A couple of Saturdays ago, my house help and I almost lost our minds after we realised that we had run out of salt. Salt is not like sugar or flour, products that are easy to monitor since you use them in large quantities. Since salt lasts forever because we use it sparingly, we rarely think about it.
This explains how I found myself with a sufuria full of food at 8.30pm and no salt to talk of. It was a disaster.
You’re probably wondering why I would be distressed about running out of salt when all I could have done was rush to the neighbourhood shop and buy a packet.
Well, to begin with, I live some distance from the nearest shop, which makes going to one that hour of the night an unattractive prospect. Not only that, chances were that no shop was open at that hour because businesses here tend to close shop early. The 24-hour economy does not exist here. And no, a supermarket was not an option because the nearest one is a car or matatu ride away.
At that point, I found myself reminiscing about the good old days when you could just knock on your neighbour’s door and borrow a spoon of salt, a cup of sugar or flour. Those days, borrowing was not frowned on, in fact, it was a normal thing to do, and people were happy to share the little that they had. Those days, homes were not hidden behind high walls and sturdy gates, and even those that were, the gate was rarely locked.
Anyway, I am friendly with my neighbours, but I simply could not envision myself knocking on their door, no, gate, at 8.30pm to borrow salt. They probably wouldn’t have heard the knocking anyway. I was, therefore, immensely relieved when, after turning the cabinets upside down, a miracle happened, I found a salt shaker with enough salt to cook with that evening, even though we had to pick out the rice the salt had been mixed with, an act that is supposed to allow the salt to flow better…
This week, a reader, J.Mugo, wrote me an email that mourned the vanishing of the good, old days when neighbours were neighbours. When, as he put it, “People would share even seeds for planting, jembes, axes, chapati pan. Life was good then. At times you wouldn't even remember who you gave what...”
I could relate with the borrowing of chapati pans. For some reason, there was that one neighbour that owned one that did not burn and harden chapatis in the middle, and all neighbourhood women took turns to borrow it.
Mugo’s going down memory lane was motivated by a recent experience where he had contracted a fundi to do a small repair job that required just a handful of sand, which he says he didn’t have.
He learned that his neighbour had a lorryful of it, and decided to borrow a trowel of it rather than buy an amount he didn’t need. Unfortunately, his neighbour wasn’t around, and those he found flatly refused to give him even a pinch.
“When we were growing up in the 60s and 70s, all one needed was to send kids to a neighbour for unga in case you realised too late in the day that you had run out of it. The same neighbour would some day send her child (to borrow) salt from you,” he wrote.
It is true that change is inevitable, and that we should embrace it, but modernity and rural to urban migration has robbed us of characteristics that made us more human.
