I was on secondment in a US Embassy in Nairobi as a contractor for the federal government in my early 20s. I was in country for a couple months at this point, and I had already seen a steady churn of NGO workers, contractors, diplomats and businesspeople cycling through, but…if you’ve ever spent any time in this setting, it is a pretty hard and fast rule that you do not want to be shitting where you eat, if you know what I’m saying. Not to mention that this crew is generally pretty homely.
Except for Sara. She came in with a blue chip international management consultancy looking to get the lay of the land in the business community in Nairobi so that they could shake all the right hands and grease the right wheels. Normally, these women were super buttoned up and professional—not to say she wasn’t—but there was definitely some liveliness to her that was totally absent from the rest of her team there. She was tall, with dark olive skin and thick, dark hair, with long, thin legs and a minuscule waist. She had a humongous, toothy smile, and laughed with her entire body. Her outfits were usually more casual—dress pants and a thin, flowy blouse that couldn’t hide the fact that she had an absolutely insane body. It was hard not to notice when she would reach back to tie her hair up in a meeting and her collarbones were visible.