Wednesday 9th September 2026
I get a taxi from the bus terminus just after 5. Hilariously, he quotes me a very reasonable price to go back home, but when we get there, he doubles it, on the basis that now he has to go back to town. He does not know with whom he fucks this morning.
I sleep till ten.
When I find that, yet again, there is no water and no electricity. Now I am all for what Daddy Copstick
would call “living like the locals”, but I feel a line is about to be drawn. Possibly in my own shit, which is piling up in the unflushable loo. In the meanwhile I treat myself to a motorbike down to Prestige for posh coffee, catfood and wifi. To say nothing of a flushing toilet.
I am not quite fully recovered from the stress of Monday and Tuesday and, as I type, I get a sudden flashback to Tuesday morning and the last group at Rongo who will just not make any attempt to explain the actual business end of their business. Not in Luo, Swahili or exasperated signing. They just want beans and rice. I end up beating myself over my head with my little ledger book, growling and stomping off. To much laughter. Not very grown up but …
I also remember reading, before I left, about companies valued at $10 trillion. And about when one of them was listed, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. I wish I could understand how that must feel. What your relationship with one dollar is if you have a trillion of them. If he can even imagine what $20 can do on the ground, when he spends and thinks and plans in millions of them. It must be very strange. Because one pound is still one pound whether you have twenty of them or a trillion. But the practical significance is a world apart. Could the gobsmackingly rich even get their heads around the fact that £20 can save the lives of a family and give them a future. Thoughts please. And, obvs, private numbers for Elon Musk … although I hear he is no longer a trillionaire.
I get enthusiastic communication from Samburu where, I am told, all the businesses we started are thriving and they have built me a small house for when I come. The sudden flood of information is no doubt triggered by my mentioning to Letina (hustler extraordinaire on behalf of these women) that I am not looking for more things to do and unless they contact me I am not going to chase them.
Good news also from Purity who has had a Big Meeting with the wazee and it seems our contracts with them (see last diary) are back on.
I go to see Rahab to enquire about the lack of water and electricity. “They are coming” apparently.
Turns out that the owners of the building have simply cut down drastically on their water deliveries, meaning that two or three days a week there simply is none.
Mary Faith calls to ask for help : the “Health” people have been round to demand that she repaint her kitchen, which according to her calculations, is going to cost over a thousand quid. The “Health” people can and will close the place if they do not get what they want, no matter how spurious their demands. In Kenya there are permanently so many official dicks on the table that they have had to get a bigger table. And the little people lose.
My £4 kettle still has not blown up so, when the leccy comes back in the evening I pack in a lot of coffee drinking.
