Service with a Smile

Disaster! The heel has come off one of my indispensible black shoes and I must get it repaired…

Those of you who are acquainted with my footwear preferences may be surprised to know that the week before leaving England I invested – with considerable reluctance – in a pair of sensible, flat, sturdy black shoes. With a heavy heart I put to the back of my wardrobe the pink, the spotty, the red, the shiny and all the other frivolous pairs I have acquired over the years and left them to hibernate while I am away. Putting on the new pair for the first time when I arrived here took some effort and I was glad not to have a mirror to see how they looked. But from that moment they have barely left my feet (except at night of course…). They grip the gritty roads, disperse the red dust and repel the heaviest of rain; what's more they are blissfully comfortable – and in short have become treasured possessions. So it is off to Kanungu I trek this Saturday morning to get them repaired, I hope, at the shoemaker's shop. Robert, the only shoe-repairer in town, has a reputation for procrastination, however, and Novias warns me that she has been waiting for weeks for her shoes to be repaired; every time she calls in at the shop, he tells her they will be ready "very soon". Does he take bribes, I wonder? If the police do (more of that some other time!) then surely I can hope that shoe menders do too? I am desperate to get my shoes back into service…

I have to wear my only other pair of shoes, my "church" shoes (which are of the unsuitable variety) to walk there and I slip and slither on the stony, dusty road as I go. I join the growing crowds of people walking to the market, some with wares to sell on their heads, some with babies strapped to their backs, most barefoot – including some very elderly women – so feel doubly self-conscious about my silly shoes as I scramble along beside them. Robert's shop, when I finally get there, is packed with black shoes: some in pairs and others randomly heaped together on the counter and shelves long separated from their partners, looking like some lonely-hearts club for shoes out on a singles night. At one end of his little shop is his table with shoe lasts, a sewing machine and the other tools of his trade; at the other his shoe-repairing stand. He greets me affectionately, as people do out here: "You are welcome! We love you!" is a typical greeting. And yes, he can repair my shoe today, with either a used piece of heel rubber or a new one, whichever I would prefer – rather like having a retread instead of a new tyre, I suppose - a choice I have certainly never been offered at Timpson's. A short time later my shoe is ready. "Thank you for choosing my establishment to get your shoe mended" he says gravely as he shakes my hand - for all the world as if he thinks that Kanungu is full of rival repair shops all vying for my custom – and I pay him the 3000sh – about £1 - for the new heel plus an expert shoe-shine job. If I walk with a slight limp, due to the fact that one shoe is now a good few millimeters higher than the other, who cares? I have my shoes back and all is well with the world!

The power is off all day today but no-one seems much bothered by this fact. Electricity only arrived here less than a year ago and few even of the houses that have it use it much, fearing it as another drain on their finances and another bill to pay( none of the school staff, incidentally, not even the Headmaster, have electricity!). This means there are very few of the everyday gadgets and machines around that are so much a part of our everyday life in the UK. Most I miss very little: never having been a great television watcher the lack of it doesn't bother me at all. No-one uses kettles out here: we have the luxury of a two-burner calor gas hob for cooking ( although most villagers cook over open fires) and we heat up water for drinks in pans – a bit tedious but perfectly manageable. There is no toaster, indeed there are no kitchen gadgets of any kind; and no hot water at the sink – we wash up in cold. The washing, too, is done in big bowls of cold water on the grass where there is an outside tap. I had forgotten the sheer effort involved in washing sheets and towels by hand! But things dry quickly in the hot midday sun, draped on the hedge, even if they haven't been very well wrung out. However, with so many quiet evenings on my own what I do miss is the radio. The reception up here in the hills is very poor and the wave-lengths change at different times of the day; so that although I have a wind-up short-wave radio – a very thoughtful birthday present – I cannot usually access the BBC World Service for more than a few tantalizing moments at a time. I sit on my bed, feeling like a secret agent in a war-film, twiddling the knob of the radio painfully slowly, hoping to find the exact perfect spot where I will be able to hear voices above the high-pitched whistling, the strange underwater gurgling sounds and the monstrous crackling. If I am lucky enough to find that spot then I must sit in precisely the same position, holding the radio stock still (regardless of the extreme discomfort this inevitably brings) as the slightest movement will result in losing the precious connection. The only benefit of this is that the global financial crisis has passed me by almost entirely – the price of bananas down the road is all I know about – for which many must envy me very deeply….

Sunday arrives and I am up early, determined not to be caught out as I was last week. The College service is at 9.00am: I have had a personal written invitation stating as much, as this is a special 'thanksgiving' service to raise money to buy a keyboard and sound system for the chapel. I arrive promptly only to find that 9.00 is a very approximate start time and a few people are just beginning to set up the keyboard and speakers that have been hired for the day to demonstrate what an asset they would be. A family of birds that nests in the roof swoops in and out as we sit waiting – the building is largely open at the sides as it would be unbearably hot otherwise under the tin roof. At 9.45 we start singing hymns to pass the time – a medley of cheerful gospel-style favourites accompanied by the usual drumming – while people drift in. The two-hundred-odd boarders from Kirima Primary School arrive at about 10.00, more people saunter in, then a while later a priest arrives; and at about 10.30 the service officially starts. This is the very elastic 'Africa time' that I have been warned about! I am more than ready to sit down after 45 minutes of energetic hymn singing - but that was just the warm-up. Still to come are unhurried welcomes and introductions, songs from the children, songs from the choir, hymns for the rest of us – all full of lively clapping, dancing, waving and swaying – as well as, ingeniously absorbed somehow into the middle of all this, the usual order of service. Unused to having an accompanist the choir starts all the singing off rather than the other way round leaving the keyboard player to try to identify the key they are singing in. This involves a lot of trial and error and he usually finds it by the final verse, having effectively ruined the rest of the music with his loudly amplified chromatic wanderings through many keys to get there. The speakers are plugged into several old car batteries as there is no power again today, and from time to time they pick up the keyboard player's mobile phone power-surges which then pulsate through the hall violently. I suspect that I am not the only one who prays that, while of course we all want the money to be raised for the new equipment – Lord, let it not be too soon…

It's 11.30 by now and the sermon is about to begin. Any hopes that this will be short are soon dispelled: just as I think that the preacher – whose delivery is passionately evangelical and longwinded – has finished, he starts to repeat the whole thing in Ruchiga for the benefit of those whose English is not good. The college Principal, has, I note, nodded off beside me and who can blame him? 12.15 arrives and the sermon finally ends; the priest taking the service, however, obviously feeling that the visiting preacher hasn't made his point well enough, reiterates much of what he has said then adds a few points of his own. The gist of their messages is first 'give' and secondly 'plan', both worthy sentiments but neither necessarily improved by the tortuous elaboration to which they have been subjected ...

But now comes the most entertaining part of the service: the collection. Money is given by some but the less well-off have brought produce instead – sticks of sugar cane, pineapples, passion-fruit, eggs, papaya – and even a live hen. These are piled up by the altar, the hen (legs tied together) sitting on a heap of pineapples. We still have the communion part of the service to come which takes place to the accompaniment of loud and reproachful clucking; and at last, at last, at 1.15pm we reach the final blessing. But can we go yet? No! We now have to auction all the produce so that these offerings can be turned into cash. The hen goes first, and I decide to buy the sugar cane for the school children who have sat quietly and uncomplainingly for over three hours and definitely deserve a reward (you cut it into short pieces and suck out the juice). The atmosphere becomes decidedly lively, raucous even, as successive items go up for sale and at 2.15pm I eventually stagger out clutching a bag of passion fruit and a pineapple, unsure whether I've been to a church service or a combination of a concert , a lecture, a party and an aerobics session. I'm exhausted!

I walk up the hill with Mercy and her friend Excellent Jolly (surely the happiest name in the world!) from the Primary School. "Did you feel the earthquake last night?" they ask. I'm relieved that I didn't imagine it, fearing that my juddering bed and rattling windows might merely have been the product of the nightmare-inducing Lariam pill that I take once a week on Saturdays to prevent malaria. I find out later that it registered 5.2 on the Richter scale and had its epicentre in nearby Congo. Because of the weakness in the Earth's crust beneath the Rift Valley these tremors happen quite often, apparently. A moving experience of a different kind to add to the many others I'm having here….