The Dead Dove

I woke up this morning to find a dead dove near my door and I couldn’t help but feel sad about it. I picked it up with a polythene paper bag and threw it into the fields. Immediately, some blue and yellow birds began circling over it. They would fly over it, pause in mid-flight and then proceed on. It’s like they were mourning for it, paying their respects. Either that or they were realizing that it’s a dead bird and they don’t eat those. These are the cycles we go through in life; birth, death and everything in between. These cycles remind me of a conversation I had with my brother yesterday and he was pointing out that he has noticed that people go through cycles of depression. These cyclical bouts of depression are like a hereditary curse that gets passed on from parents to their children. They (the cycles) in a way become trans-generational. Yes, there are times when we are up and other times when we are down, but could this be true? Just like the dove that was up in the air one minute and down on the ground the next. And if these cycles affect us, how can we avoid them, and if that’s not possible, how can we survive through them without succumbing to their numbing powers?

Life is Good

My good friends over at LG say that Life is good and I couldn’t agree with them more. As I seat here in a plastic chair at my door, reading a book by Kathryn Kuhlman, I can’t help but feel the serenity and appreciate the awareness, something within me, it knows me, and it knows the Universe. Looking out to my right, I see vast flat land dotted with green trees and brown savannah grass with hills in the distance. I appreciate the fact that we own three acres of this vast untapped land in Kitengela and I’m getting ready to tap it. As I type this out, I am literally waiting for a neighbour’s tractor to come over and start to plough up the three acres, picking up from where I left off. Life is interesting in many ways. To think that I was that little kid who had been screwed over by life when my folks decided to quit their marriage, and to now see how far I have come that it doesn’t define me anymore. I had a candid one with the caretaker Mzee (my elder) here at the farm and I found out that he had the same background. The difference is that I don’t think he’s even processed it much or even talked about it. I could see his eyes water as he narrated to me his story. It’s then that I realized that poetry might have just saved me. At the beginning, my poetry was an outlet for all those bottled up emotions from childhood. I let them breathe, I let them free through poetry and it really loosened me up. On the outside, I may seem like the same guy but deep within, there is a lot that I let go, a lot that I forgave, and a lot that I processed. Now I am whole, and despite the fact that I don’t want kids of my own, I think I turned out okay. I am at peace with myself, with my life and things are really opening up for me in a big way. The rain clouds in the horizon are giving birth to showers of wealth. I am deeply spiritual and in-tune with myself. I feel successful, I feel connected, I feel independent, and I feel that freedom. There are many things that I haven’t done, but I am glad that I have loved, loved myself. I appreciate this far that life has brought me and I recognize that life is yet to take me to the Heavens. Life is good, and it will continue to be so. That much I know.

Adaptive Advantage

Yesterday morning I photographed a slightly strange use of what is around you to accomplish at task. The farm caretaker here in Kitengela wanted to wash one of his heavier blankets but the small bucket and basin available to him were insufficient to achieve this goal. So he resourcefully looked around and the first thing he found that he could use was a wheelbarrow. That’s right, you did not misread it, and neither did I use the wrong noun. He used a wheelbarrow! Looking at it critically, the wheelbarrow has a large surface area and the depth needed to fully submerge the heavy blanket. It is also well fabricated in that it doesn’t have any leaking points. So he pulled up the hose pipe and filled it up with water and detergent. The trait of being able to think on the spot and creatively use whatever resources are around you to accomplish a stated goal is to me a component of Adaptive Advantage. In the business world, it also encompasses being able to observe market trends, predict changes in consumer behaviour and technological advancements and change early enough to take advantage of them. The example of Sony and Samsung is a perfect depiction of adaptive advantage. For the longest time, Sony was a world leader in consumer electronics like T.V. sets, gaming stations and various other electrical appliances. At the time, Samsung was dragging behind in the shadows. But over the last few years, Samsung has been able to predict that the Smartphone and Tablet markets would be huge growth areas and it invested heavily in these nifty new devices. It also utilized the Open Source Android Operating system as a platform for its devices. Right now, Samsung is the world leader in the Smartphone market edging out even Apple Inc. Last I heard, Apple was trying to get certain Samsung phones banned from sale in the US. Talk about scaring the competition stiff! This ability to think in new directions and adapt easily to new environments is actually what has brought me into farming. I had been writing research papers online and doing poetry, but now that I am farming, I am writing lifestyle articles about my experiences as a new young farmer and hopefully this will help me reach young non-farmers and entice them to join me in soiling their hands. The Ministry of Agriculture is also working towards getting young people into farming as a wealth creation tool for themselves and to enhance food security. Farming magazines are also trying to gain that new young farmer as part of their readership because these are the future. And so, by using my journalism training to write about my experiences as a new young farmer, I am connecting the dots between fellow youth, the Ministry of Agriculture and the farming magazine industry. Talk about being at the right place at the right time. My brother calls it Adaptive Advantage. I think it’s a Miracle!

Tomboys

We have around 60 goats and sheep here on the farm in Kitengela and that’s pretty wealthy by local Maasai standards. I say this because one of the locals exchanged his car for 30 goats. Well, there were extenuating circumstances because he had sold part of his shamba (land) and bought the car and then went on to squander the rest of the money. When there was nothing left and he couldn’t even fuel the car, he decided to ‘trade it in’ for 30 goats. There needs to be a lot of financial education to Maasai’s who are selling their land in Kitengela like its Christmas. Sorry, I digress. Anyway, every morning we open the shed door and let out the sheep and the goats. They sleep together in one big shed but once they get out in the morning, the sheep go their own way and the goats go their own way to graze in the 40 acres that have grass. It’s not so different with people; girls usually hang out in groups of other girls and the guys hang out with other guys. But there is always that one girl who likes to hang out with the boys. If you’re her, you’re probably running in your mind all the reasons why you don’t like hanging out with girly girls, and why you don’t watch Alejandro or wouldn’t cry just because he kissed Camilla. Most tomboys grow up in family settings where there are all boys and she’s the only girl in the family and so she tends to behave like her brothers. However, she will usually outgrow the tomboy status when her body begins to change and she can no longer hide her new features even when she wears baggy clothes. And in any case, skinny jeans are making it hard for her to dress like that and hang out with the boys who themselves aren’t wearing baggy clothes anymore. So she is slowly being forced into accepting her femininity as she matures and therein lies the struggle with a mini-identity crisis on whether to wear minis or not. There are also those awkward moments when the tomboy likes one of the boys or one of the boys likes her and neither may act on that longing because it will mess with the group dynamics, and it still does even when both or either denies existence of such feelings. The bottom line is that as much as the sheep wants to hang out with the goats, it will still be looked on as a sheep. But she is always welcome to graze with the goats as long as she is ready for when the awkward shows up, because it always does.

Tackling Rejection

Right from when we are younglings, we crave attention and acceptance, something that doesn’t change as we grow older. Well, the attention part may vary from one person to the next but we all have a need for acceptance. I am witnessing here on the farm in Kitengela, a sheep that gave birth to twins but is rejecting one of them. It pushes it away when the kid tries to suckle while fondling the other one. I am not sure why it’s behaving so but my guess is that it thinks there isn’t enough milk for both twins and is thus giving one a full-blown chance for survival while rejecting the other. My struggle with finding harmony between success and spirituality has over the years produced feelings of both acceptance and rejection. Acceptance is in the sense that I feel camaraderie with the masses when for example I am walking on the street or while traveling in a Matatu (Public Service Vehicle). On the other hand, the rejection is in the sense that I feel (whether rightly or not) feelings of rejection from the masses when I’m driving. There is that feeling of disconnect and the ‘Oh ye holier than thou’ looks from matatu passengers and pedestrians when you are driving. So, in my efforts to find harmony between success and spirituality, I have to tackle this real or perceived rejection since both spirituality and success form part of my hierarchy of values. My ideal situation is where I use my wealth to create connections with humanity through simple interactions like buying mboga (vegetables) from the corner shop to interactions with greater implications like philanthropy. So now I begin to see my wealth as a tool to explore and experience my spirituality. My desire henceforth is that my hierarchy of values reflects this new dispensation and my habits and behaviours around these two values change to reflect this new understanding both on the conscious and subconscious levels of my being. I am now using farming as a wealth creation tool and the fact that I am doing it in Kitengela strokes my spirituality in that I have always wanted to live in a simple semi-arid area. I do want to create harmony between spirituality and success and live a successful and spiritual life. So this calls on me to realize that the two can co-exist just like the twins can survive on the sheep’s milk because it’s the nutrients in the milk that are important, not the quantity. Raise your milk glasses for a toast to both spirituality and success. Cheers.

Shoe prints in the sand; City life meets country

With my former life behind me, I can now concentrate on building my new identity as a farmer, blogger, poet-at-large and philanthropist. There are many people who are finding it hard to make ends meet. They prefer to shed their over-the-top lifestyles for simpler more economic ones by moving into smaller homes in less loftier suburbs. This represents a new shift because rather than get deeper into debt, they are opting to put a stop-loss cap in their financial lives. Shoe prints in the sand is me trying to assimilate city life with upcountry life a I embark on this farming venture.

A Million Bees

Today, Monday 3rd September 2012 is day 4 at the farm in Kitengela. The farm is a 60 acre piece of land in Olturuto – about 4Km from the Kenchic breeding farm on the Kitengela-Namanga Road. Our farm is however only 3 acres out of the 60 which then belong to a family friend who sold us the three. The shopping center is about 2Km away and has a Division Officer (D.O.) stationed there. The center is also about 15-20Km from the proposed Konza ICT City although there is no direct road to it- you have to go back to Kitengela and join Mombasa Road which is farther. The homestead where I am residing belongs to the Mzee who sold us the 3 acres, and I’m housed in one of the eight SQs. There is also the main house, store, kitchen and water pump. There are two boreholes on the farm which were used to irrigate passion fruit on fifty acres up to the year 2000. That’s the last time this farm was operational. The Mzee has since quit farming and subdivided the farm for sale, that’s how we got ours. He has however been keeping livestock, mostly cows, goats and sheep. He had sold about 20 cows in April of this year which fetched him a cool KShs. 500,000. In terms of electricity, the Kenya Power grid is at a neighbour’s farm which is about 1Km away and is soon going to be connected. The farm caretaker pumps water to a neighbour about 1Km away and uses the industrial water pump on the farm to do it. The perks of this is that the generator produces so much power that all the rooms on the farm have a bulb and a socket all connected to it and thus the lights come on when the generator is on. So, he pumps water every two days (like today, that’s how I’m on my laptop) from 10am-2pm. The neighbour has a huge water tank and uses the water domestically as well as for open irrigation. He does not use drip irrigation which costs him a lot of water although we do not charge him for the water, he just buys the diesel for the generator. Once the Kenya Power grid gets here, it will be so much cheaper to pump water because the neighbour whose farm the main grid has reached had been using about KShs. 40,000 per week on diesel to irrigate his 70acre farm. Now he’s only using KShs. 17,000 a month on electricity usage for pumping water and domestic appliances. This is one of the things that convinced me to move out here; the fact that Kenya Power are at our doorstep literally. I can do my commercial writing online from here as well as farm. I woke up this morning at 6am and headed to the farm, tilled up to when the sun got hot at 10am, now I’m in “the office”. Last week, we came with an agricultural extension officer from a project funded by USAID called Feeding the Future. The project is a Barrack Obama Initiative for Kenya- proudly. He is in charge of Eastern Province and from a quick visual survey, he advised us to plant Green Grams (Dengu) as a beginner crop since the land hasn’t been tilled in 12 years. After that, he said we can plant chilies and he will link us up with the local and export markets. He will be giving me the Green Grams seeds which just so happen to be free since it is a test project for seeds and so too is the technical support. They only need you to have land and capital to work on it. I am excited about this venture and I look forward to being ‘Benna Ma-probox’ or if I work hard enough, unlock the Range Rover Sport. Like Stella Mwangi aka STL said in her Kikuyu song ‘Biashara ni Biashara.