Sleeping Around (30 page)

‘Um . . . I'm not sure,' I stammered.

I couldn't quite get the picture out of my head of a cow or goat sitting out the back just waiting to be plucked.

‘Do you like her?' Wilson asked when he saw me smile at the waitress as she poured the water onto my hands. ‘Would you like her for your second wife?' Wilson urged. ‘I can arrange it if you like.' The waitress gave me a shy smile.

‘I'm okay, thanks,' I said as another waitress turned up with the grilled chicken, rice and big slabs of the East Africa staple
ugali,
a maize-based dish similar to polenta. Willy ordered another round of beers even though I'd only taken a few sips from my first beer. ‘How much beer can you drink? Willy asked me.

‘Um . . . a bit I suppose,' I said.

‘We can drink a whole crate!'

‘Kenyans drink too much,' Wilson said, shaking his head. ‘And they all get very drunk.'

‘Everywhere I've been on this trip so far everyone gets very drunk,' I said.

‘Why is that?'

Because it's a whole lot of fun.

‘I don't really know,' I said musingly.

‘In Kenya it is stress,' Wilson sighed. ‘And mostly when you are married. The wife stays at home while you have to support her. And if she works you still have to pay for everything and the woman keeps her money to herself.'

‘What do they do with their money?'

Wilson shrugged. ‘Clothes and hairdressers.'

After we left Tala the brown dirt road turned blazing red as we climbed up into lush hills covered with banana and mango trees and pink, purple and yellow flowering trees. The ‘main street' of Mukuyuni village was a haphazard collection of tumbledown shacks with men, who were mostly wearing jeans and T-shirts covered in red dust, slouching lazily against doorways. Willy had to drive at a snail's pace so Mutisya could greet every single person with a handshake and a smile.

Mutisya's family home, which overlooked a verdant valley in which coffee and maize were grown, was a cluster of red mud-brick buildings in amongst chicken coops and a few goats and cows. As well as Mutisya's parents, the farm was home to his brother's family and his 96-year-old grandma, who was sitting up on her matriarchal throne in front of the main house. Grandma didn't look a day over 70—until she smiled at me and revealed her three remaining teeth.

Most of the main house consisted of a large and brightly lit lounge room. The light shone from a solar-powered fluorescent lamp, which was the only light on the entire farm. And one of the very few in the entire village, which had no electricity or running water.

Mutisya showed me to the back of the house, where he was in the process of renovating two bedrooms specifically for couch surfers. ‘I want everyone in the world to come to my village,' he said brightly. From the back door he swept his arm in the direction of a pile of cow shit and said, ‘I'm going to put a barbecue and a bar here for the couch surfers'. Mutisya had already hosted quite a few couch surfers, including folk from Japan, Poland, New Zealand, America, Canada, England, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Brazil. ‘It is good that many people come, because they spend money in the village,' Mutisya said. ‘Which is much good for my community.'

Quite a few of those couch surfers, I later discovered, also happened to spend money booking a safari with Mutisya. Which is much good for Mutisya. Yes, making a buck out of couch surfers is not really in the spirit of couch surfing, but in Mutisya's defence he was also genuinely interested in just getting people to experience an authentic Kenyan village—and an authentic Kenyan safari without the zebra-striped jeep.

After my brief tour we headed back into the village to the local pub, which was less of a pub and more of a tin shack with rough concrete floors and tables and chairs that looked as if they'd been hastily cobbled together using a few old branches. The only light came from a solitary gas lamp sitting on the bar, while an ancient radio, which was plugged into a car battery, was barely audible through the static. What I could make of the chorus of the song playing did seem quite apt, though: ‘I want a Tusker, no women for me, I want a Tusker.' The bar was full of men and most of them were totally tanked. I was introduced to everyone as a very famous author known all around the world. I told Mutisya that I wouldn't quite go that far—I'm still having trouble selling my books in Kyrgyzstan.

I grabbed a round of warm beers (no power meant no fridge) and sat down at a table with Mutisya's dad and 80-year-old Moses, who gave me a huge toothless smile. Neither of them spoke English. Mutisya told me that Moses once had three wives and eighteen children, but all three wives and fifteen of his children were dead—more than half of them from AIDs. Also sitting at the table was Norman, a neatly dressed English teacher with bushy white sideburns. He was also one of the very few men in the room who wasn't rolling drunk.

‘Our village has many, many problems,' he said, opening the conversation on a high note. Norman then went on to list all of the village's problems. ‘The total welfare of the village depends on water,' Norman said. ‘There is only one well, which is twenty metres deep, and in the dry season people have to queue for up to twenty-four hours to get a few litres of water.'

There was also not much work in the village. ‘Most of the people in the village work in the fields as casual labour,' Norman said. ‘The only other work is building roads, but it is very hard work and you do not get paid. You work only for food.'

‘The village really needs electricity,' Willy said, adding his two cents' worth to the village's tale of woe. Willy's village, which was only twenty minutes' drive away, had electricity. ‘My father was very smart,' Willy said, tapping his nose. ‘He organised electricity for our village twenty years ago. Now it is much too expensive for this village to get it.'

The list of problems went on. The village wasn't serviced by any public transport and the roads were so poor that it was difficult to get produce to the market.

All things considered then, I wasn't that surprised when Norman told me that alcoholism was another big problem. Some of the men in the bar were so drunk that it took them a few minutes of extreme concentration just to get their drinks to their mouth. Most of the men had been drinking
chang'a
, which is a lethal methyl alcohol concoction that is often supercharged with the added ingredients of marijuana twigs, cactus mash, battery alkaline and formalin. ‘Last year a batch made in Machakos killed more than fifty people,' Willy told me.

‘We are always positive that we can make a change,' Norman said with resolute confidence. Each week the menfolk held a meeting to discuss ways to develop and better the village. ‘It takes a long time to get anything done, though,' Norman shrugged wearily. To even get their grievances heard, the village administrator has to present to the AC (Assistant Commissioner), who in turn goes to the DO (District Officer), who goes to the DC (District Commissioner), then finally to the PC (Provisional Commissioner). Sadly, it seemed like a lot of BS to get FA.

We all squeezed into Mutisya's Shuttle Service after we left the pub. The car was chock-full of drunken uncles. One uncle couldn't even stand up—he would have had no chance of walking, let alone finding his way home in the total darkness.

By the time we got back to the house and sat down for dinner it was after 10.30. Mutisya's mum, who had been waiting patiently for the men to come home from the pub, served up a tasty dish of large slabs of
ugali
and cabbage mixed with tomatoes and onions.

My bed was in another house, because the newly renovated ‘couch surfing' rooms reeked of paint fumes. I couldn't give my new ‘couch' a rating just yet, though—I couldn't even see my room or my bed in the dark.

In the middle of the night I needed the toilet and, although there was a squat toilet outside away from the house, Mutisya told me to simply walk to the end of the corridor and just wee on the washroom floor. The ‘washroom' was a small, empty room with a concrete floor. Finding the washroom, however, was more easily said than done. When I stepped outside my room it was so dark that I couldn't figure out if I should go left or right. I think I pissed in the right place. Either that or I relieved myself on the lounge-room floor.

Mutisya knocked on my bedroom door at eight o'clock and I stumbled out rubbing my eyes. ‘This is a bit too early for me,' I moaned pathetically. I felt even more pathetic when Mutisya told me that 96-year-old Grandma had been up since five o'clock and that she still worked in the fields planting or collecting maize. She even had to walk a few kilometres just to get to the fields. Grandma had already returned from her morning's toil and was standing out the front of the main house pounding a long wooden pestle into a large mortar, transforming dried maize kernels into a fine powder to make the base for
ugali.
Just to absolutely confirm my place in the upper echelon of patheticness, I had a go and only lasted four minutes until my arms got too sore.

Mutisya kindly organised a large bucket of warm water so I could have a wash and set me up in the small, empty washroom—but thankfully not the one in the house that I may or may not have pissed in. Actually, the room
wasn't
empty. The walls were crawling with giant ants. ‘Watch it, they bite,' Mutisya warned.

‘I left my towel in Istanbul, do you have one I could borrow?' I asked.

‘You can use this,' Mutisya said, handing me a dusty and somewhat smelly piece of crumpled-up cloth.

It was raining sheets when we headed out for a guided tour of Mutisya's relatives. Our first stop was Uncle Edwin's ‘butchery', which was housed in a wooden shack with no refrigeration and no glass in the shop windows. Uncle Edwin was inside, busily hacking up meat that was covered in flies. Fresh goat meat, with blood dripping onto the floor, was hanging up in a cage behind him while chopped-up delights such as cow brains, livers and pigs' feet were laid out on wooden shelves that were open to the dusty road outside.

Although we'd just eaten breakfast we headed to the back room for a ‘morning snack'. I almost brought up my breakfast when I saw our morning snack. It was ‘African sausages'— otherwise known as goat's intestines. The boiled intestines, which were grey and slimy, came out dangling daintily from a stick. This was accompanied by a mug of soup that I'm pretty sure isn't in the Continental Cup-a-Soup range: Hearty Goat with Fat Globs and Grey Sludge. I will try to eat most things, but after the first sip left a thick layer of grease on the inside of my mouth I sheepishly (if that's the word) pushed it aside.

‘Because you are a special guest we have a surprise for you,' Mutisya said, rubbing his hands together excitedly. It certainly was a surprise. Mutisya's uncle plopped a rather grotesque-looking boiled and blackened goat's head down on the table. At least we didn't have to eat it by ourselves, since a crowd of men appeared and began something of a feeding frenzy as they pulled off ears, eyes, cheeks and lips. Being the special guest, I was handed the ‘choice' portions, but God knows what I ate. I sampled all sorts of squishy white, brown and pink chunks of meat. And something that looked like grey jelly. Admittedly, some of the bits were quite tasty, but others tasted not unlike rancid shark meat.

When the skull had been picked bare, Mutisya's uncle produced a huge machete and smashed it open, splattering bits of goat's brain onto my face and clothes. The rest of the grey mush was devoured in less than three minutes. All that was left on the table was the skull, jawbone and teeth.

We spent most of the afternoon driving from house to house through heavy rain and thick mud on The Great Relative, Cow, Goat and Chicken Tour. With an ever-changing entourage of relatives joining us in the car, we visited a brother, an aunty and a third cousin and they all seemed to have large broods of humans, goats and dogs.

On the way out of Nairobi we'd passed shop after shop selling couches and now I knew why. Our last call was on Uncle Peter, who had five couches and six lounge chairs squeezed into his living room. Peter needed plenty of space because he had nine children and fourteen grandchildren, and he himself was one of ten brothers and five sisters.

The most comfortable chair was reserved for Nzioka, Peter's 103-year-old father. ‘He has lived so long because he had three wives,' Mutisya told me. Nzioka, who still looked incredibly sprightly for a centenarian, had served in the British Army during the First World War then worked as a butcher until he retired at 89. Peter was also retired after working as a policeman for 36 years.

All the men were kicking back in the lounge room while the women scuttled about preparing dinner—which I guessed would be chicken after I'd spotted aunty chasing one around the yard as we'd arrived. That chicken may have also been past retirement age. Although it was tasty, it was a bit like trying to eat a rubber novelty chicken.