Kajiado woman believes she is the world’s oldest living being

Oldest woman Mary Tapasien,aged 112 years in Mashuru Sub location,Kajiado county. Photo/Elvis Ogina (Nairobi) September 16th,2016.

Today is International Day of Older Persons and what better way to mark it than with the story of a remarkable granny.

Forget Emma Morano of Italy who is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest at 116.

Mary Tapasian from Kajiado believes she is the world’s oldest living being. According to her children, Mary has more than 300 descendants. She has ten children and 74 grandchildren.

One grandchild is 58 years, yet he isn’t even the oldest. One son is 95 years old and hardly gets out of bed. Her eldest son died in 2014. He was 104 years old then. But how old is Mary? Her identity card says she is 112, having been born in 1904, but her family insists she is much older. Maybe 130 years old. It could be.

If Mary’s late son would have been 106 this year, then, according to her official age, she gave birth to him when she was only six!

Her family cherish her.

“During her birthday in 2013, all her descendants were here and we were more than 300,” says Daniel Tapasian, her 77-year old fifth child.

Though she is blind, is partially deaf and visibly frail, she is still mentally sharp and cracks jokes now and then. This granny is not only lively, but is also very generous.

Her son says when her younger grandchildren visit her on their way to boarding school, she gives them pocket money and blesses them.

Jovial woman

“When we were young, if you were in low spirits, she was the person to talk to. Should would make you laugh with her many jokes. There is never a dull moment with her. And she is very generous too. I think she sacrifices too much for the happiness of others,” Daniel says.

But pray what is her secret to such a long life? Well milk, meat, soup and animal fat, she says. And she does not eat food fried with commercial cooking fat. Her food is fried in animal fat or ghee.

If you cook with anything else, she can tell immediately, her son reveals. “But I eat everything! Ugali, rice, chapati, everything!” she exclaims. Her husband died in 1977 and she she says all her agemates are dead. But the real reason she is alive is divine, she says. “It is God who has enabled me to live this long,” says the granny who is a born again Christian.

Mary has lived through momentous periods in history. She was alive during the First and Second World Wars. As recalls those days, she even breaks into war songs. She knows very well how the Mau Mau fought hard against the colonialists to secure Kenya’s freedom. Back then, she would ferry milk from Kajiado to sell in Nairobi.

This forced her to learn some Kiswahili, so that she can trade with ease.

Another remarkable occurrence she has experienced is the advancement of technology. She says she witnessed the first railway being built.

 

In fact, her husband used to work in a locomotive train, shoveling coal in the train. She says she is aware of more advancements in transport.

“I hear that there is another one being built by some Chinese,” she says, referring to the Standard Gauge Railway, whose construction has already started near her home in Konza.

But what’s her view of the changing times and technology? She hates it.

“Things have changed a lot. The world is terrible. People keep killing each other everywhere. People have cold hearts. It’s sad.”

It was not like that when she was growing up. Back then, people loved genuinely, she says. She doesn’t like mobile phones either, because they interrupt privacy and limit face-to-face communication. The interesting thing is that, old as she is, she does not get the State’s monthly allowance that is meant to be given to the elderly.

“In other counties, women are given money and supported by the government when they are past a certain age. Our mother is much older than those people yet she has never received anything,” says her son Daniel.

The International Day of Older Persons is an opportunity to highlight the important contributions that older people make to society and raise awareness of the issues and challenges of ageing in today’s world.