STORIES FROM MY HEART

Lately, I have become obsessed with the oncoming elections, which could happen between August and December next year.(2012) It could be because during the last elections we were stuck at my mothers house in Kitale as i had traveled with one of my closest friends called Wairimu, and there was no way we could go towards Eldoret as her Kikuyu community was beng targeted. My daughter is also called Wambui. That complicated things, and nearing the next elections takes me back to 2007. I'm I worried? Yes. Because I fear that we may, as a voting population not learned the lesson. We still have displaced people living in camps, and some living across the border in Uganda, in search for the peace that our country failed to provide them. There are those that have nothing to loose, they may have lost it all anyway in 2007. There are those that really do not care, they may fly them and their children to another country for the duration of the elections. Then there are those ordinary ...

This past weekend was a quiet one for me. I had a lot to think about and organise, exams to prepare for, and a book, highly recommended and owned by my friend Kirigo Ng'arua. Bite of the Mango. Bite of the mango is a true story about an 11 year old girl called Mariatu Kamara from Sierra Leone, who grew up in a normal village of about 200 people. Her story is paints a picture of life before the rebels struck and after. From the eyes of a child. Mariatu writes the book in simple child-like English and in her own voice. I sort of felt that she was right there narrating it to me. She grew up with her Aunt and Uncle because of her mother's drunken habits. She lived a happy simple life, typical of most African village life, where all the older people were respected as parents, and all the younger ones lived like siblings. They cooked, ate and slept as if they were one family. The girls got married when they were very young, about 13 years old, and many of them, despite h...