A VISIT TO NORMALIA

This article is a work of satire and fiction. The events and characters depicted are purely fictional and intended for humorous entertainment purposes. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect reality or endorse any specific behavior.

At the Wet Throat

The last time I met my friends at the Wet Throat, we had a heated argument about what actions are considered normal in any society. This had led to even more question. ‘What are the effects of an individual’s micro-actions on the Nation as a whole? Who cares anyway?  Pengo, as the leader of our political party – the WCP (Who Cares Party) was the leader of opposition. I was the shadow minister for health, while Mike held the defence portfolio.

I had explained that human beings had inherent standards that determined what was normal and what was not. Mike had countered that cannibalism was quite normal in some societies, yet it was repulsive to most. Pengo had insisted that unless humans established a ‘nomalcy index’ there would be no way of measuring the extent of normalcy in any human action. The only things that were accepted as normal were the ones that had already been agreed upon by the ancestors of tribesmen or by some modern legislation. I had a feeling that Mike and Pengo were taking the argument too far in the academic realm, but I could not figure out how to counter them.

A day or two after our discussion on the 'normalcy index, I was going through a magazine.’ That is when I came across an enticing travel advertisement.s

Visit the Archipelago of Normal islands (ANI) on your next vacation and receive the keys to our splendid Nation for the entire duration of your stay. Yes! Become an honorary citizen and participate fully in our untainted and above normal politics. Meet the freest society under the tropical sun. This offer lasts a lifetime. See your Travel Agent now! Terms and conditions do not apply.

Amazing, I said to myself in a low tone as I sipped a well brewed cup of tea. I couldn’t remember ever seeing an advertisement where terms and conditions did not apply. If it wasn’t for that six letter sentence, I would have dismissed the advertisement like hundreds of others before it. Up to that point, I was sure that there wasn’t a single country in this world which could claim to be 100% normal socially and politically! Not even the super powers, past or present. But here was a strange advertisement. It had been skewed to make a claim that their existed in this world an island nation that boasted of ‘untainted and above normal politics.’ I had to show the advertisement to Mike and Pengo to gauge what they made of it.

I had expected Pengo to rant and rave about a normalcy index but he did not. He peered at the advertisement, first without his reading glasses and handed it to Mike. In the meantime, Pengo retreaved the lenses from an inside pocket of his grey jacket and snatched the magazine from Mike.

“This is crazy!” Pengo exclaimed. “Terms and conditions do not apply!”

“This is a farce,” Mike retorted. “We have to see this for ourselves.”

Since parliament was in recess at the time, Pengo suggested that we should abandon all and leave immediately on a fact finding mission. As the opposition, we hoped to one day win elections and rule our country. You must agree that it would help to know how other successful nations govern themselves. Pengo gave instructions to our secretariat to contact the authorities of ANI about our anticipated visit. Perhaps the Archipelago of Normal Islands was the yardstick for the international Normalcy index he had been talking about. Within 24 hours, we had received a reply from the minister for foreign affairs. He wanted us to be guests of the state of ANI in recognition of our distinguished status as the Opposition in the government of Kenya. That in itself was amazing. We had no honours at home, perhaps due to our vociferous opposition of everything that government did. We opposed first, and then thought it over at a later date.

And so we stopped all other business to travel on short notice to ANI. Our secretariat did the booking of our plane tickets for our departure on a Monday. Being very patriotic Kenyans, we would travel by our National carrier – Kenya Airways.

Off to Normalia

Finally the day to travel to ANI arrived. We were promptly at the airport pulling our luggage on its wheels when we discovered to our dismay that our plane was overbooked by one person. Either Mike or I would have had to remain behind. Mike looked me over to suggest that I was the least important. In his estimation, the shadow Defence portfolio is more prestigious than the Health portfolio. I stared back and dug my feet in the departure lounge. The situation was saved by quick thinking Shadow President. Pengo immediately took his mobile phone and called someone whom he referred to as old boy. It turned out that Pengo was acquainted to a big shot, a sympathizer of our WCP party in the airline management board.  Soon after that call, a security man and two airline officials led us to the plane. I later came to learn that a hapless fellow had been bumped off the plane to create the desired one vacant seat. I thought nothing of it until much later in Normalia.

The City looked much like our coastal city of Mombasa from the air with beautiful palms and clean white beaches. On arrival we were received by the mayor of Normalia, the capital City and the shadow minister for Foreign Affairs in the country's opposition. Notably absent were the traditional dancers who received dignitaries in our airports where we had come from. Pengo, thinking that our arrival had not been taken seriously demanded to know the reason for their absence. It was the mayor who responded.

“In the republic of Normal Islands, every citizen’s occupation is recorded on the identity card.”

“Really,” I caught myself exclaiming.

“Yes. And since everybody is occupied in National building, farmers are on the farm, doctor in hospitals, teachers in schools and students in classrooms. That is the normal state of affairs. Since there is no profession designated as 'traditional dancers,' it would not be exactly normal to find a Normalian in traditional regalia to dance for you on a normal day. Such dancing would be the height of idleness.”

 That was the first I heard about being idle and yet dancing. I thought an idle person did nothing. Fortunately Pengo let the matter rest there.

On the way to our hotel, Mike remarked that the twenty or so kilometres from the airport were devoid of a single pot hole, which would not be normal back home.

“What is a pothole?" The shadow minister asked.

“It is a big hole the size of a washbasin on a tarmacked road,” Mike retorted.

“My goodness," exclaimed the shadow minister, visibly shocked. "You have such holes in the middle of the roads in your country? I have never seen anything like that in my life."

Judging that the shadow minister appeared to be about fifty years of age, I reckoned there were many things he'll never see if he continued to live in his country. The shadow minister continued to explain that his country's Bureau of standards was involved in the quality of everything including roads. For the first time in a long time a pot hole struck me as a totally abnormal phenomenon.

"Currently the 'normal' standard of a road is the absence of a crack which can hold a horizontally lying toothpick. Anything larger than that and the road is closed for repairs," clarified the mayor.

It was not long before we noticed that In Normalia, the streets are so clean that if you dropped your ice cream on a hot day you will most likely just bend down and lick it. Traffic lights work and even an official motorcade like the one which took us round obeyed them. Street lights work and garbage is actually collected. The most obvious vacuum is that created by a lack of street children. Yes! There aren’t any glue sniffing children with hands to trail you and call you ‘mdosi’ for a ten shilling coin. It makes you realize how street children have become part of fauna in all urban centres for several decades now - like parking meters, lamp posts and concrete - an interesting lot these children. So human with emotions, a heartbeat and red blood, yet so detached from reality that even a refrain like ‘no reforms no elections’ is just another song about a ‘white Christmas’ but who cares?

Totally absent were mounds of garbage and street children. Fearing that perhaps a surgical operation had been mounted to get rid of street families ahead of our visit, mike made a statement.

"Your population of street children must be very small, considering that I haven’t spotted any so far." The mayor gave us a suspicious look. Maybe he didn't like critical questions but that was his problem.

"What do you mean street children? Do you have children living in your streets?" The mayor asked. It was either genuine belief or the words of a seasoned actor.

"Come on your worship. Every country has its fare share of street urchins. In Brazil they gun them down like antelopes. Fortunately, in our country it’s ‘live and let live’ except for two or three who have fallen fowl of police reservists and got themselves shot,” I explained casually. The mayor was horrified. He even inched away from us.

"You people allow orphans and destitute to live on the streets? Where do you come from," The shadow minister asked.

"Kenya," Mike responded with pride. “Surely you knew that, didn’t you?”

"In our Archipelago of normal Islands, people are a national resource,” the shadow minister said as he fidgeted nervously in a desperate bid to compose himself.

“Our definition of people includes orphans and the homeless. The worship here and I are no different. Here we have NNH's (Normal National Homes), where anybody can take refuge. They pay for their upkeep and education by working on state farms and industries. The harder they work the closer they get to own their own property. It is the normal thing,” the Shadow minister said and looked at the three of us, one at a time. Then he shook his head when he noticed that we had nothing to say.  

“Tell me. While on the streets, what do your street people eat?" the mayor enquired. This was a tough question, leading no doubt to another abnormal aspect of our Kenyan society but it had to be answered.

"Garbage," Pengo said unflinchingly. "They select discarded fruits, potato chips and other culinary titbits from the overflowing bins and the scattered garbage heaps in the back streets and housing estates."

"Disgusting!" The mayor yelled. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him to drive us back to our hotel. He had other urgent matters to attend to in the service of the pampered people of Normalia. Our visit had turned out to be quite an eye opener.

     

That evening, we chose to visit a watering hole. We were not the type to visit a strange land and not sample their beer. We had heard rumours that Kenyan beer was the best in the world, a fact we wanted to prove for ourselves.

We were having two each in a serene pub in Normalia, the capital city of the Archipelago of Normal Islands when the Mayor of Normalia sneaked to our table without explaining how he had located us. As soon as he sat down, he ordered a beer and another round of what each of us was taking. After wetting his throat twice with the frothy liquid, he went straight to what must have been disturbing him since our last meeting.

“Is it true what you said about children on the streets of Nairobi? Eating from garbage heaps and sleeping on hard street pavements? Pardon me if I sound naive but is it true?

I pardoned him and responded that it was as true as the sun would rise the next day. Being slightly inebriated, I was a bit picturesque in the description. The Mayor of Normalia was shocked beyond description. His state of paralysis fired me to continue describing in very gory details about the life of a street child on the street.

“To make some pocket money, the street families mine metal around the city, which they sell for a tidy sum to scrap metal dealers,” I said.

“Mine  Metal? Do you have iron mines in Nairobi then?” the Mayor asked with a tinge of admiration in his voice. The admiration did not last long.

“Of course not. The manhole covers; guard rails and any other metal that can be carted away,” Mike helped me to answer the question. “In isolated areas, they are able to mine an entire street of lamp-posts.”

“And if they corner you in a back street, they squeeze your throat with just enough force to relieve you off your wallet,” Pengo said and burst out laughing as if he had just cracked the funniest joke in the world.

The Mayor’s jaw dropped.  I was rather amused by the shock on his face. Kenyans had long been immunised against feelings of compassion for the underprivileged. It took the Mayor about ten minutes of drinking in silence to recover from the shocking expose of how we treat the less fortunate, leading them to the inevitable life of crime. 

 “How does your council keep the streets so clean?” Pengo asked him.

“The City Council doesn’t. The building owners do. Every building owner sees to the cleanliness of his or her building and halfway to the yellow line on the street. The building owners on the opposite side of the road do the same in symmetrical synergy and it works.”

“And then you charge them a service charge as well? That is extortion,” Mike blurted out.

“What service charge? We don’t have any such charge,” the mayor replied with glowing pride of his city.

Mike explained how every organization business and worker in Nairobi and other urban centres paid a service charge towards cleaning the city, collecting garbage and repairing the pot holes.” Then the Mayor asked the inevitable question.

“And does the city council meet its obligations after pocketing the money?” The question sounded cheeky but it put all three of us on the spot. We did not respond immediately. It took several sips of the beer in silence before the Mayor of Normalia answered the question on our behalf. He seemed to have heard about the reputation of Nairobi.

“Of course they don’t. We had the same problem in Normalia. We collected a service charge but were overwhelmed by the task of cleaning a rapidly expanding city. So we left the job to property owners themselves. This left us with the task of repairing roads which we comfortably manage from rates, trade licences, fines and parking metres. We also provide drains, a sewerage systems, water and public toilets,” The mayor talked with much pride. He took his beer in three quick gulps and excused himself. He left just as the waiters started to clear the tables as if the curtains in a play were about to come down. It was fifteen minutes to eleven and we believed that we could have another happy hour at least before retiring for the night.  

At eleven p.m. the pubs owner started to lock the doors, much to our distress while giving us shifty looks. They wanted us out of there. It did not matter that paying for our drinks in much precious foreign currency. We had to leave the pub much to pengo’s disgust.

Apparently in the republic of ANI, all pubs must close by eleven. The reason is simple. The citizens are a National resource and they must be well rested for the task of nation building every morning.

“What warped reasoning,” exclaimed Pengo,” as we staggered onto the main street.

“Fortunately we will soon be going home where drinking hours are free for all,” I consoled my friends.

As we walked to our hotel room, we came across a bus-stop as large as the one at Kencom in Nairobi. Pengo suddenly made a dash for it. He quickly went behind its advertising panels and did the unthinkable! To a Nairobian it’s not something to give you a complex. We came to learn that in normalia the action was it is sacrilegious.

Pengo was only halfway through his business when the long arm of Normalia law caught up with him.

“Are you normally normal?” the policeman who had appeared from nowhere asked. That’s what they ask you before an imminent arrest. Should you say that you’re absolutely normal, the lawman follows it up with ‘you have a right to remain silent and anything you say may be used against you.’

We tried to talk to the policeman in a bid to rescue Pengo from spending a night in a cell. The law enforcer would not budge. I removed my bulging wallet and pretended to check if all my money was there. I had wanted to check his moral standing if a bribe was offered.

“Don’t even think about it” he said as I pretended that I was just checking if the wallet was safe. Poor Pengo was calmly taken away to the police station as we followed meekly.

“You will appear in court tomorrow morning to answer to three charges,” a policeman in the station said after listening to the arresting officer.

“(1) Wetting a public utility; (2) Wrecking the environment; (3) Indecent exposure – be our guest.”   

We had to go back to our hotel without Pengo. But we immediately call our host, the Shadow Minister to see how he could help. He advised us to sleep over it and meet him the next day at the police station. 

The following morning we visited Pengo in the cells accompanied by the mayor and the shadow minister.

“Why, why did you do it?” The mayor inquired as if Pengo was his son. Pengo looked down forlornly in silence. Pengo was too ashamed to answer. That’s when I realised why most of our bus-stops stink.

In Normalia there are as many public toilets as there are people. It seems Pengo had been sneaking behind bus-stops in Nairobi for a long time, taking his bad habit with him to Normalia. There was nothing the mayor or the shadow minister could do for him. In Nairobi, talking to the right people and having the right currency denominations deep in your pocket can get you out of the stickiest situations. Not so in Normalia. Corruption was totally inexistent so Pengo had to face the full force of the law.

Pengo was advised by the lawyer provided by Normalia City Council to plead guilty as charged. If he didn’t, he risked being detained in Normalia for a few weeks to give the prosecution time to gather witnesses to prove their case. Unknown to us, a few people at the cursed bus stop had volunteered to give evidence against Pengo. Our friend pleaded guilty as charged and was fined a sum equivalent to five nights stay in a five star hotel.

The following day we paid the fine and vowed to cut short our stay. Things were so normal we were suffering from homesickness. We longed for the haphazard and lackadaisical management of Nairobi, the city in the sun.

                                                                   A loaded matatu

Home sweet home

When we arrived in Nairobi from Normalia, that capital with the highest normalcy rating in the world, we were ecstatic. Imagine the feeling of riding in a limonsine. The feeling is inexplicable and only someone who has visited Normalia would know what I mean. Pengo and Mike were also looking forward so when a Taxi offered us a comfortable ride from the airport we politely turned it down.

The contraption we entered was simply exotic. It had been welded and welded until it look like all welders in Nairobi had a go at it before graduation. Then Mike sat on a bolt which had peeped through the seat cushion. He howled in delight and almost had his eye skewered by another one peeping from the seat infront. When they say Nafasi kama kanisa, take them seriously. They mean the space below you, above you, beside you and between your knees. Usually by the time you get to your destination, you're not certain whether the matatu carried you, or it was you who did the carrying. No wonder touts really love that picture which shows a man carrying his donkey on his back with the words - mind your own business. It was really nice to be home among our own people. What better way to know that you're among your own than to touch them and smell them in a matatu. The only thing I noticed, which hadn't occured to me before is that you shouldn't look at your fellow passenger in the eye. It's the unwritten law.

The matatu dodged potholes, avoided traffic jams by racing on the pavement and actually accelarated when the lights were red! Oh I love this game. For this once I looked at Mike and Pengo and saw their joy of being Kenyan etched all over their faces.

The most enjoyable part was when the door fell right off its hingers and startled other motorists who screeched and swerved to avoid it as it hurled down the road. This caused a roar of appreciative laughter from the citizens in the contraption. They were obviously grateful that this made of transport at least gives them cause for laughter in an otherwise mundane and repetitious cycle of poverty. The tout merely whistled for the driver to slow down after which he chased the runaway door faster than an Olympiad in the two hundred metre race. Then he came racing towards the revving monstor with his door over his head. It was a herculean task and the tout received a standing ovation (under the circumstances) for his presence of mind.

Our next matatu was a sight to behold. With metalic colours, a bombastic name and 1000 watt speakers at full blast. We had to sample it. As expected, once every cranny had been filled, the music was turned on a few decibels higher. It seems the idea is drown any dissenting voice and it works. If you have a problem with your hearing, the best place to test it is in one of these machines. The test is simple. If you can concentrate on anything else other than the music, then your ear drums have lost their elasticity. If all you can think of is the music, inspite of the jargon and lack of melody, then your eardrums are perfect. The people we worried about were the kids. At least one of them was only a few months old. With this one ride, the infant’s eardrums had already received the battering which an old man received in his lifetime in the 1800s. Who cares?

Throughout this sampling of our transport systems, Pengo experienced something he was not to know until we were safely out of the matatu and on the pavement. Apparently the efforts of squeezing himself a little extra each time there was a new passenger who had squashed an artery in his left leg. Circulation wasn't taking place so his left leg went numb. When we touched the pavement, the chairman of the WCP (Who Cares Party) put his weight on the dead leg and he collapsed on the pavement. There was laughter from the tout which went like a wave through the rest of the passengers.

Our arrival had started on a rude note. Clearly something had to be done about the capacity of matatus with view of curbing overloading.

"And playing music so loud, "Pengo said as he tried to massage his leg to recover the circulation.

"And to safeguard the dignity of the citizen, "Mike added much to my surprise.

"Hey,” I interjected. "I thought we were all enjoying ourselves."

"Ofcourse we were, "Pengo replied. He had regained the composure and now resembled the chairman we were familiar with.

"The point is, even the matatu industry could do with some reforms."  

Author's Note: It is important to remember that this story is a work of satire. The events and descriptions, especially those regarding street children and urban conditions, are exaggerated for comedic effect and to highlight social issues. They are not intended to be taken as a literal or factual account.