PHOTO CREDIT: PIXABAY
There are days you wake up in the morning and you sense that the Devil is alive, kicking and seriously working on your case. Take for example recently when I woke up at 8:30 am feeling like it was on a Saturday, only to discover that it was on a Wednesday!
I almost wept and you all know that because of his pride, an African man rarely weeps because he has been made to believe that weeping is unmanly.
With the painful and outright disgusting realization that it was Wednesday, came the realization that I was late for work and the lesson I was supposed to attend to was already halfway through. Since I teach grownups who carry mobile phones to class, it was only natural that the moment I switched on my phone, I should find a few missed calls from my students and a number of messages to go with them, messages which screamed, "Sir, we are waiting for you!" or "please, we have a lesson. Are you coming?"
What follows next for me is an attempt to salvage a situation which kept mutating from bad to worse and then worst! I quickly warm some water on the gas burner but as I carry the hot water to the bathroom, I trip and spill all of it on the dusty floor and that leads to another task which involves getting a rag and mopping the flooded floor and after that, being contented with cold water for a shower and for those of you who have been to Eldoret, you know how torturous and traumatizing it is to take a cold shower during the cold season.
I still end up in the bathroom, but this time with cold water and some 'obese' Geisha soap. I predictably and cautiously start by washing my head and immediately I finish applying soap all over my hair and face, the Geisha soap slips out of my hands, into the toilet bowl and down the drain. In the ensuing commotion, as I try to save the soap, I accidentally step on the basin and -oops!- the water spills again.
I blindly fumble around and open the water tap to fetch more water, only to realize that ELDOWAS (the company supplying us with water) has already started their routine, but unfortunate water rationing. I fumble around somemore to find a towel to wipe off the now, almost drying soap from my hair and face.
It is now evident that I will not make it for the first lesson. I sit on my bed, take a deep breath and try to calm down and re-evaluate my life's goals. I would really have loved to cry at this point but then, men do not cry, do they?
I thereafter try to make some tea and as the teapot is humming beautifully in unison with the boiling tea, I realize that I have no sugar. I could have sworn by my knees that I bought sugar just the other day. There was no way I could have run out of sugar that soon. As I frantically search for the sugar on the shelf above the gas burner, I accidentally knock down a container containing salt and it lands right inside the tea pot. Apparently, I had not replaced the lid of the salt container as tightly as it should be and I ended up with salty tea. That technically meant that the mission to make tea had officially been aborted.
But there was some consolation. I could still take my bread without tea. I reach out for the cotton bag containing the bread, my last hope for the day, only for a dirty and well fed rat to emerge and disappear into some small crack on one corner of the room. Apparently, the bastard and his relatives had been feeding on my bread for the whole night. I lost my appetite.
I was left stranded, with no breakfast and no water to shower. It was also impossible for me to get water from my neighbours (those who had water tanks in their houses) because all of them had already left to run their various errands.
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interesting read. dont we hate it when that happens!!
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