Her name is Sarah Wanjiku Kuria aka Wakamanda.
I speak of her in the present tense even though she has been dead for the last couple of years because, though dead her influence in our lives is very much alive and well.
One of the most outstanding values and characters of my Cŭcŭ was PRAYER. In the village, to date, they call her ‘Cŭcŭ wa Mahoya’ (The grandmother who prays). That woman could pray, woiii, jokes aside.
My cousin Esther captured the potency of those prayers well when she said,
“There is nowhere we will ever go that the prayers of our grandmother and our mothers (her daughters) have not arrived before us.”
Such was the foresight of my Cŭcŭ’s prayers. When she prayed, she would first ask all those present to be in the moment and then, most important, to lock the doors. Disturbance and intrusion during the time of prayer was NOT WELCOME, neither tolerated. And she would begin to pray:
