What it’s like to be gay in Kenya today…

The below is from journalist Kate Copstick‘s ongoing diary in Kenya, where her Mama Biashara charity is based…

Cologne Pride, 2015… a banner with the flags of 72 countries where homosexuality is illegal

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I need to tell you about the latest ghastliness to blight the land of happy safaris and dancing with Maasai.

A short while ago, the Kenyan government had a chance to behave like decent human beings and revoke laws criminalising homosexuality, in line with pretty much exactly what their own 2010 Constitution says. But no. They went with the old Colonial Penal Code forbidding “carnal knowledge contrary to the laws of nature” – which, according to people who obviously know bugger all about nature, means homosexuality.

They also refused to stop forced anal examinations by police (which are supposed to be a sure way of telling if you are a friend of Phillip). And, of course, the bigoted, the ignorant, the religious and the bastards rejoiced and began a happily homophobic spree.

Today I met up with Vicky for her beverage of choice – Cafe Latte – and a catch-up and planning meeting for Mama Biashara.

Vicky is straight, but a greater ally than could possibly be imagined in a country like Kenya. I ask her about the situation and she sighs the Vicky sigh that says things are not good.

Of course, there are beatings and killings (there always have been, but now the government has decreed they are probably for the best) and, of course, no one in a job is safe from being outed and immediately fired. Ditto people in rented accommodation.

60% of gay people (it is reckoned) have been or are still married with children here. And that means when they are outed very often those around them evince displeasure with their lifestyle choices by sexually abusing their children.

But the worst thing is that gay guys are frequently being denied access to AntiRetroViral drugs in government hospitals. And not just ARVs but all manner of medical treatment.

The gay community is fast disappearing underground, says Vicky. She has hundreds of people wanting help from Mama Biashara. So, this time, we are going to help a load of gay (and lesbian) groups to get to a safe place (few and far between) and start a business and a new life.

This will almost certainly be outside big towns, because even Mombasa – once very gay-friendly – has become ‘hot’.

Our big challenge will be finding safe places to meet them. But that is where our Mama Biashara network comes into play.

One group who is particularly desperate is, she tells me – wide-eyed – a group of gay Maasai men.

I cannot begin to imagine how tough it must be to be a gay Maasai.

As Mama Biashara expands in Kenya, ongoing abuse but upcoming hope…

Writer and critic Kate Copstick is in Kenya, where her Mama Biashara charity helps people out of abject poverty by giving them small grants to start small, self-sustaining businesses. They help set up businesses that will give them a life. Where necessary, Mama Biashara gives training and helps with creating a customer base.

The Mama Biashara slogan is: A HAND UP, NOT A HANDOUT. Copstick receives no salary and no money to cover her own personal costs. She pays for her own overheads, flights and accommodation.

100% of all monies donated are spent on the charity’s work.

Below are a couple of edited extracts from Copstick’s diary this week. Full versions are on the Mama Biashara Facebook page.

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The farm we are visiting today. Wheat as far as the eye can see

WEDNESDAY

Off to check on a Mama Biashara farming business and do some funding.

The farm is amazing. The quarry business I posted pictures of last trip has spawned so many offshoot businesses. Once people get money, they think about creating their own group and starting afresh. 

The quarry begat a potato farm. That farm begat another farm. It did so well it begat a hotel and yet another farm. This is the farm we are visiting today. 

Wheat (as far as the eye can see) is planted alongside maize, a fabulous field of carrots and a big field that has already been harvested, dug over, and is now being planted with potatoes. There is water, which comes from the Mau Forest, and the crops are huge. 

The first wheat group has taken the profit from their harvest and are already away discussing taking over another field with the Maasai who owns it. Over the various plots here, there are about fifty Mama Biashara business people. 

We go to our local ‘safe’ house for a funding. 

There are five groups: all of them battered, abused women with children who are being abused as a way of forcing the mothers out of the community.

Once upon a Kenyan election, it used to be the thing for MPs to give out parcels of land in the Mau Forest – mainly to Maasai – in exchange for their people’s votes. Huge tracts of land disappeared into the political maw. 

Now these people are being evicted and are going back to where they came from. A lot of them came from around here. And now they want their lands back from the people they rented to and do pretty much what it takes to get them out. These women are caught up in this. 

Many came here as farmhands and dairy workers. Now the returning Maasai just want them gone. 

The women put up with outrageous levels of abuse. 

One group, when I ask if the women are being abused as well as the children, tell me: “Only what is normal”.

And being beaten is normal. 

The groups are bigger than normal – 15 women in each – but, then, the levels of violence have escalated. The women are mainly going back to their own areas, where they will be welcome and looked after. 

We set up businesses selling boiled maize, washing powder, porridge, carrier bags, chapatis and boiled sweet potato. One woman from the chapati group has her tiny, sodomised child with her. 

The child has not been taken to hospital because a hospital will demand a police report for a child with these injuries. And the women cannot report anything to the police in their own area because the police will do nothing but report the woman to the rapist who will beat her at best, kill them both at worst. So no police report. 

The child is being, I am reassured, “cured with leaves”. 

By the time you read this, 88 woman and 177 kids will be in a safe place and starting a new life. Not bad for about £750. Although I must stress that the grants are cut to the absolute bone in order to help as many as possible. 

Mama B gives small grants – A HAND UP, NOT A HANDOUT.

THURSDAY

First up is another Mama Biashara farm. This one is massive. And it has pretty much everything. 

The big advantage here is that the land has an irrigation system fed by a borehole. The rent is 80 a year. There are several groups working the many many crops here: potatoes and carrots, coriander and some other herbs, tomatoes, arrowroot, watermelon and sweet potatoes, cassava, cucumber, butternut squash, onions, passion fruit, pawpaw, mango, lemon and oranges. I am sure I have forgotten some. Also, there is a chicken project and a huge swathe of land growing silage. 

All in all, about 80 Mama Biashara people farm this land, splinter groups either from our other farms or, in the case of the silage and chicken, splinter groups from one of our fumigation groups, themselves started as part of Vicky’s Cleaners. 

Splinter groups are usually three or four from a successful group who take their profit and set themselves up in a new venture. The original group then adds some new people and the splinter group adds about ten in starting their new business. This entire farm is financially self-seeded. Some of the women who run it, who were meant to come and meet us, have disappeared. 

They disappeared, apparently, because they were worried that, because they are doing so well, I had come to demand a cut.

We stride off across a field to where today’s funding groups are sitting.

First is a group headed by four grannies who are fed up with their daughters and grandchildren being molested and beaten by the local men. Fair dos. 

They have identified a good farm with a stable water supply back in their own tribal area and, as they know farming well, they want to take their group there and grow potatoes. Seems like a plan – so 14 adults and 54 children will be setting off tomorrow morning.

The next group is big – 20 adults with 73 children between them. This group have been flagged-up by our people at the quarry. They are already doing casual labouring at another quarry, but this comes with a lot of typical Kenyan shit – like the women being used as unpaid sex workers for the supervisors. 

If they want their job for the next day, they keep the supervisors and their friends happy at night. 

Our quarry boys have identified a rich-looking piece of land in the same area as themselves and negotiated the right to quarry it. Mama Biashara has to pay the £80 licence (City Council, of course) to ensure that the workers are not harassed and set them up with the tools of the quarrying trade. 

It is a big amount of money for Mama Biashara but our original quarry has helped hundreds (maybe 500) people over the three years since it was started, as well as kicking off countless splinter groups. 

Of course, there are more groups that there were supposed to be – seven instead of four – but, when there are women explaining to you that out of their group, eight women and six children have already been raped (they don’t bother to complain about beatings unless I ask… it is ‘normal’), I find it hard to say: “Well, you weren’t on the list, so tough”. 

The constraint is money. 

Did I mention we need more? 

So we sit for a few hours under a tree in the grass and juggle the finances of saving 75 women and 185 children from certain abuse. 

I dazzle with what has become known as “your mathematics”. And we do it. 

Businesses for paraffin and petrol, maize and pease, arrowroot and a cleaning contractors are now set up and (most importantly) money is there to pay for transporting the women away to their new lives. Sometimes that can double the grant, but it is rather of the essence of the whole thing. Vicky has a fleet of lorries on speed dial and we save SO much money transporting large groups of people by truck rather than bus. It is mildly not exactly kosher so to do but needs must. And Vicky’s lorrymen are decent blokes.

All in all, not a bad day, as days go.

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What Kate Copstick and her charity has to deal with on a daily basis in Kenya

Feared comedy critic,  outspoken journalist and former on-screen sidekick of the Chuckle Brothers, Kate Copstick has been in Kenya for the last two-and-a-half weeks. It is where her Mama Biashara charity works.  

She keeps a diary while she is there. Here are a few recent, brief, very, very highly edited excerpts which give a slight hint at some of what she has to face on a daily basis.

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Sunday 27th January

I sleep in. I took my methotrexate injection yesterday evening and am beset by mild nausea and dizzy headachiness.

Tuesday 29th January

It promises to be a packed day. I have to go back to Kenyatta Hospital, this time to help the Mary Faith Home get a girl – Faith – who is being detained there (ILLEGALLY) because her bill has not been paid. She is 14 years old. 

She was raped by her father. She gave birth two weeks ago, since when she has been held there – in a ward where expectant or postpartum mothers sleep two to a single bed (or on the floor) with their newborns. A victim of incestuous rape, she is now sharing a bed with a stranger. 

I meet the matron of the maternity ward. 

The matron (if, indeed, this stone-faced, acrylic-haired person IS the matron) is completely disinterested in the fact that what they are doing is illegal. The girl, she intones, should have got medical insurance. 

The first thought, of course, of any 14 year old raped by her father, would be: Note To Self, get medical insurance just in case I am pregnant by my rapist father.

I can feel an unhelpful outburst bubbling and I stomp out. 

We go and see another lady who is Kenyatta’s One Good Person. She is not happy. She phones around. She speaks to the right people. And NHIF (Kenya’s fairly new National Insurance scheme) will pay the bill. And she will ‘have a word’ with the supposed matron of the maternity ward.

“I am very much like you,” she says to me. “Perhaps we are sisters.”

I am very flattered.

We go and deliver a pair of crutches (thank you Age UK (Hammersmith & Fulham)) to Kibe, who is delighted to be home from Kenyatta.

We hear more horror stories from inside Kenyatta. The number of people who go there and simply rot away is terrifying. And, once they have you in your 1,500 Kenyan Shillings per day bed, they will put every obstacle in the way of a transfer out. 

“It is hell,” says Kibe. “Hell”. 

I get back to Corner and get a call. The girl Faith is still in “hell”. 

I did not get the details but, when push came to shove, the hospital refused to let her go.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Thursday 31 January

We had another bomb in Nairobi earlier in the week. But it was hardly in the news at all. I think a couple of people were killed and about twenty injured. 

However, it was in quite a skanky part of town: Odeon Roundabout. The people around there are mainly hawkers and other people who are: 

1. not rich 
2. not involved in international politics 
3. not white.

And so the rather big explosion was not reported. 

It worries me much more than the big internationally covered bomb at Westlands.

I spend quite a bit of time near the Odeon Roundabout and loads of people I know/have funded have workshops there. No idea what might be in it for Al-Shabaab to attack.

I have been feeling a bit odd – utterly exhausted (for no reason) to the point of not being able to get up stairs and bad headaches – and this morning is not a great morning.

We make for Jamibora. It is the weirdest of places. A sort of gated community of stone houses which was apparently funded by a white bloke so people from the slums could get a better life and a new home. 

People started saving with Jamibora Bank, very little by very little, to buy their new home. And then the houses were sold over their heads to people with ready cash. 

It took, says my friend Mwangi, years for them to get any money back. Oddly, most of the houses are empty but one is owned by another Mama Biashara lady who made the most of her grant and is yet another of our network of ‘safe houses’. 

Today’s groups looking for funding from Mama Biashara have come from Loitoktok and elsewhere in Kajiado County. Far away, basically. They did not feel safe meeting in Kitenhela or Sultan Hamud (our original plan) so we are out here in a safe house. 

The people’s problems are the same. These are all groups of other tribes living in Maasai communities. Now the Maasai want them out. They are physically and sexually assaulted. I get a list of attacks with spears, knives, rungus (big heavy stick with a knuckle on the end) and pangas (machetes). 

It is very hard for them to use the word rape. They will say “They hold the children” or “They take the children” or describe it as “bad behaviour” or “unsuitable behaviour” and I have to push and push to find out what any of this means. It means rape. 

I apologise to them and explain that it is important to know. And to use the words that tell the truth. I tell them (last resort) that Jesus said, “The truth will set you free”. They are very impressed and mutter “Amen”. I feel slightly dirty. However we do get some more details. 

In one group the main problem is that the Maasai men want to marry the daughters of the group. And this means enforcing female genital mutilation. They are becoming quite insistent and the mothers are terrified.

A call to the Mary Faith Home confirms that Faith is still being illegally detained by Kenyatta Hospital. With her newborn child. Mary herself was so stressed today that she had a bit of a moment and fainted. Her blood pressure is, she says, worryingly high. Mine is generally low but if anything could turn me hypertensive, the goings on in Kenyatta Hospital can.

Friday 1st February

I go to Milimani Law Courts. This is where Lady Justice Wilfreda Okwany sits. She is the judge who made the game changing ruling in October last year. That ruling states that it is illegal for a Kenyan hospital to detain a patient for non-payment of fees. Illegal. But the law of Kenya “does not apply here” according to the staff at Kenyatta. 

I am thinking the good Lady Justice might be able to help me help them see the error of their ways. A tailored jacket and an authoritative manner go a long way. As does a document file under the arm and a grasp of legalese. But people are very helpful and very quickly I get to meet her clerk. The Lady Justice is on holiday (confirmed by a couple of people and a quick look at the register) but I have her clerk’s email and I am putting together a document which I hope she might read. Fingers crossed, anyway.

On the way back, Facebook tells me the British comedian Jeremy Hardy is dead. This is just another example of the world being too unfair to be the project of any kind of thinking deity. Jeremy was a wholly, honestly, hilariously brilliant political comedian. And a totally decent human being. 

Just in case he is listening from The Place Where The Good Guys Go, he might be amused by the conversation I had with David as we reach Corner. 

“You are very silent,” says David. 

“I am sad,” I say. “A very good man has died.” 

There is a pause. 

“Cancer,” I say. 

David nods. 

“Which cancer was it ?” he asks. “Was it the prostitute cancer?”

I smile all the way the Mary Faith home to drop off the beads for more Happy Bags. 

Faith is still not out of Kenyatta Hospital. Still illegally detained. But now she has locked herself in a toilet because the court (The hearing was today but she could not go to identify her father as the man who raped her because Kenyatta will not release her) told her father she was in Kenyatta Hospital and he sent one of his goons (who have already tried to get rid of her once) round to the hospital. Luckily, Faith saw him before he saw her and locked herself in the loo. A 14 year old rape victim. 

I am going to try and find someone in the media who will help. And talk (if I can get a contact) to the BBC who have a MASSIVE place here. 

The monsters are among us. 

I think it is time we got among the monsters.

I can feel my old documentary making roots tingling.

… CONTINUED HERE …

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Mama Biashara exists totally on donations and from sales of goods in its shop at Shepherds Bush, London. The website is HERE.

Kate Copstick: The real, horrific details of female genital mutilation in Kenya

Continuing edited extracts from Kate Copstick’s diary. She is currently in Kenya, working with her Mama Biashara charity.

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Copstick in Kenya with Mama Biashara co-worker Felista

SATURDAY

For the first time this trip I am a bit meh when I wake up. It has been incredible this trip. I have not so much looked at a painkiller. And nothing has swelled up, crusted, oozed or turned a funny colour. I thought I might be cured.

To Corner for food. Today seems to be the slaughtering-the-chickens day at Chicken Master. There is a LOT of blood around and piles of feathers and bits in the little room beside the entrance. And the smell of death. And piles of plucked chicken ready for sale. I have rice and cabbage.

I check on Doris who is deep in the forest outside Limuru with our next batch of terrified mothers with raped children desperate for the chance to flee their rapist husbands.

My phone abruptly dies. Falls off its perch. Becomes an ex-phone. Not pining for the fijords. Dead. With my life inside. Cos stuff doesn’t get saved to the buggering SIM card any more does it ???? NO !! It is about 7.30pm. To say I panic would be… well, OK I do get a bit unsettled. I set off through Corner and find a phone kiosk.

“Ah! – It just needs a charging,” says the young man. “The betri is veeeeeery low.” Fifteen minutes later he looks at it and says: “It is dead!” It is some sort of newfangled solid state thingy and the battery is non removeable. Without the phone I have no internet. WhatsApp. Messenger.

I get a piki piki – and immediately regret saying I need to get to Junction fast – I get to the phone shop in Junction just as it is closing. I get a slightly soiled ex-display techno-something for about £9. And I am phoneable. But with no numbers. But at least I am contactable.

I get back up the road to Corner. While online I get news that the compound in Rombo now has most of its fence, is about to get a gate and is looking gorgeous in blue and yellow. All paid for by Mama Biashara’s Phoenix Project. But nails and bits of wood and whatnot are surprisingly expensive.

I go to bed convinced amazing things are happening online and I can’t see them. Sob.

Nais – “She is not living in fear any more.”

SUNDAY

I meet Nais. She is fifteen and Maasai from the Rift Valley. Her father killed her mother and then burnt down the house with the body inside. Nais and her brother were taken by her maternal grandmother to her village to live. However, being fifteen, Nais knew what was coming and she ran away. And travelled on foot, sometimes thumbing lifts, over a period of a month and a half, to Nairobi. Desert country. She was found by the police who brought her to Felista.

Now she is not living in fear any more. She is a charming young woman. After we get her story I ask if I can ask “a hard question” (Nais speaks Swahili but not yet English). I ask if she has been ‘cut’ (ie female genital mutilation). She says no, but that was why she ran. It was the season of cutting.

And now I see something I would never have thought possible – I see Felista shocked and totally discombobulated.

I ask Nais if the cutting is done the same way as in, for example Rombo. She says the old ladies use a pair of big scissors. Think tailoring shears. The same pair for all the girls that get done that day.

“What do they take away?” I ask.

“Yote” she says. Everything.

Felista’s mouth gapes.

“And then they put goat fat and cow dung?” I ask.

Nais nods. Although in the Rift Valley they sometimes use Kimbo (cheap cooking fat), possibly because a mere girl’s butchered undercarriage is not worth wasting good goat fat on. They also put sugar on the wound, for some misbegotten reason. And then periodically wash it with cow urine.

Felista is aghast. And incandescent with rage.

“I am hearing this for the first time and I cannot believe!” she says. “Why are these people not in prison? They will arrest people who were with Raila in the park… doing nothing… but they will not arrest people who do this to young girls?”

She is also furious at the many many many NGO who get quite a lot of money for supposedly educating about and opposing female genital mutilation.

“They do not tell you the truth,” she says. “They are just being polite because they do not want the wazungu (whites) to see how backward are these people. They should say the truth!!” And then, more surprises. “They just say ‘the cut’,” says Felista. “But there are many cuts. I was cut… everyone born 1959, 1960, 1961… We were all cut. But not like this!”

The Kikkuyu tribe traditionally cut girls. And women up to the age of 49. Although it has more or less stopped now.

Felista explains that, by the time she was cut, there was only one old lady who was doing it. When Felista was taken to her she told her that they would have ‘a secret’. She would cut Felista but not the full cut because she did not want to do that any more. So she bifurcated (split in two) Felistas clitoris.

“And then you put a leaf on,” says Felista, explaining the post-operative procedure. She makes a V sign with her fingers and waggles them. “It is also very good for the man”.

I am silent.

“But that was not like this !!!” says Felista, gesturing towards Nais. “We must mobilise. But we must meet with the shoshos.” She grabs my arm. “You cannot win a game with a fight. You win a game with a game.”

According to Nais there are a load of old ladies who earn about £12 per butchering. And, given there are no gloves, no disinfectant, no cleaning of the scissors and that goat fat and cow dung are readily available, that is pretty much pure profit.

Felista is fired up about joining our anti FGM arm of the Phoenix Project.

She reckons we can do a deal with the old ladies. Persuade them to stop (for cash, obviously) and create some sort of ‘pretend’ FGM involving sanitary pads and fake blood. No-one looks to check it has been done, says Nais. And no-one comes into the manyatta with the girl when it is being done. So only the girl and the shosho know what is really happening.

That is how it stopped in other tribes. When the old ladies do not do it any more, the practice just stops. For once, the power is in the hands of the old ladies.

When I come back in April, Nais will take us out to her grandma’s village and we can see what happens. And Felista is all for creating a home for runaway Maasai girls in DECIP. I have never seen her this worked up. I think it is a lot about never having been told the whole truth that is outraging her.

“You should be telling people,” she says, poking me in the chest. “You are on the ground.” I am indeed. “I think they are working from offices,” she says, doing a fair mime of someone at a computer. And it is true that the many many many many anti-FGM NGOs (it is a killer pitch if you want funding nowadays) tend to pussyfoot around a bit.

They do a lot of talking and never quite get round to calling a spade a bloody spade. There is a lot got away with under the blanket of what is, broadly, political correctness. And the government do very very little in terms of stopping it.

It is understandable (not forgivable but understandable) because he who takes on the entire Maasai nation would face an absolute nightmare of a reaction. With the Maasai you do not fuck. Really.

“They are worse than the Meru men,” says Felista.

Alarmingly – although FGM is illegal in Kenya (like THAT has made a difference) – a bloke called Kamau is working (with quite a lot of support – even from women) to have the law overturned and FGM legalised again.

CONTINUED HERE

Kate Copstick’s charity Mama Biashara in Kenya and the need for donations

Copstick in Kenya with a chicken

Following on from yesterday’s blog, more highly-edited extracts from Kate Copstick’s diary in Kenya, where her Mama Biashara charity is based. The original, unedited diaries are on her Facebook page.

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MONDAY

Zaida tells me more about the plans for the girls’ refuge – education, personal development, outreach work. It will also provide a refuge for any girls who are raped, because here, neither the local chief (Maasai himself) nor the police will do anything about it. Slight problem is that they have chosen to call the refuge Gates Of Zion. Which worries me, although there is no overt church involvement. I tell her about Mama Biashara’s Phoenix Project … Zaida likes the name.

We go and see the compound they have been offered. It is great – a row of mabati houses, space for more, plenty of space to develop and all for 12,000 a month, which is just under £90. They are already using one house as a school for girls and anyone who wants to learn to read and write and do a bit of arithmetic. They have also already mobilised an outreach team and just need the wherewithal to make this place their own before they start rescuing girls.

Oh – and we need to dig new pit latrines because these ones are full.

We kick off our collaboration with two months’ rent and money to make a security fence. And I will be back in April.

So Mama Biashara’s Phoenix Project is rising in Rombo, under the shadow of Kilimanjaro. Apparently God lives there.

Two ladies at the new Phoenix Project compound in Rombo

TUESDAY

Back at Corner, Doris has loads of follow-up information on our Phoenix Project groups.

The first group – the Maasai people where the problem was the husbands raping their own children within the marriage and the man whose wife and kids were being raped by neighbours – have already gone. Mainly to one town in Tanzania.

We have a counsellor there and she is organising homes and a friendly doctor who will examine all the kids to see if medical treatment is required. The lady who had been raped and impregnated is no longer pregnant and is off to start her new life with her group. The girls from Kangeme are going to two centres: Malindi and Nanyuki. In both places, Doris has contacts. Malindi we know well and at Nanyuki the incomers are being put up in a hotel till they get started.

Doris has been a bit of a demon with the forms I made up for personal information on the women. We now have nuggets of info. She is getting calls in from all over Kenya on the Mama Biashara line. This is like squeezing what you think is a plook and finding it is cancer. OK, I know that is not how you diagnose cancer but you get my drift.

Tomorrow we are seeing another group of women from far away (they want to come here because we cannot meet where someone might recognise them). And the rent is paid, I hear, on the compound in Rombo. The Phoenix is rising, people. The Phoenix is rising.

Doris, one of Mama Biashara’s key helpers

WEDNESDAY

Now we have another meeting with groups from Magadi – another area of big intermarriage with the Maasai. Four groups.

This time, there are four men involved and their stories are as toe-curling as before.

If anything, the men who marry-in are treated worse than women (and that is saying something).

The Maasai men rape their wives and children in front of them. Just to show them who is boss.

And the women tell the same old story. When their children get to about five or six, their husbands start getting the inexplicable incestuous, paedophile horn. The women usually discover it has started when they “see blood coming down” from a child.

But now it is not going to happen any more for these groups. Sixteen families – which include 69 children – are moving to join the rest of our relocated people. There are places awaiting them, they have terrific self-sustaining businesses (porridge and sweet potato – separately) and Stella is waiting with counselling and medical help. Stella is turning out to be a humongous asset. Yet another friend of Doris.

Doris goes home early. She is absolutely knackered. Calls are coming in from all over almost non stop. And she has to triage the misery. I think we might have to get another phoneline and get someone to help with the first line approaches. Which is where donations will come in handy.

Mama Biashara’s Vicky: “They will just remove your head.”

THURSDAY

Vicky has come to enlist the help of The Phoenix Project for a group from Meru.

The women are in the usual hell of having a husband who rapes their kids but not having the wherewithal to get away and take the children to safety.

These groups want to go to Garissa. Which is on the border with Somalia. Your life has to be quite bad for Garissa to seem like the promised land.

“The thing with Meru men,” says Doris, “is they are mental.”

Vicky nods. “You cannot speak to them. They will just remove your head.”

This is something I have heard before, when we were helping groups of boys escape virtual slavery on the miraa farms in Meru.

There is a kind of shortcut between “Are you looking at me?” and violent death here.

It makes the East End of Glasgow look like Little Giggling in the Grasses.

Thoughtful Kate Copstick, as seen by Joanne Fagan

FRIDAY

Now the gates of hell open.

I try to get Doris to understand paperwork and follow up and form filling. It is a nightmare and we both end up tetchy.

The money for Mama Bashara has almost always come from our London shop or through donations I personally have got. We have never had to be answerable to anything except the sheer bitter slog of standing in the shop every day.

But that money is just not enough.

And we have no big money coming in from individual donors (with the exception of my friends Andrew and Paul who donate 5,000 and 1,000 most years). We also have a wonderful loyal donor in Flame Haired Janet and marvellous people who help out incredibly if there is a panic on.

But we need more if we are to run with the Phoenix Project.

And that means form filling and information stockpiling and question answering and not just doing the Kenyan thing which is to say “probably… this is what happened” and then go ahead as if your personal suppositions about someone you know nothing about are fact.

Pinning Doris down (metaphorically) on the information she has got from the people in the Phoenix Project Groups is like catching frogspawn with chopsticks. To be fair, getting any information of a personal – much less sexual – nature out of a poor Kenyan is a Sysiphian task.

But it seems that the rape starts as early as three years old. The abuse of the first children tends to go unnoticed. Given that these girls in the Namanga were all married off aged 11 or 12 and pregnant a few months later, they are so traumatised themselves that they do not know what to think.

In the Maasai villages, when the women (and they all tell exactly the same story) report their husbands to the elders, the elders summon the husband, the husband is told to buy meat for the elders, he spits on the ground and then everything is fine. Except the woman is generally beaten severely by the husband.

The women report bleeding and incontinence in the children. The older children usually tell their mum “people have been doing bad manners to me”. And then, of course, culture dictates that the raped child is kept secret.

So no doctors, no hospitals. Just local, herbal medicine.

And this is before the question of female genital mutilation rears its ugly head.

Filling in the information about each person on the laptop is taking forever.

I say I will go and print out the forms and we can fill in by hand. En route I meet Kibe. We get it downloaded and printed out in a sweet cyber where everything lurks under about an inch of masonry dust – there is work going on outside.

Back at Casa Copi, Doris wants to go.

“I will do the paperwork my way,” she says.

“No” I say. “Because your way is not to do it at all.”

Harsh, I know, but fair.

I am just too tired and frazzled to do any more.

Doris goes and Kibe and I go and eat griddled goat’s heart in the street.

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As well as the existing Mama Biashara donation page, Copstick has set up a specific Phoenix Projects donation page.

Copstick receives no money for her work and covers all her own travel and accommodation. 100% of all donations go to the Mama Biashara charity’s work.

EXTRACTS FROM COPSTICK’S DIARY CONTINUE HERE

Kate Copstick in Kenya: more child rape, corruption and struggling charity

Kate Copstick working in Kenya this week

Comedy critic Kate Copstick is currently in Kenya working for her Mama Biashara charity which gives small grants to help poor people start their own self-sustaining businesses.

The Mama Biashara slogan is “Giving a hand up not a hand out”.

Copstick receives no money from the charity and covers all her own expenses, including flights and accommodation. The charity survives on donations (you can donate HERE) and on sales in its London shop.

Three recent blogs had edited extracts from Copstick’s diary.

Now we catch up with what happened last weekend…

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Two of the women the Mama Biashara charity is helping

SATURDAY

My boggled mind forgot to mention yesterday that the women at the workshop in Kitengela – the ones whose husbands were raping their children – were themselves the victims of child rape, having been married off at ages from 11 to 14 (only one was as ancient as 14).

I hate the way the white conqueror always rides not just roughshod but with spiked soles over anyone else’s culture. But this aspect of Maasai culture is an abomination.

Today there is another workshop with another group of young women. But first back to see Vikram Dave and change the rest of the money I brought.

Dave has not yet read my email asking for school fees for the Ruai children. I tell him about the need for shoes in Western to help stop the jiggers infestations and he nods sagely.

I leave and hurtle round the market and then get back to Corner to the meet the girls. They look so young. They ARE so young. All just in their mid teens.

They are so terrified that I do not ask to take a picture.

These girls are from families in rural areas. When they get to about 12, their families get rid of them by sending them to relatives in the city as, more or less, house slaves. And the uncles and the cousins use them for sex. These girls have been sex slaves since they came to Nairobi. About five of them have children by their uncles. They are so lost.

But we drink tea and eat mandazi and talk and they slightly relax. We talk about rising from being no-one to being a businesswoman; we talk about the powers that money will give them. They are all going to get counselling and are very up for that.

They have been taught how to make rugs (the woolly ones for bathrooms and whatnot) by a woman Doris put them in touch with. The woman turned out just to be using them too – she sold the rugs and paid them almost nothing. But they have the skills. So we start a rug business. The profit is excellent and the girls really know their stuff. When I say Mama Biashara will be paying to set up this business some of them start to cry.

Mama Biashara’s Phoenix Project compound in Rombo, Kenya

SUNDAY

We head for Rombo.

OK, we are not exactly sure where Rombo is but we head for Loitoktok in the knowledge that there will be signage from there.

Just past Machakos Junction, we are stopped at a roadblock. The fat policeman toting the AK47 pokes at the bonnet, wiggles the wing mirror and gets David out of the car for a ‘chat’. He takes David’s licence. Now we will have to pay something or he will not get it back. He is obviously not happy with what David is saying as he comes and talks to me. He is taking the car to Loitoktok for impounding, he says, and I will have to get it released on bond. This will be very much money. And David will have to go to court. This will also end in ‘very much money’. He rests his aK47 on the window and looks in at me.

The ball is in my court.

I could play tough, but there are three of them now circling the David mobile.

“Is there some way to avoid all this trouble?” I ask, as charmingly as I can.

“You tell me,” says the fat policeman.

“Perhaps I could buy you lunch,” I murmer through gritted teeth.

He nods. Lunch is acceptable.

I offer 300 shillings through the window.

He turns into a parody Big Black Laughing Policeman, holding his stomach (no mean feat) and rocking backwards and forwards. This makes his gun sway alarmingly.

“Now you are making me to laugh,” he says.

“Then how much?” I ask.

“It is for you to say,” says Tubby the Extortionist.

“Five hundred is what I have,” I say, doing a pantomime pocket search. He comes around my side of the vehicle and grabs it.

David says, as we go, “I would have driven past but, when there are three and you go past, they shoot at your wheels.”

After leaving tarmac roads at Illasit we hit a road worthy of a stage in the Dakar Rally. Dust is chokingly thick and swirls around inside the car coating everything. Slightly alarmingly, my phone welcomes me to Tanzania and I worry we are on the wrong road… but this is border country and borders are porous here.

30 kilometres later we are at Rombo, met by my amazing new contact Zaida. A glass of water and a plate of fresh mango later, I am handing out de-wormers and diclofenac gel in her lovely little house like the journey had never happened.

Our little medical afternoon goes on until 8.30pm and the ailments are exactly what you would expect: muscle and joint aches and strains, headaches, massive congestions and coughs from cooking over wood indoors with no ventilation, an ocean of snot, quite a lot of constipation and some UTIs.

These ladies carry massive bundles of firewood almost every day and they all complain of the same pains in the same places. My diclofenac gel is soon done. I will send more. The marvellous Glucosamine bombs from HTC take a battering, as does their miraculous Cod Liver Oil both for adults and children. And everyone gets de-wormed – adults and children. Some of the kids are eight or nine and have never been de-wormed before.

Mama Biashara reaches out to raped mothers

There is one sweet girl who is epileptic and quite severely mentally challenged. She is breastfeeding a baby.

“She was raped,” explains her mother.

She has, I learn, three children (the eldest is nine years old) and all three are the product of rape. Her mother wants more of ‘the white pills’ the pharmacy gives her for her epilepsy. We try to find out what ‘the white pills’ are but the pharmacy has closed and the (unlicensed) pharmacist is in hiding after a raid by the Ministry of Health.

Now we are heading (in the PITCH dark) out to visit a young wife who has been so badly beaten by her husband that she cannot come to the house.

The Davidmobile is packed with me and Maasai ladies and off we go.

Cross country. Pitch black and the only sound is the acacia bushes gouging bits out of the Davidmobile’s paintwork. Through troughs of water, over stones… as a feat of driving it is very impressive.

“We are here,” says a lady.

There is absolutely nothing to see but we get out, spark up torches, and, sure enough, we are in a collection of manyattas – Maasai houses built from mud and cow dung and wood. There is great excitement from the locals at the glow-in-the-dark granny in their midst. The manyatta is thick with smoke and the girl is bruised, battered and bewildered. Her earlobe has been torn apart and I clean and dress it and leave antiseptic and painkillers. That is about all I can do.

In the car back there is a LOT of talk about the problems of girls being sold into marriage with old men when they are about eleven. They undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) and get sold off ASAP. No school for girls. No school for most of the kids, but definitely none for girls. The ladies in the back seat talk of one girl currently who is heavily pregnant but so young she has no breasts.

One girl is mentioned who was sold off and ran away, sold off again and ran away again and took herself to school. She has been beaten repeatedly and ostracised and is now living in Rombo at a place the women (led by Zaida and some of the Maasai Mamas) hope will become a refuge and a school for girls running away from FGM and forced marriage at twelve years old. There is one other girl at the house whom they were unable to save from ‘the cut’ but who was rescued before being sold to an old man.

The cut, I learn, is treated with goat fat and cow dung when fresh. And the girls are made to drink cows’ blood to replenish what they lose.

Tomorrow we are going to see this refuge house, and the compound which could be the start of something massive here.

CONTINUED HERE

Anyone who thinks they have witnessed the objectification of women needs to come here

Kate Copstick working for Mama Biashara in Kenya

My last two blogs have been edited extracts from Kate Copstick’s diary. She is currently in Kenya working with her charity Mama Biashara.

Copstick covers 100% of her own costs, including accommodation and flights and takes zero from the charity… 100% of all donations go to the charity’s work.

Here are the latest edited extracts from her diaries. The full versions are on her Facebook page.

Copstick writes:

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Doris, one of Mama Bishara’s main workers

Stand by to get very angry. Remember with all this stuff, nothing helps quite like having the money to do something about it.

So never forget Mama Biashara has a BTMyDonate page. Feel free (in fact feel obliged) to share this… If you can get someone else to donate then you don’t have to …

THURSDAY

In tonight’s news from Kenya… Opposition proscribed as a criminal organisation. Media blackout continues. Until government ‘investigation’ is done. Gulp.

I have slept like the proverbial log. Our first stop is the delightful oasis that is Wildebeest Camp to collect the farming tools I have left there. They are for the new Maasai group I am visiting.

I send a plangent plea to Vikram Dave for school fees for the Ruai children Mama Biashara has been supporting. Nowadays the school fees are crippling for us.

I am VERY late to meet Doris at ChickenMaster. She is asleep at the table when I arrive, having been up all night taking phone calls from desperate mothers of abused children who have nowhere to turn. The group we are meeting tomorrow seem quite emboldened now they have made the decision to meet us. As if they can see light at the end of the tunnel and are at least 99% sure it is not an oncoming train. They will be bringing actual business plans. They are ready to go.

FRIDAY

I have a meeting with Julius – Baba Biashara in Western Kenya.

Julius has been doing great stuff. We now have a functioning kibanda (a small single-room building) with walls and everything at the entrance to his plot. We just need to put in an electrical socket (we got the wire to bring electricity to the plot last time) and we can do everything there.

Julius has been making the most of the stuff Mama Biashara left him with – cod liver oil, glucosamine sulphate etc etc and he has a long list of quasi-medical complaints from his last get together with our groups. Generally of the “I get ulsas (acid indigestion) when I eat a big ugali” variety.

I am really hoping that Vikram Dave (if he gets back to me) will be able to help with shoes for these people. The jiggers that infest the soil, burrow into the feet, lay eggs, explode out and leave septic sores are kept at bay completely by shoes. We have a great jiggers project here with Julius and we can treat them. But with no shoes they just burrow back.

Our businesses are doing well and the area is gagging for more raincatchers. It is now dry here and a full raincatcher will keep a small community for about six weeks through the first part of the dry spell. When there is any rain at all, it is more or less all they need. And while they use raincatcher water there is absolutely no waterborn disease.

I ask Julius about the problem of child rape in Western (my Mama Biashara peeps are our eyes and ears on the ground across Kenya).

Not a biggie, I hear.

It is frowned upon in Luhya culture – as Julius says: “People will not like you because you have done a bad thing”.

However “Rape case is upon the family” he says. Meaning it has to get sorted out amongst the people themselves. Hmmmm. There is one case, he suddenly remembers, of a boy “with blood coming down” which was noticed by the mother. Julius says he will look into it. I think about shrieking: “You must contact the police!” But I realise this would do no good.

David arrives and we meet Doris and set off for Kitengela.

I do not like Kitengela. This is more or less Maasai country and every bar and restaurant is full with men eating meat (OK slight exaggeration but not much). Anyone who thinks they have witnessed the objectification of women anywhere in the west really needs to come here. Even I, hyper-insensitive as I am, can feel like I am being looked at like a cross between nothing at all and a breeding cow. I am almost overwhelmed with the urge to do something appalling or to face off with one of these arrogant, meaty-eyed, entitled (in their own way) patriarchs. But TBH, the thought of what my Dad would say stops me.

I do not fail to see the irony in that.

We find a space at the back of a bar and our group arrives. So as not to arouse suspicion, one representative from each mini-group comes. Four young women and, surprisingly, a man.

I am at a loss as to imagine how the man fits in… Is his wife getting jiggy with his son? Surely not.

Absolutely not.

Ntoto represents four men who met time and time again at the police station or at their local Chief’s office. They had all come to report the same thing. These men are Maasai from Tanzania who have married across the border into Kenya. The Kenyan Maasai do not like them and they display their Kenyan dislike by raping the wives and the children of the incomers. Repeatedly. With absolute impunity.

Ntoto and his friends went to their local Chief and to the police and none of them would do anything.

So he is here with a plan to move back into Tanzania with his wife and five children and his three friends and their wives and ten children and make a new life. They are going to manufacture charcoal. Ecologically dubious, but a good business. He almost cries when I hand over the money.

I almost cry when I hand over the money but there is no time because now we have Naserian, representing four women and sixteen children. With this little group, the husbands wait until the girl children are “big” – ie 11 years old – before raping them. The group have a good business plan, an escape route and have organised a place to stay in their new town. We have a counsellor in place there who will be there for sessions with both mothers and children as soon as they are safe and established.

Next, Mary – heading a group of four women with thirteen children and Jane, whose group of four women have sixteen children between them. With these women, the husband does not bother to wait until the girls are “big”. The rape starts, we hear, when the children are as young as five.

All the groups are going to the same town, which is great for moral support. And for the reason that they can all go to the same hospital to get checked and our counsellor can do group sessions. One of the ladies in the last group has something of an additional problem. She has five children with a child rapist. But was herself raped by another man in the community. And is now pregnant with his child.

It is brain-addling that, as I am here, my Facebook is hotching with horror at the abomination that is having ‘Brolly Dollies’ on the grid at bike races because it objectifies women. See above.

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Mama Biashara subsists solely on donations from the public and from sales at its London shop. Copstick covers 100% of her own costs, including flights and accommodation and takes zero.

100% of all donations go to the charity’s work.

You can donate HERE.

COPSTICK’S DIARY CONTINUES HERE

Kate Copstick in Kenya and in trouble

On Tuesday, I will be hosting the Grouchy Club live in London without co-host Kate Copstick. She is in Kenya, working with her Mama Biashara charity. It helps deprived individuals and groups to start up their own small legitimate businesses to support themselves.

Here is a heavily-edited version of the Kenyan diary entries she has been posting on the Mama Biashara Facebook page.

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“I am having something of an accommodation crisis.”

SATURDAY 4th JUNE

I am having something of an accommodation crisis in Nairobi.

Someone told my (Seventh-day Adventist) landlady that I come to Kenya to train people how to be gay. So she has evicted me.

Doris has just about given herself a stroke spending the past few weeks trying to find another place on my budget, which was £50 for three weeks.

When David picks me up at the airport, we drive for about an hour before reaching my new home. It is far out in the geographical, not the John Denver, sense. On the road from Dagoretti Market to Karen. Thankfully not close enough to Dagoretti Market to smell or hear the abattoir. But a real bugger for transport or walking. The room is big and I have a toilet inside !!! My mattress is on the floor and my bucket (now redundant what with the en suite) under a wee sink. Which actually has running water. So, except for the geographical location, it is bloody wonderful.

The place is a sort of a knocking shop… Chaps rent rooms and bring their girlfriends. Or vice versa. The sign on the gate says Home from Home.

As I sit in my new accommodation and look around – bare plaster walls, bare tiled floor, room empty except for my mattress on the floor – I cannot help but think that, if someone asked me where I was, I should say “Ahm in masel”. That translates as “I am in my cell” but also ” I am in by myself” It is not really that funny. But I am cold and damp and it seems hilarious when you are here.

I tell the Pamoja Boys and Martin Sombua about the trip to Samburu. They have heard all about the British soldiers raping local girls. It also happens around Nanyuki, apparently, where there is a big army base. They catch them when they are tending to the animals, or going for water apparently. The other talk is all of civil unrest and ethnic cleansing. There are now weekly demos/riots in the city centre – Tear Gas Mondays they call them. The opposition parties want the wildly corrupt electoral commission reformed. Unsurprisingly, the Government do not agree. Next year’s elections will, I fear, be messy.

SUNDAY 5th JUNE

I get a matatu to Karen. The fare is 20 bob but, because of my colour, I am charged 30 bob. I get off at The Hub, a new shopping centre.

Most of the outlets in The Hub are not yet open. Which does little to undermine the sheer, gobsmacking, breathtaking, indecent opulence of the place once you are inside. A sweeping palatial staircase leads to a balustraded second level, a massive stone flagged piazza opens up surrounded by porticoed walkways, a jazz band plays and children are riding around on life-size toy ponies which move forward as the child posts (as in a posting trot) up and down on the saddle. I walk through another archway to find fountains playing alongside a boating lake. A BOATING LAKE. Turning left I chance upon a chap who offers me gluten-free artisanal breads. He is part of their weekly Organic Farmers’ Market. There are biodynamic jellies and vegan spreads, organic wines and thoughtful sorbets. I cannot speak. I am in Vegas. It just seems so so wrong.

I meet Doris. She comes back to my cell and picks up three baby dolls for babycare training (we are MUCH in demand) and a load of rubber rings: armbands and beachballs for our burgeoning groups in Mombasa. Amazing to think a lad can make more money renting out Poundland blow up swimming aids than he can renting out himself.

Doris goes and I curl up with my slightly damp blankets and a game of solitaire. In the next room, a baby starts crying. A man’s voice starts to sing something local-sounding. The child continues to whine. And, just as I thought it could not get any worse, the man changes tune. And starts to sing Coldplay’s Yellow. The child likes it.

The Kenyan national flag

MONDAY 6th JUNE

David arrives. His car is in the Sick Car Hospital after a drunk driver hit him head on. He has a borrowed car. It makes a clunking noise in any gear below 4th.

We take a road that loops a little around the town centre in case they have started demonstrating early. The demonstrations are fairly peaceful. The uniformed thugs ‘policing’ them are not.

The Ngong Road looks like a war zone. And it is really. A war between rich and poor. Once the road had wide chunks at the side where people sold flowers and plants and turf and stuff. Then there were newspaper kiosks and snack stops. A whole little micro economy. Under lovely old trees.

The whole lot has been bulldozed. There is some sort of a plan to widen the road so the fat cats don’t have to wait behind a matatu when they are driving to a meeting. The contract will of course be given to the Chinese on a government deal.

No one is ever compensated or offered an alternative. This is money coming into Nairobi and, instead of helping the poor, it is simply forcing them out. Lord knows what they will do to the Kibera people when the road goes through. I now hate everyone in a 4×4 on principle. A radical idea but it is working for me for the moment.

Down on the coast, we are helping the ex sex workers who have destroyed their skin by scrubbing it with household bleach twice daily, I took them E45 and they are hailing it as a miracle. They are able to walk outside without pain (although they shouldn’t), they can sleep and their skin is coming back.

TUESDAY 7th JUNE

We have a meeting with Margaret – my ex landlady – to see if there is any hope of a rapprochement. I go bearing gifts of cod liver oil, garlic and iron as she is run-down and poorly. She meets us outside the property on the street. She is very nice but explains that, because of what The Scriptures say, they cannot have me living there because, if they help me, it would be as if they themselves are helping gay people. It was Poundland’s coloured and flavoured condoms what did for us.

We leave and even David – who is a Kenyan man and therefore thinks gay men are just ill and gay women don’t exist – is outraged.

But you cannot go against The Scriptures.

This is the Hub – with Doris, as Sondheim would say, on the steps of the palace…

WEDNESDAY 8th JUNE

We head for Ongata Rongai, a big town in the heartland of the area where (President Daniel arap) Moi‘s land-grabbing habit reached its apotheosis. There is enough bad blood between the Kikkuyu and the Maasai to transfuse the cast of Twilight.

The women we are going to fund are the pariah’s of the area – mixed tribe. The sons and daughters of a Maasai/Kikkuyu union. Think Catholic and Protestant marriage in Northern Ireland and you are close. Our women (and men) are working in a stone quarry for a tiny pittance, if they get paid at all. And I am talking about a quid a day. For breaking stones.

When troubles erupt – and they are now – these people are the targets’ targets. We have half a dozen groups and we are meeting at the home of another of Doris’ friends from her old life. This lady married one of her customers. She has a fab house and a huge business in electronics which her husband set up. And when Doris contacted her she has stepped up not just to the plate but to the whole dinner service. She will be overseeing and mentoring the groups we fund today.

Doris and I head back home and stop at The Hub so that I can show her this extraordinary temple to money. We drink a cocktail on the inner square. And gape.

I look the place up.

4 billion Kenya shillings. “Local investors.” Hmmmmm. 30,000 square feet of retail space. And the boating lake. This has to be dirty money. All money this big is dirty here. Interestingly, when I have a look at the local paper the headline tells of 4.2 billion being stolen from the National Youth Service. Money given out to three building companies, one of which was not even registered and two which were registered as business names only.

Sometimes I wonder what the actual fuck I am doing here …

THURSDAY 9th JUNE

I am meeting Felista who says she has found a place for me to stay that is more convenient. We look at three places. They were a bit like old Gorbals tenements. Or something from Little Dorrit. Not dreadful, but they were no nearer to town than I am now and the fact that by the time we got in the car to go back we had already attracted a couple of groups of men with the look of vampires in a convent made me think that perhaps I am safer where I am.

Doris is in town searching for the little spritzing bottles we need to take to Samburu and arm the local women against sexual attack – hence the chilli vinegar. This simple but effective deterrent worked wonders during a spree of gang rape in Nairobi. An eyeful of chilli vinegar will soon put paid to ideas of, well, anything really.

I am massively stressed at the thought of the trip to Awendo. I think, because I am living in the cell at the back of beyond and everything is taking exponentially longer and the money is running out and I am feeling ridiculously lonely (whine whine whine), the thought of the utter lack of autonomy that there is when I go to Awendo plus the fact that it takes a day to get there and a day to get back and I do not have that time to spare, the volcano of despair that is bubbling inside is fed by this further indication that nothing I ever do will be enough and I will always be disappointing someone.

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Copstick’s Grouchy Club Podcast, recorded during the above period is online.