Westlands Rd in the Nairobi’s conurbation is fast becoming New York’s 5th Ave. New money. GTC, JW Marriott, tall and sleek apartment buildings coming up on both sides of the street. Everywhere you look– Kilimani, Upper Hill, Ngara… the smell of opulence and its skyward rising is jostling for space with human traffic in a…
There’s a kind of strange poverty in a place billed as the world’s wealthiest democracy, where mass shootings are so easy and frequent. It’s the kind of poverty that runs a cold chill in the mind, even when goodness and opportunity is common, and running into human kindness everyday is heartfelt. It is not a…
There’s a story about why brides carry flowers, a culture carried on from the tribes of Europe, I believe, and transferred to us through the collision of cultures. The story goes that the scarcity of water caused the poor to go many days without washing, and that a bride’s flowers were to mask the whiff…
If I were standing on the map of my life time today, I would be standing smack dab on the equator where exactly half my life was lived in one country, and the other half was lived in another. I arrived in this country precisely half my life ago on this day. I’m still here…
Just before the year’s end, I was on the phone with my father wishing him a happy 85th birthday. Somewhere between how-are-you and have-the-rains-come, he went into story mode- A tale is told of the man Adam- dad said. He was given land as a gift by his maker. It was fertile land, capable of…