Joggo, the best friend

Accommodation

In Iten we rented two little houses, each with its own facilities, bathroom and kitchen, living room and bedroom. I am not sure of the correct name for the layout of such a unit, since the toilet and the washroom were combined by African architects efficiently, not aesthetically, into a single room with a toilet bowl and a shower.

If you want to make full use of the shower corner and its comforts, you have to stand very close to the latrine and at the same time take care not to fall in.

How to learn playing frisbee without frisbee?

Toilet seats are not used here, probably for reasons of hygiene and the need to keep things clean. We, however, suspect that the landlady of our housing complex keeps them for the children, to teach them frisbee, a game that has become very popular in recent years.

If you would like to enjoy a really pleasant bath, you can also make use of the water heater. When we finally worked out what an ingenious invention it is and how it works, we had to lean towards the theory that it is more of a marketing trick by the Iten business cartel.

Not really the same as in Europe

The chance that water will run from the tap and electricity will flow into the sockets at the same time is very low. We were often glad if we managed to cook something to eat on the gas bottles, enjoyed a cold shower as a reward at the end of the day and found our beds with a mobile phone instead of a torch.

But every time you can be online

The same cannot be said at all of the Kenyan internet provider, which is more reliable here than the water pipes and supplies us with an unlimited amount of data every day.

The African company offers services comparable with its European competitors, and at local prices too. You just have to make sure that background data for your apps is set up properly and that syncing of your photos and videos with cloud storage such as OneDrive is switched off.

I write from my own experience: within three days 3 GB of data were downloaded (for laymen, that is the contents of several CDs of the old days), which in one weekend made me perhaps the biggest customer in Iten.

I almost outdid even the load on the data network when photos were being shared during the official visit of the Deputy President of Kenya and his entourage. More can be found, for example, on his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/odpkenya/.

Another type of safari

Every day I regularly receive new data bundles for free, and now and then a special top-up offer lands among my messages. If you really want to spend a lot of money on something in Kenya, use the internet and its unlimited access. You could say that with excessive data use, the operator Safaricom comes close, as its name suggests, to the price of a safari, so the name is probably not entirely accidental.

A new girl on the board

Our expedition was made up of five Czechs, including a friend's girlfriend. Tereza joined us a few days ago, and the floor mop borrowed from the landlady, which had been put aside, came in handy. Most of the photos published above are still up to date, though, as our house is lived in only by men.

Her influence on our behaviour was impressive. Some of us cut down on typically male manifestations connected with pulses, others began to swear less, a few of us even picked up a bar of soap for the first time, and the dishes stopped being washed only in cold water without proper washing-up liquid.

A little bit of cultural differences

In connection with Tereza, however, our life here was most affected by the moment her boyfriend received an offer of a trade. Local tradition says that if a man wants to marry a girl after a successful courtship, he must offer her parents property of a suitable value in livestock.

The value differs from region to region; in the poorest parts of Kenya parents will agree even to an investment of a little more than two cows and two sheep.
Their worth, whether as farm animals or merely as a means of meeting basic human needs, should be in proportion to the circumstances of the family the girl comes from.

How much can man love a girl?

As we had already looked into how to marry well here and knew the market potential, our friend Jirka was all the more surprised when he was offered, on the spot, fifty cows for his girlfriend!

I suppose there would not be a man in the village who would turn such an offer down. Jirka is known as a very experienced negotiator; at the fruit stall he always gets a few bananas for free. Since he did not want to sell his Tereza so cheaply, he responded at once and asked for exactly double the original offer. It seemed that for a hundred cows Jirka was willing to think about it, but of course he did not let it show in front of his other half. To the doubled price we did not receive a positive answer.

We all agreed with his decision, of course (Tereza was still with us), but when push came to shove and we were wondering how to liven up our diet and get a proper hunk of meat into our bodies instead of pasta, pulses and vegetables, we remembered our new friend Joggo.

A good neighbor

When we arrived in the Kenyan hills a few weeks ago, unpacked our luggage and had a bit of rest, we began to look around and make new friends. Among our neighbours, near whom we spent most of our time, was our friend Joggo.

If you saw him for the first time, you would probably take him for an introvert. His high forehead, the colourful ornaments that completed his extravagant appearance and his charismatic gaze made it clear that he was quite a character.
But once you started exchanging views with him, to put it simply, it was not easy to shut his beak.

We got on well, but everything changed suddenly after several sleepless nights when, instead of resting, we stared at blank walls or at the screens of our mobile phones.
The reason was that J., as we liked to call him, had been used to spending a lot of time outside in the yard ever since he was little.
He was very active late into the night, which the neighbours far and wide knew all about, since his chattering and other emotional outbursts could be heard up to fifty metres away.

One day my friend Pavel declared that the swine should finally shut up, and I objected and pointed out that it was certainly not a pig, and that whoever had given birth to J., of whatever faith or race, or even if he had come out of an egg, Joggo was one of us. Still, I admitted that something had to be done.

From the grass to a plate

It is a great honour and a social occasion when the locals want to cut a cockerel's throat for you. Killing two birds with one stone, that is, lowering the decibels in the yard, especially at night, and filling our stomachs, seemed a good idea to me.

Although it had not been my intention at first, the solution offered by the locals, for 1000 Kenyan shillings (about 250 CZK), struck me as acceptable at a reasonable price. The unanimous agreement of our group was not long in coming.

Before … we were six

I cannot remember when I last slept so well. Only two things troubled me. First, the dry cough I have been carefully keeping up since our arrival, probably because of the dusty roads, the long dry season and the hard running training in the difficult local conditions. Second, my stomach was a little heavier than the day before, when we had swapped our favourite mix of rice and vegetables for fresh meat from local organic farming.

The fussing of the poultry in the yard calmed down and stopped waking us at night and just before dawn, when we were trying to gather the last good hours of sleep for proper recovery.

Does a love go through a stomach?

Our faithful friend was not just good, he was downright delicious; all night and the following morning we thought of him intently.
There is never enough quality protein from trusted sources. The high content of protein, amino acids and other substances the body needs lifted all of us, and at the morning training session, despite its high pace and difficulty, we felt as if instead of a fast run we had only gone for a little light jogging.

Goodbye, my friend, we will remember you with love.

About the story

The article about life in Africa, called Joggo, the best friend, introduces readers to the raw reality of village life. All our expectations proved false and our fears came true. Even so, we are really enjoying it here and are gradually becoming part of the local community as muzungu (the word for a white person, a European, in Kenya).