TREASURES, HUNTERS AND GATHERERS

Of Adam descendants, my mother has me, the first and four others of Eve descendants. For the bigger part of our lives, she has single handedly fed us and catered for all our needs until each of us is now able to fend for themselves. Our father loved his drink and was present with us only for a short period before he succumbed to liver cirrhosis and that in part explains why me and alcohol have always been strange bed fellows.By good luck for my mother and unlike many of her peers, there is no grandchild left to her care by any of us and that means that all she has been doing for close to 10 years since all of us left is to work for her own needs and projects. Another luck we have as siblings is that she is always independent, hardly needs our financial support and, but for a few of her projects that we contribute to, we are all happy to keep our resources to ourselves. However, there has always been a soft fight between me and her, that she reduces the amount of work she does or at least the number of hours she works because, as long as I can remember, she is up at 4.00 am and works consistently in her shop until 11.00 pm in the night when she usually retires to sleep. She does that 7 days a week and only breaks when she has a day out to attend an event and this comes quite rarely. Her work ethic is admirable but sometimes I feel like she is doing too much unnecessarily.

At this point, I would wish to tell a tale of 3 cities worlds apart, that I had a privilege to experience. And as the teacher I was trained to be, the formula is always from known to unknown. We therefore begin with Nairobi. Literally, Nairobi never sleeps. I once was an ardent reader of Sunday Nation newspaper and many Saturdays I would get late in CBD chasing the dream and would leave town with my paper in hand anytime from 11.00pm and like you guessed it, in those wee hours of the night, the city is usually well welled up with very many people doing all manner of things the whole night and that has been so as long as I can remember. Until today, a close relative of mine leaves her house daily at 2.00 am for Marikiti market to get supplies for her green grocery store and of course, I always bring the subject of safety in our discussions in an effort to dissuade her but that usually falls on deaf ears but I'll keep trying.

Little known to me is the city of Rome that I once had the chance to accompany a friend on their pilgrimage trip to the Vatican. Rome is as fast as Nairobi, doesn't sleep much as well and as many with their popular Italian suits, everyone is moving to different places in haste like the world is ending. What was fascinating about Rome is how the city moves more underground than over it. The city has an elaborate underground sub train network that moves millions of people across the city every minute. While in Rome, we mostly moved between Battistini and Anagnina in the subtrains, that are huge, fast and always full beyond capacity with locals and foreigners from allover the world in Rome usually for religious reasons. The colosseum, the st.Peter's square, the museums and humongous historic buildings sightseeing were breathtaking and left beautiful memories etched on my mind. Rome was simply super!!

We now land to the unknown city which we can call F, which I also got chance to visit. In my opinion , F is much developed than the former 2. Has a good bus and street tram system, is cleaner that the 2 but everything moves slowly. No one is in a hurry over anything. People don't cross roads until pedestrian lights turn green, whether there are vehicles coming or not. The city literally sleeps. Any day I woke up and left the house at 7.00 am, I was shocked to find myself almost alone in the streets. Streets do not begin to fill up until 8.00 in the morning. Shops and supermarkets don't open on Sundays so if you fail to buy yourself household supplies by Saturday, then you have to wait until Monday. There, people are not allowed to work more than one job and if so, then you split your 40 hours a week into all the jobs you want to have. For the time I was there and for the first time in my life, I learnt to sleep 8 hours or more in a day and not to feel guilty about it. For the quality of life, F is a wonderful place to live but for those interested in becoming rich, please F* off from F to Nairobi or Rome for better prospects.In F, there are days when all businesses close at 1.00 pm on a weekday to attend city festivals, businesses close at midday on Fridays to begin the weekend and as a culture no one works a minute beyond their contract time so, if my contract says 5.00 pm, it is that, and if customers are still waiting for service at that time, you tell them to come tomorrow and that is normal everywhere.

I've tried to tell my 3 cities tale very briefly because my writing space is small and my pen's ink is running out.

And so good people, let's gather behind the tent for a short conversation and I wish to ask a few questions. When will we stop this hoarding epidemic or must we allow it to catch our children as well? Why are we so obsessed with leaving riches for our children? I think we owe them only education. Let's not call it a good education coz that is a can of worms talking about private and public schools. Do we ever sit down and calculate what we need for the rest of our lives and understand how much more we need? I think Kenyans need to just slow down a little because, the hunting and gathering has reached crazy levels and that's why we steal from government, corporates and from other unsuspecting innocent people. To find someone to trust with your resources in Kenya has become hard as looking for a pin in the belly of indian ocean. We cannot continue like this or we will not have any country to leave to our children. We need to keep in mind that there is moth and rust. Your children could begin selling your hoards one after the other immediately you kill yourself hoarding.

Maybe we should work less, sleep more, visit parks more often, visit friends and family more (many of us visit only when one of them has died). We simply need to take time to enjoy our free God given life and sometimes we do not need money for that. Maybe we need to heed God's advice on hoarding, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:19-21. Or should we just continue gathering. Okay fair enough, so what do I stand to gain in the new deal?

@ Stephen Mungai