14th May 2026
There is electricity when I wake. We are seeing a Mama B farm and a business making uji and other food.
You may well wonder why I don’t see more businesses when I come here. They are just so far apart from each other, in interior villages and without great transport, very often. Finding the ones closest to where I am is time consuming. And every day is a lengthy mix of travel by foot, matatu and tuktuk. Sometimes hours.
As I may have whined already, I hate travelling by matatu. My loathing starts from the minute you approach and the frenzy begins. You may have seen video of a dead shark being attacked and devoured by pirhanas. It is like that, but less civilised. Then, as the journey goes on, every person who can be seen from the road, who might possibly be interested in cramming themselves into a sliver of remaining seat is exhorted to get on board. Any person who might ever think about going to anywhere. Any person who is obviously and determinedly walking in the opposite direction. Any person who looks as if one day they might give birth to a person who might grow up to want to travel in in a ramshackle, boneshaking antique being pushed to dangerous speeds. All are all but snatched from the roadside and packed in.
I am again meeting Vicky at Lights. And the coffee place “just opposite” where I ate watermelon turns out to be nothing of the sort. It is a highly visible white stone building along the road on the other side and up behind the market.
We get a matatu part way to our farm and a tuktuk the rest. It is quite far away. In another county which means a different sticker for the tuktuk (these things are important). But it is doing really well. Everything that comes out of the ground during preparation can be sold – turned into charcoal in the case of roots and tree stumps, or sold for building in the case of lumps of the white stone that is everywhere here. The group have got themselves an extra acre to add to the two they started with and each acre yields 15 90kg sacks each harvest. They also grow greens in between the maize.
Getting to the second business ( another hour or so) is a little more complicated, as it is deep in the ‘old villages’ but after a couple of wrong turnings we get there, The last bit of the ‘road’ is too narrow even for a tuktuk so we walk. The houses here are built of mud bricks – their own kind of thermal regulation system. Most of the group are off with buckets of viazi karahi (battered and deep fried potatoes served with a tamarind sauce) and big flasks of uji (thin porridge) but the ‘factory is here, with head chef still frying up a storm. Vicky LOVES viazi karahi and this batch smells particularly delicious – that nucg garlic in anything always gets me going..
Cleverly, the funding is in a little space round the back of the business. So the ladies will get viazi karahi and uji (a classic Kenyan combo) and the business will get a boost.
Good business plans – including one for selling drinking water at a huge profit., socks, a contract for githeri and various veggies. This is another area of FGM and early marriage from which no girl escapes. Neither does any of the girls go to school.
All our ladies get their viazi and uji. I too get a portion and, for the rest of the day, am very aware that I pong of garlic from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
We have electricity. Woooo
Friday 15 May 2026
Catastrophe. There is not a single seat left on the Sunday train back to Nairobi. I just could not stand another day / night in my tiny, claustrophobic, intermittently electrified garret here. But busses take 8 hours, and the alternative is the night train. The seats on the SGR are brick hard and bolt upright. I do not know what to do.
On the bright side, I am getting my hair washed at a Mama B hairdressers. Matatu first (of course) and then a tuktuk to go where the matatus do not. Actually we end up very much in matatu territory and get to watch an extremely irate makanga ( a sort of conductor) leap from her vehicle, storm the vehicle in front and accuse them of stealing a customer. She gets 50 bob compensation but things do not look friendly.
Our hairdressers has grown from a group of young girls who started doing manicures. Now the group has increased in size, ‘birthed’, as Vicky puts it, many other groups, and now has a big hairdressers doing pretty much everything beauty related. The ladies (as is the Way of Mama B) are mostly out on home visits : manicures, pedicures and braiding.
My head is taken in a vicelike grip and wrestled free of its coating of dust and grime and lord knows what else, but nothing good. My saloonist for the day murmers repeatedly about my hair being so soft (shucks) which compliment is balanced by Vicky asking why it has gone so small when wet and when will it be fluffy again.
We have been given a side room in which to do the funding. Safe, out of view, and lacking only lights to make it an excellent meeting place. Oh well, can’t have everything.
A lot of tribal violence in this group. Which means brutality, houses burnt down and rape, It also means FGM (sometimes) and early marriage (always). The young girl children are used as a way to pay off maurauders, in a much used “if I give you my ten year old daughter to do with whatever you want, will you please not beat me up?” method of negotiations. And so the mothers are doing the only thing they can : taking the daughters out of harm’s way. Having said which, thi has to be where Mama B comes in or frying pans turn into fires pretty quickly.
These groups are all going pretty far away and most of the businesses are solid – Crocs, avocados, a contract for fruit salad, miraa (huge profit here) are all great. But the mathematics on the omena (tiny imho foul smelling fish) group is way off. In more ways than one. I get a bit tetchy. The actual profit is excellent and the business will be terrific. But if they cannot get the maths right to pitch it to the only Dragon in the entire god-forsaken Den …
We do sort it out – largely because Vicky says they can definitely do the biz. And off we go in search of a tuk tuk.
My dear brother Geoff (Treasurer and longest standing trustee of Mama B (note to self, must get him a t-shirt)) asked the other day, how one would know a Mama B business from any other. Good question. Well, in terms of customers and clients, they shouldn’t. Kenyans can be extraordinarily (and not in any good way) envious. If they think that a business has in any way been ‘sponsored’ or funded by someone else (especially a mzungu), it would not be good for the businesswomen. Everyoner would want their slice. Also the businesses have to stand on their own several feet right from the start. And they absolutely do.
The next business has helped so many women over the years. SO many.
On Nyali Beach (I never feel as white as I do on a local’s beach here. It is like someone forgot to colour me in) our business has a gorgeous shaded area with chairs, changing areas and swimsuits for hire. They also offer ‘floaters’ (yup, I explained what a floater is in English) which here are inflated inner tyres from lorries – ginormous rubber rings for adults.
I drink more coconut water, we relax and get a tuk tuk, then a matatu (packed like Dolly’s girls into a 34A cup – I am sure I have caught something through the medium of sweat)
and then, when the matatu is diverted, another tuktuk.
I am desolate because I am forced to book the night train tomorrow. I am expecting the worst. So it can only be better than that
