LIFE SCRIPTS

Martin wakes up and staggers towards the nearby shop.

He can barely support himself.

His head seems to weigh a tonne while his body is famished and dehydrated.

‘Wodee!’, he retorts as he gestures to the shop keeper to get him a bottle of water in Sheng: a street patois used often among the urban low class.

He takes generous gulps as he finds his way to the ‘base’…the place where he ‘hides’ with his comrades while getting a fix of their favourite herb…Muguka.

Muguka are just a collection of leaves from Khat plants used as a low cost stimulant for those not able to afford the more expensive type.

This is their routine day by day…week after week…month after month…year after year.

After finishing his O’ levels, Marto (as the boys in the hood fondly know him) couldn’t make it to college because he came from a broken family.

Though he aspired to study pharmacy, the reality on the ground pulled him towards a different direction.

His own father had fallen prey to alcohol and couldn’t sustain a job…his mother, though hardworking couldn’t afford to put food on the table for 6 children let alone educate him.

She ran a small green grocery.

So being the eldest, Marto was supposed to fend not only for himself but for his younger siblings.

Not always was he like this.

On realizing he couldn’t make it to college, he secured some funds from some of his contacts to start a second hand clothing business which wasn’t sustainable because of competition from the ‘big players’.

So he woke up, dusted himself and started servicing and selling broken down electronics…a partnership he started with one of his childhood friends.

However cheap, Chinese imports drove their business to the ground.

Several cycles of trial and error led him to believe only in one thing…that the nation we live in belongs to those who have or are connected to those who have three things…influence, power and money.

He’d grown up seeing only less than a handful of his neighbours land jobs…meagre jobs for that matter.

For the most part, most of them (however educated) were unemployed.

It pained him to see his younger siblings not finishing school…

It pained him to see his mother struggle helplessly with a terminal illness…

It pained him to see himself in such a helpless position.

Perhaps all he needed was to stimulate himself to cloud nine…way above reality in order to avoid all that pain around him.

That’s how he found himself in the ‘den’ day and night…

Now he’s so hooked to khat, that above it, he seeks for a stronger stimulant…stronger drugs.

Occasionally they’re ‘busted’ by the police and thrown into the cells…

Occasionally, they convert into street gangs waylaying people for their belongings to afford the next fix.

He walks the streets seeing double because his blood is so used to him being ‘high’.

To the rest of the society, he’s a persona non grata…

A reject who is a threat to peace and tranquility of the middle class…

To him (and his boys), the society has played a cruel trick on them…

He sees others gaining from what they’ve not worked for…

Reaping where they’ve not sown…

Stealing wantonly from public coffers yet nothing happens to them…

Yet when they ‘steal’ in order not to sleep hungry, they’re treated as vermin.

Worse still, if they dare raise their voices to demand their rights, the police ‘force’ is sent to ‘quell’ the ‘violence’.

So forceful is the police’s approach that people lose lives.

The irony with Kenya is that it has become a nation so hostile to the poor yet over 60% of it’s population is poor…

It’s a nation that tolerates grand theft yet brutally hangs the pickpocket to dry…

It’s a nation that celebrates heroes who’ve been nurtured from crime proceeds yet frowns upon the true heroes who fend for themselves and family through the sweat of their brow.

Small wonder that Marto just needs to maintain his fix…

Small wonder that he continues wallowing in his small world…among the ‘boys’ who have lost touch with reality…

Probably he needs time out of reality because reality is not ready for him.

#seeingdouble

Originally posted on https://cleannovate.home.blog