Small Visitors

Lila and Uma are living in the garden. They tell me they will only be coming inside for meals now. The walls of their home are made from a couple of large plastic yellow barrels and some crumbling bricks. They had Ossian round earlier on, but he made the mistake of trying to walk off with one of the walls and got chased away.

Now Linda has come to visit. She comes everyday at this time, around 5.30 in the afternoon, after she's changed out of her school uniform and done her homework. Her visits are usually chaotic; the contents of the sitting room are examined and scattered on the floor, only to be cross-examined and re-scattered by the two or three smaller children who trail behind her. But today Lila and Uma have invited her into their game. This is unusual.

Soon after we moved in, we began to get small visitors calling at our house. Every afternoon, after school, cries of 'how are you?' or 'mzungu!' came from the hole in the gate. For the first few days Uma was keen to run out and play, taking Ossian's large red beach ball with her, to the delight of the crowd of children gathered outside. Lila would follow hesitantly, suspiciously, reluctantly joining in.

But soon our visitors grew more confident, opening the gate and pushing each other into the garden, laughing and whispering to each other. Lila and Uma would disappear under

a storm of hands wanting to touch their skin and stroke their hair. They became exotic objects to be wondered at, prodded, poked and discussed. They also became intimidated.

After a few weeks of this, they would run inside and hide whenever they heard calls from the gate, pretending they were tired, or were too busy playing their game. Only Linda still insisted on coming in, but eventually they began to ignore even her, hiding away in Flora's room wh

enever she came.

Today is different though. This morning Lila and Uma spent four hours in a salon in Iten having their hair plaited with long extensions, the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition for both of them to have long hair. And as their hair has grown, so has their confidence. Like Samson, their hair has given them new strength to go out and play with the children, or maybe they just feel more like everyone else with their African braids.

So now Linda is here, and they are pleased to see her. They don't even seem to mind when she dismantles their house, and with a flick of their pony tails they chase after her, out of the gate, to join the other children playing outside.

Volleyball

It's Sunday afternoon and since the morning the sound of shouting and cheering has been drifting over our garden wall. There's a volleyball tournament on in the big playing field in the centre of Iten. After lunch we file out of our gate and take the short cut, down a narrow winding path that comes out just by the field.

A crowd, mostly men, have gathered around the game. It's the final. They are leaning in, shoulders touching, intent, their feet marking the boundaries of the pitch. Every so often the ball flies into the crowd, striking somebody in the face or arm, an eruption of laughter follows, and the ball is thrown back in.

Beside me, a young girl is playing with a ball of string, pulling it behind her like a dog on a lead. Three boys play football with an empty plastic bottle, another runs past rolling a tyre with a stick. Beyond them a football game is in motion, cows grazing a few feet away.

Something has amused the crowd, there are peals of laughter, people keep glancing over to one corner of the pitch. I walk around the outside to get a better view, heads turn like a Mexican wave to stare at me as I go. I find an opening and squeeze in between two men, looking over to the source of the laughter.

I see Adharanand sitting on the ground, right on the sideline, with Lila and Uma next to him. Each time the ball comes in their direction, a man jumps in front of them, shouting out, pretending to stop the ball from hitting them. More raucous laughter.

I ask a friend what he is saying. "He says he is protecting the two little dolls from the ball".

The game ends, and Adharanand stands up to leave. I try and walk over to him, but it's like trying to get close to a celebrity. He and the girls are surrounded. The winners of the game walk past unnoticed.

We make our way back to the start of the path, a swarm of children around our legs. The attention has been too much, and Lila and Uma insist on being carried. We retreat to our garden and close the gate behind us.

Mrs Koila's house

Today we were invited round to our neighbour Mrs Koila's house for tea. We bumped into her on her way back from work, at the Iten Post Office, and walked home with her, down the red dirt track past scruffy chickens and sheep tethered to weeds. Her house is similar in design and layout to ours, set in the middle of a small plot of land.

Mr Koila is a former runner who helped to find us our house, and their youngest daughter Linda has befriended Lila and Uma. Linda was there when we arrived, just changing out of her school uniform and, after a little nudge from her mother, she showed us her room. A bed in one corner, a net curtain nailed up at the window, a cupboard with the door missing, an old chest of drawers with clothes spilling out of it.

Linda lay on the floor to do her homework, copying text from a test paper with a red 80% scrawled across the top of it. The floor had some tiles missing. Lila and Uma sat down next to her and watched curiously.

Adharanand, Ossian and I sat with Mrs Koila in the sitting room, on sofas neatly covered with white squares of embroidered fabric. Ossian insisted on jumping from one sofa to the next in his big walking boots. I tired to stop him, worried that he would muddy the crisp white linen, but Mrs Koila didn't seem bothered. "Let him" she said, "we can wash them".

Her 'house girl' came in, sharply dressed in a pristine white skirt and t-shirt, and pulled a table cloth off one of the coffee tables, putting down a thermos flask of sweet, milky tea. She shook our hands and left the room. "She's been with us for seven years," Mrs Koila told us, leaning back in her armchair, smiling.

Low budget music videos flickered across the TV screen, people gyrating in front of trees and patches of grass. Mrs Koila was talking about education; "These", she said, waving at the TV and the computer in the corner of the room "the children want to play with them when they get home from school, they get distracted and don't perform well". For this reason her three older children have all gone to boarding school, where life is more focused. They are going to visit her nine-year-old this Sunday.

Ossian padded around the room pointing at things, a calendar on the painted wall with a shoal of fish on it, a toy rabbit, a fireplace covered over with fabric, a picture of a sunset bearing the quote "It's not where you are but where you're going to that matters".

I followed Ossian out into the kitchen. The room was empty. No cooker. Bare work surfaces and only a packet of millet flour in a cupboard on the wall. A door lead out into the garden, beyond it a wooden shack with a bed, bare mattress, earth floor. Smoke and the smell of cooking wafted from the shack.

We left Lila and Uma playing on the computer with Linda, and walked out into the front garden. Mrs Koila showed us her huge avocado tree and vegetable patch of bananas and maze. She told us about her farm, on the other side of Eldoret, where they grow millet and keep cows.

"You will come round for supper one day, when Mr Koila is here," she said with a firm handshake. We thanked her and walked home with Ossian, leaving the girls to play for a while.

Water

Over the last 10 days we've had just half a day of running water, where you turn on the tap and water comes out. For four of those days, the whole of Iten had no water either. So we buy bottles of drinking water, and our landlady brings us emergency 70-litre barrels of water, which stand outside the kitchen door where they are closely monitored. For most other people though, they have to go and fetch water, either from a neighbour's bore hole, or from the river.

Even though I knew we had no water, it took a few days before I stopped instinctively going over to the sink and trying to turn the tap on. We've had to prioritise our water usage, with cooking and washing up at the top, and making perfume, a favourite game of Lila and Uma's, at the bottom. Even so, it's surprising how quickly we get through 70 litres.

The clothes washing has come to a halt. Flora washes the clothes by hand (very few homes have a washing machine here), and this also uses a lot of water, especially as Uma and Lila like to wash their dolls clothes at the same time. Bath time has become tin basin time, like the olden days, with a tub in front of the fire, except without the fire.

One night there was an almighty thunder storm and the rain came pouring down. In our new water-conscious state we were busy putting out barrels to collect it in. For us, all of this is a novelty, part of our 'Kenyan experience', but for many people here, including some of our neighbours, there is no running water, ever.

Toy gun

I was sitting in the car today with Ossian on my lap and Lila and Uma playing in the back seat, waiting for Adharanand to come out of the supermarket in Eldoret. We were in the car park, the Uganda Highway fuming by behind the fence in front of us.

A street kid came up to the fence and tried to get my attention. I tried to ignore him. He started to pull faces at Lila and Uma, sticking his tongue out and waving his arms around, his body jerking as though he was trying to dance. He was about 14 years old and had bare feet.

He looked back at me and lifted up his shirt. Tucked into his trousers was a gun, the handle lying flat against his stomach. I couldn't tell if it was real or not. He started to touch it, looking over at Lila and Uma again and putting his finger on the trigger. From the look on his face it was impossible to tell whether he was about to break into another dance routine, or pull out the gun and shoot at us.

I went over to the security guard from the supermarket and pointed to the kid. The guard laughed: "Just a street kid, toy, toy, just relax." The kid walked off. Adharanand came back to the car, and as I was telling him what had happened, the kid came back. "That one?" Adharanand asked. "I gave him some money just now." We watched as he pulled a small glass bottle from his jacket, took a swig, and swayed off down the street.