Necessity and Inventiveness

We talk about waste and trash. We see garbage flooding our cities.

At the same time we have children who are hopelessly idle as their parents have all the money to buy any toy they need, be it useful or completely useless, even destructive.

When I was growing up it was impossible to find things thrown around as we always had use for them. We never had a plastic menace as there was not enough plastic to meet our creativeness. That is what we used to make balls for all games as it made balls that had the right weight and couldn’t be soaked; meaning that we could even play it in the rain and it would not weigh more.

Thrown away clothes (which were completely worn out as very few people had more than one change, and even those were the better off) were used by girls to make bean bags and toys.

We used the big Kimbo and Cow Boy (brands) cooking fat tins to make tambourines to play in church. Of course we looked far and wide for bottle tops to complete the instrument.

We used the smaller ones with the milk packaging and some other hard and shiny paper to make very attractive flowers. There were few houses that did not enjoy that beauty. 

 Another source of flowers was filled in books. Those were ‘weaved’ in very many patterns to make flowers that were hung all around the house.

Worn pullovers and cardigans (what we today call sweaters) were received with wide open arms.

Many times they would be so worn out that very little thread (or is it yarn?) would be left. But it would very patiently be undone and joined. Then it would be used to knit or crotchet anything from table mats to cloths to babies’ socks to full pullovers with as much color as the collection of the different thrown material. And they would be proudly worn as many times that would be the only warm clothing someone had.

Young men went to the forest to look for hard wood that they would use to make anything from combs to cooking sticks. In fact I think I first saw a plastic comb as I was about to clear primary school.

Of course girls even then had a painful relationship with their hair. The blow dry was a tin with many holes made all around with a stick of sorts affixed on them. Then live coal would be put inside. The heat transferred to the tin would be used to ‘burn’ the hair to the right texture.

Of course I can’t forget to say that a nail was a treasure to any boy. I doubt you could find any lying idle anywhere you find a boy, any boy. In fact it was a currency of sorts.

Boys would also go to the edges of the Mount Kenya forest to fetch a special grass that they used to make hats, and very durable hats at that.

Of course there were dangerous things we did.

One of the most dangerous was car racing. That is why nails were premium items.

We collected trees to make a go cart which was in two parts, one of which steered the contraption. Then a particular tree would make the wheels.

Let me not describe the rest of the production as it might scare some of you to death.

Then we would go to the steepest and highest point after ‘greasing’ the car with cow dung and ‘drive’ to the farthest.

Many times the steering didn’t work and so the car would take you where it chose, probably because the racing ground was also too steep that it would pick up speed too fast. But sometimes we did not also care as we even drove in reverse. And we never had any side mirror or even attempted to look backwards. And that place had gullies and boulders. We would be stopped by such a boulder or fall in the gully for the most part or fall off when the car lost balance. Many times cars would collide and that would also stop the race.

To this day I wonder why none of us broke any bones in that adventure!

We were village children and so our adventures were limited to our circumstances. I am sure city children also had their own brand of creativity as per their circumstances. And I am sure the city ones may have had a few toys as their parents were working. Yet I know they also mastered their own brand of creativity and maximization of the scanty resources they had.

That is why the city was then not as dirty as it has been since wealth and idleness seeped into the country.

What can we do to make our children as creative as or even more creative than we were?