There was a friend of our family whose farm was deep in the settlement scheme, putting her farm a few kilometers away from OlKalou town, the only place for shopping and business transactions. Her husband worked in a city far away from OlKalou, only coming home occasionally, but he sent money to his family often. There was no bank in OlKalou back then, only a satellite branch operated by the good old Kenya Commercial Bank. I will tell you more about that later. This was banking done from the back of a KCB LandRover that came into town every Thursday at 10 Oclock in the morning.
Our family friend walked the four kilometers to OlKalou town every Thursday to withdraw whatever cash her husband had sent. When she got to middle age and walking the four kilometers started wearing her legs out, she decided to use the cart that was pulled by her donkey as her mode of transportation. Every Thursday, she padded the donkey’s cart with a mattress, sat there comfortably as she chatted with neighbors she met along the way. After making her bank withdrawal, she did her shopping, loaded everything on the donkeys’ cart and made her way home in total comfort, even using an umbrella to shelter from the sun.
At first we thought it was comical, and our mother thought it was unladylike. When I thought about it later in my life, I wondered why more people had not utilized that mode of transportation instead of wearing themselves out walking for miles carrying heavy loads on their backs. The royal monarchies around the world have used horse drawn carts for generations, but they fancied theirs by calling them carriages. Before the invention of automobiles, western civilizations had for centuries used horse drawn carts as their mode of transportation, ferrying both humans and cargo for short and long distances. The Americans used them for travel across many states. They called them Stagecoach.
I am certain our family friend who rode the donkey cart had not watched any western movies, but she used her sensibilities to utilize whatever means were at her disposal. She did not care what anybody else thought of her means of transportation, she just did what she needed to do, and it served her well for very many years. Genius.
