Voices After

This grave is not quiet

The inside rumbles like a sick stomach

Its anger burns hot like a volcanic lava
Here lies one whose body you destroyed
The one whose soul escaped your knife

Rebellious as a maxist worker

Here lies a saint in hell

This grave shades tears to swim in

And the voices that you hear,

Comes from besides the dry bones

Without regard for age and innocence,

Armed with red eyes, a knife and all

You shocked me numb 
pinned my body to the ground like a dry skin 

and forced my soul out

Everything crudely, beastly and hatefully done

Oh! No! sacrifice for no gods

Still my terrified soul cried, "father!" 
But I know you didn't hear

Your primitive I'd driving you high

As you drove it into me, 

and extinguished the foundation of my youth

I told mother it wasn't early menstruation

But poor mother 
Bound by the culture of submissiveness
And struggling to remain the good wife of her her husband

Turned aside like one speaking to a goddess,

"Domestic affairs, must remain domestic, 
Tell no one about it child."

But why mother? why? 

"When a man reaps from a tree he waters, 
It's no big deal 

Behave like your big sister. 

This is a river that flows through the family garden."

Mother! Can't you see my tears? 

Rape or incest mother?

Tell someone I am crying mother!

The very thing that I feared

Has come upon me

AIDS is not a flu!

Consequences

A shake on my shoulder wakes me up. I attempt to shrug off this hand by shaking my shoulders. No success. The person persists.

One thing that I don’t like is someone waking me up from sleep. I haven’t had proper rest for the last two days and here is someone disrupting me. For this one, it’s unforgivable.

“What?” I asked.

My eyes open wide in readiness to attack. Realizing there is too much light getting into my corneas, my eyes close by reflex. I crick my eyes; slowly widening my view. I notice the figure of a person standing in front of me. I instantly open my eyes wide, gaze around like a rat lost in the middle of a desert. “I’m not supposed to be here,” I think to myself.

The sounds of breaking windows and commotion are still looming in my mind.

“Kijana, wapi ticket? (Young man, your ticket?)” The tout asks.

“How many times are you going to ask for my ticket?” I think to myself. “It’s been three times since departure and here you are asking for my ticket yet we are not half way the journey?”

I give him my already creased, wet, and faded ticket which has been in my sweaty hands all along. He looks at it, then glances at me like a mother staring at a mischievous child and gives it back.

He then proceeds to the man seated next to me; who was not there when we began our journey from Kakamega. I quickly glance at his ticket; it has Kisumu to Nairobi written on it. If you have traveled with public means I’m sure you know how bus tickets look like, they are almost similar for every bus company. The man is neatly dressed in a black suit, maroon shirt and a black tie.

He must be travelling back to Nairobi for work after a weekend with his family and must have extended into Monday.

The bus makes a routine stop in Kericho, just in case anyone is interested in getting snacks or stretching a bit, before resuming the journey.

I stay put. My present need is to get home. And even if I want to alight from the bus I can’t. I don’t want people staring at me as if I were some strange creature from another planet.

I take time to dust off my legs, and feet which are in slippers. Then stretch my little navy blue short to at least cover my knees before other passengers come back. I don’t like the way my shorts keep moving up my waist leaving my knees and parts of my thighs exposed. It makes me look like a marathoner on track only that my T-shirt is faded- brown in color without initials printed on it.

Looking around the bus, I notice polythene paper still lining the maroon velvet on some of the seats. The curtains are stiff probably due to the effect of starch in them.

Twenty minutes later, people are now coming in the bus one after the other. I look at them as they come in at least to find anyone to identify with. There is none. Devastation creeps in.

The man on the seat next to mine comes back with a cob of roasted maize. I cannot resist the sweet aroma emanating from the corn which leaves me salivating. Having declined to take breakfast, I am hungry but feel shy to ask for a piece. This is improper.   

As if to have read my mind, he stretches out the hand holding firmly on to the cob. I hold the other end, and break a piece for myself. I wish I had money on me.

I had left school in a rush. I left all my possessions in the dormitory. It all began after supper at around 7.30pm. The bell rang. Lights around the school compound went off.

“Tokeni nje!” A shout resonated throughout our class. I could hear windows breaking. I sped off towards the eastern side of the school fence.

“Ee Mungu nguvu yetu. Ilete Baraka kwetu……..” I heard the students, who were now assembled at the soccer pitch, sing.

I jumped over the fence into the farm next to our school to witness the commotion. I saw the library burn. Its iron sheets turn red. Then the roof caved in.

“BOOM!” I was interrupted by a loud blast coming from our Principal’s house which sent the walls falling apart. Terrified, I found myself running in maize plantations.

Give sight to your mind to see possibilities

This week, I had training in Naivasha at a hotel I have been to before. It reminded me of my experience there.

On that day as we headed there, I thought the driver had missed the way because the bumpy road seemed to lead nowhere. The driver had to assure me that we were not lost. When we finally arrived, before us was this beautiful hotel with an impressive golf course.

It got me thinking: What is it that will make any human being to invest millions of shilling in the middle of nowhere and expect people to go there?

The answer is vision

It is vision that makes you see treasure where others are seeing pressure. Vision takes you beyond your last performance, whether it was good or bad. If the performance was good, vision makes you set higher targets. If the job was bad, vision makes you see that you can still excel.

Vision is the compass of destiny. People do not fail due to adversity. Neither do companies fail only because of the economy. Every failure is largely the manifestation of a lack of vision.

How else would you explain how the same adversities that many have blamed for their failures are the platforms on which some great successes have been initiated?

If you always have excuses as to why you could not meet your targets, then you are a risk to the organisation. Don’t give explanations for failure when others are having manifestations of success.

The most powerful enemy of vision is a blind mind. You cannot possibly execute a task if you don’t see it. The seeing that we are talking about here has nothing to do with your eyes. It is a seeing with your mind.

The reality is that if you have a seeing mind and blind eyes, you will accomplish more than a person with seeing eyes and a blind mind. Take American musician Stevie Wonder, for example. Blindness was not an obstacle to his success. There is also Ifeolo, my blind cousin who is a law professor today.

These two people demonstrate that a person can lose their sight but if they don’t lose their vision, they will still go ahead and achieve success.

That is why the biggest tragedy of all is when people have seeing eyes but they deliberately aid and abet the blindness of their minds by tolerating ignorance.

The other thing many of us tolerate is the fear we grow up with from childhood. Usually the baby has no concept of fear until he is told by the parents what not to do. Then the baby touches the flame of a candle and learns fear by experience.

As we grow up, the mistakes a lot of people make is that they hold on to all the beliefs and fears of their childhood.

The key to breaking out of your past is to challenge it. One of the questions I had to ask to challenge the poverty of my past was, “All these people who are successful, do they have two heads?” the obvious answer was no.

I also asked if their brains had special wiring. The answer again was no. Once I was convinced that they did not have a natural and biological advantage over me, I went to next level of questioning. “What did they do to become successful?”

I knew that the secret of men’s success was in their stories and that many of them had written stories in books. So, I saved some money and once I had enough to buy a book, I would go for it.

Since my major issue was finances, I carefully selected the books. I remember first going for every book that had “millionaire” on it. I bought books like, The Millionaire Mind and The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J Stanley: How to Think Like a Millionaire by Mark Fisher and Marc Allen; The Millionaire Note Book by Steve Scott; The Millionaire Course by Marc Allen; Cracking the Millionaire Code by Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen, among others.

I also read the Laws of Prosperity by Kenneth Copeland and Breaking Financial Hardship by David Oyedepo.

As I read these books and asked questions, something began to happen. My mind began to see more possibilities than obstacles. I was changing my mental environment and before long, it began to affect everything around me. The rest is history.

One important thing I noticed was this: When I was neck deep in poverty, I had a credit line of about Sh.100 with the neighborhood kiosk where I picked things like milk and sugar.

At that time, the owner of the kiosk was by far better off than me. Today, the story is different. I have moved on but there has been no significant difference in the life of the kiosk owner.

The difference between that wonderful kiosk owner and me was that he accepted where he was as a destination, while I considered my place then as only a bus stop.

What made the difference? I suppose it was my vision and ability to challenge my conditions. Unfortunately like many people would do, the kiosk owner began to look for excuses as to why I could move on and he couldn't.

I have discovered that once a person accepts where they are as their fate and once they are not willing to challenge their conditions, there is very little that anyone can do to help them.

Negativity is free of charge. It takes no effort to program your mind with negativity. However, changing your mental environment and giving sight to your mind takes effort.

No matter how bad or good your performance this year has been, you can set the tone for next year. Challenge your performance to provoke yourself to the next level.