The road to riches is paved by those with evil intentions:

I am constantly bemused by the barrage of people wanting to interest me in one form of therapy or another, or in one cure all or another, or in one weight loss program or another, or one magic portion bullet or another to fight a variety of conditions from obesity, to AIDS, to TB, to Cholera, to being poor and to guarantee future riches.

This bemusement also extends to those intending to sell to me pieces of glass orbs that supposedly purify and deionize water, to necklaces that you wear to ward off bad karma, to foot baths that rid the body of toxins to gadgets with beams that you direct at certain parts of your body for instant healing. Those selling all sorts of poultices, herbal creams, mineral and vitamin supplements, ointments and balms are also in their hundreds every one proclaiming that their product is better than the next or has health benefits unheard of before and can be yours for the low, low price of Kshs. 50,000.00, Kshs. 100,000.00 or such other large amounts of money. The pricing is the key because while what you purchase is never intrinsically worth what you pay for it, the pricing ensures that only those with that kind of money can afford it thus giving the whole show some semblance of exclusivity.

But call me a skeptic or whatever else you wish to call me, but all that is balderdash, hogwash and a load of bull and is most likely just some get rich quick scheme like that hoax hatched some years ago by a company based in the UK that manufactured a gadget that they claimed could detect, explosives, guns and other contraband items from a great distance.

Now for a fair warning. For those who feel slighted by the direction of this blog article, stop reading NOW because it is likely that some of my comments will hit below the belt. If you do choose to continue reading it is with the tacit acceptance that you will not hold me accountable for any ill feelings you may harbor against me now or in the future so you continue at your own risk.

Many governments have over the years been convinced to buy that useless detection gadget for use by their police and military forces while there is no conclusive evidence that it even does what it is claimed to do. Our very own Kenya Police purchased these expensive devices and have defended their effectiveness over the years perhaps to avoid looking foolish in the eyes of the tax paying public. The gadget was described as "a useless quack device which cannot perform any other function than separating naive persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud”………which would pretty much be my definition of many of these devices and gadgets said to be magical cures to a host of ailments by directing a ray here, a beaded necklace here and a glass orb there and so on.

But the story doesn’t end there because these merchants and masters of chicanery having sold you some worthless but expensive piece of junk then encourage you to establish a down line of other people willing to purchase the product or the benefits of the product where you stand to earn a commission on the sale thereby recovering your initial investment.

These multilevel scams have invaded churches, clubs, colleges, homes and offices with people actively holding meetings and selling junk to others naive enough to be separated from their money with the initiators of the scam laughing all the way to the bank while spinning fantastic stories of sudden great wealth and access to all the good things that money can buy once your down line is 5 or 10 strong only for the game to reach its logical conclusion and collapse on itself when the saturation point and life cycle of the scam reaches often in a very short time.

As the cycle of the never ending quest for instant riches continues the next day as yet another charlatan opens up shop with another fantastic story to tell of a magical gadget that is guaranteed to put money in your pocket just going to prove how fickle and shallow minded the human mind real is. The cacophony surrounding this phenomenon would see our country hurtling towards becoming a very wealthy country within the next 10 years if only half the energy in the multilevel business was directed toward more meaningful pursuits.

So you have been warned, the road to riches is paved with the evil intentions of the crafty and fed by the insatiable greed of the naïve and at the end of the day, only one will make his money..............the crafty !! Ask the government of Kenya.

What happened to the English language?

Mrs. Jill Davies was my English teacher in Form One and for most of my high school years. She was a quintessential English school ma’am, insisting on being addressed in correct English and with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed in the essays that you handed over to her. English under her tutelage was fascinating because she had the clipped British accent that was so enthralling to the young boys that we were.

Those of us who had completed our primary level education in Nairobi or any of the other large towns in Kenya or at any of the few private primary schools back then were lucky in that our English was by and large quite refined. It was quite another story for those who had attended primary school in the more rural areas tongues heavy with the dialect of the part of Kenya they came from and English as a second language taught only in classrooms and with no real reason to put what you were taught into regular practice.

Jill Davies’s accent was to these guys (and with all due respect to anyone who was similarly afflicted) a real challenge to keep up with and many would stare mesmerized at Mrs. Davies as she prattled along, not understanding a word she said but nodding their heads whenever those who could make out what she was saying did so, and then being caught off guard as she would fire off a question directed at one of the head nodding boys who would then nod back to her unable to comprehend that a question was being directed at him. The fumbling, mumbling and obvious confusion would send the rest of the class into a paroxysm of laughter often resulting in someone being punished to kneel at a corner or a quick rap with a ruler on their knuckles.

The experience with Mrs. Davies however by and large ensured that we would all become fairly conversant in our spoken and written English once done with high school something that I am eternally grateful for today. I am able to construct a semblance of a sentence and string together several sentences to make a paragraph and I still enjoy reading and have a stock of novels both bound and online that I treasure immensely.

However, in this digital age of the internet, auto correct, online dictionaries, websites dedicated to helping people communicate better and social media I get quite disappointed at the quality of the written word. Hasty contractions and abbreviations, poor sentence construction, no due regard to capitalization of proper nouns, no pagination, apostrophes and exclamation marks taken for granted and used anyhowly!!!! Question marks where none is required? Silly speling errors……..the list is endless and Jill Davies would be beetroot red hopping mad if she discovered who was responsible for this massacre of the queen’s language.

Truly the language of English has been stretched, pulled, pulverized and convoluted so badly over the years that in the process we have been reduced to being poor communicators both in our personal and business lives content with struggling to read incomprehensible gibberish, shortened for convenience sake and to save a few shillings on an SMS and in a combination of English, Swahili, sheng and our mother tongue. It’s no wonder that the comic relief provided by the poor English speaker is one of the most hilarious things one is likely to encounter anywhere in Kenya today including in our hallowed precincts of Parliament and in positions of responsibility and power!!

I do not claim to be the best in this English thing or anything else but do take the trouble to check what you have typed before hitting that send, print or share button because now more than ever before spell prompt and predictive text has also added new unseen and hidden dangers to the typing of a letter, email message or SMS because it predicts what you want to write and populates (or is it pollutes) it even before you have had a chance to figure out what you wanted to say!!

NB - Read also my earlier blog on this link on a similar subject http://www.joe-wonderingallowed.blogspot.com/2012/01/and-you-wonder-why-they-speak-funny.html

Extinct animals back to life?

I have just finished reading a novel entitled ’Sector C’ by Phoenix Sullivan. It is one among a collection of 7 novels that I recently purchased on Amazon.com at a ridiculous price of $0.99…..for all 7 novels!!

Being a voracious and avid reader of novels Amazon.com has proved to be a revelation to me and with a Kindle app that I downloaded on my tablet sometime back this has got to be the best thing that happened in the digitization of books.

But this is not about Amazon.com or the many books that I have purchased online at a fraction of what it would cost at a bookshop, but about ‘Sector C’ a novel unlike any that I have ever read since it is in a genre that I usually would not be interested in since it is set in the future (sci-fi), contains a hint of romance and on a subject matter that I have the least interest in generally - genetics! I guess when you buy a collection of books together like in this case for $0.99; you inevitably also purchase something you may not necessary have an interest in.

But of the novels that I have so far read in the 7, ‘Sector C’ is the most intriguing. It is a story set in the indeterminable future where a bioengineering company sets up a laboratory and facilities somewhere in rural USA where they have somehow managed to extract the DNA of long extinct wooly mammoths, sabre toothed tigers, short faced bears, wolves and other creatures that have been extinct for many hundreds of years and through a genetic process have been able to extract the cells of these creatures and then through in vitro fertilization have formed a zygote which they have then implanted into surrogate mother animals who have then delivered after full term pregnancies living mammoths, sabre toothed tigers, wolves etc that now roam in large enclosures within the company’s land. Fascinating stuff you will agree.

But to me that is not the exciting bit because in the process, they have also replicated a protein embedded in the genes and DNA of the animals being ‘reborn’ that was (in the novel) the probable cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs millions of years ago and this protein is now able to jump across species very quickly (unlike most viruses and bacteria that do not jump between species) and is now manifesting itself in cows, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats and humans infecting and killing all as there is no cure to this protein which is likened to ‘mad cow’ disease and the ‘avian flu’ that a few years ago wreaked havoc in the beef and poultry industry across the world.

The unfolding scenario where a state of emergency is declared in the affected states, a quarantine is imposed on travel to and from the affected places, people are urged to destroy all meat and poultry products and the National Guard is called out to keep the peace as well as to destroy and ensure the burial of all livestock, dogs, cats, rats, deer etc – millions and millions of animals - and the ensuing panic as people scramble to look out for their lives and those of their loved ones in this pandemic makes for a mesmerizing read!!

The interesting and scary thing to me, is this beyond the realms of possibility? Is it possible for extinct animals to be brought back to life through extracting their DNA and then through in vitro fertilization giving life to living breathing dinosaurs and other creatures? Would such a feat also give rise to possible revival of long dormant strains of diseases now awakened through the DNA of these long extinct creatures for which no known cure exists?

In September 2012 a specimen of a wooly mammoth baby was discovered perfectly preserved in the permafrost somewhere in the Siberian tundra. Scientists and paleontologists have heralded this as a breakthrough in their quest to discover the genetic make-up of the now extinct animals and possible clues as to how they became extinct amongst other things and then clone it into a living breathing animal ‘Jurassic Park’ style. With improved scientific methodologies and technologies available now this should be possible, given that Dolly the sheep cloned in 1996 lived a hale and hearty life as did many other different animals cloned in the last 50 years or so.

Shall I live to see a living breathing wooly mammoth, dinosaur or sabre toothed tiger in my lifetime? Possibly given the advances in science that I mention and the very real scenario painted in the novel “Sector C”.

Cloning has been successfully done many times with varying degrees of success so why not this time around with the wooly mammoth though fooling around with nature would not necessarily be a very wise thing to do!

I wonder if this was a mistake or intentional theft:

I was stuck behind a slow moving private garbage compactor truck recently along Mbagathi Way on its way to collect yet more garbage somewhere else. In the business end of the truck, which is all I could see from my vantage point directly behind it, there were three people lounging there among remnants of uncompacted garbage presumably the garbage carriers/loaders. If they had a uniform so as to identify them as being genuine employees of the garbage company it was not apparent since they all had differing attire two of them clearly possibly ‘chokoras’ filthy clothes, bedraggled shoes that had seen better days and no overalls, gumboots, gloves, face masks or any of the other safety equipment you would expect of people dealing in garbage collection.

As the truck passed the Forces Memorial Hospital still trundling along at a snails pace, one of the ‘chokoras’ sighted a handbag and a plastic ‘juala’ paper bag lying by the wall parallel to the road seemingly abandoned or thrown away earlier. On instruction one of them deftly jumped out of the slow moving truck and retrieved the items throwing them into the truck to his colleagues before also jumping in and then they began searching through the bags. It was only after moving several metres past that it dawned on me who the bags belonged to.

Two women were busy sweeping the road side identified as Nairobi City County workers by their yellow coats and the bags apparently belonged to them as was soon to become obvious. It was likely that they had been left neatly by the fence as they swept their allotted length of space to be retrieved when they had completed the day’s work. Women have a keen sense of something not being right, and it seemed to kick in because as soon as the truck passed them one of them looked up, possibly saw her shawl being extricated from her bag, looked back and did not see her possessions and promptly took off running after the truck now gathering speed as the traffic opened up. The ‘chokoras’ having noticed (or probably heard) the shouts from the women seemed to exchange some words among themselves before seeming to agree that they had made a mistake and promptly threw the ransacked handbag out of the still moving truck while still retaining the ‘juala’ which they proceeded to methodically pillage before similarly throwing it out of the truck.

The truck having now gained speed sped off towards the City Mortuary as the hapless women proceeded to retrieve their possessions from the roadside possibly minus any money and valuables that may have been inside the bags. I will never know what transpired or where the truck went as I veered off towards Ngummo Estate on my way to back to work. But was this an honest mistake or intentional theft?? Do normal people go about retrieving handbags and ‘jualas’ that they find along the way?

Sample this second incident that happened many years ago.

“Mum” was the office secretary and had earned the affectionate title since she was a mother figure to many of us. She lived somewhere in Ngara and walked to work every morning and back home in the evening. She however had a peculiar habit of putting her personal effects in a filthy ‘juala’ plastic paper bag on her walk to and from work which ‘juala’ she would then place next to her desk retrieving whatever she needed from it as necessary. Her explanation was that no one would accost her carrying a filthy, tired looking ‘juala’ which had little appeal as opposed to if she carried a handbag or purse however bedraggled it was, the unspoken reason being she had probably been mugged and her handbag or purse snatched from her forcibly sometime in her life. All the cleaners knew enough not to touch that ‘juala’ either from having been told off from her acerbic tongue or by common sense.

As fate would have it and without anyone’s prior knowledge, a new cleaner was assigned to Mum’s section on morning and as usual Mum showed up with her ‘juala’ and left it in her usual spot next to her desk and went off on her own errands. On her return, she couldn’t trace her beloved ‘juala’ where she had left it despite her frantic search everywhere and promptly panicked asking everyone whether they had seen it anywhere! No one had seen it as she got to the office long before most people and often even before the cleaners had begun their work.

So what next! The distraught woman was asking everyone and was clearly in a state of panic about her ‘juala’. It was at this point and in her panic that she let on that the ‘juala’ also contained her purse something unbeknown to any of us in the office, and having lost the ‘juala’ her purse was also gone!! This brought a renewed state of anxiety as she would now probably accuse one of us as having been the culprit until someone thought to ask the new cleaner when all was revealed.

Mum’s habit was to leave the ‘juala’ next to her desk and near her wastepaper bin. On his cleaning rounds, the new cleaner had naturally cleaned the area around the desk and as per instructions also emptied the waste paper bin into his giant trash sack. On noticing a dirty ‘juala’ next to the bin, he had assumed that someone had missed the bin altogether when trashing it and had added the ‘juala’ and its contents to his sack of trash and had disposed of everything. Mystery solved!!

But the challenge now was where was the handbag? At this point in time I do not recall if this story had a happy ending or not, probably not given that if the ending was positive I would still recall this fact but since I do not, it is likely that the purse was never retrieved. I do recall that she followed the garbage collection truck all the way to the garbage dump somewhere in the vicinity of Kijabe Street and despite eliciting the assistance of the ‘chokoras’ there was no sign of the ‘juala’ and its contents.

Suffice is to say that Mum was more careful with her next ‘juala’ which she would keep well hidden in her drawers when she was not around lest she loses it and its contents afresh. No one in the office could dare mention the incident in her presence as she clearly did not see anything funny, but it was the reason for many a stifled guffaw whenever she was seen stuffing her new ‘juala’ into her desk drawer.

The question is this,given the direction of the recent incident I witnessed and that I narrated earlier is it possible that the ‘chokoras’ could have helped themselves to the contents of Mum’s ‘juala’ and thrown the rest of the stuff away? Was the initial error by the cleaner in Mum’s case an honest mistake or something more sinister? Were the ‘chokoras’ in the incident involving the County cleaners innocent or was their intention dishonest?

The verdict is yours!!

Of freshly caught fish and nature at its best:

I went fishing recently on a weekend thanks to my brother who had invited all of us including my parents to a weekend stay at Mugumo House at Mweiga Farm in Nyeri. The fishing was at a dam in a neighboring coffee farm that is owned by his employer and where he is a senior management staff member.

The dam is stocked with Tilapia and occupies perhaps one acre or so. A trip around the dam at a natural walking pace takes maybe 15 minutes…..20 minutes tops! I was accompanied by my brothers and some of my brother’s children for this afternoon of fishing. Our fishing rods were rather rudimentary being a fishing line with a hook attached to the end and then tied to a bamboo rod. For the floatation a piece of slipper placed about a foot from the hook and our bait, those earthworms that are dug out and are found in any moist soil anywhere in the world and which you had to thread expertly head first (or ass first who knows) through the bend in the hook to make a tempting bait for the fish!

For those not aware, fishing is one of those activities that requires copious amounts of patience and on this afternoon unlike an earlier trip to the same dam 9 months prior, the fish were not biting. One by one my nephews and brothers who had enthusiastically caught many fish the previous visit, lost interest and wandered off and it was left to me to stoically soldier on the prospects of returning home with no fish too terrible to comprehend promises of plenty of fish for those waiting at Mugumo House looking as good as broken! As the afternoon wore on so did the tedium of walking up and down the banks of the dam tossing my rod into the water and looking for a place where the fish would bite. This was now getting embarrassing, three veterans (I and two farm workers) and not a single fish between us??

The tranquility and beauty of this dam and a cool calming breeze was however more than enough compensation for the disappointing fishing. The ducks lazily swimming on the water, the incessant hum of the cicadas and other creatures a sonorous background to my own thoughts weaved a tapestry of adventure and folklore. After all this place is adjacent to the Abedare National Park home to some very rare species of wildlife in Kenya and where a bitter war was waged against the colonial government in the 1950’s leading up to independence in 1963 fifty years ago. Is this how the dam had been all those years ago? What had changed in the intervening half century? Had any Mau Mau been fed from this dam and had it seen any action in those dark days?

It’s funny how ones thoughts causes them to lose focus on what is around them because I had been standing at one place lost in my reflections my line in the water when the bobbing piece of slipper indicated that there might be something at the end of my hook. A quick yank and voila, I had caught my first fish of the afternoon and the jinx was broken!! Now the action would start.

As the afternoon wore on the pile of freshly caught fish steadily grew in our bucket as the three of us continued to fish even as the number of worms reduced drastically for it seemed that the fish this afternoon were adept at nibbling on the bait without latching onto the hook. The final tally was a miserable 13 fish down from a record 45 fish nine months earlier but still enough for all of us to have a well-deserved meal of freshly caught and grilled fish for dinner that evening.

After dinner it was time to play some family games involving all the children, parents and grandparents. It was interesting to watch the children get the better of their parents and grandparents, a natural reaction given that they are in the digital age and the information age. It was definitely time well spent with family and bonding came easily despite the scarcity of fish at the end of our line in a beautiful setting overlooking the Abedare Mountains on one side and Mount Kenya Forest on the other.

We were truly in God’s playground that afternoon and even if I had not caught any fish, it was still time well spent.

Is it me or are our brother and sisters in ‘pwani’ a fascinating lot!

While on leave I had the opportunity to go on a short holiday to Mombasa with my family for some rest and relaxation but also to attend a wedding. For me the best way to travel to the Coast is to drive down so that you get the freedom of having your own set of wheels to see the sights and sounds along the way as well as to commute at the Coast. Admittedly, the drive down can be rather stressful given the large volume of long distance trucks and trailers on the road as they lumber and crawl across East Africa delivering their varied commodities that oil the economies of countries as far away as Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The numerous rest stops and weighbridge stations obviously don’t help particularly on heavy traffic days when delays to the truckers are inevitable leading to impatience and queue jumping which results in almighty gridlocks.

But I digress because a gridlock is what we found ourselves in at 8.30 pm as we completed the Miritini section of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway a few kilometers to Mombasa Island caused by a road crew obviously struggling to complete an allotted road section before they called it a night. Frenetic activity with the heavy machinery had led them to partially close off the road and traffic was now forced to use one section of the road at a time for east bound and west bound traffic alternatingly. Clearly frustration had been mounting among the drivers of the various vehicles this evening because once our side was opened up we were struck after barely 100 meters or so possibly due to an errant driver from the opposite side blocking us from moving. So there we were in a gridlock 30 cars deep unable to make head or tail of what was causing the tailback. Suddenly from out of the blue one of those reflective jacketed fellows carrying red and green flags began beckoning me to squeeze myself in through the smallest of spaces between two behemoths presumably guiding me towards freedom and a chance to unlock the gridlock no doubt caused by his poor management of the situation.

So born of the foolhardiness of the impatient and with the prospect of freeing myself from this entanglement before anyone else, I obeyed the animated instructions of this overzealous individual unaware that I was but a pawn in his dastardly plot! Inch by agonizing inch I maneuvered my way between the trucks only to find that once clear, I was confronted by a mess of impatient drivers in a long line of oncoming traffic angrily hooting at me. With a “haya mzee, sasa jipange!” (Now old man, sort yourself out!) he disappeared from sight the tailback in the section where he had extricated me from now miraculously moving.

What to do now? A steep slope on the left and traffic on the right and a mob of impatient, angry drivers facing me……..and a carload full of a laughing wife and children, clearly the joke was on me! Within a short time I was able to extricate myself marveling at the evil genius who had landed me squarely into the face of oncoming traffic and out foxed me in the process!!

Many years earlier I was caught up in similar mischief on another trip to Mombasa after arriving at the Mwembe Tayari bus stage at the ungodly hour of 5.00 am. Still too dark to trust going anywhere on foot (as many of us mistrusting Nairobians are wont to be) I stepped into a nearby restaurant with my luggage for an early breakfast. This is one of those restaurants which being located close to the main bus terminal in Mombasa is open 24 hours a day to cater to the hungry arriving and departing passengers to and from destinations across East Africa thus guaranteeing freshness and a fair price. The restaurant was not busy and hence the waiter quickly took my breakfast order and went off to have it prepared. The only other people in the restaurant were a sleepy cashier nodding off at his counter and a cleaner who was busy mopping the floor.

Anyone who has travelled on the night bus knows that the first thing you look for when you disembark is a loo for a welcome toilet break. Not wanting to disturb the cashier from his torpor, I approached the cleaner to ask him where the loo was. For a moment he went about his business ignoring me altogether before he retorted in rapid fire Kiswahili “Huoni mimi ni na kazi? Hiyo siyo kazi yangu. Nenda kamulize yule!” (Can’t you see I am busy? That is not my work. Go and ask that guy!) as he pointed at the still drowsy cashier with his mouth and resumed his mopping. Somewhat taken aback and unable to formulate a response quickly enough, I sheepishly went to the cashier as I noisily cleared my throat to wake him up which he gratefully did to enquire where the ablution facility was. Would you believe it, the door to the toilet happened to be just behind where the cleaner was mopping?

A friend of mine also narrated to me a story of how on a visit to Mombasa’s Mama Ngina Drive one evening a few years ago he stopped to buy madafu for his family from one of the numerous sellers that line up along that stretch at dusk. He intentionally chose a seller who appeared as if he was the most hard up so as to ensure his money would be well appreciated. As he chose his coconuts and waited for them to be split open, he casually began chatting with the seller, after all the process was going to take a few minutes to complete. The madafu seller was obviously reluctant to talk more so as he realized my friend was obviously not from Mombasa due to his Kiswahili accent, but he had little choice given that my friend had probably uplifted his sales that evening substantially. They made casual chit chat and then my friend asked him the question of how much money he had made selling his coconuts, to which after a short silence he replied “ Milioni si kitu” (“A million is nothing”). My friend almost died of laughter as he remembered the look of complete seriousness on the madafu sellers face as he proclaimed that he was a rich man!

So while at the coast expect anything from our ‘pwani’ brothers and sisters and don’t take it to heart! It seems that they have this uncanny ability to recognize a person from ‘bara’ from miles away and want to make a complete fool of them.

You may be wondering why my blog posts have petered out!

I have been on leave for the last three weeks. On leave from having to wake up at the crack of dawn to get to the office, on leave from an 8.00 am to 5.00 pm job, on leave to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to and on leave from writing my regular posts.

Leave is supposed to be a time to recoup, recover and recharge ones batteries but many are the times when one gets back to their daily routine from leave and still feel like they require a few extra days to recover! Hands up anyone who feels the same way…!!

I hope to soon get back into my regular routine of writing my blog articles when the chaos at work as I catch up with stuff subsides so for now hold that thought!!