THE WEEK THAT WAS

So you wake up in the morning. No, it’s not morning yet. You wake up at 5 am. This is not the time you usually wake up and you are not awake by any natural process – though you really need to pee you could have ignored that for a few more hours. You are woken up by music, not the good type of music. The shouting-neighbour-praising-the-lord-5am-in-the-morning type of music

Now, this neighbor of mine does this everyday since I started this holiday. I even got used to it and could sleep through it most days. Sometimes when he is away I would wake up some minutes after five maybe to adjust to the strange environment then I would go back to sleep. Today however, he is not alone; they have visitors at their church that came for a Week of Power crusade. My good born again neighbor has accommodated three of them and today they are a choir of groaning voices. How do you sleep at three in the morning because of a revival and make to wake up at five to praise?

I use my ear phones to plug my ears, I cover my head with the pillow then pull the blanket over my head – its really hot around here, even at 5 am and soon I start sweating. The voices, like a persistent tracker, still seek out my eardrums and torment them. So I sit up look at where I believe the heavens are and ask the great one above ‘is this really, really necessary?’

I wait for a few seconds, and then I grab my phone. Am an early morning and late night face-booker, am not an addict, am not. Just because it’s the last thing I do before I go to sleep and the first thing I check out in the morning doesn’t mean I am an addict. It doesn’t. Facebook is boring this early so I check out twitter, these people don’t sleep.

There is this hot chick I follow who wakes up in the morning and tweets ‘ God send his only Son to earth to deliver us from our sins, his only son, and yet we are all Gods children. So clearly we are all a bunch little of girls’. Hahaha that was funny
This guy from BBC Africa is talking about a Tanzanian court that slaps a life sentence to this former Rwandan prime minister and her son. From the way he talks about her condition I imagine the sentence went like this ‘this court.......................................... and therefore sentences you to two months in prison by which time you will certainly be dead, otherwise the court orders that you remain in jail until such time as you will be pronounced dead’
Jokes aside, this international trial took ten years for people who are directly involved in the crimes against humanity. Mrs. Nyiramasuhuko was found guilty of extermination, ordering killings and aiding rape. Her son led a militia and participated in all these heinous acts.

I couldn’t help but think about our own struggle with the ICC, how long it’s going to take and if Kenyans are going to get justice at last. I have written in this blog before that I believe the process was flawed, that there are people with more ‘responsibility’ as Prosecutor Ocampo calls it than people like Sang. However it would be a very big flop if the prosecutions would delay beyond 2012. Knowing Kenyans and looking at the current trends from opinion polls and rallies, I have this sickening feeling that power is going to land in the hands of the people who are on trial or who have been campaigning against the ICC all through.

The price of 2 kg packet of maize floor is retailed at 170 Kenyan shillings here; Sugar goes for 150 a kg. But that is not the kind of things we Kenyans hold ‘peaceful’ demonstrations for. You might think am a hater by now. But check the trends. Fuel prices go up, there are a few protests here and there, the government takes two shillings off the prices, there is an artificial shortage and now we are just thankful that at least there is fuel. Doesn’t matter how much it costs. Very clever

Back to food. I know the price of sugar because of a conversation I had with some farmer in the joint I take breakfast – I prefer buying tea instead of hustling for all the ingredients that make it then spent time converting and mixing them. The gentle farmer tells me that for the past one week, half a kilo of sugar has had a different price every day he goes to the shop to purchase it. He has resorted to joining me on my breakfast table. He thought it was a consolation until he was told the price of tea has also gone up. I advised him to grow sugarcane or keep bees as long term sugar problem solutions.

The poor farmer will not participate in peaceful demonstrations. He says it’s a waste of time. What will he eat while parading? He asks .However, I believe that if they decide to settle IDPs in the government land close to the village he can spare a week to parade in Nairobi, courtesy of a leader of course and some twisted organization. But for sugar or flour? He would rather hustle to feed himself than parade on the streets.

Now we are sure what Obama’s mission in Libya was. He had managed to convince the US population that the military intervention was to protect civilians against air attacks – those being attacked in southern Sudan are not very civilian. The mission was to unseat Gadaffi - of that we are clear - and control Libyan Oil – that is just me thinking aloud. Gadaffi has been too stubborn even before the war. Refusing to cooperate with western powers in many a occasions so it doesn’t really come as a surprise that after Iraq the next place the US go to protect ‘civilians’ is Libya.

On Sunday I got bored by that small radio I listen to. So I went out to the river to read this supposedly mystifying collection of stories that did not turn out to be that mystifying. I wanted to have an experience of the overrated feeling of tranquility enhanced by interaction with nature at its rawest. I sat on a big rock and dipped my feet in the river. The sound of singing birds and feeble branches defying the soft breeze that didn’t seem to go in any particular direction soothed my mood, behind me were trees and shrubs growing on a vertical cliff, there were plenty of rocks everywhere in the big space left by the el- Niño flooding. A few shrubs grew among the rocks. There was no sun

I read a story about this community that lived below a volcanic mountain. They grew fruits and vegetable but sometimes the volcano will erupt and destroy the trees and their homes. They believed that the eruption was caused by a king of the mountain that would get angry and make the lands vibrate. Every time the earthquake comes in preparation for the hot river that will flow from the top of the mountain, the people will go to their church, take flowers to Saint Antony and pray that he will persuade the king of the mountain to spare them. By some twisted luck, this worked enough times for the people to maintain their beliefs.

Whatever you believe this week, it doesn’t matter what science, logical reasoning or historical evidence has proved. Hold on to it. Believing worked for the people of the mountain, it can work for you too.