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.