Last week I had the opportunity to speak to a group of ladies on Passion & Determination at the Village Market talk on Ladies Day.
I spoke on my tumultuous journey in both my private and public life.

I was able to give the group a few of my personal quotes that I have gathered in my short but challenging life, which I gladly share with you today.

It was a Saturday morning like any other to me and I was going about my normal business. My day was interrupted by a phone call from the head of my Landscaping department, telling me a pregnant woman was in labor in the park, and asked that I come right away.

Some of my landscape workers, former ex-Street boys, were by the highway waiting to flag me down. They led me into the park by foot, since traffic would have put my arrival much later. Two women in the park had taken control of the situation delivering a beautiful baby girl to a laboring young woman. Within seconds, the baby was turning blue and the only thing to wrap the baby in was a head scarf. By this time, I held the baby, covered in blood, as the two women delivered the placenta. Read the rest of this entry »

16.5 MILLION KENYANS LIVE IN POVERTY. That is why we should care.

Well it’s very simple – DO WE WANT A REVOLUTION? ARE WE VICTIMS OF CRIME? ARE WE LIVING IN FEAR OF CRIME? DO WE CARE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE? DO WE CARE ENOUGH TO SHARE?

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean we spoon feed the less fortunate. But when one is in ICU you have to feed them until they have regained their own strength and that is what we have to do. This blog is about knowing the driver and the direction to where I feel we should be going together. Join me as a passenger and when I tire take the wheels as this bus has to get to its destination with all the passengers content!

I am sure some of you are reading this and going I pay my taxes, I tithe, I help my extended family, I give a few coins every month to the poor on the street, I employ a few people etc etc . I know you do! But look around you, in your neighborhood there is a slum. It is growing bigger, the conditions are getting worse, and all our collective effort this far has not made visible difference.

A recent study that we commissioned through Adopt A Light on the impact of the lighting in the slums posed the question “how do you feel about the rich. The answer went like this “they don’t care about us, we don’t exist for them after we done the slaving for them”

I see a relationship between the violent crimes and this perception. I see crime increasing and the youth continuing to being gunned down. These young men are children, fathers, brothers, and providers of their family and no matter how hard we judge them, they are a loss to someone who will have a bone to pick with us if not now, in the future?

Besides poverty, hatred, there is another reason why crime is escalating and that is drugs. Drugs are consumed so readily among the poor, damaging the brain, once addicted! They will kill for it! Many people who have been car jacked say the same thing, the men where young, educated, and stoned.

So I have put together this website and many others sites that I will unveil to you in time, as a platform for you and I to connect and drive this vision to a bigger picture of a Perfect Kenya by 2015.

When it comes to poverty we have to take the same approach to invoke the need and the urgency to take action through a lifetime commitment to be part of the solution!

Well it’s simple. I am matured, a bit too late. I have realized that there is so much wrong amid our lives and its time to act. The truth is it’s too darn late. I wish I had the strength and the resources to have addressed poverty sooner! But what keeps me on track is the saying – it’s never too late?

I believe we have serious problems in Kenya and we desperately need to start chatting – honesty being the key word. We need to chat to the point where it (our honesty) comes out. We are a self destructive nation that believes going to church every Sunday or to the mosque or temple makes it all right? And when that is done we are back to being who we are until the next hour with the Almighty which I call living the big lie…amid all the wrongs. We also have convinced ourselves that we are great and everything is great too and all the problems are the colonials, our politicians, the donors, or just someone else’s problem to fix? It’s called passing the buck!

So why this blog? Poverty is our problem to fix! And if we don’t address it with the urgency it deserves then I liken the post election violence to just a tip of the iceberg or rather a trailer to a horror movie that has yet to begin! At this point I want you to take a deep breath and read the words of a great man:

“The mother of revolution and crime is poverty” by Aristotle the Ancient Greek Philosopher.

A point to ponder; look around you…Is poverty on the decrease? Is Vision 2030 working? Are we truly on course with the world leaders pledge under goal No. 1 of the Millennium Development Goals that is – To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by the year 2015?

Maybe these questions can make us examine our individual roles as Kenyans in addressing these issues by brain storming and coming up with solutions. This is at least a start to our proactive stance!