Saturday, April 21, 2007

what!

walala!wonders never cease!ive really chekad!talk about dedication. shes made my day!

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

what would a kenyan do?(hypothetically)

You’re a mute. One day as you’re minding you’re business, you see a run-away trolley with five people aboard hurtling down a track leading to a cliff. You can see their tiny faces squeezed up against the window. Eyes round, mouths open in silent screams, hands frantically waving, tears streaming....you can smell their fear.
Nooooooo!you say!(or rather you think, remember, youre a mute)
Surprise ,surprise! You’re standing next to a switch that will shunt the trolley onto another track where it will stop safely. Without your intervention these people will soon die, but today of all days, Nairobi City Council felt duty bound to send a one man mission with a packet of cement ,a jembe and a torch to go carry out necessary repairs on the track. This man was now standing on that other track totally engrossed in chimbaing some hole and thinking about how he was going to explain to his wife that he sold another one of their daughters. He had promised not to .And to top it off to a man from another tribe!! But in his defense, this one was rich and was'nt as smelly as the others, and he'd gone to the mganga for some juju-busting fluid that would definitley ward off any bad spirits that might come from the union.
This man will be killed if you throw the switch.
You have 5 seconds..... Watch the trolley go off the cliff or throw the switch?

OR

You’re a street youth(i.e chokora) and a mute and you have'nt had a meal in yonks! Word on the street is that they're dishing out free food at a mission church in town. You get there as quick as you can, enter the line and eagerly lick youre chapped lips in anticipation of the few bits of ugali and sukuma that are about to come youre way.Your stomach cramps as you wait and this time you welcome it, knowing that for a few hours,your gastric juices will be replete. Just when you get to the top of the line a shout rings out!
'chakula imeisha, chakula imeisha, nendeni nyumbani'
In one minute, the mission workers have packed up all the sufurias, stuffed them into boxes, doused the area with dettol and doom and cleaned up all traces of food!(and when I say all I mean all!)The compound is left gleaming! They scurry off leaving you standing there mdomo wazi ,you're heart breaking cause for real, you can't even spot a crumb!Another stomach cramp is descending.
Five minutes or so later, you see the head officer of the mission pack ugali and sukuma into a plastic container, enough to have fed you for two weeks!He looks up and finds you staring, cracks a smile , winks, and then takes a big bite of ugali and squeezes himself into his car. He drives off and you're left there eating his dust.Literally! That sukuma could have been yours.....you see red!
So that evening , before darkness falls and as you're hunting for a place to sleep, you see a trolley hurtling to its doom .i.e towards a cliff.
Note:this time there’s no switch to shunt it to another track.
Instead you’re standing on a bridge over the track. A morbidly obese man is standing there too, a few yards away from you. You suddenly recognize him. It's the ugali stealing,mean winking, sukuma munching fool!the head officer of the mission!unamjua!
The laws of physics operating in that moment state that if you give him a push his body will fall on the track and stop the trolley. You’re too small and so can't stop the trolley on your own, so there’s no point in sacrificing yourself. Theres no other large masses laying about.What do you do? you have like 30seconds or so....

infact which situation would you rather be in?hehehe...
Adapted from carlson.

Friday, April 06, 2007

One flew over the kukus nest...

Now at home the only time I actually encountered a mad man was in a jav on the way to Westlands. As usual since temperatures were huko stifling, I was sitting next to the window ,my blouse flapping in the breeze, my mind far away. So we made a stop and some guy enters , has a mild conversation with the conductor and then sits by me.At this point my mind is still meandering. Just when the daydreams are getting interesting e.g I've unleashed my super powers and…..I feel a nudge. So thinking it’s the conductor I look up about to tell him I already paid. Instead, my eyes gaze into the yellowish orbs of a middle aged guy…hmmm, actually they’re reddish, his eyes that is

Something else draws my attention though….my gaze falls…

So far my brain is computing, a lot of….eh, dirt, mangled hair, remnants of beard, a strange earthy smell wafting its way to my nostrils and something else that’s…that’s… unidentifiable. Something at the back of my brain keeps flashing water closet, but I ignore it. I continue looking, and further record, holes in shorts, no shoes, hairy/spindly legs.... then I look at the hands; long nails…(gulp),and somehow, I don’t know how, the smell intensifies.

Auuu!

Its poo poo!yeuuuukkk! Congealed stuff… all black now!

What causes me to panic is that this guy is now asking me for money…now I was somewhat naive at that point of my life and so instead of being intelligent about all this I think I shrugged and then panicked.

‘what if he has other stuff in his pocket, what if he gets aggressive, what if he grabs me….(oowii,moan, moan)’

I’m not sure what look flashed across my face, but it galvanized the conductor and he came to my rescue!yaaay!

Back to the present, last week I was at the library sitting, reading, thinking, wondering at why such a fine establishment still looked like it was stuck in the 1970’s, smelly carpet an all. My brain was overheating as it tends to do nowadays and I couldn’t help but wish that I was born in another era, where all I had to do was resign myself to washing clothes and baking bread…but that’s a story for another day.

Sigh, I did need to focus and as I looked down at the page once again all I could see was words. They looked pretty! Slippery s’s, erect l’s, staunch o's… HA! I lie! When things are in Times New Roman how exciting can they get surely. Clearly you can see I was pining for a distraction. Anywho, I heard some shuffling and so looked up. A man was joining me at my table. My first thought was that the whole purpose of me sitting at this spot was that I wanted to be alone bucko! Well I guess he didn’t know. He sits and at first everything seems fine. He mutters a few times but I don’t really pay attention. However(said like my std.5 GHC teacher)when he started talking real loud, I did begin to wonder…..


‘power….the yanks rock., what they need to do…..heheheh…hehehe, the sharks, they ate him…cool…heheh, what he doin in the wa-er… POWER! Those terrorists….mumble…fart arse you ‘ave!….making noise like.&^*$*%! mumble mumble…’

Note: he was reading the newspaper and scribbling all sorts of things across pictures and shouting randomly to people who made a little noise…

After all this he removed some food from a paper bag, acting like it was some covert operation and then proceeded to eat the food with enough sound effects to do Frank Miller proud!

So I sat there looking at this man and wondering how life was like for him. If he worried about life, if he dreamed, if he talked with God, how God replied, if he liked ice-cream....
There’s also another lady who I see at our bus stop ,posh British accent, dresses like a man and generally has quite the conversation with herself ,cracking quite a number of racist jokes and laughing at them the way I laugh at my dry jokes.(I really do laugh at my own jokes,its not sad!)
what’s life like for her?

Now, if western societies are anything to go by, we are definitely going to see a rise in psychopathologies and all that in Kenya. Do you think Kenyans are ready? No scratch that…would you be ready?

oh i forgot!MERRY EASTER EVERYONE! think about the good things that happened during this time!