times are wasting

went to my sister's in Naks the last weekend ... and like always it felt thrilling to travel in a car full of strange peeps ... it sort of felt like we were this big wierd family and i was this little kid hunched up like a camel on a small corner while the rest were having fun ... actually i suffered a lot because i was sitting next to this lady who gorged up piles and piles of food from her kiondo mpaka i was like men ... nways, the only sad thing is that the driver ran over a hapless baby baboon... i pity those baboons in Naivasha ... someone should relocate them to some safe place

Nakuru was cool as always ... we had so much fun there last december with guys from campo ... we rented a kismall place and literally painted the town red ... but last weekend it was all about seeing my lovely sister again ... let us just call her Susan ... it was lovely seeing her house again ... she is a brainiac when it comes to interior design and the whole place had been transformed into yellows and browns ... from the plates to the spoons, the sofas and the curtains, and all those fluffy fluffy stuffs with strange names were all in those sweet colours ... the place felt kinda hallowed

Yes, she fixed me tea, served it on a yellow cup and stirred the sugar with a brown spoon ... and with those mysterious scents that always linger in a lady's apartment, our conversations were lent an air of enchantment ... she told me about mama and papa back at home ... about how mama is to make a pilgrimage to Israel and how all these hizballah-lebanon thing might affect it ... about workers at the farm ... and my favourite Dan, who has always fascinated me with endless tales about night-runners ... incidentally Dan was doing more than just tell me tales because he is now the proud father of a bouncing baby boy dutifully delivered by a local girl whom I never realized had fallen for Dan's sweet charms

Then another elder sister arrived ... the youngest girl in the family and the one whom i immediately follow ... let us call her Roxa shall we ... Roxa the true raconteur and the life-of-the-party kind of girl further embellished our talk with such hilarious anecdotes that sent our bellies bursting with laughter ... but soon we somehow drifted too much more sober talks ... it seems somehow that in shaggz peeps are starting to lead such messy lives ... a neighbour burnt up her husband with petrol and is now langushing in Lang'ata ... another finally let out that her children were not fathered by her husband, was beaten up by the enraged spouse and is now lying comatose in hospital ... another, a decent man actually, living a modest life and all, cut up the wife with a panga and drove with the corpse to chebloch, a gorge in the iten-kabarnet road to feed the remains to crocodiles ... and this are just the nitty-gritties ... i was like shuck-a-ducky and jizz-the-whizz, wondering why all this was happening..

Iten has always borne a romantic enchatment about it ... mostly because of the scenic valley and the way thick fog would rise from the valley during the rainy season and pour like heavy cream over the land ... may be it only takes a child to see these things and since i spent my entire childhood there, i noticed them all ... we have a farm and a kitchen garden, and an orchard where my mum strove hard to plant all the kinds of fruit available in Kenya and the world ... my sister whose in Swaziland brought her some strange-looking seeds recently and we are waiting with bated breath to see what kind of plant would sprout from them ... nways, about the orchard ... yes... i loved staying there when i was a young lamb, eating unripe apple fruits because they would never mature with all the birds that came to eat them up anytime they produced any form of sweetness ... and when the fog came i would imagine i was in a strange land ... or i had been whisked away to the ice ages and the fog was a snow blizzard hiding away mammoths and mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers ... may be because my folks worked hard to ensure me a comfortable living made me blind to the fact that there was a much more uglier side to Iten ... now that I am old enough i am beginning to see...

but still when i go back there ... and see old gogos shuffling about with grass to thatch there roofs ... and see farmers move about with puttering old tractors ... and see them greet me so warmly in kikale and with so much admiration because am like from kampo and all ... the scent of beauty flows back to my nose

but i could not reminisce for long ... for another sister walked in ... let us call her Shifrah ... Roxa follows Shifrah in the order of birth sequence ... and the two have been arguing and fighting for longer than i care to remember ... i hear it stemmed from the day mama brought me home from hospital... freshly born somewhere around the year 1985 ...and that i was so pretty with cheeks begging to be gobbled and the two sisters would fight over who was to look after me ... the altercation matured over the years into even more bizarre forms ... they would fight when one left a scarf on the other's bed and other wierd feminine battles and the whole house would be full of noise, the two female matadors not minding that there were other folks in the house who needed some peace and queit....

so a pleasant surprise it was to see them hugging and admiring the other one's hairstyle ... and for the rest of the evening ... to hear them talk and chat like bosom buddies brought so much joy to my heart ... every war in the world can end ... it is all a matter of being patient