By Elizabeth Lundi

Fatma, Mariam and I meet over dinner that evening.

“Have you spoken to Jo today?” Mariam asks me, nibbling on a piece of bruschetta that’s been served to us while we wait for our meal to come.

“Yes. She didn’t sound too good. In fact, I don’t think our conversation went well at all. She’s decided not to speak to me,” I shrug.
“It’s Jo, she’ll be back,” Fatma consoles.

“After all that she has put us through, I am not sure I want her back in our lives,” I laugh. “But seriously, I am extremely worried about her.”

“If what you are saying about Ike’s story is true, then yes, I am concerned too,” Mariam adds.

Just then, my cell phone starts ringing.

“Speaking of whom,” I say, looking at the display, “it’s Ike.”

“Ignore him,” Fatma advises. “If he is calling to rant, he can do it another time, not now during our bonding time. Agreeing with her, I divert the phone call.

Ringing again

“So I was thinking that I-,” I start to say, but then the insistent trill of my cell phone cuts me off again. “It’s him again,” I say, dismissively this time and not even waiting for an opinion before cutting the call off.

It resumes ringing again almost immediately

“I think there is something wrong,” I frown. “Ike is not the kind of person to call so insistently.” And so, bracing myself for the worst, I answer.
“You need to come and pick your friend up,” he says evenly, although I can tell that he is trying to contain his anger. In the background, I can hear women shouting.

“What?” I gasp. “What’s going on?”

“She turned up at my house uninvited and now she has gone crazy.”

“Jo?” My hand flies up to my mouth in horror and Fatma and Mariam stop talking to listen in. “What… what do you mean? Crazy how?”

“Look, she’s threatening my fiancée and I am not taking it.

You need to come and take her away before I do something I might regret.”

“Oh no,” I wail. “What exactly is she-,” but Ike hangs up before I finish the question I was about to ask.

“What? What’s wrong?” Mariam asks. I go silent for a few seconds, trying to process the conversation I have just had in my head.

“I don’t know,” I say finally. “He says Jo is over at his house threatening his girlfriend.”

Fatma gasps while Mariam doesn’t even wait for a cue; she starts collecting her handbag and signals the waiter at the same time to ask him to cancel our order.

“What are we waiting for?” she says when she is done with him. “Let’s go now.”
We all pile into my car and on the way to Ike’s house, loudly debate what we think is going on in Jo’s internal world.

“I don’t get it,” Fatma says. “I know she has anger issues, but I have never known her to react like this.”

“Me, I think she broke,” Mariam chips in.

Heart was broken
“Broke how?” Fatma counters.

“You know… all those years of denying that her heart was broken whenever it didn’t work out with someone.

Now it has all piled up and broken her.”

We think about that for a few seconds as I zoom through the evening traffic. Then Fatma shakes her head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” I wonder out loud. “As a theory, it makes sense to me.”

“Because no one has actually dumped Jo in the past. She is the one who always walks out.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” I say. “This is the first time she has been dumped and she doesn’t know how to cope.”

“How about this; maybe she really did love this man,” Mariam says.

I disagree. “After a week? I don’t think so,” I say in reply.

This is exactly what I told Jo a week ago that caused her to flip her top. “I think she is just very, very infatuated.”

Both Mariam and Fatma lapse into a momentary silence, but we can all sense how concerned each of us is for our friend.

“It doesn’t matter what we think now, anyway,” I say eventually. “We’re here.”

Locate any sounds

We drive into the apartment block in Kileleshwa where Ike lives and park the car. I switch off the engine and we sit in tense silence for a minute, trying to locate any sounds of females in distress.

Hearing nothing but the usual crickets and traffic just beyond the gate, we get out, lock the car and resolutely head towards Ike’s second-floor flat.

The front door is wide open when we walk in, but the silence is ominous. “Hello! Ike?” I call out as the three of us cautiously cross the threshold.

There is no response from the interior of the house, although the lights in the living room straight ahead and in the kitchen, to the right of the corridor we are in right now, are on.

I step back outside the door and press the doorbell. Still nothing. Mariam tries her hand at knocking on the door, and there is no response to that either. “Maybe something really serious has happened,” Mariam whispers theatrically.

“Like what?” I turn to her, mock exasperated. “Look, let’s just go in and find out what’s going on,” I say, putting on my determined face. And with a decisive turn on my high heel, we all walk into the living room.

Source: Daily Nation

By Caroline Njunge

“Have you noticed the growing number of teenage girls with love handles nowadays?” read the email from a colleague.

‘Love handles’ are just a polite name for a potbelly if you’re wondering.

It was interesting because I too had noticed this. Young, flawless faces, but when your eyes dropped to the midsection, the shock of protruding, sagging bellies that looked out of place in an otherwise young-looking body.

I forwarded the email to a couple of colleagues and friends and surprise, surprise; they too had noticed the increasing number of young women struggling to cover bellies that threatened to spill over from the waistlines of their trendy jeans.

“Blame it on junk food, alcohol, our nyama choma culture and what I call the couch potato syndrome,” says Kepha Nyanumba, a nutritionist

with AAR.

According to Kepha, most of today’s young people have embraced an unhealthy lifestyle, a disastrous menu of junk food, too much red meat, excess alcohol and fizzy drinks coupled with inactivity.

And how true that is. Wander into any pub in the city centre on a Friday or Saturday evening and you will notice groups of young girls, most of them in their late teens or early 20s downing bottle after bottle of beer.

Nyama choma is no longer the elderly man’s meal, so they will have already had their fill of roast meat to ‘line’ the stomach as they prepare for a long night.

Most of them would also tell you that before popping into the pub for the ‘main course’, they had passed by a fast food joint for a plate of chips and fried chicken.

Exercise is, of course, a foreign word in their vocabulary.

“Fat tends to be stored around the waist in women,” says Kepha.

Forget aesthetics for a moment, most of the body’s vital organs are found here, and too much fat deposit around this section interferes with their proper functioning.

Unknowingly, while these young women meet every weekend to “do Nyama” or join the long queue of predominantly young people who take advantage of a weekly offer to ‘buy-one-pizza-get-one-free’ at a popular fast food restaurant in the city centre, they are setting themselves up for future infertility, and diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and a host of cardiovascular diseases.

It is also worth noting that the rate of metabolism in men is higher than that in women. According to Kepha, men break down fat faster than women.

This means that when women in their early 20s compete with their male companions for the two kilos of nyama choma and ugali, which they then wash down with several bottles of beer, the damaging effects of this deadly menu are likely to show themselves sooner in the fairer sex.

Kepha points out that though your average young woman is conscious of her looks, this does not make her immune to the lure of junk food, which, besides being tastier, is also cheaper than nutritionally-healthy food and therefore friendlier to their pockets.

“Generally, most young women are conscious about their looks and will do just about anything, including starving themselves to portray a certain image.”

Take bulimia nervosa for instance, which Kepha singles out as common in young women. It is characterised by recurrent binge eating, which one then tries to compensate for by fasting, vomiting, or over-exercising. It, of course, does not work because the damage is already done.

What is the way out then? There is no short cut to losing weight unfortunately, or getting rid of the dangerous fat around the waist. You just have to eat healthy and exercise.

Unless young women embrace a healthy lifestyle now, the problem will be much more than an expanding waistline.

Source: Daily Nation