Creative writing

Writing is now my new hobby(cheers! whistles!). I have finally found a useful and inexpensive way to entertain myself during non-working hours. Yes, writing IS entertaining. Taxing on the brain too. All I need is to carry around a good biro and an A4 exercise book. Lovely!

Below I have posted the first product of my hobby. This one was born in a cafeteria downtown on Moi Ave. Enjoy.

Anti-Citizen City
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There's something wrong with Nairobi. Having lived here most of my life I would know. It pains me to see things this way so I'm taking pains to explain.

Cities continue to exist primarily due to the economic activity that takes place in them. Most companies worth their salt have at least one branch and/or headquarters in them. With the high concentration of people living and walking around it makes sense if you are selling merchandise or services to have a presence.

This said, I am appalled at the measures taken to ensure a thriving business environment. For starters there are fewer and fewer places where one can relax without spending money. The metal railings outside some buildings that were once sat on by tired pedestrians taking a breather are now covered in spikes. The message portrayed being "We have no room for idle bottoms here!" Just in case your backside is sturdier than most, there is a stone-faced askari hovering nearby to urge you to take your 'diab' and place it elsewhere.

"But there's Uhuru Park..." you say. True, and its pretty well spruced up nowadays by the way, but suppose you are exhausted on the opposite end of the CBD (like Moi avenue), it surely makes no sense trudging all the way just to take a rest; you'd probably die en-route. Jeevanjee Gardens? Let's not even go there. Literally. Unless you enjoy listening to preaching done at a volume that should be outlawed.

What's worse about this whole affair is that the Nairobi City Council is in on the racket too. The recent and almost rabid upgrade of the city, though commendable, has it's dark spots. Consider those large green cement flowerpots that have been installed in various places. They aren't an eyesore; it's just that they have a really unfriendly sign on them : "DO NOT SIT ON FLOWER POT." Hmmph! With all the taxes we pay willingly or otherwise, you would think we have a right to sit on a public flowerpot now and then.

---I've edited out the last part of this article because it seemed disjointed. Not sure what I'll put in there but for now that's the end. >11-09-10

learning free

In further pursuit of freedom, I have ended up deep in literature about homeschooling/unschooling. Men such as John Holt, John Taylor Gatto and Ivan Illich have been my "enlighten-ers" in this. But my journey to educational freedom didn't start with them.

I encountered homeschooling several years ago when I discovered one of my college professors from the States, who was in Kenya for a year, didn't send his kids to school. That seemed odd for a prof who made his living from pedagogy. His kids seemed pretty smart and happy regardless. They also had lots of time to go walkabout on campus and socialise and that to me wasn't such a bad thing. Hmm.

Later, after campus...

My interest piqued when I was introduced to a Kenyan family that homeschooled. I met the daughter in that family and was completely blown away by her demeanor. She acted like a tiny grown up; such fluent and unabashed speech! (she was four at the time, btw.) If more of us had been brought up that way, who knows what we'd have achieved by now.

Needless to say, I am obsessed by natural, non-institutional methods of learning. One of the reasons being that my own formal education was miserable from somewhere in mid-primary all the way to Uni. A part of my high school I enjoyed because it was a slightly more liberal place than what I had encountered prior.

Right now I am reading excerpts from a book by John Holt, an education reformer from the sixties and seventies who decided that reforming schools wasn't the answer to creating better learning environments. Abolishing formal schools ALTOGETHER is the only remedy since they weren't in the first place created to be places where children could achieve their full potential in whatever they desired. Schools were invented to teach people their place, to grade and pigeon-hole them so as to make them easier to control. Encouraging the spread of school is the worst thing that we could do. Read the chilling quote below from "Instead of Education:Ways to Help People Do Things Better" by John Holt:

"A global schoolhouse would be a world, which we seem to be moving toward, in which one group of people would have the right through our entire lives to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require us to submit to various kinds of treatment, i.e. education, therapy, etc., until we did. A worse nightmare is hard to imagine."

Shiver me timbers.

My children (if I ever have any) shall be homeschooled, no contest.

routine

It's been two weeks or so at KLR and I am starting to get the hang of it. Work, that is. Whenever I sigh and settle down to do something 'I' want to do, someone raises their voice and it's "Mutindaaaa, please come. Something's wrong with my (take your pick) Internet Explorer/Mouse/Screen....". Those are the perks of my job. Getting summoned by all and sundry at the drop of a hat to solve any number of computer problems.

It's not always a bad thing, this having to solve end-user's minor problems. I get a chance to 'interview' all my 'clients' and in the process get told a lot of stuff which I normally wouldn't know. I just have to make sure that I don't turn the info into HOT gossip; it could land me in deep sewage. There's more I could say about this, but for the sake of national unity I'll shut my yap....until the coast is clear....

All in all, I'm enjoying myself. There are so many projects going on simultaneously and people are working feverishly (most of them at least) so there is rarely a dull moment here at The Council. That plus there are always 'freshers' I can bully; there seems to be a new one every week! If it continues this way, we'll have some people doing their work in the corridors or on the floor. Hm.

Sports day

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Due to severe protests from some 'quarters', the pics and vibe about this day have been censored. In the interests of national security and peace.

However let me just say that it was the bomb, I had a terrific time and would relive that day several times over (apart from the arm injury. It still aches a little...)

Yesss!

Yeeah! I finally got my letter of appointment for the job at the National Council for Law Reporting. What a relief! I have been waiting to join those guys for ages.

I started work on Monday and so far its been good, most folks there are friendly and so charged with a sense of duty, its intoxicating. What's even better is that I'm there part time so I can always rush out for a coupla hours to do my own side shows. The place is so near town that I walk either to or from on most days.

What I like most about this joint is that they are so psyched up about I.T. that they are willing to try virtually anything that will help the organisation to run better. And who better that ME to hire, who LOVES to experiment and try out new stuff?

The network is pretty serious, with a mixed environment; windows machines, macs and even a couple of linux boxes (one of which I installed, but do I say?) More to come for sure, especially the one that I'll be using. The wonders I'll do on that machine, you just wait!

More on this later. As for today, I'm helping some pals move office so its all about literally shifting an entire network complete with wireless internet from one location to another. I might be here all day....well, at least they're going to pay me :)

career move - and my picture!

How's that for a first pic? I have decided to come out of the closet and reveal myself. You couldn't really tell from my posts whether I was a he or a she, could you? That's me at my new but yet to be fully confirmed workplace. The National Council for Law Reporting. I'm in the I.T. department, assistant Sys Admin.

I can tell that I will truly be breathing free here; It's a Government based organization that is making great steps to embrace cutting edge I.T. and I will be right in the middle of it! HA! Finally an uninhibited environment where I can test and implement all my ideas, especially the Open Source ones. So far I have done two such projects at the same organization but as an outsider. Now after getting plugged into the system, the sky is the limit. Watch this space, super-guru in the making!

Back to my roots?

Back to the keyboard first. It's tough remaining faithful to a blog, especially when you have work to do and not too much time to spend online. I however will never say die; this blog is here to stay so you can count on that.

I am an African. How can you tell? Well, if you ever get to see my pictures then you'll notice I have an African nose, full and dark-ish African lips, though the rest of my skin is a bit on the lighter side. My elbows and knees are kinda dark too, come to think of it. No, I haven't bleached my skin, that's just the way I've always looked.

Enough about my physical features. So I'm African, but unless you heard me speak you could easily mistake me for someone from......anywhere really. Especially Europe or the States. Partly because of my skin colour but also because of how I dress. Typical western garb. When I'm feeling corporate then I wear a collared cotton shirt, short sleeved with dark cotton trousers and of course black leather shoes. If I'm in a casual mood, then its jeans and a tee shirt or corduroys and a tee shirt topped with my favourite (and only) leather jacket. How African is that?

What I'd really like is to come up with some unique garb that would identify me as something other than just A GUY. Even if its some hides and skins on top of or mingled with my current threads, I wouldn't mind. But its not as easy to do as I used to think. Ever since I was a kid, I don't recall ever even seeing anyone in the traditional gear of my people (the Akamba). Its only after my dad bought me a book that had pictures taken of my people in the early 20th century that I got a clue. We actually used to wear skins and walked barefoot less than a century ago. Men wore loincloths and perhaps some amulets and earrings of some sort; women dressed mostly the same with sometimes bigger loincloths. No tops were necessary it seems, but that was ok since we live in the tropics, plus everyone was that way so it wasn't pornographic.

Having been brought up overdressed as I have it would literally make me sick if I threw off my regular clothes and resorted to wearing skins daily. It would also be the quickest way to get my friends carting me off to Mathari mental hospital without a second thought. My poor feet would blister in a day if I dared walk the distances I do while barefoot. So now what?

My South African brothers and sisters seem to have a better idea. Watching their music videos is quite revealing about them. They too are victims of westernization but because of their seclusion during the apartheid days they have maintained a lot of their original culture(s). Most musicians sing or rap in isiZulu, isiSotho, Xhosa etc. mingled with some English words and the theme of some of their better music is for the youth not to forget their culture. View the youtube video at the top left of page for a sample; it's by Bongo Maffin, a group I'm really digging right now because of that particular song. It has the three group members getting rid of their western clothes and ending up dressed in their stunning traditionals then standing in a museum for guys to come view. (Hmm. Museum....why there? Irony?)

the shift

I have moved. Previously on mutindaniskeelo.zoomshare.com. Blogger is WAY better than zoomshare; so many ways to edit my page.

This is currently under construction; see me in a week or so.