The day I took the times to the village

Back when I was a teenager in the 80s, I went to the big City of Nairobi like I usually did when I could afford it. I was fascinated by skyscrapers and loved sneaking into some of the tall buildings  taking the lift (Elevator) to the highest floor. I used to get a blood rush which for some reason made me want to pee as soon I got back to the ground.

On this day, I was walking by The New Stanley Hotel and as always there were many white tourists in the Khaki shorts and safari hats enjoying their drinks reading papers. Sometimes I would just go past but this day I stop and looked around and noticed a man struggling with what appeared to me as a newspaper but pretty wide.( many years later I found out they are called (Broadsheets)

As he rolled and folded the papers, I was impressed by how easy he seemed to manage it. So I looked around and found the newsstand and I approached a man  standing there how much the papers cost. He asked me which one and I pointed to the one one the white man was reading. He told me in Swahili that was The Times of London and it cost nine Shillings which to me was a fortune back then. I don't know whether he lied to me because the price on the paper was in British Pound.

As soon as he handed me the paper, I wanted to run. I had a feeling I now owned something that was rare and I did not want to be mugged. So I walked as fast as I could to Ngala where I boarded the evening bus heading to the village. I could not wait to start reading.

As found a seat in the back but i wanted to seat where I could manage to open it so i chose to sit between two older gentlemen as I thought they would not be reading anything. I wanted to browse through and find some interesting topics so I opened the thing and it spread across to the second man on both sides of me.

I pretended I knew how to handle it and started reading the middle. The man next to me quipped sarcastically in kikuyu ( ni woiga uthome cia mucomba) so you decided to read the white man's paper?. I smiled and nodded but the other was reading his side. Soon It became a struggle and I folded the paper and kept it on my laps.

When I got off the bus I walked home wondering how I was going to manage my treasure. I tried spreading it on my wooden bed but it left me no space to lie down. I tied my grandmothers coffee table but it was bigger that too.  I decided to wait until the next day so I could spread it on the green grass outside grandmothers house.

The next day I took my tea and sweet potatoes outside on the green grass and pretended to be a tourist. I started reading every word from the front page. I read to page 3 and my head started to hurt. The equatorial sun was too bright. So got a machete and went to the woods and cut a few baby trees. I made my own stand where I could spread the paper and read comfortably while standing.

Everything I read did not make much sense. The English was very difficult for me to fully comprehend. I did not understand most of the stories and places. I remember there was a story about nuclear disaster in Chernobyl which I could not even pronounce. I remember thinking either the white people were either too smart or crazy. The only section that made sense was the sports part because I could understand the scores and football.

It took me about a week to read the whole paper but I had to borrow my cousins Oxford Dictionary to aid my reading. I'd later invite some of my friends who thought they were smart to come read it but had to pledge to be careful handling it. At the end I felt like I had taken the entire world to the village. I remember thinking the world out there must be very complex and different I will never know.

But today no place sound foreign and its the village that feels a little foreign.