Kenya

Hey all,

Kenya, or The Lion King, or just plain F***wit, depending on one's mood, is 18 or 19 years old.  Just finished high-school, grew up in Kenya to a family that apparently owns three quarters of Africa, sent to boarding school in England for the last few years, then to Christmas tree farm (family friends – they do swaps with each other's children as farm labourers to teach them to be human beings after school) then on to one of the other Colonies (Australia) to polish off the “learning to be human” side of things before on to university, inheritance, captain of industry and so on.  Polite and friendly to us all but mildly irritating as feels polite and friendly in a way I might be polite and friendly to a pack of uncouth but basically good-natured dogs.  Talks firmly to us in commanding voice when we get rambunctious, also in a way I might do to uncouth dogs.  Will probably be fit for adult company in 2-3 years.  Until then is (sporadically) incredibly annoying due to his habit of giving all and sundry orders in a pompous little voice and completely the wrong kind of accent for this sort of environment.  He persists in doing this, despite the total lack of any response apart from laughter, rolled eyes, four letter words, snowballs and even the occasional tree thrown at his head.  I guess having your own cook and driver up until the age of 18 would do that to you.  Made the rookie mistake of not logging out of Facebook on the office computer one day, something which Canada discovered with glee: Kenya spent the best part of a week broadcasting to the world that he was desperately seeking a male companion after finding himself strangely warmed by the sight of the two huge and muscular Kiwis (one of them even has a moustache, for the love of God) he shares his caravan with cooking breakfast in their underwear.  He realised something was amiss when he logged on and found a heap of birthday wishes months out of his actual birthday.  He took this with pretty good humour, which endeared him to Canada, who was (I think) a little bit worried about the consequences after the sheer joy of the vandalism and slander had worn off.

Basically a decent and likable guy though, just spent too much time in a universe where people care what he says simply by virtue of the fact that he said it.  I guess that is why they Send Them Away to do some work somewhere.

Photos:  1.  Stack of five foot trees in foreground represents about half a day's work, all of them being picked off the stack by me...  2.  Forklift compressing trees as Poland ties them off – would frequently get the front wheels two or even three feet off the ground while doing so.  3.  First compression.  Some of the pallet combinations of trees so optimistic that the trees on the bottom were going close to becoming Christmas tree juice by the time pallet finished being compressed.  Once they got icy this was really problematic as at the end of the pallet Poland would be balancing precariously on an icy slippery stack of trees three feet above the top of the twelve foot high pallet box.  Said to Forklift Driver that if pallet combinations not a bit more reasonable would just start counting phantom trees because not worth Poland breaking his skull open after 12 foot drop for 6 pounds an hour.  Forklift Driver, for once, not amused, but number of trees expected to crush into pallet did go down a bit, after conversation between Forklift Drive and Boss took place where I would imagine my threat to arbitrarily rip off all his clients by counting non existent trees in pallet was not mentioned.

Cheers, B.