Shiko-Msa

Just the other day I was wondering, or rather casting serious doubt on just how the Witness Protection Program would work locally.  In my thinking, it was all about giving the job to security officials, law enforcers, cops. 

Only to read an article last week alleging that a commissioner with from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights is leaking witnesses identities and safe houses to suspects targeted by the International Criminal Court.  Read the rest of the article here.

PS: This article has nothing to do with the Eyjafjallajökull Volcanic Ash that has now become the excuse for even not going to visit your grandma upcountry.

You’ve been cooling your heels at the airport waiting lounge for 2 hours and just when you can hardly wait to board, KQ announces a 3 hour flight delay. What to do?

• Congregate and harrass the nearest hapless person in uniform. It could be an airline staffer, an airport staffer, a cleaning services staffer……

• Say how some of you are CEOs of some of the biggest organizations in the country.

• Tweet.

• Sit calmly like a 2 hour wait plus a 3 hour delay pisses off everyone else except you. After all life is too short to be pissed off and being pissed off never made anyone feel better.

• Read. No reading material? Browse the airport bookstore. Take time off your livid state and read ‘A Guide To The Acacias Of Africa…..’

• Keep muttering you should have taken the bus.

• Watch parliamentary debate on the draft constitution. You’ll have to read their lips or do something else clever – the telly will be on near mute.

• Swear.

• Its happened. Rant and get over it. Sit back and observe people. Take out a notepad and scribble things. You never know, your scribblings could turn out to be an article.

• Pace!

• Genuinely worry about missing your connecting flight.

• Drink copious amounts of bad coffee and eat lots of bad sandwiches. Just be careful not to end up here.

• Red the paper again. This time read even those pages.

• Strike rapport with fellow passengers and bash the airline for operating like a matatu.

• Remind everyone how pissed off you are.

As for the airlines, strike the fear of God in the passengers by citing technical problems in the plane.

In the meantime, may I take your order?

So Hizbul Islam has outlawed tunes played on radio stations in Mogadishu. It is for stories like these that I’m grateful for living and working in Kenya.

“Islamic groups have previously outlawed music in some areas under their control, along with beards, football, movies, women’s beauty salons and bras. The latest ban on all tunes – including those used in commercials – appears to be the most widely applied yet, and indicative of the rebels’ ability to instil fear….”

I don’t listen to radio much so I’d relate more with telly. I don’t necessarily get entertained by the melodies before our news and adverts. The fact that right now I can’t remember any of the tunes our stations play is indicative of just how much I take them for granted. But all the same I’d not want them replaced with the very therapeautic sounds of chickens and horses. Like heehaw! heehaw! here is the news read by Julie Gichuru quack! quack!  Eish.

I would easier understand a ban on re-broadcasting BBC and VOA programs. Not that I’d tolerate,  but I would work hard to get a glimpse of where the rebels are coming from. What with the remote possibility of polluting the minds of the masses with western ideas and all. But harmless melodies to introduce news broadcasts, educational and health programs? Come on.

From The Past: To Veil Or Not To Veil

Guest Post By Wamathai Warugongo.

I know you wonder if it’s you

That I write about on my updates on twitter and facebook

I know you want it to be you

That I write poetry for

That I tell my friends about

I know you will be shocked

When you find out that it’s actually your friend

And I can hardly wait for my mum to meet her.

@wamathai warugongo.

Ok this is crazy. When reading the first line of the article below I instinctively placed the story in some far off country. Only to realize it’s right here in Kenya.

A 49 Year old nurse was jailed for 17 years for raping a patient.

Peter Munyoki, who worked at the Kitui General Hospital, was convicted on Thursday for the offence committed in March last year.

The patient had been admitted with her breastfeeding child suffering from a urinary tract infection.

After the child was taken away from her, the patient’s breasts swelled because she was not breastfeeding.

The nurse on duty offered to press out the milk to ease the patient’s pain.

It was while he was attending to the patient in a side room that Munyoki raped her.

She reported the matter to other nurses and the man was arrested.

Story adopted from Nation Media.

See also: Quiet Please.

Post By: Owen Wyndago – The Sanctum

This post probably does not fit in the subject category or categories of this blog but then I was told that the idea behind guest blogging is to add different flavour right? That is why I decided to take this opportunity to give you a trip through my rather disturbed mind, and by that I mean my thoughts are always interrupted and brought to a halt by a question my mind cannot think up an answer to, and not that I’m mentally unstable. Sometimes I even feel like my mind has a mind of its own when it challenges me with impossible thoughts, so I’m always trying to jump the hurdles of these mind interruptions to the final destination of contentment by trying to solve every mystery that life poses. This being very sane in my view.

Life is so full of mysteries and my unending curiosity (Which can be annoying to some people) just wouldn’t allow me to rest, every other minute a question pops up in my head like one of those pop-ups in a computer, complete with a beeping sound notifying me of something. Just now I was reading a piece about drunk driving and a thought popped up; if a person died drunk, how does he show up in heaven, still drunk? Arriving at the pearly gates arguing with the good Lord…..

“Couldn’t you at least wait until I sobered up so I can argue my case with a straight mind?”

And my brain processes these types of thoughts (half-thoughts would be more suitable) at incredible amounts, it’s so sick. Speaking of sickness, have you ever read or heard about a disease or disorder and wished – I’d like to have that? No, don’t sneer yet. I read about this disorder with a fancy long name – super autobiographical…. something, it is apparently very rare that only four people in the whole world have been confirmed to have it, it causes people to not forget things, ever! They call that a disorder, I call it a gift! I know I want that, but we already have those people of our own here in Kenya, we create them in our schools. Unfortunately, I’m living proof that our education system is still dysfunctional because it failed to successfully convert me into one of those people, I can barely remember things! Okay, now sneer.

Socrates, the famous ancient Greek philosopher, according to Plato’s dialogues, had this thought concerning knowledge and the soul. It is sort of a question of, where does the line between the body and soul lie? Just like I asked earlier, if the body is drunk, is the soul drunk too? So Socrates argued that learning is simply a recollection of knowledge that was initially most likely in the possession of the soul. According to him, the soul of a man had existed even prior to his conception and therefore the soul must have had some knowledge before the body came to be. Since we are all born with a fresh, empty and innocent brain, Socrates explained that prior knowledge is but forgotten and therefore man must begin the task of dredging up this information afresh! A little far fetched? I don’t know. This would mean that our memory has been, or is being messed up with at regular (or irregular) intervals to keep us humans in check. This is to mean that man is not created to know everything. It may seem like a normal thing to forget but I ask myself, once I know something why should I forget, involuntarily?

Another man from a more recent time who had interesting views on the subject of memory and time is Philip K. Dick, a prolific American science fiction novelist who’d created his work during the 50′s all the way through to the 70′s, wrote in his essay, How to build a universe that would not fall apart two days later, that we could be living in the biblical time, concluding this after the occurrence of  a set of coincidences in his life that corresponded with biblical stories and with astonishing accuracy! I recommend you read this essay, it is quite lengthy but worth a read, captivating, interesting – just read it. You will be dumbfounded.

In the essay, Philip K. Dick questions whether we are living in 50AD, around the time when the bible was written, and that Christ is shortly coming back. If at all some demon has distorted our memories and caused us to forget by creating a veil of time so that it seems to us that Christ has been gone for too long and for others to think that He may not come back, yet He is, sooner than we think because it may not be any less 50AD now that it was in 50AD. There may only be one time – now!

Which leaves me wondering, why were we created with forgetfulness if not that God or any other being responsible for it didn’t want us to remember something we once knew or might find out? In the bible, when man sought to build their way to heaven, God confused them and made them speak in different tongues….. perhaps we are confused in the way that we are, and we don’t even know it! Adam and Eve didn’t know they were naked before their ‘eyes’ were opened….

Some things I see on TV and I wonder it it’s true. I know it’s just acting but how true is it, the idea that they are trying to sell us? For example, the best TV series I watched last year were Lie To Me and Mentalist, in that order. If you haven’t watched lie to me then find it, do whatever, just look for it. I’m on a quest to find season two, which I hear is already available on the streets of Nairobi, you know downtown? It’s about a psychologist who reads facial expressions (even subtle ones, they are termed as micro-expressions) and body language or precisely predict whether or not a subject is lying.

The show was inspired by a real psychologist named Paul Ekman who does exactly that. Studies show that there are people who naturally have this ability and do not have to be trained. And it is through the study of such individuals that doctors want to discover (or have discovered?) the secret of identifying liars! These individuals are called Truth wizards. I want that! I want to become a Truth Wizard! No kidding, I went to their website and they have a training kit for sale for those who want to learn the skill. Perhaps, some things which we think we cannot know or should not know, we can train ourselves to ‘see’ them, the same way we trained to speak and walk. How true is this?

In conclusion, I do not want to receive a ready-made fake reality that the world is constantly and somehow forcibly handing me, I want to explore and discover my own true reality that would make sense to me, because like Philip K. Dick said, we all see the world differently. And if I tried to see it the way the majority of people see it, I become a fake. I want to make  mistakes, I want to be wrong, so that in the end I can be absolutely right!