[acolyte]

I just ran across this posting on a Kenyan blog and thought I would share it.You have to admit that life in Kenya is far from fair!Her goes.....

I’ve just read a depressing story in today’s issue of the Standard.

Kennedy Omondi, from Rachuonyo, graduated with a degree in Sociology in 1994. He’s been applying for jobs ever since. He’s never landed one. In fact, the article reads as though he’s never received so much as a letter of regret.

He’s a subsistence farmer. The article describes him as ‘living hand to mouth’. He longs for university days long gone by when the ‘boom’ (allowance) we received from the government was 10,080 Ksh a year. He’s never had so much money in his life.
He had wanted to be a lawyer, or an administrator, he says.

Reading this story sets off all sorts of emotion in me. Perhaps it is because we graduated in the same year.

One of these emotions is guilt—guilt that I got the chances that he didn’t.

Why me?

I remember I walked out of university determined to do absolutely nothing for at least one month. To sit back and relax. I felt I deserved it.

It was not to be.

The next day, Thursday, a former lecturer of mine called and offered me a job teaching at a college she had established. It was not what I had in mind for a job but I couldn’t find it in myself to say no. I visited the college on Friday, to prepare for the job which was to begin on Monday.

While I was walking across town later that afternoon, going I don’t know where, I bumped into a friend who’d been my senior in high school. I hadn’t seen her in years. Actually, she was more a friend of a friend than a friend per se.

She asked me what I was up to. I told her I had just finished at University. She said that was interesting. She said it just so happened there was a short term position available where she worked and they were looking for a university graduate. Would I be interested? They were a consulting NGO looking to do some research in western Kenya, and needed a research assistant. It paid slightly better than the teaching job. I’d never been to Western Kenya. I jumped at the chance.

The very next Wednesday, off I went to Kakamega. I’ve been employed ever since, apart from the one year break I took early on for some postgraduate study.

So, I’m wondering: what did I do that he didn’t? Why did I get the chances I got?

To be honest though, this is not really about Kennedy Omondi.

It’s about one of my dearest friends from high school—one of the most intelligent women I know.

Kennedy Omondi’s story is in the public domain, I can retell it.

Hers, I cannot. (Cannot or will not.)

Suffice it to say she has potential to be so much more than who she is right now. Sometimes, I have nagged and cajoled. Complete your masters. Apply for this job. Talk to that person. Sometimes she has allowed me to nag. Sometimes she has taken offence.

She has been in her right to take offence. Who am I? Who do I think I am?

But every thought of her pierces my heart, sometimes to tears. Why has life, post-university, been so tough for her?

Am I talking as though I’m the most successful person I know? I’m SO not. I can think of plenty of folk who thought I would be in a different place than I am right now. One of them would be me.

Sometimes, when I say to someone I knew way back when that I work for____________, I see the quirk of the eyebrow, the fall of the face, the ‘oh, where did you go wrong?’ scrolling across their forehead. Sometimes.

I’m definitely not the Joneses.

But, I’ve got a little more than two coins to rub together. Most of the time, I’m growing and becoming, which is important to me. I feel that this place needs me and that I can make a difference here, which is very important to me. So, when I’m not complaining, I’m actually thinking I’ve been lucky. (News just in, I know.)


I remember our admission letter into high school contained, among other things, instructions about what we should pack for the term. I specifically remember two items on the list: three simple dresses; two packets of biscuits. (Or was that one packet of biscuits?)

Those were far simpler times. It didn’t matter where we came from: school issue uniforms, Bata unisex shoes and ‘strictly no more than six plaited lines on the head’ pretty much levelled the playing ground. There’s a solidarity you feel when all six hundred of you are walking around with stiff, rounded, rustling, bells for skirts.

True, we discovered quickly that three simple dresses could be interpreted variously. And that there were your standard Marie Biscuits by House of Manji and then there were the yummy imported cookies Margaret’s folks brought her on visiting day. But, for the most part, there was a concerted effort by the system to ensure that those who had less did not feel the sting of it.

And then came life after school.

Reality.

Kennedy Omondi says his worst moments are when he visits Kisumu and Oyugi’s towns and comes face to face with his former collegemates. They are well-dressed, many own cars, some own property.

He was among the graduates who scored top marks in his class.

He says: “I’ve wept in silence over the years, asking God to tell me where I went wrong.”

He’s come to the conclusion that it is what he chose to study at university that is the problem. He oughtn’t have studied Sociology. His peers who studied education are now principals or senior education officials, while he languishes in unemployment.

I know it’s easy to prescribe solutions, hot off the production line. But, I will not. What do I know?

There’s another article, in the same issue of the Standard that contains a similar story. I almost skipped it. Enough already.

John Bosco Kabesa attended Lenana School and then Kenyatta University where he studied Sociology. After he graduated in 1996, he was employed as an untrained teacher in Kisii where he not only earned a pittance, but he also only received that pittance at irregular intervals. So he quit and came to Nairobi. He figured that he could find his way around, find something to do.

He tried his hand at a couple of businesses. They failed for lack of the proper licences or from harassment from City Council Askaris and Public Health Officers. Finally, he found himself at Uhuru Park, selling sodas and sweets. He makes 400 Shillings (just under six dollars) a day. He spends about 200 a day and saves the other 200. He lives in the Mukuru kwa Njenga slum, where he pays rent of 1,000 shillings per month.

He’s ambitious. He wants to secure a small business premise in the city centre in the future. For this he estimates that he needs to save at least 200,000 Shillings.

His story gives me hope. Just a little hope, but that will do for now. He’s obviously under employed. But his determination and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds is heartening.

He reminds me of an encounter I had when I had just moved out of home and was renting the servants quarter at my Aunt’s house. Across the road from where I lived, there was a construction site. I passed it sometimes on my way to the shops nearby. One day, one of the men at the site stopped me in my tracks. As in he suddenly stood in my way as I walked by. I confess, I felt a little intimidated.

He wanted to know why I was ignoring him, pretending I didn’t know him. I thought he meant that he felt I was looking down on him because he was a manual labourer. I said to him that I had nothing against him, I just didn’t know him. He told me to stop pretending, we were at university together.

I didn’t believe him, of course. I was brought up on a healthy serving of optimism. I belong to the Someni Vijana generation. That tune was burned into the national psyche. We had it for breakfast, right after we’d dug our teeth into Amka Kumekucha.

“Someni Vijana, Muongeze Pia Bidii, Mwisho Wa Kusoma, Mtapata Kazi Nzuri Sana.”

“Go to school, young people, study. Work Hard. When you’re done with your education, you’ll get jobs. Good jobs. No, scratch that Very Good Jobs.”

That’s what the song said. That’s what the song promised. That was our staple food, growing up. This is what we held to be true.

How then can I be blamed for failing to join the dots when this man, this manual labourer standing in front of me, told me we were at university together? It didn’t even occur to me for a fraction of a second that he was speaking the truth. But, I figured the best way to get past him and on to my business was to humour him. So I said, oh, and then I pretended to look into his face more directly, more intently, and said, I remember the face now, vaguely.

I made to side-step him. He slid horizontally in perfect step with me so that he still stood in front of me, uncomfortably close.

Clearly, he didn’t buy my act. Bugger.

You don’t believe me, he said. Weren’t you in ____________ University? He was right. I was a little surprised. But then I thought, there are four public universities, (there were only four then), how hard was it to take a gamble? And then he added, seeing that I still did not believe him, you lived in ______________ and he named the part of campus that I’d resided for all but the first semester.

Ohmygoodness.

He could see that I was all confused now.

Could it be? Really?

I managed, somehow, to ask him whether we had taken any classes together or interacted in any way on campus. He said no. But he remembered me. He remembered seeing me in the dining hall. Or sometimes with the crowd I hang out with. (Which wasn’t really a crowd but I did not think to point this out, there being so many other things on my mind.)

I drew some comfort from knowing that we had never actually met and been introduced. Nor shared classes.

Finally, I said I was sorry I did not remember him. I had not meant to insult him.

He relaxed. He seemed to believe that I believed him and that was enough. He even attempted to joke.

Perhaps, he said, it’s these tattered manual labourer’s clothes that make it difficult for you to remember me. Perhaps it would have been easier if I was dressed in a suit.

He said he’d been looking for a job ever since we left university. In the end, this was all he could get. He had to eat. He had to live. He had to do what he had to do. I think that he was earning 150 Shillings a day. About 2 and a half dollars back then.

That’s all he wanted—for me to say hello. For him to be able to tell his co-labourers, who probably didn’t believe him either, when he said that he had been to University. See that young woman there? We were at university together. That’s all he wanted to be able to say.

I made a point to smile, wave and say hello after that. But the shock of that encounter stayed with me.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what he must have been feeling, thinking, what must have been going on inside of him. I could not get myself to ask. What do you do when you’re brought up on Someni Vijana, and then you end up here, chipping stones at two and a half dollars a day? How could he get his mind around it?

Today, reading The Standard, I remember him. And wonder where he is, what he is doing.

What happens to all the people for whom the future is not what it used to be? Where do they go from here?

Ah. So that’s it. That’s why the paper is full is stories of people who graduated and were unable to find jobs in the formal sector. It’s all about the one billion shillings that Kimunya set aside in his budget to help youth start their own businesses.

Most of those who weigh in on this matter are pessimistic. It’s probably a populist gesture with an eye on next year’s election. After all, according to a report by the International Labour Organisation on Youth Employment discussed in yet another article,

‘The absence of work, the quality of work, voice at work, gender discrimination and unacceptably high youth unemployment are all at the heart of politics today.”

I find, also, that I am angry. Angry on behalf of and alongside all the people who suffer the indignity of not being able to find meaningful employment. Angry also perhaps, because I feel so helpless.

[Dem Gal]

Soooo True....sadly so but so true.

[nyukitamu]

Oh Gosh.U can imagine a person having to go days without sleep in the hope of being successful and life jst dishes u with unemployment, sleepless nights, regrets, doubts, u name it! I was once there so i know how it feels to lay still in the dark and cry ur heart out...the first thot was 'where did i go wrong' and after a few years i realised that that was the problem. Thinking that i had done something wrong!! I picked myself up n vowed never ever to think negative bout myself n i have come a long way. Luck has got nothing to do with anything and FAITH has everything to do with jst bout anything. God Bless.

[m4one]

Interesting article. I think about last year when I went back to Kenya and made an attempt to catch up to my old childhood friends in Buru. To be honset my heart sank when I learned that whereas some "made it" some totally gave up. One of my neighbours even went as far as commiting suicide. Its hard to believe that the guys who had my back as kids have been reduced to mere shells of what they could have been. Makes me question myself why life turned out so different for all of us. Its not that I did anything special to deserve to be where am at. I honestly didnt do anything different from these guys. We all went to good primos, most went to National schools or reputable provincial schools, most went to university and graduated while others went abroad.
Many years down the line I look back and I can barely recognize or relate with my childhood friends. Its as though we grew up on two different planets. Sad.

P.s @ Poster I was one of those that was brought up on that nostalgic music.."Someni vijana...." Thanks for reminding of some good ol' days gone by.

[Dem Gal]

Its so dishertening that the present or prior governments have not made creation of jobs a priority. Too many brains are wasted in Kenya.

Reminds me of my college buddy who, in all standards was what we called a 'brainee'. The kind that reads 2 days before exams and A'sses them (Gosh! didn't I 'hate' that!). Went to one of the top National Schools in Kenya and in college studied Computer Science when the Computer Phenomenon was just hitting Kenya. Since graduation in late 90's till earlier this year, my buddy had been tarmacking and doing odd jobs here and there. In all standards everything pointed to a bright future for my friend but obviously reality hit hard and bad. Like someone said, sometimes you can't explain why things happen they way they do, a higher power than ourselves is in control.

[miss phat]

>I just ran across this posting on a Kenyan blog and thought I
>would share it.You have to admit that life in Kenya is far
>from fair!Her goes.....
>
>I’ve just read a depressing story in today’s issue of the
>Standard.
>
>Kennedy Omondi, from Rachuonyo, graduated with a degree in
>Sociology in 1994. He’s been applying for jobs ever since.
>He’s never landed one. In fact, the article reads as though
>he’s never received so much as a letter of regret.
>
>He’s a subsistence farmer. The article describes him as
>‘living hand to mouth’. He longs for university days long gone
>by when the ‘boom’ (allowance) we received from the government
>was 10,080 Ksh a year. He’s never had so much money in his
>life.
>He had wanted to be a lawyer, or an administrator, he says.
>
>Reading this story sets off all sorts of emotion in me.
>Perhaps it is because we graduated in the same year.
>
>One of these emotions is guilt—guilt that I got the chances
>that he didn’t.
>
>Why me?
>
>I remember I walked out of university determined to do
>absolutely nothing for at least one month. To sit back and
>relax. I felt I deserved it.
>
>It was not to be.
>
>The next day, Thursday, a former lecturer of mine called and
>offered me a job teaching at a college she had established. It
>was not what I had in mind for a job but I couldn’t find it in
>myself to say no. I visited the college on Friday, to prepare
>for the job which was to begin on Monday.
>
>While I was walking across town later that afternoon, going I
>don’t know where, I bumped into a friend who’d been my senior
>in high school. I hadn’t seen her in years. Actually, she was
>more a friend of a friend than a friend per se.
>
>She asked me what I was up to. I told her I had just finished
>at University. She said that was interesting. She said it just
>so happened there was a short term position available where
>she worked and they were looking for a university graduate.
>Would I be interested? They were a consulting NGO looking to
>do some research in western Kenya, and needed a research
>assistant. It paid slightly better than the teaching job. I’d
>never been to Western Kenya. I jumped at the chance.
>
>The very next Wednesday, off I went to Kakamega. I’ve been
>employed ever since, apart from the one year break I took
>early on for some postgraduate study.
>
>So, I’m wondering: what did I do that he didn’t? Why did I get
>the chances I got?
>
>To be honest though, this is not really about Kennedy Omondi.
>
>It’s about one of my dearest friends from high school—one of
>the most intelligent women I know.
>
>Kennedy Omondi’s story is in the public domain, I can retell
>it.
>
>Hers, I cannot. (Cannot or will not.)
>
>Suffice it to say she has potential to be so much more than
>who she is right now. Sometimes, I have nagged and cajoled.
>Complete your masters. Apply for this job. Talk to that
>person. Sometimes she has allowed me to nag. Sometimes she has
>taken offence.
>
>She has been in her right to take offence. Who am I? Who do I
>think I am?
>
>But every thought of her pierces my heart, sometimes to tears.
>Why has life, post-university, been so tough for her?
>
>Am I talking as though I’m the most successful person I know?
>I’m SO not. I can think of plenty of folk who thought I would
>be in a different place than I am right now. One of them would
>be me.
>
>Sometimes, when I say to someone I knew way back when that I
>work for____________, I see the quirk of the eyebrow, the fall
>of the face, the ‘oh, where did you go wrong?’ scrolling
>across their forehead. Sometimes.
>
>I’m definitely not the Joneses.
>
>But, I’ve got a little more than two coins to rub together.
>Most of the time, I’m growing and becoming, which is important
>to me. I feel that this place needs me and that I can make a
>difference here, which is very important to me. So, when I’m
>not complaining, I’m actually thinking I’ve been lucky. (News
>just in, I know.)
>
>
>I remember our admission letter into high school contained,
>among other things, instructions about what we should pack for
>the term. I specifically remember two items on the list: three
>simple dresses; two packets of biscuits. (Or was that one
>packet of biscuits?)
>
>Those were far simpler times. It didn’t matter where we came
>from: school issue uniforms, Bata unisex shoes and ‘strictly
>no more than six plaited lines on the head’ pretty much
>levelled the playing ground. There’s a solidarity you feel
>when all six hundred of you are walking around with stiff,
>rounded, rustling, bells for skirts.
>
>True, we discovered quickly that three simple dresses could be
>interpreted variously. And that there were your standard Marie
>Biscuits by House of Manji and then there were the yummy
>imported cookies Margaret’s folks brought her on visiting day.
>But, for the most part, there was a concerted effort by the
>system to ensure that those who had less did not feel the
>sting of it.
>
>And then came life after school.
>
>Reality.
>
>Kennedy Omondi says his worst moments are when he visits
>Kisumu and Oyugi’s towns and comes face to face with his
>former collegemates. They are well-dressed, many own cars,
>some own property.
>
>He was among the graduates who scored top marks in his class.
>
>He says: “I’ve wept in silence over the years, asking God to
>tell me where I went wrong.”
>
>He’s come to the conclusion that it is what he chose to study
>at university that is the problem. He oughtn’t have studied
>Sociology. His peers who studied education are now principals
>or senior education officials, while he languishes in
>unemployment.
>
>I know it’s easy to prescribe solutions, hot off the
>production line. But, I will not. What do I know?
>
>There’s another article, in the same issue of the Standard
>that contains a similar story. I almost skipped it. Enough
>already.
>
>John Bosco Kabesa attended Lenana School and then Kenyatta
>University where he studied Sociology. After he graduated in
>1996, he was employed as an untrained teacher in Kisii where
>he not only earned a pittance, but he also only received that
>pittance at irregular intervals. So he quit and came to
>Nairobi. He figured that he could find his way around, find
>something to do.
>
>He tried his hand at a couple of businesses. They failed for
>lack of the proper licences or from harassment from City
>Council Askaris and Public Health Officers. Finally, he found
>himself at Uhuru Park, selling sodas and sweets. He makes 400
>Shillings (just under six dollars) a day. He spends about 200
>a day and saves the other 200. He lives in the Mukuru kwa
>Njenga slum, where he pays rent of 1,000 shillings per month.
>
>He’s ambitious. He wants to secure a small business premise in
>the city centre in the future. For this he estimates that he
>needs to save at least 200,000 Shillings.
>
>His story gives me hope. Just a little hope, but that will do
>for now. He’s obviously under employed. But his determination
>and resilience in the face of overwhelming odds is
>heartening.
>
>He reminds me of an encounter I had when I had just moved out
>of home and was renting the servants quarter at my Aunt’s
>house. Across the road from where I lived, there was a
>construction site. I passed it sometimes on my way to the
>shops nearby. One day, one of the men at the site stopped me
>in my tracks. As in he suddenly stood in my way as I walked
>by. I confess, I felt a little intimidated.
>
>He wanted to know why I was ignoring him, pretending I didn’t
>know him. I thought he meant that he felt I was looking down
>on him because he was a manual labourer. I said to him that I
>had nothing against him, I just didn’t know him. He told me to
>stop pretending, we were at university together.
>
>I didn’t believe him, of course. I was brought up on a healthy
>serving of optimism. I belong to the Someni Vijana generation.
>That tune was burned into the national psyche. We had it for
>breakfast, right after we’d dug our teeth into Amka
>Kumekucha.
>
>“Someni Vijana, Muongeze Pia Bidii, Mwisho Wa Kusoma, Mtapata
>Kazi Nzuri Sana.”
>
>“Go to school, young people, study. Work Hard. When you’re
>done with your education, you’ll get jobs. Good jobs. No,
>scratch that Very Good Jobs.”
>
>That’s what the song said. That’s what the song promised. That
>was our staple food, growing up. This is what we held to be
>true.
>
>How then can I be blamed for failing to join the dots when
>this man, this manual labourer standing in front of me, told
>me we were at university together? It didn’t even occur to me
>for a fraction of a second that he was speaking the truth.
>But, I figured the best way to get past him and on to my
>business was to humour him. So I said, oh, and then I
>pretended to look into his face more directly, more intently,
>and said, I remember the face now, vaguely.
>
>I made to side-step him. He slid horizontally in perfect step
>with me so that he still stood in front of me, uncomfortably
>close.
>
>Clearly, he didn’t buy my act. Bugger.
>
>You don’t believe me, he said. Weren’t you in ____________
>University? He was right. I was a little surprised. But then I
>thought, there are four public universities, (there were only
>four then), how hard was it to take a gamble? And then he
>added, seeing that I still did not believe him, you lived in
>______________ and he named the part of campus that I’d
>resided for all but the first semester.
>
>Ohmygoodness.
>
>He could see that I was all confused now.
>
>Could it be? Really?
>
>I managed, somehow, to ask him whether we had taken any
>classes together or interacted in any way on campus. He said
>no. But he remembered me. He remembered seeing me in the
>dining hall. Or sometimes with the crowd I hang out with.
>(Which wasn’t really a crowd but I did not think to point this
>out, there being so many other things on my mind.)
>
>I drew some comfort from knowing that we had never actually
>met and been introduced. Nor shared classes.
>
>Finally, I said I was sorry I did not remember him. I had not
>meant to insult him.
>
>He relaxed. He seemed to believe that I believed him and that
>was enough. He even attempted to joke.
>
>Perhaps, he said, it’s these tattered manual labourer’s
>clothes that make it difficult for you to remember me. Perhaps
>it would have been easier if I was dressed in a suit.
>
>He said he’d been looking for a job ever since we left
>university. In the end, this was all he could get. He had to
>eat. He had to live. He had to do what he had to do. I think
>that he was earning 150 Shillings a day. About 2 and a half
>dollars back then.
>
>That’s all he wanted—for me to say hello. For him to be able
>to tell his co-labourers, who probably didn’t believe him
>either, when he said that he had been to University. See that
>young woman there? We were at university together. That’s all
>he wanted to be able to say.
>
>I made a point to smile, wave and say hello after that. But
>the shock of that encounter stayed with me.
>
>I couldn’t begin to imagine what he must have been feeling,
>thinking, what must have been going on inside of him. I could
>not get myself to ask. What do you do when you’re brought up
>on Someni Vijana, and then you end up here, chipping stones at
>two and a half dollars a day? How could he get his mind around
>it?
>
>Today, reading The Standard, I remember him. And wonder where
>he is, what he is doing.
>
>What happens to all the people for whom the future is not what
>it used to be? Where do they go from here?
>
>Ah. So that’s it. That’s why the paper is full is stories of
>people who graduated and were unable to find jobs in the
>formal sector. It’s all about the one billion shillings that
>Kimunya set aside in his budget to help youth start their own
>businesses.
>
>Most of those who weigh in on this matter are pessimistic.
>It’s probably a populist gesture with an eye on next year’s
>election. After all, according to a report by the
>International Labour Organisation on Youth Employment
>discussed in yet another article,
>
>‘The absence of work, the quality of work, voice at work,
>gender discrimination and unacceptably high youth unemployment
>are all at the heart of politics today.”
>
>I find, also, that I am angry. Angry on behalf of and
>alongside all the people who suffer the indignity of not being
>able to find meaningful employment. Angry also perhaps,
>because I feel so helpless.
This is so true i can relate to the tarmacking for a job, it can get so frustrating but theres a God for some takes a few months after graduation to get jobs for others 1 year, years , the thing is to never give up even when you think uve tried all.

You have ONE advantage over me.....you can kiss my ass and I can't!!