If you ever find yourself needing to spend the night in any town in Kenya on a low budget, you might end up in what we Kenyans simply refer to as a ‘Lodging’. The ‘Lodging’ is usually a building that has several sleeping rooms for travelers and any other person who might choose to spend a night away from his or her own bed. All the ‘Lodgings’ are similar and if you spend a night in one in a particular town, be assured that you might as well have sampled the ‘Lodgings’ in all the other towns in the country.
Once you pay for your room – usually just a few hundred shillings – you will be given a key attached to an oversized wooden or plastic key holder with a number written on it. The clerk will then direct you to the room whose number is the same as the one on the key holder. On unlocking the room and entering, switching on the single naked bulb on the ceiling will reveal a small room with a smell you might never have encountered before. There will be a bed at one corner and on the other corner, a small reading table with drawers and a rickety chair pushed under it. There will most probably be an ashtray with numerous burn marks on it, mounted on a huge base with the initials of the ‘Lodging’ printed on it. The bed will have freshly laundered linen and a dirty mosquito net tied on a knot, dangling from the ceiling. In the adjacent toilet cum bathroom you will find a clean towel whose snow-white days are long gone and a tiny bar of soap that is just enough to wash your whole body once. There will also be a new roll of white tissue paper next to the toilet closet. The bed linen and the towel will have the name of the ‘Lodging’ printed on them in large conspicuous letters.
Under the bed, you will find a pair of mismatched rubber flip flops (bathroom slippers) – each with a different color. You might also be surprised to find that a tiny wedge has been nipped off at the heel of the flip flops. This extraordinary flip flops will discourage anyone who might be tempted to steal them, just as printing the name of the lodging house on the linen and mounting an extra base of an ashtray will do.
Next to the bed, you will see a small bedside table. On this table it is guaranteed that you will find two items; a well sized Bible and a packet of condoms. Perhaps the person who set the ‘Lodging’ standards in Kenya assumed that anyone who spends a night at the ‘Lodging’ without having sex must be a particularly holy person. Whatever the case, as in most places in life, these two items in the ‘Lodging’ will remind you about the choices that you have to make while going through life.
