People
People
The Big Man’s Error
There are people who smell like money. People whose price of cologne alone could feed a small village for two days straight. These people have a spring to their step because they know for a fact that their families will never have to worry financially for generations that don’t even have names yet. People who breathe money. They sit and their bank accounts talk for them. They don’t have to do anything, say anything, because they are loaded beyond one’s own imagination. They can hire people to wipe their butts if they so wish. These are also people you never …
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The Gates
At 7, you were probably still riding your bike with the training wheels on. At 7 you hold a grudge for 4 minutes and forget about it. You have a favorite princess dress that you will wear any chance people are going out and at 7, a football was your best friend. At age 7, Julian Wagumba was returned to the gates of Nairobi’s New Life Children Center. He doesn’t remember much about this specific time other than the cologne of his then ex-foster father, a smell that follows him till today. He remembers a call from a social worker …
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David’s Demons
After their wedding, David’s new father-in-law paid for his Diploma in Management. He left his wife just 2 days into their new lives knowing it would all be worth it. He studied the same way he won her heart. For her. For his angel. He did odd jobs to support himself in school and sent money back home to Sylvia. It is what a man would do, and David was a real man. He said he never looked at any other women when I asked. Sylvia is his soulmate. She saved all the envelops that came to her from Nairobi …
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David’s Angel
Somewhere between the confines of the blue mesh and the white walls of Mathare was where Dave Kalalei Junior learnt to accept his fate. Going in, he had sworn to never let the crazy people doctors anywhere near his head. He was alright. He was of perfect health. In fact, his father was the one who should have walked through those gates. His father, David Kalalei Sr is one tough cookie. He was raised in Baringo county, where I assume he literally had to cross rivers, fight crocodiles and brave storms just to get to school. He actually raised himself..I …
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Modern Day Musketeers
Don’t you just hate exams? It’s like the teachers don’t believe in themselves, right? There thinking testing us is the only way to validate themselves. Constantly not believing in us and that we really went to class and concentrated the whole time. Minus the few times we looked into our phones or just didn’t go to the class, because there are some of those classes that we just have to purposely miss. Every semester they give us exams to test us, rather than teaching us those exact things that they test for. Like 10 questions are the scale to know …
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Jacked Up Stranger: The Test
Growing up without the guts to punch people who piss you off in the face is cowardly, yes, but also kind of interesting. I know because I lived it. Barely being able to tell people who did you wrong that they had. What I did instead is probably the most cowardly thing you have ever heard of. I would write. Write down what they did to make my chest burn. I would sit down and describe, in gruesome detail, what they made me feel. Pages filled with words describing how I felt when I was facing adolescence filled my notebooks. …
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Delusions of Grandeur
Isn’t social media a crazy place? A mess of the wealthy and the wealthy wanna-bes, the high schoolers and the campus-ers, the odis and the classy all mixed together in one gigantic cauldron. Everyone has forgotten those terrible blurry selfies with the ridiculous poses and just as bad captions. I recall a time when we identified our accounts on Facebook (because Facebook was all we had) by our profile pictures. “Nilikutumia friend request na hukuaccept,” a classmate would say 2 weeks into a new term. “Who? Me? No you didn’t. What account did you send it to?” “Si wewe ndiyo …
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