The city kids were always a marvel, and source of envy every time they visited the village during the Christmas holiday. You couldn’t get enough of their ‘accentlless’ and flawless English, and of course their seemingly rich parents.
Once in high school, these kids ran away with the entertainment scene, were more popular, and occasionally showed up with adult magazines to school. We wanted to be like them, even more desperately than when were kids.
Now all grown up, having relished to desires that drove the city kid’s ambitions, we can authoritatively say that the city life was all a lie. There’s no beauty in it. Their worldview was largely shaped by American pop culture while ours was shaped by completely different things.
Seeing the kids in the plots, it sometimes hurts when you hear their parents warning them not to step out of the gate. Their play area, which was so small that the space between a kitchen and the ‘main house’ in the rural area is quite large. These city kids don’t know how it feels to play in the vast and expansive field.
There were butterflies to catch, grasshoppers to trap and dung beetles dig up from cow dung. All these activities were enough to engross us until we forgot that we were taking care of sheep from straying into people’s farms. The beating that would follow was part of the fun.
Of course, there was ‘moriot’ or ukoko in Swahili. This was a delicious snack, way better than crisps. We’d fight for it as if our lives depended on it. Our mother’s intervention only saved the day. In the city, once ugali has been cooked, which is rare, the sufuria is immediately soaked.
City kids do not understand the hassle of fetching water from the river. Worse still when your mother orders you to fill a hundred litre container with five-litre containers. You’d make endless trips to the river, cursing endlessly until you fill the container.
Lastly, the city kids downgraded when it was time for holidays. They came to us and went to their cities. Trust me there’s nothing breathtaking like being in the city like Nairobi for the first time. The countryside consisted of a dreary routine of chores while the city was a place of luxury: no sheep to tend, no farm to till.
#hivisasaoriginal