Whipping up a smootie to beat Covid blues

I will tell you a story about how, not long ago, I locked eyes with a stranger, a man, and we proceeded to share a brief but intense and revealing moment.

I have started feeling like my new found skill of whipping up smoothies is making me feminine.

It started with me wanting to make a smoothie. I’m from the school of thought that a smoothie has to have a banana in it. Otherwise, why bother? I hear there is a small tribe of humans who hate bananas. I’m lucky I haven’t run into one.

I wanted to make a smoothie because my eating habits have been deteriorating sharply of late and we all know that you are what you eat, and going by that adage, I am a glutton. It doesn’t help that in this dying and jaded era of COVID, the fridge seems to follow me everywhere in the house like a house dog. Notably, I have recently greatly increased my intake of chapatis. I have taken to folding three chapatis at a go, which isn’t so bad if I was feeling remorseful after. And that’s dangerous, when you stop feeling guilty. When you stop giving a toss.

There was a night I was watching the final two episodes of Michael Jordan’s NBA Documentary, “Last Dance” and although I had eaten dinner two hours earlier, I impulsively put the kettle on and threw in half a chapati in the microwave to warm. I ate that and felt no guilt. After ten minutes, I started thinking about the half chapati I had returned to the fridge. I just felt like it was a bit pretentious and insincere to leave that half chapo uneaten. It’s not like it would cause diabetes, I thought to myself. After a long (64 seconds) sober debate I figured I wouldn’t concentrate on the final episode of that series with that chapo still in the fridge. And Jordan deserved better. So I warmed and ate that too.

That’s been happening a lot lately, chapatis just tempting me and me not resisting them. We are talking three or five chapatis a day. I can’t be left alone unsupervised in a room with a chapati. I don’t fear COVID, I fear what chapatis are turning me into; weak-willed and gluttonous. And it’s starting to show around my gut area.

So I started making smoothies to distract my body. To lessen the guilt. To fill a disturbing hole of inadequacy that only a chapo has always filled. I set on a path to be a better man, a momentous task faced with the temptations of chapos. And from making smoothies I made a discovery; that if I emerge with a skill from this COVID season, it’s my adeptness at making smoothies. I didn’t know I had it in me. The trick is to throw in a banana, whatever it is you are making. A banana is the elixir of smoothies. And good health. But a word of caution; don’t overdo it…to say, don’t go bananas. Just one or two bananas is fine. Then you can throw in other things; baby spinach, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, almond milk, pawpaw and maybe a mango. (I don’t particularly care for mangoes).

This material day I needed supplies.

I drove to Quick Mart, Kiserian. There is a reason why the first thing you see when you enter that store are bananas, of course over and above serendipity. A ripened, yellow banana exudes joy and warmth – a ripe avocado could never hold a candle to that. Or ripened pineapples. No matter how ripe a pineapple is, it will always feel like something that can prick you. Like a porcupine. You don’t want to make a smoothie from a porcupine now, do you? I don’t care how ripe it is.

This time – hanging at the entrance – were some very old overripe bananas with dark underbellies, like they were crawling under a tunnel. If bananas could get stretch marks, those bananas had a lot of them. I stood there and bowed my head somberly, like you would at a wake. Thankfully, there were some more bananas arranged below. I picked a beautiful bunch while acutely aware of how hard it must be to be a fruit. Think about it. Shoppers come and look you over, inspecting you to see if you are worth their time and money. You have no choice in this as a fruit. You are a slave in a market. To be a fruit you can’t afford to wear your emotions on your sleeve. And you can’t take it personally because your whole life is spent being chosen or discarded and being taken home even by people at the very bottom of the food chain; people who still wear briefs.

You have no hand in this process. The only thing you can be is the best fruit you can ever be. The rest you leave to the gods of nutrition. We shall never know how fruits that have not been chosen feel at the end of the day, when they have to be discarded, their whole lives ending up in a bin where, I’m sure, conversations about “purpose” must happen in earnest.

I also picked some baby spinach, a tender name to give a vegetable. But the thing with baby spinach is that they never grow up. While they weighed my fruits, I heard a low psst psst and looked up to see a pawpaw looking at me. I had forgotten to pick one so I went over, picked the pawpaw and whispered, “Don’t do that. This is not Koinange Street.” It wasn’t the best looking pawpaw; bruised in certain areas and looked like it had led a very rough childhood. A loveless pawpaw. Only reason I picked it was because it was proactive. Some fruits, especially the very good looking ones, normally just assume they will be picked because they look good. It’s shallow. But then most of us city dwellers are shallow.

Take oranges for instance. Oranges are the most deceptive of all fruits. They are always bright and in good spirits but often you get home and peel one only to discover how bitter it is inside, a bitterness that comes from deep-seated issues. So I’m always very careful with oranges, because what you see isn’t always what you get. If an orange had a twitter handle it’s bio would read; people say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.

At the grains section I stared at the groundnuts a little too long. There is this myth that groundnuts are powerful grains that make a man virile. That we should all keep some in our pockets, nibbling on them throughout the day. I decided that I didn’t need it. Besides, groundnuts bloat me. So I looked up at the lady seated behind one of those drums bearing the nuts and smiled at her. “Sasa?” I don’t know if she smiled back behind her mask but I saw her eyes narrow, which could mean that indeed she smiled back or she grimaced. I inquired where I could get almond milk. She pointed.

At the till, some guy in a jacket at high noon stood too close to me even though there were clear markers indicating social distancing. I’m used to people like this. Most people don’t bother to read anything; signage, instructions, traffic lights, dosages. I could hear him chew gum right behind my ear. The whole store could hear him chew gum.

My phone rang and I stared at it for a while before picking it.

“I thought you were going to look at it ring and ignore it,” the caller said. “That would have been awkward because I can see you.”

I chuckled and looked around. He was paying at a different till.

“I see you grew a beard,” I said.

He stroked it proudly, like you would stroke a favorite cat. We men are so uncomplicated, really small things thrill us. Like a grown beard. Or a new pair of tyres. I bought this fancy silver measuring tot in a Remy Martin gift shop in Cognac, France and it’s the only thing I can save in a burning house.

“How’z biashara?” I asked.

“What biashara?”

We had the usual phone conversation people have now; quarantine, e-learning, lack of business. We asked about each other’s children (“I gave away mine,” I told him. “Last in first out kinda thing”), then we promised to meet up after COVID. I then took the staircase to the rooftop where I had parked just near that place which refills milk, I think. It was one of those very hot afternoons that the sun bounced harshly from the bodies of parked cars.

A car away I could see a fellow standing outside his car with a small child who must have been three or four years old. The only reason I noticed them was because of that child, a little baby doll wearing socks in that heat and snub-nosed pink shoes that made noise when she hopped playfully on the spot.

As I popped open my trunk I heard a female voice; a harsh-edged voice, matronly voice, displeased, harangued and urgent. She was castigating the man, saying something to him about him not having “brains” for bringing the child out in the hot sun. “I don’t even know how you think sometimes,” I remember her saying. I caught a glimpse of her as I closed my boot, she was loading a bag of shopping into the car. As I made my way to the driver’s door, I happened to look at the man standing there taking the heat and that’s when our eyes met. Normally, we would have both looked away but for some reason we held each other’s gaze. This moment might have lasted three or so seconds but it felt forever because of – what I would learn later – was the significance of that non-verbal exchange.

I drove away.

I thought about him on my short drive home. I thought about him as my blender whirred and churned, the ice-cubes crashing and rattling. And over the following days the man and that child would occasionally cross my mind. I remember his silence, his resignation. It sounded loud in my head, like an echo in a cave. His silence, it seemed, had somehow normalized his situation, at least from that brief moment we interacted in that parking lot. I wondered what was on his mind as he got a hiding. Was he thinking, “This too shall pass?” Or “Silence is the best medicine.” How thick had his skin become? How thick can one’s skin become? I narrated this story to a friend of mine and he said simply, “that man knows his escape.”

Sometimes I picture him at home sitting in the living room in as small a ball because the smaller you are the less a target you become. He’s hiding behind an old newspaper, his tea losing its heat next to him. I wondered what occupies his mind when he’s in bed. Where he gets his validation. What makes him feel good about himself? I also wonder about that little girl, if one day she will grow up and remember that hot day in the rooftop parking; the fire on her mother’s tongue and the resounding silence of her father. I wonder what adjectives she will use to describe her father when she’s 12. Or 20. “Stoic.” “Wise.” “Calm.” “muted.” “mousy”, “faint.” And how that incidence might shape her view of a man.

Mostly I think of that look we exchanged, strangers, yet brothers. That intense look that evoked a strange feeling in me. I felt shame for him and embarrassment for myself. Shame because I saw him in his most vulnerable state, in his weakness, in his nakedness. The one language that we share as men is ego and pride, and he had none at that moment he was getting an earful in public. He was clothed, but his nakedness was stark. I intruded on his vulnerability and was embarrassed to be a witness.

I still think about him occasionally, almost a month later. And if he’s reading this, I hope he never lowers his chin. 

What is the current state of agribusiness in Kenya?

 The Covid-19 pandemic struck Kenya at a time when farmers were struggling with the locust menace.

The outbreak of the disease in March also marked the onset of the planting season, a time when farmers are busy on the farm.

Although Covid-19 impact on farming has been indirect, the disease has had several socio-economic effects in relation to agribusiness

Assessing the challenges various value chain actors encountered during the outbreak and developing mitigating measures will offer ways on how to cope with future catastrophes thus guarantee sustainable food production.

Input supplies

Inputs include feeds, seeds and fertilise. The challenge with livestock feeds is that the raw materials used such as maize and soybean meal come from neighbouring countries. 

As a strategic measure, feed producers should in the long-term search for produce that can replace imported inputs.

These include sunflower cake in place of soybean meal and yellow maize and sugar beets. 

Further, farmers must now take up the challenge and plant more feed materials targeting the animal feed market and explore possibilities of growing yellow maize and sugar beet, which do well in dairy animal zones.

They can also plant high protein trees and fodder like lucerne and desmodium that can supplement the manufactured feeds such as dairy meal, which require high protein content. 

These fodder can be used for direct animal feeding or conserved in wet and dry forms such as silage and hay.  

Farmers should also learn how to make homemade feed rations from the crops that they produce on the farm.

To plant livestock feeds, farmers require seeds and fertilisers. Although seeds have not been a big challenge during the outbreak (most likely because that are locally produced), fertiliser acquisition was not easy. 

Similarly, animal manure which is available on livestock farms was not accessible due to poor condition of rural roads, especially during the planting season that is also the wet time of the year. 

Farmers should, therefore, practice manure management through use of biogas technology or through composting.

Further they should harvest and store dry manure under a shade and in the accessible parts of the farm. 

Other livestock waste producers such as slaughterhouses should start to aggressively sell animal stomach content, which is a good fertiliser.

Sewage treatment plants produce human waste that has been treated and can be applied to trees and young fruit trees to preserve inorganic fertilisers and manure for sensitive crops such as horticulture.

Foliar fertilisers produced on rabbit farms, for instance, should be marketed and embraced as another source of crop nourishment.

Drug producers/distributors

The pandemic disrupted the importation of livestock drugs, with key vaccines such as parvovirus for dogs and pox for poultry going out of stock.

Further, there was a glaring lack of convenient vaccine packages to support local production.

A good example is that of poultry vaccines, which are in packages of 100, 200, 500 and 1,000 doses despite the fact that most of the farmers keep 1-10 birds.

Customers buy fresh vegetables at Naivas supermarket at Mega City Mall in Kisumu. The coronavirus crisis has helped boost food safety as consumers, producers, manufacturers and distributors strove to maintain hygiene.

Key cattle vaccines such as those for foot and mouth disease (FMD) are in 100 dose bottle despite the low number of animals kept by small-scale producers.

This should change, it is time manufacturers embrace packages that are proportionate to local herds and flocks.

Further, drug manufactures should strive to open branches across the country for ease of supply during pandemics while local vaccine producing companies should broaden their spectrum to cover all livestock and the various diseases in respective breeds.

Emphasis should also be placed on production of long-acting drugs and vaccines.

Distributors/agrovets shops can strive to stock large quantities of drugs in anticipation of shortages or when signs that there may be a pandemic set in.

Most antibiotics are administered for 3-5 days, the shorter cycle can be recommended in times of a catastrophe as a drug-saving mechanism.

Insurance agents should work closely with financial institutions and intensify their coverage of the agricultural produce.

Farmers (producers)

Producers must strive to use other disease-control methods such as bio-security that minimise introduction of pathogens on the farms.

During a crisis, they should also avoid introduction of new animals as a bio-security measure. 

Reducing the animal stock to manageable levels, especially the breeding stock that assist in bouncing back, can help enhance disease control measures such as vaccination, deworming and tick management.

Work to extend the shelf-life of produce through use of refrigeration and processing, for instance of milk, into long shelf-life products such as mala and yogurt. 

Another big lesson for farmers is that they should always save to have some cash reserves either through formal institutions like commercial banks and Saccos or through informal channels like table-banking and merry-go-round. Such money will cushion you in case of emergencies. 

Then, mechanise farms. With the need to observe social distancing, the congregation of workers on the farm is discouraged, thus you cannot go wrong with machines.  

Marketers

Online platforms have come in handy during the Covid-19 pandemic by enhancing trade when mobility situations remained low.

Going forwward, farmers must strive to use this platforms. Storage facilities and national food reserves should be improved.

Consumers

Avoid food wastage. Purchase long shelf-life products such as grains and extend the shelf-life of others through smoking, drying and refrigeration.  

Lastly, one of the big lessons from the pandemic is that a country cannot rely on food imports.

It is thus time policy makers formulate strategies that enhance local production of maize (yellow and white), other crops, vaccines and drugs for our own sufficiency.

****

Situation

1. The crisis has brought out the importance of agriculture industry, with the sector remaining resilient during the pandemic.

2. The importance of prioritising mechanisation has come out in bid to maintain social distance.

3. The crisis helped boost food safety as consumers, producers, manufacturers and distributors strove to maintain hygiene.

4. As food imports from neighbouring countries declined, Kenyan farmers sustained the supply chain, an indication that we can produce enough.

5. Insurance agents should work closely with financial institutions and intensify their coverage of agricultural produce.

6. Policymakers should formulate strategies that enhance local production of yellow maize, vaccines and drugs.

This one is for the good old times

Once upon a time,you met a girl outside Kenya Cinema. She wore baggy stonewash jeans. She – left handed – scribbled her telephone number on a scrap of paper you borrowed from a shop inside. “Is this a four or a nine?” you asked her pointing at the last digit. She said it was a four. The Lord gives you a stunning smile with one hand and takes away your handwriting with the other. You folded this paper five times and stuffed it in that very small pocket over the main front pocket of your jeans. Nothing gets lost there. The following day, midmorning, you stepped into the only telephone booth in your neighbourhood and closed the door. It felt like being in a mummy box. You unfolded the paper and dialled the number. The phone rang numerous times without being answered. Back then a telephone would ring as long as you allowed it to ring. You sighed and waited for two minutes then tried again. After five rings there was a click in the line.

“Yes?” Growled a male voice.

At this point you were presented with two scenarios. First, there was a chance you could have been given a number to a morgue and the gentleman speaking was a mortician whom you had just interrupted sawing through a cadaver’s skull. This could be a practical joke she does on chaps who ask for her number in the streets which,by the way, was the only place to ask for numbers because this was pre-internet. The other explanation could just be that the grumpy guy was actually her father who happened to have taken the day off because of a toothache or a broken wrist. He sounded large and – quite possibly – violent. Someone who hated when babies tagged at his beard. You immediately realised where she got her handwriting from; it matched her father’s temperament. Either way, the best thing to do at this point was to hang up and try again later – depending on how fast a broken wrist could heal.

You called a landline.

The landline was tricky. You never knew who was calling until you picked. And you never knew who was going to pick. It was all left to faith and chance. The landline had one ringtone; loud and shreaky. It rattled your bones, reverberating through walls and doors in little seismic shocks. It didn’t have a missed call facility, so if someone said, “but I called you twice last afternoon,” you’d have to take their word for it. Or not. If someone said they’d call at 3pm, you’d have to hang around and wait, sometimes staring at the phone intently. Sometimes there would be static in the line, especially if it was a long distance call; little crackling sounds, like the sound of crickets in mating season. A long distance call, in this case, could even have been someone calling from Mombasa. (Assuming you are not reading this from Mombasa).

It had its gems, though. You didn’t have to charge it. So that inane question, ‘do you have a charger?’ was never necessary. Neither did you have to buy a screen protector. And there was no newer version each year that folk would line up for. People had one phone their whole lifetime. One of the greatest beauty of landlines was that it didn’t allow for passive aggression. You could slam the receiver down to show your displeasure and end a terrible conversation. The other person would be sure it wasn’t the network or call drop or whatever. They’d know you slammed the phone on them. It was a good outlet, one that therapists would have encouraged now. Slamming down the phone was the zen of the 80s, not sitting cross legged in a forest eating oats. It was always cathartic, you always felt better after slamming a receiver down. It was the 90s equivalent of the ‘f’ word. Or the middle finger emoji. Oh, and the phrase, ‘to tap’ had a whole different meaning in that era. It meant to make a call illegally. Tap that phone. Can you imagine the evolution of language?

Not long after, vanity was born in the form of pagers. But only shady people called them that. They were beepers. Google them; small little contraptions the size of a matchbox that went off with messages. The folks who had beepers – important men with important jobs – went to Carnivore and wore moccasins and blazers with massive shoulder padding to carry the heavy weight and responsibility of coolness. Note, beeping someone was still cool then. Not so now. Come to think of it, I only remember men carrying pagers. Never saw a woman carry a pager.

You strapped it on your belt and you swaggered about. It would go off and the important person would peer at it with a creased brow then excuse themselves to find a phone to call from. My brother-in-law had one. So did Bobby Brown. It looked so important to have a pager. So busy. So engaged and connected and productive. And cool.

Then came the mobile phones. When I say ‘came’ I mean to Kenya. I-G mobile phones. You must have seen the I-G cellular phones with Pablo Escobar in Narcos. Big ugly things with antennas. This phone was so heavy it would get tired lying on its back so people sat it on their bottoms, like you would a seven-month baby learning how to sit. In any case, it was as heavy as a baby. Can you imagine the men who had these phones then,pretty girls ogling at the contraption seated at a table, each man sitting his phone down on its ass asking you to address the phone first? It might have looked like a space program – a table of rocket launchers.

The chaps who had beepers called them – rather snobbishly – ‘cellular phones.’ It’s like telling a waiter, ‘do you have a smoothie with musa acuminata in it?’

‘A what?’

“A musa acuminata! I’m sorry, didn’t you read any book? That’s a banana in lay dialect.’

There is never any need to call something by its scientific name. Or use latin. Or prinkle your skinny french vocabulary in a conversation (Ivory?). Well, unless you carried a pager at some point in your life.

Then came the 2G mobile technology. I think this is when I bought my first mobile phone; a Nokia 5110. It was 4,999/ a special offer by Safaricom and came with a line and 250 bob airtime, perfect, seeing as I was working in a lab and living on a shoestring budget in a small house without curtains or a bed. It was blue in colour. I was proud of that phone. It had an antennae longer than my epiglottis but, then again, so did most phones. I’d wedge it in my front pocket and swagger about. ‘I’m sorry, what’s that poking me?: “Oh, nothing. That’s just my antennae.”

The phone had a strip of network and battery running on either side of the small screen. It weighed 170gms. For perspective, an adult hamster that is pregnant weighs that much. It could only keep eight dialled numbers, five received numbers and five missed calls. Who cared, I didn’t get that many calls anyway. It was also generous enough to give me about 250 names to save in my phone-book. Anything more you’d have to save the names on a piece of paper. There was no way I could have exhausted that.

Oh, and my ringtone was William Tell, in case you are wondering.

The battery, on standby, could last for 120 hours, easily. That’s going to Mombasa back and forth 24 times! Great if I was a truck driver. If I wanted to send an SMS I had 160 characters to do that. No beating about the bush, fellas, you got to the point because SMS was something crazy, like I dunno, 10 bob? It required one to have great editing skills. All words in the sms had to earn their keep. Also, note there were no emojis. If you want to say you were mad, you had to say you were mad – no red faced emoji. People wrote what they meant. Or they just sent 🙁 or :-|. And nobody sent nudes. For that you had to use the post office mail box after calling in a cheeky camera man to your locked bedroom to take the nudes! Complicated stuff,that one.

The Nokia 5110 was a toughie. Your girlfriend could drop it from the 6th floor in a moment of rage, and it would still ring. A horse could stomp on it and pee on it and it would still work. It had games too; memory, snake and logic. I liked snake. It made these sounds that made me giggle whenever the snake ate the mark.

One night, a week after I bought the Nokia 5110, two miscreants robbed me off that phone at gunpoint. I had not even exhausted my complimentary airtime. I became phoneless for two months before I got a Nokia 3110. Then I got a Nokia 1100 and a 3310 that I used for a while. Jack Bauer also used the 3310 for a while, breathing heavily in it as he chased down terrorists.

Big phones were fashionable, then they stopped being fashionable. Small phones became fashionable. Then they stopped being fashionable. Then sleek flip phones became a thing. And slide phones. In all these mixes there was the Blackberry that was for the elite. Then it became a jungle of phones that could do all these things and represented all these things.

The most underrated phone is the kabambe. If you are reading this from Milan, kabambe, – not pronounced kaw-ba-mbee – is a small phone that does what my Nokia 5110 did. In other words, it’s multi-talented; it can survive a nuclear attack, you can bury it in the ground for six months and you might still find it working and it shines harder than a headlight. It also fits anywhere – which means it doesn’t have self esteem issues. It’s for people who are truly busy, folk who don’t want to waste their time sending emojis or videos. The kabambe doesn’t die on you. Maybe that should be their slogan; we don’t die on you. It’s also unsightly. There is no kabambe that one looks at and goes, I can match this phone with my new shoes. It’s not an accessory.

Until now. There is the Neon Ray Pro. It’s a kabambe that just got a passport. A kabambe with a Youtube channel. It’s 4G. It’s for your shamba guy who has to send you pictures of all the chicken that died mysteriously in the night. (Because it has a camera). Or your domestic manager who is trying to send you the colour of the baby’s stool for you to determine if they are ill or they took too much pawpaw. It’s for the blue collar who are plugged into the new age. Or for you, if you live a double life. And you can pay it slowly, 20-bob everyday.

The other side of face masks:Everyboby is hiding something

 

You see a man in a beautiful well-cut suit, looking like he was baptized in it, one hand thrust in his pocket, standing casually at ease, waiting for the elevator to come down. And in this era of Covid10,he is wearing a fashionable face mask. That man’s hiding something. A woman in a flashy red scarf curled around her neck like a serpent of fashion, pointing at bread through a glass display at a chic patisserie. She’s hiding something. You see a boy, with his large innocent eyes, before they are filled with secrets of his own world, asking if he can only take two more spoons because he’s full and his stomach hurts. He’s hiding something.

Everybody’s hiding something from the world; a wild dream, a dark fear, a complicated past, an inadequacy, a secret, illegitimate children, a scar of life. Whatever. But the man who hides something from themselves? Oh that’s the man to watch. This is a man who has believed he’s someone he’s not and he’s out there, saying someone else’s lines, eating their food, listening to their music, watering their plants, just living someone else’s life. But then one day when he looks in the mirror, when he really looks in the mirror, he will not recognise who he is anymore. He would have been lost in his own deceit and sunk into an endless theater of delusion.

I don’t know why I thought of opening this story with those words. I wrote them a long time ago when I was to write about someone very complex and tortured and beautiful, someone who at the last minute texted me in the middle of the night. “I’m pulling out. I’m not ready. I’m kinda scared. The person’s life I had described in the interview is not who I am. Sorry I wasted your time.” And that story’s tits went up in the air.

So I wrote what I felt about that development in the notes on my phone and I forgot all about it. Well, until I met this gentleman recently and a section of his story reminded me of that incident, so I retrieved the note and read it and I said, “baby, I knew one day I’d use you.” Sometimes I call paragraphs I write “baby.” I validate them. It’s the language of love for paragraphs; words of affirmation. For example I’d say to a particularly clunky paragraph, “baby, this is not going to work. Your bones are too dry. They make noise when someone turns a page.” Or to a paragraph I particularly enjoyed writing, “go out there and grow in hearts like a bush of bougainvillea.”

It’s complicated. And a bit psychotic, I realise.

I’ve known this guy for 13 years now. He’s the kind of guy you’d not find me standing close to at a cocktail function, because of his dressing. It was like standing next to a ringing Catholic church bell. You can see his trousers from the moon. I used to observe him from afar, like one would Mt Kenya, in his blazers, dotted cravats, complex shirts and loud fancy shoes. A clotheshorse. We started talking when he won a competition for the magazine I was writing for. I remember him waltzing into the office to claim his prize. I’d never seen a man so well put together before in my life and if I did it was Andy Garcia on TV, killing people or some pimp in Harlem calling everybody “baby.” The men I knew were scruffy yahoos, who at best oiled their elbows as a fashion statement. But there he was; wearing so many pieces of clothes, all of them so well pressed, well thought-out, well coordinated, a fashion ballet. The clothes also seemed to accept him. There are men who can throw a Savile Row suit on and you might as well have worn a bush with it. There are men who clothes reject, like a transplanted kidney would.

This guy was proud, or self assured, or whatever. It’s in how he strutted in there, like a prized fighter getting into a ring to defend his belt. He drove a Mercedes. This was 2007 when driving a Mercedes was still a big deal. The office girls gathered around him, immediately claiming him as their own. They seemed at ease around him.

He was effeminate.

Over the years, I’d run into him and I noticed his dressing was getting bolder, louder. He would waltz through foyers like a sweeping gale, turning heads. One time I was driving along Galana Road at 7am on a Saturday morning, off to catch a worm and I saw him outside that notorious Kiza gate, standing there in an extravagant suit, looking up and down the road, waiting for a cab, or a bloody chopper, who knew? Amidst the debris of the night that Kiza had spat out in the morning – drunken men and women, faces sagged by debauchery, wearing the ugliness of the night like disgraced dogs of war – he stood out like a sore thumb – how still well-put together he was, how untouched the night had left him.

Two weeks ago he called me. He wanted to tell me his story, he said.He had to tell it before Covid19 snuffles his biggest life story unceremoniously.He had no one else to tell.He said i was his only friend at the moment. I found him seated in a booth at Java on a quiet wintry morning. He was frail-looking and had grown a beard. His hat sat next to him, together with a bag made from african fabric. (I’m simply calling it a bag because I’m not fashion forward but I realise it must have a fancy name). He was in jeans. I’d never seen him in jeans before. Under an over-sized coat he wore a loose fitting shirt belonging to his dead lover. He looked spent. Light refused to reach his eyes.

“I’m gay.” He said before I could order my tea.

“No shit.” I said dryly, tearing the mask off my face. Masks have become to us what bras are to women; you just can’t wait to remove them. I looked up at the waitress with a lean face and ordered scrambled eggs with basil and mushroom and some brown toast buttered. He was already half-way through his pancake. His fork lay facing upward on his plate. His tea looked lukewarm now, like mangrove water.

“I think you have always worn it [sexuality] on your sleeves, no?” I said.

“Yeah, maybe.” He stroked his beard. “But it’s not the same when I tell someone. When I utter those words. It’s…I dunno, different? At least for me. It’s like I’m freeing myself because this is not something I generally tell people. It’s not easy to say those words, so to verbalize them, to say ‘I’m gay’ makes me feel like it’s out of my hands, this weight.”

“A weight.” I say testing the weight of that word.

“Yeah, that’s what it feels like. It feels good to say it because -” The manager came and placed my hot water with lemon before me. “I’m sorry, we don’t have basil. Can I put baby spinach instead?”

I resisted saying, yes baby, because she didn’t look like the type who might take a joke like that. Instead I said, “if it will still taste good, sure.”

“It will.” She smiled.

“Here is what I think.” I told him. “I don’t want to hear a gay story. It’s not something I’d want to read myself, to be honest. I’ve read a dime a dozen. What more value will a piece like that add? Look, I like girls with a lovely ass, I care little for boobs. But guess how many people care about my preference but me?”

He grinned.

“No one!” I said. “Not one person cares what I want. It’s my preference. But I also realise that being gay comes with its challenges. Many. But the question I ask myself is, are you hurting animals being gay? Is it causing global warming? Are you hurting people?”

He smiled like he knew something. “Go on.”

“If I’m to know your story, I want to know you, not you the gay guy. I want to know what you fear, what you want, I want to know about your dead dreams. I don’t want your story to be centered around your sexuality, you get? So you like men, go gaga!”

“I hear you, but you realise that the life I have led as a gay man is different to the life you have led as a straight man?” He says. “I have not had the liberties to express my love and wants like you have? I have had to hide my whole life, to deny who I am at some point, to people and to myself. So, how can my sexuality not be central to who I am when it has dictated my whole life and the choices I have made? I don’t want anyone to see me as Tim* that gay man. I don’t. I want to be known as a professional, a friend, a colleague, not as gay. But I can’t deny that it has shaped a lot in my life.”

He had a point. Across the room, a middle-aged guy with a face-mask that has a spiderman web on the side sits down. The boy in us never dies, I think.

“Ok, so why now?” I asked him. “Why is telling your story now so important?”

“Because I almost died.” He said leaning back and looking out the window to the balconies of the next apartment. “I had a scary liver problem. Plus, I’m turning 40. Also, I didn’t choose to be gay. Nobody does. It’s not something you can return to the supermarket and get another, because if it was I’d have done that ages ago because it’s not worth going through the things I have gone through.”

“How long have you known you are gay?”

“Since I was in class six in primary school.” He looked at his pancake. He didn’t look like he’d eat it. “ I sat on another boy’s laps while goofing around, as boys would and I remember thinking how good it felt. I liked the idea of it. Also, I would look at another boy and think how cute he was.”

In form two he was caught making out with an older boy in the dormitory one night. The boy was in fourth form and had a big Adam’s apple. “I went to a private boarding school, a posh one. Most of the boys were Nairobi boys. That night, they had laid a trap for us because there had been rumours. And so when we were busted, we were frog-marched through the school at night. The whole school came out to watch as we were led to the head teacher’s office. There was a big commotion. We were taunted and jeered and abused. Some boys kicked, pushed and punched me. The other guy wasn’t touched because he was a senior. It was greatly humiliating. Sana!”

The head teacher, whose night had been interrupted, came to the office wearing a trench coat and carrying a torch. He was a tall man with broad shoulders. He looked like Batman from behind. He led them into his office and locked the door. The whole school waited outside, some sort of a lynch mob. He looked at them and sighed. “We are not going to sort this mess today.” He said. “But tomorrow morning, we will.” So they were let go. He packed his bags that night because he knew the head teacher would humiliate them during the morning assembly and they would be expelled. However, during the next day’s morning assembly, the head teacher never said a word. Nor the next day. Or the day after. Or the following week. Or ever. The story was never brought up.

But he became a pariah.

“My life got very tough after that. I had my name scrolled in loos as a homosexual, a word I resent.” He says. “I was constantly abused and made fun of and taunted for the rest of my high school. That kind of treatment takes a toll on you no matter how strong you want to show you are – the constant reminder that you are different, queer, odd, strange, the abuses, other boys laughing at you, talking about you. But you know what?”

“What?” [Wait, where the hell are my eggs?]

“Some of the nastiest boys who beat me when I was being frog-marched later came to me in private and started seducing me. Can you imagine? I couldn’t. They were closeted. Which makes me believe that the most homophobic men are afraid of their own sexuality. I ended up dating one of those boys who had been at the front of the people braying for my blood.” He says as my eggs come.

In university he dated a girl. “We actually lived together the whole of my campus days.” He says. It’s hard to show dismay with your mouth full of scrambled eggs.

“Oh, how did that work out?”

“I’d be with them the whole week and the weekend – because the uni was out of town – I’d be with my boyfriend who was then already working.”

“And you’d have sex with this girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you are bi, then?”

“No, I don’t believe there is something like bi. You are either straight or you are not.”

“So this girl, she never suspected you were gay?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t struggle being intimate with her?”

“No, it’s because I never saw her as a girl. In my head – when I was sleeping with her – she was a man.”

“She had a beard.” I said smiling. “It’s happened to the best of us.”

He chuckled. “Actually she was quite voluptuous, and light, with long hair. Very nice girl. She even took me home to meet her parents. But uni was interesting because I was struggling with who I was. I was battling many things about my sexuality and being with her – the first and last girl I was with – was perhaps me trying to tick a box, or reassure myself that I could be straight after all. My mental health issues started that moment, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, this was coupled with the fact that my mother had passed on not so long ago and it really affected me because she was all I had. I’m the only child. The guy I was seeing suggested that I see a therapist who I went to see for many years, like four..”

After uni he secured a job with a reputable firm. Meanwhile he was hiding his sexuality which must have seemed like hiding a neon ball under your shirt in darkness. He then met and started dating an older man. “He was a single father. He spoilt me.” He says. “He was a great supporter of my career, always at hand with advice. I moved in with him and we lived together. He was a very nice guy, very understanding and gentle and most importantly he allowed me to be.”

Then he met another man, down the road from where he lived with his lover. “He came from a very wealthy family, he was an heir in waiting. He was not handsome but he was very successful and charming, but also tortured, with mental illness to boot.” He says, “His parents, he would tell me, had expectations of him, to get married and then take over the family business one day, but he couldn’t. He was deeply closeted but also conflicted. So I noticed that he was doing drugs; someone would supply cocaine to the house every evening and he would disappear to snort it in the loo. I only found out one day when he blacked out in the loo.”

“Wait, what was happening to the guy you were living with?”

“We had drifted by this time, sleeping in different bedrooms, but still friends.” He cuts his pancake and takes a bite. “ This new guy really spoilt me, anything I wanted he would give me. We traveled. He bought me clothes. He was very generous but I had a problem with his drug usage and every time I tried leaving he would cry. Anyway, eventually I left. And soon after, he overdosed on cocaine and was found dead. I have never cried like that. I was completely devastated. Completely. You know this guy.” He shows me a picture of him in the wallet.

“I can’t say I do.” I said “He doesn’t look anything gay at all.”

“Oh, I know very many deeply closeted men who are very manly, you stand next to them and they are more manly than you.” He said. “This guy, with all his problems, found escape in drugs.”

“And what has been your escape?”

He thought about it. “Hmm, I have never thought of that before.” A long pause followed. “I think luxury. I like to dress well and to travel and to eat out in good restaurants.”

When he was taken ill and he was in a ward, his liver almost gone, literally at death’s door, he had a lot of time to reflect on his life. He thought a lot about his mother; who separated with his father (“he abandoned us”) when he was young and she was the only thing he had being an only child. Then she became deaf and he was left alone to stew on this hot boiling secret. He thought of his life, hiding half of himself to the world and losing the man he thought he might have saved but also, losing what he had with the first guy. If he was going to die, he thought, what would he show for his life?

“You know, I might come across as confident and well-heeled but I’m lonely. I’m happy but lonely. I don’t know if that makes sense?”

“Describe that for me.”

“The loneliness?”

“Yeah.”

“When I was in the ward, dying or trying not to die, I didn’t have anyone special to sit by my bed and hold my hand. I didn’t have anyone who was worried for me. You want that. You don’t know how important that is when you are thinking you are not going to make it. I thought I’d die and there’d be nobody by my bed crying, someone who would be devastated by my departure. I mean, my mother is deaf, I don’t talk to my dad, I have no one. And that really made me so sad. I realised I was lonely. When I go home, there is nobody there. My house has things, but it’s a shell. It’s empty.”

“What do you regret?”

“I regret not having a loving mother. Ireget that the women in my life never gained enough trust in my eyes for me to tell them what am now telling you. I regret that the relationship with the older man never worked out. I regret not fighting harder for him. He’s a good man.” He said. “I also regret not leaving this country when I had a chance to. It’s hard not being yourself, not living your life freely here, not acknowledging who you are not only to yourself but to others. I have a close unit of friends who are tolerant of me, but that window of starting over in a different country at my age is closed.” Pause. “I want to let go of grief, of loss, of starting a different chapter after my 50th. Maybe something better awaits me in the other half of life. I think I deserve it because I think I’m not a bad person.”

Later, when he’d long gone I sat there and thought; you see a man wearing an over-sized coat, standing outside a cafe waiting for his Uber in the cold and you don’t know the turmoil and grief he’s hiding under that coat. A dead lover’s coat.

Most people show you what they want you to see. That’s what I’ve learnt. The streets are full of masks. Everybody’s wearing one. Some are ugly.

Nobody shows you their hand.

Aren't we all hiding something behind our impassive eyes? I'm glad that the face masks are now making it easy for us!

Overcome the five hindrances to good life

 The Buddha taught that there are five hindrances to realizing enlightenment. These are (words in parentheses are in Pali):

1. Sensual desire (kamacchanda)
2. Ill will (vyapada)
3. Sloth, torpor, or drowsiness ( thina-middha)
4. Restlessness and worry (uddhacca-kukkucca)
5. Uncertainty or skepticism (vicikiccha)

These mental states are called "hindrances" because they bind us to ignorance and to suffering (dukkha). Realizing the liberation of enlightenment requires unbinding ourselves from the hindrances. But how do you do that?

This essay is called "Practicing With the Five Hindrances" rather than "Getting Rid of the Five Hindrances," because practicing with them is the key to going through them. They cannot be ignored or wished away. Ultimately, the hindrances are states you are creating for yourself, but until you perceive this personally they will be a problem.

Much of the Buddha's advice about the hindrances relates to meditation. But in truth practice never ceases, and usually what comes up repeatedly in meditation is an issue for you all the time. With every hindrance, the first step is to recognize it, acknowledge it, and understand that you are the one making it "real."

Sensual Desire (kamacchanda)

If you are familiar with the Four Noble Truths, you've heard that cessation of greed and desire is the door to enlightenment. There are different kinds of desire, from the urge to possess something you think will make you happy (lobha), to the general craving born of the misperception that we are separate from everything else (tanha, or trishna in Sanskrit).

Sensual desire, kamacchanda, is especially common during meditation. It can take many forms, from desiring sex to hungering for doughnuts. As always, the first step is to fully recognize and acknowledge the desire and endeavor to just observe it, not chase it.

In the various parts of the Pali Tipitika the Buddha advised his monks to contemplate "impure" things. For example, he suggested visualizing unattractive body parts. Of course, the Buddha's disciples were mostly celibate monastics. If you are not celibate, developing an aversion to sex (or anything else) probably is not a good idea.

Ill Will (vyapada)

Seething with anger at others is an obvious hindrance. and the obvious antidote is cultivating metta, loving kindness. Metta is one of the Immeasurables, or virtues, that the Buddha suggested as a specific antidote to anger and ill will. The other immeasurables are karuna (compassion), mudita (sympathetic joy) and upekkha (equanimity).

Most of the time, we get angry because someone has bumped into our ego-armor. The first step in letting go of anger is acknowledging that it is there; the second step is acknowledging that it is born of our own ignorance and pride.

Sloth, Torpor, or Drowsiness (thina-middha)

Sleepiness while meditating happens to all of us. The Pali Tipitika records that even one of the Buddha's chief disciples, Maudgalyayana, struggled with dozing off during meditation. The Buddha's advice to Maudgalyana is given in the Capala Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya, 7.58), or the Buddha's Discourse on Nodding.

The Buddha's advice includes paying attention to what thoughts you are chasing as you get drowsy, and direct your mind elsewhere. Also, you can try pulling your earlobes, splashing your face with water, or switch to walking meditation. As a last resort, stop meditating and take a nap.

If you often feel low on energy, find out if there is a physical or psychological cause.

Restlessness and Worry (uddhacca-kukkucca)

This hindrance takes many forms -- anxiety, remorse, feeling "antsy." Meditating with a restless or anxious state of mind can be very uncomfortable.

Whatever you do, don't try to push your anxiety out of your mind. Instead, some teachers suggest imagining that your body is a container. Then just observe the restlessness ping-ponging around freely; don't try to separate from it, and don't try to control it.

People with chronic anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorders may find meditation to be unbearably intense. In some circumstances, it may be necessary to seek psychological help before beginning an intensive meditation practice.

Uncertainty or Skepticism (vicikiccha)

When we speak of uncertainty, of what are we uncertain? Do we doubt the practice? Other people? Ourselves? The remedy may depend on the answer.

Doubt itself is neither good nor bad; it's something to work with. Don't ignore it or tell yourself you "shouldn't" doubt. Instead, be open to what your doubt trying to tell you.

Often we become discouraged when the experience of practice doesn't live up to expectation. For this reason, it's unwise to be attached to expectation. The strength of practice will wax and wane. One meditation period could be deep, and the next may be painful and frustrating.

But the effects of sitting are not immediately apparent; sometimes sitting through a painful and frustrating meditation period will bear beautiful fruit down the road. For this reason, it's important to not judge our meditation as "good" or "bad." Do your best without attaching to it.

True happiness and freedom comes from appreciating the impermanence of all compounded things

 All compounded things are impermanent. The historical Buddha taught this, over and over. These words were among the last he ever spoke.

"Compounded things" are, of course, anything that can be divided into parts and science tells us even the most basic "parts," chemical elements, degrade over vast periods of time.

Most of us think the impermanence of all things is an unpleasant fact we'd rather ignore. We look at the world around us, and most of it seems solid and fixed. We tend to stay in places we find comfortable and safe, and we don't want them to change. We want to have relationships that will never change over time. We want to acquire material things that are permanent in nature. We also think we are permanent, the same person continuing from birth to death, and maybe beyond that.

In other words, we may know, intellectually, that things are impermanent, but we don't perceive things that way. And that's a problem.

Four Noble Truths

In his first sermon after his enlightenment, the Buddha laid out a proposition -- the Four Noble Truths. He said that life is dukkha, a word that cannot be precisely translated into English, but is sometimes rendered "stressful," "unsatisfactory," or "suffering." Very basically, life is full of craving or "thirst" that is never satisfied. This thirst comes from ignorance of the true nature of reality.

We see ourselves as permanent beings, separate from everything else. This is the primordial ignorance and the first of the three poisons out of which arise the other two poisons, greed and hate. We go through life attaching to things, wanting them to last forever. But they don't last, and this makes us sad. We experience envy and anger and even become violent with others because we cling to a false perception of permanence.We attach not only to physical things but also to ideas and opinions about ourselves and the world around us. Then we grow frustrated when the world doesn't behave the way we think it should and our lives don't conform to our expectations. The fact of the matter is that things change.

Buddhist practice brings about a radical change in perspective. Our tendency to divide the universe into "me" and "everything else" fades away. In time, the practitioner is better able to enjoy life's experiences without judgment, bias, manipulation, or any of the other mental barriers we erect between ourselves and what's real.

The solution to dukkha is to stop clinging and attaching. But how do we do that? The fact is that it cannot be accomplished by an act of will. It's impossible to just vow to yourself, from now on I won't crave anything. This doesn't work because the conditions that give rise to craving will still be present.

The Second Noble Truth tells us that we cling to things we believe will make us happy or keep us safe. Grasping for one ephemeral thing after another never satisfies us for long because it's all impermanent. It is only when we see this for ourselves that we can stop grasping. When we do see it, the letting go is easy. The craving will seem to disappear of its own accord.

The realization of wisdom is that this separation is an illusion because permanence is an illusion. Even the "I" we think is so permanent is an illusion. If you are new to Buddhism, at first this may not make much sense. The idea that perceiving impermanence is the key to happiness also doesn't make much sense. It's not something that can be understood by intellect alone.

However, the Fourth Noble Truth is that through the practice of the Eightfold Path we may realize and experience the truth of impermanence and be free of the pernicious effects of the three poisons. When it's perceived that the causes of hate and greed are illusions, hate and greed -- and the misery they cause -- disappear.

Anatta

The Buddha taught that existence has three marks -- dukkha, anicca (impermanence), and anatta (egolessness). Anatta is also sometimes translated as "without essence" or "no self." This is the teaching that what we think of as "me," who was born one day and will die another day, is an illusion.

Yes, you are here, reading this article. But the "I" you think is permanent is really a series of thought-moments, an illusion continually generated by our bodies and senses and nervous systems. There is no permanent, fixed "me" that has always inhabited your ever-changing body.

In some schools of Buddhism, the doctrine of anatta is taken further, to the teaching of shunyata, or "emptiness." This teaching stresses that there is no intrinsic self or "thing" within a compilation of component parts, whether we are talking about a person or a car or a flower. The fact is ,what we call a thing can be broken into different parts causing the 'thing' to cease to exist. This is an extremely difficult doctrine for most of us, so don't feel bad if this makes no sense at all. It takes time.

Attachment

"Attachment" is a word one hears a lot in Buddhism. Attachment in this context doesn't mean what you may think it means.

The act of attaching requires two things -- an attacher, and an object of attachment. "Attachment," then, is a natural by-product of ignorance. Because we see ourselves as a permanent thing separate from everything else, we grasp and cling to "other" things. Attachment in this sense might be defined as any mental habit that perpetuates the illusion of a permanent, separate self.

The most damaging attachment is ego attachment. Whatever we think we need to "be ourselves," whether a job title, a lifestyle or a belief system, is an attachment. We cling to these things,and we are devastated when we lose them.

On top of that, we go through life wearing emotional armor to protect our egos, and that emotional armor closes us off from each other. So, in this sense, attachment comes from the illusion of a permanent, separate self, and non-attachment comes from the realization that nothing is separate.

Renunciation

"Renunciation" is another word one hears a lot in Buddhism. Very simply, it means to renounce whatever binds us to ignorance and suffering. It is not simply a matter of avoiding things we crave as a penance for craving. The Buddha taught that genuine renunciation requires thoroughly perceiving how we make ourselves unhappy by clinging to things we desire. When we do, renunciation naturally follows. it is an act of liberation, not a punishment.

We can renounce a toxic relationship. We can renounce toxic people from our life;we dont hate them. We simply remove them from our life into perphery of things that have no  direct influence in our life. How many times have you thought of a faraway galaxy in the recent past? How many times have you been bothered that you cant spot it during the night? That is the kind of periphery that i am talking about.

Change

The seemingly fixed and solid world you see around you actually is in a state of flux. Our senses may not be able to detect moment-t0-moment change, but everything is always changing. When we fully appreciate this, we can fully appreciate our experiences without clinging to them. We can also learn to let go of old fears, disappointments, regrets. Nothing is real but this moment.

Because nothing is permanent, everything is possible. Liberation is possible. Enlightenment is possible.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote,

"We have to nourish our insight into impermanence every day. If we do, we will live more deeply, suffer less, and enjoy life much more. Living deeply, we will touch the foundation of reality, nirvana, the world of no-birth and no-death. Touching impermanence deeply, we touch the world beyond permanence and impermanence. We touch the ground of being and see that which we have called being and nonbeing are just notions. Nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever gained." [The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching (Parallax Press 1998), p. 124]

And dont always look for answers to every question in this impermanent world.... 

 ....like a man struck by a poisoned arrow, who would not have the arrow removed until someone told him the name of the man who had shot him, and whether he was tall or short, and where he lived, and what sort of feathers were used for the fletchings.

Being given answers to those questions would not be helpful, the Buddha said. "Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding."

In several other places in the Pali texts, the Buddha discusses skillful and unskillful questions. For example, in the Sabbasava Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 2), he said that speculating about the future or the past, or wondering "Am I? Am I not? What am I? How am I? Where has this being come from? Where is it bound? Why me?" gives rise to a "wilderness of views" that do not help liberate one from stress and strife that comes from trying to create a permanent world for oneself.