I watched the news two nights ago. A young visibly desolate boy – with his back to the cameras to conceal his identity, inside a dimly lit rusty tin-shack situated in one of Nairobi’s informal settlements – shaking one of those branded plastic containers you leave the hospital with full of drugs.
With his voice distorted by the television crew cognizance of ethical protocols involved while interviewing persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLWAs), he invited the whole nation inside his house, to understand what cheering on US President Donald Trump has got us into.
You could freeze the screen and rewind the tape – technology has made it easier and our internet bandwidth is almost becoming the envy of the world – if you’re one of those scholars who swear by body language analysis. Let’s begin with the ecosystem for a concise understanding of the delicate situation the boy finds himself in.
I have asked around my circle of wood making friends for helpful clues and, 48 hours later, I’m still waiting for the name of the person who discovered the bed. My anthropology training reminds me that our prehistoric ancestors slept on a pile of leaves or grass stuffed onto a depression on the ground like modern birds preparing brooding nests.
You have to go back to 3000 BC to meet ancient Egyptians who were the first documented innovators to come up with the idea of a raised bed. Before then, you will meet ancient Persians improving the idea of a peaceful sleep from nestling grass on the ground to goatskins filled with water, before ancient Greeks took the innovation further to a trilinear wooden structure mostly for resting and eating but also for displaying the dead.
It is ancient Romans who took up from the Greeks left and came with the idea of a mattress, made of sacks filled with hay, natural wool or birds feathers.
These days, the modern man gets excited with innovative ideas whenever they come across any sighting of a bed, but my carpenter friends are still categorical that most of their clients ask them to make beds primarily aimed at the provision of a peaceful sleep. Granted, beds can also be used for resting, relaxing and reading, but there is a reason why beds aren’t found in public libraries and those using beds for reading are clearly in the minority.
The bed that boy with his back to my television screen was sitting on does not qualify to be called a bed, because from the look of things, it performed several primary functions, and guaranteeing the owner a peaceful sleep is certainly not one of them.
When you watch that video, and think about your life, you get to the final realisation that people who find themselves in informal settlements deserve all the grace they can get – anywhere they can get it.
From what my eyes could see, the bed was handcrafted by a toddling carpenter in a hurry to make quick sales and relocate to another town never to be seen again. It’s a convoluted patchwork of assembled joinery leftovers, put together by a trainee carpenter still using his beginner’s guide as a point of reference. It doesn’t look good even for a bed in an informal settlement, but when you are down in the trenches, anything that lifts your body up is welcome relief.
Surrounding that makeshift bed is an overcrowded area full of everything, everywhere. The boy sitting with his back to my TV starts talking immediately the lights go out and what he says doesn’t sound inspiring for the privileged class out there jumping out and down in praise of the newest United States President, who is no longer new, both in office and in character.
The boy’s antiretroviral upkeep needs is due to drain again in less than a month’s time, he’s literally shaking the medicine tub for the viewer to gauge the level of depletion since he last left the hospital for his refill. He says he’s even at a better place, as he knows some of his mates whose doses are up for replenishment next week.
Five days ago, when the news broke out that President Trump had signed an executive order to freeze the supply of lifesaving drugs for HIV, Malaria, and Tuberculosis; the PLWAs fraternity in Kenya went down on their knees asking God what they did to deserve such a thunderbolt of a punishment.
The thunderbolt was followed by a memo to all partners working with USAID instructing them to stop work immediately, as part of a broader freeze on United States aid and funding that began after Trump’s inauguration on January 20.
The boy wondered why Americans would punish him for an election he did not participate not was interested in. That is how the world works these days.
There exists an entire community of Kenyans who wake up on the edge every day and does not know what a peaceful sleep is, regardless of the material their beds are padded with, and you wouldn’t blame them when life-changing decisions are being made casually on life and death matters.
Persons relying on critical medicine for life support have done nothing wrong. While it is philosophical to conclude that foreign governments owe Kenya no obligation to come through at our time of need, it is equally important to provide a rider that Donald Trump’s core political base, composed purely of card-carrying pro-life Bible-belt evangelical Christians, cannot, and must not, add fuel to any policy discussion that advances the termination of life or relapsing of those on life-support.
Christianity is a fair religion to those who walk in the light. It empowers its adherents with life’s teachings on unconditional brotherly love and consistent care for children of God beaten by the world and left for dead. It cannot be that those who ride to public office on account of their mastery of the scripture are the same ones turning around issuing decrees to disadvantage those relying on critical care medicine.
If the re-election of Donald Trump has, in actual fact, restored America back to the body of Christ, there is need for the world to see it in deed, and not merely in empty words.
