Freddy sent a list
the night before.
Herbs and all.

The night before, Freddy sent a list.

What to buy. Which herbs go well with the goat. What to add to the stew. By the time I got to Naivasha, he had already been to the market.

This is the man they call "Mr. Story Man" on site. The one who can talk through a full shift and never repeat himself, who has a story for every occasion and an audience whether he has asked for one or not. But that morning he was not just all stories. He was stories and work. He organised who would cut the vegetables, who would skin the goat, who would make the stew. He knew what needed to happen and in what order and he moved through it with the same authority he brought to a full day of concrete. When John the chef arrived — yes, Freddy had brought a talented chef, a man called John — it was clear who was running the kitchen. It was Freddy's kitchen. John was a very welcome guest in it.

The view after the rain

It was Labour Day.

I did not want to do the mbuzi the way it is usually done. Customarily, you slaughter after the foundation is laid. It's treated like a ritual, a thanksgiving, a marker that the ground has been broken and held. I held off. I wanted to wait until we had done the top floor slab, until everyone who had been part of the build up to that point was present. One celebration for all of it. One goat for the whole journey.

We bought the goat but they did not want me to get a chef. They wanted to cook it themselves — from slaughtering to marinating to even prepping the vegetables. That is not a small thing. That is a team that built Lava & Lake and I wanted to celebrate it the same way, together from start to end.

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Not because we need the numbers. Because the people who find this place through someone who loves it are already the right people.

Some of the crew I had seen every week since the first profile was marked. Others came for the heavy days and left when the heavy work was done.

Kevin was different. He was there from the first day and he never left. The kind of presence you stop noticing because they are always there, until the day they are not.

Kevin was the one that hit differently.

I met him on the first day. He and Isaac were the ones who made sure everything was packed up, everything was accounted for, every morning and every evening without being asked. Even when the slab needed curing — which means watering it down twice a day to keep the concrete from cracking as it sets — I always found Kevin doing it. Morning. Evening. Without fail. He lived on site. The build was not just a job he came to, it was a place he was.

A month and a half ago he told me what this meant to him. Not the money or the experience. He is going to campus to study building. Engineering or architecture, something around that world. The same world he spent these months living inside, one slab at a time. When he told me that, I felt something I did not expect. Not pride exactly. More like the quiet satisfaction of knowing that the smallest thing you did found someone who needed it.

The team cleaning up after the feast

Back to our mbuzi. When the food was ready, the rain came.

Not torrential. A shower, steady and warm, the kind that on any other day would send you inside. Nobody moved. Most of us huddled under a tree and kept eating, kept talking, kept going back for second and third servings. Some of the team rushed to the house but most of us stayed where the cooking had happened, close to the fire, close to the food, close to each other.

Maybe we did not want to leave the moment. Maybe we just wanted more mbuzi.

The goat was amazing. Every bite was tender. Not rubber, not dry. Juicy and tasty — the kind of meat that makes you stop talking and just eat for a while.

Just then as we ate, I got flashbacks of the day we laid the ground floor slab. The 25 men. The harbour mixer. The sand blowing into faces until they looked ashen. The men lifting buckets of concrete and cement to feed the mixer, over and over, not stopping, not complaining. The ones who skipped lunch because the slab mattered more than the break. I had written about that day here. I had lived that day. Standing there watching Freddy tend to the fire, both things were true at once. It was yesterday and it was weeks ago.

Now here they were. Cleaned up, laughing, arguing over second servings. You would not recognise them as the same people if you had only seen them on the slab day. The ashen faces gone, the buckets down, the work done. That is what a promise kept looks like. Not a speech. Not a plaque. A goat, a fire, and the same people who built the thing sitting together long enough to feel it.

I left at six and drove back to Nairobi with a portion of mbuzi wrapped for Makena.

She had wanted to be there. Another errand had taken her elsewhere and she had spent the day sending her wishes from a distance. I walked in just after the girls had finished dinner. It was movie night. My last born was still awake. She is never the first to sleep and the moment I came through the door she started.

"Every time you go to Naivasha you take soooooo long."

She had said it earlier in the day too, on the phone. Same complaint. She meant it. While she was engrossed with the cartoon character 'Master Bread', I slipped to the kitchen. I warmed the meat in the microwave, put it in front of her, and waited. She loves Choma. This was in some way my penance or a bribe — whichever of the two it was, I waited to see if it would work.

First bite. Second bite. She stopped being angry.

My first born was having her own moment with it. Makena tasted it and I could see her wish she had been there, not just for the goat but for the day itself. For the team, for the celebration she had helped build towards from the start.

The view from the terrace

I came into this build blind. I did not know a thing. I was scared from all the stories I heard of how builds in Kenya go. Of contractors and costs and things that don't turn out the way you imagined. I did not expect to find what I did. The people and the milestones. The moments I did not plan for that turned out to be the ones that mattered most. There have been setbacks. The original plumber had us tearing into the foundation to realign the pipe outlets. The bathroom that did not sit right with us. Those things cost time and money plus a few nights of not sleeping well. They dim in comparison to everything else. But they happened.

The finishes start now. The crew that leaves carries a piece of this. The crew that stays has more work to do.

I turned in for the night. One thought stayed with me.

In a few months time, we will all be heading there together. Not me alone at 5am in a quiet car. Makena, the girls, all of us. This will be our getaway. We will get to wake up to that lake, knowing the thing we built is now the place we rise up to.

That is what all of this will be for.

And somewhere in Naivasha, Kevin will be on his way to university with a small part of this build in his pocket.

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