When I was away earlier a storm blew down my fence and the papaya tree in my backyard. I’ve given up gardening and was going to let it stay down, but my neighbor, mama Jessica, kept on pushing – I don’t think she likes it when my property is messy. She introduced me to this fundi (person who makes things), and the next day the laborer carried some logs to prop up the fence. He needed money for twine – I didn’t have any change, so I gave him ten thousand schillings (the total price for the job) while my neighbor’s husband was watching. He accepted the money touching his elbow, a sign of a respect for employers, and I knew he wasn’t planning on coming back.
On Thursday I came back from school and the fundi was there. Mama Jessica was yelling at him, talking really fast, and I gathered that she had searched around his village and forced him to come back to work; she was talking about calling the police and her own ten thousand and so forth. The fundi said he had a problem – they always have problems – but he showed us his back, scattered with big white blotches. I thought of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a sure sign of HIV. The fundi fixed one section of the fence by digging ditches in the ground and tying the fence to stakes, then propping up weak sections with other pieces of logs. It started raining before he finished though and he said he would come back. He’s still missing, of course.
A couple lessons came out of this. First, never trust any laborers here with a single schilling. Most people are like that, they won’t pay back their debts to a richer man unless that man has some pressing problem, and in a sense money is (loosely) communal. This fundi was ripping me off completely though, charging double the going rate and then running away without doing any work. The Yamiseo’s had been getting on my nerves for a while, constantly borrowing things and yelling at me when any bit of the yard wasn’t clean; it’s good to know now that they’ll also look after me.
