It’s always a good thing when someone from the village makes it big. This happens mostly in the cities.

Jiji Ndogo is no different. People here are still talking about the girl who left to work as a domestic servant in Nairobi some years back. Even such mundane opportunities are not frowned upon. The story gets worse before it gets better.

The girl visited the village after one year and there wasn’t much different about her. She brought her mother a few things, and that was it. Then she disappeared for three years without a word, only to show up unannounced behind the wheel of a bright red BMW. Riding shotgun was a man the size of Mt Longonot wearing a suit whose cost could feed Jiji Ndogo for a week. She had married her boss, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

Legend has it that he divorced his wife to marry her, although her family insists the wife died before she snagged the man. But who cares, right? A BMW seems worth the hustle.

The latest to make it big is our resident troublemaker who goes by the name Kevo. Kevo has tried everything — boda boda, selling weed, snatching phones, crazy bets. If you can think of a money-making scheme, he’s probably done it.

Lately, he seems to have landed on the mother lode. It started with a brief disappearance. For almost a month, Jiji Ndogo has been Kevo-free. For us here at the police post, it’s good news. We haven’t had to haul him in for one thing or another, and a day without Kevo is a good day. The other day he materialised on social media in pictures in front of a black Toyota V8. Then it was a mansion, complete with a swimming pool.

Of course, you know what this means. Everyone here wondered what Kevo had done. Most of us wondered who he had killed to come into this sort of wealth. Some thought he might have robbed a bank, but some us know he’s not smart enough to pull off something like that. Kevo kept us in the dark for a whole week before finally clearing the air.

“I turned Sh1,000 into millions in one month,” he captioned one of his pics. “If you want to know how, call this number.”

There it was, the secret laid bare. Those who called the number were amazed at the simplicity of turning little to nothing into millions in the space of weeks. The answer was Forex, and Kevo is selling training packages on how to do exactly this.

“You might not see me for a while,” Nyaguthii, one of our long-time denizens, declares to me. “Maybe never. Soon as I get a handle on this trading, I’m out of here.”

At this rate, Jiji Ndogo might soon be a ghost town.