Diaspora & Dilemmas: I hoard and I wish I could ship. Do you?

It is amazing to be human and to belong to a place; whether by birth or by default. You are born and tomorrow you learn to eat and then begin to accept the surrounding and all over sudden that is the world you are going to exceptionally own, defend and believe to be the best.  You become accustomed to a place and when circumstances permits, you will escape to another environment for a career, a case or education. In the diaspora, you will learn that a dog has a room and doctor and a snake is part of someone’s dinner menu. I do not intend to uncover all the mysteries and absurdness of the lovely Earth but to entertain you with certain indoor circumstances that put a mind in a foreign land in dilemma.  You may be lost but understand that I am a typical African from In’go and polythene/plastic bags are an asset and all containers are to be saved for future use. Accompany me down the lines and I will highlight some habits that will catch up with you in the diaspora.

Let’s begin with your first day in the West, especially during the winter and your new friend is taking you on a walk in the woods/forest. What a fortune! The treasure of the village woman that is laying barely outside and no woman seems to understand what it is. “Tyaa Kwenik chu!”  Dry logs of trees out there ready to be put to use. At your first sight you begin to think and conclude how quick githeri can cook with these kind of dry logs? How many bags of charcoal can I produce with all these dead trees? To the extreme, you consider your neighbor who used to terrorize your fence just to make a litre of Chang’aa. Your mind will start spinning trying to calculate and convert everything in terms of what all the logs could amount to in your village. You may be tempted to touch and even take a picture but you still want to come up with exactly how to miraculously unplug the whole scene and plant it to where its purpose is realistic. It is unfair how some things exist and that could be one of the kind.

Are you still wondering?  Here is the ugliest scenario which is a sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. You have secured yourself a room and luckily a roommate to create a society closely related to your village. The ugly behavior sets in, you begin saving plastic bags in a drawer to the extreme end of the kitchen closet. It won’t bother you what for or why it is just a behavior of hoarding based on the prior scarcity and original purpose of the same in the village. You pile them up and if you are a student in the west you may be familiar with the pretty plastics bags from Barnes & Nobles, Payless, victoria secrets, etc. It would have worked best as a book bag in the days when I was in primary school, it would have been far much better than the 10 bob green polythene. You keep hoarding and as days go by you will be forced to ill heartedly accompany them to the trash container.

Here is another one I noticed from a friend, the village idea of saving and cleaning plastic containers to keep milk or uji or busaa. I will consider these bottles/containers are commodities of value to Chang’aa brewers in the village and they touch or break them. You find folks in diaspora cleaning and storing Marva Maid milk containers and storing them in the corner or to the side of the trash can.  You find a nicely decorated whiskey and wine bottles just being thrown outside and you quickly take a flight in dreams to your neighbor who sells Changaa in a decade or millennium old bottle and you wish to give the same to her and receive a genuine smile and a thank you.

I would have ended there, but allow me to expand and expose some of our closet habits. The naughty behaviors of assuming that someday you will be skinny or somehow you won’t put on some weight. You have your closet full of shoes or clothes from when you were small, medium, large and now extra-large. You still insist on keeping them and hopefully you will donate them to an unidentified somebody one day. I will assume with certainty that this is a mental issue in which all things are referred to or treated in reference to the original environment that you grew up in. You want to keep as much to compensate for the time when the only option you had was the one you wore and that which was still drying in the sun. Similarly to the shoes, whether they are beyond wearing, you won’t risk throwing them away but rather retain them in your closet. They could have tasted time and mileage, but the saying “ ngo’ kikomelin soet, ko ngikere tany’ ilen kait” (“if you have ever been brushed by a Buffalo, when you see a cow you think it is coming again”)  fits the habit and you keep hoarding and hope you will have enough if drought visits. It is trash let them go!

It is a long list of the absurdism of diversity I would wish to highlight and make fun of myself and those who are chasing their dreams in the West. Do not then be confused by the Western Media that preaches poverty in Mamaland and be convinced that I am actually affirming the existence of poverty and scarcity in mamaland. I am only laughing at myself and respecting diversity. I find it awkward to find somebody who doesn’t understand how to get milk from a cow. It is fun to see how expensive Sukuma wiki or eggs that are stamped…free range or organic chicken in the West when mama grows and harvest fresh goodies from the backyard.