There was one final, critical, nail biting process outside the Cereal Board warehouses before a farmer could sigh relief and walk away with ease. Told you there was no rest for the weary in Nyandarua, you better believe it.
When the hired truck pulled up at the Cereal Board warehouses in OlKalou town, their employees climbed onto the truck and opened a few bags of wheat at random. If they spotted anything other than whole, nicely dried, plump golden grains of wheat, they assumed your entire consignment was not cleaned properly. They sent you back with your wheat to go clean it some more. Can you imagine that? Taking the wheat back home, opening and cleaning each bag all over again, buying new sisal twine for hemming the bags afresh and hiring a truck once again to deliver the wheat. This was an expensive repeat job costing the farmer double the money, double the labor and it could take another two to three weeks before he could get his wheat accepted at the Cereal Board.
My parents had zero tolerance for such inconveniences, so they made sure we cleaned our wheat thoroughly the first time round. Thank God we never had our wheat sent back for further cleaning. We saw it happen to other families, and at such moments, we appreciated our parents strictness in their demand for top notch performance of any task, big or small.
