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Last week this blog was miraculously picked up on by The Times and some extracts were run for a couple of days to describe the election chaos from a British housewife’s point of view. I think that it’s fair to say that all bloggers have a secret desire to be ‘discovered’ by the press somehow and reading news clippings about the blogs of mothers like me (i.e. La Petite Anglaise, Wife in the North) did inspire me to keep going. I began ‘Africaexpatwivesclub’ in September 2006 in an effort to realistically describe daily expat life in Kenya without the ‘Happy Valley’ or ‘White Mischief’ associations that journalists are even now so fond of using.
Having said that, the reason it was found, within the context of all the horrific events and disbelief over Kenya’s December 2007 election, was perhaps not ideal. Having run the blog anonymously in the newspaper for a couple of days, I was asked if I’d mind being interviewed and I said no, as long as The Times make a donation to Red Cross Kenya, which they duly did.
Having done the interview, the temptation has been to quickly track back through the blog removing any flippant comments or anything that might cause offence, but I promise I haven’t, albeit at my peril! Writing a blog is, by definition, a fairly self absorbed exercise, so the idea for the ‘expat stereotypes’, based on the ‘social stereotypes’ written by Victoria Mather for The Telegraph magazine, was to lighten the ‘diary’, make people laugh and perhaps poke a bit of fun at ourselves. The intention certainly was not to cause offence and I did qualify all of them by saying; ‘there’s a little bit of me in each one.’
So happy reading if you like but I’ll understand if you don’t wish to continue because it is, afterall, only a blog. Hope to get back to the really mundane stuff soon.