Travelling with Buttons

It always amazes me that there are so many people in the world who simply don't know what to do if a button falls off an item of clothing. I've seen people just look at the space where the button used to be and look....lost.

Which leads me on to - I can't believe how many people do not know how to sew on a button!! I know that I love sewing but seriously, it's not that hard! I think even my Dad, at a push, could sew on a button -although he'd probably wait until I came home.

When I first went to Kenya in 2005, I was teaching at a day care centre for children who lived on the local rubbish dump. All of the children were given their clothes by charities, or wore what they could forage from the rubbish dump and none of them seemed to have any buttons on their clothes. I know a lot of charity shops in England will cut the buttons off the clothes which they can't sell, before recycling the buttons, so I don't know if it was the same in Kenya, but the children never had any on their clothes.

Playtime was always very energetic; football, skipping, wrestling, play fighting, jumping -which meant a lot of almost losing of clothes. Boys would just leave their shirts flapping, almost like a superhero cape, girls would be always pulling up the shoulders of their dresses, and I quickly ran out of safety pins to hold up their trousers.

I then spent the next few nights after school scouring town for buttons. There were lots of shops and market stalls selling fabric, but none seemed to have any haberdashery, apart from the odd few spools of thread. I was taught that the Swahili word for 'button' was 'kifungo' so I don't know if it was my pronunciation, or the fact that a lot of people in Nakuru speak Kikuyu, or whether they just thought that it was such a strange request that a 'Mzungu' was after buttons?

Anyway, eventually I found a shop which only had clear small plastic buttons, and at 1 shilling each (there were 130KSH to £1 at this point) I bought 100.

So I spent the next few lunchtimes with a constant queue of children in front of me, and I sewed on buttons non-stop all lunchtime. Normally, most of the children would wear the same clothes every day all week, and then I guess washing day was at the weekend. However, as soon as I started my button fixing, they were soon wearing entirely different outfits every day, to make sure that I fixed all of their clothes before I got bored or ran out of buttons.

Of course, 100 buttons did not last me long (my fingers were pricked to shreds by this point) and so I soon had to go back to the shop and buy more. The man in the shop thought I was mental that I'd got through 100 buttons already. I did explain what I was doing with them, but I was still 'kichizi' (crazy).

'Kichizi kama ndizi' = Crazy like a banana (I love this phrase!)

I also had to sew a lot of button holes as a lot of the Dresses and Shirts didn't even have a button hole - let alone a button to go with it!

Enough for one blog I think - Travel with buttons part 2 will follow soon...