Farewell to a boyhood when the village teemed with life and some swag

This morning, I'll return to my land of birth to bury a dear friend and relation, Paul Kibe. The news of his sudden illness took me to the KU Referral and Teaching Hospital-and the resultant Google Maps misadventures that I recounted last week. Brother Paul, or more commonly, Fauro, as we localised his name with a bit of swag, was part of a quintet born within months of each other, so we did virtually everything together: sprinting to school barefoot with small knapsacks pounding the small of our backs. Fauro's household was the only one within our connections that boasted of a clock- the rest of us relied on our eyes to detect the first light of day, which was seldom, or listening out for cockcrow. So the task of rousing me out of slumber-munene wa iroto, the dream master, as my mother would sneer because of my sleeping ways-fell on Fauro. He would yell at the top of his lungs as he made his way to school. His face and feet were washed; his lunch was packed and he was ready to face the new day. That's the roundabout way of saying the rest of us routinely scrambled out of bed and trotted to catch up with Fauro all day. The evenings were calm: we assembled on a molehill swept by the gush from the eucalyptus on the property we knew as Gwa Githuri and shared morsels that had we saved from our lunch: ngwaci, ugali, githeri. We had learnt early on that: a) one shouldn't eat alone, b) one shouldn't walk alone and c) giving is better than receiving. That sounds like such a novelty, but it was the way we lived. At teenage, the quintet comprising of Fauro and I and three other cousins faced the knife, drawing a curtain on boyhood visanga, from breaking limbs, falling off trees, when surviving the prospects of an eye being gouged because one had dared the other to shoot in the eye Alternatively, sparing our heads from crashing into trunks of casuarina trees, as we hurtled down at supersonic speed. Post-high school training consigned us to the four directions of the wind. Fauro ended up apprenticing with a multinational firm that assembled vehicles, beginning a life full of travel that took him to different parts of the country, and ultimately the region. We remained in touch, writing letters and ultimately visiting each other when life permitted it. Fauro had a slight stutter which often surfaced when he was agitated. I recall one such moment, on a soup and mutura outing, which was marred by a strange find in Fauro's cup. "There is a living thing in my cup," he said. The butcher, a little man we knew as Kiingati, expressed his scepticism, implying the establishment's sanitary conditions were beyond reproach. The specimen that Fauro suspected to be in his cup was a tiny roach, so it couldn't possibly have been living in the boiling pot. "Are you suggesting I retrieved a roach from my pocket?" Fauro thundered. That's the man I knew and cared for, so when I saw him a fortnight ago, almost lifeless, a network of pipes jutting in and out of his body to help him breathe, eat, and all the functions we do without even knowing, I was overwhelmed by dubiously deep questions about life. It's the same question that we wrestled last Sunday, over muratina, as one of the original quintet-one other member passed on last year- wept that Fauro's work was done and that he was on the cusp of life in retirement, settling to enjoy the fruits of his labour. One could say journey is the destination, and Fauro has embarked on a journey with no return. I was privileged to walk with him in this life, on a journey without a defined destination.

Farewell to a boyhood when the village teemed with life and some swag

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Farewell to a boyhood when the village teemed with life and some swag

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