Despair

Despair
by Kimberly

If only the world could see what I feel
then, would the world, know who I am
I've loved, lost and feared the world
for it is sometimes too much to bare

Control, power, is what I fear
for I am weak inside and full of pain
I shout and cry, but knowing
there is nobody there to hear me
I swallow the shame and anger
that lies beneath me

I am lost to reality and living in time
Though I am struggling through life
and all that it offers, I am only human
and that is what makes me . . . Me.

Still, I wish for the happiness and pleasure
that I have earned, but realize that, I have
not yet overcome the world's greatest challenge

Love! and how to accept it -
I am ready to face my fears

Childhood

I have never been one of those people who have nostalgic longings for childhood. Don't get me wrong, as far as childhoods go, I am pretty much convinced that I had about as close to a perfect childhood as one could wish for. My parents were loving, kind, successful and always present. I can't remember a single occasion when there was any kind of open conflict between my parent and I was always fully secure and confident in their love. School life as also pretty much a breeze, I was a popular athlete who did really well in class and was also a student leader. In fact, it was this almost picture perfect description of m childhood that first drew my attention to the complete absence of warm fuzzy feelings towards my childhood. If anyone should have loved their younger days it should have been me.

It was not until i reached college and had the opportunity to really experience life on my own that I realized where the feelings of dread that I associated with childhood came from: a feeling of lack of control. As a child you have absolutely no say in anything that happens to you, good or bad, and while I was fortunate enough to have ended up in a wonderful loving family, I could just as well have ended up with a mean family that I hated and there would have been very little that I could have done about it, especially in Kenya. The feeling is akin to what I feel when I think of a country like Switzerland, a land were everyone has a fairly high standard of living but is also subject to a highly controlled system where it is illegal for instance to buy food in neighboring France mainly because it is cheaper. While there are many who would do anything to live in a country like Switzerland, the very though of it stifles me.

Frankly, I think coming to the US and going through 5 years of school would seeing my parents has caused me to become sort of addicted to my independence. I am used to doing things without having to explain myself to anyone and accustomed to knowing that I will bear the consequences of my choices. I can not fathom reentering an world in which I will have to tell another person where I am going, why I am going there and when I will be back every time I leave the house. This is probably why the thought of relationships is also quite stifling to me. I know that I will have to let go og these sentiments at some point but not just yet. As a friend of mine used to say, I am still 'enjoying my stallion years', and see no reason why they should be cut short by a blind desire to join society in it blind addition to companionship.

So yeah, I don't long for my childhood, though other would probably kill for it and I am addicted to my independence. I wonder where these traits will lead me.

Providence

Providence. I have heard this word used over and over again since my early childhood. I have never bothered to look up what it means. I have inferred it of course from the context in which it is often used, phrases like 'divine providence' or 'Gods providence'. It also helps that it kind of sounds like the word provide so I guess it easy to make the connection and assume that if means something along the lines of being given/provided something by someone.

Well I looked it up today and it turns out that the words 'divine' and 'God's' are kind of redundant in those phrases I mentioned earlier. According to google's new dictionary (which will inevitable become the standard for all word definitions), providence is defined thus:

Synonyms:
noun: foresight, forethought, prudence
Providence is God, or a force which is believed by some people to arrange the things that happen to us

Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to this, providence IS God (or a force), and He is not giving/providing you with anything, he is 'arranging the things that happen to us'. Well I'm sad that I have, for most of my life, had the wrong understanding of a word that has been such a staple in the conversations around me. I'm glad however to see that it represents exactly what I am excited about right now: Gods ability to plan out our live so perfectly that we marvel at the outcomes even with the benefit of hindsight.

I have been through a roller-coaster ride of a recruiting process to say the least. Up until march of 2009 I was comfortable in the knowledge that I had a full time job offer from a major Wall street firm. I could see the plan coming together, go to New York, earn your strips in a hellish environment for two years, pay your student loans and parley the name of the company and the experience into a great career in Africa focused private equity. Then the sky came crashing down with one phone call. Suddenly I had no Job, no way to pay my student loans, no way to guarantee my stay in the US, and an impending graduation that would surely user in a period of doom and distraction. My grand scheme was in a tailspin and it took everything calm down and not throw in towel.

Almost a year later, I can confidently say that that call was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It enabled me to free myself from a job that I would be miserable doing for 2 years while keeping my large signing bonus and corporate scholarship which were integral to my being able to finish school and contingent on my accepting a full time offer with the company. It gave me the chance to spend an extra semester in the university I love the most (UT Austin), it gave me a chance to keep working with the RSC foundation and help another African student attend my Alma mater and it gave me the opportunity in the American city I love the most (Austin, TX!). I couldn't see it then but God was arranging things in a way that I could never have understood at the time. Thank God for Providence. Thank God for God ;)

Addiction

Addiction is a strange phenomenon. It can happen in so many different ways to so many different things. It easier to understand the addictions that have been found to be the result of actual physiological changes in the brain such as smoking and the increase of nicotine receptors. I find the purely psychological addictions a lot more disturbing and frightening. The fact that a human being could be caused or forced, to do something that he really rationally does not want to do and that he know he will regret after he has done is understandable. It only becomes bizarre when the person doing the forcing is the same one being forced. This internal battle that is every bit as real as battle between two human beings but more deadly because at least in a fist fight one of you can run away thus avoiding the consequences of a confrontation. One can't very well run away from one self. Thats the scariest thing about addiction. The inescapably of it all. When struggling with addiction, there is always a fight, there is always a winner, and there is always a looser. Worst of all, there is always another fight to come. If Milan Kundera is to believed, this endless cycle of battles with addiction is exactly what gives addiction so much weight in our lives. The fact that we know that we will meet this adversary again and again and that the outcome of this battle affects the outcome of the next makes it more difficult to carry the burden of addiction.

I wonder what is to be done about it. We can't give in, one of the things that makes us humans is our ability to choose what we want to do. Free will is a cornerstone of what it means to be human. Man was not meant to be a slave, not to another man and certainly not to oneself. In the slavery that is addiction there is no escape, there is no underground railroad. There is only insurrection, the slave must rise up, take up arms and overthrow the master, that is his/her only hope of redemption. But in his weekend state, battered and bruised by past battles he can not do it alone. He must look up, reach up find the helping had that awaits there, join forces with his helper, then and only then will there be hope for a new beginning.

After a three year hiatus, I wonder what has changed

My life is a series of close calls, constantly punctuated by 'almost disaster' after 'almost disaster': a last minute trip to the embassy followed by a hurried take off to an unknown land, a summer internship without which an entire year of college would have been rendered useless, a last minute deferment of fees, a hurried one hour registration for classes. Close calls at the bus stop, close calls at the airport, close calls all around. I wonder whether these close calls stress me out of invigorate me, I know that I have often felt that my life would be intolerably boring where it not for the continuous current of perils that have beset me. I look back on the last 5 years of my life and can clearly see that the most uncertain of times are also the times when I felt most alive. It almost as if there is an adrenaline surge in my system as my survival instincts kick in and suddenly I can put a lot of things that seemed so important into perspective.

I often joke that if I had been given the opportunity to plan my life I would have learned absolutely nothing. Thats because I would never have purposeful planed peril into my life, and without peril and the attending opportunity to over come it, it is difficult to see which important life lessons I would currently have in my arsenal. I hope you don't misunderstand me though, I am in no way bemoaning my life as some singularly troubled experience. I am very well aware of the fact that I am probably in the most fortunate 5% of the worlds population as far as opportunities for self direction and self development goes. As a good friend of mine once said, 'If God were to put all the worlds troubles into one pot then redistribute them equally, I would be begging Him to give me back my own troubles'. I am simply saying that I have had man a time when I felt like my life was quickly spinning out of control, and those have turned out to be some of the richest times in my life.

Does it therefor make sense that if still get that jolt of anxiety whenever I am faced with a new challenge? Even when the challenge at hand is minuscule in comparison to what I have over come so far, I still get flustered at the possibility of failure. I wonder if it is because with each of my past successes I have gain something new to worry about loosing. Let me explain: when I was worried about getting into a good high school, I was primarily concerned about doing dad proud by attending his High School Alma Marta. Where I to fail, I could always go to another high school and do just fine. Contrast that with failing to get a job post college graduation, now failure means wasting a very expensive college education, creating financial burdens for people who have already given so much for me, inability to give back to those who supported me or give forward to other who may need me. Loss of a pear group that I have grown accustomed to and even possible deportation. Maybe all this things, all these responsibilities keep raising the stakes just enough to ensure that when the next close call comes around I will be just as anxious about it as the last one

Kudos to Afrigator

I'm glad to see that, after a break down some time back, Afrigator is up and running. I was a big fan of the blog agrigator from inception but got a bit disillusioned when I notices that the RSS feed (at least for the Kenya section of the site) stopped updating for a long time.

I have just returned to the site after my friend John Wesonga let me know that It had been mentioned in a CNN article along side giants like joost and esnips as one of the the top web 2.0 start-ups outside the US. It was the only one from Africa to be mentioned so kudos to the Afrigator team.

One of the most interesting things that I came across in the CNN article was the amount of funding that it took to setup Afrigator. The article quoted $32000, a figure that i feel really shows the benefit of doing work especially technology oriented work in Africa. When put up against the other start ups mentioned (many of which refused to declare what funding if any they had received) it is clear that Afrigator was the least funded and if I am not mistaken the start up with the second lowest amount of declared funding had something like $1 million. Despite the disparity in funding, the quality of work that has been put out by the Afrigator team is definitely at per with that of their, much better funded, compatriots. It just goes to show that the dream Africa as a center of technological innovation is becoming a reality faster than most think and the cost saving advantage will only accelerate the process further.

I am looking to leverage African technologists in the near future, hopefully I will be able to put yet another tech start up from Africa on the map.

BDAfrica: The good the bad and the ugly

I have been reading the Business Daily Africa website for some time now as my source for Kenyan business news and I must say that I love the articles that they feature. I they stick to the business facts and for the most part steer clear of the political noise that often clouds the news from others such as its parent company's (nation media) nationmedia.com and the East African Standards eastandard.net.

One major qualm i have with the site though is the number of typos that i keep running into in their articles. I don't believe i have ever gone through an entire issue without finding a significant number of typos. Some of these typos are Rather innocuous such as a missing letter here or there but some are more serious such as miss quoted figure or differences in figures quoted more than once within a single article.

The mistakes take away significantly from the air of professionalism that is created by the clean layout and clear writing style that is employed by BDAfrica.

I would advise that they impose stricter editorial over-site to ensure that the facts are not only properly researched but properly presented in order to prevent loss of credibility. It they feel that hiring a full time staff member to do proof reading would be too costly then they should at least give readers an easy way of sending in typo notification. I'm sure that a number of readers wouldn't mind assisting in this manner given the value of the articles they put up.

While they are at it they might also consider implementing a discussion feature that would enable viewers to discuss the most popular articles. I see this taking a longer term to implement as it might necessitate them moving from the ijoomla platform to a more feature filled platform.

Overall though I think that bdAfrica.com is at the front of the pack as far as Kenyan business news is concerned and would recommend it to anyone wishing to stay on top of Kenyan business news.

Interesting things happening in kenya

There are a number of interesting development in kenya of late. One of the most interesting thus far is the launching of KenTv, an IPTV service based in the UK and focusing on the delivery of kenyan content to kenyans int eh diaspora. It is an area that is definately lucrative and I can see a number of individuals really latching on to the service. According to John Wesonga, the service is currently getting over 35000 view per day. Thats a huge number for a site that has just been launched that the is focusing on Kenyan content. The naviagation could use some work though and the 5 minute Nakumatt advertisement is a bit too much if you ask me.

Also, in news just released on bdAfrica, kenTv has just entered into a partnership with the steadman group to provide on demand research sevices to Kenyans in the diaspora. I think this service will be a hit both with kenyan students seeking to do research on Kenyan topics as well as with people seeking to guage the viablilitly of business ventures before plunging in. The turn-around time is good (92 hours) and the price is quite appealling ($3.99 per question with bulk discounts) considering what it would cost to do similar research on your own. Another advantage is steadmans ability to return research result of the entire East African region.

Also the Safaricom IPO is causing quite a stire as is to be expected with $500 million worth of equity in the pot. A number of major financial institutions (Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Credit Swiss, PNB Paribus to name a few), are gunning for advisory roles on the IPO along with a number of major internation law firms. I must say that i was a bit disapointed not to see Merrill Lynch as one of the firms in the running, I feel that they are letting a major entry point into the African market pass them by. This is quite sad considering the growth potential in this market. Setting up relationships early is definately going to be a key determinant going forward of who cashes in on the Afican Renaissance.