I stand at the door to Ruby’s room, watching as she yawns and stretches languidly in her bed. ‘The rest of the Nytol is all yours,’ I say, before plodding back to my room and sitting on the end of my bed, trying to muster the energy to get dressed for the day.
When I take my plates through to the kitchen after breakfast, I try to explain to Esther what happened. ‘Hey, sorry about this morning, Esther,’ I say. I’m a spoiled idiot who took too many antihistamines to try to escape the existential suffering of having an annoying job. ‘I, ah – I had an allergic reaction to some tablets I took last night. They made me a bit sick.’
‘Ohhh, pole sana,’ she says, as though there’s nothing that weird about finding someone covered in moisturising cream and gauze passed out next to a flat computer. ‘You are okay now?’ I don’t deserve her sympathy.
The Nytol horror really takes the shine off the bromazepam buzz. I realise the past month has been a blur. Despite our rules – never take it on duty, never drive while affected – we’ve still managed to sedate ourselves to the point that we’ve clearly developed a tolerance for the drug.
Besides that, my conscience has started to get to me. It’s pathetic, I realise, to become a pharmaceutical junkie because life in Walt’s house is ‘hard’. And ‘relaxing’ isn’t really helping me relax at all. It’s certainly not helping me get anything real done to be spending my downtime lazing on a sun lounger by the pool at the Club, guzzling G & Ts as I develop an equatorial tan, eating samosas and picking the crumbs off my chest, reading until my arms tire of holding the book up and my eyes can’t take the glare anymore, or the shade I’ve been dozing under shifts to the other side of the umbrella. Actually, it’s truly revolting. I’ve never found that sort of hedonism as enjoyable as it’s made out to be, and realise that getting hammered and sunburnt is only a temporary balm that sees me start my next shift with Walt even more irritable than I’d finished the last.
I make a promise to myself: to focus on getting the bodybuilding article written, and to stop being a sloth. Instead, to truly let off steam, I need to boil. I rededicate myself to the gym, and I get hooked on sweat instead of sedatives.
The gym is a relatively new addition to the Club’s facilities. It’s in a huge new annex behind the main building, with soaring ceilings and wide windows along the northern wall that look out onto the pool and open out over low hedges to let the fresh Nairobi breeze drift through the room, sweeping the sweat along with it. I sign in at the mahogany reception desk, where I’m handed a key to a locker in the change rooms. Jugs of chilled water infused with slices of lemon and mint sprigs sit on a silver tray in the hallway, tinkling with crystalline ice cubes. A wicker basket of freshly rolled towels is stationed at the door to the main room, along with bottles of spring water and wet washers. This is how I imagine North Shore mums in Sydney do ‘the gym’: a world away from the tin sheds cooled by pedestal fans that I grew up with in Mackay.
An attendant is walking slow lengths of the room, guiding a lamb’s-wool buffer across the polished wooden floorboards, while it hums at the thick red power cord trailing behind it. I feel bad about scuffing the waxy sheen, so I tiptoe across it in my socks, only putting my shoes on once I reach the equipment.
A couple of hefty personal trainers are on duty to instruct any guest who desires it. They seem painfully bored. One is called over to spot a couple of diplomats’ wives on Swiss balls. He guides them through gentle Pilates movements, and I can’t help but be amused by these accented ladies with alarmingly poor balance. They seem far more interested in the trainer’s company than his expertise.
I just want to run.
(This first visit would set the rules for what became a ritual: it was very important that I got the second treadmill along the northern wall. The second treadmill sat directly in front of an open window and had a clear view of the bright blue diving board at the deep end of the pool. I formed a relationship with that machine. Sometimes I’d wait twenty minutes for it to become free, even when all the others were available.)
The psychic cleansing begins with a series of soothing sounds and silent mantras. The fizzy zip of the tread on my shoes skidding over the grip of the belt. Fuck Walt, the spoiled old bastard. A plastic thunk and slosh as I slam my water bottle into the holder. Fuck Marguerite, the scatty old bitch. Towel folded over the rail, just so. Bobby pins in to hold stray hair off my face. A series of beeps as I set the incline and button up on speed. Fuck Fiona, the paranoid schemer. Fuck all these impossible cunts. Until a walk trips into a plodding jog and I fall into a run at thirteen kilometres per hour. And then, I just run. Run and breathe and sweat and blast music through my iPod. Run and stare in soft focus at the red numbers ticking over on the display, which shows time and distance rolling steadily forward. Run and stare at the yellow tracer creeping its way around a picture of a 400-metre oval, or Al Jazeera headlines about South Sudan becoming the world’s newest country, or the results of the mid-term elections in the United States. I run and stare out the window at the Kenyan nannies looking after other people’s children: broods of black and brown and white kids swirling around the pool, all squealing and laughing and crying together.
I run. At the three-minute mark, I find my rhythm. Lungs and legs sync up. At ten minutes, I feel euphoric and weightless, as though I could run forever. Seventeen minutes is when the pain sets in, and the digging begins. I rake over the slights of the previous twenty-four hours. A dirty look from Fiona because I coughed and disturbed Walt while he read his newspaper. Marguerite asking me to go and buy groceries for her, then driving off in the car she told me to take. Walt refusing to swallow his tablets at breakfast, then grabbing me by the wrist when I reached to put them back into the container, with a grip that pinched my radial nerve and sent a shock all the way up to the back of my neck. All of it burns like petrol.
From twenty-three minutes, it gets easy again. By the time the red numbers tick over to forty, I’m physically spent and spiritually renewed. I hit the stop button, take my weight on the handrails and place my feet on the sideboards until the belt whines to a stop.
I sit on my towel at the end of the machine, loosen my laces, let my arms hang from my knees and watch the sweat bead on my thighs, streak down my shinbones and drip from the end of my nose into a pool on the floor. I suck air in and blow it back out. Feel my pulse settle, and my joints ache, then finish off with a half-hour routine of body-weight exercises and stretching.
In the change rooms, none of it seems that bad anymore. Poor Walt is a dying old man. His daughter and wife just want what is best for him. My job isn’t hard: it’s an extraordinary chance to see Africa – I just need to make more of it.
I’m chastened, exhausted, and my life is put back into focus. Thousands of people are starving to death in a famine just a few hundred kilometres away, for fuck’s sake. People are getting blown up at bus stops for following the wrong religion. I’m beyond fortunate. I return to the house restored, with a wellspring of patience and perspective.
I leave early on the Friday morning of the Mr Kericho weekend.
I’ve managed to talk Ruby and two of the AYAD girls we met through Sarah and Jack into coming. A road trip through the western highlands to see the world’s biggest single tea plantation and some of the fittest men in the country – who’d say no to that?
Windows down, music up, we’re climbing the escarpment north out of Nairobi, taking turns to control the stereo: Fleetwood Mac and Florence and the Machine wail into the Great Rift Valley. We drive north past Mount Longonot, past Lake Naivasha, and past the Olkaria geothermal power station – soon to become the largest in the world. We drive past Lake Nakuru. We carry on west, towards Molo on the northern edge of the Mau Forest, and then … then, we get stuck.
A storm has ripped through the area. Trees have fallen, huge craters have opened up in the ground, live powerlines are thrashing and sparking across the road. Traffic is at a standstill, matatus and trucks and buses honking pointlessly.
But there’s no way around it, no turning back. This is the only road to Kericho. It’ll take as long as it takes.
We inch along, keeping our spirits up with karaoke renditions of Bruce Springsteen and Meatloaf. We play I-spy, and Ruby and I do impressions of Walt and Marguerite that have the AYAD girls in stitches. Whenever we catch up with ex-pats, we’re called upon for updates on life in the house. Although we’re always desperate for their news from the outside world – from people doing important and interesting work – they just want the latest on the colonial time-warp soap opera that all sounds too insane to actually be true.
It’s dark by the time we reach a junction where a couple of local men have appointed themselves traffic wardens in return for compulsory donations. A matatu is stuck on the side of the road, bogged in the mud on the siding. The passengers are resigned to their fate; sleeping faces press against the windows as the driver spins the wheels. Kericho is only 250 kilometres away, and what should have been a four and a half hour journey has already stretched to at least six.
I hold a two hundred bob note out the window, and the men stop the traffic coming from the other direction, allowing us to man oeuvre around a huge log and past a snaking electrical cable spitting sparks into the air. Just as we get through, we hear an almighty crack behind us: an even bigger tree has collapsed, completely blocking the road, and some of the branches have caught fire.
I hit the accelerator, but somewhere along the way I make a wrong turn. We end up on a dirt road winding around the side of a mountain, no phone reception, no map. A couple of women at a lonely duka selling sheepskin hats and warm Cokes assure us that Kericho isn’t much further, and so we press on, decidedly less confident than when we began the trip.
Faith pays off. Finally, around ten, we pass the Deliverance and Full Gospel tin-shed churches where Pentecostal Christian guidance is passed on to Kenya’s poor and humble, as long as they give the right amount in tithings. From God’s barns, we follow the lights of Kisumu-Busia Road to the Kericho Tea Hotel.
It’s only when we wake up in the morning that we can appreciate our lodgings for their faded former glory. The Kericho Tea Hotel was clearly the Club of this town in its day. A grand stone building set over manicured gardens, with a bar, and a ballroom and private bandas, it was the centre of the social scene for pre-Independence white settlers, who farmed tea on the surrounding highlands. And although these days it caters more to travelling Kenyan businessmen than wealthy mzungus, it seems that nothing – no chair, no bedspread, no curtain – has been updated since 1963. The only giveaway of the modern era is a framed picture of President Mwai Kibaki, hung on the wall above reception.
On our way to the primary school where the competition is being held, we pass by lush countryside: the deep green brush of tea plantations, flecked with the white sacks of pickers and their colourful kanga headscarves. The town of Kericho is considered the heart of Kenya’s sizeable tea industry – no other country in the world exports as much of the Camellia sinensis leaf. Something like half of every cup drunk in England comes from here, and a fair amount of that consumed in Egypt, Sudan and Pakistan too, making it Kenya’s biggest forex earner – though little of that cash reaches the labourers on the hills, who pocket less than 10 per cent of the price their crop earns at auction. The tension between the rise of corporatised agribusiness and small-scale farms is a perennial political issue.
Kericho seems an unlikely venue for a bodybuilding event, as the region is hardly known for its gym junkies. But once we arrive at the school, I realise there’s more to it than just the title.
A crowd of a few hundred people is milling around the car park. A couple of canvas booths are set up at the entrance to the main hall – they’re running free HIV tests, for competitors and spectators alike. It turns out the Mr Kericho competition is sponsored by the Walter Reed Project, a US Military HIV Research Program with a local base in town, and they’ve scheduled the event to coincide with World AIDS Day. Kenya has had great success in tackling the epidemic: the rate of infection is down to 6.3 per cent, less than half what it was a decade ago, thanks in large part to bold public-education campaigns like this one, which aim to overcome the stigma of the disease. The social etiquette around ‘knowing and disclosing your status’ is now standard fare for relationship advice columns, TV panel shows and drive-time radio talkback. Newspaper classifieds feature personal ads for ‘positives seeking positives’, women’s magazines run features titled ‘How many dates before you ask the Status Q?’ and despite the protestations of church groups, condoms are as widely available as Coca-Cola.
We make our way inside, where children’s desks have been pushed to the side and rows of plastic chairs set up for the audience. A roving theatre group dressed up as colonial police is entertaining the crowd. They’re wearing ‘white face’ and have stuffed their shirts to create saggy paunches, and are clowning around blowing whistles and wagging fingers in people’s faces, excellent mimics of the men who told their grandparents what to do.
While my friends find a good spot to watch from, I go backstage to get set up. Through a tangle of sweaty biceps and barbells I find Wilson and Joseph: the brothers I met at the junior event in Nairobi. Wilson is giving Joseph a pep talk while smearing him with cooking oil. ‘Symmetry, remember – left and right together!’ he urges, holding his arms up in a double curl, ‘and smile – you have to smile!’
Joseph flashes a tense grin, mirroring his brother’s example.
The men hustle to be registered at the weigh-in station, then queue up at a trestle table loaded with laptops and leads. A couple of young DJs are trying to keep track of a growing pile of competitors’ MP3 players and smartphones as they coordinate the playlists.
The emcee calls for a group prayer to kick off proceedings, and the hall falls silent as around fifty hulking men sit on school chairs with their heads bowed.
Finally, God acknowledged, the main event begins. Celine Dion yowls over the PA system with a medley of pop-ballad remixes as the first contestant struts onto the stage wearing a very small pair of Brisbane Broncos togs. He pirouettes away from the crowd, flexes his lats and pulls the maroon briefs taut across his clenched buttocks. ‘THAT’S MY TEAM!’ reads the yellow lettering – the old Australian National Rugby League slogan. Frenzy ensues. Teenage boys whoop, grown women shriek and children crouch by the stage with digital cameras while the judging panel watches on soberly, making hurried notes between poses.
Once the round is over, I go behind the curtains to find out more about the Broncos kit.
‘The mtumba,’ the man tells me. ‘There are many like this here!’ The word mtumba roughly translates from Swahili as ‘sackcloth’ but is more commonly used to refer to the enormous second-hand clothing market on the outskirts of Nairobi. All those bundles of outdated trends dumped at Vinnies after spring cleaning? The sad runs of commemorative hats for sporting teams that end up placing second? All that crap ends up over here, much more than anyone needs. The mtumba has had a devastating impact on local textile industries, with traditional garb giving way in a generation to the Nike swoosh. Recently, thanks to a ‘proudly African’ campaign among the continent’s fashion designers, there’s been a push to reclaim cultural identity, but it seems they’ve yet to corner the men’s spandex market.
And those briefs are a big deal, too. No one wants to wear the same pair on stage twice so competitors swap between rounds, and each man saves his best pair for the finals. The men are so unfazed by my presence (or my camera) that they readily strip right down to nothing. I avert my eyes out of respect, but there are so many mirrors around the place that I soon figure it’s best to leave the room until the costume changes are done.
On the bright side, the fact that they’re so relaxed means I’m able to observe that the atmosphere behind the scenes is one of genuine camaraderie. The men spot each other under heavy weights, and readily share training and dietary advice. Meat is an expensive luxury and supplements totally unaffordabl
e for most, so any tips on cheap protein alternatives are welcome. ‘Eggs, peanuts and milk for breakfast,’ recommends one guy. Another swears by ugali and beans.
The most fun – for the audience and contestants alike – comes with the two-minute ‘freepose’ rounds: here, each contestant shows off their best assets through choreographed moves set to cued lighting and music of their choice – more often than not, they’ve gone for a Backstreet Boys track. The performances fall somewhere between interpretive dance and aerobics, as the men strive to show off ‘personality’ and ‘stage presence’.
The prize pool this year of 133,000 shillings (about $1500 almost twice Kenya’s average yearly income) has drawn competitors from as far as Mombasa, 750 kilometres away on the coast, and Kampala in neighbouring Uganda. One particularly good display from Ivan Byekwaso – a twenty-six-year-old Ugandan who takes out the middleweight division – gets the crowd so worked up that the security guards are forced to remove some of the more inebriated supporters who are jealous of the interloper’s attention from women in the audience. For a moment, it seems these guys might cause a scene – but in the end they agree to leave peacefully.
For the KBBF, the event seems to be shaping up as a great success. The past few years have seen their dedicated efforts to building the sport pay off. It’s a great turnout, a mix of long-term supporters and a few curious passers-by for whom bodybuilding is a foreign – and evidently highly amusing – concept. There’s a bit of star power in it, too. Guest judge Paul Mwangale is a former Kericho man who last year was crowned world champion at the international FAME Bodybuilding Championship and has secured the sponsorship of a leading South African sports supplements brand. To the locals he’s a celebrity; to the other bodybuilders he’s an idol.
That night, twenty-eight-year-old Meshack ‘Priest’ Ochieng is crowned Mr Kericho. His nickname honours Lee Priest, the internationally renowned Australian body builder from Newcastle. Ochieng is a well-known and respected competitor. He stands just 160 centimetres tall but boasts an astonishingly solid physique, regularly topping the field in his welter-weight division. The audience erupts when he brings his wife and children on stage to accept his prize, then quiets as he’s handed the microphone.
I Built No Schools in Kenya Page 31