A colleague had gone to his fiancee's place in Nairobi last weekend, as the rest of us headed to coast for a team building get-together. On Monday morning as we were shaking hands to part was for a day's break before we resumed business the following day, he called one of us saying that he had an urgent matter to talk with him about. So the friend requested me o stay with him a while longer while he waited for him to travel from Hurma to the CBD. When he arrived he and was asked what the serious matter was, he formed a dishonourable, shy smile, pulled him away from me and told him that he wanted him to lend him some money to go home.
Unfortunately the friend did not have money and instead advised him to try and see whether I could help him. Since I did not have liquid cash, we chatted our way to a nearby ATM along Muindi Mbingu street, my friend poking him a little about how he had spent the ten thousand we were given each by he employer, just within two days.
When I jokingly comforted that men are blind spenders in the presence of women they are in love with, his despondency found a leeway and h started emptying his heart.
He lamented that he was sure that his wife-to-be who happens to be from Kambaland uses potent potions to blindfold him into spending lavishly with her, only to leave a pauper after he leaves her. I joked that he should dump her for a better wife who doesn't fleece him but he contradicted himself by saying that he could be the problem because he once had another girlfriend from central Kenya and that he used t have the same financial hurdles.
The other colleague suggested that there was nothing supernatural in that, stating that our friend was not I this web alone as he knew friends f his who spend all their money entertaining mistresses a and fail to go home with the sachet of salt that their wives had requested or even half a kg of sugar. They sometimes even find themselves without the fare to back to their places of residence, and they start begging coins from strangers saying that they had been attacked by abductors and robbed.
Finally it becomes crystal clear that many men have a lot financial weaknesses while with their female lovers, it is not just a problem unique to my colleague at work.
Hassan, a jua kali artisan along the Mombasa road in Nairobi admits having suffered this problem as young man boasts to have wisely combated it by ensuring that he always carried exactly the right amount of money that he estimated he needed while with his girlfriend. He says that though he often felt embarrassed whenever he told his girlfriend hat he no more money left, it saved him the disgrace he had been having of buying her expensive gifts and return to beg food from friends in Nairobi.
In fact, he confesses that this helped him get the opportunity t love his girlfriend better that he finally decided to marry her. He says that at first he felt that the lady was using charms on him and thus did not feel fully free while with her. When he finally gained control of his spending, he discovered that he had been his own problem and grew more in love with her up to last year they exchanged vows in a colorful wedding at the Nairobi Arboretum. He also got surprised how the lady also adjusted her behavior and stopped asking for impromptu gifts and niceties.
For Kamaliza, a popular mason around Mwingi town, women are best described as devil sent demons. He recalls a time he left home to Kitui to pay school fees for his son who was in form three then. He says that he decided to spend the night in Kitui town cooling his intestines a little before proceeding to St. Charles Lwanga to pay school fees the following morning. He narrates his grievous ordeal with a twilight girl who dulled his wit and fleeced him all the seven thousand he had meant for fees. He recounts his shameful worry the following morning as he combed Kitui town looking for a neighbor who worked as a conductor to assist him with the fare go back home, instead of going to school to clear his sons school fees. Asked by a fellow mason whether she had tricked him to take more beer than he could bear and then robbed him he refuses, saying that he spent the money himself, adding that he was not even that drunk as he had only taken only three bottles of Alsopps.
According to him, this served as the toughest lesson of his lifetime. This is because when he finally traced he neighbor, he told him that he cold stay in his house while sought fare for him citing the fact that he was broke and it was not yet month end. He recalls how he spent a whole week sleeping on the floor in a 'boy's house' when he was a rich man with a boastful mansion at home. After getting the fare and going home, he cheated his wife that he had been arrested by police on his way from paying school fees by police on patrol and had been incarcerated. To cover it up, he borrowed money from another man he had been constructing a house and sent a cousin of his to clear the fees to void the son from being send home as this would make him lose his wife's trust.
He says that since that day, he vowed to himself never to entertain any woman's company, let alone an affair, apart from his wife. Nzomo, a linguistics graduate from Moi University recalls a time he was on the verge of dropping from school, the result of a flamy love affair with a classmate. The young man, who is now working as a PR officer with a well known church foundation, says that only receiving Christ helped him regain his sobriety after he had reached what he calls the edge of the cliff.
On a Sunday morning, when the end of semester examinations were beginning the following morning, it had chillily dawned on him that he had a fee balance and would not be able to secure an exam card to sit the morning paper, attempts of persuading the dean of school the whole of the foregoing week by colleagues had not borne any fruits and he now faced the disaster of forfeiting a whole academic year.
His parents had given him all the school fees he had requested as well receiving a help loan from the higher education loans board. He felt totally cornered and he found that what he terms his own extinction inevitable.
He rejoices that he embraced bold and urgent measures and somehow maneuvered the damning situation. He beeped his girlfriend and when she called back he termed her daughter f a bitch and Lucifer herself. Before she could ask him what the matter was, he had without hesitance announced to her that the affair was over and that he had received Jesus as his personal savior.
He hurriedly dressed in a suit and a tie ad joined other believers at the Christian union service where after the sermon and the evangelist was asking whether there was anyone willing to break the yoke of sin and receive Jesus, he said he was.
He walked tearfully to the pulpit upon request by the pastor. After saying some short prayer after the jubilant preacher, in denial of the evil one and in acceptance of handing over his heavy burdens to the son of man, he announced to the congregation, sobbing, that he had lost his both parents to grisly road accident along the Nairobi-Machakos road the previous year, and that he was facing failure to sit the exam owing to a fee balance of twenty thousand. The officials, after a short discussion, asked the rest of the church to give generously towards educating the orphan fees, the chairman sermonizing that whomsoever helps the fatherless helps god himself. They collected a total of sixteen thousand; the remaining was sourced from the union's treasury. He so narrowly escaped the grueling nightmare!
Despite working as a taxi driver in Eldoret town for over a decade, he doesn't have a family, not even a makeshift structure in the name of a house at home. He tearfully laments that women have conspired to milk him to the grave. That is Ulomola for you, the man who swears his dental formula that that women and the devil are birds of a feather. He recalls a time in 2009 when was hospitalized for three months at the moi teaching hospital and referral, the bill totaling 159,000 but could not raise a single cent towards is cost. It took the benevolence of well wishers and relatives who contributed the amount at a fundraiser organized by his aged mother.
Saying this, tears easily ooze from his eyes, realizing that women have for him become a downfall he could do nothing about. He weeps as he realizes as if for the first time that he's never bought his mother single piece clothing, not even a handkerchief, while he has spent thousands buying other men's wives clothes.
If you think the above suffered any major ignominy, then you have perhaps never heard of Musyoka's tribulation that sold all his acres of land and relocated to the love of his life's residence at Matuu. Within four moths, all the 300,000 was over and the mother of one called he clan and announced that someone had visited her home and had refused to go away, and could they help her chase him away?
However the middle aged man is alive and can at least tell his story while hoping against hope to chance upon a jackpot some day. Better him. One Musyoki, once upon a time, people of Mwingi tell you, had a crafty lover from Kirinyaga, and he duo appeared inseparably interwoven by the unbreakable trammels of love until the regrettable events of 1987.
She persuaded him to write a will, because demise was no fool of age, not even love, and he never knew the hour or the minute. After he had written that all his millions could be given to his mistress on the occasion of his death, the woman hired goons and before sun set she had all the wealth to her name.
2010-11-01
