Groom’s Shower Gone Wrong! There’s Only One Bride!

Last Friday, as we marked 30 days to our June 9th wedding, I woke up abruptly at 2:52 a.m. and found myself on the floor having fallen off the bed. They don’t tell you this in church but when the Good Book says it is not good for man to be alone, God wanted to protect Adam from falling off the bed every time he had a bad dream, but I digress.

Falling off the bed onto a cold hard floor in the wee hours hurts but for me it was like jumping from the fire not into the frying pan but into the safety of the hotpot. After being chased on foot from Limuru by a drove of donkeys, I lost them at Westlands when I took the expressway and ran faster than Eliud Kipchoge. However, upon reaching Museum Hill, I ran into a kennel of German Shepherd dogs coming at me with all ferociousness. I jumped from the expressway and landed on the floor. It was 2:52 a.m.10th May 2024.

This nightmare was 22 years in the making. Where were you in December 2002? For those of a certain vintage, you were voting out Moi together with his pet Uhuru. Yet my most memorable event that month was witnessing my first mass wedding at a church in Kitale. Everyone seemed to get a wife that afternoon. I probably missed out for being underage!

In my 2024 dream, my best man and groomsmen hosted me for…what do you call the male version of a bridal shower? I hear murmurs at the back saying it’s a bachelor party but no, that’s too hedonistic so we’ll call it a groom’s shower. There’s no prizes for guessing where the venue was. That church in Kitale. And we marched back in time to December 2002 while keeping all our 2024 ujuaji. And it was a mass wedding all over again. Now with much younger brides. Apparently, there were more brides in the church than wedding guests. And for some reason the church pianist played Burna Boy’s “It’s Plenty.” Thank goodness he skipped the “order Hennessy” part.

If you couldn’t order Hennessy in that church, you could marry multiple brides. The officiating pastor was like, “You get a wife, he gets a wife, she gets a husband!” He rang a bell like the ones shops on Tom Mboya street ring to signal bei ya jioni. If Jesus chanced upon that hullabaloo, He would have cleansed that temple again while slapping long prison sentences on the participants to boot!

All my groomsmen walked out of the church with a bride on each hand. When my turn came, I informed the pastor that I had a wedding lined up in 30 days. “Fimbo ya mbali haiui nyoka na hata maji chafu huzima moto, ndugu” he told me. I walked out with my cup running over. We hired a coaster bus to accommodate all our blessings and set off for Nairobi. Everything went swimmingly from Kitale to Eldoret. 

No sooner had we left Eldoret and darkness fell upon the land than an elephant appeared in the middle of the road. Our driver swerved sharply to the left and two brides went through the window. The driver swerved again sharply to the right to regain his balance and another pair of brides went through the opposite window. We stopped to check on the stricken brides but the elephant started running at us and we let lost brides remain lost. 

We ran into a traffic police checkpoint at Mau Summit. When the cops saw the remaining brides still in their wedding gowns, they asked for our marriage certificates. That’s when it dawned upon us we didn’t have any papers. We coughed up 20K for transporting brides without proper documentation. All hell broke loose when we got to Salgaa. No sooner had we stepped out of the coaster bus to replace a burst tyre than a pack of hyenas crept off the forest and chased after us. In classic miguu niponye fashion, we lost our bearings only to find ourselves on the shores of Lake Nakuru. 

The lake offered a brief respite but the animals there took a dim view of us before the zebras drove us off to Lake Naivasha. Moving from a salt water lake to one with fresh water may have seemed beneficial but we soon found out there was little to celebrate when we became guests of Lake Naivasha’s infamous hippos. Hippos love chasing humans and biting them in their behinds and we were no exception. We were lucky to get away with non-life threatening bites before we got to Maai Mahiu at the break of dawn.

Maai Mahiu is Kikuyu for hot water. Suffice it to say our predicament had reached boiling point. If you’ve run all the way from Mau Summit to Maai Mahiu, getting to Nairobi on foot should be a walk in the park, right? Hell no! We ran into a herd of donkeys grazing on an open field and the sight of us ran them beserk. They charged at us and we took off helter skelter up the escarpment, into Limuru, down to Kikuyu, Uthiru, Kagemi and for some reason I was the last man standing or rather running by the time we got to Westlands. Donkeys are not allowed on the expressway and that was my saving grace. Neither are humans on foot but I jumped that barrier like Ezekiel Kemboi haring down the 3000 metre steeplechase with gold in his mind.

Unlike open land where you can run in all directions, you can only run forward or retreat backward on the expressway especially when it transitions to above level ground. Like a pot that breaks at the doorstep, I met my waterloo at Museum Hill where the expressway flies high above the Nairobi River. That’s when I saw a pack of German shepherd dogs covering the entire width of the expressway coming down at me with all menace. I jumped off the expressway and found myself alone on the cold hard floor next to the bed. I grabbed my phone and the last WhtsApp message was Ruth’s. The lesson was home. The gods have spoken. There’s only one bride. The bride is Ruth or Lake Naivasha hippos will bite my bottom again. It’s Ruth or bust!