A Letter to My Son 7

By 

Charl Chotto\Charles Aketch (buddingmind@gmail.com)

I am a Frustrated man.

Dear Son,

Son, whenever I look at myself in the mirror and notice these ever growing beards which have put me in constant state of ever shaving, I feel a very frustrated man. From the boiling temperatures of Nairobi living which sent me to the village to hibernate till things go cool, to the ever rising prices of unga. It is like circumstances have conspired with misfortunes to make living such a hell. No job, no money, no food; all around is growing emptiness that growingly has become the nightmare that stalks our sleep we hardly catch close our eyes.

Son, there was a time when life was so nice and waking up was always the best thing; those days when I woke up to love and the passion of the knowledge that I was living for love gave flesh to my dreams of a better life. I was a hero of my own; a hero to her; a soldier braving the storms of nothingness to reach the top of the tree where the sun shines so bright and the oxygen is just too abundant. Today, these are gone and waking up is all emptiness, waking up with pregnant longing for the good all days when I swam in the knowledge that your mum, the greatest woman I ever met, was out there thinking and dreaming about me.

However, nothing can beat the good old days when we grew in the elegant neighbourhood of Sega town. We paced the streets of the town full of life, dreams and illusions; swimming in the beauty of the youth. Girls were beautiful and were the very extravagant jewels with which we adorned our little town. We fell in love and ate the offerings of young innocent fellowships of the hearts that glowed with young love that were never publicly proclaimed nor ever known to those we loved since shyness made us take the oath of silence. I sat and waited to tell this young beautiful girl that she was the one Cinderella stalking my dreams but never got to doing that. Our town was a town of man-eat-woman society and all the pretty girls were a preserve of the few obvious grown up  young men who were able to buy cheap gifts for  these young girls who were too innocent to know  the prices of those gifts and the folly of the hearts that offered them. As the girls grew up, they were spotted and kept on waiting.We young boys were accursed lot, sidelined by circumstances as we saw our girls taken away yet we were so helpless to do anything.

These girls were wasted and dumped to us either pregnant or with HIV/AIDS and they never went back to school. Their innocence was taken away and left empty shells. Today I see them walking around shriveled and with dreamy eyes looking at things in the distance that I never see. What if I would have been allowed to profess my love? Would it have made a difference?

Son, in this era of increased gender based violence with women increasingly beating women; I got really scared recently when this neighbour of mine got into the habit of wailing through the night as if his wife was killing him. When we could not take it, we broke the silence to find out what was going on only to find out that the man was enjoying his conjugal rights in the tiny one-roomed peasant house with children in it. I wondered where, in this era when life in the neighbourhood had been reduced into a mere shadow due to hard living, he got his strength from. His act was unheard of.

 I am wishing that this church, “Church Of God’s Last Appeal “ I once saw should be built in my neighbourhood to bring moral decency back to its feet to save our young girls and pray that the Kenyan shilling grows stronger and that the escalating prices of unga and cooking oil slumps down with immediate effect.

Otherwise, son, these men who destroyed our prospects of love and wasted our young girls will forever wait for judgment in my heart. It would have been that those are the days we would remember now and boast of as life today becomes more of an empty scratching and scavenging. But in the face of all that weighs on us, I still live hoping that tomorrow you will be a man of substance that world would rely on. I am off to find unga. See you next time.

Yours

Sleep-Walking-Buddy

Good-Loving-Daddy-For-Life

Charl Chotto