GOING HERBAL

I went to town the other day and swore that I will not ride in a 14-seater matatu again. This is because even though the mat is tiny and slummed, it produces music that wouldn't be played in any of our major stadia because it would blow off both the players and the audience out of the stadium. The music started to play and it is the kind of music that you can't tell whether it goes into your body through the ears and on to the lungs and out through the heart. So I figured that my ventricles and whatever other ligaments and tissue that keep my heart in place would cave in and I moved to buses coz there I get to share the noise with four times more people and I hope I will extend my life by the same proportion.

So I took a bus and I promise you except that it was rather crowded, it was quiet. I sat between two men and you will find out the reason I mention them. We rolled off town finally and just when I made sure that the two fellows I was sitting with were not likely to pick my pockets, I clutched onto my handbag and napped off. I had barely closed my eyes when a man disrupted my nap with the introduction of his company whose name had 'Christian' in the middle. At first I thought he was going to preach and pray for us and then ask for an offering and since I had decided upfront I wasn't going to part with an offering, I decided I was going to sleep so that I wouldn't hear what he had to say as in 'No hearing, no offering'.

He must have seen me trying to pull that one on him and he grew louder and annoying and obnoxious about his trade. He wasn't a preacher after all. He was a doctor - a herbal doctor. He finished his introduction at Pangani and launched into his consultancy.

He started by insulting us. He told us that we were walking corpses and that if we did not buy his medicine immediately, some of us would walk back straight to the City Mortuary while the rest of us would have the pleasure of going to bid bye our doctors at the Kenyatta National Hospital. I shouted 'Halleluyah' coz I thought that would be the best thing to happen in the present economic times. Everybody else seemed to think so too and the doc realized that this was a crowd that was not easy to threaten. So he decided to change tact and give us a lecture on the diseases that were killing us. He said that each of us was carrying a total of 56 diseases but that he was going to deal with the top two which were (get ready) Dirty Blood Syndrome (DBS) and Male Impotence. He launched into a talk about how food manufacturers had agreed to exterminate us by adding Potassium Permanganate in all our foods hence the (DBS). He went ahead to do an experiment where he put Potassium Permanganate in a 250ml mineral water bottle and wonder of wonders the solution turned purple! I would have imagined that since he was talking about blood he would have used real human blood. He then added 'his medicine'(which cleanses our blood and cuts short our trip to the city morgue) and the water became almost clear! He said that if we bought his two day dose that our blood would be completely rid of all toxins.

He reminded me of the first time I saw the Potassium Permanganate experiment in class 8. I stole some and became the local magician and charged every child in the neighbourhood a bob. Business picked up immediately with kids coming in droves begging their parents for the money. I was 24 shillings rich when the news reached my mom that I had become a magician and charging a fee for it. You imagine that mom would have rejoiced at the thought of us becoming rich through magic. But no. She gave me a proper whomping and returned all my hard earned cash to the owners.

After the doctor had proved that we had DBS, he launched into Male Impotence. He said that the reason people were not filling the world with little brats is because men have become impotent. You and I know that it is for economic reasons that we are not filling our houses with children. This guy, who obviously lives on Planet Zoog thinks it is as a result of Male Impotence and fortunately for those who are so stupid they believe him, he has a solution. He promised the MI sufferers that he had medicine that would have men's virility shooting to the high heavens and that it costs 300 Shillings but for that day he was going to offer it to the lowest bidder coz he only had one dose. The rest would have to look for him in their office in town. We arrived at the bus station and you wouldn't believe that we couldn't alight because a small clot of people had formed at the exit listening to the doc and bidding. Except that the driver of the bus threatened to run down the doc and his newly found "patients', I probably would still be trapped in that bus waiting for the doc to finish handing out his business cards.

I would have thrown him a contempt card but I wasn't carrying one then. I will sure start carrying some and I encourage you to have yours handy coz you don't know when you will fall into the hands of such a contemptuous person especially when you are accompanied by your family.

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