I have had a chance to experience life between the Kenya-Uganda border and I can tell you for sure, the experience is very hilarious and bad in a way. Located around Busia-Kenya, Busia-Uganda popularly known as Sofia or as the old saying goes, it is a no man’s land, a place if you’ve not been there then this is a shot for you.

It all begins with the smelly airwaves that welcome you the moment you are out of Kenya but this is not the hilarious part of it all. Sofia has always been considered to be a place where no rules are initiated and everyone is free to live the life of his or her choice. This allows you to damp wastes anyhow and no one will raise a finger on you and if perhaps you meet a naïve Kenyan who will at most be the person to question you then you will have to teach the person the untold rules of the land.

If you take a lonely walk around the grass thatched houses glued next to each other then most probably your lungs will experience a partial smoking tour you’ve never gone through before. As if this is just not enough, such houses are used for leisure activities and if I say leisure activities I don’t mean listening to music and so on. In Sofia, sex is part of leisure and changaa is another version of holy water to the remnants here. Actually, most of the times you will meet Kenyan women in Busia Kenya complaining of how they are being co-wives to the addictive taste of that local brew.

Sofia boomed due to the charcoal business that started in the late 2000s. Huge trucks from Congo driven by Congolese and other parts of Africa formed a market that slowly grew giving birth to a residency. In Sofia, you can do better if you know more than three languages and that is Buganda, a little bit of Congolese and most importantly English. Kiswahili alone can take you through the hardest communication cycle you’ve ever experienced in your life. If you trek down headed to Uganda around 9 pm at night then you will have done yourself the best life tour ever, first and foremost, don’t take any short cut around unless you want to be devoured by the hungry sex hyenas around. I once got confiscated and thrown into a room with a lady so brown with black spots all over, all she wanted was any coin in return for sex. Studies show that most students around Busia who have sexually related defects get them from Sofia. So long as you are a lady residing in Sofia chances of you scaling the heights of education are very minimum and changaa vendors pick such people to make their businesses a success because men here are parasites, they want to feed on you as they take the local brew.

If it is your first time ever coming to this place then you better get a Ugandan dude to tour guide you only if you want to enjoy the guide. When I first came to Sofia, my tour guide, a boy between the age of 16 to 19 told me stories of how he has a chain of women. Women who give him a ride of his life. What shocked me is when the young guy told me of his wife. At that age already having a wife! The good thing with Sofia is that no matter how dirty it is, food is very cheap and the sweetest ever maybe because Ugandans have invested a lot in bringing up shaggy hotels that provide food for the lost drunkards. I couldn’t leave without tasting the food although it took me quite a while before I could actually settle in one hotel that at least knew what it means to be clean in hotel environs. As they say, Ugandan cooks are amongst the best cooks in Africa and their service is that of a class of its own no matter the condition of the surrounding. I would say people in Sofia use recipes that I have never seen, they have a culture of creating up recipes of their own. Sofia is a no man’s land, it houses people from all walks of life. Most especially I noticed there are so many street families in this place, what they do is of course theft and drugs. Congolese who have come to sell their products are moving all over and a few Tanzanians who come to experience the diverse Ugandan culture. Kenyans and Ugandans are the most dominant group in this place.