Thursday 7th May 2026
Up at 7am and wondering why I don’t do this more often. OK, stupid question. Neither Dagoretti Corner not Shepherds Bush offers anything like here. This kind of landscape, and the sheer endlessness of it, does tend to make you believe in something bigger than yourself.
While it is in my mind, I have to mention the quite incredible amount of spitting that goes on here. All the men chew mugoka, which creates juice which is then spat out. Then the fibre is kind of packed round your lower gums. It reminds me of my brother Geoff’s way. When young. with a brussel sprout (of which he was not fond) minus the spitting, of course.
The chests of the area are also thick with mucus. Every so often the morning quiet will be riven by the sound of someone dredging a gob of some hideous, rattling goo from the very depths of their innards and letting it fly.
I sit and drink tea. Made with goat’s milk, it is absolutely delicious.
In theory, we have a meeting with the village’s 20 hopeful businessswomen at 8.30. Around 8.45 two turn up. The beatific inner peace of last night is giving way to a more Copstickian mood.
When the ‘meeting’ does get underway, things do not improve. And it is largely my fault. I thought I understood “small”. I did not. We have decided on one business selling tea leaves and sugar in tiny amounts. Their ‘business plan’ had been to buy 1kg of sugar at 150 shillings and sell at 160 shillings. I don’t know if you know, but I have a double blood clot in my temporal sinus vein and this just about busts it where no amount of heparin has helped. I ask how THEY buy sugar for themselves. Usually they buy two tablespoons (sometimes one) for 20 shillings. Same with the tea leaves. Everything in the villages is day to day. And that works really well for a small business. “Small small sugar makes big big profit” I explain. They agree that they will measure with a spoon. And now we have one group good to totter.
Sorry to bang on about this but this is the perfect example of how you cannot hope to help anyone without going to where they live, to understand how they live. And this has been a big leap for me.
Then I suggest (as my sister Amanda would cry “my idea!”) a business making mandazi and boiled eggs and selling them at the many schools in the area. I then explain you must ask the headmaster for permission and we dispatch one group member. This also looks like a goer
Then good old liquid soap making, slightly hindered by the fact that (like all the groups), no one really knows what the buying price is. Once I explain again that they must sell “small small”, even though I will be bring 60 litres. we decide to give this a go.
Letina arrives. I initially met him at the rather excellent Wildebeest Eco Camp in Nairobi but he has come home. He is ‘added security’ says Munu. Letina is a good bloke, and, I think, helps the womenas much as he can, and for this I cope with the traditional male Kenyan’s eternal tendancy to mansplain absolutely everything. Even one’s own ideas and statements are mansplained back to you. This is the way here. And the women just accept a place as a lower class of human.
And so we get on Munu’s motorbike and go to Wamba. Which – albeit described as being “just here” – is about 25 minutes on a motorbike.
And it is another perfect example of why, if you are attempting in any way to help sell around the villages, you have to go “to the ground”, to understand the place.
I had vaguely imagined Wamba to be a small town, but with pretty much all the basics. Ah. Crazy optimistic me. We go to the mill to get porridge flour for the kids … there is nothing outrageous in my mix that they shouldn’t have. Nope. And all the peanuts have been bought by the guys selling miraa. We are offered (we want to buy 5kg) the option of buying 50 of the small packets they sell to the chewers. HAH !! There is not a wholesale price to be had for anything anywhere. Just as well the businesses are starting small.
The flour and sugar and tea leaves all have to be bought retail price. Same for everything. And there is only really one shop to buy everything. I try a vague haggle and get absolutely nowhere. This is an extraordinary experience.
We load everything on another motorbike, buy a load of fruit (as requesated) for the kids and set of back to the village.
The women are still sitting where we had left them, more or less.
They get their start up bundles and go.
I drink more tea.
And try to persuade myself that this is not going to go horribly wrong.
A big bonfire is made (I am sensing more singing and dancing in the offing), I have a plate of some of the eggs that were broken on the journey back from Wamba fried up in a sufuria and some good news starts to come in.
The soap ladies have already mixed their soap and are bottling it up nice and small. The sugar and tea leaves ladies are selling up a storm. They sell around two tablespoons for forty shillings and make (from a 150 shilling kg bag of sugar) 400 shillings. I brought them 5kgs. They have pretty much sold it all. I think this is all going to be ok.
I get a taste of traditional Samburu liquor (distilled by my landlady), Tastes definitely herbal and warms the cockles (and various other parts).
I wish I could stay longer. But Mombasa is calling.
I am being picked up on the road at 8am.
