I hate handling lethal weapons, but I will surely have to jump the gun this time round. It is almost the end of the year, and if I was to describe the year 2011 in one word, then it must be...Epic! Not that everything was awesome, but it was on the polar ends: epic win or epic fail. I attribute the use of the word ‘epic’ to Eric Mugendi a.k.a Kemikali, a pal of mine who has hash-tagged it so feverishly on Twitter that it must have been trending at some point.
Speaking of Twitter, I at last got my head wrapped around this micro-blogging toy and actually understood how to use it effectively; although I am yet to be converted to be a fully fledged Twitteratti, although this is actually happening as I speak. How? I have no idea...They say toys are usually not suitable for kids under five years old, so there will be no excuse of not being a master of Twittering after using it for five years; four years to go, what a reprieve!
Stripes are usually an interesting pattern, so I will thus adopt it for this blog post, alternating between Epic Wins and Epic Fails. So, recently, I noticed that one of the plates I was using had a chunk the shape of the human dental gum missing; that is, someone must have bitten off a chunk of the plate. I am not certain why, but I sure do know the culprit...Reuben. Maybe it is because I achieved my personal goal of preparing 5-start meals, but I sure didn’t bite off the plate! Among other destructive things I did was breaking off plenty of things, but thank God, some mishaps were almost a total disaster. For example, this laptop which I am typing this blog with flew wide open from five feet atop to ten feet away. By God’s grace, the screen ne’er shattered, as I had expected, and everything remained intact – except that the casing was pried open a bit on one end, but I am not complaining. The TV on which the laptop was sitting atop also fell face first - if there is any such thing of this sort- onto the hard concrete and rolled over twice, but nothing broke or cracked; is it that the devil had visited my house that day? I also broke a tome of other things, and will leave that to your active imagination..or rather pure guesswork!
So, I had set upon myself to travel to a new country this year, and sure enough I was blessed with that wish. In June 2011, I attended the bi-annual African Union Heads of State Summit in Equatorial Guinea. In addition, I was also participating in a training programme dubbed African Union Youth Volunteer Corps (AUYVC), ready for deployment to volunteer in another African Country. This was totally exciting, no doubt, and I was not disappointed by the turn of events. A couple of days before my departure, I had a dramatic turn of events, and my friend Salim can expound on that. To say that I had awesome fun in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, would be a massive understatement, really! I spent three weeks with one hundred awesome African Youth, and true Africanism was the prevailing ambience. Late breakfast, delayed lunch and dinner, fantastic cultural nights every night, swimming, football, and intense professional training sessions and insane deadlines on assignments were the norm of the day. But who would dare complain? I made so many friends, and quite a few very very very close friends (I’ll leave this part to speculation). But to get a bit serous, the slam-dunk of the whole experience was engaging African Heads of State on working with young people in fostering sustainable development in Africa. By the way, the African Youth scared the heads of state out of their wits when they dangled a certain jeenie....the percentage population of African Youth in the continent...70%. Mind you, we were not begging them to assist us, but rather, we were serving them a notice of our ongoing projects of bringing forth positive changes, and of the forthcoming events.......
~ End of part one; part two will be up shortly!
~ Kenny Liti