By Haron Wachira
Grandma was a church girl, partly brought up by missionaries at Kabare Mission, after her father either died or abandoned her. That is about all I learned from asking around. I never got to know the exact details because grandpa never told it straight, but always tongue-in-cheek, looking at her from the side. I would ask, “Grandpa, how did you and Cùcù meet?” And, always with a chuckle and a twinkle in his eye, grandpa would pout, “Gììkì (this one, but in a naughty sense – untranslatable), I picked up from the roadside.
Cùcù would threaten to hurl a flaming branch from her hearth, instantly killing off the Q&A session. I don’t know how it was that I always asked the question when they were together.
I had a perfectly legitimate reason why I happened to be in their house frequently. Grandma made the perfect cup of tea, you see. From a strategic position in my mother’s kitchen, I had got to follow through Cùcù’s tea-making process: she boiled the milk first, and set it aside. She made the same quantity of tea each time, measuring out the exact proportion of milk and water using a cup. Next she would bring the mixture to boil, drop into it a an exact scoop of tea leaves using a tea sieve. At that point grandma removed the tea from the fire, covered the pot for an exact period of time, then filtered out the tea dregs through a sieve into an orange tea kettle that she’d previously kept by the fireside to warm up as the tea got ready. Always.
I would rush off from our kitchen at the very moment Cùcù started to run the tea through the sieve, positioning myself at a low stool near her fireplace as she finished. And, always, with her quiet smile that made her dimples stand out, Cùcù would address me fondly “wa Nyaga,” handing me a great tasting cup of tea. Process; precision in execution.
Years later, when I started working and learning to edit a magazine my boss, @Tim Stafford, explained to me that there were two ways of learning to type, the two finger approach with your eyes on the keyboard or the QWERTY approach, using a book like they taught with in secretarial colleges.
“What’s the difference?” I asked
“The QWERTY method is professional; methodical,” Tim explained. “Eventually you will type faster and more accurately.”
I chose the methodical, process-driven approach.
Tim bought me a typing lesson book, and I followed it methodically. It paid off. I type >60 wpm.
I tried to use the same approach in teaching my staff later on and was horrified to realize that very few could master the discipline. At one time I had to block up all the typewriter keys and threaten to fire anyone who removed the stickers! I hadn’t realized until then that my choice in favour of process and methodical follow-through had been programmed in me from watching my grandma make tea.
Fast forward: my children and many people who have worked for me over the years learned to type properly, and are thankful for the skill!
And me: I developed a process for getting a magazine out precisely on the 27th of each month, which saw Step Magazine grow to over 53,000 copies per month in 11 African countries. Post-Step, I took an interest in structured process engineering and used the skill to develop highly sophisticated computer systems for several large blue chip firms….including PricewaterhouseCoopers, KenCell (now Airtel), Howard Humphreys, and Linton Park…
Years later, in my village, our local tea factory blacklisted my smallholder tea farm because, they claimed, we must have been buying tea leaves illegally from other farmers – ati we were selling significantly more tea than the feasible quantity from our farm. But we were not. We were simply following a diligent process of harvesting every eighth day; keeping the “table” of the tea plantation level; cutting down the tea plants after the third year, exactly 2 inches above the branched nodes; applying 150g of fertilizer around each stem, bending to make sure all the fertilizer grains fell no more than half a meter from each tea stem. Result: better than average production.
Haron Wachira 