Monday 25th May 2026
Last week in Kenya. And I am feeling it.
Off to Limuru today to a funding with Purity and to visit some of our business ladies around the place. The petrol strikers and general accompanying hoo-ha have slightly played havoc with delivery schedules, but the ladies somehow manage to sell on. And business is brisk. They take out a few bags of fruit and/or veg, sell them and go back to base for more. I buy some big white passion fruit, some banana passion and a couple of local avocados. We have a look at the big bus station recently bought by the local council with plans to turn it into an open air market and Purity is hoping to get a couple of stalls there.
The funding is in what can only be described as a ‘hostelry’. Cheery, relaxed, selling booze, food and equipped with a pool table which is being enthusiastically, if not expertly used by some afternoon guests.
There are another 11 groups here, all battered women with battered children and husbands – well, men – who inflict untold abuse, make it impossible for the women to find enough money to pay for food, for school, in many cases for shoes, and in a frightening number of cases, even to sleep indoors. The men get drunk and simply chase the wives and children out of the house. In some cases, wives and children are chased out of the house so that the husband can have sex with another woman. The businesses are all well thought through and well chosen. Most with a minimum of 300% profit and big orders lined up.
Even more impressively, Purity tells me – because I ask about previous groups we have funded who have big orders lined up and big profit margins – that these big money groups are the ones who subsidise the girls we met in the streets. Each ‘big’ group is committed to take on about a half dozen of their own ladies and support them. I am deeply impressed. They find the extra ladies, Purity vets then and they are good to go. This whole Mama B thing is better than I thought !
The ladies go and Purity, David and I dine on what looks like a large dead something and most of a large cabbage, boiled. Oh yes, and potatoes. And the soup it was all boiled in.
I hoover the cabbage which is, to be fair, bloody delicious. As is the soup.
We have one of those “is David just trying to get me to chew my own tongue out with frustration or does he actually believe this?” conversations, on the subject of how, according to David, it is absolutely impossible for women to live without men. We were discussing the Samburu village. Which cannot, says David, exist without local men because that is how things are.
He is convinced that because the local professional ladies (who have been experiencing a downturn in trade because of the riots etc) in Maile Tisa the other day, were keen to have his custom, this proves his point that all women must have men. I attempt to point out the difference between biological imperative and commerce … and get nowhere.
