door and invited me in. As I was ushered into the kitchen I saw Jane, another host-mum and owner of the kitchen I had occupied earlier in the day. The ladies were having a wonderful time. Theirs were the clamorous voices I had heard on the doorstep. They were very pleased to see me and amazed me by opening the oven door to ask me if the buns were ready yet. I didn’t even know Elizabeth had a functioning oven! Actually, as it transpired, nor did she until Jane had come over and decided to use it, thereby turning it on for the first time since it had been purchased. It turned out that they had been trying to get hold of me for some time in order to ask me to help them know when the buns were done.

It seemed to me that I’d arrived at the perfect time, just as everything was looking nicely browned. I was wrong again (of course – why change a winning theme). As I ignorantly offered to prepare these two wonderful ladies the first taste, I picked up a bun, knife in hand, ready to cut it in half, and realized that only the top half was cooked. The bottom was still cold and doughy. That was unexpected.

What I hadn’t appreciated is that what we had was not an oven so much as a grill, so it was necessary to turn every bun upside-down in order to cook the bottoms too. Unorthodox but effective.

As we waited for the buns to finish, volunteers began to fill the house, joining the host mums and me. By the time the batch was ready there were 9 mouths to feed, 5 of which had never tasted this Eastertime classic before. It pleased me so much to slather my UK traditions in melted butter and share them with my Kenyan friends that I very nearly forgot the stress I’d gone through to produce it.

My host sister wants me to cook her pizza next week. I’m not sure I can cope.

Joshua's story

Believe it or not, when I'm not kidnapping children or baking banana bread, there's actually quite a lot of hard work that goes on out here. My specific mission is to work with five local entrepreneurs to launch or grow their businesses.

Let me paint a picture of our first meeting with Joshua. My team mates  (both male, one from Nairobi, the other from Salisbury) and I were sat on a low table and a plastic chair inside his General shop. The little building, made of wood, had been boldly painted blue. There were no windows, save for a hatch that customers could peer through to order their wares. This hatch had a metal gause over it for security purposes. Shelves lined the shop but they were largely bare as there were not enough funds to fill them. Those shelves that were stocked supported everyday household items like flour, soap and tea. We could see that the shop could play a very useful role in supplying locals with essential items without requiring them to walk to town. Joshua himself spoke good English, was aged around 30, married, with 3 adorable children. Also, when he wasn't running the shop he was a night watchman at a local savings collective, which caused me always to wonder when he found time to sleep.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that Joshua already kept financial records. In a big book, a keen pencil showed logs of money coming in and money going out. Although Joshua had diligently recorded both of these, he hadn't ever added up the two columns. Unfortunately, when we did, we found that the shop was running at a loss. This was a shock to us all, especially Joshua. We had to come up with a plan of action and fast, before any more money could disappear.

The key to finding a solution was to look closely at the recorded sales. The fastest sellers appeared to be snacks like Mandazis and sweets. Let me quickly introduce mandazis for the British readers, they're like deep fried bread dough often eaten for breakfast; If you imagine a triangular doughnut without the sugar coating you'd be about right. Joshua was buying 6 mandazis for 50/= and selling them at 10/= each. We reasoned that the first thing we could do to cut costs would be to make them ourselves. As luck would have it, mandazi making is one of the skills Joshua already happened to have, it was as though fate had divined this course of action for us.

The next day I was up at 5am, ready for an incredibly early start. The mandazis had to be cooked early in order to catch the breakfast-time market which would begin at 6am. Unfortunately for me, it wasn't light yet and no unescorted young lady wonders around town after dark, so I waited impatiently for the sun to rise before trotting  across town to meet my team in Joshua's shop. There in the middle of the shop floor was a little stove (called a 'jiko') full of boiling oil and Joshua was preparing to deep fry his mandazis in it. He would drop in flat slices of pastry and within a few minutes they would puff up and rise, it was like seeing a cake bake in fast forward. The three of us volunteers watched like vultures, entranced by the smell of cooking dough and eager for our first taste of the new product. It did not disappoint, indeed collectively we were so pleased with the taste that there were very few mandazis left for regular customers.

The following day we returned, having resolved to eat no more than two each, ready to support Joshua once more in his early start. We were very impressed to see that even in 24 hours Joshua's skills had improved. The mandazis we had praised so highly yesterday looked sadly flat compared to the well risen batch we had produced today. This trajectory for improvement continued. Joshua was always tweaking the recipe to get a better texture, taste, colour or smell. He became very popular locally and was soon doing deliveries at his other place of work.

I'd like to say this was all plain sailing, but it wasn't. Improving the recipe comes at a cost, and no customer would be prepared to pay extra for a higher quality mandazi. Everyone knows that they cost 10/= each, that's just the way it is. Joshua wasn't particularly interested in his profit margins, he was much more concerned by the number of sales made. I felt like we were always in danger of spending more on ingredients than we made from sales, making the transition from a profitable business to one that runs at a loss. Joshua wasn't in the habit of telling me when he had changed the recipe, unless something had gone wrong and affected his sales, so I always worried that we wouldn't know if the balance tipped.

Compared to Kenya, the UK may be described as 'hyper-communicative' especially in a business setting. So I'd like to highlight that Joshua wasn't unusual in not keeping us abreast of every change he made. In fact, compared to many, he was very good at keeping us informed.

The spin off of not knowing when the recipe changed was that we couldn't spot problems coming. One day Joshua decided to make his dough the night before so that he could have a lie in the following day. As the milk in his dough curdled it created a sort of sour dough effect when cooked. I loved it, Joshua wasn't so sure and I'm not convinced the customers could tell. Less successful was the time he decided to substitute water for milk and the whole batch failed to rise. He was so ashamed of the flat tasteless mandazis that he didn't take the usual delivery to the neighbouring town and left for his evening job with a quick text to tell me that 80% of the day's batch hadn't sold. The team was busy with another entrepreneur in the market at the time, but we rushed over as soon as we could, met Joshua's wife and proceeded to stand at the roadside (where there was higher footfall) and sell the mandazis there. This was one of the few times when my white skin was a real asset as it attracted a good deal of attention and worked to promote our wares for us with one person even remarking that "it must be good if a white person is selling it". In this way we managed to weather the storm that setting up a new business can bring.

Near the end of our time there, we got the opportunity to pitch for a loan at 0% interest. This is something quite unusual in a country where banks would offer a businessman of Joshua's age and experience a loan at closer to 25%. While I was very nervous about the pitch (for all my entrepreneurs) Joshua did well. Armed with a thick wedge of paperwork that we had prepared, he went into the dragon's den style panel with a well deserved level of confidence and secured 16,000/= to spend on his shop. The money is going to be used to buy ingredients in bulk (which is cheaper than going into a supermarket), a bicycle (to do more deliveries) and a new stove (to cook more at once).

The bicycle was secured before we left. It's sky blue and the children love it. They think it's a motorbike and love to ride behind their daddy. The sight of them was enough to bring a lump to my throat. It's been a stressful, laborious journey but in that moment it was so obviously worth it.

A couple of days after I got back to the UK, I received a message from Joshua and as well as all the normal chat were details of the cost per mandazi and the profit per mandazi that he had calculated. We got there in the end!

Time to let off some (more) steam

After the day of pitching had finished, the UK girls went together to the cyber café (to apply for jobs post-Heathrow) and since that was not a very uplifting experience, we went out afterwards for “one drink”. They do a very dangerous wine here called kingfisher. It’s 8%, tastes like strawberry and is served in little beer bottles. After the first one we were all sitting around giggling and smiling, coming out with ideas like “let’s be sentimental!” after the second one we were trying to take photos of each other but couldn’t because no one would stay still. I was laughing so much I couldn’t speak. Helen* decided to ring Arthur and tell him that she loved him. Evidently her feelings weren’t reciprocated as she came off the phone saying that she hated him. Catherine decided to kiss Daniel, who loved this idea and unsubtly relocated them both several meters from the main group in a terrible effort to get some privacy. Some entrepreneurs came along and one painstakingly took 20 minutes to try and communicate in English to Katie that she was like a teenager. Helen decided she hated Daniel and we have a hilarious video of her explaining why (“becausssse ofmyyy sass!”). Happily he was otherwise engaged with Catherine and so will never know. Megan lost some post it notes, 1000 shillings and a packet of rolos and the pitching panel spilt a good number of secrets regarding who would and wouldn’t get funding. I was walked back by Megan who then took herself off into the night, met some men who claimed to know where her friends were and so she accompanied them on a very high risk 20 minute walk of Njoro town. All in all it was the night that was needed to help relieve the stress of the previous 3 weeks.


* Because we've all been so badly behaved in this post, names have been changed.

How to party like a Kenyan!

After the monumental low that preceded the pitching document deadline came the post-deadline party, which I attended in a state of wild sleep deprivation and spent a good deal of the night wondering if I was drunk or just manically tired. Katie and I were warmly welcomed back to the group of volunteers, who of course hadn't seen us in a long while (4 days is ages in that kind of close community!) It was held in a 3-sided marquee in a field, with a food buffet at one end and a DJ at the other. Tequila kicked the night off.

At about 7pm I found Melissa on the floor, amongst the bags, behind the plastic chairs, saying that she was drunk. I hadn't started drinking at this stage, so I wasn't in danger of spilling anything at all by lying down next to her, having a hug, and generally ensuring that she wasn't the only one sprawled on the floor. Tim was very quickly out of his mind, asked Amy if she wanted a hug and then bit her, which she thought was hilarious and dined out on the story for the rest of the evening, made better by the fact that her audience kept forgetting and needed to be told again. The tent was soon full of dancers. Hamish was struggling to stay upright, but still managed to dance by holding on to a tent pole.  I resolved to write a formal letter of appreciation to the DJ. Catherine, always dignified, was currently experiencing drunkenness for the first time; maintaining a meek countenance like no one else alive, she danced by herself in a corner, thereby saying nothing silly to anyone. Meanwhile, it had started to rain outside, heavily, in the way that I'd only ever seen in Kenya. The locals stayed sensibly under the tent shelter, but the volunteers (including several Kenyan ones) came out to dance in the rain. It's a wonderful sensation. It also makes you feel about 1.5x more drunk than you really are. A little like reality has been partly suspended and you're in a music video. I was soon soaked through and I didn't care.

I found Kenyan dancing a bit tough, but it was OK because so did my friend Jane and she is the benchmark for dance floor morality as far I am concerned. The reason that such a benchmark was needed, was that in UK terms, Kenyan dancing is incredibly sexual. If a Kenyan friend came to visit me at home, I couldn't take them to a night club because their moves would almost certainly be mistaken for premature foreplay. One of my Kenyan friends helpfully explained the etiquette: "you just have to give them a hard-on Clare, and then leave them". This very helpful piece of advice certainly explained why so many of the men were running round with erections, but it didn't make dancing with them much easier. I resolved that as long as I was well out of my comfort zone I was probably doing it right, but problematically this benchmark didn't stay steady and the more vodka I drank, the more challenging dance moves I was required to undertake to ensure that I was always being stretched in a risque direction. While Kenyans don't attribute any significance to dance floor antics and don't see it as particularly sexual, I eventually had to extricate myself from what I felt was becoming a threesome, rather than a dance, and went off in pursuit of more vodka.

Eventually it was time to leave. At least one of the party had to be carried out of the gate, because he was sound asleep, despite the very loud music. As I stepped out into the road, I was startled to find my friend Helen, squatting down and relieving herself in a pothole. At exactly the same time our taxi arrived. Helen hared past me with the speed of a Kenyan sprinter (perhaps not coincidentally) and left a group of us to laugh uncontrollably in her wake. When we got into the taxi, it was Catherine's turn, "I need a wee". This state of affairs got more urgent until we arrived at my house and I invited her into our garden to use our hole-in-the-ground, she stepped out of the taxi behind me but the next thing I heard was "MATT DON'T LOOK!" Never before or since have I heard her sound so fierce. Clearly Helen wasn't the only one to water the road that evening.

According to her roommate, Catherine was out like a lamp that evening but was so excited by her drunken dreams that her roommate was woken hourly to be told about them.

I wish there was a moral to this story, or something intelligent to conclude with, but really this is just an important progression in the story: We'd had a tough time and we needed a break.

I've hit Breaking point and now I'm broken

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the stress of preparing entrepreneurs to pitch for their loan was slightly overwhelming. Luckily I have a diary which I can look back over to highlight to me just  how my madness peaked. There were early warning signs, "Today disaster struck, I got windows loaded onto my laptop at the computer shop and lost all my photos and the pitching documents. I felt a bit tearful but better for eating a pack of Oreos, a mug of Kenyan tea, bar of fruit and nut, plain dairy milk bar, dinner, a leftover chapati from Friday, some watermelon and a slice of mango. All this stress is not good for me!" I'll draw a curtain over the next day, after discovering that one of my entrepreneurs had changed his pricing system to run at a loss, I was in such a state that my team leader sent me home to get some rest. It wasn't a big deal in itself but it was the straw that broke the camel's back and rather embarrassingly the metaphorical camel was in the very centre of town at the time where there is very little privacy. Nevertheless, this enforced day off was necessary as I was totally burnt out, having not scheduled any rest days of my own volition in a month. Despite this day of rest, I was still writing ridiculously anxty diary entries, "My neighbours have recently started a new tradition of playing loud music from 9:45 onwards at night. I would like to know what has inspired this and then shoot it". Clearly there was still a little tension in the air!

Also, the fact remained, that while I was taking this day off, there was a lot of work that wasn't being done. My clutch of entrepreneurs were the only ones to have no drop-outs and unfortunately for me, all of them wanted to pitch for the loan that was on offer, this meant that the workload I was neglecting was already substantially larger than average. Let me explain what the big deal is: The loans were repayable at 0% interest, rather than the standard 25% that Kenyan banks would offer a small business like ours. Basically, it's a once-in-a-career opportunity for our entrepreneurs. Some of course didn't want or need the money, but many did and felt they could expand their business faster with a cash injection now and then use the increased profits to pay the money back. There was a central pot of money that all of the entrepreneurs on the program are able to pitch for, in a style very much like Dragon's Den. However, unlike Dragon's Den, their proposals were supported by an awful lot of paperwork describing their journey and their financial status, which it fell down to me to produce (as the only team member with a laptop). Having had my laptop's memory wiped just 2 days before meant that I had 5 pitching documents to write in 4 days. The future careers and lifestyles of all my entrepreneurs were weighing very heavily on my shoulders.

I spent the next 4 days indoors with fellow volunteer Katie, who also had 4 documents of her own to write. We sat at the kitchen table and ate huge quantities of bread (because it was within easy reach) and discouraged anyone from coming into the house or indeed making any noise at all. Our workmates didn't have laptops and so they too were discouraged from coming in and disturbing us. This was no time for discussion! It was much like being at university again, cramming for a deadline. The only noise in the room being the sound of our keyboard keys and Ludovico Einaudi's piano compositions (the favoured soundtrack to many students' crises). All the while my entrepreneurs were helping to make me more stressed by not opening their shops, submitting incorrect financial figures to me and altering traditional recipes. It was so difficult being removed from them all in Katie's kitchen. I so wanted to be out there, on the shop floor, explaining why it was important to let the customers in.

Although my workmate, Paul, wasn't able to do an awful lot document-wise, he did meet with one entrepreneur and convince him not to pitch. Thank God! One less document to write! Now, don't think that we did this out of laziness. The fact was that the entrepreneur in question didn't really need a loan, he just wanted to be on the bandwagon.

On the last night we organised a sleepover, not for social reasons but so that we could stay up even later and work together. Our super-supportive team leader arrived with a large tub of chocolate ice cream and her laptop at 5pm to help get the job done. The ice cream didn't last a full half hour under the tyranny of Katie and me, but was silently demolished. It's amazing what stress can do! I eventually went to bed at 3am, but then my wretched body clock got me up again at 7.

As with all things, this time passed. Katie and I both got our documents submitted, admittedly a little after the deadline. I'd like to say that our mental sanity swiftly returned but I'll let you be the judge of that! I'll dedicate my next blog post to the type of party that follows an experience like this...