What If

I've always marveled at a marathoner's staying power. Have you ever watched those Olympics marathoners? I watch them, especially the Kenyans and Ethiopians, how they start off on an easy trot, as if on a romantic jog in the park, their feet going, step-lift-jump, step-lift-jump, carrying a light body-frame round and round the tracks, overlapping those who cannot keep up, without ever changing rhythm, not a drop of sweat on their brow it seems. And just before they get to the finish line, they lurch forward with a sudden surge of power on their heels. Just like that, they win, and walk off the tracks as if they just came from visiting the next-door neighbor.

It's amazing, really is. An astonishing work of art. Seems so easy, until you take a pause and think about what got the marathoner to winning the race. Years of practice, defeat, frustration, getting up from a fall, and running again and again. It all started with the question, what if? A young lady sitting by the fireside with a bowl of porridge, tired of the humdrum in her life, knowing there must be more to existence, and while looking intensely at the burning embers, she feels a certain itch in her feet and goes, what if I ran? That simple what-if becomes the Olympic triumph of a villager.

You've probably answered to a certain itch yourself. What if... A dream you got to work on, daring to tell the world about it and got an audience to watch you as you built it. Then things didn't go too right. You ran out of bricks, got bruised building it, started slinking back into the lonely darkness of your struggles to face the frustrations, fear, defeat, rejection, and you decided to readjust the size of your dream, cut it in half so you can survive. Those who saw it thought it excellent, gave you applause, awarded you, but it was a far cry from what your mind had conceived, a mere drop of water where you had promised a full calabash. You still need to get back on track and finish it. It's never a one-shot deal.

At JKIA. After 4 months of a what-if, getting back to rebuilding

Life on earth is very short. In the blink of an eye, we're come and gone. We depart from this world in mid-step, mid-sentence, half-way through our marathons. No one ever says, “I have finished life, I'm ready to depart now.” We usually just keep on moving from one task to the other, hoping to live long enough to experience something spectacular. Departure is a certainty, and life as we know it is totally meaningless unless we imbue it with meaning. Let your slice of life on earth not run out before you give your what-if a shot. It's spectacular really, just daring to make a what-if become what-is.

Einstein asked, what if I moved at the speed of light and saw the unseen? Mother Teresa asked, what if I touched the untouchables and defied a religion? Gandhi asked, what if I became non-violent against an empire's army? Maathai asked, what if I spoke for the trees and stood up to brutish men? Jesus asked, what if I became the son of God and dined with outcasts? You can expand the list. They, ordinary people with feet of clay just like you and me, changed the world spectacularly. They had a marathoner's staying power and did not care when their lives would end.

What if I told a story true and gathered a nation to listen to it?

Sere

About Nerea's Baby

Flashback, 2-3 months ago. I'm in a matatu in Nairobi, and a beautiful song is blaring out through the speakers. The lyrics are quite a story. Guy is begging his ex-girlfriend, Neria, I think is her name- not to abort his child, because when God makes a child, he brings its plate with it. I burst out laughing, passengers think I'm schizo for sure. You know that's hogwash. No, love is not an issue; there's plenty of that. But you find the plate yourself to feed that child- work, beg, borrow, steal or hope “the village” raises it. Then if you're a person of faith, you thank God for doing it.

Has any country ever prospered without addressing its population issues? I think not. China did with its brutal one-child policy; European countries did, to the extent that some feel they now have an underpopulation problem; the US did, with its historical controversies still raging, re- Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. Good or bad, they connected a child and its plate of food to policy.

The only mention of Africa in Obama's SOTU address was with regard to America feeding Africans, fighting AIDS, and eliminating Malaria. Stay with me; I'll post on good stories from Africa later- a thousand pages of it. Back to population and the economy. Kenyans like to say we don't have an overpopulation issue, because, look at how much land is still unoccupied. Overpopulation is not about square-foot per person, more like plate per person.

So imaginary Neria's baby will add to Kenya's population explosion, which no one is addressing as a matter of policy. I don't want her to abort it either, but that's a long debate for another day. Tackling population explosion will always be a sensitive issue, deeply personal, none-of-your-business stuff. But there's no plate of food that automatically drops from heaven with the birth of a child. You want to talk about the number of abandoned children in Kenya alone? Visit any odd police station in Nairobi and take a look at that massive poster displaying countless faces of abandoned children, with the caption- have you seen their parents? Abandoned, not stolen. Their plate of food may well be coming from America. Darn it, I await the day a sitting US President will mention Africa, prosperity, trade partner, all in the same sentence. Not food-plates and AIDS and Malaria.

I found that song! Nerea, by Sauti Sol. Enjoy it.

About Nerea's Baby: Part II

So it was brought to my attention that those lyrics to that beautiful song, Nerea, say that if God brings a child, he brings it in his own time. I checked them out. The Swahili lyrics provide both aural and linguistic ambiguity with the words “analeta saa ni yake”, easily heard as “analeta sahani yake”, because that's what makes sense to the mind. It's rather meaningless from standard Swahili point of view. Perhaps it's an attempt at poetic arrangement, or it's Sheng. Art being art, it makes room for both the composer's intended meaning and the consumer's interpretation or thematic deconstruction. Music is always first subject to aural interpretation, mis- or re-interpretation.

So, I'm thinking about this imaginary Nerea's unborn child again, and why its father wants it to escape an abortion. His reasoning, it could become the next Lupita, the next Obama... a long list of greats. Ok fine. Hey look,  I'm not for ending a life in gestation either, with exceptions. But it could become a serial killer too, or an abandoned baby.

That image of a massive poster with faces of abandoned children at Ruaraka Police Station, it's hard to get over it. I had enough time to stand there and peer into the faces of all those children ranging from 3 months to fifteen years. They represented only but a few of thousands of mothers across Kenya who abandon unwanted babies. Kenya went through an intense abortion debate during its Constitutional reform period. This debate should now extend to the formulation of policy and legislation on unwanted children- which includes the exploding number of street children.

So many times (I find myself addressing Kenyans here), we surrender our responsibility to think and when we make severe mistakes like having thousands of Nerea's babies ending up on an abandoned children's poster, we get all spiritual- God will provide a mother, a loving family, today's food, school fees, etc. Yeah, ask that 15 year-old boy still waiting on God's timing, having been abandoned at birth. Kenya's God must have one heck of a cynical sense of humor if we keep making him responsible for the birth, abandonment and street-raising of unwanted children.

So what's the solution? I said before, it's not easy addressing population issues. Effective national solutions will get emotional, ugly, even brutal. Every time I visit Kenya, usually after a year or two, I'm overwhelmed by the additional swarm of people in the cities and in rural Kenya. You have to be away to notice it. If we fail to do anything, nature acts. I remember in high school we learnt about the Malthusian theory in a Geography class. When a population overwhelms available resources, disasters (man-made or natural) will create an extermination factor and resolve the situation.

Valid theory or not, we have to do right by a generation before we conceive it, especially when we have the power of wiser choices, and the better mind to instruct or legislate. Aren't we tired of seeing the littering of cities and townships with children we treat like garbage. It's not God's timing that conceives them; it's ours.

Sere