...of someone I don't know. I heard the story today and felt very sad.
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It’s likely she was the brunt of a few jokes during the month-end Friday evening bravado of village young bloods thinking of girls and future wives to tend their houses, children, livestock and maize. Or perhaps by the women themselves, her contemporaries, congregating around the river to fill their bright yellow plastic jerry cans, catching up with the gossip and then contemplating the way back to their huts burdened with their loads.
To feed her cow she’d walk for miles to find some spare grass, cut it with her panga and then hope that there’d be a couple of chaps nearby to help her load it on her back so she could carry it home. No short cuts to it, just graft. She’d lament on this later, when her young neighbour stole her chickens, and she’d had to work doubly hard for a year, breaking her back to buy some more, only for him to steal them again.
There was probably violence too, who knows? Things just aren’t easy. Six kids were put through school, some made it through university, some now with children of their own. All have their own way in life now and left her, as usual, getting on with things. No retirement. No pension plan. There's reasons why kids don't come back home.
Last year when there was drought and the cows and goats were screaming out loud with thirst and hunger, she couldn’t bear the thought of her cow, her companion in labour and provider for the family for so many years, dying in that scanty dust bowl of a thing called a “pasture” a mile away from home. She asked three local Joes to help load the cow on her back, and with legs shaking, bore it back home to die in its own stable.
A short while later, the years of burden left her partly paralysed and last month she died a lonely and difficult death. Her children were not by her side. She is remembered by a man who, in his youth, once made a few jokes at her expense and who, several times, helped lift some grass onto her back, wondering how on earth she managed to carry that load at all.
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It’s likely she was the brunt of a few jokes during the month-end Friday evening bravado of village young bloods thinking of girls and future wives to tend their houses, children, livestock and maize. Or perhaps by the women themselves, her contemporaries, congregating around the river to fill their bright yellow plastic jerry cans, catching up with the gossip and then contemplating the way back to their huts burdened with their loads.
It’s likely that, if she heard what people said, she would have simply snorted, treated such things gruffly and dismissed them. If your husband dies and leaves you with not much else but six young children to bring up, put through school and open up their paths in this world, then what choice but to just get on with things?
To feed her cow she’d walk for miles to find some spare grass, cut it with her panga and then hope that there’d be a couple of chaps nearby to help her load it on her back so she could carry it home. No short cuts to it, just graft. She’d lament on this later, when her young neighbour stole her chickens, and she’d had to work doubly hard for a year, breaking her back to buy some more, only for him to steal them again.
There was probably violence too, who knows? Things just aren’t easy. Six kids were put through school, some made it through university, some now with children of their own. All have their own way in life now and left her, as usual, getting on with things. No retirement. No pension plan. There's reasons why kids don't come back home.
Last year when there was drought and the cows and goats were screaming out loud with thirst and hunger, she couldn’t bear the thought of her cow, her companion in labour and provider for the family for so many years, dying in that scanty dust bowl of a thing called a “pasture” a mile away from home. She asked three local Joes to help load the cow on her back, and with legs shaking, bore it back home to die in its own stable.
A short while later, the years of burden left her partly paralysed and last month she died a lonely and difficult death. Her children were not by her side. She is remembered by a man who, in his youth, once made a few jokes at her expense and who, several times, helped lift some grass onto her back, wondering how on earth she managed to carry that load at all.
Nairobi, 2nd October, 2011
