Photos taken by Alojz

And one of the “gentlemen for shaving,” who photographed pieces of his own life instead of me, was Alojz. He approached the task in a thoroughly pragmatic way—no unnecessary questions, just grabbed the camera and returned it two days later, complete with photos. Alojz is also part of the local avant-garde, a half-resident of the village of Mbogoi, an occasional model, and the only man in the world—and probably the only human in sub-Saharan Africa—who genuinely likes Ed Sheeran.
He was the only Maasai far and wide who owned a shop. A shop selling technical odds and ends of every imaginable kind. It even had several doors, the best of which led from behind the counter into the customer area. They were about 1.2 meters high, and Alojz walked through them at least a hundred times a day. When I suggested we modify them so he wouldn’t have to bend every time, he just laughed about it for a long while.

When electricity finally reached the village last year, Alojz was the first to buy the largest angle grinder he could find—used, of course, because a new one is very expensive—along with a welding machine. In the very first month, there were three attempts at self-administered leg amputation using the grinder. Fortunately, none of the experimenters carried it through to a successful conclusion. And that’s without me even asking about the worsening eyesight of those working with the welder.

And on top of that, he had one more useful quality—the probability that he would lose my phone, which he was supposed to use for taking photos, was significantly lower than with others. Which does not mean it was low.Here are Alojz’s photos straight from the phone, unedited.