"You Should Have Been Here!"
Nairobi #7

Arriving in Nairobi, I learned I missed the best part of recent weeks:

Bert, we had such a magnificent new year's party and all the time said you should have been here. I had planned a nice small party for some 20 intimate friends, starting at six. In the morning I would play a game of golf with my European guests, one of whom is a golf pro. Coming home from golf, around three, we saw a group of about thirty Kenyans, mostly children, in the swimming pool area. My golf partners went in for a shower and a rest. On the veranda I found family and friends of my Kenyan boyfriend, who had understood the party would start at two and had missed the plot of receiving a limited list of invited guests. His guests were colossal Maasai women in impeccable colourful tent size dresses. The most outgoing two of them wore heavily undersized bra's to allow for regular inadvertent dropouts of their gigantic tits, which then would be stuffed back under conspicuous giggling. This veranda group, I presumed, had brought the swimming pool party, of whom nobody felt the need to come up to make acquaintance with me. In the kitchen I found my dinner shopping cooked and served out, the "soda"-stock thoroughly finished by the swim party, other drinks on the verge of depletion. My new Kenyan kitchen women was in total control of smoothly processing and serving the remainder of my food stock, actually quite a good piece of work, a real pity I had to fire her a few weeks later for systematically stealing money. My friend W (decently grumpy, for aware that the massive events were unplanned) was making some traditional European new year's eve dishes, not trying to hide her contempt for the smooth but untimely kitchen logistics around her. Two hours to go to the start of MY party!
I made a new shopping list. Gave my house keeper the keys of my brand new white Toyota Landcruiser to go for a thorough kitchen refill. 

Left: Anne and her (no not hippo) Landcruiser.

Suddenly we heard sirens and saw the glowing of flashing lights on the street side at our gate. This transpired to mark the arrival of the ambassador of one of the most powerful nations on earth. One of the veranda ladies of my Maasai's boyfriend entourage turned out to be his new girlfriend. Two tin cans of armed muscular white security in dark grey party suits got opened by one of His Excellency's assistants and spread over the premises, taking place behind concrete garden walls, in tree tops and at the gate. The ambassador assumed a Red Indian face colour when he first caught sight of the undersized bras holding oversized tits and their owners were swiftly hustled by their friends to the back garden seats. To avoid the impression of an expulsion, part of the veranda followed suit.
Meanwhile my house keeper carried in our backup food delivery and after setting the kitchen at work I decided I would NOT let myself be averted from my joy in having a NICE new year's eve. So I poured a wine and, leaving the ambassador with his girlfriend in the Maasai company on the veranda, joined the back garden group, which was just reaching the state of drunkenness in which one does no longer care to stuff back what fell out. In the dark a muscular white figure in dark grey suit approached us from the side of the house, but my fear for unpleasant ambassadorial security discussions was unnecessary. It was my pro-golfer guest who after his shower and rest, looking out of his window, had erroneously inferred the dress code of the evening from the outfit of the ambassador's security guards. We got him a drink and explained the matter, tits and all, on the basis of which he decided to keep his dress for the rest of the evening, sitting in the back garden where also my other European and African best friends joined for food and drinks. I enjoyed the company so much that I did not notice the swimming 30 had moved out without even saying goodbye to me. But was reported that on the veranda the ambassador had said he'd never seen such a nice and well organized party, so "informal and relaxing", that he was simply obliged to go to a next party but would surely return after fulfilling the minimum of his obligations. Then I was reported that the Maasai veranda community started to gossip about the rude inhospitality of my sitting all evening in the dark of my back garden. I decided not to give a fuck.
Midnight approached. I went to the kitchen to have Champaign poured out, went with the first tray to toast with the veranda party. My back garden party guests came up, music gained volume, fireworks splashed out in the garden and everybody danced together, while I was told that the Champaign action had fully cleared my image in the Maasai community. [end of interview]

It was surely bad luck that I missed all that Anne related in the interview above but I was easily consoled: Nairobi temperatures made me quickly recover from the heat of Uganda's dry season (Uganda's Victoria Lake is 600m lower, that is, on average 3.6^o warmer than Nairobi). I also got elected, balloted and installed as Official Full Member of Royal Nairobi Golf Club - if you have Anne behind you, you'll steam through anything, even this ^{[how did she do it?]} -, proudly endowed with a Real Plastic Member's Swipe Card instead of the hateful provisional cardboard one. I extended my longest drive record. 260m at 825 millibar, according to confessed golf rules-of-thumb - x% lower pressure yields x% longer distance - should make 230m at sea level, but this might be difficult to repeat once the fairways will again be less dry and hard.

I often call Annemarie "smart but uneducated", epithets she proudly helps spreading personally. Here she meets, to her great enjoyment, her equals as high end B&B guests: highly successful Dutch businessman Adje, starting up a rural Kenyan charity that is going to make a huge lot of money, and his sympathetic Dutch friend, assistant and English interpreter Abram, a fervent Pentecostal, here wearing one of his favourite wigs.

Between this visit and my last, Anne had precipitated herself in a host of other Nairobi business projects, from buying and letting real estate to managing Dano's photography school and selling and installing solar water heaters. She is now even busier than I can remember ever to have been in my vaguely remembered distant past before I headed for Africa, and this results in a focused maintenance of her tight schedule of deadlines by pushing and ordering around the wide circle of  pliable and compliant people she works with. Of course, she does not need the money, this is all fun and entertainment, but stress occurs, at least in my direction, every time she rediscovers that I can't be lined up in her manageable environment. On the other hand, she keeps playing her golf every other day, and in the evening always finds time to pleasantly empty the odd bottle of wine in agreeable company. "Zo zit ik in elkaar" ("That is the way I am put together"), she keeps saying in the charming voice we are used from her, best described as the energetic yapping of an adrenaline-rich little white poodle.

I do not remember ever in my now almost 60 years long life to have aired a mattress.