Meeting Kiprotich's sweetheart and home

By Daniel Edyegu in Kapchorwa

Off the neat Mbale-Kapchorwa tarmac road, way before the busy Kapchorwa town centre, a marram path veers from the highway and ascends through several hills and valleys.

The narrow path, barely three metres wide and with dust and sizeable potholes, slithers through villages and streams to the unknown.

On the left side of the path, about 6km from Kapchorwa town, a modest homestead comes into view.

The homestead, ringed in a rectangular fence of split bamboo poles, is surrounded with arabica coffee trees and plantains that bar houses within from sight. A narrow footpath through the coffee trees leads to the compound.

“Karibu (Welcome home),” a mellow female voice beckons and suddenly the person goes to the compound to fetch foldable wooden seats.

The voice is unmistakable! It’s of the 24-year-old Patricia Cherop Kiprotich, the wife to the Olympic Gold medalist, Stephen Kiprotich, 23.

Cherop’s face melts into a steady smile instantly at the sight of visitors.

“I’m happy. Very happy over my husband’s victory,” Cherop says before covering her face in characteristic joy.

Welcome to the home of golden boy, Kiprotich! A sweeping look through the home and its surroundings bears nothing spectacular.

trueA mud-and-wattle house, with almost no compound due to scarcity of land, nests on a cutout slope facing Mt. Elgon forest national park.

A grass-thatched kitchen, sits on the side of the house with an adjacent traditional granary and a makeshift shade for the marathoner’s three goats and heifer.

An old wooden trough for the heifer wanders beneath the coffee trees in the backyard. Pieces of firewood that the family use for cooking are stacked at the kitchen verandah with bundles of harvested bean plants dangling slightly above.

Nothing so ‘superstar’ about the inside of the house either. A single bedroom house with two additional spaces, which, for lack of a better word, can pass for cubicles! These stretch barely two square metres wide.

Medals won

One serves as the ‘bedroom’ to the athletes medals won in past events while the other shelters his two children – Elliot Musao, one and a half years and Esther Chebet, 4.

trueThe home has no unique interior decor or coat of paint except for the builder’s fine touch in smoothing the walls with red clay.

There is more than meets the eye inside the modest house though. A neat decorated plastic crimson carpet sprawls across the living room.

Kiprotich’s portrait dressed in a formal suit and not track suit hangs from the wall.

Insulated wires creep from the solar battery on the floor, through the surface of the wall to feed with energy while a solar light bulb dangles from the naked timbers that shoulder the roof without a ceiling.

At the same time, various charts clatter the wall.

Three crimson sofa sets complete the picture in the living room.

Inside the toddler’s cubicle, a mattress lies on the floor with clothes clattered all over. Here, like any average rural children’s room, the smell of fermented urine, most likely the result of the kids wetting beddings, is in the air.

Kiprotich’s bedroom is nothing glamorous either. It is crammed with a wooden bed, clothing and mattresses, so that finding fresh air inside is impossibile.

The room has a single rectangular window that is almost always closed with no ventilation. A nailed cloth line swarming with all types of garments, strides from one end of the wall to the other.

This is where the golden Olympic dreams were nurtured for a while before culminating to reality.

“As a family, we rely on earnings that he (Kiprotich) gets in prizes from marathons events he competes in for sustainability,” Cherop further told New Vision.

Plot of land

“We grow plantains (matooke), arabica coffee, beans and maize.

“Kiprotich bought another plot of land within the village, besides where the home sits, for cultivation,” Cherop adds.

The family is eagerly looking forward to Kiprotich’s return from his London triumph today. A hero’s welcome awaits the runner.