FREE FROM COCAINE AT LAST

Seven months of struggling, sweating, late nights and a lot of shillings later, I am through with my field report. Hot damn it feels good. Hot damn, it’s been long. I had even forgotten about the field study. It was in August last year, in the wilderness, for 40 28 days. Remember that? Probably not. The field work was hard and long but the report writing should have not even taken more than 2 weeks. We could have been through with it by September, but this being a third world country, our labs lacked equipment for analyzing samples and we had to take them to the government labs, and we all know how those are. Add high levels of procrastinations to that and you have report of 60 pages taking a whole 6 months to write. Kenya.
Anyway, 3 weeks ago, we finally got all the data we needed and truthfully, that is when the real report writing began. On the day of handing in the reports however we were hit with something we didn’t expect. Together with the hard copy (which cost an arm and 3 fingers to print in colour twice), we also had to submit the soft copy of the same. At first, I was pissed off because that meant spending more money but I found a blank disk lying somewhere so I was okay. And the hurry of beating the deadline, I did not realize that I had just burnt a 5 MB file on a 4.7 GB disk. What a waste. Do you have any idea how many porn movies would have fitted there. Then I was told it had to be on CD not DVD and I had to spend the money anyway. Then after submission I hear that the supervisors wanted the softcopy so as to run it through a plagiarism checker. What the fuck, I didn’t know that they are that advanced, I want the third world Kenya back. This technology will be the end of us.
I got to scan my report on one such program later only to score 4 % on originality. Which is kind of fucked up because I actually didn’t copy paste, as many would have expected. I swote (sweated?) writing that shit form scratch and all the ideas borrowed were properly referenced at the end of the report so I don’t get how that prog works. Someone pointed out that it just searched the web for the words in the report. Not even phrases, just words. Like if I used the word ‘and’ it got screened as a plagiarized word. So basically my whole report was plagiarized because I wrote it in English. Scumbag programs. The 4% were the names of the locations I was doing the field study. Words like Kwavonza don’t show up very often in Google’s English.
Anyway,  gone is the report and now enter the 4th year project. It’s due in 2 weeks. I haven’t started. Yeah yeah I know, I’m fucked.  But when life gives you lemons, thank God because it could have given you rotten avocados. For now I just want to lengthen this post by posting some of the pics I took in Kitui (where the field study was). I don’t know if I said this but that is a very rich place yet people live in poverty and drought. Women are the head of most families because the husbands are just drunkards or have abandoned their wives.

And then my earphones snapped on random Wednesday. Life in the field without music.

Sometimes we lacked tea and had to just eat bread with water. Yeah, that's right, this is a classmate 'dipping' bread in water. I actually didn't pull such stunts, you know, because I have saliva.

The sweets in Kitui had weird names. Like this one is named after the Migingo Island we have been fighting over with Uganda for. Migingo ni yetu translates to Migingo is ours. 

This was at the last supper bash. Goat meat was in plenty but this guy just wanted its balls. Homoperv, is the name we gave him. A straight guy that does gay things.  

Like I said, some parts of Kitui suffer from serious drought. This is a dry river. It  over  4 meters deep and 3 buses wide. It hadn't rained the whole of last year apparently. Guys have to dig the sand to get to the water that might have been saved from evaporation.

This is how your feet look like immediately after taking a bath with the borehole water.  It is as salty and a prostitute's pussy. ( How the hell would I know that?) Moving on. 

The reason the roads here are so great is because there are no cars to spoil them. This is the school bus speeding down and empty road. This went on for a couple of minutes.

Don't you just hate it when you go down on a chick so hard that you break your glasses?

Random skull on a random shamba. Dont get it twisted folks. The area is not littered with carcasses all over. If it were I would have taken a better picture. This was probably those charm things I hear Kambas have. It was in the middle of a shamba and the owners didn't seem bothered by it.

We thought this was a type of yourghut when it was bought, luckily we had a girl in  our group that explained in detail why we should not drink whipping cream. It was such a waste.

The interior however had bad narrow roads. A tree branch broke the bus' window. No  one was hurt though.

This one time we went to the Kitui Campus and the head bought us lunch at their lectures lounge. Rice, beef, chapati and cabbages. It cost him just 80 bob a plate. If it were in this campus, that would be well over 200 bob. Life in Kitui is cheaper. But still the poverty level there...

Kitui is like right smack dab in the middle of Kenya. So it was hard getting what this Kitui Beach Club was about. Seeing as to the fact that they are miles away from the closest ocean. Maybe it's an inside joke I dont get.

We had tonnes of shops with weird names over there. 'I wasn't going to buy anything. On second thought...'

This cow was freaking huge, sorry I dont have a scale against it as proof. The cows there are adapted or somethings. This one though belonged to the Kitui Campus

This is how the mandazis in Kitui look like. And the best part is one of them costs a shilling. Not like here in Nairobi where one such costs 5 shillings. These Kambas can cook. If you can ever find a place called Yakalia, but chapattis from there. I promise you will thank me.

This is a Yamaha helmet. No wait...
Yeah China fakes found Kitui. What was really funny about this was that it is labelled Ya -Maana which is Swahili for 'Useful' 

The Kambas have weird names and no one seems to point this out. This guy  has named his shop after him. Wilson Matiti Nzuli. That is almost Swahili for Wilson Breast Nice. If this guy went to high school outside Kitui, the name calling must have been endless.

I missed that shot but that is a guy seated in the hood of that matatu. I want to say that transportation here is an issue, but I wont.

Like I said, the sweets over there had weird names. 'Mom when you go to the shop can you buy me some Pussy?' I mean seriously!

Just China doing Chinese things.

That is all I have for now, these are the few pictures that remained after my phone lost its mind. I had backed these up on my Twitter. That place was awesome I enjoyed every bit of it. From the long freakishly hot days to the cold mosquitic nights. From the locals that thought we had come to cut off their tongues for sale to the women that work their asses off to support their families just because the husbands are drunkaholics. From the way we loved each other to the way the next minute a guy is breaking my glasses while scrambling for avocados. The food was that great by the way. Okay not the one we cooked ourselves but the one that we found in the market. Everything tasted different over there, sometimes in a nice way. Maybe it was the salty water, but either way, everything tasted awesome. Even the pack of glucose from the supermarket had a different taste. It would taste like a kiss from that celebrity crush that you admire so much. Its taste would make your heart pound and legs weak. Take you out of this world and put you in a paradise that you never want to leave. You never want it to leave your lips because it is the one that you want to make love with. That taste made you lust for more, because that rush of adrenaline is exhilarating. That taste would make you want to confess your love for it, but then stop you because you dont want to sound like you are on drugs talking to food.  That taste gives you dreams that you fantasize about. You will never forget that taste and will always be looking forward to have more. But then sometimes, during the day it would taste like earwax. I will miss it.