I will tell you something we people of Maua don’t like hearing but is true. Miraa is a drug! That’s right and I’m saying it again, Miraa is a drug.
Read: Baite Inside! Yes, I am Meru
But then, so is weed, and alcohol, and coffee, and tea. Especially coffee and tea – those are the closest there is to Miraa. It all depends on the amount you take.
See, when we veveka, we do it from early evening, around 5:00 pm to past midnight.…
There were many reasons why I was looking forward to my hastily prepared trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Let’s assume the beautiful women we see in pictures was not one of them – you know, a man has to feed his eyes. I and I Rastas and weed lovers would enjoy a pilgrimage to SHASH-amane and us Baites would want to go see the Ethiopian miraa, the only other miraa in the whole wide world (btw, let me put things clear, muguka is not miraa).…
Mary (not her real name) is a woman in a complicated situation. And she is so good an actor, you can’t tell what’s going on in her life. You see, Mary is the wife of a pastor… and on Sundays, she is the bubbly “Mum” of her church, laughing and hugging everyone, leading the worship team, and doing all the happy things that church mums do.
But the smile wipes away as soon as she steps into her house, or sorry, pastors’ wives host a lot of guests, who she serves with a smile… but then this falls into mighty sadness and terror.…
Ladies and Gentlemen, I was an accountant!
That’s right, I was… Maybe I still have some accounting knowledge, but most of it was swept away by the floods in my brain. And it’s not like being a Boy Scout – “Once an accountant always an accountant?”
Na vile I struggled with CPA – that ridiculously hard Kasneb thing that keeps “catching” people. Did I ever tell you how poor I was in Maths? So poor I would get headaches during Maths papers in primary and high schools.…
Have you ever looked at stones and wondered if they communicate, if they have senses, if they have life in there? I mean, they can’t just be there, doing nothing and being nothing.
I do. A lot. Sometimes I look at stones differently. Stop giving me that look, I know what looking at a person, or thing differently mean. Let me digress a little… I was reading the story of a guy convicted of beastiality somewhere in Asia.…
How time flies. Just the other day, I was recapping 2016… and then just as I blinked, 2017 was gone and we were singing Feliz Navidad (or whatever that Chriostmas song says. And now we are in 2018. Older. Better? More experienced?
So, what are the things that happened in 2017?
You probably knew that I was working for one of the top e-commerce companies around – Kilimall – handling things I had not previously handled full time, PR and Affiliate Marketing.…
Last week. Tuesday 14th 2017.
My dad had been complaining of a severe headache for a week. And it was getting worse by the day. He had been to all hospitals in Meru (hospitals in upcountry Kenya can be shit and everyone had been giving him shit painkillers)… including miti shamba. Nothing was working, no one knew what was ailing him. The best bet was, he had been bewitched, or cursed, or both. You don’t suffer from unknown diseases.…
We met in very unconventional circumstances. While people nowadays meet on Social Media, we met on phone. Yes. She called the office line from the US and she wanted a pair of shoes shipped to her. Not a problem, we were in the business of selling shoes online. But this one order had too many complications. Complications that, instead of turning her from me and the company, only got us closer. And closer.
First, the payment could not go through, so, she thought it was a problem with our systems.…
It’s a fine Sunday evening and I’m walking to Plot 10 from seeing my one of my hunnies at UoN Hall 5. We’ve been there since we left church and so, it’s been a romantic day – I am walking on clouds with a bounce… and a sweet feeling on my lips, of course. I’m even thinking about the future already, when I will break my virginity and stop kulaing kwa macho.
And so, I’m startled when someone grabs me roughly on the shoulder, bringing me from my utopia heaven to this rough world that’s deficient of chills.…
Last weekend was a dark weekend for our village and the surrounding villages. The dark cloud still hangs over us like a giant rock about to crash us. What you saw on TV and read in newspapers and social media actually happened to us. The horrible accident in along Meru-Nkubu Road that killed 8 people affected is directly. To us, it was not just a statistic. We lost family members, neighbours, close friends. Children are mourning the loss of both parents, parents distraught at the loss of their children… and we’ve been crying, wailing in pain, asking God Almighty all the questions and receiving no answers.…
Is there an award for the person who spends the most time in the toilet? I deserve that award – I’ve realized I spend insane amounts of time in that little room.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I have seen the toilet as an adult. You see, in Gitura where I grew up, the thought of shitting inside the house was unimaginable. Why would anyone want to do that unless they are in a police cell or too sick to move?…
Deep inside Kibera Slums, an elderly lady sat alone in a huge, old brick, double roomed house. In Kibera standards, that’s a humongous mansion. This was a wealthy lady… I mean, who owns a brick house amongst all the mud, mabati and polyethene structures?
Normally, the old woman would have gone to church for the New Year’s vigil on this night. But this time… this time things were looking complicated. An election had just ended and some people were unhappy.…
Life is a journey… and to survive this journey, we all need some rules. Personal and universal life rules. Here are mine… that I think you should add to your constitution.
Beyond the people who pay me money, no one else knows how much money I make. Never let anyone know how much money you have. No one should know what you earn, how much you have in your accounts… because money breeds jealousy. That’s how you die or get screwed over.…
Where did we leave it last time? Oh, I was getting high high in the sky on my very first flight. So, lets complete the flight and the landing, will we?
Now, every time I ever took a whisky, even my bowels used to stagger – I have to use the loo at the ,”earliest opportunity. This was no exception… adding on the different things I had eaten for the first time. And no, on a plane, you don’t tell the pilot to simamisha ndege you go to the bushes like you do with Kensilver.…
Hello, baby.
No matter how old you get, you will always be my baby. Wewe ni toto langu. And I will always be your father. I have seen a lot of things that you still don’t know about. I’m not saying I know everything – I expect you to see a lot more than me in your life, go to places I haven’t gone to, meet people I have never dreamt of meeting. But since I was here first, listen to me.…
We had gotten ourselves a business trip to India, Julie and I, for an e-Commerce and Customer Loyalty conference…
To travel, you need passports. Which we don’t have and the notice period was three weeks. The queues at Nyayo house are long and torturing. And when I get to the front of the queue they reject my birth certificate because it looks “like it was tampered with.” Made me feel older. Makes me wonder if I was born earlier and they have been lying to me all along (there are parents who do that).…
Be a man and face your troubles. Actually, be a man and carry the burdens of the world.
Be a man and sweat your ass out in the mjengo to feed your family. Even the Good Lord said you have to toil. Sell one of your balls and buy food if you have to because you don’t deserve to be called a man if your family sleeps hungry.
Be a man and get yourself a job. A man cannot rest on his stupid ass and wait for his wife to go out and work.…
Last week, I was live on Radio Jambo, talking about Valentine’s Day and how to spend the least but make the best impression on Valentine’s. So if you had any doubts about my expansive knowledge of the subject of love, there you have it (twitches my fingers like a badass mafia capi). You can say “…awww, his girlfriend is soo lucky, dating such a romantic bae”. Well, Awww to you too! 🙂
Now that we have established I am an expert in these things, up there with Chris Hart and Gertrude Mungai, read on carefully on how to rock your Valentine’s Day on a shoestring budget.…
Everybody has encountered one, or many. Those people who, giving them a debt, under any circumstance, is like throwing your money into a pit latrine. People who have no tinge of guilt keeping money that doesn’t belong to them, and continue to live their lives normally, while you skip meals or get acid burns in their stomach when you see the good life they are living on Instagram.
…Debts make my skin crawl. I can’t live comfortably with someone’s debt.
Last week, Njaanuary sent me two messages, just a reminder that it exists. One, cooking gas went kaput, without warning as it always does- two gas cylinders all with 0 gas at night with minced meat on the plates. Then we woke up to no electricity – the units were also gone. You know how fast Kenya Power sends the power token when you pay with M-Pesa, so there was just no use purchasing the units at that time of the morning.…
I have seen a few monos in the streets this week. You can tell a mono from a mile away, you can smell even a mono. You can see it in the clothes, brand new, with ridiculously sharp iron lines, blindingly shone shoes, crudely knitted names on the sweaters, shirts and sometimes, even pants. And the faces, the faces betray monoism, frightened eyes, wildly chewing jaws, bouncing steps (fake confidence). I see them and I shake my head.…
I can’t believe 2016 was the same 12 month-long year as every other one, it felt much much shorter. What happened to the good old days when you would spend a full 12 months in one classroom? Then, time felt like time. This time it went faster than me in a sack race (I have a sackrace medal). The good thing about 2016 is, I learned a lot of things, both about myself and about life in general, that I am taking with me to 2017:
We all know that one person who’s always sad about something, or angry at someone. Roll your mind…do you see someone? Sad Facebook posts about someone who betrayed them, a sickness they are having, how broke they are.
Like a friend of mine on Facebook, whose posts I noticed were all sad as I scrolled through. It was a sad timeline. I mentioned this to a friend, and she told me about this other girl whose baby daddy became dead beat and for all the three years since, her posts have seen very sad.…
And for this headline, the world will order for my stoning. The feminists will rise up and castigate me for saying the unthinkable.
“How can you dare not respect women in this age, you archaic gorilla living in pre-colonial Africa?”
“Your mother is a woman.”
“Who says that?”
“These are the type of men who never left their uncivilised villages.”
“You sexist, misogynistic Trump!”
Well, go on, say it! Roast me. Stone me. But I said it.
I have seen too many of these sentiments these last few weeks.…
One day, my girlfriend (now ex) got into a fight with me because I didn’t fight her. Close your mouth… I also get girlfriends, I have a girlfriend. I just don’t post her photos on Instagram because, you know, witchcraft is real, and some jealous neighbour may see our heavenly happiness and decide to roga us. I hate witches, those jealous people.
Now that I have finished dreamily staring into space with the sudden feeling of love, let me tell you about this ex of mine.…
“Kama umetahiriwa nitusi tena.”
I was in my village last week. And I took a walk around the village one fine evening inspecting projects of development.
The girls I knew as babies were shyly smiling at me. Grown women who are now worthy of visiting my simba. One or two now have babies of their own.
Boys I saw being taken home in baby shawls from hospital are now fearsome young laing’o capable of filling both cheeks with taxiies of veve (a feat I have never accomplished).…
My great great grandfather’s name was Thamunyari. Don’t beat your head over the name because you have never heard it. It is extinct. He is the father of my great grandfather M’Kiringo who is the father of my grandfather Mabbi. Thamunyari lived to many many years. He saw so many moons, droughts and harvests he wouldn’t have said. I’m told I saw my great grandfather, M’Kiringo. He waited around for me, and died at over 120 years. But strong.…
I saw her every day, apart from Sundays, for two months. She came every morning, washed my utensils (how I hate that thing), washed the floor, made my bed. She would even change my towels, arrange my clothes that I sometimes forgot discarded on the bathroom floor, and flush my toilet. While I sat, unashamedly working. It was her work, and while I appreciated the fact that I wouldn’t have to do all these things that us bachelors hate so much, I would rest easy that, it was work, anyway.…
There is a common saying among my crew, “We belong to the clan of pigs. We eat anything.” Growing up, I have eaten anything I have been offered, including the sumptuous, inviting piles of mole soil. 🙂
It has all been a factor of what I can afford at a point in time.
Or the Nairobi Initiation 3 period, when Kero and I lived in a house within a house, where the family used to eat chicken daily and we would pass by their kitchen to go make ugali with the sufuria we had cooked porridge in in the morning, without washing.…
When I told you I was already a sexpert by Class 2, I know you said to yourself “this is one of those hopelessly spoilt brats.” No. I was better than most, most of the time. Or rather, instead of doing the small small things that got y’all caned daily, I would accumulate my misdeeds and unleash one huge misdeed at some point. It would be so big a sin, even comical, I would be unbeatable. People would just laugh it off, or look at me in bewilderment.…
The past few weeks have been quite fast for me. Long nights, hard work (which I enjoy a lot, by the way), hours facing a screen of sorts and, well, not having time for myself, leave alone lovers and friends. Takes a toll on life, trust me. But it is a phase you have to go through when you have a young calf you need to breastfeed and support to stand on her feet. (See what I did there?
So the girl you have been eyeing for ages has finally accepted a sleepover and you have a feeling that this will be a good night. You had praised your kitchen skills on Whatsapp and she wants to taste your food. You will cook for her. So, you go to the market, or supermarket depending on where you are, and buy cooking stuff you don’t use in your bachelor pad, like carrots and cucumbers, garbage. You get ginger, dhania and pilipili hoho, too.
…
A girl friend of mine inboxes me on Facebook, “Frank, imagine someone called me fat today”.
I ask her, “Who? Njoki Chege?”
She hasn’t replied to me. I think she feels terrible someone called her fat. She actually isn’t big, she has a nice body, but could might have added on just a little weight. She is a modern girl. It is a taboo for modern women to add weight.
But. What happened to the world? When did growing thin and skinny become sexy?
We all have those contacts in the phone that are just that-contacts! Numbers and emails we have no idea where they came from. Or, is it only me? I have accumulated so many over the years, considering I have never lost my contacts since I got my line in Form 2. Some have just come, somehow. Mostly in the era of 2Go. (Let’s not go there) 🙂
So, the other day, I discovered a name that has been lying in my phone book, long dormant and sleepy.
…
I am who I am largely because of my teachers. I am even writing this blog, in part, because I don’t want to let my teachers down. They all thought I was going to be a journalist, or editor of some sort, because, English and Swahili were my bread and butter. Oddly, all teachers, both in Primary school and High school; even teachers who never taught me but knew me… They all advised me to be a journalist.
The other day, I I told you I am looking for a wife. I told you, candidly, what I am looking for in my wife. That turned out to be one of the most popular posts I have done so far. I received lots of comments, including people calling me up. Friends wished me well in my search, my mboys blasted me, random people told me enough things to fill a book, and speaking of books, there are readers who think I should write a book.
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Have you slept hungry, not because you don’t have food in the house, but because cooking sucks, especially when you know you will eat it alone? Have you then tried to sleep in a cold bed (in Limuru), alone, and still hungry? Have you woken up at 1:00 pm every Saturday, hyper hungry and stayed indoors till Sunday evening without speaking to anyone? Makes the mouth stink. Has Monday ever reached without you doing the laundry for the week because you had no one to wash for you, or at least motivate you?
A few weeks ago, I was lazily scrolling my Facebook when I saw a beauty. Some of you will call me a fisi, but males are supposed to “see” beautiful females, right? I see them a lot. But this one caught my eye. She was beautiful. I just like such photos. But I commented on this. See, she was wearing a tee shirt that resonated with me. It had this message that I had seen before but, frankly, hadn’t given much thought: Baite Inside: Proud to be Meru.
Two children, A and B are playing in ashes. You know, the game of smearing ash on each other’s face to make “Kamuithia”. Child B’s grandmother meets the kids playing and panics. You see, the “ash” is actually a very poisonous coffee pesticide. She picks up her grandchild and runs off with her, leaving Child A playing with the poison, un-amused. An older child, C, comes along and is shocked. He doesn’t run away to call for help, he doesn’t join in to play, he doesn’t admonish him, he does a smart thing… he carefully ties Child A’s hands with polyethylene bags so that he doesn’t put his hands in his mouth… and takes him home.…
I am walking home from college. Remember, I am doing CPA at Vision and I live in Plot 10, Kirinyaga Road. Just past Globe Cinema, this guy meekly greets me. He is lost, and wants to know where KCS house is. I tell him I don’t know. He has this heavy Meru accent, and I ask him if he is Meru… He is. Where? Kianjai. Wow! I went to school near those parts. Next thing I know, we are korogaing deep American.
…
If you are reading this,you must have read part 1-3. Thank you for sticking with me. This is a true story and I have evoked nostalgia in some of my friends, and anger or shame or whatever in others. I am just Frank.
Where were we last time? Yes,we had to leave the house we knew as Mwanyenye- we knew only the house girl’s name because everyone in the house used to call her so loudly in Kisii,even in the middle of the night, to pass a glass of water.
So I came to Nairobi… And did all manner of things, including walking all the way to Rongai and meeting my high school sweetheart, Makena. As I was telling you…meeting Makena introduced a new aspect to my Nairobi life… a new dimension.
Read Nairobi Initiation 1. and Nairobi Initiation 2.
Makena had progressed a big deal. She was way ahead of me in class-she was almost finishing CPA while I was starting. She was a laid back, devout young lady while I was a Hip Hop head.
I was telling you the other day of some villager’s(aka yours truly) ‘soft’ landing in the largest metropolis in Eastern Africa-Don’t we love bragging with our city, Nairobi? Being the most intelligent monkey in a group of apes makes you number 1 by design.
Anyway, here I was, on the morning after. Duwano was actually a five star hostel, by my standards, maybe. There was a good breakfast ready-eggs, sausage, toast and tea-this was the life, baby!
The year is 2008. It is first of July and I am at the bus office bidding my mum goodbye. I am going to the big city alone for the first time,for a long time. Going to college.
I see a flash of tears in her eyes and she looks away fast. Tells me in a croaky voice to call her when I arrive.
“And keep the money safe” I am carrying cash.
Off we go. The bus literally crawling up those Meru hills.
I once wrote a rather historical-informative article for a company blog. Now, it required information from either books, or people who had been in the organization for long. You know, to provide me with the milestones and important dates for the organization. I dug in the archives and got little such information-so I had to resort to the latter-people.
As always, they were very helpful. That organization is one where teamwork and ‘community’ is embedded. I got information, and where they could not help, they would refer me to someone who was likely to have the information.
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What does it take to stand out as an effective person?
The other day, we had a sit-rep (that’s military lingo for unofficial inter-flow meetings) with Christine (you probably know her as MrsMwiti). Now, if you have had a chance to visit her blog, you will be mystified by the wisdom that she oozes. What’s more, she is my official mentor. We sit-rep all day at work. Call me lucky.
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| Pic source: SBM |
The other night, I received a call from my friend’s girlfriend (It’s complicated, now-I will tell you why), she called me at around 8:00 pm as I was reading a novel, waiting for my broth to cook. THAT MOMENT! She is a jovial person, and calls to say hi, or tease me.
Not today. She was sobbing, that struck me. “Frank, uko wapi (where are you)?” No greetings.
I told her I was in the house, and she asked if I was busy.…
Being an entrepreneur is a little like being a musician. There are countless kids singing in choirs and carrying guitars but only a handful will ever record a hit song.Some of the not-so-lucky eventually pick themselves up and build a better career that the lucky handful, by hard work and sheer luck. There’s as much luck in entrepreneurship as there is in any other shoot-the-moon career. And sometimes it really is more about who you know than what you know.
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