perfectly imperfect

• This is a short poem i wrote a while ago and posted it on my facebook page thought it would be great to share with a Different audience…..enjoy

  I don’t have fair skin
  I don’t have long luscious waves of hair
  I don’t have the perfect teeth,voice,eyes nose
  But
  am perfectly imperfect
  with my not so smooth skin it has been through a lot
  my never growing hair it has had a tough life
  My big eyes and nose they have smelt and seen so many sights some breath taking some dismal
  cried countless tears some of joy and others of pain
  They have journeyed through the UPS and downs of life
  The trials and tribulations
  They have seen it all
  Smelt it all
  Felt it all
  They have attracted as well as repelled
  They have been loved as well as hated
  They are the physical me the one thing to be remembered when nothing else is there that body
  Those eyes
  That hair
  That nose
  That skin
  They are perfect to me in this world of imperfections

My country …..in a few words and pictures

I have noticed most of my followers are not from my native country and that’s great having different views from all over the world is a breath of fresh air i get to know a bit of their cultures and they can learn a bit of mine.Here it goes…

I come from Kenya a country on the eastern side of Africa

we are made up of roughly 42 different cultural communities who have different languages(i know crazy but we manage).This makes us diverse and in a way very accommodating, actually if you compare us to our neighbouring countries we are very cosmopolitan. Apart from the 42 tribes we have various other non natives from all over the world we have expatriates  from all over the world who fell in love with the country and decided to be citizens for good .There is a considerable indian population mostly they came to kenya during the colonial era to build the railways and they remained. there are also those who are descendant from the colonialists who remained and made kenya their home.

The most known communities are the maasais  pictured below in their traditional  dress

Our national languages are English and Swahili,if we all stuck to our languages it would be chaos though we use them informally amongst ourselves

We  are on the global radar because of our long distance runners particularly the marathoners they are really good.

OUR FLAG

the flag has quite  a lot of symbolism from the colours to the shield on it.

the colour black represent the people,white is for peace green is for the natural resources we have hand red for the bloodshed during the fight for independence. This was developed as we broke free from colonial rule we were colonised by the British.

 

we are an agricultural country we do grow tea, coffee and flowers.tea being one of our biggest exports

                            

 

being an african country kenya is endowed with an abundance of wildlife. so game parks and reserves are quite many. we have one in the middle of our capital city Nairobi this one is quite popular since it’s easily accessible for business travellers  who haven’t got much time to tour the country

 

 

the other famous park is the mara reserve popular because of the wildebeest migration which is an interesting natural phenomena.

 

 

last but not least we have an amazing coastline with white sandy  beaches perfect for getaways

 

that’s it in a nutshell but i still have plenty more i will elaborate that in another post

Grandfather

A close friends grandparent passed away and it got me thinking about one of my grandfathers who passed on a few years ago of all my grandparents he is the only one who i spent quite a lot of time with and i could say i knew well.

Eccentric and charismatic those are two words i could use to describe my granddad starting with his name like most luhyas(a bantu tribe in kenya) was something to think about and the way he said it was equally interesting Sophas Akanga Tsindoli. I remember cringing everytime he had to introduce himself it was almost like he was making a declaration and it sounded very weird to me.part of his eccentric nature was in the way he named his children some of my aunts and my mother  have unique names and upto we keep on wondering where he got them.he was a creative person a tailor actually and this talent trickled down to my aunts and my mother and  some of it to us the grandchildren i love fashion and trying to sew clothes though i haven’t perfected it.

He was very approachable particularly to us his grandchildren it was always a pleasure having him around since you could see the pride he had in having seen us growing up and trying to make it out in life.in his last days he was ill and had to stay with my family for a while it was interesting having to take care of him he was stubborn didn’t want to eat or would eat very little,but most of all he wanted to be in his house i guess with age you get attached to the comforts related to your own space and nothing compares to that.in hindsight i think he knew his time was up and he needed to be in his home to enjoy his last moments.

His death was sudden we knew he was about to go but still it was a shock and his funeral was more of a celebration of a life well lived he left everything in order and had talked to each of his children. Though he left us his spirit lives in each one of us through his many traits passed down the family line.

 

How to Deal with Misogyny on Social Media

Great read ….check it out

Alexis Chateau

I joined Twitter in 2009 at my boyfriend’s request. At the time we knew little and less about social media. But I was moving away for college, and he thought it would be a great way to keep up with eachother’s lives. He was right.

Outside of ourrelationship, social media also opened up a lot of new doors for me. By 2013, I had built up a strong enough onlinepresence toattract a local high-profile client, who then asked me to manageall his social media pages.

The First Bitter Taste

When our contract ended due to delayed funding from his investors, I drifted back to my personal account. At that point, I noticed a new and disturbing development: the misogynists had finally made their way to Twitter.

All day, every day, there were derogatory comments about women. Revenge porn came next; with guys thinking it was “cool” or “amusing” to…

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The African renaissance :Part one

I haven’t written in a long while just haven’t gotten the right inspiration,in the meantime i may as well celebrate the writers and books i appreciate so do enjoy.

Over the last few years a renaissance has been sweeping over  the african entertainment scene  particularly in the music world and the literary word . There has been a wave of by africans for africans  products which has been a great success and the major beneficiaries have been from West Africa particularly Nigeria. I have never seen people so proud of their culture they incorporate it in everything they do their music wows the rest of the african continent and there books equally challenge the  rest of the continent.

The last time we had such a phenomena most of us millenials had not even been born.The results had been great  writers such as Chinua Achebe and wole sonyika among others They churned out books which up to now are considered literary successes it’s no wonder at this present age new writers have embraced their style, one such writer is  Chika unigwe writer of On black sister street.it is a simple but well written with a  lot of nigerian culture ingrained and very entertaining  though the ending was somehow a cliff hanger would have loved it if a continuation was brought forth. all in all a good read

courtesy of goodreads

on black sister street 

synopsis

On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives. Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. They offer their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home, or to save up for her own future. Drawn together by Sisi’s murder, the women must choose between their secrets and their safety.(courtesy of amazon)

learning to dream again

I am a serial procrastinator and for a long time my draft section has been filled with many unfinished works mostly because i started on something but stopped once distracted or felt it wasn’t good enough.

All in all I realised that i am aprehensive when it comes to writting about what i felt or experienced particularly the bad feelings its as if I was casting it into stone by writting it down once upon a time this used to be theraphy but now it seemed like chronicles of my life the good the bad and the ugly.it inhibitted my creative streak thgough every once in a while I would break free and write something and would really dfeel great about it.

Well it’s time to dream again to put those good and bad experiences on paper to tell my dreams I got just one life and i intend to live it to the max

Fear

i don’t want to let  go

because of the fear held inside

what will i feel when it’s all said and done

relief that i have finally let go and i would be fine

or that unbearable pain i felt before when i was let go

 

its just a name! isn’t it?

 

Growing up i had the novel experience of having  a unique name as i recall no one  had a name even similar to mine and to some extent it was a good thing.

the culture shock came in when i finally made my way into the working world my name is unisex but it seems it is majorly for the males(my name is Noel) so every time my name i was called or i received a phone call they would expect to see or listen to a  man so it was quite annoying to be asked “really isn’t that a mans name?”

 

so whats in a name

what if i was named Theresa? would i have been like her mother Theresa?

 

 

i believe to some extent it defines you, in a way if you are named after a particular personality expectations are that you are to live up to that name though some personalities are not the best to emulate.

Coming from an African background one is named after seasons time of day or at times after some family members long gone and funny thing is we sometimes embody the characters of who we are named after of course you don’t realize it until someone else tells you the story of your namesake hopefully a good one!

In a nutshell its how you take it, your name could define you or your character or have no effect at ……………..its just a name!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never say never

One thing i have learnt through out the years is never to judge anyone, believe me one day you might find yourself in their situation and it will all be a deja vu moment

Our journeys of life are very different each person is shaped by so many factors which are never quite the same therefore. Some have it easy (it seems that way) but we don’t really know what they have been through probably they handle it much better thats why they look always perfect

but if we switch places you will get to know how resilient they are all in all accept everyone for who  they are life aint about perfection its about trying,we might not get there or the people we wanted to be but all that matters is that we made an effort.

Carpe diem

seize the day

its easier said than done just jumping at the opportunity before you pushing aside all your inhibitions

so one weekend my friend calls me and suggests we go hiking mt.longonot  am not really a physically fit person and at the time i was on the throes of being overweight but i decided it was a good challenge and i had been stuck in the city for way too long i needed to be out and about experience a bit of nature

 

so as usual plans have a tendency of going haywire.

The trip started later than expected that is due to car problems but that was sorted out and we wound our way to the famous mt longonot a crater mountain .

 

 

On reaching the site we were met by lots of exhausted school kids and  groups of tourist one of them actually warned us “its tough” well from the ground it looked quite simple and my friends had done the climb quite a number of times so i thought i was up to it.

 

 

The journey began at first i was climbing like a pro it felt easy thirty minutes into  the climb and i started to feel the heat i was breathing heavily and feeling tired i had to take breaksand drinking some juice i needed the sugar (it helped) .

After a lot of walking  sitting and being pushed when i coudnt move,  i finally made it to the top.The view was spectacular

 

 

A day well spent getting down was fun though we almost met some buffaloes going down to quench their thirst ,that would have been one hell of a story if it had happened