DAY 25 MONDAY, 2nd JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

I came to Africa to travel about in my customary restless, footloose manner but find myself quite remarkably content in this charming household, wrapped in their warmth as I have seldom been. There’s so much difference between the small ‘nuclear’, European family life and that of a large, sharing extended family. Of course, that’s what I always found humbling in Africa. It’s a great gift, to be so accepted. I find myself totally at ease, comfortably welcome – and sleeping ten hours a night.

Off to the New Year’s Eve party

Scovia and Faith

With Shamilla

Soon I will be off on my own. Today I have had the benefit of two enthusiastic, knowledgeable mechanics working on the little blue bike – ‘expedition preparation’. We have made new brackets for the headlight, fitted much better handlebars which will be, coincidentally exactly the same as those that I have used for almost 35 years on my old friend, my African Elephant. It is good to have Cor and Rico working on the bike, giving it a good check up and inspection. I am further delayed by the extended holidays: we went to town this morning carrying a long list of parts to find and fit, but few shops and no businesses were open. It’ll be still a couple more days before I get going.

DAY 26/27 MONDAY/ TUESDAY 3rd/ 4th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Days go by. Weeks go by in Africa, and so far as actual achievement is concerned, it’s about the same thing!! Adelight, Cor and I spent no less than seven hours in the chaos of town trying to sort things out. The progress we made was slight – and made me appreciate just how simple it was to set up similar expeditions in South Africa. I hope that some items are successfully on order and may arrive tomorrow in Kitale. The bike couldn’t be registered to Adelight since the ‘system was down’ at the post office all day.

Back we go on Tuesday morning… Earlier this time: at the licensing office soon after nine. It’s a tiny, cramped office behind the post office that has obviously changed use from some form of internet cafe. There’s a large desk taking up most of the space between the old terminals; just about knee room for five plastic chairs and a large photocopier. Everything happens at snail-like pace as one fellow sits at a computer besieged by customers leaning on his desk, thrusting papers and ID cards beneath his nose as he appears to work on multiple applications. All the time more people come; everyone leans over his screen. Meanwhile the day’s newspapers are passed around… We sit… Time passes… Conversations are made into mobile phones on all sides… We continue to sit… Most of it is a mystery to me… On the computer it appears that Adelight’s ID has been recorded with someone else’s photo and phone number… She has to use her own phone to have the details changed on the ‘system’ (something of a misnomer, it seems to me)… We sit… Ten o’clock passes quietly by… The ‘system’ goes at the speed it goes… At least we are sitting down and it’s cool as yet… At any minute, of course, the ‘system’ could collapse as the internet goes down… Well, it’s still not a month that I’ve been here, trying to set up my motorbike safari… Adelight keys in numbers on her phone to change her citizen details, hands over the phone and they are copied (I assume) onto ‘the system’… We wait… Ah, the fellow at the computer asks for the logbook… A request for money, 2210 Kenya Shillings (£18), but we’ve no change now since I just gave the fellow at the other computer all my change – this in a post office… Adelight goes to the street for change… 10.15 passes… People come and go… At least Kenyans are quiet and unexcitable; in West Africa this’d be hell… Will the internet hold up..? Might as well read the paper… Gridlock in most towns yesterday as the holidays ended; matatus charging double fares to get people home and children to school. But the season’s over and hotels complaining that occupancy will be very low. Good news for me as I can bargain for better rooms. There are few international tourists coming now; Africa’s seen as too ‘unsafe’ (despite terrorist attacks in Europe, but people don’t rationalise these things)… It’s 10.30 – and we sit… Everyone’s on the phone just now. No one goes outside for this, of course… Read on… Controversy about elections, well, what’s new? This is an election year in Kenya. Should there be so much reliance on electronic voting? Here!?? Where ‘the system’ can’t even get Adelight’s picture and phone number on the same page as the rest of her details? 10.42. Something seems to be happening! Adelight’s entering the charges on her mobile phone cash transfer! We have paid eCitizen our £18! Not yet two hours, we’re doing well… When this is over, we still have insurance and a lawyer’s letter to authenticate the ‘loan’ of my motorbike to myself from Adelight… Ten more minutes pass… We have a print-out of a receipt… Documents – the logbook, no less! – handed along the line to the fellow at the second computer… We might get done under two hours..? Queries; Adelight looks concerned… Discussions, papers waving… Problem? Not sure what’s happening, but we seem to be leaving.

Not done yet though… “What now?” I ask as we exit to the bright sunshine in the dusty street. “We go to the bank to get my Kenya Revenue Document. Then we to to the lawyer and make photocopies…” Then, it seems, we send Patrick, who’s been in the back of the car these two hours, down to Eldoret, fifty miles away, to change the insurance documentation. That’s the nearest office of the insurance company Yuri used in Nairobi…

It’s 11.05. Two hours. I’m left in the car in the busy street. Adelight’s getting the next of the documents we need. At least I can watch the activity of the street while I wait this time – in the sunbathed car… Thus far, we have one document we didn’t leave home with. I wonder if the parts arrived from Nairobi? I bet there’ll be a problem there too… A small woman begs at my window. It’s always an attraction – a white skin. Fortunately I have a twenty-bob piece. Still called ‘bobs’ here! She needs it more than me, I guess. Africa makes you ponder wealth and poverty; there’s not much of one and a lot of the other. At least she blesses me. Not sure which god though, probably Allah with that headscarf… A man fills the pavement in front of me with a large heap of boxes of Twyford ceramic tiles. Next door is the ‘Botanic Studio’, digital prints. ‘Claxks Collection Boutique’, ‘the best quality you ever imagined’, not so hot on the spelling though, shares the shop, some dated mannequins on the pavement, oddly pink in Africa where all the customers are brown. The same small shop, about nine feet wide, seems to house ‘Cheringani Eye and Optical Services, Daktari Wa Macho’, the optician I assume, and ‘Stellar Cask Wines and Spirits, stockist, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers’. And I can see a sign that tells me that rooms 57 and 58 – in a store with a nine foot frontage! – holds the ‘Cheringani Nursing Home Out-patient Clinic’. In front of it all are four piles of cheap panel doors, a parked pedal cycle and a woman sitting in a ubiquitous Chinese plastic chair turning the pages of a large calendar in front of Simba Telecom. I have described about 25 feet of the view from the car!

11.22 and Adelight has the tax paper. Now to the lawyer… He’s on the first floor of a small shopping complex amongst dress shops and beauticians, a brushed aluminium and formica booth in a bigger office. A kind looking young man with a tidy mop of black hair and a friendly smile, ‘Kidiavai and Company, Commissioners For Oaths Notaries Public’. Confidence-inspiring piles of law books on the desk. Neat suit and tie, bare feet and flip-flops under the desk, I notice. An efficient typist and an easy manner, he taps out an affidavit to bullshit the authorities along my way. “I want lots of stamps and big signatures!” I joke with him, “I know they impress African policemen! Plenty of extravagant detail.” I couldn’t work in here all day, no natural light, just a tantalising glimpse in the central well… 12.05. Three hours and Ronny, the lawyer hands me an affidavit: …’being of sound mind competent to make an oath’ (after several hours of this torture there’s an argument to be made there…); ‘currently I am in Kenya on a safari/ visit… have borrowed a Motor Cycle Registration Number KMCF 482H… and blue in colour… from one Adelight Nanjala Barasa, a Kenyan citizen of National Identity Number… intend to use the said motorcycle to travel within the East African Community Countries… sworn at Kitale on this 4th day of January 2017 by the said Bean Jonathan… before me Aggrey L Kidiavai…’ Then he charges me another £40. This is my most expensive motorbike ever.

Ronny tells us there’s an agent of the insurer right opposite his office! Is this our first piece of serendipitous good fortune or is it too good to be true? Does Patrick have to go to Eldoret? We cross the sunny, congested road and enter a gloomy warren of security screened offices. Kenya Orient Insurance HAS an office. Lit by a single tube, three desks, two operatives and a fellow lounging on a chair playing a game on his mobile, ‘ping, ping, pung’. Tired paintwork, an old manual typewriter, the like of which I haven’t seen in years, big adverts on the walls, worn paint, stickers all over the desk fronts, ‘informally’ dressed agents, it doesn’t inspire much confidence, but if it works, who cares? Buckets and mops in the corner, floor cleaning rag draped over the security grilles. More customers enter, handshakes all round. Kenyans are polite. Our papers are taken away. We wait… Adelight is so patient, she’s used to it. 12.25. The insurance can’t be transferred. I need to buy it again! It’ll be another £25 – £40… Now we have to try to get the money back from Yuri. Fat chance… Why did he take insurance in his own name for a bike he was selling to someone else? Who knows? I suppose I could use that old excuse, so often repeated, ‘this is Africa’…

12.45 at Kitale Auto Spares. They didn’t put through my order yesterday. Why? Who the hell knows? Nothing will come until tomorrow… Twenty eight days since I left Harberton. What have I achieved for my journey so far? The counter fellow goes off for some information he says he got from a friend who ‘knows all about Suzukis’ about inner tubes. “Stay here! Don’t go.” I wait again. Ten minutes pass. Where is he? Down the street somewhere. Fifteen minutes. Then it’s one o’clock. He’s back with a tube he swears that his friend who’s an expert on Suzukis says will fit. It’s bloody expensive. Another £24 – for an inner tube! It’d be about a tenner at home. Now long phone calls about the front tube. No one does anything unless you are standing there. We discussed this 26 hours ago but nothing was done. I wait… The upshot..? No answer. He will try to get the information, but I know he will forget the minute I turn my back. I appeal to his better nature, “I have been here in Kenya one whole month trying to get my safari started!” Maybe he’ll have the information tomorrow. Maybe. We part with many greetings and exclamations about the way I once rode from Cape Town to Lokichoggio, the end of Kenya north of here. He is Charles and I now have a number for him, his ‘hot line’, he calls it, in case I need help or to talk to his friend who ‘knows all about Suzuki 200 piki-pikis’, he says.

Then we have shopping to do and school fees to pay. But everyone leaves this until the final moment possible – and it’s the end of the month and most Africans live hand to mouth, queues long and snaking round banks to get their salaries on the last days of the month – or in this case, the first after the holidays. We will wait hours in queues to pay the school fees of four of the girls. It’s not cheap, either. A whole year at most of the girls’ schools costs about £400, that’s for their harsh and basic boarding fees, poor food and tuition. Adelight has to supply washing soap, laundry soap, mattresses, sanitary products, shoe polish, pencils, paper, books and even erasers. Yesterday I trolleyed a huge load to the car from the supermarket. At home all the girls were having their elaborate holiday hair styles reduced to school regulation weaves. Scovia was scathing about the reduction of her fancy styles to this rigorous convention!

It’s hot in this, the third bank. Adelight’s about eighth in line here. At 2.15 she makes it to the pay desk. That’s the second school bill paid. Only two more to go! Every school uses a different bank… The cashier counts. 19,000 Kenya Shillings. Rico’s only paying a term at a time just now until his new contract brings more money. Caring for all these young women takes a lot of cash. At Barclays the queue is seventy or eighty people long. Four cashiers. Say three minutes a transaction, minimum, and that’s at least an hour, but it doesn’t look to be moving THAT fast! Fortunately, in African style, Adelight has an introduction to one of the security guards and maybe we can cut this corner? She wants lunch! We wait…

We are done! Except (always a qualification here!) we must come back for a receipt. It’s 2.40. We left home at 8.50. At last it’s lunchtime – at the Iroko Hotel, a balcony bar above the chaos. Some very dead sheep and fried bananas. The meat’s not exactly butchered, more thrashed to bits, little bits filled with shards of bone, perilous territory for my weak English teeth, the front one that just maintains my smile wobbling in anticipatory fear. I flick a fly from my juice. In Ghana they always say you can tell three stages of white men’s adaptation to Africa: when a fly settles in a tourist’s beer, he calls for another beer. When a fly settles in a frequent visitor’s beer he pours off the top. When a fly settles in an adapted traveller’s beer, he flicks the fly on the floor and continues to drink! The waiter has a great smile: no problems with breaking teeth and sheep bones for him.

Twenty past three. Back in Barclays the queue’s still fifty strong. We’d probably still be waiting. The little schoolgirl with whom I joked an hour ago still sits by the window. “Have a good time at school! Work hard!” A shy smile. She sits on patiently. Perhaps a parent is in the long snaking line? But in Africa who you know is paramount. We’re here for the receipt from Adelight’s contact… We wait… Adelight’s patience seems bottomless. Long inured, I guess… The contact is not around… We wait… 3.30, she spots him. “He’s comin’!”. 3.33, we are done with school fees.

“Now, we just do some shopping and we go..!” Well, that came as a bit of a surprise: ‘we just do some shopping’!

We push our way into a seething Indian supermarket, crowded surely beyond any safety limit. It’s the last day of the school holidays. Everyone, everyone and her daughter or son, are shopping, all the same things we had in our vast trolley yesterday: soap, sanitary towels, loo rolls, shoe polish, tin trunks. It’s bedlam. We buy some school shorts and a shirt for little Shamilla. I get a tee shirt to replace the increasingly holey one that’s had four trips in Africa, perhaps hand-washed 100 times. We are done! But no: “I just buy some tomatoes!” Adelight’s a great one for springing surprises, just as well she’s such good company! “You wait here..?” and she leaves me penned in amongst shopping trolleys at the foot of the stairs, watching people in a contented manner I’d never manage in Totnes Morrisons. Ten minutes pass. The tomatoes have multiplied to a full basket of goods. We sneak back upstairs to less busy tills to pay…

At 3.59 we are done! It only took seven hours. I’ve shaken hands with dozens of strangers, stayed remarkably calm and observed a lot of African life, packed humanity, dodged the floods of unlicensed motorbike taxis, tripped over the uneven pavements – even picked one poor old woman up off the floor. I am hot and weary. Adelight’s still smiling: “but I feel headache…” I’m not surprised. For me it’s all something of a novelty, quite entertaining. She does this several times a week.

4.15 and we are home. And I thought that what we’d just been through was bad. Rico has spent his day with a patchy internet connection trying to work out how he can receive his 40 foot container of personal effects that’s coming from Holland. It’s got to Nairobi today. They insist he must bring the original copy of his passport to customs. He’s leaving for South Sudan for three months tomorrow! With said passport… ‘Oh, this is Africa’, goes the old excuse that changes nothing, just perpetuates this astonishing, arcane inefficiency and bureaucracy, and wastes millions of man/woman hours…

Thank god it’s only 45 minutes to Beer O’clock. Another day has passed in Africa. I haven’t ridden even a yard on my – now becoming almost two and a half thousand pound motorbike – yet! I’ve been in Kenya a month, come ‘tomorrow next’ (a Ghanaian idiom)…

Will tomorrow advance my piki-piki safari? Who knows? ‘This is Africa’, always with a half-amused shrug…
*

Thank goodness for ten minutes’ of magical, antidotal Schubert’s ‘notturno’ trio on the iPad and I know I’ll sleep like a log in the garage office, for a month now my haven.. I’ll dream lengthy dreams (but remember none): I always do in Africa…

DAY 28 WEDNESDAY 5th JANUARY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

One thing achieved a day – if you’re lucky. I bought insurance for the bike, deciding just to ignore the wasted £40 already spent on the utterly useless policy that Yuri took in his own name and invet another £25 in this most expensive of all my motorbikes. I just haven’t the energy to fight that one. Not now. I want to get on with my journey. I am determined to leave on Saturday. In fact, I am astonished at my patience and general satisfaction at my time in Kitale. It’s a testament to the warmth of Rico’s extraordinary family.

Today Rico left for his contract in South Sudan. I am missing his comfortable friendship and his support in the practical matter of the bike. I haven’t the same commitment from Cor and have spent the evening trying to put the bike back together myself with the parts that finally arrived at Kitale Auto Spares. However, I just cannot adjust the clutch! I am dependent on Cor’s knowledge, but he is diverted onto other matters concerning the container from Holland, the paperwork for which takes hours and hours about town. I just hope he will spare me time to fix the clutch in the morning… I haven’t even ridden the bike a yard yet. And I mean to set off on a several thousand mile trip on Saturday. Once again, it’ll just be a matter of hoping for the best… Well, it won’t be the first time I set off on long motorbike expeditions totally unprepared!

The bureaucracy that the whole process has involved has been boggling. Everything has to be written out, photocopied on cranky copiers or elderly scanners, authorised, checked, taken to other departments, paid for elsewhere, receipted, countersigned, listed, entered into computers and ledgers, signed and sealed. The shameful thing is: we British brought all this nonsense to Africa, probably to control the ‘natives’. It’s ghastly, arcane and incredibly frustrating, open to corruption at every level and wastes millions of working hours. If I’d known how much energy and mental anguish would be involved I’m not even sure I’d have started. And that’s not even to consider the cost. How can a ten year old, battered and well used, not very impressive old 200cc Suzuki from pretty low down the range of motorcycling style have possibly cost me – so far – about £2270? I wouldn’t have paid £600 or £700 in England without raised eyebrows. It would have cost me no more to have imported a bike from home – a vastly better bike – on a carnet de passage customs bond, including air freight. I know it was fifteen years ago, but it cost me £400 to ship my Elephant to Durban and £250 to fly it back from Mombasa. Today I spent over £85 on a not very high quality – certainly not an original Suzuki part – clutch lever and clutch lever handlebar bracket. I’d have refused with derisive laughter if I’d been charged more than say £25or £30 in Europe for a similar poor quality casting, probably made in China.

I hope for Saturday, I really do. Watch this space. I hope the next entry will have a new header address!

DAY 18/19/20 MONDAY, BOXING DAY, TUESDAY 27th, WEDNESDAY 28th DECEMBER 2016. KITALE, KENYA

Life goes on much the same. I am in the heart of this happy family, welcomed warmly, eating their simple but tasty meals, playing Scrabble, riding to town in vain efforts to get strong internet access (it’s not even strong enough these last few days to upload an episode of this journal), and working on the big swing project with Rico.

I’ve little interest in working with metal. It seems to me such an unsympathetic material, but I have found that working with Rico, who has so much confidence and knowledge of machines and methods (and the tools required), that I’ve been quite enjoying the process of stripping down a huge chunk of industrial machinery piece by piece. It’s always satisfying to watch skilled people at work. Maybe I’ve learned something – not much danger of becoming a mechanic however! We have now reduced the three enormous pieces of very heavy structure to their component parts and manoeuvred them into the garden with jacks, wheels and rollers. Now the girls will prepare them and we will paint them and add the top bar for the swings. It’ll be just about the sturdiest swing in east Africa.

*

Frustratingly, motorbikes still seem to be elusive. I suppose I was over optimistic to imagine that international money transfers would happen over Christmas, with half the world on holiday. I am faintly encouraged in the fact that a transfer I made at the same time to my ‘son’ Dennis in Ghana is also undelivered. At least it means that there’s no particular problem with my transfer to Nairobi, for the system to Dennis has worked well on previous occasions. So I just have to hold myself in patience still longer. I wanted to be on my way by next Monday at the latest. At present I have no idea if that will happen. Another holiday weekend is approaching so if it’s not here by Saturday, it could well be the first days of January..! Almost a month. All I can do is wait. Huh.

It’s funny how nervous I become at this stage. Far from the intrepid traveller of some readers’ imaginations, about now I become apprehensive of the journey to come; of the unknown that I profess to enjoy so much. It’s quite different sitting as a passenger in Rico’s Land Cruiser looking out at the crazy antics of African traffic or African towns; passing the cheap ‘hotels’ with which I will have to haggle, and the prospect of negotiating it all myself; of overcoming all those fears, probably apocryphal, of robberies on the road, bad roads, wild elephants, disintegrated bridges, foaming rivers, and all the hazards of the tales that abound over our beers.

Of course, once on my way, even the first miles, it will all become a new journey filled with observation, nothing very dramatic to cope with, just living on my wits – that I know from past experience can deal with pretty much whatever befalls, usually with fun and interest. Much of it will be boring, some of it fascinating, and a very small percentage – the bit that makes all the discomfort and effort worthwhile – will be absolutely exhilarating and wonderful, memorable and the stuff of my future stories!

All as yet elusive…

*

On Wednesday afternoon I received an email that the money transfer company needed to speak to me in person, with a London phone number. It makes me appreciate just how easy that sort of action is from home… Not so easy from a rural town in western Kenya. By sitting in the corner of the garden behind Rico’s house I was able cheekily to piggy-back his neighbour’s connection and make a Skype call to London where, it seems, it wasn’t the large sum that you would expect to ring the alarms as it goes to ‘Nairobbery’, that caused the problems but the small sum I sent to Dennis, that I have sent often before. Oddly, that same transfer also triggered a fraud warning from my own bank that I had to deal with a few days ago. Well, it seems to be sorted and I am awaiting, on Thursday morning, the confirmation from the Nairobi bank. “I have to tell you that since you are using the money for purchase of goods, WorldRemit cannot be held responsible for any defective products,” the pleasant young man informed me from far away London. “That’s a risk I will accept happily when the money goes through!” I replied. It made me think: when I started my world travels in 1973 there was no way I could just phone home, transfer money to remote places or be in contact with anything but the world immediately around me. We certainly live in a different world fifty years later. Remember travellers’ cheques? Remember envelopes and stamps? Remember telegrams? Remember Telex? Come to that, remember Fax..? Doubtless, we will soon raise an ironic eyebrow and say, ‘Remember email? How SLOW it was’..!

DAY 21/22 THURSDAY/ FRIDAY 29th/30th DECEMBER 2016. KITALE, KENYA

FINALLY, at 4.35pm on Friday we had a call from Yuri, the bike owner, that the money had shown up in his account. We now had 25 minutes to transfer £80 to the transport company in Nairobi! Talk about ‘up to the wire’ at the eleventh hour! I gave Adelight 10,000 Kenyan Shillings and she jumped in the car and drove to town to send the money with her mobile phone. If we could get it to Titus, the transport fellow down in Nairobi, it would be on tonight’s Wells Fargo delivery to Kitale. It made for a nail-biting half hour, but at last, soon after six, we had confirmation that my ‘wheels’ should arrive by noon on New Year’s Eve! Wow. What a saga it has been. Early on Friday I discovered that I had missed a digit from Yuri’s bank account number and the transfer had failed – again.

Well, I suppose all’s well that ends well!

*

Meanwhile, we have constructed the swing for the children, spayed it this morning and even made a seat and had our first swingers enjoying the considerable work we have put into it over the past few days, activity that has maintained my sanity during this very frustrating period. It has been voted a success by the girls! A practical Christmas present for them all.

Thank goodness for the happy family around me that has kept me surprisingly content these past three weeks. It’s such fun to be part of this very cheerful group, one of the truest families I have ever been amongst, despite the fact that so few of them are actually blood relations…

DAY 23 SATURDAY 31st DECEMBER 2016. KITALE, KENYA

The last day of 2016, and at 10.45 the bike arrived! Phew, what a struggle it all has been. So now I can begin to plan my journey. Tomorrow, New Year’s Day, we will work on the bike – some brackets for my panniers, some new handlebars that Rico had for his old BMW GS, some brackets and bits that need attention. The bike seems alright and Cor, who has lots of motorbike maintenance experience, reckons it’s as good a buy as I would find here. It’s a bit small for my height, but it’s light too; it IS, though, the most expensive vehicle I ever bought, reckoned per cubic centimetre! Even my big BMW 1200GS cost only a quarter per cc! But that’s the way it is here: a ten year old, 73,022 kilometre small 200cc bike has cost me, including transport from Nairobi, just pennies short of £2000. But Rico and Cor reckon it will sell for as much when I am done with it.

Now, or soon, my safari can begin. Probably a shortish journey in Kenya to kick off before I depart for foreign parts.

*

As I grow older I wish New Year could happen at about 9.30! 2016 ended in a happy crowd at the Kitale Club annual New Year celebration, an event into which they must put a lot of work attended by the great and good (and, this being Africa, the corrupt and uncaught!) of Kitale glitterati, including the Rico family and guests. Squeezing all fourteen of us, plus baby Liam, into the Land Cruiser, we set off in full party rig, the girls dressed to kill, including their spray-on trousers, short skirts and elaborate hairstyles – looking great! We old white blokes couldn’t quite keep up the side…

Rico deserves unbounded respect for the way that, now with Adelight’s understanding, he has heroically created one of the truest ‘families’ it’s been my privilege to join for a few weeks. There is so much love, mutual support and delight in each other’s company amongst these girls and young women. There’s very little competition, no bickering, no mean-spiritedness – just a very cohesive spirit. It’s been a true lesson to witness this family life, for only a couple of them are related by blood, the relation that we, in the ‘developed’ world, count above all else. Family and community have so much more to do with generosity of spirit, acceptance of others and openness, mutual support, unselfishness and liberality than it has with mere kith and kin. Once again I applaud and honour the extended family system, probably the one aspect of African life that I admire above all others. Surely these profound human relations, this kindness and acceptance, this generosity embodied within such an extended family is the real meaning of life itself? Shy, quiet Rose, rescued from the street, is as much part if this FAMILY as anyone, equal, sharing and taking her part in a group that seems to be without hierarchy, rivalry, or strife. How have we, with our so called ‘development’ got it so wrong, become so aggressive, competitive, mean-spirited and self centred?

And 2016 must go down as one of the most mean-spirited years in history. Brexit, Trump, the rise of far right parties across the globe, ‘religious’ wars, greed and self interest; attitudes to refugees, outsiders, strangers; ignorance and ‘post-truth’ politics; people closing ranks to look after their own interests – surely one of the least generous years of my lifetime? Narrow, unquestioning ignorance, mean rhetoric exploited by liars and ambitious leaders and immoral corporate greed, abusing the vulnerability of the uninformed, whipping sentiment and alarm from the poorly educated and marginalised – it’s been a year worth putting behind us. Not a lot of which to be proud…

Although I have little hope that 2017 will actually teach many of us in the arrogant ‘advanced’ nations the lessons that I see about me on this ignored, misunderstood continent…

*

We sat beneath the decorated awnings and tents beside the 18th green, ubiquitous Chinese plastic chairs camouflaged in white nylon and ribbons, a good barbecue and buffet supper washed down with lots of pale gassy Tusker amongst several hundred folk, many of the adults poring over mobile phones to the detriment of bored small children. The young people of our considerable party were off behind the swimming pool where disco music thumped, more to their taste than the African beat of the live band entertaining our party, one singer’s awful voice tempered by her astonishingly mobile backside, gyrating in a frill like I have never seen! Small Shamilla and Sherry dozed, heads on the table as we waited the midnight hour. Then, at last, we saw in the New Year with the usual hugs and exclamations and eventually piled, fourteen of us, back into the car for the couple of miles home. By now Orion (the constellation on its side here on the Equator) now high overhead and a slight chill to the night air as we all fell into bed about one o’clock.

And so began 2017. Where, I wonder, will it take us all..?

*

I’m beginning to feel a trifle grubby. We have been without water for three days now! No internet and occasional power cuts. You have to adapt to live life in Africa. Just imagine the angst in a household of eight or nine pretty young women in England if they couldn’t shower and wash their hair twice a day!! Haha. I like to imagine that!

DAY 24 SUNDAY, NEW YEAR’S DAY 2017. KITALE, KENYA

Now that my safari gets to be a likelihood I am strangely reluctant to leave this happy family and relaxed lifestyle! But by Thursday Rico is off on a new contract in South Sudan and all the girls start school this week, so it will be a natural end to this most enjoyable holiday and the start of another journey. I will have been here most of a month, a third of my trip. But of course, if I want to I can later extend my stay a bit. It is limited only by my visa, which is easily extended here apparently. There’d be a charge for changing flights but I won’t make the decision for a few weeks until I see how it all goes and how the little blue bike performs and how I am enjoying myself in the new countries.

Rico and I fabricated an efficient rack to hold my pannier bags – well, I say Rico and I… of course, Rico did the making, I just did the observing and painting! Tomorrow we will fix new handlebars and attach the headlight properly; currently it is held on with cable ties. The clutch lever needs work and then we have to reregister the bike in Adelight’s name and get a local lawyer to make up a simple but bullshitting document that it is on loan to me. It has to be registered to a Kenyan citizen and Rico is still battling through the arcane system for his Kenyan passport. Then there’s the insurance to sort out too. I also have quite a shopping list: lock and chain, spare tube, mirror, spare key, replacement petrol pipe and the like. It’s an expensive option, owning your own vehicle in foreign lands. And I am certain I will be buying another in South Africa too! I am missing Lesotho and the free and easy travelling down there. I’m sure I’ll be back.

But for now, by Wednesday or Thursday I will be on my way at last to explore Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania! Lots of new people to meet…

DAY 12 TUESDAY DECEMBER 20th KITALE, KENYA to DAY 15, FRIDAY DECEMBER 23rd.

Despite all the endless internet frustrations here at home, it looks as if my motorbike may soon be on its way up from Nairobi. I HOPE that I have transferred the money to Yuri and that tomorrow morning, Wednesday, he will drop it off at the transporter for carriage up to Kitale over the next couple of days. Let’s hope it went smoothly… It’s all a bit of a leap of faith. Using the internet in Africa is seldom straightforward which, considering how modern life now relies on the convenience, means patience. A few days ago I punched in the wrong PIN number on my credit card (I have two with similar but transposed numbers) and the card was blocked. It takes a few minutes to unblock it – if you have a convenient phone line to the Bank of Ireland, in this case. Try that from rural Kenya! The only phone I have available is to Skype on my iPad, for which I need a strong signal. Huh! The internet cafe manager kindly lent me his office for the business, where it then took me forty minutes to reestablish my summarily discontinued Skype account! “Just take your card to any ATM and select ‘card services’,” said an Irish voice eventually. Of course, the ATM I found had no such selection – but it did pay out £240 in Kenya shillings..! Ho hum.

Today also, we have had a break in the water pipes in Kitale, leading to no running water and later to cloudy water unwise to drink. Then in the evening an hour-long power cut. Infrastructure in Africa is so stretched by poor maintenance, overuse and bad workmanship and, not infrequently, corruption. The power cut created a lovely atmosphere, happening after ‘beer o’clock’ as Rico, Cor and I sat after sunset on the verandah, the stars spreading into the dark night sky and an occasional firefly sparkling across the garden. Behind us in the kitchen Adelight fried banana chips for supper by candlelight, the aroma wafting out to us. The children and girls played and talked and there was no intrusion from the media world. Sometimes I wish there were more power cuts in Africa! (I shouldn’t have written that! See later…).

Digging a hole to support the seesaw that Rico intends to build for the girls took all my energy – a hole a couple of feet by two and a half, and only ten inches deep. By the end, hefting a sharp hoe, I was exhausted for much of the rest of the day – here at 6200 feet on the sunny Equator. Still, I sleep well in my garage bedroom, much as I did in 2001 when I slept in a battered old brown tent in Rico’s garden up in desert Lodwar, until flooded out one night by extraordinary and rare torrents of brown water that inundated the yard and made rivers flow fast enough to wash uprooted trees and trucks down the previously parched riverbeds. When nature takes over in Africa, things don’t happen by halves.

On Thursday Rico, Adelight and I drove down to Eldoret, the ugly, bustling, traffic-clogged town fifty miles back along the main road towards Nairobi. “I’ve seen enough of Eldoret for this trip!” I exclaimed as we finally shook loose of the traffic jams later in the afternoon. I recollect that feeling fifteen years ago on a brief visit. I shall do my best to avoid the place. But even in the chaos, one of the things I like best in Africa is the way in which people return a look. Catch their eye and everyone reacts, a smile, a wave, an ironic shrug. No on ever looks away embarrassed.

A stiff wind blew all day, whisking dust and plastic bags, the ‘Flowers of Africa’ into whirling clouds; the most persistent wind Rico could remember here in western Kenya, where wind usually only comes with rain or in brief episodes. Chaos ruled in the town, traffic congested and filthy, people everywhere. The big supermarket was full of families Christmas shopping, flocking the aisles, dithering with trollies. We went there so I could buy presents for the girls back home for Christmas; Rico and Adelight’s suggestions being a large Scrabble set for the older girls and a plastic bowling set for the younger ones – (and perfume for Adelight)! Life isn’t cheap in Kenya, much more than in South Africa and its surrounding states. Those items and a few groceries came to about £70, with VAT here at 16%. Food is quite expensive, especially when you have ten or so young stomachs to fill.

We drove to Eldoret to collect Faith, another of the ‘original’ Rico Girls that I remember from 2002. Faith is now married to Felix, a young German who has worked a good deal in Africa – mainly Tanzania, and is something of an expert on alternative energies. Faith and Felix have a five month old baby, Liam, and have come for Christmas here in Kitale from their home base in Berlin. Faith is the daughter of Rico’s first wife Anna’s sister, who died in the first months of Faith’s life, her father having died in a traffic accident even before she was born. A grandmother took her in until Rico and Anna took her into their family aged three. These are stories so common in Africa, well, the former part of the story is common, finding a new family and being brought up as generously as Faith was is far from common of course. Rico deserves so much admiration for his total involvement in Africa, his astonishing support of so many waifs who, without him, would have had hard, difficult lives – the lives so common to so many that fall by the wayside in these hand to mouth economies in Africa.

Adelight, of whom I have become increasingly fond and respectful, must now also be mentioned in despatches for her complete commitment to the family of girls. Happily, she is now pregnant with her own child, so Rico will have one blood relative in Africa after all. Between them, Rico and Adelight have created a delightful family, seldom more in evidence than with the excitement of the return of their sister Faith, and especially, of course, her baby! We arrived to great elation and animation.

At home the power had been off since the morning; now on Friday morning it is still off. It makes for peaceful times, only a couple of solar bulbs and candles, the TV quiet, the night star-filled and silent. Adelight and the older girls cooked up a big saucepan of pilau rice and small cubes of meat and I went to bed happy, with a couple of litres of thin, gassy beer inside me and stinking, no doubt, of Adelight’s chopped garlic with mayonnaise.

No internet; no news therefore of the bike or money transfers. It’s so frustrating… “Oh, this is Africa!” says everyone with a shrug, an acceptance that perpetuates the inefficiency endlessly. It’s always the excuse and it never solves the problems, never improves the situation, never provokes activity; just this ceaseless inability to take initiative and do something about it! THAT is Africa!

But one must adapt, for I myself can change little. My dear friend Leslie paid me a fine compliment in a recent email: ‘I know you appreciate your surroundings and situations more than most people I know. One of the things I love about you. You bloom where you are planted.’ It’s not a struggle to bloom when surrounded by warmth and generous friendship.

DAY 16. SATURDAY, CHRISTMAS EVE 2016. KITALE, KENYA

I’ve come to the conclusion that to achieve one thing in a day here in Kenya is good progress. This sort of resigned acceptance makes life so much easier. Yesterday I finally made the money transfer to Yuri the bike mechanic in Nairobi – but we have yet to find out the status of quite where the motorbike actually IS! Maybe it is at this minute on the road north? Maybe… I’ve been here two weeks and at least I know there’s a bike on the way. I have to be satisfied with that.

The power has been off for 48 hours as I write. It is on next door to the east, but off for the whole block towards the Ugandan sunsets. We fear that if it doesn’t get repaired today we will have no power until after the holiday. Well, ‘this is Africa’, comes the usual excuse for lack of initiative. Meanwhile, everyone copes and rearranges their lives, adapts and compromises. It’s a lesson in fortitude for Europeans so used to light at the flick of a switch and water at the turn of a tap. We had no water for some hours, followed by cloudy stuff flowing from a broken pipe somewhere. And Kenya prides itself on more advanced infrastructure! Haha.

Life continues pleasantly here in the cheery household. Scovia just spotted the roll of Christmas paper on the desk in front of me, left over from wrapping the Scrabble, bowls and perfume. She’s taken it away to wrap around the bucket that is holding the Christmas tree, made from a tall branch of some conifer from the garden. I suggested to Adelight that I should buy ice cream and fruit as a Christmas treat, to go with the goat that is currently roaming outside the gate (safe from the compound dogs!). Maybe we can keep it cold enough in the fridge in the room that Faith and Felix are fortunately renting next door – to the powered east! You see, adaptation is the key to African life… So is complete patience – 16 days in and I am still where I started!

I spent the warm afternoon restoring chairs. “I can’t mend cars but let me do some crafty odd-jobs and I’m happy!” I told Rico, as he and Cor fixed and mended vehicle electrics and discussed things technical with Felix, expert in alternative power generation. I’ve no interest, let alone aptitude, but give me a chair to reupholster and I’ll make my best efforts! Useful skills in an African household economy.

*

Some years ago, my late mother took me to a supermarket on Christmas Eve. For years afterwards she laughed at my reaction: “Don’t EVER do that to me again!”

Yet here in Africa, I can join the throng, have trolleys driven over my feet and butt me in the bum, battle my way through dithering families, struggle at heaving checkouts, watch the proliferation of another ten thousand ‘Flower of Africa’ plastic bags – and do so with a wide, contented smile on my face, watching people. Small excited children wore shaped and knotted balloons as headdresses, tied by three fellows in Father Christmas hats for charity as the warm sun beat down outside. Ghastly mechanical mannequins jiggled inside an Alpine hut surrounded by cartoon animals and jerking felt elves. A cotton-wool bearded, black-skinned young Father Christmas ho-hoed at little girls in spangly party frocks and mothers pushed over-piled trolleys to the long queues in the compact cashier area where assistants packed a million plastic bags with groceries. This was, I have to add, a middle class shopping mall, supplying the relatively well off. The market will have looked different, of course. Guards perform a pointless security check at the entrance, their scanner beeping uselessly, probably a result of the terrorist attack on the shopping mall in Nairobi a few years ago. None of the guards check bags and I doubt the scanner actually works for it makes the same beeps and the guards the same bored actions if I empty my pockets as I did the first couple of times, or just wander through as I do now!

*

This evening we all crowded round the sitting room, the branch tree blinking in the corner. The TV switched off – we eventually regained power this afternoon after more than two days, resulting in ghastly Christmas singing from the South African Broadcasting Corporation – and the girls and children gathering on the floor. I hadn’t put two and two together until I remembered this is a continental household, half Dutch in spirit, and Christmas Eve is ice cream and presents round the tree time. The next hour was warm and good humoured, a few modest gifts unwrapped with laughter and jokes, with none of the extravagance and aspirations of western Christmas. Packs of new knickers and chocolate bars instead of unreasonable electronic devices and expensive toys, greeted with hugs and warmth. It’s a privilege, especially at this material time of year, to be part of such a cheerful family gathering where people are grateful for the little they have; where the love of family counts for so much more than the acquisition of ‘stuff’; where smiles and laughter express so much of the closeness of this largely unrelated FAMILY. So many lessons to learn in Africa if you look…

DAY 17. SUNDAY, CHRISTMAS DAY 2016. KITALE, KENYA

I awoke to the sound of supper: the Christmas goat being slaughtered somewhere outside in the garden. One is usually close to the sources of nutrition in Africa!

Later, little Shamilla with a crestfallen look and a tear dribbling down her cheek, sat on Rico’s knee. “They’ve killed my goat!” and he had to explain where the meat in the house comes from, a lesson seldom learned in Europe, merely a vaguely uncomfortable concept, almost never an animal screaming in the morning.

*

It’s been a family Christmas like many around the world; unlike Europe in the fact of the goat legs protruding from a washing up bowl on the kitchen table as Adelight and Scovia hacked with a cleaver, for the dogs playing over cloven, hairy forelegs, for the total absence of material reminders and of course for the warm, bright Equatorial sun; African in the fresh goat stew and universal for games of Scrabble and bad sentimental Christmas music from the kitchen radio.

Rico and I worked in the garage, stripping a large car lift, parts of which were stolen some time past for their scrap value, leaving the robust frame – from which we are going to make a sturdy garden swing with probably an attached seesaw. It’s heavy work but another resourceful recycling of scrap materials. Little is wasted on this continent: that’s unaffordable.

So, by some grubby manual labour, goat meat – barbecued for supper – a few beers and Scrabble games, a congenial, memorable Christmas 2016 came and went, my fourth consecutive African Christmas. Where next year, I wonder?

Seventeen days and still no motorbike. Well, one just settles into the mood and waits patiently, or as patiently as possible. I admit, I AM beginning to become a bit impatient to be on my way much though I am enjoying the warmth of and apparent total acceptance by the family here in sunny Kitale on the Equator.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS