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I don't know what to title this post hence the "alama za dukuduku" (one of the few things I learnt in swa).

So the economy is going down the trash and like a million Kenyans, I wearily look at my fuel gauge in traffic. My heart is continuously broken by the state of my account and yet I have to go to work, business as usual. These are trying times we live in. Rent and housing has gone up, most of us consider putting kerosene in the tank, just to test whether it'll work, and as of today morning, you can only buy one packet of sugar and maize flour at a time. I bet you right now that maize farmers rank among the most eligible bachelors. Add on heartbreak, disappointment at work, uncertainty, rising health complications and for a moment, you are left to wonder what it is you are really doing here.

There are some people out there who seem to be rolling in awesome lives and good on them but for the majority, life seems to have taken a wrong turn towards doom. Of course if you are an MP, no offense, but suddenly you're life has been much harder by the Tax Authorities. But what can I say, welcome to the club where half your salary disappears before it reaches your checking account (or if you get paid like some of us, before it just never reaches!) With the shilling hell bent on crushing through the floor, we have to think we are a doomed society at best and heading for Zimbabwe at worst. So do you dress up and go to work to push yourself for peanuts or do you sit back and let the world do to you as it pleases? So we work. To pay for houses we can barely afford anymore, to fuel cars that should be on stones, to buy clothes that are 5 seasons too late, to buy basic food that is now restricted and too expensive for the common mwananchi.

Transport to Juja is now 300 bob. So I've heard. For those like me, you remember a time when it was 30 bob and we still had our complaints. I am not talking about a time when we were ruled by colonialists or an English pound was equivalent to 20/=, we are talking of barely 5 years ago and this is happening to everything. Our lives have gotten complicated and hard. The things we do have become expensive and rare. It makes me lose my breath... and not in the nice kind of way. Not in the way that makes you want to smile after. But in the way that makes you want to jump infront of a train. Mostly because nothing is adding up and the more you try the less it makes sense.

So there I am on an evening like any other listening to MP's insult our intelligence with excuses and ridicule our hard earned money with their antics when it hit me....is this as good as it gets? Is this what I went to school for? For someone who acts half my IQ to tell me that I, being paid less than a tenth his income, should be taxed at a whooping 30% yet he, should be exempt because he has a mortgage of half a million. Most people cannot even afford the rent let alone raise enough for a mortgage. It is incredible.

I worry for my economy, I worry for my children (if ever there shall be any), I worry for the uncertainty of my future. I once went for a whole week with only 30 bob in my wallet. I prayed every day as I left home that there wouldn't be traffic so that at the very least I have transportation back. It was the scariest week ever. Let's just say I survived it by the grace of God. But I wondered that if I am this scared for myself, what is happening with people who have half of what I have or even less. What hope do they have? At the rate that things are going, I can only hope that either things will change for the better or I will change for the better. Something has to give.

In other news, today morning there was a ray of hope in my day. In the midst of all my troubled thoughts, my old man brought me tea. It may not have had sugar but the simple gesture that he looked for a cup, cooked the tea and brought it up to me made another day in the mines not the worst thing to ever happen. Like I could push on for another day without worry. He may not have said it out loud but at that moment, I knew that if I ever should fall, he would catch me.