2011 is gone, dusted, finished............and not a moment to soon. It has been one of those years you wish never happened. It has been a year where my father in law passed away and my brother's father in law and brother in law passed on all in the space of a month and a half and all three of them to chronic diseases - cancer and pneumonia! A father to a dear friend also passed on after complications occasioned by kidney failure that has led him to undergo chemotherapy sessions every week over the past two and a half years.
The final nail on the coffin was three young lives snuffed out in an instant on the morning of the eve of New Year's Day 2012 in a grisly road accident along Mombasa Road. Three Kenyans home for the Christmas holidays and all based and living in the USA back home to visit and make merry with their family, friends and loved ones. I do not know any of the three personally but one of them, the only lady in the trio, is a sister to a friend therefore the tragedy is of one of our friends.
It was also a year when I was involved in a road accident that led to the death of a young pedestrian who decided to play chicken with me and my car a few minutes to 11 pm on a Saturday night...............and lost with his life. That incident so traumatized me that I had to undergo a series of counselling sessions that will remain etched with me forever and never take the power of counselling for granted ever again.
Without even factoring in all the other tragedies that have befallen thousands of other families across the country called Kenya, all these tragedies have made me come to the realization that life is very transient and we all cling on precariously hoping against hope that one will make it to the next day in one piece. It is a prayer of hope that the next drunk driver will not run you down, or that you will not be present when the next policeman runs amok with his semi automatic rifle spewing death through the shower of the bullets it unleashes, or that petrol pipeline that runs silently underground as it pumps thousand of litres of its deadly cargo to hungry vehicles across the country will not ignite in a conflagration of hot, choking burning fumes that will reduce you to a mass of twisted.........what!
It is also the hope that the next matatu that you board will not have a mad matatu driver at the wheel and in a hurry to pick up another commuter so that he can make a few extra bob and will not overtake at a blind corner into the path of a lumbering behemoth of a truck and sudden jarring painful death. It is also the prayer of the wife whose husband accustomed to his daily drink of 'kill me quick' should not catch up with the variety that will reduce him to a slobbering, blithering idiot and dispatch him to his maker quicker than you can say 'Texian Tornado". Death from the misadventures of buying property in someone else's space complete with a fake title deed is also a distinct possibility either from the heart attack of seeing a bulldozer destroy your millions in investments or the debris squashing you into pulp as the bulldozers continue with their macabre dance as you sleep on forever.
But that year is behind up now and I hope that the next 366 days of 2012 will present you with boundless opportunities to thrive even as you pray to live another day.
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