If there is one thing our village is extremely good at, then it’s being innovative. Like this place where people used to serve ugali accompanied by torn pieces of chapati or salty water when vegetables are no longer in season!
And because mobile phones were a pipe dream back then, youths of opposite sex used very creative ways to access their objects of desire, especially when they needed to meet at night for activities that the Bible frowns upon.
Before girls retire for the night, they would tie a long sisal rope on their ankles that would extend all the way out through holes made by stray mongrels marking their territory using urine on the mud walled houses.
At night, when fathers were dead asleep, the girl’s lovers would creep into the homestead and tug on the rope. And just like that, parents woke up a month later and found their daughter throwing up like madness.
Like mobile phones, these ‘improvised village calls’ came with challenges. Sometimes the men got ‘missed calls’, that is they would tug on the ropes, but the girl would be dead asleep and never felt a thing. Sometimes, they dialled a ‘wrong number’.
Some would tug on the rope and out came the elder sister who was probably going for a pee. Sometimes, the boys ‘misdialled’. They pulled on the rope only for to hear a goat bleating!
Once in a while the girls used to get ‘spam calls’, which is when the village night runner pulled the ropes violently and bolted off, laughing his ass off like a lunatic.
The worst of it all was getting ‘blueticked’. That was after tugging the rope it got hastily pulled inside and no one came out! This was due to various reasons.
Maybe the lady heard her parents’ bed creaking and knew they were still awake and got scared of getting caught tiptoeing out.
Or maybe she could be mad at the guy for imagining she was him taking a phone number (gesturing in ways that could suggest she was directing him to which part of the house she slept) from another lady. Basically, every man yearned for a successful ‘call’.
I recall the girls at one pastor’s homestead were really famous for calls during the holiday season. They actually turned their father’s homes into a customer care call centre. Their phone booth was always ringing and they ever accepted the numerous incoming ‘calls’.
People were always visiting to make some midnight deposits. However, during the day they transformed into wingless angels.
Their father, blinded by the love he had for them, he normally praised and defended the girls more than he did Jesus.
To him those were the purest of souls, and if ever came a day when the world needed to sacrifice the untouched, to save ourselves from calamity, this man would gladly volunteer his daughters.
So the events at the pastor’s house went on for weeks until one particular day when he woke up in the middle of the night to answer a call of nature and decided to take a walk around his worn out house, for either security purposes or instructions from the witchdoctor.
As he passed the back of the house he noticed several long ropes lying on the ground.
Curious on what’s on the other end, he picked one rope and he pulled it. The lady inside assumed her date was messing with her and decided to let him have his fun.
The pulling grew intense but since she couldn’t shout for fear of being heard, the lady bit her tongue and slightly resisted the force.
This made the pastor even more motivated and he dug his heels and put all his strength on it. Suddenly there were screams and a painfully distressed foot popped out of the wall.
Shocked beyond words, the good old pastor was blessed with the agility of an antelope and was found almost a kilometre away on his knees, praying.
Amidst all the confusion, the ladies managed to safely tuck their ‘phones’ away. To date their father believes the foot of “Moses” spoke to him.
I guess it was a win-win on both sides as the ladies never got caught and the pastor’s congregation has doubled, as all people in the village flooded the church to hear about the good words the foot conveyed.
As for the ladies, they got pregnant and gave birth to kids while still living under his roof. You don’t want to know how the pastor explained it to those who were looking up to him and his daughters.