Lie With Me

First things first. Happy (belated) Madaraka day to my Kenyan brothers and sisters. Yesterdays celebration was very welcome as it had been a rather terrible weekend. I caught something and had to be in bed instead of out there contributing to my friends’ social lives. My doctor didn’t even call it a cold - upper respiratory infection, he alleged. It would have been the perfect time to ask him to, in his best handwriting, scribble me a note to aid in securing sick leave, except it was a Saturday and I am very much unemployed.

I strongly believe the condition drastically impacted the range of activities I would have otherwise engaged in. My actions were limited to only those that required little to no movement. It took me a while trying to figure out what to do with all the time on my hands. At one point I just about picked up a book by Paulo Coelho which a wonderful friend got me as a gift (God bless you, I’m still in page 50) but judiciously decided against it. The sheer amount of eye movement and page flipping would have drained my energy and I clearly needed to rest.

Parallel to my discomfort was a party going on downstairs, celebrating the arrival of my first nephew. It was easy to tell my folks and their friends were having quite the moment. For once it was the young man who was envious of the elderly, of their merriment and unreserved laughter, of the fact that at the prime of his life, at peak of the weekend, he was quarantined by his health to his bed, with nothing more than a laptop and 200 shillings worth of movies. The gum to the sole was that I couldn’t be around that sweet cherub who will one day call me ‘unko’. There was reasonable concern that I could easily give him or rather that he could easily catch what I had. Yes I was bummed about it but decided I could always munch on his cheeks and crow about my proficiency in baby talk another day.

Then Sunday came and it was worse. I missed church. A friend had prayed for me on the eve but when I woke up with a rhythmic migraine on church-day, I revaluated the potency of his faith. It also turned out that my mum had caught the bug and missed church as well. Then my dad later clued me in on a ‘cold wave’ that had been sweeping Nairobi. What are the odds? Kenyans are so petrified about missing opportunity that if one person catches the flu, we all get on the bandwagon and sneeze together. Still, it was comforting to know that somewhere in the city, my fellow countrymen were lying with me (in their own beds of course), coughing with me and not getting to do what befits an end-month weekend. Our people aren’t so cold after all.