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| cartoon by Ron Leishman |
Dear Son,
Son, whenever I look at myself in the mirror and notice these ever growing beards which have put me in a constant state of ever shaving, I feel a very frustrated man. From the boiling temperatures of Nairobi living which sent me to the village to hibernate till things go down from boiling point characterized by the ever rising prices of unga,it is like circumstances have conspired with misfortunes to make living such a hell for not just me but so many others of my kind. No job, no money, no food; all around is growing emptiness that increasingly has become the nightmare that stalks our sleep we hardly close our eyes to catch some sleep.
However, nothing can beat the good old days when we grew in the elegant neighbourhood of Sega town. We paced the streets of the town full of life, dreams and illusions; swimming in the beauty of the youth. Girls were beautiful and were the very extravagant jewels with which we adorned our little town. We fell in love and ate the offerings of young innocent fellowships of the hearts that glowed with young love that were never publicly proclaimed nor ever known to those we loved since shyness made us take the oath of silence. I sat and waited to tell this young beautiful girl that she was the one Cinderella stalking my dreams but never got to doing that. Our town was a town of man-eat-woman society and all the pretty girls were a preserve of the few obvious grown up young men who were able to buy cheap gifts for these young girls who were too innocent to know the prices of those gifts and the folly of the hearts that offered them. As the girls grew up, they were spotted and their names added on the waiting list.We young boys were accursed lot, sidelined by circumstances as we saw our girls taken away yet we were so helpless to do anything.
These girls were wasted and dumped to us either pregnant or with HIV/AIDS and they never went back to school. Their innocence was taken away and left empty shells. Today I see them walking around shriveled and with dreamy eyes looking at things in the distance that I never see. What if I would have been allowed to profess my love? Would it have made a difference?
Son, in this era of increased reversed gender based violence with women increasingly pounding men out their masculine senses,all men need to watch out each others' backs.I got really scared recently when this neighbour got into the habit of wailing through the night as if his wife was killing him. When we could not take it, we broke the silence to find out what was going on only to find out that the man was enjoying his conjugal rights in the tiny one-roomed peasant house with children in it! I wondered where, in this era when life in the neighbourhood had been reduced into a mere shadow due to hard living, he got his strength from. His act was unheard of.
I am wishing that the Church Of God’s Last Appeal I once saw somewhere while grazing away from home should be built in my neighbourhood to bring moral decency back to its feet to save our young girls and pray that the Kenyan shilling grows stronger and that the escalating prices of unga and cooking oil slump down with immediate effect.
Otherwise, son, these men who destroyed our prospects of love and wasted our young girls will forever wait for judgment in my heart. It would have been that those are the days we would remember now and boast of as life today becomes more of an empty scratching and scavenging. But in the face of all that weighs on us, I still live hoping that tomorrow you will be a man of substance that world would rely on. I am off to find unga.
See you next time.
See you next time.
Yours
Sleep-Walking-Buddy
Good-Loving-Daddy-For-Life
Charl Chotto
