How many lives have you lived?

It's hard to write about someone you know. You're not sure of how much to say, and whether you stick to the interview or not, what you know about them always slips through the cracks. Fortunately for Ballo, he's a friend. So I won't roast him (much). This interview has been in the works since the time I heard him talk about the various things he's had to do for work and I had to ask him,

"Kwani how many lives have you lived?"

Because this guy is about my age and he's hustled way more than is normal for someone with his years. It was around last year, when we scheduled his story to be the first one of the year... But because we're both procrastinators, it's the first one of this month.

We met up at a dusty football pitch in the great Kingdom of Rongai. As guys made their rounds to warm up for a match, we started off.

"You can finally tell me how many lives you've lived" I tell him. And he laughs as he always does.

When he was about 12, he got his first job selling rice.
"My father used to bring rice home in sacks, from where he travelled for work.  Mum and I would package them and sell them around." He tells me, complete with actions how they'd package their rice.

After high school, he joined his cousins on his aunt's bottled water business. And I mean immediately after. He finished on a Thursday and Monday he was at work.

" We used to arrange the bottles, then someone fills them with a pipe, then someone else used to place the bottle tops on the filled bottles then we close them until you hear the 'kak kaak' so you know it's properly closed," he tells me his life's ambition at the time was to be as fast as his cousins who used to close three bottles by the time he was done with one (the weak link in the chain.)

At the same time because he's a ninja, he would buy a lot of onions cheap from his aunt's farm, then re-pack them into smaller poythene paper bags (before they were banned) and go sell them around houses and shops for a profit.

"I used to do it with a friend of mine. We made a killing the first like three weeks."
"Then?" I ask

" We stopped, I don't know why we stopped." He laughs.

As we talk, the men on the football pitch are still warming up. Late comers arrive as they greet Ballo, give him their car keys, house keys, various keys to hold and get into the field. He's like a celebrity here, everyone seems to have an inside joke or story with him. But back to the story; he moved from packing the water to distributing the water. They would drive around asking shops if they wanted water. And it was fun but hard, because of the sun and the constant asking people to buy water.

Eventually, his aunt wasn't paying enough to keep him around. He moved on to selling clothes. He would go to Gikomba then buy stuff, take pictures and send them to his contacts, if anyone wanted anything, he was the guy to call.

Then he started work as a 'kamagera'. Now for those people who don't know who those are, they're those guys who help fill matatus and buses. They've probably chosen your window to bang a few times to call guys. Or sweet talked you to go somewhere you don't even know. I once found myself in Banana like this. Most likely they've fought over you to go to the matatu they're calling out for. Or sat inside a bus to make you think there are many guys. Are we all together now? Good.

" I loved it,  sometimes I used to drive nganyas (big, loud, graffitied matatus) and  hustle for space and people. It was so much fun"  he tells me smiling. The story reminds me of a time he scared me with his nganya driving skills. That's a story for another day.

" I couldn't do that job for long though." He says.

"Why?"

"That job is hard. You can't do it for long without using drugs. That energy they use the whole day you think they get it from ugali? Plus sometimes there are police crackdowns, sometimes there are plainclothes guys that try to get you. It's crazy. But they're good guys. Most people think those guys are bad but they're nice, some are just trying to survive, you know?"

All this time, the men on the pitch are shaking up the red soil with their exercise and the sun is at that nice warmth that's not overwhelming.

He tells me how he met a guy, Tony, and they started renting out sound. Ballo would travel with the sound and learned on the job to be a sound guy (si they're called sound guys?)

All this time, people at Diguna (a Christian organisation) were waiting for him to come volunteer. They had been waiting for him since he cleared high school, five jobs ago. He decided to go ahead and do it for a year. He got into sports, and high ropes. For those at the back, high ropes is a scary form of team building, scary for people who are afraid of heights. And got more into spoken word.

Now he sells cars, and chicken. He could sell you a car full of chicken if you wanted. Or a chicken that could drive (his words not mine.) He could make you a deal, buy a car get a chicken free. Where else would you get a deal like that? Dinner and the thing to drive it home?

Oh and he's also a part time driver. And he's still doing spoken word. Basically right now he's a jack of all trades. (Which means he could sell you a car and drive both you and the chicken home while entertaining you with poetry.)

In his stories, he doesn't talk about his father much, I poke around and he tells me how the guy left when Ballo was in class 8, two weeks before KCPE. He tells me how he tried to visit him once, when he was in high school, he tracked his dad, and found him with a  brand new family, and a daughter named the same as his little sister. He's never tried again.

I ask him if his leaving affected him in any way. He said
"Of course," he says. I can tell this is a weird subject for him, he doesn't like talking about serious things that isn't work.
 I don't know how, but we ended up talking about trust issues.

"I know I have trust issues, I won't even lie"

"Do you have a best friend?" I ask.

"What is a best friend? What are those? Me I don't know what that is, I'm a man"  He says all (fake) serious.

He's never had a best friend, he doesn't believe in such, it's like I asked him if he's seen a unicorn before. He only thinks there's good friends, or just friends. Again,evidence of his trust issues.

" I mean if my own father left me who are you?" He tries to laugh off the statement.
We hear a rumble of a tuktuk and he jumps up as one of his football friends (I'm assuming) come to view driving a tuktuk, he runs after it and dangles on the side, begging, no, demanding to be allowed to drive it.  Eventually,he walks back to our bench like nothing happened. Dangling the many keys in his hands he says,

"They call me key-mani" (did I tell you, he has terrible jokes)
Then he  gets excited and pulls out money from his pocket,
"Wait," he says "They call me Key-money" (just terrible)

He sits and asks me where we were in the interview. By now a match has started on our dusty field and the sun has began to set.

 I ask him if he's ever been in a serious relationship, short answer; no. (Trust issues)
I think he'll end up with someone though. Someone who knows how to cook, and will laugh at his terrible jokes.

I tell him to use his poet's brain to come up with a good ending, because I never know how to end these things.

He tells me" I heard this once, I think in a movie or something, You don't stop playing before you get old, you get old because you stopped playing."






Oh, and a small announcement:
The only reason the post took this long, is because we were setting up a page. Still writing, well, more of journal entries, for our Random thoughts and experiences, like the time I sat next to a maasai on my way to school, or rants about freedom, anything really, to read when you're bored(because I'm slowly incepting a reading culture in all your minds.)

Anyway... Yeah feel free to check the first one by going back to the home page, there's a new page right by the home page.

And if nobody's told you today, you have nice eyelashes. Now go read.

Photo by Mugoya Mokua.