Any Time Is Tea Time!

For the unattached, upwardly mobile urbanite, the maxim that "Anytime is tea time" may sound like the quaint relic of a by-gone era - a time when there were fulltime home makers for whom tea time was the only social activity and tea making an art in which they reveled. That was before modernity came,complete with new vocabulary to describe the new realities: working mothers, fixed incomes, market economies and monthly budgets. And now we are in the twenty-first century, the age of multi-tasking on several levels at the speed of light. Of what use is Oolong Tea, and who has the time anyway?

For a while, in the blissful ignorance of youth and inexperience, I truly believed that tea as a beverage was on its way out. There were simply too many cons against it. It is, after all, a time-consuming chore. What's more, unless you are well-versed in the culinary arts, the effort will need to be duplicated several times before you serve a perfect cup of Fahari Ya Kenya Tea. And the steaming brew cannot be downed in a single gulp, nor slipped into a back pack to be sipped at leisure. It is this logic which leaves packets of tea leaves covered in dust on the supermarket shelves as pop and juice are zapped up and sipped.
All that changed for me the day I moved out of town to rent accommodation in a commercial centre near our rural home. On market days, all members of the clan would descend from the various ridges, and my house became the ritual stop where clan members caught up on local gossip on their way to and from the market, with the tea flowing liberally at my expense. It mattered little to these relatives that I was absent, or that I lived by a monthly budget on a fixed income. For some, it was the only cup of tea they would get all week, and our tea time became a luxury not to be missed, whether they had business at the market or not.
Lofty ideals and city conventions aside, I was suddenly very grateful for the liberalization of the tea sector and the local availability of good Fahari ya Kenya tea which made it possible for me to provide a steady stream of freshly brewed tea cups without going bankrupt. By the time I resurfaced in suburbia, I was attached and shorn of both innocence and upward mobility. With both feet firmly on the ground, I came face to face, day in day out, with the disproportionate percentage of Kenyans who live below the poverty line, where cup of tea is the unifying factor, in joy and in sorrow.
If you have attended a home-based fundraising lately, or been to a matanga, or found yourself trapped in marriage negotiations, you will know exactly what I mean. You will also know why I can say with great confidence, for both rural and urban folks, that tea taking will remain with us for a long time yet, and any time is indeed, tea time.