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.