My definition of this is simple: Feeling less than …… We all have a bit of it, or there are some situations we step into and immediately it hits us like a bolt of lightning. When I describe the people of OlKalou town and the Hospital staff, I remember the high regard with which we held them as we felt small in their presence. We were the people from the Settlement Scheme (Mashamba-ini) and that did not make us feel good at all.
The town people were always clean, with clean clothes and they wore shoes all the time. They used tap water and they shopped for their food from the market and the shops. They made their tea with milk that came in the familiar triangular green and white stripped KCC packets bought from shops. You wonder why they bought pasturized KCC milk from shops with all the fresh creamy milk in OlKalou? As unbelievable as it may sound, it was illegal for farmers to sell their milk anywhere else other than KCC. Even when KCC was overwhelmed with surplus milk and returned perfectly good milk to the farmers for weeks, milk which we ended up pouring out, it was still illegal to sell such milk to people in town. Call it what you may, but that is a perfect example of Government monopoly for maximum exploitation.
Anyway, the town people ate Ugali made from packet flour (mutu wa bagiti) with name brands like Jogoo and Jimbi. Their chapatis were made with EXE flour from Unga Limited, making their chapatis look divine. They used Kerosene stove to cook their food, supplementing with charcoal jiko, unlike us Mashamba-ini people who used firewood, only supplementing with charcoal once in a while when making Chapatis.
For us Mashamba-ini youth, we thought the above was the life to aspire. We thought those people were better than us, because they had things we did not have. We considered them ‘rich’, unlike us ‘poor’ folks from the Settlement Scheme. We could have moved to OlKalou town in a heartbeat if we had the chance. One thing we failed to consider was that, those people were living on a salary. A small salary I can only imagine. I wonder how much a Primary School teacher earned back then. They had no choice but to buy their food from the shops and the market. They lived in rented single rooms, families using curtains to divide the sitting and cooking area from the parents’ bed space while another curtain covered the childrens’ double decker bed. Yet, we thought they were better than us. Most of those people, even the ones who owned businesses in town, lived in those small accomodations that OlKalou town had to offer back in the day. What we did not realize was that most of them were working so hard, trying to save money any way they could, including borrowing loans from their employers hoping to one day afford to purchase a piece of land somewhere, even an acre or less, to settle their families.
As the years progressed, we started missing some of the employed workers and traders we knew in OlKalou town. We later learnt that some, the lucky few, had managed to purchase some land, ranging from half acre to five acres maximum, further interior in places like Wanjohi, Ngorika, Thubiri and other places. They constructed simple houses and relocated their families there.
That is when it dawned on us that those “rich” people we revered in town were just struggling low income people who actually envied us, the big land owners.
