“It is the best manure” my mother declared emphatically: and her word was law. She said you cannot get better manure for your crops than chicken manure (thumu wa nguku). With our three roomed granary (ikumbi) and a huge chicken coop (Kiaga kia nguku) underneath it, housing a minimum of fifty chickens at a time, we had plenty of manure every few months. The coop being underneath a building had no standing space for unusually tall teenagers like us, who were tasked with the responsibility of gathering the chicken manure. We crawled into the coop every day to gather the eggs. That was easy.
But the gathering of the manure was a whole different operation. We crawled under there with jembes, spades, buckets and basins. We raked the manure piling it closer to the entrance of the coop. We scooped it into the buckets and basins, carried them outside the coop and emptied the manure into sisal gunny bags. By the end of the operation, we had three or four bags full.
You can imagine how dusty we looked at the end of that operation. From the hair, eyelashes, our clothes and every inch of our body was covered in manure dust. That means we had no choice but to bath that day, an inconvenience we had not planned for.
As fate would have it, on such a day when we were covered in manure dust from head to toe, my brothers found some girls they had been trying to impress sitting outside our house with our mother sipping some tea. The girls were sent by their mothers to deliver something or borrow something from our mother. There was no escaping because mother considered it rude not to greet visitors. My manure covered brothers made a beeline to their love interests looking like Groundhogs (huko).
After we had bathed and put on clean clothes, I heard my brothers grumbling “why couldnt they come at a time like now” ending with a clicking of their tongues (kugutha kanua). Oh well, that ship had already sailed, and the manure covered image is what was currently trending. Life is funny, you better laugh while you can.
