when the heart rests

i feel sad ... but i feel happy too ... i feel so warm and closeted ... like all the scares i had of the big world were all my creation ... that all the evil in the world could be found in me ... and that all i had to be afraid of ... was me or not

i always had this thoughts ... that everyone i came across was just a figment of my imagination ... that someone was just carrying out a farce to please or to annoy me ... may be africa and all its problems did not exist ... may be america was not that powerful that it could invade our living room with its images of a better life that we could only pant for

there was no africa or europe or america or asia or australia in Iten where i grew up ... the rest of the world was far away ... or may be it was just too close only that i did not care ... but with the trees my mother had planted ... the orchard ... the fog ... the field hand who went on with his duties as glum as Uncle Tom would have been ... it was just me and my thoughts ... dream i did dream .

i made images of kingdoms and giant thick forests where the strangest of animals lived ... i saw brave, heroic lasses wielding magic swords running away through the thick forests ... running away from evil lords/wicked witches/ugly trolls who sought to capture them ... and from then on ... the tales of my people and the tales of the outside world merged in me

they say the voice that sings from outside africa is louder than the voice that sings from africa ... every day as i trudged to school we were taught concepts that were too far divorced from the lives we led around ... but that was ok ... science is never different ... it might have found others earlier and the ones who are a tad behind had better learn from those who can call themselves the masters ... still if only a teacher would have made me see the valley that lay to the west of our home ... if someone would have told me to take a keener look at the wood, stone and leaf around

western education made me a dreamer ... i dreamt of a world far beyond ... and the people around me became little ... i too became little ... and so did Kabon .... the old grandma who trudged barefoot to thatch her house

the world used to come to iten once in a while ... the International Safari Rally ... helicopters buzzed around and blew up blouses ... opening up sneak previews for the voyeurs ... and then the colors ... it is so strange to see a mix of color ... it brings life into a sharper reality ... people of all colors moving around ... and the cars and the helicopters

i have read far and wide ... the tutors at school have always thought of me as clever ... i just find myself odd ... in one way or another ... knowing and being interested in things no one else cares about ... who wants to hear about Tenochtilan or Genghis Khan ... who needs the past when you have a whole future fresh and unexplored ... who cares about Bugganes and Guanacos, or whether mammoths could be cloned or that the cross between a lion and a tiger is a liger and that the latter grows so much larger than the parents

may be i should forget the big, wide world for a while ... and focus on me ... improve on me ...create a rock, solid self-image with a pure fountain inside ... may be others would love to drink from that ... others that make my world

africa resource bank conference, simba lodge

from sunday to wednesday i have been at simba lodge naivasha discussing with all these cool peeps on how to turn africa people into a resource ... i attended the conference courtesy of SIFE (students in free enterprise) and i immensely thank James Shikwati, the country director and a dear friend for that

it was more like a think tank kind of thingy and oh, i was like the youngest and the like the least educated because almost everyone carried scents of Phds and Masters ... i learnt a lot about the african situation ... and that africa is the only continent that is going to note an increase in its population by the year 2025 therefore the eager need that these people be turned into an asset or risk them proving a major liability ... if you consider that 50% of the population is under the age of 17 with many of them facing an uncertain future in regard to poor governance, disease, poverty and unemployment some serious considerations have to take place ... our workshop was such an attempt

let me go back to less serious issues ... simba lodge was the bomb ... i would wake up in the morning and run towards the lake so that i could view hippopotamuses grazing ... there were beautiful waterbucks also that held no fear or awe for the humanity surrounding them ... a friend had a digital camera and we took some major snaps ... i tried downloading them but there was a hitch so i will try to do that some other time ... the lake ... there is something incredibly fantastic about standing close to a lake ... it reminded me of the time i was in high school and we went for a major hike down kerio valley to touch the waters of lake kamnarok ... lake naivasha is just the same ... only grander ... and with all these beautiful birds standing and wading around ... and in the distance where the sun rays shimmered over the lake, one could spot a fisherman or two trying their trade

the hospitality from the lodge staff was great, the only tragedy is that most of them seem averse to smiling ... which is not necessarily bad but a smile does not seem to cost that much, does it? ... i met all these peeps from south africa and tanzania ... shared a lot about our cultures ... learnt some afrikaans and plied it on a south african lady who laughed her socks off when i told her that she was a beautiful girl in Afrikaans

the best part was the mbuzi choma we had ... never tasted roasted goat that was half that good ... i was rather full from an excellent dinner so i missed somewhat on that delicacy but there were other rewards like in being around all these interesting peeps doing all these interesting things that you had no idea that they could possibly be done

most folks there were exceptional in that each person seemed to have in a certain way chosen the road less travelled ... they all took exception to conventional wisdom and followed what was in their own hearts ... and i was like caramba! that must have demanded a lot of courage

there were poets, writers, businessmen, social workers,researchers, proffessors, idlers who did not like working but had saved money to attend all manner of conference ... and each person was very confident about their position in life and were not attracted in any manner to what any other participant might have had on their side of the fence

i met this lady who scored straight As in highschool ... her father had insisted on choosing the most complicated degrees for her so as to effectively utilize her load of brains ... you could imagine the list ... doctor, lawyer, rocket scientist, astronaut ... or something that would involve her shutting herself in a lab for good watching a paramecium reproduce in the hope that such an observation would earn her a nobel prize

instead, this girl did philosophy and theology in the states and came back immediately afterwards ... there was some form of career assurance in america but the country sucked culture-wise and she hopped on plane back to africa ... she is like very jobless right now ... oh, she did a stint in strath but thought that a teaching job sucked so she is just at home travelling around the world with the money she saved ... she is thinking of working for a cruise ship, hmmmm ... my mind could not adequately correlate her decisions but then she told be a beautiful thing ...ALL WE WANT IN THIS LIFE IS TO LOVE AND TO BE LOVED ...period ... she has already achieved that and sees not why we should have much hullabaloo about life

this is critical if we a too look at the education system in africa ... there are those who say that a developing nation needs more scientists than it does guys in the so called liberal artistes ... do we force children to become doctors, engineers and accountants or do we give them the free will to explore their God-given talents ... are the students who fail pro-science examination necessarily weak or are they just victims of an unfair system ... the whole talk challenged me to really look at myself in the mirror and see what i really am and what i really want ... which of course is a difficult task for any human ... but i guess that at the end of it all we have to make choices about our lives and we have to be ready to live by those choices and not blame anyone if anything goes awry ...

TO BE CONTINUED

if i could write a letter about iten

i wrote a letter to my brother yesterday ... it was raining and i thought that would be cool for inspiration ... i did jumble and jot many words down i remember ... but today in the morning i was too afraid to send it ... instead i just folded it sharply and placed it inside a novel

he is lucky that he gets written letters ... i only got three letters in high school ... perhaps that is not such a shame for an extreme introvert ... the first one was from my elder sister ... she wrote when i was in form one ... a lovely letter that ended with a cool catch-phrase, cheerio, that was the thingy for those heydays ... she demanded that i write back and just like yesterday i did scribble something down but it only ended between the pages of my exercise book ... she never wrote again!

the next one i received in fourth form ... it was a rather saucy letter from a girl i had no idea about ... i was more stupefied than impressed, and it came to my realization letter that all the 'let my love come flying like a jumbo jet to the airport of your heart' stuff was meant for another 'downstairs' guy in the next class ... one was referred to as a 'downstairs bloke' if their transcripts were one of the usuals that were decorated with capital Ds ... he stole my identity cause i was bright and quite unknown ... and the way my name was plastered proudly on the noticeboard for excellent results was a sure way of having the chick think of him as one solid brainiac ... it worked ... i idly returned the letter to the fella and did not even raise an issue ... all my energies were committed elsewhere

the last one i got in the midst of the fervent fires of the kcse exams ... it was from my sister who lives in swaziland ... it came with a delightful card and i proudly showcased it on top of my desk during moments of absurd vanity ... it was the first letter she wrote to me after moving there ... it appeared that she was rather happy and content ... the swaziland she described seemed remarkably different from kenya both in features and in culture that one could always be occupied with the satiation of their own curiosity ... she said that she was rather shy of displaying our photos for we were rather skinny as compared to those bootylicious swazis ... surprisingly, those 'reed dance' crazy folks down there have been feeding on mutated cows that take only three months to mature! ... better to remain a leaner but healthier-eating kenyan

it is not so hard to fall in love with letters especially if you come from iten ... a close friend told me frankly that to grow up in such a beautiful place ... close to the howling valley with its creamy fog ... meant that one could either go mad or become a poet ... the latter description better suits me thank you though much of my poetry i only read myself

i guess the valley will always be a part of my life ... it howls within me from time to time like a lover calling his man to her bosom ... i was always scared and i still am of looking down at it ... of course their was the profit of the panoramic view that opened before you ... a closer brown valley dotted with huts and lines of grevellia trees and a much more distant second one ... the second valley is always purple but with binoculars one can have a closer look at where the kerio river feeds the lake kamnarok and probably spot elephants taking a sip of water during a hot day

i have walked all the way down to that 'hell' ... for hell it is, burning and scalding hotter than anything i can ever imagine ... it was part of a hike we took while we were in high school ... and it firmly implanted the adage 'life is beautiful but cruel' into our young minds

descending down the first valley is not hard ... there are people mingling all over and cars flashing past on its way to either eldoret or kabarnet ...and since we left at dusk we were howling like dogs all the way probably scaring sleeping little children that a pack of jackals or T-9s had been let loose ... then we slipped down a narrow road that opened slowly like a ribbon to lead us down to the desolate second valley ... the trip down is beautiful ... brownish-green grass, virgin and untouched by human hand or a cow's mouth wave rustle softly in the wind reminding you of a beautiful woman ... and the path bear no sign of human feet ... you feel like adam or eve taking the first steps in a brand new planet

the experience was also very carthartic for long ago, the people of my tribe 'the keiyo' had stuck to the stiff sides of this escarpment to seek protection from the violent nandi, tugen and maasai tribes ... my mother has endowed me with many memories of my people and walking down the escarpment i could almost see them herding their goats, tending their streams of water, making mursik, giving their warcries when nandi warriors were spotted ... it was a war cry that even the goats knew very well and they would follow their owners into hiding ... leaving behind a deserted village

the torture begins once you are down the second valley ... it is not as flat as it is normally viewed as from iten ... it is just a chaos of hill and valley ... you struggle up the sharp incline of a hill, thinking that it is the last one and that you can finally be rewarded with the majestic view of the green lake kamnarok only to find out that there is another hill -and probably five others as well after that

but with a spirit that only high school students could have we struggled and leapt with young joy as we spotted the lake, it did not even matter that we could no longer touch it with the proliferation of weed around it ... it did not not even come to mind that there was another torturous back trip ... one in which many would have their legs fail them, one in which a student would be severely dehydrated that he would have to be hospitalized for a week, one in which a close friend would wonder of on his own and almost end up trampled by elephants ... we just celebrated the fact that our hard work had come to fruition and we could at least gaze close upon the lake ... it looked distant and inviting, almost hypnotic and all of us were mesmerized by a sensation almost alien ... i do not know whether our headmaster and literature felt the same for they had taken an easier hour drive to the lake with a weatherbeaten landrover ...

i will write my brother a letter another time!