Beginner’s bad luck

 

By BENSON RIUNGU
Memoirs of a scribe; Beginner’s bad luck: Kivaa Town sits on the banks of River Tana, where a bridge crosses the narrow end of Gitaru Dam and connects Machakos and Embu counties.
In the early 1980s, it was a flyblown little town whose sight did nothing to raise a traveller’s spirits, least of all of one whose feet were sore from walking, and who did not have two coins to rub together in his pocket.
To get there, I had been forced to walk some 12 kilometres down a little used road from Masinga Dam to the main road from Matuu to Kivaa and Embu beyond. Counting the 12km I had walked in the morning between Masinga Town and the dam, that was a total of 24 kilometres without a drop of water to drink in the kind of heat that Sunday school teachers use to describe hell, and, hopefully, persuade children to embrace a God-fearing life.
Darkness was gathering when I reached Gitaru Dam, and I was wondering how to talk total strangers into giving me food and somewhere to sleep when a motorcycle came roaring over the bridge. The rider, dressed in a T-shirt to expose tattooed sinewy biceps, looked familiar.
He stopped not far from where I stood and I recognised Songomo, an old schoolmate who used to spend his free time pumping iron and practising karate moves. Ours was a happy reunion, and it turned out that Songomo was a businessman of some importance in Kivaa Town.
Significantly for me, Songomo ran a bar and owned lodgings, and his generosity was unstinting. In the morning, I shamefacedly explained my financial predicament, and he kindly offered to pay by matatu fare to Embu Town, and even dropped me off at Kiritiri, where I could get transport.
To trim the fat off a long story, I eventually made my way back to Nairobi. By combining the little information I could glean on Masinga Dam from official sources with a large dose of the writer’s travails, I turned a failed assignment into a success of sorts. I turned journalism on its head by making the reporter the subject of the story.