Down town Nyeri the place to be:

Down town Nyeri is the place to be. A cacophonous place teeming with (confused) activity as pedestrians compete with delivery trucks, matatus, boda bodas and handcart pushers for right of way and where booming music coming from a myriad of speakers advertising the wares on sale deafens all but those with the keenest of hearing. This is epicenter of the matatu business, actually one of three, and affectionately known as ‘stage ya chini’, where matatus arriving from Nairobi, Muranga, Karatina, Othaya etc jostle for space as they pick up and disgorge their passengers like hungry beasts eating and vomiting at the same time creating an almost perpetual traffic gridlock and where the main parcel delivery pick up and drop off points for the various matatu Sacco’s are located. This must be how hell looks and sounds like on a normal day!

It is also where you have many micro and SME businesses located in a swathe awash with all manner of businesses from hardware, spares, used clothes, small supermarkets, wholesalers, green grocers, paper sellers, CD’s and VCD’s, hats, shoes, bananas and other fruits, assorted vegetables, restaurants, offices, cafes, hotels, opticians, drycleaners, mobile phones, airtime and so on. This is where the main Soko Mjinga market (no idea why it is named so) is located and where all manner of business is conducted by enterprising people who call this hodge podge, mish mash area their office or work place! In the evening this street becomes a large open air flea market where vegetables, shoes, clothes and all manner of goods are displayed on the pavements and on part of the road thanks to the largesse of the county government possible to appease the many disgruntled hawkers and other people who need to earn a living. God help you if you trample on someone’s wares so you have to look out where you step!

To add to this cacophony, Naivas Supermarket a national supermarket chain with stores across the country opened its doors recently (on 30th December 2014) to an almost tumultuous welcome from Nyeri residents – a New Year’s gift to them no doubt! This is the first building with escalators within the building and it looked like the grand stand at Immoler or Hockenheim what with the many residents wanting to experience the sensation of a first time ride on an escalator some even sitting down probably suffering from motion sickness. I am sure the other supermarkets did little business that day as a result of the excitement generated by Naivas because Nyeri residents now have a choice of supermarket to shop at between the existing ‘big’ three Kasturi, Samrat & Maathai and now Naivas so competition is bound to bring a lot of relief to the town residents and is bound to attract shoppers from other outlying areas in Nyeri County out to satisfy their curiosity and possibly get a good bargain in the process.

Welcome to Nyeri Naivas!!

The carcass count was high:

The carcass count was extremely high on my drive up one Monday morning. I counted at least 8 mangled and mashed remains of some unidentifiable animals on the 141 kilometer drive to Nyeri from my home in Nairobi. Usually it is only one or two unfortunate animals that have been dispatched to their maker on the same drive most days the question of whether animals go to heaven or hell notwithstanding!!

So could there be a logical explanation to this phenomenon? I have my theories.

Perhaps these unfortunate animals are in some form of torpor and in their frenzied state of mind find they are unable to resist the urge to jump into the path of a fast moving vehicle to a sure suicide. Many must be aware of the lemming effect where Lemmings, an arctic rodent, have become the subject of a widely popular misconception that they commit mass suicide when they migrate which is apparently not true. Or maybe our own animals here in Kenya just have the urge to see how adept they might be at dodging a speeding vehicle as they scamper across the road……a death wish so to speak. I wonder also how many more escaped unscathed or with some injuries in their macabre dance with death!

Now for those who are non-golfers stop reading right here since the rest of this post will make no sense to you because you have to experience golf to understand it fully!!

This insane lemming like behavior reminds me of that of a golfer because golf is one of those sports that is constantly looking to humiliate you, single handicap or being a professional golfer notwithstanding. From the time you pick up the sport and get started, it’s like you have been injected with a hormone or a drug that causes you to go into a state of torpor and lose all your sensibilities and makes you keep on coming back for more mistreatment, humiliation and punishment for I am yet to meet a golfer who at one time or another did not contemplate throwing their golf clubs into the nearest lake or water body after a particularly torrid round of golf!

The relationship of many amateur golfers to the sport is in a constant state of flux of love and hate because one day you can pull of a wonderful, flawless round of golf and make some good money from your betting friends in addition to being called up to the podium to receive your prize while congratulations and accolades come in from all those admiring your prowess. The very next day (and for two weeks to come) you are in golfing hell, struggling to stay out of the forest, the bunkers and the rough and hacking, shanking, topping and generally having a miserable time on the course. Your efforts after such a showing will be rewarded with a well boiled goat head or some other equally inane prize in front of all the guests & members as well as being forced to dig deep into your pocket to pay out on your bets with additional humiliation particularly today of your vain efforts being posted as a social media video a permanent record of your tribulations as you tried to get out of a bunker!

Golfers are therefore like the carcasses that I came across recently on the highway but this time victims of the golf course whose sole purpose it would seem is to place a fairway bunker at the nearest reaches of your driver, place the flag at the position most likely to attract your ball into the accompanying greenside bunker, create water hazards and out of bounds that magically attract golf balls, roughs that miraculously swallow golf balls, and other obstacles designed to frustrate the average amateur golfer into almost committing suicide as they attempt to navigate the gamut of any golf course around the world traversing whizzing golf balls, wayward hitters, difficult and wordy rules, bunkers, water hazards, the rough, out of bounds and etiquette rules that defines how one dresses, behaves, stands, marks their ball and generally ruining your well-ordered life as you struggle to make head or tail of it all.

Despite all the challenges, and like the proverbial suicidal lemming, you are bound to see the same golfer next week coming back for more punishment and humiliation, throwing themselves at the mercy of the golf course waiting to dodge another speeding vehicle in the name of the game of golf and hoping to come out unscathed on the other side for however badly you play you always want to come back to prove to yourself and the world that your golf isn’t really so bad or if you had an excellent round that it was not just a flash in the pan and you need to prove to yourself that you can repeat your excellent performance.

No golfer after all ever leaves home with the intention of playing a bad round of golf, but the reality is that the golf highway is plagued with numerous obstacles and speeding vehicles enough to make you throw a tantrum and forever heaping the blame on someone else…..anyone from your caddy, your fellow players, your boss, your spouse,your choice of club, your friends and your heavy head after a wild party the previous day…….anyone but your bad golf skills!!

But that is the essence of the game of golf and why golfers keep coming back for more as we are all gluttons for punishment like those trouble makers in school back in the day who, try as they may, always found themselves on the receiving end of a punishment. If this isn’t madness doing the same thing and hoping for a different result then I don’t know what is and all golfers should get their head examined every so often for their own sanity sake!

So remember to keep them straight and on the fairway lest you become part of the carcass count that I passed by enroute to Nyeri not too long ago…....……and for those non-golfers who have continued to read this post until the end, take on the fairways to understand what this post is all about!!

Adios!!

The Brits have failed........

I am not surprised at the emerging evidence that some people ate ‘chicken’ a few years ago through inflated pricing for the printing of ballot and examination papers. I am however surprised that the people called the British whose language we inherited alongside a slew of our own ‘native’ languages thanks to several years of their colonization in the early part of the 20th Century and who are supposed to be the defenders of proper diction, command and vocabulary required of the English language could fail so miserably when it comes to identifying someone to represent their business interests. ‘Willis the Wordsmith’ is probably furious they did not choose him!

It would be assumed that for an agent representing the business interests of a British company, the very basic requirement for such an executive appointment would be a suitable candidate identified after a well defined recruitment process who would be at the minimum someone with a good command of the English language in both its spoken and written form and well versed in the idiosyncrasies, grammatical requirements, sentence construction and rules required of being able to express oneself in the Queen’s English. After all, how would you be expected to converse with someone who cannot talk the same language as you?

But it looks like in their haste and probably without due care and regard to what would be considered proper employment practices, they have settled on a fellow whose command of the English language at least in its written form (since I have not heard him speak) could at best be described as wanting. This company is now a candidate for 'laughing stock of the year' in the British corporate world!

The diction and spelling of this agent can be best compared to that of a 6 year old just learning his alphabets. His keyboard continuously and shamelessly slashes, hacks and distorts what he is trying to say in his broken, grammatical style with no flair, no capitalizing of his proper nouns and no full stops and commas as required under the stringent rules of business English. It must have caused his employers to grimace now that every correspondence is being scrutinized in a court of law every time his emails and any other written correspondences that he may have penned are read out because with defiitely no secretary and no secretariat he must have been forced to write letters and emails himself.

This agent may have been brilliant in obtaining business for his employer in Kenya but the High Court in Britain should also bring charges of ‘assaulting’ the English language against both he and his employer to teach the British Corporate world a lesson in executive appointments!