I was stuck behind a slow moving private garbage compactor truck recently along Mbagathi Way on its way to collect yet more garbage somewhere else. In the business end of the truck, which is all I could see from my vantage point directly behind it, there were three people lounging there among remnants of uncompacted garbage presumably the garbage carriers/loaders. If they had a uniform so as to identify them as being genuine employees of the garbage company it was not apparent since they all had differing attire two of them clearly possibly ‘chokoras’ filthy clothes, bedraggled shoes that had seen better days and no overalls, gumboots, gloves, face masks or any of the other safety equipment you would expect of people dealing in garbage collection.
As the truck passed the Forces Memorial Hospital still trundling along at a snails pace, one of the ‘chokoras’ sighted a handbag and a plastic ‘juala’ paper bag lying by the wall parallel to the road seemingly abandoned or thrown away earlier. On instruction one of them deftly jumped out of the slow moving truck and retrieved the items throwing them into the truck to his colleagues before also jumping in and then they began searching through the bags. It was only after moving several metres past that it dawned on me who the bags belonged to.
Two women were busy sweeping the road side identified as Nairobi City County workers by their yellow coats and the bags apparently belonged to them as was soon to become obvious. It was likely that they had been left neatly by the fence as they swept their allotted length of space to be retrieved when they had completed the day’s work. Women have a keen sense of something not being right, and it seemed to kick in because as soon as the truck passed them one of them looked up, possibly saw her shawl being extricated from her bag, looked back and did not see her possessions and promptly took off running after the truck now gathering speed as the traffic opened up. The ‘chokoras’ having noticed (or probably heard) the shouts from the women seemed to exchange some words among themselves before seeming to agree that they had made a mistake and promptly threw the ransacked handbag out of the still moving truck while still retaining the ‘juala’ which they proceeded to methodically pillage before similarly throwing it out of the truck.
The truck having now gained speed sped off towards the City Mortuary as the hapless women proceeded to retrieve their possessions from the roadside possibly minus any money and valuables that may have been inside the bags. I will never know what transpired or where the truck went as I veered off towards Ngummo Estate on my way to back to work. But was this an honest mistake or intentional theft?? Do normal people go about retrieving handbags and ‘jualas’ that they find along the way?
Sample this second incident that happened many years ago.
“Mum” was the office secretary and had earned the affectionate title since she was a mother figure to many of us. She lived somewhere in Ngara and walked to work every morning and back home in the evening. She however had a peculiar habit of putting her personal effects in a filthy ‘juala’ plastic paper bag on her walk to and from work which ‘juala’ she would then place next to her desk retrieving whatever she needed from it as necessary. Her explanation was that no one would accost her carrying a filthy, tired looking ‘juala’ which had little appeal as opposed to if she carried a handbag or purse however bedraggled it was, the unspoken reason being she had probably been mugged and her handbag or purse snatched from her forcibly sometime in her life. All the cleaners knew enough not to touch that ‘juala’ either from having been told off from her acerbic tongue or by common sense.
As fate would have it and without anyone’s prior knowledge, a new cleaner was assigned to Mum’s section on morning and as usual Mum showed up with her ‘juala’ and left it in her usual spot next to her desk and went off on her own errands. On her return, she couldn’t trace her beloved ‘juala’ where she had left it despite her frantic search everywhere and promptly panicked asking everyone whether they had seen it anywhere! No one had seen it as she got to the office long before most people and often even before the cleaners had begun their work.
So what next! The distraught woman was asking everyone and was clearly in a state of panic about her ‘juala’. It was at this point and in her panic that she let on that the ‘juala’ also contained her purse something unbeknown to any of us in the office, and having lost the ‘juala’ her purse was also gone!! This brought a renewed state of anxiety as she would now probably accuse one of us as having been the culprit until someone thought to ask the new cleaner when all was revealed.
Mum’s habit was to leave the ‘juala’ next to her desk and near her wastepaper bin. On his cleaning rounds, the new cleaner had naturally cleaned the area around the desk and as per instructions also emptied the waste paper bin into his giant trash sack. On noticing a dirty ‘juala’ next to the bin, he had assumed that someone had missed the bin altogether when trashing it and had added the ‘juala’ and its contents to his sack of trash and had disposed of everything. Mystery solved!!
But the challenge now was where was the handbag? At this point in time I do not recall if this story had a happy ending or not, probably not given that if the ending was positive I would still recall this fact but since I do not, it is likely that the purse was never retrieved. I do recall that she followed the garbage collection truck all the way to the garbage dump somewhere in the vicinity of Kijabe Street and despite eliciting the assistance of the ‘chokoras’ there was no sign of the ‘juala’ and its contents.
Suffice is to say that Mum was more careful with her next ‘juala’ which she would keep well hidden in her drawers when she was not around lest she loses it and its contents afresh. No one in the office could dare mention the incident in her presence as she clearly did not see anything funny, but it was the reason for many a stifled guffaw whenever she was seen stuffing her new ‘juala’ into her desk drawer.
The question is this,given the direction of the recent incident I witnessed and that I narrated earlier is it possible that the ‘chokoras’ could have helped themselves to the contents of Mum’s ‘juala’ and thrown the rest of the stuff away? Was the initial error by the cleaner in Mum’s case an honest mistake or something more sinister? Were the ‘chokoras’ in the incident involving the County cleaners innocent or was their intention dishonest?
The verdict is yours!!
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