17th September 2025
Late start for me but Vicky is up at 5am and in the market sourcing everything that yesterday’s groups will need for their businesses. She is an incredible woman. Mama B is so very lucky to have her. We are meeting at ‘Lights’. Kenyan landmarks are often used as directions, sometimes, unfortunately, long after they have disappeared. But the big set f traffic lights is still there, alongside a seething market. I wander up the hill and bag myself a seat outside a bank. I ponder anew the vagaries of the Islamic dress rules as most of the women who pass by are in full ‘soft-shell dalek’ attire. A small girl wanders along and she too is swathed from head to toe. The father, on the other hand, is in a cutaway T-shirt and custom ripped jeans. Whatever it was that someone said that someone translated from something that Big Mo said, it cannot have meant this.
Anyway. We get a tuktuk (luxury !) to today’s businesses and funding, get into the winding innards of where we are going, get very lost, find our way again and get out at a lovely business (started two years ago and now turned into two businesses : fashion and greengrocery. Both going well. This is a ‘mixed’ group, including several fans of the show tune, now safe (ish) from the horrors they endured where they were. Vicky and I browsw but she can find nothing in her size and, although I LOVE the pair of embroidered shorts they have, with my legs ? Tragic.
Our next business has also expanded, from greengrocery to fried fish, which they supply all over the area. It is, it has to be said, delicious, albeit it looks offputting. Please do not be underwhelmed by the single women who turn up in our photos – this is base camp, as it were. Fish are cooked round the back, some are sold here, and the rest of the ladies in the group ferry the delicacies to hotels (remembering that here a ‘hotel’ is anywhere you can sit on a stool to eat or drink) and schools.
Now to the funding – four groups, all with horror stories to tell. Now, far be it from me to suggest that those in the west who consider themselves on the front line of gender politics and the struggle against homophobia because they tweet their outrage at the Loretta scene not being cut from Life of Brian, really might want to consider that being called a pansy by a bloke with unsavoury tats might not be the worst that can happen. Here – and in probably most of Africa – “they do not like the gays” as Vicky puts it, in what surely must be a front runner for “Understatement Of The Year”. Here, there is not just gay bashing, but something like gay pulverising, and occasionally burning. What we have with us today is a group mixed male and female and, what Vicky charmingly calls “those who don’t know what they are”. I rather excitedly think we have our first trans group, but no, just a bisexual contingent. They have a wonderful contract painting some new building work. Two months of great pay, good conditions and no violence. Now THIS is much closer to the front line. So anyone out there who REALLY feels like making a difference in the lives of the friends of Dorothy, k.d. and anyone in between, feel free to contribute. Our other groups are all mothers trying to save their girls from FGM and early marriage which, in this part of the world , happens aged nine or ten. I am still getting my head around this. But it is the norm. Given that most of the women were victims of enforced early marriage themselves, they are now also subject to tribal based violence. Which their ‘husbands’ do nothing to stop.
I am mildly distracted by a baby (I assume it is a baby) under the shawl of the woman next to me. The slurping gurgling noises it is making as it suckles are really quite something And not necessarily something good. Its mother is in a group which wants to sell carrot and green peas. We also have groups selling crocs and one doing roasted cassava. All have safe places to go to, all will be looked after and – most importantly for the mums – all the girls will go to school.
We have quite the early finish and so Vicky suggests we go down to Pirate’s (the locals’ beach). Vicky eats viazi karahi (deep fried semi-battered potatoes) and I have fried cassava. To say it is ‘al dente’ would only be true if you have teeth like a white shark. We hire two chairs and relax with a fresh coconut and foot massage from a couple of beach boys we know from previous visits. They actually work the tourist boats but will turn their hands to anything. Probably. Massage is done with wet sand. It is surprisingly lovely. Then feet are buried before being washed off, left to dry and oiled up. Very very good. We turn down the offer of a whole body massage.
Getting a tuktuk back to Mtwapa is problematic. Do you remember being taught at school “four into three won’t go” ? Well it does here, as four of us (one being Vicky, who really counts as one and a half) cram into a passing vehicle built for three.
Vicky thinks my scarlet bumps are bed bug bites, and, given their proliferation down the side on which I sleep, I think she could be right. But they are still driving me mad.
We dine, of course, at Baraka. And quaff their fresh passion fruit juice. I board a pikipiki back to my place, open the window, lower the mozzie net and calm my worries about … I don’t know … everything, by watching crap online.
18th September 2025
We are off to Kilifi County today. Vicky and I have decided that I will no longer use specific names of the places we go (Kilifi County is massive and so ok to name) to help keep people safe. Kilifi County has something of a ghastly reputation for evil sects and mass graves in forests. Not ideal. But, if you ask me, religion rarely is.
We get a sort of people carrier vehicle, as opposed to a matatu, which is a massive luxury, then get off and change to a tuktuk. We do get a bit lost in the windy back tracks of the place, but manage to find our lovely Mama B hairdressers and I get my hair washed. Oh the joy. And it always causes hilarity in the salon because it is “so soft”. As I emerge squeaky clean and we prepare to leave, I trot out my perennial joke about not needing a blow drier because “God will dry my hair”. How they laugh. Next up, a whole family business (even the little boy, who looks about six is helping) which supplies samosas for practically the entire county. It is really impressive.
There is a sister business selling smoked and fried fish with great success. Business is booming.
Now to the funding. All the mothers in the groups are desperate to save their girls from FGM and early marriage. And for all of them this happens around age nine or ten. Refusal is really not an option for the mothers, is they would rather not be beaten to a pulp, and have their girls sold off anyway. We have a carrier bag group, a fantastic, high paying cleaning contract, a potato farm and a miraa business. The miraa girls are going to make a LOT of money, and so have to add others to the group as soon as they can. The farm group will get an income from firewood and charcoal as they clear the land for planting. These groups are sorted now. Which is excellent.