education, really????

For a while now I have been looking at the new Kenyan education system with much bewilderment. When my mother went to nursery school, for two years they went from eight to twelve to play and sing songs, and maybe learn a bit on how to hold a pen and stuff. The real education began in standard one. In my day, we went from eight to three, to learn how to write in the morning, then sleep and play after lunch waiting to be picked up at three. Now I get it that with the advent of civilization and development, carrying with it massive traffic jams and hence the need to beat them, we have to make a few adjustments. But what is the price we are paying – our children?

Picture this: It’s Tuesday morning. This family lives somewhere in Nairobi, it’s not important where; the difference more often than not is the same. The school bus passes outside the house at exactly 6.00 am, and hence Junior must be ready and on the bus-stop by then. Mum had to wake up before five to ensure that by this time she too is ready, having attended to the kids and dad so that she goes on to work as she drops off the child at the bus-point. Junior threw a mega-tantrum this morning, and who can blame him? He got home at 9pm last night due to the rains that resulted in unbelievable traffic hold up. He had homework which he had not touched, so he had to do that. Then dinner, shower, getting tomorrow’s shirt ironed, polishing them shoes… before you knew it, it was 11pm, and he was still about. I would be quite disagreeable come five am and the alarm, how much more this eight year old standard two pupil?

I grew up in an estate in Mumias. School was a ten-minute walk away, we came back home for lunch and actually had time to play. Matter of fact, I lost my shoes once, as we played on the way home, and my mother whose sense of teach-a-child-a-lesson-they’ll-never-forget was sharper than anyone I’d ever known, made me go to school barefoot. But it was easy. I woke up at 6.20 to be in school by seven, when we got older and it was 6.15, I woke up at 5.45. By 5.45 now, a child in baby class is at a bus-stop waiting for the bus. What then? Is it any shock we’re treating ulcers in six-year-olds?

 Don’t think that I’m recommending school mashinani, that we should all move from town. Even in the rural private school I went to, things have now changed. They now get to school by 6.00 am, for morning prep, then break at 5pm for tea and stuff, and then go back for night prep till 9.00 pm. Night prep, where a teacher comes to class and continues to drill more knowledge into their already saturated brains and then leaves them homework. To do at home, at 9.30 when they get there.  Education, no, slavery, maybe a little. I’m excited by the Mutula moves now, children need a break. But no, parents want to hire private tutors, transforming home into more comfortable school. So now, the child hates the holiday as much as the school term, home as much as school.

What is this you want to tell the child between 7 pm and 9 pm, that you didn’t manage to say during the day? Even if that child is a candidate. We want to hide behind candidature and the exams, when in essence all we are masking is poor planning. Don’t get me wrong, I am a staunch believer in the last minute policy, but if a teachers’ strike happens in 3^rd term and we are panicking that children will fail because of a three-week glitch, someone didn’t plan properly. I had the pleasure of going to a good public secondary school, where by the end of June all syllabi were completed, through holiday school and third term, we just did papers upon papers. And you really don’t need much from teachers; they are there to answer the questions we couldn’t. And they were not many.

I have nothing against teachers, or students, or the government (at this time ;))))) it’s the system. It’s okay if the ones affected are adult, we can manage, even though just barely, but our children, they are caught in the middle of circumstances too complex for them to understand and process, they have no say, they cannot speak out. We tell them to count themselves lucky because they are driven to school, that in ‘our days’ we walked 5km every morning and evening with no shoes on. They should not complain. But while their mouths are mum, a lot more speaks out to us, we can see the results. We see it in the infant mortality rates, despite the advances in medicine. We see it in the growing rate of childhood cancers and ulcers, in the increasing suicide statistics in children, in the college drop-out, truancy and delinquency rates.

There’s got to be a better way, surely, or else our future is bleak at best. Unless this crop of adults invents a way to live forever.

talk to my guns and my arrows...

Dear Kenyan politician,

You must think us to be so gullible, you must think we have no eyes. But I don’t blame you. While you were one of us, it is all you saw, and what son is a worthy son, except the one that surpasses all that his father ever was? And you have by all means surpassed your father. With every subsequent rebirth we see that you learnt the lessons, you learnt them well. And we, we let you carry out your impunity with heads bowed low, for as you told us, the reason we have you is because we don’t know anything, and we need you to defend our rights. And then you tell us that in order to love your neighbor as yourself, you must first love yourself. And love yourself you do.

That guy speaks well, Dedan Kimathi must be turning in his grave, watching the independence he fought for so hard washed down to an even more severe colonialism at the hands of our very brothers… watching as you get up on national television and urge us to wipe out those invaders who are in our land, while you embrace and bump fists with their leader. Had Mekatilili known this was what she gave her life up for, to watch her people turned to donkeys, working three jobs to barely survive, while you dear politician decide that we must pay our and your taxes, we must finance your holidays, and increase your salaries because the work you do for us is so great, so vastly involving, that you have no time to appear and fight for legislation that would better our lives. You must think us so gullible. And we are.

Uliniahidi matamu sasa nanywa machungu,

You said that you would fight the corruption now you only fight each other

You promised me the sky, now I watch you while you fly away

You told me to live, then you came and took my life away

              Dedan Kimathi must be turning in his grave,

              Mekatilili must be turning in her grave,

             What can say to you

 What would you have me do

Now you just talk to my guns and my arrows

It’s a refusal to think, a sad delusion by which the mind creates an excuse to brand the skin black, the society backward and the political economics third world. Leadership thus becomes confused with might and vice versa. Lives are mortgaged to give rise to a mini Euro-Anglo-American suburb and the cries of the people are silenced by the promise of edible warm and nutritious democracy. Demokrasia itakayojaza matumbo, itawapa watu makaazi, italeta ajira na kuwapa watu umoja na amani…

Meanwhile we turn the other cheek. We call every reprimand aimed at you a bullet aimed at removing our people from power. And then we go to that neighbor of ours and burn his house down. Go and tell your leader to leave ours alone. The very next day, you shake hands, the beginning of a coalition between the two of you. Because two heads are better than one. No wonder you treat us like so, it is we who have slept on the job. No one is responsible for my rights, that’s why they call it capitalism. Look out for your rights and those of your people. Don’t entrust them to another who is also just looking out for their own rights and those of their people…

Paukwa pakawa, umesaidia vipi wenzako hawa, nalia,

Sahani ya mchele, wengine wafa njaa tumbo yako mbele,

Giza ya mwizi, lakini mchana twaogopa siku hizi,

Kiboko kwa mkorofi, maovu yako yanapigiwa makofi…

            Dua la mnyonge halimpati mwewe

Mwenye nguvu mpishe, kilio changu kisikizee

            Dua la mnyonge halimpati mwewe

Nalia, nalia….

But we are done. No more sleeping on the job. No more voting is for the old and grey. No more get out of my land you stranger, yet he too was born in the same hospital I was. Eventually, the chickens come home to roost. And no matter how much you postpone the day of reckoning, yours will come. And the voice that we have, the voice that you silenced, we shall use it then… we will dig further into our pockets to run our economy. We will work harder to see our children through school, and we will teach them to be one… and eventually, you will grow old, and so will your ideologies. Then you will be irrelevant, and you will be replaced… it will happen…  And I hope you live long enough to see it…

Yours,

Young Citizen.

a fork in the road...

When I was in campus I had these things that made life easier. When I left I gave them to some girls so their lives would be made easier as well. But then there are those I carried home, they were reminders for me of a place in my life, a stage I went through and came out of alive. I thought I would keep them for a while, maybe even until my own daughter (my mouth to Your ears Lord!!) was old enough to see them, you know… and then I had to let them go. And I finally realized that it was over. I am done with campus. I am, again, out there, the real ‘out there’ forget the one we always fussed about in high school. That ‘out’ was nothing. This is it. And it’s here.

I know countless people have walked before me along this road. Some have made it easy, some have made it through nothing short of sheer stubbornness, and some have tried and failed. And I wonder, how did they feel after campus? How did they feel when they sent out applications to any and every job advertised because any job at that point would suffice?  Were they as confused and unsure as I am? Today I watched this movie, this guy told this girl that the reason she could never find anyone who could make her dreams come true was the fact that she didn’t know those dreams herself. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, how do you know when you’ve found it? When you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know when you get there? How easy is it to decide the rest of my life based on my 20-some years worth of knowledge? What do I know about corporate affairs, and seven to five jobs… how will I feel if in 10 years I’m still doing what I’m doing now? Will I be satisfied, will I be happy? Or will I start counting the years to retirement with nothing to do but work on because the bills need paying? Should I take that course everyone seems to believe is the answer to a direct sure job? After I get there will I want to be in the field for the rest of my life?

Did anyone ever find one answer to just one of these questions? Some welcome to life…

it's just another birthday, and i am fine...

#np: Just Another Birthday - Casting Crowns

TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. I turn, well sixteen(ish). I’m old enough. I have loved this birthday more than the last few birthdays because I was forced to sit down and not think about myself today. I had an exam. The paper was in the afternoon, so thankfully, there went my plans for a quiet dinner in town, granted, that’s still gonna happen like it or yes, but not today. Today was a calm day. In the past I’ve made such a fuss of the day, by evening I really didn’t know what being a year older meant. Today I came from my paper, and just sat in my room and thought. And decided to write.

This year has been about the craziest year I have had in my life ever. I suppose it gets crazier as one grows up. I’ve had days I wished could be thirty hours long, I’ve beaten deadlines in the true Kenyan fashion, at the last possible second. Why, just immediately after writing this I should set about writing this practical report for a trip we went on three weeks ago, because it is due tomorrow, and after the report read for the paper that I’m sitting for tomorrow. Like I said, najivunia kuwa Mkenya. Also I love the ease with which things get done when you’re at the now or never point. But I digress.

Within the year I have lost quite a few things I’d rather not have. I’ve lost a few people I wish I didn’t have to. I have come face to face with rock bottom, I have known what it must be like for things to get so bad sometimes death seems like a worthy reprieve. Perhaps not for me, but I know a little of what that is. My friend lost her brother because he took his own life, it was incredibly sad, also annoying, because he was fourteen and in that season suicides in Kenya were like flies, everyday in the news there were about two. And he became a statistic, just like that. 

I’m just about to finish campus, what a relief that is for me, it has been a hectic ride, it still is… Sometimes I wish someone would lend me six hours from their day, sometimes I wish I could bring back all that time I had idle in January, cause I need it now, and then some. But the Lord is faithful. I am here today because God kept me. I’m alive only because of His grace. And these are not just words; I mean alive in the literal sense of the word. Breathing.

There are just things that no one can ever teach you, there are lessons one must learn for themselves, mistakes one must make so that they can learn. There are thing only Time teaches, wounds only Time heals… I’ve learnt a few lessons this year...

I’ve learnt that being right is not nearly as important as we make it to be. And I wish I wasn’t right so many times, because when I got to be right, sometimes I lost someone I cared about, and I would sit on my bed and fume about how I was justified, but my justification wasn’t there for me when I needed a shoulder to lean on, someone was. Other times I was wrong, but I was too stubborn to make things right, so I made myself right. Some relationships actually did end, some got scarred and broken, and I’m still trying to pick up the pieces thereof, and some I don’t even know where to begin. What's that they say about starting afresh, is that even possible? Say if I broke a cup’s handle, can I just put tea in cup and tell cup let’s start afresh, you were never broken? I have to learn how to hold cup again without a handle, where to place my hands so I don’t get burnt, or maybe use cup for a different thing altogether. But I can’t say let’s start over… And so somehow I’m still trying to figure out where to start mending those relationships. Cups are easy going, people, not so much…

I have learnt to hold my head up high, no matter how beat up I really feel... Everyone's fighting battles of their own, not just me. Everyone is struggling and dealing with baggage under the weight of which I could easily suffocate. But we faint not  hold our heads up high, we make ourselves available for our friends, because maybe even if we can't solve our own, we can help them work through their baggage. Even though we can't pray for ourselves, we can cry out to God for our friends, and maybe, maybe in searching for answers to someone else's problems, in being answers to someone else's prayers, we may find what we so desperately look for. And meanwhile we walk tall. I am not Atlas, I do not bear the weight of the world on my shoulders. So I treat myself kindly, I've learnt to say no to commitments I feel are too much for me. I've learnt the beauty of delegation, and with that the grace to accept less than perfection, and appreciate honest effort. I've learnt that people are not donkeys, they don't need to be pushed to live. And I've learnt to allow people to be who they are, to be with who they want, and do what they feel is right for them at the time. Many lessons I have learnt not by my friends' nagging,but by my choosing my own path. I have learnt that true  friendship involves mastery of the art of silence. But I also learnt not to get less than I deserve. I learnt to politely but firmly refuse to be pushed and walked all over. I have come to admire the quiet dignity and gumption I see in my older friends, the boldness that makes my mum walk into a bank and demand from the manager what is rightfully hers, on a matter of principle. And I want that...


And I’ve learnt that it’s not that serious. If it is not about my God, then it just is not that serious. I’ve learnt not to break my back for things that will never truly satisfy. I’ve learnt not to worry about things I have no control over. I’ve learnt not to borrow from tomorrow its evil to mule over today. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. In less than one month I am going to be a Kenyan. My folks have this thing about how I should start making the transition from bread-eater to bread-earner, about sooner rather than later. So I thought about it, and about how I don’t see myself in a lab for the rest of my life, and how I don’t know where I’ll end up, and what if I don’t like it there, and why did I do biochemistry anyway… I thought about many things without answers, I talked to people who could only smile because they don’t know either, eventually it was too much. And the worries wouldn't stop piling on. I couldn’t focus on now worrying about tomorrow. A tomorrow I don’t even know I have, and you know what, it just is not that serious. When the time comes for me to sit and work through that, then I will. But I won’t borrow trouble from tomorrow as if I’ve got all of today’s sorted out. Give it Time, you never know what’s coming. Half of the things I worried about getting into campus never happened, and the ones that could have happened already did, and I’m still here. Nothing is ever that serious. Nothing is ever forever and thank the Lord that it’s not.

So I thank God for last year, I thank God for this new year. I’m 23 now, who knows what that holds... all I know is that I cannot wait to find out!!!.

jar of hearts

When I was in my first semester of first year a bunch of us landed in a Bible study group with a former schoolmate of mine. She was kind enough to break my idealistic view of the education system early enough, for which I’m eternally grateful. Otherwise, I would have been sore disappointed with the Kenyan public university system. But she also told us something else I’ve never forgotten. She said, “Don’t ever squander any young man’s money; you’ll have sons one day”. Well, I had already been given ‘the talk’ about campus boys, what I hadn’t been told I saw within two weeks of being in campus (my roommate then was REALLY sweet and pretty, as everyone noticed, me, well… I have that face that needs to keep smiling or else… ;)))). 

I’m a bit of an introvert, I don’t take to novelty easily, especially new people. Hence some people think I’m really quiet, others know me as chatterbox Joy. Anyhow, even when I was a teenager, I was always so scared of well, boys – all boys. Not because they want ‘one thing’, back then I didn’t even know about this ‘thing’. But I was afraid of anyone ever mistaking my attention and infectious affection for anything other than what it was. When a boy came along, I was quick to say no, coz I always  wanted to marry my first boyfriend, and that high school chap was soooooo not it. So why go for that date, why should I waste his money (his mother’s money), and yet I wasn’t going to give him what he wants.

I was so young then, so naive, so unschooled and unexposed. No one had ever told me any of this stuff; don’t even know where I came up with it, God just worked overtime on my behalf before I even knew what He was up to. But I still live by those rules I made for myself as a girl, because now I have the understanding. I’m responsible for every heart I break, I’m responsible for every ambiguous message I give. That boy has a Father to whom I will answer. I have a Father to whom I will answer for how I watched over His daughter. One day I may have sons, and they will do some searching before they find a wife, if I bleed him dry now, yet I know we’re not headed anywhere, my sons may be the ones who take the fall for it. As a result, I haven’t been on too many dates… sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes I don’t think it is. Maybe if I was a bit more ‘out there’ I’d… Sigh!!

Right now on replay is Christina Perri’s Jar of Hearts:

And who do you think you are?
Runnin' 'round leaving scars
Collecting your jar of hearts
And tearing love apart
You're gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
So don't come back for me
Who do you think you are?

I like that ‘running around leaving scars’ part, ain’t that what we do now? Breaking hearts upon hearts for that momentary high? How many hearts have we got in our jars? I know I have some; I have not been too faithful to 16 year old me… We have so much trivialized relationships, and the responsibility that comes with them… Nine year old girls are in love, and their parents think it’s ‘cute’ and everyone goes, ‘Aaaawwww!!!’ Is it a wonder girls in primary school are having sex now? What is this world my children will come into? 

When my mum was in Form 1 she got a letter from a boy in our brother school. She cried!!! Real tears!! She was so distraught, why would he write me such a letter?!  So, I didn’t see the letter, but I don’t think this boy wrote any derogatory things, just the normal ‘I can’t sleep thinking about you’, we know them, those letters. We wrote them or got them. But I envy that innocence, maybe it isn’t all good, but we’re raising a generation of adult children. Between civilization – the Internet, social networks, telly and novels – the result is babies trying to carry the emotional weight of an adult. and then when we become adults, we're still babies. But we don’t listen; we want to make all the mistakes ourselves, coz our folks don’t know what they’re saying.

Can you honestly get your heart broken thrice, even just once, and go into another relationship whole? I won’t even talk about ‘chips funga’. A lady came one Sunday and told us “Marriage is not for children”. Every heart in your jar will affect your marriage, every meaningless fling, every friends-with-benefit, every relationship that didn’t work. This guy, Richard Cohen, wrote for the Washington Post years back about this open marriage couple (quoted by Chuck Swindoll):

Open Marriage… Broken Marriage

“There were these couples I know. They were open. They were honest. They were having affairs. They were not sneaking around (applause), they were not lying (applause), they were being honest (whistles). Everyone agreed that it was wonderful. The men agreed and the women agreed and I agreed and it all made you wonder.

Then they split. There was something wrong. Invariably someone couldn't take it. It had nothing to do with the head. The head understood. It was the heart; it was - you should pardon the expression - broken.

It all made you think. It made you think that maybe there are things we still don't know about men and women and maybe before we spit in the eye of tradition we ought to know what we're doing. I have some theories and one of them is that one of the ways you measure love is not with words, but with actions, with commitment, with what you are willing to give up, with what you are willing to share with no one else.”

Are we experts on the human psyche? Do some of us know more about human beings the rest of humanity doesn't? Do we know what we are doing? God, forgive my ignorance… forgive my ignorance…

Who do you think you are, running around leaving scars,

Collecting your jar of hearts, tearing love apart…

some time later

I forgot how to write. So much happening, so much change, not enough time to process. It’s a new morning, I’m listening to Rigga's album - The Awakening, he sings that stuff I hate – hip-hop, rap – but I’m listening to him because of the depth of the message he preaches. I’d love for it to be uhmm… much much less noisy, but his stuff is deep.

My woes began six months ago (it’s been that long already?), and as it has been from times past, it began with a boy. Unlike my brother, ours wasn’t a match made in heaven, but he made me laugh, and then he made me cry, and I cried for the rest of the year last year. For my truth all I got were lies, for my kindness all I received was manipulation. I know I’m too idealistic, I believe in the goodness of mankind too much. I also know the world is a cruel place where each one looks out for themselves, but the church too? Isn’t church the place we go to escape all that treachery? Isn’t church the place we go to lay ourselves bare before our peers, and try to walk the walk together? But the church too has become a stage, a place where they go to get the good ones. A place where you get the right profile for yourself, so that no one will doubt your story, you’re the perfect person. You’re born again. You’re even an official. You’re beyond reproach, your weaknesses are covered. No one can say anything against you. If they do, a thousand more will defend you. It’s a good place to be. Until the walls fall, and sooner or later, all walls fall.

Through all this I struggled with going to church, any church. How can do this to a God I love so much? How do I go back and fix what cannot be fixed? How do I stand before people and raise my hands to a God whose grace and mercy I find impossible to understand, hence accept? That just like that that, I confess my sin before Him, leave my sin, and just like that He forgets my sin. How? How can He say He forgets my sin, when as David says, my sin is ever before me? And I mean ever. How can He love me, after I spat on His face, took His blood for granted and destroyed the body that He paid the ultimate price for? So I went to church because it was easier not to have that discussion with anyone, and I looked around at those people who I knew since I was like zero, those people who taught me in Sunday school. Would they understand? Would their arms still be open when they realized she was not so perfect?

 And all the growing up I hadn’t done in the last since I reached puberty, I did in less than two months. The first thing I wanted to do was run to my blog and post Ntozake Shange’s poem here, “One thing I don’t need is sorry”. At the New Year I thought about a happy New Year post, but I had nothing to report, it was just another year to live, far as I was concerned. I shut everyone out; I sat in my room, cried all night and slept all day. I was only too relieved to come back to school, here I didn’t have to make small talk and pretend it was all right. Because it wasn’t all right. It wasn’t right at all.

I’d love to say there was a turning point, there was a moment of truth when it all got better, or I got angry and decided to let all the anger and guilt go, when I decided I won’t be captive to all that fear and helplessness. Maybe it was the diligent prayers of people like Dinah, and my mother. But the truth is, every day I wake up, it’s grace. Every time I lift my hands up to worship it’s grace. When I pray, when I go to church, all grace. Because I still don’t understand it, I still don’t understand what all that love is like, why it’s being poured out on a wretch like me. But if my father still loves me, if after everything he still said, “You are my daughter”, then how much more my heavenly Father? So I’m still here, I still try, and thank you Lord, by His grace, it gets easier.