It’s winter in Kenya:

It’s winter in the +254……..…..at least from where I sit (stand, squat, sleep) in the Nairobi Metropolitan area and toes, ears and fingers are freezing. Temperatures have plunged and are now hovering around 13 degrees Celsius at night. This is cold by Nairobi standards though I am told 30 minutes out of Nairobi around Limuru the mercury has been reported at 9 degrees Celsius and we are not yet into July the traditionally coldest month of the year!

I have had a heater in the house that has not been working for a few years thanks to a blown fuse that caused the plug to fuse with the extension cable. A few days ago I decided that this cold was the type to consign me to an early grave and I broke the extension cable and liberated the heater’s plug from its imprisonment by the extension cable. Then to add insult to injury on the unfortunate extension cable, I used its plug to connect to the heater and threw away the now useless cable and voila, I now have a working heater and a nice toasty bedroom. It’s the only place I want to be in these days after work where I can lie down in relative comfort, socks off, half sweater off the only tough decision being when to venture out of the room for one reason or another. Thank God that I have the essentials in my bedroom, a TV and a loo, so those forays are few and far between!

In this weather, those long forgotten heavy jackets, vests, scarves and (yes) gloves have been dusted off and now seem to have become ‘nom de plume’ with majority of Nairobians dressed up warmly to shield themselves from the elements. I see gloves being sold along the highways nowadays and wonder who had the foresight to import them in advance, or are they a product of some sweat shop in Kariobangi running full throttle 24 hours a day to meet the insatiable demand for them?

 I wonder how the young school going kids in those traditionally cold climes in Kenya like Limuru, Meru, Nyeri, Burnt Forest, Kinangop, Eldoret and Nyahururu (in no particular order) are faring since I noted a few years ago that a balaclava a.k.a ‘boshori’ was a necessary item of school clothing and that was in the summer (do we have such a thing in Kenya?) months. Now that it is winter which additional items of clothing to ward off the freezing temperatures will their parent be saddled with? Thermal underwear, full body woollen suits, blankets or hot water bottles perhaps!!! Essential items of clothing considering that many of the public schools require more than a coat of paint to make them spick and span – like windows, doors and roofs.

This is despite the fact that if the current government has its way future public primary school kids will be the proud owners of solar laptops to be used in drafty cold classrooms bereft of windows, doors and roofs!! Maybe they should have a heater app developed for those laptops as an added bonus for the children in the colder parts of this country and to give them an incentive to attend school so as to keep warm or a fan app to keep them cool when in the ravages of a heat wave.

But some Kenyans (and most tourists) in our capital city still don’t get it. They still walk around half dressed in tee shirts and shorts, tank tops and boob tubes as if they are in sweltering Mombasa not realizing that this is our winter season. It makes one wonder who is mad, them or us well draped people or if God, in his haste to create some of us, omitted to add the mandatory thermostat that the others seem to have been given a 2^nd dosage of in his infinite wisdom……….or to mock the rest of us!

Come on people you are making the majority of us look bad and what would your mother say, you going out half dressed when more sensible people are warmly wrapped up! You will catch your death of cold and will have no one to blame but yourself.

But ‘ngai baba’, what shall we do when July rolls in?