The sweet life…

Week 4 of school, and so far things are going… well.
More responsibility than ever, I’m even turning down stuff to do coz my schedule is just way too tight. I have Fridays free, free from class. But not free from other things, like AIESEC and extra-curriculars and such.
And to make it worse, my success is my own worst enemy. Like the more I get done, the more I get to do… Finishing stuff on time means getting more stuff to do that’s not even mine…
But still, college life rocks.
Wouldn’t trade it for anything else.
Even the caffeine-driven Coke days that start at 7 and end at 3am the next day… Even those ones. Sleep is for the sleepy.

To college. May it rock, and rock, and rock.

Tagged

So I was watching this music video I haven’t seen in a while, Dirty Vegas’s Walk Into The Sun. Basically the plot revolves around the characters in a restaurant and they’re all tagged. They have their identities, like the white girl that’s ignorant, and the black boy that’s ignored, the waitress that’s bored, then she serves coffee to the guy that’s alone.
So all in all, everyone has their entire character broken down into that one word. Everything they do, say, see, hear, feel and such is boiled down to that word. Their whole lives are defined by that one tag. Usually from a habit, like the junkie or the drunk, some a little more wordy, like the washed-up has-been. Others are age-defined. Preteens, tweens, teens, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, middle-aged, old…
But what is the purpose of this?
Human minds are made to compartmentalize. Groups of things are easier to process than individuals.
So are we wired to be prejudicial?
Perhaps not. Prejudice is a reaction to this compartmentalization, sometimes made easier by physical differences.
Safety in numbers… A herd mentality. That’s what ends up making the situation the way it is.
Labels… More than meets the eye.

Still feels like the first time…

Another song reference… The Rasmus’ ‘First Day of my Life‘.
Today marks five months since I started my internship at UNEP. And it also marks the end of my internship. I go back to school next week. And it has been an interesting 5 months. The weird thing is, I still feel like I did the first day I came here… Like all the while I’ve been here is one gigantic circle… I have come full circle.
I ahve met some interesting people, from all sorts of places, Siaya, Mexico, Ireland, just over there in Parklands, Machakos, Canada and all sorts of other places…
I was horribly awkward to begin with. This was an internship, not a real job. But that didn’t make it any easier to do. First, I imposed a dress code upon myself. Shirts and ties. So much so that it was generally assumed that that’s what they expected me to wear… Then there was the fact that despite being an environmental job, it just involved sitting at a computer all day, typing away, tagging documents to make a pretty decent output site for environmental assessment documents. And test-driving an eLearning system for the environment as well. Good stuff.
With time, I settled in, I learned the names of the guys in the office, and we even went out for lunch and *kinda* got drunk on day 1… There was wine, it had to be finished. That was quite a welcome.
On to the serious stuff, that was done with trepidation first. While I was jazzed to get my job description and having something to do, having just witnessed a strike from the inside that effectively ended my higher education, for a while at least, there was the sheer mass of unknown that came with this internship, like how I was to work right across the corridor from my mother, and how I was in a position of responsibility unlike any i have held before, a regular day job. So with the newness came the neophobia, the fear of all things new. But slowly, like concrete, I settled. And it felt… right. Like I was made for this gig…
So I left for 3 or so weeks to go back to school to do exams, and it was weird. Like I had worked, and I had found something I was good at. School was supposed to be the great unifier between what I want to achieve and what I have. Like my skills are what will put food on the table. but somewhere along the way, I realized I had found something I was good at, making a bit of money from it, and I realized I actually quite detested being in school. people I can’t relate with, a course that makes sense some times, other times it just contradicts itself, and other times it’s just plain boring. i get bored very easily. I need constant stimulation. And I found that school provides very little of that. So I got into other things, to challenge myself and get the gears in the old brain turning.
So I finally found something that gets me stimulated and thinking and using my brain, and now I have to say goodbye to it, as I go back to school… Alas, you can’t have it all, it seems. So it’s back to the books, back to the grind.
I shall miss this place.

This is what you get for not counting me…

So the National Population and Housing census is well underway, started on Monday night and we even got a public holiday out of it. We, here refers to everyone else, I had an exam to do. But it got me thinking, what is the relevance of all this? There’s controversy over the tribe question being as we’re only just starting to recover from the trauma of post-election violence. We being the folks in Nairobi… There’s places outside the city where the violence is still all too real… Every 10 years, money goes into counting people. Money that could be used in other ways, like for example, to make the said people’s lives better… Like this guy, a pensioner and retired teacher that doesn’t see the value in him getting counted.
Ok, while I se the value, being as I have done a bit of population dynamics and planning for populations (both first-year environmental planning units), it could have been planned better, even with a diary.
For one, the exercise should have been put on a Friday, so that the weekend can eb used to ensure that people are at home, rather than putting it on Monday then forcing a public holiday… And it’s been done before, that’s how they did it in ’99…
There’s the contentious question of tribe. I for one, do not want to be identified by my tribe. As a result of circumstance, I have no father. I don’t speak my mother’s language. I was born in MP Shah Hospital and have lived in Nairobi all my life. As such, for me, the idea that my tribe defines who I am is a fallacy. I have been identified alternately as Generation X, the dot com generation, the 90′s generation, the future and many other random things… But ultimately I am part of an increasingly frustrated generation, with potential denied and such. I’m the one they’re planning for. The next census expects to find me settled, employed and with my own household to do a survey on. The future is no longer as safe a haven as it once was. The way markets are collapsing and such, investments lost, it will be increasingly liquid. And jobs will be hard to come by as well… Now I want the planning minister to tell me what he’s going to do with that info.
And I still haven’t been counted…

Strike

So in the past two weeks, we’ve gone on strike twice. First one wasn’t too bad, blocking traffic, breaking windows, making noise… Then after coming back from that one, on a Sunday night, the second one happened, way worse. Buildings were burned, there were police, there was even a death…
So that’s just an indication at how messed up things were. the authorities weren’t that into problem solving, they believed more in treating the symptoms than solving problems. And on the side of the striking students, they don’t speak for me, their grievances don’t affect me in any way. But they claim to be speaking for me, an issue I continue to find sad.
And for that, we all suffered, and continue to suffer.
This generally sucks, especially how I keep suffering for the stuff other people do. But it’s all good. This too shall pass.