February 13th

How does the saying go? “Sometimes you dig for stones and find gold?”

I came home from work today and turned on my phone to find I had received three text messages from my host sister, Jean, all exactly the same, sent 5 minutes apart from one another. I asked her about it and she claimed it must have been a glitch in Safaricom’s service.

An hour later I texted another volunteer, Carla, to forward to Jean the text, “This is Safaricom. There is a glitch in your SIM card, please replace it to avoid further problems.” An inane enough act that morphed into unmatched entertainment for the rest of the night.
Carla wrote back to tell me that Jean responded to the text with, “Go to Hell.” Obviously I’m thinking Jean knows it was me (why wouldn’t she, we were just talking about Safaricom glitches) and chose to respond via text even though we were sitting across from each other in the living room (along with the rest of the family).
Then Jean got a call and answered it, “This is Harriet [lie].” And proceeded to tell the person on the other line, “Yes, I live in Nairobi [lie] and spend many weekends in Nakuru [lie] … yes … I’ll be up in Nakuru next weekend [lie] … ok … bye.” As she hung up her siblings burst out laughing. I texted Carla to reply to Jean’s last text, “Only liars go to hell, Harriet.”
When Jean received it, she flipped out. Turns out she never knew I was behind it and still didn’t. The guy she was on the line with was DJ Sniper, a potential love interest who she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see, so she gave a false name so she’d be harder to track down. Now she was afraid that Carla’s number belonged to a friend of the DJ who was onto her game.
Jean then called Carla’s number to get to the bottom of the situation. When Carla answered in an obviously feminine voice Jean screamed, hung up, and went into full panic mode. She got into a frantic Swahili exchange with her sister, while her brother (who knew I was behind it all), amidst uncontrollable laughter translated, “She thinks it’s his wife!”
Now normally I don’t enjoy causing people to suffer [lie], but when the target is a potential home-wrecking liar … well, let’s just say I almost suffocated on my own laughter.

The whole charade of panic and laughter continued for a couple hours until Jean used my phone to call Carla’s number. I had wisely deleted Carla’s entry in my phone and warned her she may be called to prepare for this scenario. But Carla let down her guard and asked to speak to “Raf” and the gig was up.
Jean vowed never to talk to me again. Well worth it.