Thursday 10th September 2026
I am up and about and positively perky quite early. I REALLY need to wash my hair, but here in the room it involves boiling kettles and much splashing. I decide to go to a hairdressers. OMG what a treat. Heaven. With conditioner. I make a quick whizz around the rooftop market at Junction, meet up with David and head off to Limuru area. Out in an area about twelve miles outside Limuru we head cross country to find – be still my beating heart – the splendid view that is twenty acres of Mama B farmland. I am gobsmacked. Ten groups farm the land here, in two acre plots for each group. Around a hundred women. Potatoes, peas, maize and a small patch being seeded for coriander for an order. These farms have grown from Mama B businesses funded for soap and for carrier bags, in the main part. The women take the profit, rent the plot and continue some soap/carrier bag sales as a ‘side hustle’ and to bring in income while waiting for the harvest. They pretty much harvest something most of the year using crop rotation, the yield is high and prices are good. Even the dry wood and tree stumps that they clear away when they get the land initially are stacked and either sold for firewood or turned into charcoal. I am so impressed. They are loving their lives. No violence, plenty to eat, kids in school … what’s not to enjoy.
We go back and meet some of our bra sellers. Of course they try and sell me a bra. Purity laughs and grabs my right booblet … “she does not wear them … there is nothing here” she announces. Fairl. We duck inside a dark and smoke filled hut to eat pig’s head soup. It is almost delicious, were it not for the fact that it makes the Dead Sea seem undersalted. I can feel my arteries crisping as I drink. All parts of the pig’s head are available to eat – ears, snout, cheek … jawbones litter the table. If you like fat – which I do – this is great stuff. I wish I could have taken a photo but this is not the kind of place where you can do that. Now for the funding. Purity has found another safe room for us and there are ten groups. They drink soup while I ask questions about the beatings and rapings of women and children in the families, the no food and the being thrown out of the house to sleep outside. No school for the children, obviously as what little money the women might bring in from casual labouring jobs is taken by the men for drinking. One women describes her husband as being like “a zombie” and there is much nodding around the table .All the groups have found orders from hospitals, schools, hotels or estates. The minimum profit is about 200% and some are as high as 400% (the group selling dried cassava). All of them buy from the farms where their stock is grown and they pack the sacks themselves – beetroot and dragonfruit, onions and thorn melon, local avocados and pawpaw – and all, given the orders in place, sell in a day. Now I have seen what a carrier bag business can grow into and the one we have here seems particularly on the ball, having already got themselves orders, I may well be visiting their safari park the next time I visit.
After such a stonkingly good day, we celebrate at a favourite hostelry and I drink more beer than I should.
