Kenya

About a month ago Cassandra bought a fish tank and populated it with a few fish: a Plecostomus, four Platys, and a Siamese. What started as a fun weekend project has turned into a strange month of fish keeping.

From the get go the Siamese chased all the others around. I was getting so worked up watching him relentlessly pester the other fish that I kept offering to throw him out the window to show him who the real big fish was. Eventually we moved him to his own tank, but then the Platys started going at each other. I kept telling myself, “It’s just fish politics, you wouldn’t understand,” but then I wanted to throw one of the aggressive Platy males out the window too. Fish politics aside, everything was going along “swimmingly.”

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Kenya, Rants

Walking home from work the other day I passed very close to the road construction on Wayaki Way. The old, worn road had been grazed and the workers were shoveling hot, new tarmac onto the road from the back of a truck. I had to squint and hold my breath as I passed for those few seconds, yet the two guys shoveling had zero special equipment (other than shovels)—no eye gear, work boots, gloves or masks! All this got me thinking about the common mwananchi (roughly “citizen” in Swahili), and how stuff like this is probably typical.

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Kenya

Some guy called me last week and told me that he had accidentally sent me money on M-PESA, and could I please send it back. I told him that no, I hadn’t noticed any text messages, but that I would look. “Tafadhali, ndugu yangu, niangalilie” (please, my brother, look for me). As I had just been on the phone before he called, I hadn’t seen that there was, in fact, an SMS confirmation of an M-PESA transaction. I gave him a call back and told him that I’d return the money to him right away.

BC8JT386 Confirmed you have received Ksh 1,230 from JAMES KORIR on6/4/11 at 5:40 pm your new M-PESA balance is Ksh2,150

―The M-PESA transaction confirmation SMS from “James Korir”

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