A great escape from the city, swapping the leafy suburbs with dusty hills of Rift Valley

Last weekend, my household and I drove out of town carrying all our earthly possessions, presumably for the last time, and arrived at a location on the edge of the Rift Valley.

I like the idea of writing on the edge, which is what I hope to be doing from here, and I have finally secured what Virginia Woolf calls "a room of her own“, meaning a private space where every writer should retreat to write.

But this is not some literary adventure; this is the first time we are putting down roots, settling to a new home, not moving house.

Like Mr Biswas in V S Naipul‘s A House for Mr Biswas, I hope this is the last time that the house furniture is being moved.

And just like Mr Biswas, I am enthralled at the sight of the sun-rays trickling through the bay windows, spreading through the house with a magical glint.

Yes, I have given up the house in the leafy suburbs of Nairobi for the fabled dust-drenched plains of Maasailand; but I am yet to experience the dust: only showers of blessings that soaked the land and grounded the truck that delivered us there.

And there is the massive wind that blows day and night, leaving a numbing chill in its wake.

I feel so close to nature, I am just thinking of ways to harvest the wind and the sun to power the home.

Besides the romanticism that afflicts first-time home owners, there are some practical realities one has to face up pretty quickly.

When power supply is interrupted there is no expectation that a neighbour has rung Kenya Power for reconnection.

And when the taps run dry, there is no caretaker to call and demand instant supply.

At least that‘s the illusion of community, as Tumaini‘s Guka summed it up, that assails many urban families. Here, one is on his own.

Yet, no one verbalises the challenges of urban-rural migration better than the young man of the house Tumaini.

“I am not used to this Kitengela thing,” he said when the TV screen blinked blankly because the cable TV technician had yet to arrive and hook us up.

SPEAKING LOUDLY

Other members of the family might not be speaking too loudly about things that they find disconcerting, but someone was distracted enough to have left a tap running, draining a whole tank in only a few hours, and new supplies couldn‘t be ordered immediately for fear of the trucker being stuck in the mud.

Meanwhile, we were nearly drowning under rain water, some of which seeped through the chimney and into the ceiling, stretching its belly and staining the whiteness of the boards before the paint could dry up.

There is a finality that our exodus heralds: it is unlikely that we shall be anybody‘s tenants again, at least not in this part of the world.

The location of my new abode somewhat reveals my transient state: it is close to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, and my travelling bags are not somewhere in the attic but close by for easy retrieval.

This calls to mind one of the best-loved family jokes about my great escape from the city to the village and the memorable brown bag that I had pilfered from mother‘s bedroom at the age of 14.

I have made yet another escape from the city, this time for the long haul, I feel, but time will tell how long that shall be.